The Development Mirage: How Agricultural Aid Became a System of Waste

By Balbir Singh

There is a question that haunts every serious observer of international development: with billions of dollars flowing into agricultural programs across Africa and Asia each decade, why do so many of the world’s smallholder farmers remain trapped in poverty? The answer, for those willing to look honestly, is not a lack of funding.

It is a catastrophic – and, one suspects, entirely predictable – squandering of it.

I have seen this firsthand. Several years ago, an international bank and a fertilizer association, operating under the banner of corporate social responsibility, offered our organization US$8 million for agricultural research and farmer training across five countries.

It sounded transformative. It was not. When the dust settled, approximately 98 percent of that budget had been consumed by activities bearing no relationship whatsoever to farming. Barely 2 percent reached the fields.

Let me be precise about where that money went – because the details matter.

The SUV Problem

Roughly 30 percent of the budget – nearly US$2.4 million – was allocated to purchasing three Toyota Land Cruiser Prados for three project directors. Each director already possessed a Prado funded by a previous project.

These were not replacements born of necessity. They were upgrades born of habit.

Drive through any African or Asian capital city hosting a development project and you will understand immediately: the white Land Cruiser has become the defining symbol of international aid, a four-wheeled monument to institutional self-indulgence.

The Per Diem Economy

Another 20 percent – US$1.6 million – was earmarked for travel allowances, daily allowances, and international study tours. Here the inefficiency becomes almost theatrical.

A journey of 50 kilometers (80 miles), which a private-sector employee might complete in five hours, would consume five days under the project’s travel protocols: one day’s driving in the Prado, an overnight hotel stay, meals and incidentals, all multiplied across a delegation of ten staff members – none of whom possessed any meaningful expertise in agricultural research or development. They were, in essence, professional per-diem collectors.

The international travel provisions were, if anything, more offensive. Researchers working in countries where the average farm holding is less than one hectare were budgeting for study tours to Brazil and Denmark – nations where farms routinely exceed 100 hectares and operate with precision agriculture technology wholly inapplicable to a rain-fed, smallholder context.

These were not learning missions. They were holidays dressed in the language of capacity building: shopping trips to São Paulo and Copenhagen, funded by institutions nominally committed to feeding the rural poor.

The visual absurdity of it all deserves to be stated plainly: officials from countries without paved roads were routing through Dubai International Airport on “study tours.”

The Staffing Fiction

Staff salaries consumed a further 20 percent of the budget. When one examines the organizational charts, the picture becomes deeply troubling.

Roles filled included photographers, secretaries, nutritionists, environmental consultants, social studies researchers, community liaison officers, and statisticians – virtually none of them with any direct expertise in agronomy, soil science, or farm economics.

The salary scales were extraordinary by local standards. A recent graduate with no relevant experience could draw US$7,000 per month in base salary, plus US$300 per day in travel allowances when in the field.

In a country where a farmer earns US$300 over four months of hard labor, this is not merely a misallocation of resources. It is a social rupture – a parallel economy of development-sector privilege that breeds resentment, distorts local labor markets, and corrodes the institutional legitimacy these projects depend upon.

The Equipment Graveyard

Equipment procurement claimed 25 percent of the budget – approximately US$2 million – for greenhouses, tissue culture laboratories, soil testing kits, projectors, and 100-horsepower tractors. None of these purchases were made with any apparent plan for utilization beyond the project’s two-year lifespan.

Development practitioners have a term for what comes next: “project closure.” Everyone else calls it abandonment.

Within months of a project’s end, laboratories fall silent, tractors sit idle, and expensive equipment slowly rusts in courtyards, a testament to procurement cycles that were never about agriculture in the first place.

What Actually Reached Farmers

Field research received approximately 2 percent of the total budget. Of that, an estimated 80 percent was spent purchasing counterfeit seeds and adulterated fertilizers.

The remainder accomplished little of scientific value.

Farmer training – the stated purpose of the entire US$8 million enterprise – received 3 percent. And the farmers selected to receive that training were, in the main, relatives and family members of project directors and staff.

The transformation of a public agricultural development program into a patronage network for the professional class is not an aberration in these projects. It is, increasingly, the operating model.

A Structural Catastrophe, Not an Accident

It would be comforting to attribute all of this to individual corruption, the isolated misconduct of a few bad actors. But that framing lets the system off too easily.

The project design described above – the vehicle allocations, the per diem structures, the bloated staffing pyramids, the equipment procurement cycles – was submitted as a formal proposal, evaluated by institutional reviewers, and approved. The catastrophe was not accidental. It was architectural.

Donor organizations, international banks, and multilateral agricultural bodies have, over decades, built project evaluation and disbursement systems that are exquisitely well-designed to reward bureaucratic compliance and almost entirely indifferent to agricultural outcomes. Projects are assessed on documentation, reporting cycles, and fiduciary audits – not on whether crop yields improved, whether soil health advanced, or whether a single family ate better as a result.

Until the measurement changes, the behavior will not.

The Path Forward

The solution is neither more money nor more oversight in its current form. It is structural reimagination.

Donor organizations should seriously consider bypassing the project-implementation apparatus entirely and establishing direct operational foundations staffed by practitioners accountable for field outcomes.

The technology agenda requires equal urgency: decades of imported high-input, capital-intensive agricultural solutions have failed comprehensively across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The way forward runs through local artisans, locally adapted tools, and supply chains built around production and consumption within the same communities.

The farmers of Africa and Asia do not need study tours to Denmark. They need functioning seed systems, accessible credit, and soil health that improves from one season to the next. They need the US$8 million to reach the field – not the fleet.

Until donors, governments, and implementing agencies are held to that standard, the development project will remain exactly what it has too often been: a very comfortable arrangement for everyone involved, except the people it was designed to serve.

Balbir (Shekhawat) Singh, PhD, is a results-driven agribusiness techno-commercial professional with over 18 years of experience in sales, marketing, agronomy, product management, farming, commodity trading, and agri-inputs (fertilizers, seeds, agrochemicals). Passionate about advancing sustainable farming, he currently serves as Director General/CEO of Sodesep SA-Fertilizer Abuja, Nigeria. He has worked across emerging markets including India, Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Nigeria.