SoA Lecture Series: Dr. Hsain Ilahiane, Mississippi State University

Thursday, March 4, 20212:00 p.m.Via Zoom Title: "Mobile Phones and Smallholder Farmers in Morocco: The Mobile Phone is Neither a Snowmobile nor a Truck" Abstract: Agricultural decisions on timely soil preparation and planting, irrigation and weeding, cultivating and harvesting, and storage and marketing have always been key concerns to farmers. The impacts of information and communication technologies in agriculture are not new, and many forms of local knowledge and technology are still central in managing agriculture.  Mobile phones, however, are speeding up ways in which farmers get, exchange, and manipulate information. They have reworked the ways farmers interact with rural and urban markets. Increasingly, mobile phones enable farmers to focus, search, and extract useful and up-to-date market information from social and business networks. In this paper, I examine how and to what effects mobile phones are used by smallholder farmers in Morocco. Second, I contend that the mobile phone is a tool of re-organizing production and marketing strategies, leading to higher farming revenues. Third, I claim that mobile phones have deepened and expanded market participation, resulting in intensive cultivation of “market-friendly” crops. Fourth, I argue that mobile phones have enabled farmers to take risks more easily than before, creating a spirit of risk taking.  Fourth, I contend that mobile phone use for market information search has led to the flattening of information asymmetry between farmers and footloose middlemen.  Finally, I discuss the ways in which mobile phones are different from “old” technologies such as snowmobiles and trucks in the development space. Hsain Ilahiane, Professor and HeadDepartment of Anthropology and Middle Eastern CulturesMississippi State University FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC For more information, contact: Dr. Mamadou Baro ( baro@arizona.edu)or Catherine Lehman (cml@arizona.edu)