Global Food+ 2018: My 7-minute speed talk on my research

I recently gave a talk.

Alicia Harley: Innovation and access to technology for the poorest farmers GlobalFood+ Speed Talks, 16 Feb. 2018: New research at the nexus of food, agriculture, environment and health This event brought together leading faculty members from Boston University, Harvard, MIT and Tufts to share their most important new work towards healthier and more sustainable food systems. Our speed talk format allowed participants to make new connections across Boston-area schools and types of research spanning a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, from archaeology to theology. The speaker list reflected the range and depth of recent discoveries about agriculture and the environment, food systems, health and well-being in the United States and worldwide. To facilitate communication across different scientific fields and institutions, each speaker was allotted 7 minutes to describe a specific finding in terms of its motivation, method and results.

A Solar Village in Bihar: The Politics of Greening India

The village of Dharnai lies on highway 83 between Patna and Gaya just past Jehanabad on Patna-Gaya road 83. The project was funded by Greenpeace and was inaugurated in the summer of 2014 by the former (and future) chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar. Nitish’s speech is summarized in THIS article form the International Business Times. Nitish said that "Solar energy is the only solution and I praise and appreciate Greenpeace for accepting the challenge in successfully installing this everlasting viable solution model." 

After the speech, I went to the inauguration and walked around the village with some local journalists. What struck me most when I walked through the village was that for many residents of Dharnai there was profound skepticism and discontent about the project. The farmers said that they wanted "real" electricity and not whatever Greenpeace had installed. As I probed further, I realized that what the residents of Dharnai meant by the demand for real electricity was that they wanted electricity like they saw in nearby towns that ran for more hours per day and more importantly was able to power high-load equipment especially electric motor pumps for lifting groundwater for irrigation. The village was not that far away from the grid (in fact you could see the high powered transmission lines from highway 83 that runs directly past the village). It was perfectly reasonable for the villagers to wonder then why they were left with a type of electricity that could only power a light bulb or a fan and that would only for a limited number of hours a day when electricity that could benefit them substantially more was literally visible from their village.

A few days later, I learnt from a journalist/friend of mine that soon after the inauguration of the solar mini-grid , the villagers raised enough discontent that the government got nervous and extended the actual electric grid to Dharnai, making the entire project relatively low-value.

I later asked an ex-employee of the project in Patna why Greenpeace had not build the mini-grid somewhere father from a major highway and major transmission lines—somewhere that was unlikely to get connected to a major grid for 5 to 10 years. The main answer was that putting the project in a more remote village would make it a poor demonstration site for politicians and donors to visit if it was not easily accessible. I sort of get that, but at the same time, its a poor place for these people to visit if the project is not successful.

Follow-up

Several months after the inauguration, I returned to Dharnai to speak with farmers after the media and public attention had largely subsided. It was clear the that project had never completely materialized. On a sign at the entrance to the village there is a list of the achievements of the project which included both the three mini-solar grid substations and 10 solar irrigation pumps. Around the village there were several other signboards advertising the rates that villagers would pay for access to the grid. However, as we quickly learned, only 1 of the advertised 10 solar irrigation pumps had ever arrived in the village. Only a minority of the villagers were hooked up to the solar mini-grid and paid the monthly connection fees. Most had found a way to illegally steal electricity from the electric grid which the government had extended to the village—probably soon they felt the government would force them to standardized their connections to the electric grid and they would have to pay for their electricity, but they still preferred that to the solar mini grid.

Another interesting thing I later heard from someone involved in the project is that Dharnai has three separate solar grids and solar power stations because the upper-castes in Dharnai which is comprised of three separate tolas (hamlets) refused to draw their power from the same solar power station as lower caste villagers. I cannot verify this account beyond a single source, but it does speak to the many challenges of bringing solar projects into fruition. These challenges are often overlooked by excited development practitioners keen on the benefits of solar energy to solve rural energy challenges “sustainably”.

Lessons Learned

A big lesson from Dharnai is that bringing solar to solve energy challenges in rural areas is a political as well as technical challenge. Solar has many advantages--individual villages can pursue micro-grids thereby bypassing the inability* of the State to expand and maintain a power grid that reaches most of Bihar's rural areas. It also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from coal power plants. Solar powered irrigation pumps bring perhaps even more benefits to farmers as they give them access to groundwater at a significantly reduced cost than the diesel which is the only alternative where grid power does not reach. 

However, solar energy at least to date cannot do all the things that grid connected energy can. Farmers want to be able to power lights, watch the TV and do other activities at any time they want to rather than only when the sun is shining and for a few hours after that. I understand the excitement of the international community to “leapfrog” rural India over fossil fuel technologies directly to energy systems that  do not generate greenhouse gases and threaten future generations, BUT we must be extremely sensitive I think to asking some of the poorest people in the world (Bihar’s rural poor) to shoulder the burden of decreasing global greenhouse gas emissions when available technologies that would contribute substantially to their immediate well-being (albeit while negatively impacting the future) are widely available. The villagers made this point loud and clear to their government after Nitish came to the village and the government was embarrassed into extending the grid, negating many of the benefits of GreenPeace’s project.

 Update 2018:

I recently came across this masters thesis on the solar project in Dharnai: file:///Users/agh736/Downloads/jawaid_eqra.pdf

* Views differ a great deal on how soon Bihar's rural areas will have more access to grid-power. See a recent landscaping of views on electrification in Bihar by The Energy Collective at MIT: http://theenergycollective.com/pjlevi/2205931/uncertainty-grid-expansion-and-grid-supply-case-study-bihar-india

**

Results 4 Development: What happens when funders seek to ensure projects achieve both basic research and tangible development outcomes

This is a bit of an ethnographic blog post of my experience at the Water, Land and Eco-systems (WLE) write-shop in Nepal Katmandu. This write-shop was the final stage in preparing a grant we later received from WLE to implement a project testing financial models to help small farmers adopt solar powered irrigation pumps. However, this post is not about solar or pumps or farming, it’s about the challenges faced by donors and international organizations in bringing basic research together with development projects. It is a big and important challenge and one that many good people are trying to muddle through. This piece is a critique of my experience, but hopefully one with useful lessons and more importantly, I don't think the WLE program is behind the ball in this field at all, only that figuring out how to link knowledge with action or do results for development (R4D) research is not easy.

The goal of the write-shop was for 5 finalist proposals in the Ganga river basin to come together for 3 days to find synergies between their projects and develop their ideas including outcomes, outputs and research questions. The workshop organizers put a huge amount of emphasis on R4D and in many ways had taken some of the “linking knowledge with action” ideas to heart, pushing the participants who they assumed were "pure researchers" and had never thought of anything but a research question, to think first about the impacts they wanted to have and also about the outputs (e.g. policy briefs, movies, news articles) they would want to create as part of their grant proposal.

While these developments in the CGIAR’s grant making process seem positive, there are still many challenges. For one, the pendulum seems to have swung so far in the “D” direction of “R4D” that any concept of "use inspired basic research" is gone and it seems like the program might be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water, trying to act like development program or agency without the kind of budget that is required to scale development projects. 

The organizers spoke at length about linking research with action by engaging with “next users” which they defined as people like government agencies, donors, private sector etc who might take projects to scale. There was some but much less emphasis on the importance of iterative learning with “end users”. Its not that they left it out, but it was certainly under-emphasized compared to the single minded focus on taking the specific project each of the five teams had in mind to scale. The idea of engaging with "next users” was treated like a novelty idea that no researcher had ever done before—seemingly the CGIAR has forgotten its own history and that the Green Revolution in India as well as the creation of the CGIAR itself was the result of active engagement on the part of scientists to influence policy and government institutions. 

The problems that came out of the Green Revolution as well as many of the problems that have plagued agriculture development since both (both environmental degradation and the challenges of improving the lives of poor and marginal farmers) are not, I would argue, due to a lack of communication between science and policy (knowledge to action) as much as do to science pushing specific ideas and agendas without paying attention to tradeoffs that arise from the introduction of new technologies and the impacts on equity that their development programs create. These issues were almost left off the table entirely during the workshop except for the constant pleas of the gender specialist to collect “gender disaggregated data", but without insights into why this is important from a macro-perspective of the history of agriculture development projects or the CGIAR.  

This is not to say that the workshop was not useful. It provided an excellent opportunity for Aditi and I to get on the same page with the project, clarify research priorities, train our field managers, and think about project synergies across WLE projects. But it also made me feel like the reforms of the CGIAR towards getting better at linking knowledge with action are still faltering. They have certainly taken on some lessons of linking knowledge with action, but issues raised by the literature in terms of iterative feedback from end-users, issues of power in development etc have not yet been well integrated. 

Workshop Report: Innovation for Vulnerable Farmers: Drought and Water Scarcity Adaptation Technologies

Together with Professor Michele Holbrook, I recently co-organized a workshop on the challenge of designing innovation systems to meet the needs of the most vulnerable farmers. The workshop was held at Harvard University on September 11–12, 2014. It brought together a diverse group of scholars to explore how actors in the agriculture innovation system can better promote the needs of small and marginal farmers.

Four key themes emerged from the workshop:

(1) Drought sets fundamental limits on productivity. Its impacts are intertwined with temperature and nutrient stresses. Both genetic and management options to mitigate impacts of drought exist, but there are no silver bullets. Moreover, many existing technologies for addressing drought and water scarcity are currently not in widespread and sustained use across many parts of the developing world.

(2) Agriculture technologies should be thought of in terms of risk profiles to farmers rather than yields. This mirrors how farmers themselves think about whether to adopt a new technology. In this context, packages of technologies, as opposed to stand-alone interventions, are often important. So are broader institutional interventions that mitigate risks to farmers and facilitate adoption such as access to assured markets.

(3) Successful innovation is a multistage process, generally involving invention, selection, promotion, adoption, and adaptation on the way to widespread use. The actors in the innovation system who are most concerned with serving the needs of small and marginal farmers too often focus only on one stage of the innovation system, missing other important stages that are necessary to achieve their ultimate goals. A broader perspective that encompasses the entire innovation system is needed.

(4) Efforts are needed to increase the involvement of small and marginal farmers throughout the stages of the innovation system. In order to do this we need to build local capacity to adapt knowledge and technologies to specific social and ecological conditions and develop social capital among small and marginal farmers to demand policies and technologies that meet their needs. A common theme connecting examples of success was the role of local champions, who often approach challenges from a systems perspective, connecting stages of the innovation system to help develop “pockets of prosperity” for small and marginal farmers in specific regions.

You can read our full workshop report HERE.

You can visit the workshop website HERE.

PROVIDE LINK TO PAPER.

Guest Post from JAIN Irrigation Ltd: Improving Livelihoods of Marginal Farmers a collaboration with JAIN Irrigation Systems India

JAIN Irrigation Systems Ltd put together this blog post about our collaborative work on solar irrigation in Bihar.

PLEASE CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL BLOG POST HERE.

Incentives for Drip Irrigation

Interviewing drip irrigation adopters in Kerala, India.

Im just setting up my website and blog. The first post will be on drip irrigation in India and will be here soon. I posted this as a place holding mostly to make sure I actually understand how this website works. Please come back soon. 

Written: May 19 2015

Blog Post will be up by end of week