Rural Communication Services for Family Farming: Contributions, Evidence and Perspectives

"Rural communication services and policies can translate farmers' right to communication into fair and transparent regulatory frameworks that will allow equitable access to information and communication services in rural areas and ensure the active participation of smallholder and family farmers.”

This Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) publication reports results of the Forum on Communication for Development and Community Media for Family Farming (FCCM) held in Rome, Italy, October 23-24 2016. It describes the appropriation of communication as an asset for rural agriculture and development; the practices; institutional communication for development (C4D) efforts; challenges, opportunities and options for communication services; and joint initiatives.

The International Year of Family Farming (IYFF), 2014, resulted in a year-long period of consultation and dialogues including this FCCM with the following objectives:

• "Showcase the contribution of communication for development (ComDev) and community media to family farming, providing evidence of innovative programmes and farmer-led experiences.
• Raise awareness of the potential of communication in agriculture and rural development, giving voice to farmers and civil society organizations, rural institutions, the private sector and community media.
• Identify opportunities, policy options and strategic initiatives to promote ComDev policies and services in support of family farming and rural development."

A dedicated webpage (available here) facilitated outreach and is now used to share regular updates on the activities and joint initiatives.  Because farming needs to be: knowledge intensive; social in its dialogue, marketing, and information sharing; and engaged in that these are tasks of engagement, examples of farmer-community radio interaction illustrate possibilities that include dialogue on better knowledge - for example, seeking marketing knowledge, resulting in station programming response,  and then radio station engagement of government, for example, to respond to need for road improvement to move produce.

Lessons learned include:

1. Mobile phones are an affordable and accessible tool with great potential to enhance farm productivity, for example by using an SMS (short message service) commodity-price information service. 
2. Farmer-driven information services are often the most accurate, timely, locally relevant and trusted by fellow farmers, for example, information liaisons known as “Community Knowledge Workers”, including women farmers who speak to women.
3. Community media supports community rights and good governance, for example, preserving the minority language and cultural identity of the semi-nomadic Maasai  people by broadcasting in it, demanding the accountability of elected and traditional leaders, and bringing the issue of women’s personal and economic security to the forefront of community conversation.
4. ComDev can engage family farmers in scientific discussions, ensuring that their local and traditional knowledge is valued, for example gathering local weather knowledge and translating into local languages.
5. Access to ICTs alone is not enough to trigger change in rural areas, so there is a need to enhance the capacity of farmers and rural stakeholders in the application of digital skills.
6. The convergence of traditional media and ICTs can provide even the poorest rural communities with access to relevant information, for example, Sri Lanka's "radio browsing" of listeners, guest experts, and volunteers browsing the internet to discuss and contextualize agricultural information in local languages.
7. Partnerships between local communities, government extension and the private sector are important, for example, for fishers who need free text-based real-time weather and market-information service to prevented losses due to spoilage.
8. Community-based farmer organizations are key to facilitating the use of advanced ICTs, providing information and communication services and helping members to empower themselves, for example, direct marketing of shea butter by Malian women.
9. ComDev can bring local farmers’ perspectives to wider audiences and demand accountability from power holders, for example, listener/action groups in Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger.
10. ICTs can attract young people to careers in farming and improve their farm management skills, for example, with business management software.

Recommendations include:

• enabling policy and institutional frameworks by building alliances, brining national laws and policies in line with international standards, providing legal recognition to create a regulatory environment; and integrating women's and men's needs and priorities to develop rural communication services.
• investing and creating partnership opportunities, including multistakeholder partnerships, and assurance of access, especially by women and youth, to services.
• developing capacity by applying a diversity approach. "At the level of farmers: facilitate knowledge, confidence and agency of women and men farmers to voice their needs and concerns, claim their rights, interact and organize themselves....At the level of development professionals: develop collaborative learning strategies that link directly to and are inspired by rural realities with special attention to gender, class, age and socio-cultural issues..." ensuring support for independent and pluralistic media.

The publication concludes that: "Supporting dialogic communication and knowledge sharing processes is a powerful means of helping farmer organizations, indigenous peoples, rural communities and civil society organizations to make their voices heard and be part of the development agenda. Rural communication services and policies can translate farmers’ right to communication into fair and transparent regulatory frameworks that will allow equitable access to information and communication services in rural areas and ensure the active participation of smallholder and family farmers."