Agricultural Change: A Grass-Roots Case Study (Kenya)

Between the influence of multinational organizations and grass-roots culture, is agriculture as a reality. A case study of grass-roots agriculture (the developing world smallholder), through survey, interview, and participatory research, is developed to include the major external influence as indicated by rural, smallholding farmers of Kenya – the market. Multiple methods are utilized in the case study to discuss global agriculture reform within the context of development. This paper has three primary aims: (1) Examine and evaluate the most significant external forces on small scale farming in developing countries using Kenya as a case study. (2) Identify the needs of grassroots from several points of view: students, farmers, farm organizations, and local development NGOs. (3) Examine the opportunities and constraints of small these farmers, in the framework of WB and WTO policy, to meet the needs of sustainable agriculture. In this paper, several areas of agricultural practice in Kenya are compared and contrasted to identify the constraints and opportunities of the case and to draw some general conclusions of how these pertain to developing world smallholders. Comparing agriculture in various settings of Kenya and, further, comparing the goals of that culture with that of international policy is the focus of the paper. The methods of this investigation include: (1) Qualitative case study of Kenya as a grassroots agricultural community. (2) Comparative social science between cases within Kenya and between grassroots needs and international agenda. (3) Participatory research in a cross-sectional and longitudinal manner. Informants include students (university and vocational), demonstration farms of varied topology, smallholders in three communities, two local farming organizations, and five local development NGOs. This cross-sectional comparison of perspectives and circumstances represents a multi-scale approach, and allows analysis and prediction of reform through the projection of grass-roots needs and global agriculture, onto the canvas of development. Longitudinal studies, as well, are represented by multiple interviews with single subjects. Through projecting Netting’s model of smallholder production (1993) and neo-Boserupian theory of agricultural intensification (Stone, 2001) onto empirical evidence, generalizations are made to describe the opportunities and constraints of global agricultural development.