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Risk in agriculture
112
Book rev~ws
The nine case studies have some interesting details but most of them have been written up elsewhere, some, I suspect, several times over. They are concerned with maize, beans, rice and potatoes, so the agricultural range is not wide. There are three or four contributions from each of the three tropical continents. Nowhere is there sufficient technical detail given to enable the professional agriculturist to pull out data for critical analysis. Tripp's observation about poor quality science seems to be supported by reported trials in which means are either unadorned by standard errors or are ornamented by errors which suggest wild inaccuracy. I also hope that I shall never again, have to read about the storage of seed potatoes in the Andes. The technique of storage in diffuse light ('chitting') was common practice in Britain back in the 1920s and even earlier. CIP agronomists should have been able to go straight to practical field trials long before anthropologists found it necessary to do circular tours of farmers. This underlines my point in what I take to be the most important feature of the book: the weakness of FSR and the current tendency to return to the (once-reviled) view that well-informed researchers often have good ideas and materials, which receptive farmers are capable of adapting to their purposes. Some chapters here, in fact, describe explicit examples of research-generated packages (e.g. rice in the Philippines, maize in Indonesia, beans in Peru). Top-down packages rear their ugly heads again and why not? Researchers often are sensible and many of them even talk to farmers. Under the FSR banner, we were in some danger of forgetting that agricultural research was about agriculture rather than sociology and this book is a useful reminder of the fact. On-farm research, founded on social good sense, has a place, but it is more valuable in the context of interdisciplinary thinking by scientists rather than interdisciplinary verbiage by FSR teams. I liked this book and think that it should be widely read for its clear expression of this most relevant message: This view still leaves plenty of room for socio-economic good sense, as some of the better exponents of this subject have abundantly demonstrated. N. W. Simmonds
Risk in Agriculture. Edited by Dennis Holden, Peter Hazell and Anthony Pritchard. The World Bank, Washington DC, 1991, 159 pp. Price: $10.95 (softback). ISBN 0 8213 1965 5. This is the proceedings of the Tenth Agriculture Sector Symposium held at the World Bank in 1990. Nine papers from ten authors cover a variety of topics concerning risks in a macro- and micro-economic setting. These
Book reviews
113
range from a consideration of risk in economic development, crop insurance in the public and private sectors, commodity price risk management and financial markets, the role of agricultural research for risk management, through to the management of risk at the farm level in the West African semi-arid tropics, Mediterranean farming systems, and African pastoral systems. Coverage is uneven, and the quality of papers varies. Some are concise and very much to the point. Jock R. Anderson on agricultural research and risk management identifies two neglected areas where risk research could be expected to have a substantial impact. One is breeding for heritable inbuilt resistance to storage pests; the other is farm planning under risk. As Anderson says, this is an area that is severely underplayed in most developing country institutions. This is not through a lack of tools or methodology, although much could be done to adapt and apply these. As many authors have pointed out, it is difficult to separate out the riskreducing effects of different management practices. The case study chapters in the book underline the fact that, in general, there is a lack of data concerning producers' attitudes to risk. This also contributes to the difficulties both in understanding farmers' behaviour in terms of risk and in prescribing appropriate risk-reducing practices. Another paper of interest is on the failure of public sector crop insurance schemes and the rise of the private sector alternative. Michael Gudger points out that catastrophe can have the same effect on the insurers as on the insured, but at least private schemes can avoid the more obvious failings of the public schemes. In the foreword, the target audience of the book is defined as those working in agriculture and rural development, and its object, to enhance knowledge and information exchange. Coverage is not really comprehensive, however, and pointers to the enormous literature on the subject tend to be rather limited. Despite the opening remarks, where the World Bank's emphases on the environment and on women in development are highlighted, there is little in the subsequent papers on either of these issues. Presentation also could have been improved. In these days of cheap desk-top publishing software, it is surely not too much to expect tables and figures to be integrated into the text. The book could serve as supplemental reading material for students of, and workers in, agricultural development, as a number of the case studies are of interest in this regard. If it stimulates activity in riskrelated research, especially in the institutions of the developing countries, then the book will certainly have performed a highly useful function.
Philip Thornton
Book rev~ws
The nine case studies have some interesting details but most of them have been written up elsewhere, some, I suspect, several times over. They are concerned with maize, beans, rice and potatoes, so the agricultural range is not wide. There are three or four contributions from each of the three tropical continents. Nowhere is there sufficient technical detail given to enable the professional agriculturist to pull out data for critical analysis. Tripp's observation about poor quality science seems to be supported by reported trials in which means are either unadorned by standard errors or are ornamented by errors which suggest wild inaccuracy. I also hope that I shall never again, have to read about the storage of seed potatoes in the Andes. The technique of storage in diffuse light ('chitting') was common practice in Britain back in the 1920s and even earlier. CIP agronomists should have been able to go straight to practical field trials long before anthropologists found it necessary to do circular tours of farmers. This underlines my point in what I take to be the most important feature of the book: the weakness of FSR and the current tendency to return to the (once-reviled) view that well-informed researchers often have good ideas and materials, which receptive farmers are capable of adapting to their purposes. Some chapters here, in fact, describe explicit examples of research-generated packages (e.g. rice in the Philippines, maize in Indonesia, beans in Peru). Top-down packages rear their ugly heads again and why not? Researchers often are sensible and many of them even talk to farmers. Under the FSR banner, we were in some danger of forgetting that agricultural research was about agriculture rather than sociology and this book is a useful reminder of the fact. On-farm research, founded on social good sense, has a place, but it is more valuable in the context of interdisciplinary thinking by scientists rather than interdisciplinary verbiage by FSR teams. I liked this book and think that it should be widely read for its clear expression of this most relevant message: This view still leaves plenty of room for socio-economic good sense, as some of the better exponents of this subject have abundantly demonstrated. N. W. Simmonds
Risk in Agriculture. Edited by Dennis Holden, Peter Hazell and Anthony Pritchard. The World Bank, Washington DC, 1991, 159 pp. Price: $10.95 (softback). ISBN 0 8213 1965 5. This is the proceedings of the Tenth Agriculture Sector Symposium held at the World Bank in 1990. Nine papers from ten authors cover a variety of topics concerning risks in a macro- and micro-economic setting. These
Book reviews
113
range from a consideration of risk in economic development, crop insurance in the public and private sectors, commodity price risk management and financial markets, the role of agricultural research for risk management, through to the management of risk at the farm level in the West African semi-arid tropics, Mediterranean farming systems, and African pastoral systems. Coverage is uneven, and the quality of papers varies. Some are concise and very much to the point. Jock R. Anderson on agricultural research and risk management identifies two neglected areas where risk research could be expected to have a substantial impact. One is breeding for heritable inbuilt resistance to storage pests; the other is farm planning under risk. As Anderson says, this is an area that is severely underplayed in most developing country institutions. This is not through a lack of tools or methodology, although much could be done to adapt and apply these. As many authors have pointed out, it is difficult to separate out the riskreducing effects of different management practices. The case study chapters in the book underline the fact that, in general, there is a lack of data concerning producers' attitudes to risk. This also contributes to the difficulties both in understanding farmers' behaviour in terms of risk and in prescribing appropriate risk-reducing practices. Another paper of interest is on the failure of public sector crop insurance schemes and the rise of the private sector alternative. Michael Gudger points out that catastrophe can have the same effect on the insurers as on the insured, but at least private schemes can avoid the more obvious failings of the public schemes. In the foreword, the target audience of the book is defined as those working in agriculture and rural development, and its object, to enhance knowledge and information exchange. Coverage is not really comprehensive, however, and pointers to the enormous literature on the subject tend to be rather limited. Despite the opening remarks, where the World Bank's emphases on the environment and on women in development are highlighted, there is little in the subsequent papers on either of these issues. Presentation also could have been improved. In these days of cheap desk-top publishing software, it is surely not too much to expect tables and figures to be integrated into the text. The book could serve as supplemental reading material for students of, and workers in, agricultural development, as a number of the case studies are of interest in this regard. If it stimulates activity in riskrelated research, especially in the institutions of the developing countries, then the book will certainly have performed a highly useful function.
Philip Thornton