Plenty will have to be sorted out in DADP implementation

Regional secretariats meanwhile provide the liaison work, coordinating things that the districts have in common.

The government has just launched district agricultural development plans, with local government authorities given major responsibilities.

These include promoting agricultural development within the districts, which isn’t new as such as traditionally farm extension work is organised at the district level, but there are auxiliary aspects.

Top government officials have characterised the district-level plans as an extension of the wider Agricultural Sector Development Plan – which now focuses on each district for liaison, coordination and the sorting out of problems on the ground.

The focus arises from a diminution of nationwide crop development strategies or other agro-sector parameters to encourage private investment in the sector.

This means that the central authorities have less to do after drawing up the wider policy framework and ensuring that supply chains are working. When it comes to investment take-off, infrastructure assurance, it is localised.

One feature about agro-sector policies which leads to some confusion is the presence of large tracts of land suitable for agriculture, and how seeking to put this ‘bankable land’ into investor use or access brings about intractable problems.

There are still reports of investment authorities sending surveyors to an area, marking it off and proceeding to make decisions concerning it, and people wake up in the morning to find beacons and other strange installations.

Often such incidents are tied up with corruption, bringing officials to quicken things, but they arise from law provisions on land holdings.

That is why there is an area which needs appropriate guidance, or at least making such guidance clear and unmistakable at the general level, as to what needs to be done for land to be accessible to investors.

What ought to be reviewed at least in implementing the policy, of localising most implementation issues of agro-sector development at district level, is that the powers that villages and in that regard, district councils have enjoyed in relation to land use decisions be curtailed.

This way of doing things generates or precipitates conflicts, whereas if any customary land is ceded to investors only by agreement with villagers directly, and compensating them adequately for current land use needs or future prospects, conflicts are minimised or eliminated.

At another level, the government has been doing plenty of work mapping out land-holding (often called ‘ownership’) in village areas, where customary land-holding has prominence over individual titles.

The trouble in observing this legislation is that district and village authorities often act as if the land was theirs, instead of coordinating procedures for investors to compensate villagers in a transparent and sufficient manner.

As there are plenty of orientation shifts in various levels of government right now, let us expect that respecting individual villagers’ rights will be observed for smooth implementation of the respective policies. When investors have paid out villagers they know the project is sustainable for, otherwise, it isn’t.