Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to face market women; to access loans from banks and solve problems
together. This group has helped father three other groups in an area with
about 1,000 farmers, but not all the farmers are members. Even though not
all the farmers have joined the groups, the activities of the groups have
impacted on other irrigators within the area. They benefit from negotiated
market prices by the groups, because they happen to be in the same vicinity
where the market price is the same. The irrigator groups are registered with
the department of co-operatives and are recognised by MOFA and the banks.
The groups have developed their own constitution and elected executives.
The other management system identified is by individual irrigators who are
not registered with any farmer group. They have no obligations to others but
respect the ethics (e.g water rights and communal policing) that prevail at
the farm level. Irrigators have the right to abstract water as much as they
can find and also respect boundaries between them and their neighbours.
Because the irrigators have social relations by birth and by community
relations they are able to manage their farming activities and conflicts by
help of their social ties.
Land Management
Land along the river channel is owned by the family heads who hold it in
trust for their families as is the custom of the area. Most of the family heads
are elderly men who do not have the physical strength to do dry season
irrigation farming. Irrigators (mostly young men) who wish to farm along the
river channel but do not own land have to contact a landowner and negotiate
to get access to land. It is not difficult to rent land from landowners as
observed in the area. However as the landowners prefer to rent out large
areas, they prefer to give their land to men more than women because men
tend to cultivate larger areas than women. This notwithstanding, women are
eligible to negotiate for land for the dry season farming.
Apart from paying for renting land for irrigation, the farmer is expected to
plough the land for the landlord at the end of the irrigation season as a
rental condition. The irrigator offers the landowner a small initial payment
(about US$5 - US$10) and pays a bigger amount at the end of the season
depending on the harvest and the farm. The amount paid to landlords at the
end of the season ranges from US$20 to US$100.
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