Damaged Environments and Lives: The Bitter Harvest of Rice Policies in The Gambia

Introduction One of the tragic consequences of rice policies in The Gambia over the past twenty years is how severely they undermined the domestic rice sector. Between 1966-1984, international development assistance had promoted irrigation projects on the country's abundant alluvial swamps. The objective was to create surpluses for national demand by growing the second crop by irrigation. Double cropping would strengthen household food reserves while generating surpluses to raise rural incomes. But irrigation, as planners repeatedly failed to comprehend, involves more than the implementation of a technical infrastructure. Social factors are also important since irrigated agriculture imposes rigid production schedules and requires shifting seasonal farming systems to year-round cultivation. Gambian irrigation projects sowed seeds of discord, as the traditional rice growers, women, lost control over their developed fields to male household heads, who expected their wives to carry out the new labor regime (Carney 1988, 1993). The projects improved subsistence security but failed to deliver anticipated marketable surpluses. While productivity suffered, rural households were in the process of adjusting female crop rights and family labor for irrigated farming over the brief period that the domestic rice sector received policy support (Carney 2004). There was genuine economic optimism in the mid-1980s among Gambian irrigated rice growers. Then came the first of a series of economic reforms that changed Gambian rice production completely. From 1986, the International Monetary Fund oversaw the country's structural adjustment. For rice farmers the policy change completely altered the landscape of production. Government interventions in irrigated rice farming came to an end as comparative advantage replaced import-substitution rice policies. The reforms removed the producer support price of domestic rice as well as subsidized inputs, such as fertilizer, whose price climbed steeply by the end of the 1980s (McPherson and Posner 1991). The parastatal responsible for rice purchases and inputs was dismantled. Foreign-trained agronomists and rice experts who had been posted to rural sites were reassigned to the capital, as government bureaucracies were downsized and cost-saving measures imposed. The devaluation of the Gambian currency cheapened the cost of imported rice. Within a decade, milled imports more than doubled while the domestic rice sector stagnated. The long-term effect of structural adjustment is a disarticulated economy and the emergence of two Gambias. One is the urban seaboard, home to one-third of the country's population, which is fed with milled Asian imports. The other is rural Gambia, barely accessible by road, where …