Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
creation of job opportunities, and contributing to agricultural growth and
the macro economy (Awulachew, et al., 2005). The beneficiaries are the local
farmers who are engaged to cultivate on the developed lands and are
expected to pay for the water use and other services rendered to them on the
scheme. As a result there are different management styles associated with
government-led irrigation schemes. These are the company/agency managed,
farmer-managed or the community managed schemes. Some of these
management styles are instituted during construction while others have
emerged after some years of operation. Most management institutions of
government-led irrigation schemes of large or medium scale are public
institutions with subvention from the government while the small-scale
systems are mostly managed by the communities through Water User
Associations.
In a bid to achieve improved productivity, limit external interventions,
encourage farmers to take responsibility and also to follow global trends, the
management of some government-led irrigation schemes have been
transferred to the farmers. While some of these transfers have yielded
positive results others have not. The reasons for the failures encountered are
due to the fact that the original schemes were not designed for farmer
management (Kamara, et al., 2001), wrong farmer-perception on the hand-
over of irrigation schemes and financial/implementation challenges (Nkhoma
and Mulwafu, 2004).
In many systems management tasks are shared between the public officials
and the farmers. A typical example is the Office du Niger irrigation scheme
which initially was managed by a powerful government agency and had
monopoly over land, civil works, resources, allocation, farm inputs, farmer
organizations, food processing and credit. A series of reforms that started in
1982 and backed by farmers, international donors and changing political will,
triggered mainly by low productivity, has eventually resulted in the sharing
of management responsibilities by the Office du Niger and Farmer Based
Organisations (FBOs) (Aw and Diemer, 2005).
In most public managed government-led irrigation schemes, it is an added
responsibility of the management to help farmers market their produce or to
secure markets for the produce, but this remains a challenge yet to be
resolved by some schemes. The inability to secure markets for produce has
led to the decline in the productivity of many schemes. There are many
marketing challenges for perishable comodities such as vegetables which if
not sold in time lead to losses for farmers. Due to the importation of food in
sub-Saharan Africa, local products such as rice have marketing challenges. In
Search WWH ::
Custom Search