By Mamadou Edrisa Njie
Labor intensive land preparation is a major bottleneck for farmers across rice ecologies in The Gambia. This is especially so for women farmers who are the principal rice producers in the country. They are often engaged in backbreaking manual land preparation in rice fields, with significant consequences on their health (especially in flooded fields) as well as their wellbeing and the wellbeing of the young children who often have to be in rice fields with their mothers.
In addition, the excessive amount of time taken to prepare small plots of rice fields have consequences on the timeliness of other key production activities and the resulting rice yields.
Limited access to tractors and other land preparation equipment is a major constraint to rice production in The Gambia. The size of individual and household plots make it highly inefficient for small farmers to make investments in relatively expensive land preparation equipment. Very often, producers rely on rented tractor plowing services. However, the high demand and limited supply of these services remain a key challenge for most rural farmers.
Facilitating timely access to land preparation services will contribute significantly to reducing the drudgery of farm labor faced by rural women, as well as increase productivity and production through timely operations and effective management.
It will also have direct positive effects on young children who would otherwise spend significant amounts of time in rice fields that are often located miles away from villages. Facilitation of access to tractor plowing contributes to timely farming activities and reduces the drudgery of labor for women in lowland rice fields.
In 2016, 1,060 hectares of lowland rice area was targeted for tractor-plowing support under the National Agricultural Land and Water Management Development Project (Nema-Chosso). Due to the shortage of tractors in the targeted areas however, support was provided to cover 990 ha in 6 beneficiary communities of Giboro Kuta in West Coast Region, Jurunku and Salikene in the North Bank Region, Boiram and Kudang in Central River Region/South and Taibatou in the Upper River Region.
To cover the shortfall, another 70 hectares of upland area was covered in Giboro Kuta and Jurunku. In total, more than 2000 households benefited from this initiative.Nema- Chosso matching grant beneficiaries who successfully procured land preparation equipment through the project’s capital investment stimulation fund (CISF) were contracted to for plowing the fields.
In 2017, an increase in the number of tractors under the CISF allowed the project to extend the support to a larger number of beneficiary communities. A total of 15 new communities joined the programme in that year, benefiting more than 4000 households cultivating more than 2000 hectares of lowland rice.
In 2018, the number of beneficiary communities doubled to more than 30, covering a total area of 2,700 hectares and 5,400 beneficiary households across the country.
The project Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Mr. Ensa Colley, reflected on the importance of this initiative for women in rural Gambia, in these words: “Addressing the problems of manual land preparation in lowland rice fields is a priority for the project.
“From a gender perspective, the initiative targeted female farmers who cultivate more than 95 percent of the total lowland rice area in the country. These women are the primary targets of the Nema-Chosso project.”
From the field, Mariama Trawally, a female lowland rice farmer in Salikenni with a long history of lowland rice production, stated that multiple generations of women in her community have been engaged in lowland rice over several decades.
Production was characterized by land preparation. This had limited the area that women are able to cultivate and affected the timeliness of activities, thereby reducing their rice yields. These problems have now been addressed by easy access to tractor plowing services, thanks to the Nema matching grant scheme that enabled a community member to purchase a tractor.
Challenges and Lessons
The key challenge of this initiative is the very high demand from farmers in the face of extreme shortage of agricultural equipment in farming communities. Key lessons from include the following:
- Providing ‘free’ tractor plowing services to large numbers of communities and beneficiaries may not be sustainable in the long term. Whilst this intervention may offer an immediate ‘stop-gap’ response, it is important to progressively shift the focus to a more sustainable approach with farmers paying for plowing services.
- Linking tractor owners to farmers offers a win-win for all. Tractor owners will have the necessary clientele to make their operations profitable and sustainable. Farmers will also benefit directly from reduction in the drudgery of manual land preparation and obtain higher yields from timely operations and good management.
Perspectives
- Linking matching grant beneficiaries to farmers that need these services represents a good start. It is however important to consider strategies that would engage farmers to consider land preparation as a direct production cost.
