Tackling rural poverty, together

Willi Graf, Ph.D.

Senior Adviser, Natural Resources & Environment, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Berne

Let's show more respect for the social and environmental contribution of farms

Nater: How does the SDC reconcile its defense of the interests of small farmers in poor countries with Switzerland’s heavy subsidies to its own farmers? By some accounts, support payments as a share of gross Swiss farm income stand at 68%, the second-highest in the world after Iceland.

Graf: It’s true that Swiss agriculture is one of the most heavily subsidised in the world. But Swiss agriculture is being restructured, and the SDC is helping to push that process along. We’ve practically eliminated export dumping. The linkage between food aid and Swiss farm surpluses is very minor and will disappear by 2008. Also, Swiss import tariffs affect mainly products from Europe and the US, only a few from developing countries and practically none from the poorest ones. And we’re progressively cutting back subsidies so as to limit them essentially to multifunctional farms in remote areas of Switzerland that preserve local environmental and social systems. The intention is ensure that our subsidies become less and less of an obstacle to open access of imported products to Swiss markets.

We also feel that some of the concepts put forward by Switzerland are having a positive impact on the international debate on rural development. We believe that low-income, food-importing countries should be allowed to preserve the economic, environmental and social multi-functionality of their farms, and so must have the possibility of protecting their agriculture. If rapid liberalisation is forced upon these countries, they will be the losers. The winners would be principally the large, food exporting middle-income countries like Brazil and Argentina, not the poorest countries.

Is it hard to keep rural development at the top of the SDC agenda?
On the one hand, the SDC is mainly working in rural areas. We’re not big on infrastructure development or urban projects. There’s general agreement on the rural focus, because of the poverty there. On the other hand, rural development cuts across many of our thematic sectors and tasks, so keeping productive aspects of rural development at the top of the agenda is a challenge. Also, fund allocation within the SDC is decided mainly on a geographical basis. The influence of technical experts like myself on the SDC’s use and allocation of funds is limited, so we have to communicate a lot.

Meaning what?
We're developing institutional tools and procedures that helps us reach out to colleagues. We try to do this in a coordinated and congenial way. We have a special website, the SDC Focal Point for Rural Development, for discussions and information exchange with the field. We seek out our RD experts, both international and local staff, and invite them to come see us when they’re back at home base. We tell them we want to listen. Our message to them is, “You’re an important person for us”. We offer them an open discussion forum. We invite them to give presentations, if they want to. If not, we just invite them to talk about their concerns and to catch up on state-of-the-art discussions about rural development. We call these our “rural development briefings”.