Area development in Liberia : toward integration and participation

The projects, designed to diversify and expand the economy by encouraging small farmer production of coffee, cocoa, and swamp rice, focused on planting new coffee and cocoa trees, rehabilitating old trees, restoring old swamps, and clearing new ones; support activities included monitoring schistosomiasis, training farmers and extensionists, building wells and latrines, strengthening and establishing marketing cooperatives, repairing feeder roads, and creating semi-autonomous project management units (PMU's). Some 17,000 farm families have been involved in these efforts. Although the PMU's performed ably in coping with unforeseen circumstances, the projects lacked provision for the formal and comprehensive mid-course redesign work which was necessitated by, inter alia, commodity price fluctuations (which limited farmers' incentives to participate in the crop development programs), the lack of a strong agricultural research program (erroneously assumed to exist), and unresolved national-level policy, financial, and administrative problems. Also, district cooperatives - which are to be the PMUs' heirs - have not yet proven their viability, and long-term social impacts (on, e.g., women, land tenure, the environment) are still undetermined. It was learned that: (1) broad-based projects must be flexible enough to allow design changes; (2) agricultural projects should test proposed technical packages; (3) decentralized projects are viable given national policy and administrative support; (4) farmers' participation depends upon their perception of material benefit; (5) decentralized projects should be integrated, with explicit linkages between central government and project staff, among donors, and across sectors; and (6) locally-based agricultural research which involves farmers and is closely tied to extension is crucial in agricultural development.