Where Is Little Beautifuller? In My Inclusive Development Journalism!

Simply put, Growth is quantitativewhile Development is qualitative (image from All India ITR, google.com). I prefer Quality to Quantity – Beauty to Volume.

Approaching 79, I think more of PH Agriculture, with its new Quality Hope in the hands of William Dar, the new Secretary of Agriculture.

Today, Monday, 19 August 2019, I celebrate the birth of my brand of journalism that I call inclusive development journalism, iDevJourn (see my essay "Now Is The Time For All Good Men To Come To The Active Aid Of Their Country!" 18 August 2019, Creativity Works! icreativityworks.blogspot.com). Please note well: Not inclusive growth but inclusive development.

With iDevJourn, from now on I have a guide as to how to develop each topic that I write – towards inclusive development. No, I did not invent that concept; now I must tell you how I came across and wrote about it 9 years ago yet in my dedicated blog iCRiSAT Watch ("ICRISAT Strat. Drylands & The Economics Of The Little," 28 September 2010, icrisatwatch.blogspot.com). I was on my 4th year as international consulting writer for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, based in India, when Mr Dar was the ICRISAT Director General – he was so good he was a 3-term DG, from January 2000 to December 2014, when he retired.

ICRISAT called its strategy inclusive market-oriented development, IMOD; let me now quote myself from that essay:

I can summarize IMOD in 4 Rs:

Reduce the costs – Like: Produce planting materials through seed systems to assure quality, availability, and affordability. Intercrop pigeon pea with corn, and you can reduce your fertilizer cost by 47 times.

Reduce the risks – With disease-resistant varieties, you not only decrease the risk of a crop failure, you also decrease the risk of investment failure – and increase the harvest per hectare.

Run the market – Help the poor farmers form a producers' marketing group so they can market their farm produce by themselves so that they get the middleman's share of the value added – because they are the Middleman...

Raise the incomes – Doing the 3 Rs above results in pigeon pea net returns increasing more than a hundredfold to a hectare, like it's $366 for improved practice vs $76 for farmer's practice, so that gives us an actual increase of 482% (icrisat.org).

Beautiful! IMOD is what I called in that essay "the economics of the little."

The concept of farm-to-market road is not enough; that is the Economics of the Big, the Trader. In the ideal IMOD… the farmer himself is the middleman. He gets all the value added from his produce. This is the poor farmer commercializing his own crop. And so I like to call IMOD the economics of the little.

"The Economics of The Little" seems to be a concept I have invented. Now I like to say this:

Inclusive development journalism is the writer's pursuit of a country's application of The Economics of The Little.

How did Ernest F Schumacher put it again? "Small is beautiful." And now I proudly say, "Little is beautifuller!"@517