Computer and Internet use is increasing at a breakneck speed, particularly in Asia. The World Wide Web has become a huge library, laboratory, and bazaar all rolled into one. In several large developing countries, ICTs represent the fastest-growing industries and are assuming growing macroeconomic importance. Wireless phone use is expanding across geographic, sectoral, and class boundaries. Countries, companies, and citizens that have the infrastructure, skills, and institutions that complement ICTs are hooked to a veritable technological and competitive juggernaut.

Do these new technologies offer any means of improving the economic welfare of smallholder agriculturalists in developing countries? And how can these technologies, especially those surrounding the World Wide Web, be brought within reach of these smallholder farmers?

Relative lack of literacy and numeracy typically characterize the poor, as does lack of access to accurate price, technical, and other information relevant to the profitability of their business decisions and their integration with markets. Illiteracy and lack of education breed social and cultural isolation, and the poor, who are often in remote areas, are further handicapped by limited availability of public information that the nonpoor take for granted (for instance, information about health and sanitation hazards; public transportation schedules; rights to public, gravity-flow irrigation systems; and natural disasters). Today, more than ever before, having access to relevant, timely, adequate, and accurate information is critical if the poor are to make viable business, health, and safety decisions that can enable them to escape poverty.

Even smallholder agriculturalists must participate in an increasingly integrated global economy characterized by greater use of ICTs. Globalization will be accompanied by more intense competition and redefined business processes with an accent on much greater use of ICTs. ICT powerhouses will harness high-end computing in their efforts to develop designer crops and achieve “just-in-time” marketing and storage of farm crops. Agents in smallholder agriculture have no option but to try to find “hooks” with which to take advantage of the ICT-led transformation. ICTs can help the smallholder agriculturalists compete in this global, information-driven marketplace by

• Giving policymakers access to real-time market information and best-practice insights and providing smallholder farmers with the latest information about public interventions in food and agricultural markets;
• Improving the profitability of business decisions and the associated returns to labor of small fishermen and farmers, traders, and other small producers by providing adequate, up-to-date information, for example, on grain prices, possible supply shocks, and new or improved production techniques;
• Reducing private and public search and transaction costs;
• Fostering diversification of the rural economy;
• Saving lives by mounting early-warning information systems and introducing Internet-based healthcare solutions and diagnostics;
• Using the Web to improve the education, training, and income-earning potential of the poor in developing countries.

Smallholder agriculturalists often have strong latent demand for production and marketing information and may not be able to reach their economic potential without that information. The poor who do have access to ICTs are using them to develop highly customized marketing strategies. This is especially true with wireless phones and the Internet. For example, in the rural phones program run by GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, the poor typically use cell-phone access as a production input (for example, to keep in touch with market developments relating to perishable goods). Such access has a considerable effect on the poor’s production surpluses. This kind of use is not confined to South Asia. In Laos, while cell phone purchases were motivated mainly by social needs (getting in touch with loved ones), economic uses (such as keeping abreast of the latest output and input prices and exchange rates) were important too. In both Ghana and India, coastal fishermen, while still at sea, have used cell phones for the latest information about markets with the best prices for a particular catch. Also in south India, in villages where fishermen in the past depended on astrologers to avoid being lost at sea in inclement weather, they now depend on broadcast advisories gleaned from the Web.

India’s Tamil Nadu University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, in collaboration with Cornell University, is setting up a rural email network. Compared with a brick-and-mortar extension system, the advantages of this emerging online version are speed, a potentially much vaster reach, a much lower cost of providing service, and wider interactivity. In this region, raising fast-growing broiler chickens is common, thus making access to emailed extension advice an important priority.

In northeast Bangladesh, rural wireless broadband has been installed using wireless local loop (WLL). WLL delivers bandwidths broad enough to support applications such as the downloading of graphics-rich Web pages replete with price and product data. WLL is much cheaper than the global system for mobile communications (GSM), which currently dominates the digital cellular market, and thus appears destined to become the ultimate platform of choice of rural telephony services. With rural wireless broadband providing the basic models of telephony and Internet connectivity, it will be possible to discover where and how agriculture, rural development, and communications technology intersect.

These technologies have a community interface as well as an individual interface. If governments provide necessary information infrastructure as a matter of policy, communities can and undoubtedly will invest in circumventing the limitations of poor individuals. Those communities would of course need public leadership in the development of policies and institutions.

The following policies have the potential to bring the benefits of ICTs to smallholder agriculturalists:

• Create a congenial climate for high rates of investment, including by private enterprise, in telecommunications and information infrastructure that provides rural public call offices and ICT-enabled communications centers on the broadest basis;
• Invest in telecommunications companies and Internet connectivity to the point of making them economically viable commodities;
• Wire farmers into connectivity, archive indigenous knowledge related to farm extension, convert it into local vernacular, and populate an email network with farmers interested in receiving farm extension online;
• Host regular updates of prices of benchmark farm commodities for key terminal markets on government Web sites, and make them available for downloading;
• Provide smallholder farmers with leading-edge computer hardware, enabling applications that improve the productivity of the smallholder agriculturalists and promote farm-friendly Web content; and
• Wire rural schools into the Internet, exposing children to computerization to demystify technology; and make computer labs in such schools into community learning hubs where children learn computing during regular hours and parents learn computing after-hours as continuing education students.

Without ICTs the poor will find it all the more difficult to integrate themselves with unfolding economic processes and global markets, making their escape from the vicious cycle of poverty even more uncertain. But their loss would also translate into national and global economic loss. Investment in and widespread diffusion of ICTs therefore should be a high priority for developing countries.

For further reading see N. Chowdhury, U. Mohan, and K. von Grebmer, “Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty, and Food Security in the New Century,” Communications Division Discussion Paper 1 (Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2001, forthcoming).

Nuimuddin Chowdhury (nuim2@yahoo.com) was a former senior researcher at IFPRI. He is now a freelance ICT consultant based in Toronto, Canada.