Ryan McGuine in conversation with Marty Havlovic //
Marty Havlovic is a Professor Emeritus with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Extension. He worked for UW-Extension for 31 years as a county-based faculty in Burnett, Dunn and Marquette Counties. For six of those years he was he was Chair of the Department of Community Resource Development. He also served as International Liaison for UW-Cooperative Extension and worked in over 20 countries providing education and technical support in the fields of agriculture and organizational development. Marty was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo from 1976-1979, serving as a high school teacher in the agriculture program, as well as teaching first aid as the mountainous area and coaching the school’s boys basketball team. Marty then worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for 4 years, coordinating a $5 million rural development project that taught Togolese farmers how to farm with oxen. He continues to work overseas on short-term USAID projects related to cooperative formation and training, organizational development and agriculture marketing in low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central America. Marty is a former president of the Wisconsin/Nicaragua Partners of the Americas, Inc, and currently serves as president of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Wisconsin-Madison and Friends of Togo. He also manages the Nicaragua Bee Project which trains and supports beekeepers in Nicaragua. For the past ten years, Marty has been a city council member in Portage, Wisconsin, representing Aldermanic District 8. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a Master’s in Agricultural Economics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In this installment of Sustaining Conversations, Marty joined Ryan to discuss the changing picture of agriculture, entrepreneurial beekeeping, the importance of vocational education in Africa, international volunteering, local governance, differences between American and Chinese development assistance, and more.
You and I are going to start an NGO with the broad mandate of improving the well-being of low-income people. It can be in any country, and there is no limits on how or where it gets spent. Say we have $10 million or $20 million to start out with. How would you think about beginning to spend that money?
The first thing I would look at is, what are the activities that one is going to do in order to improve the income of poor families? Once I have those activities, I would try to narrow down the focus — is it going to be a small business development, agriculture, commercial, manufacturing? You also want to consider the regional focus. Rural, urban, you know, focusing down on what’s going to be the target, the primary audience for this spending. Because if you are getting $20 million, the donor is going to be asking for specific results in order to justify the money. So, you want to have a program where you’re going to make some impact initially, as well as long term.
Then the second thing I would look at is, what country do we want to focus on this project, given that this is going to be our area of expertise? If it is agriculture, for example, what is a low-income country that would enable us to do the projects, to do the things we have decided to focus on? You want to consider the culture in different countries, as well as government regulations, and things like that. You don’t want to go into a country and work with women in agriculture, if that country’s culture and history don’t really support women in agriculture. You might have too many differences or too many barriers there. So, you are going to want to look at where it is possible to do what we want to do, and where we are likely to achieve success, otherwise you’re beating yourself against the wall.
Those would be the things: what is it that we want to do, who are the people we want to work with in order to help, and then what is the country best suited, adaptable, open, willing to accept that project? That’s what I would look at.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Well, the nuns in grade school wanted me to become a priest. I loved school and I loved education, so I always thought it would be nice to be a teacher. But really to tell the truth, coming from a farm in Nebraska with 15 kids, I just wanted to get off the farm and get out of Nebraska. In all honesty, that was it. As I went to college, I saw that teaching wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do — you know, to be confined in the classroom. Business was offering me more of an opportunity to get out to do things, not be so restricted as to time, place, and things like that.
What are the largest changes in agriculture, both at home in the US and abroad, that you have noticed throughout your career?
I would say the one biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that agriculture used to progress from basic hand labor, to animal labor, to mechanization. What you see now in a lot of low-income countries is agriculture jumping from a hand labor straight to mechanization. So, you have the farmers who really do not have that ability to progress on a gradual evolution. One day they’re hoeing by hand, and the next day, a tractor comes in. So there is this kind of disconnect.
And in the States, agriculture is rarely a small-scale, family business anymore. It is all about scale, mechanization, computerization, so you’re seeing fewer and fewer farming families. When I was growing up, ours was one of four farms on one square mile. Now, when I go back to Nebraska, that same square mile of 640 acres that once supported four farmers, is just one part of a much larger farm. So scale and production have increased considerably, and you are seeing a movement away from individual rural farmers, that’s the biggest trend I see.
When you say tractors “just showed up” in low-income countries, is that because of donors giving them away? Or is there something else that enables farmers to make the jump faster?
Two things, when I was working overseas in agricultural development, we were introducing oxen that farmers could use. That was a gradual progression. But around the same time, there was another project that brought in garden tractors, the two-wheel ones that might pull a small one-board plow. The government itself, in order to farm large acreage, would even set up these district centers with four or five, six tractors. And you as a farmer could rent that tractor and a driver to come out and plow or cultivate your fields to get them ready for planting. But the problem with such a scheme is that it costs the farmers money, you had to pay for the tractor and driver to drive to your field, but they did not own the tractors themselves. So if everybody wants their field work done at the same time, how do you choose which farmer gets his field cultivator or plowed first? There was a lot of mistrust, as well as bribery and things like that under the table. Also, if a tractor broke down, there were no spare parts, so a lot of times you saw tractors rusting in a field, simply because of a lack of something small like a sparkplug or a flat tire.
Now that is in third-world countries. In second-world countries like South Africa, and some of these others, there are farmers who are can afford to purchase a tractor. The big problem there, though, is the support system behind it. Do you have a dealership? Do you have any equipment and all that? Plus, how much land do you really have, in order to justify a tractor? Many of these farmers are probably have up to two to five hectares of land, 10 to 15 acres, and that’s pretty much it. It is kind of tough to turn the tractor around in a small space like that.
What are some small changes that you would recommend that farmers in low-income countries could make today, that would increase their livelihoods quickly?
The biggest thing is knowing how to do cost analysis and budgeting. A lot of the farmers, both male and female, just have no clue as to whether they are making money or not, and what their enterprise is. Is it growing corn, raising pigs, chickens, whatever, that would make them money? Many of these people tell me, “Well, I’m just doing what my parents did,” or, “I’m just continuing to farm like in the past.” None of them are able to sit down and put a pen to paper and actually determine what their costs are, and whether they are really making a profit. I think doing that just makes the person much more capable of making a decision. Is this the enterprise I want to be doing? How much money am I going to be making from this? What are the markets? Where can I sell my product? What is the current cost? Is there a niche?
Another thing is this is, figuring out whether you are a price taker or a price maker. If I am raising a commodity like corn, or any grain, that has no identification or anything, I am up against every other corn producer in my area. There is no reason for someone to buy my product over others, so I am a price taker. I’m at the whim of the middleman, I’m at the whim of market pricing, I’m at the whim of the government, so I’m just a laborer. If I have a product that has some value, then I can become a price maker. I have more say in what I want for my product. Getting that sense into people as well, the idea that if I am growing tomatoes, there may be some other vegetable that has a higher demand that isn’t being grown, that I can move over into. Oftentimes, farmers are able to do that, to change their product. They will go out and do marketing research, find out where the demand is, and determine whether they can meet that demand, and whether they produce that product and sell it. Pretty much anyone and everyone can do that. And if for some reason you can’t, if you are just growing corn and you are open to the market, then you have to look at how you can reduce costs or increase production.
The third change, which a lot of people don’t look at, is reducing post-harvest loss. In a lot of countries about 20-30% of a harvest is lost because it is harvested at the wrong time, or it is stored improperly or poorly in sacks — either in a building where insects or rodents can get to it, or somewhere with too much moisture, and it begins to mold. So, if you can save 20% or 30% of your harvest because of storage facilities and the way you store it, that is better than increasing your yields by 20%. You already have this produce, just spend a little time and effort and money to harvest and store it correctly, rather than buying fertilizer and, you know, looking at different hybrids and seed varieties in order to increase production. And a lot of people I talk to respond like, “Wow, I didn’t think of that.”
How can beekeeping improve the livelihoods of Nicaraguans?
A couple of ways. First, to be a beekeeper, the initial capital investment is about $400. That will get you two hives with bees, all the equipment, bee suit, smoker, hive tool, all this. The second thing is, you don’t need to own land to raise bees. You can put bees on public land, or you can put bees on someone else’s land, and you don’t need a whole lot of space. So, your initial investment of equipment, as well as land ownership, is almost non-existent. That means anyone could raise bees, whether you are female, male, even young kids. It is an opportunity where you can go in with a small investment — well, $400 to Nicaraguans is about an annual income for a family in rural areas — but the honey that you harvest from those two hives in one year will pay some $200 back to you. So already in one year, you’ve gotten half of that investment back, and after two years, it is all profit. You get two honey flows a year, and you can divide those first two colonies, so that after one year, you have four hives, and so on. So, it offers poor people the opportunity to get to earn money on a small investment.
Now the biggest problem in this whole equation, though, is selling honey. Retail, it is currently about $2 a pound. If you sell it wholesale, it is about $1.60 a pound. A lot of the honey producers are saying, “Well, if I can get $2 a pound, I’m going to sell my honey retail.” But then you are only selling maybe one bottle of honey a day, or two or three bottles a week. You have to bottle it. You have to have someone there that’s either sitting at your honey stand or when people come to your house to buy it. So, you are getting maybe $2, $4, $10 a week. Well, if I’m getting $10 a week, I’m spending that money out the door right away. If I sell, say 200 pounds of honey, and I get $360 or $350, I can take $50 of that and put it under my mattress, so that I can invest in more boxes, frames, things like this, to expand my business. And then, I can take the other $300 and use it for family purposes. This doesn’t make sense to a lot of Nicaraguans because they keep saying, “But yet I can get $2 a pound if I sell it retail.” And I’m telling them, but you are getting that $2 times to $400, it is going to take you four or five, six months. Is $350 today, better than $400 in six months? That’s the issue, and we see that a lot. So not only are we training people to become beekeepers, we also have to train them to become business people.
The Madison Returned Peace Corps Volunteers gives out grants to global development projects twice a year, what differentiates them from grants and there elsewhere?
The next one is April 10, and we have 12 applications. These are small grants — the maximum is $2,500 — and you have to have a sponsor that is a member of our organization. We primarily give them for international projects. They are going out to countries where former Peace Corps Volunteers have served, so they know the people, they know the individuals. These grants cannot be used for management, administration, travel, food, things like that, it is more for equipment and supplies toward actually doing something there. So it is kind of a direct, almost like a person-to-person grant. We feel that we have a bigger impact this way, because we are actually getting money and assistance out to the individual people in those countries, as opposed to the bigger international development grant money, much of which goes to administration, and just maintenance and upkeep. In total, we give about $50,000 a year, in two grant cycles, primarily to communities and people throughout the world where Peace Corps operates. You should know about it, you got a grant from us. Funds for these projects come from the sale of our International Calendar that we sell throughout the United States.
I know, I’m giving you free publicity.
International development work can be problematic in a number of ways. What tips would you give a group from America who wants to help out in a way that is truly beneficial?
Well, number one is you have to have your boots on the ground in the country. You need to have local participation, local acceptance, and local support in that country where you are involved. Someone or some people you can trust, and also have what I would call a trust and respect within that community where you are going to be working. The second part is back home, you need to show some connection between the donors’ dollar and how they are making an impact in the country, for fundraising purposes and all that. So, you need people on the ground in their country that can report success, results, even failure, so that you can implement that project correctly, honestly, and without corruption or unnecessary expenditures. But you also need a good message and good publicity here in the States so that you can set up the mechanisms to ask for money and look for possible grant sources. If people can see that you are in that country with your project, trying and learning, then you can get support and influence to do the job you want to do.
The biggest problem I always saw with international development work funded by the US government is that you almost have to predict your results ahead of time to get funding. The US government is not going to fund a project unless they know what the intended results are. But a lot of times, we go into these countries and it is tough to understand what the basic needs of those people are. Is that what we project, or what we suppose they need? Or do we actually ask them what it is they need? And the reason I say this is because I’ve seen a lot of projects where people will go into a country and say, “Oh, my God, these people are so poor, if they had a latrine, it would be much more healthy.” So, the American government comes in and spends money to build these latrines, but the people never use them, because either they are unhealthy, unsanitary, or that’s just not what they needed in the first place.
The US government is unwilling to say, “Here’s $1 million, find out what the people of Ghana need.” They want me to say, “The people of Ghana need wells, and it is going to cost you $1 million.” So we, as a government, are afraid to just to give money and do a community needs assessment program, where you go into a community and say, “What is it that you need?” I have seen many times where people say, “We don’t need a well, we need a mill to grind our corn, because we have to go six miles away to get our corn ground. If we had a mill here, we could pay for it eventually.” So that’s the biggest issue right now, us projecting what we think people need, as opposed to finding out what what they really need. If it was something they really needed, they would then maintain it and keep it operating. I have seen wells where the pump couldn’t pump water because of a broken cotter key. The village sent their children a mile or two miles away to get water from the river. I said, “All you have to do is spend $5 to get a cotter key. That’s two pennies, three pennies per person.” They looked at me and they said, “You Americans built well, you can repair it.” There will only be ownership if people get things that actually help them.
What trends in government development assistance are you most optimistic about?
Boy, that’s a tough one. I don’t know if it is a trend, but I think what you’re seeing more and more of, is projects where the emphasis is on small communities, small groups of people as opposed to large agricultural commodity projects. The other thing related to economic development is, donor countries are becoming more concerned with soft skills development. That is everything from management, business, accounting, decision making, that kind of thing, rather than tractors or fertilizer. They are trying to develop the skills and the abilities of the individuals to make change. So the emphasis on economic development in developing world is, let’s make the person more competent, more skilled, more able to make decisions, as opposed to giving them all this equipment, materials, and just praying that it will work. It is more of a person development than it is resource development.
It seems like China is investing a lot on exactly those sort of large-scale infrastructure projects and making that a priority of their foreign assistance. Do you think their projects are doomed to run into the same issues that the West did? Or is there something about the way they are doing their spending that is going to make it more successful?
Well, China has been in Africa for over 50 years. Their whole strategy has been to do infrastructure development in return for open markets, duty-free imports, or access to raw materials, minerals, etc. Much of China’s rationale for development spending is to get some of our market share. Also, when China goes into these countries to do infrastructure work, such as solar energy, roads, dams, bridges, it is China labor. They are bringing their people into these countries to do a lot of the work. So they are providing new roads, things like that, but not the soft skill development — the training of citizens to then repair and maintain the infrastructures that they built. As such, in another 50 years, people may say, “China built this road, but now it is full of potholes, because we haven’t had the skills, the ability, or the training or knowledge to fix it.” The US also initially built a lot of roads and infrastructure and things like that, but you don’t really see that now. The emphasis is on training individuals.
How is Togo as a vacation destination?
Not too bad. If you want to see culture and you want to go from a mountain, forest, jungle to sub-Sahara, you can do that. You can get around Togo pretty easily — it is about the size of Vermont, and it is fairly safe to get around. So Togo now is sort of like a mini-Africa, you can hit the beach, find good cooking and culture, you know, things like that. In that way, it’s pretty good.
In some respects, Africa seems like an obvious place to become the next hub for labor intensive manufacturing. The vast majority of young people in the world today reside in Africa, and its home to the most low-income people in the world. What are some of the constraints that are preventing that from happening?
I would say, number one, would be the culture and education, and just transportation. You don’t have the history of low-wage labor like you do in Asia. In many African countries, you have a culture of strong extended family and community ties. That is good in a lot of ways. People all want to move up and improve together as a community. However, I remember at times when people in a community would spend more time pounding a person down than they were turning around and elevating everybody up. So it is sort of communal, we all improve together or we don’t improve at all. If someone is improving on their own, it’s either they are stealing money, or some other issue, and people spend their energy trying to determine why that person is doing better than us.
Besides that, I don’t think a lot of large-scale manufacturers have confidence in the African labor market. Not because it can’t be successful, but just because no one has taken the risk to begin with. Some countries like South Africa, Kenya, Ivory Coast, maybe Tanzania are already attracting some manufacturing, and that may spread more widely in the future. But I think that sort of production is going to come across Eastern Asia and move towards Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and into India before you will see it in Africa.
And do you think there is something that leaders in Africa could do to change that? For instance, what if they did a push for education, like South Korea had after the Korean War, or something equivalent.
Actually, Africans as a whole are pretty educated and literate, at least up to eighth grade or so. There’s the need is for more technical schools, to be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, things like that. You don’t see a lot of emphasis on that sort of education — technical schools, trade schools, and the like. Most of the emphasis is on university education. Leaders probably think that the quickest way to develop a country is to get people with undergraduate and PhD degrees. But when I visit, I see many college students driving taxis, because there is just a shortage of knowledge-based jobs relative to the number of graduates. So they are educating people or workforce for skills that aren’t needed. I would say they might well be better off looking at technical trade skills, things like that, and supporting those types of schools, at least until there is a higher demand for knowledge jobs.
What is something that most Americans fail to appreciate about their local governments?
That there is a lot of common citizens, just Joe or Jane Does like me, that are serving on councils and boards as volunteers, but we don’t really get enough citizen input or participation. We also don’t have the temporary volunteers, where people go into government for a few years and then exit. So local government is no longer really a voluntary citizen activity, it is almost becoming a profession, where you have professional politicians that are making decisions based upon their own feelings, their own political objectives, as opposed to community members coming together to serve, and then leave. It kind of brings me back to the old Roman citizen Cincinnatus, who was a farmer that served as dictator, and later relinquished the job to return to his farm. You don’t see that anymore. So that’s what I think people miss — government is people, not politicians.
What is the most valuable contribution that participating in Peace Corps makes for the individuals participating?
Well, Peace Corps has three parts: to share some technical improvement skills and knowledge with the developing world, to show them what American citizens are really like, and to bring back that culture to the United States, to tell Americans what people in Togo and Nicaragua are really like. So it is kind of a person-to-person relationship. I would say the most important impact that it has on the volunteer, is that it makes them look internally as to what are their assets? What are their skills? What are their abilities? Secondly, it forces them to look at the culture, and try to figure out why people in Togo do what they do. You know, why do they feel about something, as opposed to why I feel about the same issue? Is it a bit of a difference in culture, difference in environment, difference in education, experiences? So it brings people face to face, and you begin to realize that we can speak a different language, we can look different, we can eat different foods, but we all have the basic same skills, the hierarchy of Maslow. And that is kind of surprising to a lot of people, because it elevates someone from a totally different context to being the same as me.
And what is the most valuable contribution to the Peace Corps does for the communities abroad?
I was told every day to brush my teeth outside my house so that the neighbor kids would see someone brushing their teeth — that was a sign of hygiene, and the government wanted people to see us doing it as role models. I think the biggest thing volunteers can do is to show the people in their community that they’re not Batman, they’re not the mafia shooting people, that they’re just an average American person who has the same issues and things as they do. They are not the person they see in movies about America or TV and all that. They’re not rich, they don’t fly airplanes or things like that. That they are more like them. So I think that has helped a lot of foreigners come to understand that American people are more like them, and not necessarily what is portrayed in the news or on film.
Did you ever find yourself in any morally or ethically uncomfortable situations during the Peace Corps?
All the time. A lot of them, yes. I remember, our village was having a Christmas dance. The Director of the school invited me to the dance, and he said that he had a date for me, and that we were going to have supper at his house, and then going to the dance. Well, the date turned out to be one of my students and he had another student. And so, the four of us had dinner at his house, which his wife cooked and served us. And then, we were supposed to go to the dance afterwards.
There are other times where people were stealing and were punished. One terrible situation I saw was, a girl graduated from high school, and her family killed her because they didn’t know how to react to a woman who was educated. That was the first girl in that extended family who passed her high school exams. And so, a couple months later, she was poisoned dead. So, you know, things like that.
If I remember correctly, you landed in a country with an active coup underway?
That was when I flew into Cotonou in Benin, and it was the first flight after a failed coup attempt in 1977. The airport had bullet holes, broken glass and blood and all that. I was the only white person on the airplane landing, and the coup attempt was carried out in part by mercenaries from Canada, France, and South Africa, so the military thought I was one of the mercenaries, but I came in late. So they arrested me and accused me of trying to overthrow the government. The lesson behind that is, if you are traveling in anywhere, always file a travel plan with someone. I left Togo on a vacation and I did not tell anyone. No one would have known if I had been killed. No one would have had a clue as to what happened to me. So after that, I always tell people where I’m going and for how long.
How did you balance family life with a career that involves so much travel?
Well my children were born overseas — one in Togo, and one in Germany. So they also have the travel bug in them. When I came back and got my Master’s and worked for the University of Wisconsin – Cooperative Extension, I did not do any international development work for the first five or six years. We did travel overseas, but that was usually to go to back to Europe to visit their grandparents and cousins and that. It wasn’t until they were in high school that I decided I would do one or two international consulting jobs a year. Those are usually for two weeks. So that is how I managed that. Once they were in college and away from home, I would usually do three or four a year.
What are you working on right now, and why do you think that it is important?
Well right now, as part of the Nicaragua Bee Project, we have been able to bring up some Nicaraguan beekeepers to America to work as beekeepers. You just can’t find labor here in the US for people that want to work with bees, so we are bringing up some Nicaraguans to spend six months here working with American beekeepers. They are on H-2A visas, and they get the same pay as Americans, the pay scale depending upon the state where they are working. They pay into social security and FICA. Right now, we have four Nicaraguans in Florida and one in Texas, and in May all five of them will be coming up to work in Wisconsin. I handle some of the paperwork on that. For Nicaraguans, getting minimum wage in Florida, I think around $9, that is very good money, so they are more than happy to come up and work. They are provided housing and everything else by the beekeeper they work for.
I’m also looking at going back overseas to do some farmer-to-farmer consulting work. I had two projects that were put on hold because of the COVID situation. And then lastly, I also do some US tours for international aid groups of farmers and managers. The latest request came out of Russia to look at meat substitutes or vegan meat. They want to tour companies producing vegan meat and look at how the US is producing meat substitutes, so I am trying to figure out what universities, researchers, or companies are doing research in that. I will get a 10-day tour organized, and just wait until travel is back to what it used to be. So that’s how I keep busy.
Finally, are there any final comments or resources that you would like to leave readers with?
I would say, check out the Farmer-to-Farmer Program through USAID. It is really a good opportunity for people to go overseas and work with different groups. It’s not only a technical thing, it’s also about the soft skills. I do a lot of co-op management, leadership development, marketing, things like that, and they are always looking for new people. The more people they can get into a farmer-to-farmer program is beneficial — women, men, you name it. The other is, at any good land grant institution, there is a lot of activity going on. Each of them has an international development office that offers students international opportunities, as well as working with international groups or in foreign countries. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has some good international development programs.
And I would also mention for the record that the Madison RPCVs sell calendars every year to help fund the grants we talked about earlier.
Yeah, $15 a calendar. You can go online to place an order, and we will mail it to you. Of that, we get about $8 profit, and that generates about $50,000 a year that we can use to fund projects oversees. Everything from beekeeping to solar energy, to leadership development, to purchasing baking equipment, you name it.