Third World: Net Gains for Poor Farmers
8/12/97
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Headline: Third World: Net Gains for Poor Farmers
Source: Financial Times
Date: 8/12/97
Author: Heather Bourbeau
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 1997
How much can the rural poor realistically gain from the internet and
modern telecommunications technology? A great deal, believes the United
Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad).
In an attempt to pool scientific and local knowledge, Ifad has launched
the FidAmerica communications network. However, the effectiveness of
this new cybertool is being limited by the same problems that affect
living standards in Latin America.
FidAmerica was created in 1995 to eliminate repeated mistakes in
agricultural development projects and to disseminate practical
information throughout 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The network consists of an online database, a virtualfarmer's market,
electronic conferences, newsletters andlists of Ifad's 33 projects in
Latin America.
Although FidAmerica's developers encourage participation by the rural
poor, they are hampered by illiteracy, unfamiliarity with computers and
technical shortcomings.
Barbara Woloch, an ethnographer, worked on a women's health web site and
a project, independent of Ifad, consolidating the medicinal knowledge of
the Mayan population in the Mexican state of Chiapas via CD-Roms. She
believes wide participation by the rural poor is unrealistic for an
undertaking such as FIDAmerica.
Instead, she says, FIDAmerica should concentrate on training, and
opening communication between community leaders, who already act as
liaisons between village life and more urban, technological settings.
"To go from living in a shack with a lightbulb to clicking on an icon is
a big leap," she says.
To make the leap easier, Ifad does not buy computer equipment or pay for
the communication costs of its projects. Instead, the burden of
acquisition falls on the community leaders, who act as project managers
and are trained at Ifad workshops.
This ensures that technical knowledge is sustained and dispersed better
throughout the local community, according to Julio Berdegue, one of
FIDAmerica's developers. "It's not about computers or software. It's
about people solving real problems."
But what if these people cannot read, let alone move a mouse? While
literacy in Spanish or Portuguese is much more common among younger
Latin Americans, many older and more isolated people cannot read and write. Some
software
developers have tried to get around this problem by using touch screens,
graphics and audio programmes.
However, Woloch and FIDAmerica developers agree that the best way to
spread information is the text-based web site. Although the FIDAmerica
site (www.fidamerica.cl/) assumes literacy in Spanish, the text
restriction allows users with slow modems or poor connections to access
the information and participate in the forums.
So far, the network has been successful among its Ifad-trained users. It
has provided an electronic forum for an Amazon village chief to explain
to development workers how his community negotiated a contract with the
Body Shop, the UK-based cosmetics chain, to sell essential oils, allowed
Chilean farmers to advertise and sell their oversupply of potatoes, and
it acted as the means for a Dominican farmer to answer a Guatemalan's
irrigation query.
The initial FIDAmerica project will be finished in December 1998. Ifad
is looking to other funding and development organisations to continue
and expand the network.
It hopes to add a help desk, which unlike most such facilities would
offer specific rural development tips rather than technical advice about
system hitches. There are plans, too, to set up similar networks in
Africa and Asia.
Copyright the Financial Times Limited 1997
"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times Limited.