Hamzah M.

Hamzah is engaging dry-land communities in developing and spreading new technologies to improve agricultural productivity.

Hamzah recognizes the need to put viable technologies into the able hands of people who have a stake in their success. He is raising agricultural productivity in Indonesia's driest lands through the combination of sustainable technologies, farmer cooperatives, and the development of new farm products and markets. A drip irrigation specialist and avid inventor, Hamzah is driven by a simple insight into the nature of the problems that face the rural people with whom he works: accessing maximum benefit from the resources already available is a more practical, more sustainable approach than pinning hopes on a large "project" like a dam. His life's work is a continual effort to strengthen agriculture through people's ownership and management of appropriate technology.
Hamzah's first success was his invention of a simple drip irrigation gadget and, subsequently, its transformation into a powerful development tool. He discovered that local materials, including clay and rice husks, could be processed into crude ceramic knobs that allow water to drip at a regulated pace. Called "emitters" in irrigation parlance, these instruments, when attached to discarded water bottles, can be fashioned into an effective drip irrigation system. The result is a locally produced irrigation system that can be manufactured and sold at one-tenth of the cost of comparable systems.
But Hamzah understood that simply producing and selling a technology–no matter how "appropriate" or inexpensive it might be–would not have the lasting impact, or the geographical reach, required to help people work their way out of poverty. He needed–simultaneously–to develop this product, a primary market of its users, and a secondary market for new farm produce. Crucial to his idea is increasing the scale of social benefit so that dry-land farmers, in addition to earning more cash in the present, can over the long term recover the productive capacity of their land.
Having spent a number of years developing the drip irrigation system, Hamzah is now marketing it, spreading its impact, and using its success to establish a movement to support other technical and social programs for dry areas. With the proven success of the emitter, Hamzah has also begun to develop other technologies for dry-land communities. He plans to create a center to test and perfect these ideas and train citizens to help in the production and distribution of this system. Hamzah's idea is replicable in arid communities throughout Indonesia and beyond.

Known for its tropical forests and lush green paddy fields, Indonesia is also home to surprisingly large dry areas, mostly in the islands east of Bali. These areas experience little rainfall and are sometimes hard pressed to produce a single crop each year. In the provinces of eastern Indonesia, arid zones account for 36 percent of land under cultivation, and 60 percent of the people are dry-land farmers. Serious deforestation in recent years has exacerbated the problems of insufficient rainfall and poor soil. In the least hospitable, most remote places, the precarious ability of the land to produce has contributed to chronic poverty. Because few alternatives to subsistence agriculture exist, poverty has led to persistent malnutrition and periodic famine. Even when starvation is averted, most farming families make do with one meal a day.

National agricultural policy has been designed to maximize production in the most fertile farmland, rather than make marginal lands more productive. Little time and money have been spent on improving the prospects of dry-land farmers. Only 0.5 percent of the national agricultural development budget is currently devoted to improving arid lands. Where money has been spent, the government has favored large infrastructure projects, like dams, pumping stations, and irrigation canals. For a variety of geological, environmental, and social reasons well known in the development sector, most of these have failed to produce the desired results. The soil has been too porous for canals; monies allocated for a dam disappear and nothing gets built; new pumps rust away, unused, because no thought is given to building local capacity for maintenance. Of course, drip irrigation systems are already on the market, but these are priced far beyond what a poor dry-land farmer could ever hope to pay. And given the expertise needed to apply, adapt, and sustain such systems, these distant commercial technologies have little hope of taking root.

Little sustained attention has been given to alternative crops or new farming techniques. The scarcity of water has become an obstacle that conventional development thinking has been unable to overcome.

The principle behind Hamzah's drip irrigation system–deriving maximum productive benefit from available resources for the lowest possible cost–is also the principle behind his larger dry-land development plans. Hamzah has designed the irrigation technology so that manufacturing the essential piece, putting it to use, and raising agricultural productivity can all start small but grow at the same time. Hamzah's main technical inputs are training in how to produce the emitter and instruction in how to use the system. This all begins at the subcommunity level, where unemployed women are taught how to produce the emitter and where local farmers, through demonstration and free samples, are shown the benefit of the technology. Farmers find that they are able to reliably grow crops that they have been unable to grow in the past. The efficiency of water use can be increased by up to 90 percent because the water goes directly to the root zones of plants with little lost to evaporation. For the first time, farmers have success in producing tomatoes and chilies as quick-growing crops and can produce healthy saplings for cashew, mango, and teak trees. Working at a modest pace, farmers are able to generate new cash income, which they are encouraged to reinvest in production at a larger scale. Because the technology is so versatile and needs are so great, farmers can apply the technology in a variety of ways: for subsistence, to deal with their own food security; for cash-cropping, to earn more money; and for systematic growth in their own productivity, to recover unused or misused farmlands in a sustainable and environmentally healthy way.

The simple economics of this arrangement are held together by the efficiency of Hamzah's manufacturing process. Because producers invest virtually nothing in raw materials, which are plentiful, they can afford to sell the systems cheaply. Drip irrigation systems for use in other dry climates, such as Egypt and the Middle East, typically use high-tech components that keep costs high. While these imports can raise farmers' costs to an impossible 18 million rupiah per hectare, Hamzah's system can be applied to the same area for only 2 million rupiah.

Hamzah franchises the manufacturing process to producer groups, largely made up of women who once worked in an ill-fated ceramics export industry. Each emitter knob is priced at 1050 rupiah (about ten and a half cents). The 1,000 rupiah go to the producers, and the 50 rupiah per piece fund expansion and marketing activities carried out by Hamzah and his marketing team. Various producer groups on different islands in eastern Indonesia have produced roughly 200,000 emitters, helping farmers put over 500 hectares of dry-land into more productive cultivation.

Hamzah's promotion of the drip irrigation technology is only the beginning of a sustained effort to help dry-land farmers diversify their crops and raise their incomes. He sees markets for local products that can be grown and processed with similarly appropriate technologies. Tomato sauce is one example, sweets from local mangos is another. A third innovation currently being perfected is the production of glue from the seeds of the plentiful tamarind fruit–seeds which before were considered useless. This glue can be used for pipes, like those found in the larger-scale emitter drip irrigation system Hamzah has developed. Yet another product with potential is a cost-effective model for generating and storing electricity in small amounts in coastal areas.

Hamzah has succeeded in spreading his ideas through collaboration with several universities and regional governments. For example, universities allow him to use their lab facilities in return for his teaching university students and working with farmers groups. Hamzah's next steps will be to build stronger institutions to carry his work forward. One of these will be a nonprofit organization to take on the promotion and marketing of the "Hamzah Emitter" on a larger scale. Other functions of the organization will be to identify new opportunities for dry-land farmers to build markets for their goods. Creating brand recognition for dry-land fruits is one strategy for accessing existing markets and raising farm income. The other institution Hamzah will establish is a research and development laboratory that can serve not only as a place to invent and test appropriate technology, but also as a "school" of sorts for the next generation of innovators in dry-land areas.

As Hamzah trained local women to produce the ceramic knob, he began demonstrating that drip technology could, in a single season, grow tomatoes, chili bushes, and fruit-tree saplings for the farmer to take to market. The next step was working with users of the emitters so that they could afford to expand the scale of production, organizing them to reinvest some of their profits into the next level of growth. A few women producing a few hundred emitters thus supported families growing a few plants. When the farmers earned enough from this produce to invest in the next level of irrigation technology, they stepped up to alley cropping, and so demand for the emitters grew. While all this goes on, Hamzah trains women and young people to market, distribute, and help set up the system in neighboring communities. As use of the technology has spread from Sumbawa to other islands, new local producers and users groups are formed.

Hamzah grew up in the western part of Sumbawa Island where relatively adequate rainfall ensures better crop production. He recalls vividly his first exposure to the hardships of dry-land farmers. In the 1980s, already burdened by a harsh climate, farmers in Bima began to seek new employment in a promising local ceramics industry. Suddenly drought struck just as the bottom fell out of their export market. Skilled artisans on other islands had quickly captured the ceramics market, and many of Bima's farmers who had rashly given up farming in hopes of a better livelihood had no food, no money, and no rice or corn in the fields. Hamzah, who had just begun his career as an agricultural extension worker, was shocked to see Indonesians dying of starvation when he knew that not far away paddy was in surplus. He committed himself to working with people to make farming viable once again and to avoid the mistakes that had caused so much misery.