In determining whether to adopt homegardening as a strategy for improving the livelihood of poor families, planners must begin by defining the class of prospective beneficiaries.[17] Although homegardening may be a beneficial intervention for both urban and rural poor populations, the opportunities are likely to differ based on a number of considerations. Suitable land is much more likely to be available in sufficient quantity and quality in rural areas, either because poor families already possess suitable land or because planners can obtain suitable land and distribute it to target families. Once the general class of beneficiaries is defined, we propose that planners undertake the following analysis, summarized in Figure 3.
After planners define the general class of beneficiaries, a threshold question is whether homegardens are likely to provide benefits to the target population. To answer this question, planners should ask whether homegardens presently provide benefits to any families (including the non-poor) in the vicinity of the area where the target population resides (the target area). Areas in which households have historically been unable to overcome climatic, economic or cultural constraints to operating homegardens may not be appropriate areas for homegardening interventions (Marsh 1998, Ninez 1985).
If homegardens do not appear to exist or do not appear to be providing substantial benefits to any families in vicinity of the target area, the question then becomes whether homegardens are providing benefits in settings that planners deem to be analogous to the target setting, including settings in other communities with similar climates and similar resource constraints. The existence of homegardens in the vicinity of the target-setting (or in analogous settings) would suggest that water, soils, climate, cultural preferences and other factors are not a barrier to establishment of productive homegardens in the target area, and further suggests that homegardens may be a viable strategy for addressing livelihood needs of the target population.
In making the preliminary assessment on whether homegardens might provide benefits to the target population, planners will likely benefit from field inquiries or studies, using rapid or participatory appraisal methods. Such field inquiries or studies might apply one or more of three approaches:
(1) What are existing typical uses and benefits of homegardens by target population? Focus should be on a representative sample of the target population to determine how home plot is used, what benefits accrue, and what constraints are faced.
(2) What potential uses and benefits do homegardens offer target population? Focus should be on a purposively selected sample of the target population that have well-developed homegardens. Investigators should determine the benefits and how and why this portion of the target population has been able to use homegardens more productively.
(3) What best practices have emerged from NGO or other interventions related to homegardens in the target area? It is possible or even likely that NGO or other government departments have made or are making small-scale homegarden interventions in part of the target area. These deserve study so lessons can be learned, successes replicated and mistakes avoided.
Figure 4. Analyzing appropriateness of homegardens
Once planners make a preliminary determination that homegardens might provide benefits to the target population, planners should determine what proportion of families in that population have access to suitable land on which to construct a house and establish a homegarden. It is important to address the issue of access to land separately from access to other inputs for several reasons. Where families do not possess suitable land or their rights to possessed land are not sufficiently secure, this is the single largest barrier to establishing homegardens. While the cost of obtaining and allocating land to target families may be quite affordable, the nature of land - the fact that it is immovable, and the fact that access to land can have important social and political implications - makes its allocation more complicated than allocation of other homegardening inputs such as water, know-how, appropriate plant and animal stocks, etc. For these reasons, it is appropriate for planners to evaluate the costs of identifying, obtaining and allocating land independent of other costs.
At the same time, planners should attempt to assess the special benefits associated with allocating homegarden plots to landless and functionally landless beneficiaries. Provision of land to a landless or functionally landless family can have benefits far beyond the benefits ordinarily associated with homegardening, including improved status in the village and the ability to demand reasonable wages in the job market without risk of eviction. See Box 1. Thus, planners should assess the value of special benefits associated with allocating land to landless families separate from their evaluation of other homegardening benefits.
In determining what proportion of families in that population have access to suitable land on which to construct a house and establish a homegarden, planners should assess suitability of land in relation to two important factors. First, the parcel on which the family resides must be large enough to support a homegarden that can provide benefits to the family.[18] Second, the family must have ownership-like rights to the land rather than use the land as a squatter or with the permission of a landlord. The existence of ownership-like rights determines whether the family has the right to improve the land and whether the family has a reasonable expectation of receiving the benefits of any long-term improvements, such as planting trees.
For that portion of the target group already possessing suitable land for homegardening, planners should proceed to consider the sufficiency of water and other inputs such as family capital, family know-how, etc., as described in following sections. For that portion of the target group that does not possess suitable land (as defined above), planners must undertake a critical analysis to determine the availability of appropriate land in the vicinity of the target families. Planners should consider the quantity of land available from various sources, including government land and land that the government might purchase from private owners.
In the case of assessing the availability of public lands for reallocation, planners should take special care to verify that the land is not functioning as a common property resource providing benefits essential to the local population. This is a significant risk in many settings where the government claims ownership of common property resources such as community forests or wastelands located near population centers. Planners frequently underestimate or are unaware of the extent to which poor families use such resources to graze livestock, hunt forest animals, and gather plants for consumption, fodder, medicine and fuel (Jodha 1990, Blair 1996, Meinzen-Dick et al 2001). Even where planners recognize that such activities occur, they may underestimate the importance of these activities in the household economy of the poorest families. It would be counterproductive to eliminate a common property resource that provides a low level of support to a large number of poor families in order to distribute homegarden plots to a smaller number of families, even if the total economic use of the land would be enhanced by such a use conversion. The detrimental impact on some poor families would not justify the benefit to other poor families. Planners should also satisfy themselves that available land is not located in a place where residential uses would create sanitation or other environmental problems.
If planners determine that appropriate land is available in the vicinity of the target population, they should then calculate the cost of purchasing such land (if it is necessary to purchase it), as well as administrative costs of obtaining and allocating the land, calculated in terms of costs per family benefited. (See Box 2.) Planners must also consider whether the beneficiaries should share in the costs of land purchase (as well as other costs), and, if so, to what extent. Important factors to consider include: affordability for what are likely to be among the society’s poorest households, administrative costs of collection (relative to benefits of such collection), the desirability of cost-sharing by beneficiaries to promote their "ownership" of the programme activities, and related moral risk issues.
Because homegardens must be established near where target beneficiaries live and because appropriate land is likely to be more available for acquisition and allocation in rural areas, homegardening - and allocating land for homegardens - may be a particularly viable strategy in rural areas. Programmes that enhance the livelihoods of poor rural families may have the added advantage of reducing the incentives that members of poor families have to migrate to cities in search of better livelihoods.
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Box 2. Cost of obtaining land: evidence from India. The cost of obtaining suitable land on which to allocate homegarden plots is likely to be affordable, especially in rural areas. In Karnataka, India, a November 2001 sample of 400 rural households in four districts estimated the value of unimproved and non-irrigated agricultural land to be between 21,000 and 44,000 Rupees per acre, with an average of 33,250 Rupees per acre (Hanstad et al 2002), which equates to approximately US$ 694 per acre (US$ 1,714 per hectare) at November 2001 exchange rates. This represents an average cost of approximately $86 per family benefited if each family receives 500 m2 of land (20 families per hectare).[19] These estimates reflect the likely purchase price of acquiring agricultural land at market prices, but do not include administrative costs of acquisition and allocation, or costs of constructing simple roads and drainage. Although such costs are likely to be low in comparison to land acquisition costs, they are not negligible. |
Another consideration is whether creation of homegarden plots is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, causing a fall in overall agricultural productivity or exacerbating food security concerns. Even assuming that arable land is used to create homegardens, these risks are likely to be insubstantial for several reasons. First, because even very small plots can provide important benefits to families, the total amount of land needed for homegardens is likely to be modest. Assuming that 5 percent of the acquired land is used to construct roads, drainage and other infrastructure, a one hectare plot could provide 380 m2 plots to 25 families. To place this in perspective, in India, distribution of 380 m2 plots to each of the nation’s estimated 15 million completely landless families would require only 600,000 hectares of land, which is approximately 4/10 of 1 percent of the nation’s 161.8 million hectares of arable land (FAO 2002).
Second, if used with even modest intensity to produce vegetables, fruits and animal products, homegarden plots are likely to be produce as least as much agricultural value per unit area as had been produced on the arable land. A study of Javanese home gardens found that net income per square meter was higher for homegardens than for rice fields. The same study found that relative costs of production on home gardens were much lower than for rice fields (15.1 percent of gross income versus 55.9 percent of gross income for rice fields) (Danoesastro 1980, cited in Christanty 1990).[20] The latter is particularly important for poor households, who typically have less access to credit and are less able to insure against risk. A study of well-developed homegardens in Karnataka indicate that the income per square meter is several multiples higher than arable land in the same area used for grain crops. (Hanstad et al, in preparation). On a macro-scale, homegardens in Russia comprised about 4.5 percent of total agricultural land in 2000, and yet were reported to have produced 64 percent of all produce in the country, including 90 percent of all potatoes and 75 percent of fresh vegetables (Borisova 2000.)
Third, even if homegardens do not produce as much per hectare as arable land, the effect of any reduction in the total amount of food produced is likely to be offset by the fact that homegardens efficiently provide foods to one of the most food-insecure segments of the population. Homegardens are likely to make such foods available to the poor more efficiently than other government food programmes since the poor themselves control distribution of homegarden products. Whatever production poor families do not consume they will trade or sell to others.
In evaluating social value of distributing homegarden plots, it is useful to evaluate the efficacy of alternative programmes targeted to assist the same populations. In India, for example, we have found that government resources devoted to constructing housing for landless and land poor families might be better spent, and would reach more beneficiaries, if some portion of programme resources were diverted from housing construction and instead used to obtain larger house sites that provide space for homegardening. Our own field research in India indicates that even the poorest rural households are able to accumulate the resources to construct a house (in stages) if they have secure rights to an adequate house site. For example in one study of 45 households who had received house sites from the government, 32 had constructed housing without government assistance, indicating that these families had the personal incentive, as well as access to sufficient materials or sufficient savings or access to credit to construct the house once they received land (Hanstad and Lokesh 2002).
Several other considerations may be considered in planning the acquisition and allocation of land for homegardens:
Ownership of the land should be registered and certificated in the name of both spouses. This provides a level of additional protection to the wife in case of spousal separation or death of the husband. In addition to this important security protection, the literature indicates that legal land ownership by women facilitates increased respect within their families and communities, as well as a means of earning and controlling income, feeding their families and accessing government programmes (Agarwal 1994, Deere and Leon 2001, Deininger 2003).
Although it is important to register ownership of the land and issue appropriate ownership documents, the lack of a full-fledged land registry for conducting land transactions should not impede allocation of land to landless and land poor families. Families who receive small parcels for construction of a house and establishment of a homegarden are unlikely to want to transfer such land in the near term, which reduces the importance of the transaction registry. However, such families must be able to prove their rights to the land to protect against uncompensated taking by the government.
In order to reduce the threat that local elites, including large landowners, will seek to capture benefits of the land allocation programme, planners should keep the benefits relatively small for each beneficiary family. Most elites will not be interested in receiving small parcels measuring, for example, 380 m2. In addition, if the parcels are sited in colonies, elites are likely to be even less interested in obtaining such land since its location within the colony reduces the alternative uses to which the elites could put the land.
Before the land is allocated, planners must resolve any questions of prior ownership and address any land use restrictions to ensure that the land can be allocated for residential and homegardening uses. Where the land acquired is zoned as agricultural land, it may be necessary to redesignate the land for non-agricultural uses.
Planners must consider typical habitation patterns and related customs when allocating land for homegardens. Sociological research may be required to inform the planning process. In deciding where to site new homegarden plots, planners should be sensitive to the issue of isolating groups according to caste and ethnicity. In deciding the shape of the allocated parcels, planners should determine how close to one another families in the region generally prefer to build their houses - longer parcels may allow for a more intimate siting of houses than square parcels. If beneficiary families are willing to relocate from their existing village, how close must the new colony of residential homegarden parcels be to that village? In India, for example, land poor families state that they would prefer to receive a new residential plot of land within one half to one kilometer of the existing village.
Water deserves special consideration. In many environments, water for home-gardening is likely to be the most important consideration after land. In some environments, water may be even more scarce than land and more expensive to supply during the driest months of the year. Where water is scarce throughout the year, its absence may preclude homegardening as a viable strategy.
On the other hand, the amount of water needed for homegardening is often not great, and carrying water to the garden may be a reasonable solution. In addition, water availability should be considered when identifying which trees and other plantings to promote in homegardening. Project planners may also be able to reduce water demand of homegardeners by providing extension advice on water conservation and subsidizing low-cost techniques homegardeners can use to collect, store and efficiently use rainwater and household wastewaters.
Even with conservation and such self-help approaches to irrigation, the increased need for irrigation water may stress public water delivery systems, particularly in urban areas and particularly during dry months. Clearly, if homegardening irrigation by some families causes other families to lose access to adequate amounts of water necessary for household needs, this will not be an acceptable trade off. If planners do not plan for the increased demand for water that comes with homegardening, water shortages could result.
Planners may therefore wish to explore the cost of upgrading systems for delivering water to households, or establishing new delivery systems where homegarden plots are being allocated to landless families. Once planners determine that it is technically feasible to supply adequate amounts of water to the planned homegardens, they must calculate the costs per family benefited to determine whether the cost is socially justified. It is quite possible that the public cost of supplying irrigation water to homegardens will exceed the economic value of products produced in the homegardens. Under such conditions homegardening will prosper only if the public subsidizes the cost of delivering irrigation water to homegardens. Such a public subsidy may be socially justified when viewed against other public subsidies targeted at providing social assistance to the poor.
Once access to land and water are secured, planners must consider what other factors require attention to promote homegardening, and what issues are likely to arise with respect to each. Most literature dealing with homegardens applies to these questions.
As was noted at the beginning of this paper, one important and distinguishing characteristics of homegardening is that it is the poor may enter without making great investments of capital (Marsh 1998). Ultimately, homegardens are likely to be a useful strategy for improving the livelihoods of poor households only if such households value homegardens to the extent that they are willing to invest scarce savings in improving and maintaining the homegarden. To be sustainable, homegarden inputs must be affordable within the typical household budget of the poor. In India, we have met with very poor agricultural labourer families who invested scarce family capital to construct housing, plant trees and raise poultry and livestock once they obtained secure ownership of small plots of land. These families reported receiving no government assistance in purchasing inputs for homegardening.
As with many development interventions, programmes to distribute homegardens to the poor bring with them the risk that beneficiary families will not value what they are given for free. One solution is to design programmes such that recipients of homegarden plots are obligated to invest their own time and labour in making improvements to the plot, such as construction of a house. Families are likely to value such assets if they make active investments of this type.
In many situations planners may determine that some level of public subsidy of homegarden inputs is justified, at least with respect to homegarden start-up costs such as the purchase of seedlings and seeds. If the project subsidizes these or other homegardening inputs, it may be useful to use "introductory" schemes in which inputs are sold at a reduced price for a limited time, rather than outright gifts of inputs. This approach has been found to legitimize projects as something other than an attempt to "help the poor," which poor families often resent (Ninez 1985). Planners should avoid any project design that calls for ongoing subsidy of inputs.
Although the poor may be able to find capital to purchase building materials, planting materials, poultry and livestock, in some cases it may be much more difficult for them to access reliable information on how to maximize the productivity of plants and animals. This is likely to be particularly true in urban areas where many families do not have direct experience in agriculture. Agricultural extension can help to fill information gaps.
It is important to integrate nutrition awareness and education into garden planning so that homegardening families have full information upon which to base decisions of whether and to what extent they will use the homegarden to produce foods to supplement and improve the family diet, as opposed to using the homegarden primarily as a source of additional household income. When designing an effective means for communicating an appropriate nutrition strategy, planners must understand the traditional diet and food taboos, seasonal food shortages, food storage practices, food cooking practices, and distribution of food within the household. It is most effective to integrate gardening technique education with nutrition education so that households can plant varieties that comply with taste preferences and that will supply nutrients year-round (Marsh 1998).
Even where homegardening families have experience in producing various plants and animals, they may not fully understand the long-term consequences of various production techniques. For example, homegardeners who do not take proper steps to preserve soil fertility may eventually find that the soil is exhausted. Extension agents can explain the benefits of using animal manures and composting of kitchen wastes can help restore nutrients to soils. The fact that homegardens have persisted for generations in some societies without the addition of artificial fertilizers suggests that viable low-cost strategies do exist for preserving soil fertility. Programmes promoting homegardening should include an agricultural extension component that helps families to appreciate the importance of soil fertility and affordable techniques that will preserve soil nutrients.
Agricultural extension and nutritional education can serve another important purpose: helping families to understand and value the economic practicalities of homegardening, as well as the ways in which homegardening can contribute to family food security, family nutrition, family income and family social status. Ideally, the local community will value homegardening as an appropriate strategy for all families rather than as a leisure activity of wealthier households, or a mark of household poverty. Although it may seem somewhat contradictory, homegardens may be a better strategy for improving the livelihoods of the poor if homegardens are presented as a universal strategy for improving household nutrition and household independence, rather than as a "poor man’s" strategy of subsistence. To the extent non-poor families participate in homegardening, this removes the social stigma of gardening as an activity of the poor, and improves the relative status of poor families by providing them with another activity they have in common with non-poor families. For these reasons, planners should consider whether agricultural extension should target not only poor households, but all homegardening households. Brownrigg (1985) suggests that it may be better to avoid creating demonstration homegarden plots, and focus instead on working with a local family who is willing, in the spirit of experimentation and cooperation, to allow their homegarden to be used as a demonstration garden for the village.
Intervention projects should promote the economic benefits of homegardening rather than focus solely on benefits of home consumption. Increased income can also be used to purchase more nutritious foods. Other potential economic benefits include: (a) returns to land and labour are often higher for homegardens than for field agriculture, (b) homegardens can supply fodder for animals, fuelwood, supplies for handicrafts, (c) household processing of homegarden fruits and vegetables can increase their market value and preserve them for later consumption, and (d) sale of homegarden produce may be one of the only sources of independent income for women (Marsh 1998).
Homegardening planners should avoid introducing plant species that are locally unknown, no matter how nutritious and economical the plants are. Where it is uncertain whether particular plants can be grown easily in the local environment, or it is uncertain that they are accepted in the local diet, there may be high hurdles to their adoption (Brownrigg 1985).
Homegardening projects are more likely to succeed by promoting existing local species and by making local planting stocks more readily available to the target population. The most sustainable approach is likely to be one in which local nurseries can be established to satisfy the needs of homegardeners while earning a profit for the nursery. Programmes to help establish local nurseries may help to demonstrate their profitability. In the Helen Keller International programme to promote homegarden development in Bangladesh, implementers found that the lack of a regular supply of quality seeds and other gardening inputs was a constraint to improving homegarden production. Their solution was to establish a series of privately owned village-level nurseries to provide information and plant stocks to homegardeners:
"Local partner NGO’s work with their community groups to establish village-level nurseries and homestead gardens. The village nurseries serve as a community support service network in such a way that they are the focal point for demonstration and training on low-cost, low-risk gardening practices for nursery holders, the leaders of the NGO women’s groups, and household gardeners. In addition, they are the source and distribution centres for seeds, seedlings, and saplings, the sites for demonstration of new plant varieties, and the centres for community mobilization and organization. The majority of the village nurseries are operated as small enterprises and are a significant source of income for the household." (Talukder et al 2000:167)
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[17] Definition of the
general class of beneficiaries is presumed to depend upon the base poverty line,
family ownership of various assets, and other measurements already familiar to
planners. [18] If "family" is defined as a nuclear family (parents and unmarried children), then it quite common to find that married children occupy the homesite of their parents, such that several generations, comprised of several nuclear families, occupy the same homesite. In many such situations, the second generation is functionally landless since they own no land of their own and the homesite is not large enough to support the number of occupying nuclear families. [19] In a December 2000 survey of 500 rural households in West Bengal, respondents estimated the average cost of non-irrigated arable land to be 46,975 Rupees per acre (Hanstad and Lokesh 2002), which is equivalent to approximately US$ 1,006 per acre ($US 2,487 per hectare) at December 2000 exchange rates. If one hectare is divided such that 20 families receive 500 m2 of land each, this represents an average acquisition cost of approximately $124 per family benefited. [20] Marten (1990) reports that a study of households in West Java revealed that although rice fields controlled by the poorest households produced a higher value of products per square meter as compared to the value produced per square meter on the homegarden, the cost of purchased inputs for homegardening were much less; for the better-off households (defined as any household earning more than $100 per year), the value of homegarden production per square meter equaled the value produced per square meter on rice fields. |
