John Kerr

Watershed Development, Environmental Services, and Poverty Alleviation in India

Abstract Complementarity between conservation and productivity objectives makes watershed development attractive in semi-arid areas. A potential trade-off with poverty alleviation arises however because watershed development may benefit landholders while harming landless people, particularly herders and women. India has a history of highly innovative watershed projects in which downstream landholders share benefits by compensating landless people upstream for providing an environmental service. Most current projects, however, take alternative measures that ignore the issue of environmental services. Evidence from 70 villages in Maharashtra suggests the presence of poverty alleviation trade-offs, highlighting the potential value of more explicitly addressing compensation for environmental services.

Payments for Watershed Services in Asia: A Review of Current Initiatives

This article reviews 15 payment for watershed services (PWS) programs in Asia, most of which are in early stages of implementation. Important constraints against PWS in Asia include high population density that escalates transaction costs of contracting potential service suppliers, and state control over most forestlands. China has two nationwide programs that encourage afforestation to arrest soil erosion. Indonesia has several local PWS schemes to conserve catchments upstream of dams and hydroelectric plants. Vietnam, Nepal, and the Philippines have similar initiatives, funded by international donors or local hydroelectric companies. India presents two cases where village communities came up with innovative social arrangements to secure watershed services. However, in most cases conditionality is weakly enforced, and participation may be mandatory. Government is the major buyer of watershed services, while private or quasi-private companies are involved in a few watersheds in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nepal. Evidence of PWS on poverty alleviation is tenuous in most cases. Chinas Sloping Land Conversion Program has helped the poor increase their asset base while landless farmers in Indonesia have received conditional land tenure.

Scaling up Participatory Watershed Development in India

‘Participation’ is widely accepted as a prerequisite to successful watershed development in India, but there is no shared understanding of its meaning, nor of how to make it operational. Meaningful participation, in which communities work collectively, help make decisions and share costs, is limited primarily to projects implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Participation in government projects is more superficial because staff lack the skills and incentive to engage in meaningful participation. Strategies to scale up meaningful participation require a large number of NGOs. However, the number of NGOs with the necessary skills and values is limited, so a realistic strategy must seek to improve the capabilities and incentives of government agencies. Their performance may improve by making them accountable through transparent processes and participatory monitoring and evaluation. NGO-facilitated access to information for communities can potentially change power relations and initiate political processes that make both community leaders and government agencies more accountable to communities.

Resource constraints and partial adoption of conservation agriculture by hand-hoe farmers in Mozambique

Conservation agriculture is a set of practices widely promoted to increase agricultural productivity while conserving soil through reduced tillage, mulching and crop rotation. Adoption levels are low across southern Africa and farmers often use only some components on small portions of their land. This study uses in-depth interviews and partial budget analysis to explore adoption of conservation agriculture in Mozambiques Angonia highlands. Farmers described many benefits but there was little sign of adoption beyond plots where non-governmental organizations promoting conservation agriculture had provided inputs. Most farmers were adamant that conservation agriculture could perform better than conventional agriculture only if they applied fertilizer or compost. With current costs and prices, conservation agriculture is unprofitable except on small plots for farmers with low opportunity cost of household labour. These findings suggest that conservation agriculture can improve maize yields but capital and labour constraints limit adoption to small plots in the absence of free or subsidized inputs. Given the current ranges of prices for grain and inputs these manual forms of conservation agriculture will not be adopted on a large scale in Angonia. Nevertheless, small conservation agriculture plots can provide farmers with high yields where constraints are lowest.

Watershed Project Performance in India: Conservation, Productivity, and Equity

The semiarid tropics are characterized by seasonally concentrated rainfall, lowagricultural productivity, degraded natural resources, and severe poverty. Concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, these regions were little affected by the green revolution that transformed agriculture in the more favorable areas of developing countries. In the 1980s and 1990s, agricultural scientists and planners turned to watershed development as a way to raise rainfed agricultural production, conserve natural resources, and reduce poverty in semiarid regions (Lal; Farrington, Turton and James). A watershed or catchment is an area from which all water drains to a common point, making it an attractive unit for technical efforts to manage water and conserve soil for production and conservation. In water-scarce areas, the objective is to capture water during rainy periods for subsequent use in dry periods. This involves conserving soil moisture to support crop growth, encouraging water infiltration to recharge aquifers, and harvesting surface runoff water in small ponds or tanks. Often, the main project activity is the construction of water harvesting structures (e.g., small dams) in the drainage lines of upper catchments where runoff water is captured. To be sustainable, local water harvesting requires protecting upper reaches of small catchments against erosion that would reduce storage capacity of water harvesting ponds. Watersheds cover a broad range of sizes, but many projects operate at the level of small microwatersheds that lie within a

MICHIGAN RESIDENTS' PERCEPTIONS OF WETLANDS AND MITIGATION

The regulation and management of wetlands is often contentious because wetlands share characteristics of both land, typically a private good, and water, typically treated as a public good. Landowners’ desires to develop “their property” with wetlands tend to conflict with the public benefits associated with healthy, intact wetland ecosystems. To understand better how residents in the state of Michigan, USA understand and perceive wetlands, a statewide telephone survey was undertaken. The survey of 1012 Michigan residents revealed most people to be very familiar with wetlands and think it very important to protect them. Across demographic groups, at least 60 percent of respondents believe it to be very important that wetlands exist both now and in the future. Multiple regression analysis suggests that younger, better educated, and wealthier people place greater importance than others on wetland existence; the analysis also indicates that Republicans seem to value wetlands slightly less than Democrats and Independents. Interestingly, respondents’ community type (e.g., rural, urban, suburban) appears to make relatively little difference on the importance of wetland existence.

Reconciling Environment and Development in the Clean Development Mechanism

Abstract Providing a mechanism for financial transfers from the North to the South, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) aims to fund afforestation projects resulting in both reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide and sustainable development. One attractive feature of the CDM is that unlike other emerging carbon trading schemes it offers a means to promote sustainable development, which in a poor country must include providing poor people with income-earning opportunities. In practice however, the CDM projects may fail to address four issues key to this possibility: ownership, price, transaction costs, and use rights. The failure to address these issues ultimately could lead the CDM to benefit elite landowners at the expense of the poor. However, recognition of this oversight provides opportunities to work with poor communities worldwide to facilitate the collective action required to make the CDM work for them. Such a focus holds the key to ensuring that the CDM achieves the twin objectives of environmental conservation and sustainable development.

Price policy, irreversible investment, and the scale of agricultural mechanization in Egypt

Egyptian farmers responded to migration-induced labor shortages in the 1970s and 1980s by mechanizing many agricultural operations. Tractor subsidies encouraged this process. After the mid-1980s, wages and employment fell steadily and remained low throughout the 1990s, but agriculture remained mechanized. This paper traces the process by which economic policies and technical indivisibilities locked Egypt into tractor-based mechanization even though economic analysis suggested that smaller scale machines were more profitable to farmers and generated more employment. A linear programming model is used to analyze both the determinants and dynamic implications of tractor adoption.

Institutional barriers to policy reform in Egypt: The case of the agricultural machinery industry

Abstract Economic reform has been on the Egyptian policy agenda since the mid-1970s. But progress has been slow in part due to strong regulatory and institutional obstacles. The experience of the agricultural machinery manufacturing industry displays this problem. An economic analysis of manufacturing threshers shows that while the impact of price policies was about neutral, institutional barriers effectively taxed the industry 15–22%. The greatest obstacle was access to marketing credit from the state-owned Principal Bank for Development and Agricultural Credit. Access to materials and difficulties with tax authorities also hampered the industry.

Sociocultural and institutional contexts of social cash transfer programs: Lessons from stakeholders’ attitudes and experiences in Ghana

As conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs spread in African countries, there is a need for well-designed programs that reflect their economic, institutional, political, and sociocultural circumstances. Using both qualitative and quantitative data analysis, this article examines the perspectives of beneficiaries, program managers, and community leaders regarding Ghana’s CCT program. It addresses sociocultural attitudes toward poverty, perceptions of CCT as a poverty reduction strategy, and experiences with CCT implementation. Findings indicate favorable views of CCT but little support for giving money to the poor as a long-term poverty-alleviation strategy. Ghana’s CCT program is seen as fair and popular, but current payment levels are viewed as inadequate, impractical, and unreliable.