The Current Status and Role of Private Extension

A Literature Review and a Conceptual Framework

Suresh Chandra Babu, Natarajan Ramesh and Caitlin Shaw,    International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA

This chapter reviews the current status of private extension systems and their role in agricultural development. It also develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and impact of private extension systems and sets the stage for the case studies presented in the rest of the book. It also reviews the factors affecting the successful performance of private extension systems.

Keywords

Private extension; current status; conceptual framework; assessment methods

Contents

Introduction

The role of the private sector in providing agricultural extension and advisory services has been well recognized as a means of increasing productivity in the effort to meet food security goals. Agricultural extension providers provide not only technology, but also the information and skills necessary to increase production in a sustainable manner. Traditionally, extension has implied training and dissemination of information surrounding specific production technologies. More recently, it has expanded to include helping farmers to form groups, deal with the marketing of products, and partnering with relevant service providers such as rural credit institutions. However, in today’s rapidly changing environment, it is important to understand the role of pluralistic extension systems in meeting the diverse technology and information needs of farmers. The pluralistic form of extension, combining a variety of service and technical providers, offers a unique opportunity to address the challenges facing smallholders as the agricultural sector transitions to a more market-oriented system.

Recently, there has been growing interest from large international actors in the role of extension in meeting targets such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. In addition, the creation of targeted advisory groups such as the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services has put agricultural extension at the forefront of policy discussions.

In this chapter we review the current status and the role of private extension programs in developing countries. We specifically address the following questions to better understand the role of private extension provision:

As will be seen in the later chapters of this volume, the demand patterns of farmers are changing in developing countries due to the transformation of the agricultural sector. As the income of smallholder farmers rises, farmers are shifting away from cereals to higher-value crops. Production systems have become more specialized, requiring more context- and commodity-specific extension services for farmers, requiring a move away from the top-down, linear approach of the training and visit (T&V) system (Anderson and Feder, 2004). Public extension systems can no longer adequately provide extension because of the limitations of a bureaucratic, “one-size-fits-all” approach and because of the fiscal unsustainability of a government trying to meet all the various, specialized needs of farmers.

As a solution, many countries have privatized some of their extension services—for example, providing vouchers as in Costa Rica and China, or contracting out extension as in Chile. In addition, the number of farmers’ associations has increased significantly, enabling smallholders to band together in order to fund private, fee-for-service extension. Furthermore, farmers are also able to obtain extension services (among other services) through contract farming or extension embedded in their transactions with input dealers. However, further research is needed to analyze the true impact of the extension component of contract farming. Yet there is comparatively little evidence on how private extension operates, who benefits, what costs are incurred, and how to scale up these operations. In this review we analyze the literature around how private extension has been emerging in different contexts and the current status, challenges, and constraints on expansion.

The literature review is organized as follows. In the next section we review the emerging trends in a chronological fashion. This is followed by literature on the privatization of public extension. Then we review private extension models that have been modified for the specialized information needs of farmers. We then look at the issues around analyzing private extension from a policy perspective.

The literature review is followed by development of a conceptual framework that guides the case studies presented later in the book, in terms of identifying the key elements in assessing the role and impact of private extension services. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks. Following the end of the chapter, Table 2.3 provides a detailed list of publications on private extension and their areas of focus.

Trends in the Development of Private Extension

After an extensive literature review of journal articles, discussion papers, and other articles from 1994 to 2014, several trends have emerged. Current overarching trends in agricultural extension are broadly focused on decentralization, outsourcing, and privatization. Among the most prominent trends are the following:

Another important trend that emerged was the gradual change in focus from using welfare economic ideas to create a framework for analyzing private extension to incorporating a more diverse set of ideas to build an analytical framework, such as sociological network theory, institutional economics, and systems theory (Labarthe, 2009; Faure et al., 2012).

Pluralistic agricultural extension systems

Pluralistic agricultural extension and advisory services refers to the growing variety of services providers operating in this space. This extension structure acknowledges the need to address agricultural and rural development challenges with varied approaches (Heemskerk and Davis, 2012). This encompasses the outsourcing and privatization trends mentioned above to include public–private partnerships, farmer-based and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as private input suppliers. The benefits of a pluralistic extension system include the ability to overcome common constraints such as funding, personnel, and capacity as well as allowing the flexibility to meet the specific needs of different subgroups of farmers or regions. This allows the system to better meet the information, skill, and technology needs of the farmers. It is recommended that the public extension system act to coordinate and manage the stakeholders toward the common goal of addressing the needs of farmers in order to capitalize on the specialized roles of each organization.

Privatization of public extension literature

One of the earliest frameworks for the privatization of extension was based on a concept from welfare economics: the rivalry and excludability of goods (Umali and Schwartz, 1994; Umali-Deininger, 1997). The authors combined these characteristics to sort the types of agricultural information into public (non rivalrous and non excludable), private (rivalrous and excludable), common-pool (non excludable and rivalrous), and toll goods (excludable and non rivalrous) (Table 2.1). This characterization enabled the authors to answer their initial question about who should fund agricultural extension. They concluded that farmers will only pay for private goods and...