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In print
The Water Harvester: Episodes from the inspired
life of Zephaniah Phiri
By Mary Witoshynsky
Published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Harare, Zimbabwe
Distributed by the African Books Collective, 27 Park End Street, Oxford, OX1 1HU, UK
Email: abc@dial.pipex.com or Website: www.africanbookscollective.com
2000, 70pp., ISBN 0797421238 (Pb) £10.95
Small scale farming is not really in fashion at the moment; food production it is argued, would better be done on a bigger, more efficient scale. In Zimbabwe, where Mr. Zephaniah Phiri, the Water Harvester, lives and works, the take-over and break up of large, commercial farms has been attacked for its disastrous effects on national food production.
Zephaniah Phiri's story is a challenge to this prevailing mood. It is the story of a man who has spent much of his life developing new ways to harvest rainfall and preserve his soil. While the Zvishavane Water Project, of which Phiri is the founder, has received international attention and funding, its founder has remained loyal to his small-scale background. As a boy, he says that he was not aware of poverty. His family had enough to eat and were happy. This kind of innocence and optimism runs through his tale. Ambition has led him not to make bigger and better projects but to find ways for more people to learn of his 'water planting' ideas.
His story has been written on the basis of numerous conversations, and is presented not as a smooth connected narrative, but in short snippets, separated by attractive patterns and drawings. His language reveals his empathy with his land. He believes that water can be 'planted', and was first inspired to harvest rain by the book of Genesis, and the two rivers that watered the garden of Eden. From this he learned that by creating bodies of water on his land he could create life, and that by digging pits in the land he would prompt a natural healing process that, as a by-product, would provide water for his plants. Like blood collecting in a cut in the skin, in order to clot and heal, so water would gather to heal the pit with fresh soil. Phiri's early attempts to farm the wetlands led to repeated fines, until he invited a judge to come and see if his work was really doing the damage it was accused of.
Phiri was imprisoned and tortured for years, for helping Zimbabwe's freedom fighters, and later set up one of Zimbabwe's first indigenous NGOs, the Zvishavane Water Project, through which he broadened his range of innovations and his contact with farmers both in Zimbabwe and further afield. All his technologies have been low or no cost (except labour). He uses infiltration pits in combination with contour ridges to collect run-off water and soil. Walls built from broken stones slow run-off and catch soil on steep slopes, or can be used to dam up gullies. 'Poor man's tanks' are covered pits filled with rocks, where water running off from washing areas or overflowing from ponds can collect, to seep slowly into the surrounding soil keeping the crops alive.
It would be easy to be dismissive about Zephaniah Phiri and his philosophy; to write it off as unpractical and romantic. Those in the business of development planning may regard the close relationship between farmer and land as an irrelevant luxury. But if he, who has experienced torture and imprisonment, can remain ideologically intact, positive and free from bitterness, as this short account reveals, who has the right to say that the way he is helping fellow farmers to follow is the wrong one?
Seeding Solutions. Volume 1:
Policy options for genetic resources
(People, Plants and Patents revisited)
By The Crucible II Group
Co-published by the International Development Research Centre,
the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute,
and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Via delle Sette Chiese, 142, 00145 Rome, Italy
Website: http://www.cgiar.org/ipgri
2000, 135pp., ISBN 0 88936 926 7, (Pb) $25
Seeding Solutions attempts to provide some much needed clarity to the questions in the Intellectual Property debate, particularly in connection with lab-developed germplasm and crop varieties. The first half of the book, which sets out the context of the debate, is interesting in parts. Arresting details include the amazing advances in mammalian cloning and the extraordinary acceleration in gene sequencing, which enables a team of scientists to achieve in one day what until recently would have taken one thousand researchers ten years. The second half of the book, which has been written with policy-makers in mind, certainly manages to convey the complexity both of the issues and the treaties and conventions which have attempted to define them.
To help the reader cope with the tortuous nature of the subject, assistance is given in the form of 'Viewpoint boxes', which summarise a few of the major positions in a debate. These are the most accessible parts of the book. Issues such as the rights of farmers to save seed, or the development of 'Terminator' seeds to prevent them doing so, provoke polar disagreements, and few would disagree that unless the seed breeders can make a profit, there simply will not be the incentive to develop higher yielding, or hardier varieties.
Unfortunately the bulk of Seeding Solutions has not been written by an author with a passionate interest in opening people's eyes to the issues. Rather it has been put together by a group of experts who appear unconcerned that much of the final product is so dense as to be inaccessible to all but the most determined. As the book says, advances in technology are happening faster than social policies can be devised to guide them, or legal systems can evolve to address them. It advocates the need for informed public debate on the issues, not just decisions made by 'expert' panels. That may be true, but if an informed public is what the writers want, disappointingly this book will not be a good starting point.
Hay and straw conservation for small-scale farming and pastoral conditions
State of the World 2001
The Peri-Urban interface: A tale of two cities 
World Watch List for Domestic Animal
Diversity (3rd Edition)
