I think one of the keys to minimizing the need for child labor in smallholder agriculture is to address a major oversight in the effort to improved agronomic production particularly in SSA that relys heavily on manual labor. I think it is safe to assume most parents are interested in their childern's overall welfare and would perfer not to have them involved in child labor. Instead they see it as essential for thier family survival. The need thus is to take a close look at how to reduce the overall drudgery associated with manual smallholder farming.
This gets to the limits of the agronomy discipline as it does an excellent job of determining the agronomic potential of an areas while saying nothing about the operational resources need to expend small plot result across a smallholder community. The underlying default assumption is that it is not a problem and farmers only need extension/educated on improve techonlogy and the adoption is then fully discretionary. I think this is far from true as the manual labor can be extremely limited. Unfortunately, the availablity of labor or labor substitues falls into an aministative void between the agronomists or other applied biological scientists and the social scientists. Who in an agronomic development effort is responsible to determine the amount of labor needed, the availability of the labor and what are the rational compromises in apply improved technology, most of which require additioal labor, when the labor is not available?
Has anyone looked at the dietary energy balance between the 4000 kcal/day energy required to undertake a full day of agronoic field work and th approximately 2000 to 2500 kcal/day available, to most smallholder farmers. This is just meeting basic metabolism needs with only enough energy for a few hours of field work with perhaps limited diligence. The result is taking up to 8 weeks for basic crop establishment with progressively declining yield until it is virtually impossible to meet basic family food security with manual agriculture. You simply cannot hoe your way out of poverty. Thus to effectively reduce the reliance on child labor the most effective means may be to facilitate smallholder access to mechanization for basic crop establishment and perhaps mechanical threshing to improve the yield recovery. This has to be done through private ower/operators of equipment and not through any means of shared equipment.
Please visit the following webpages: https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/OperationalFe… : https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/calorie-energy-balan… ; https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/DietPoster.pdf ; https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/most-effective-proje…;
Thank you
博士 Dick Tinsley