146 Poverty and Hunger
programmes and policy, there were human and ethical costs as projects were abandoned.
With the new priority to influence policy so continuity, partnerships, relationships,
understanding and trust became and remain more important than ever.
Irreversibility is neglected in conventional economics compared to risk and uncer-
tainty. The precautionary principle in environmental and other decision making recog-
nizes irreversibility, but it remains underdeveloped as a practical concept. Far more
attention should be paid to human activities like quarrying and mining, which are
controllable but have effects that are irreversible.
Commitment, continuity and irreversibility are Cinderella words and concepts,
which merit more analysis and prominence in development discourse and practice.
Agricultural settlement in decline: Twists in the tale
After the 1960s, agricultural settlement schemes became less common and less
conspicuous. In Africa, their problems and costs, the less land available and politi-
cal factors combined to reduce their popularity and prevalence. In Zimbabwe,
although earlier settlements had been quite successful, the greed and intransigence
of the later political leadership prevented an orderly programme that might have
served equity and peace by transferring land from European to African farmers, as
had been achieved during the 1960s in Kenya. More generally, the withdrawal of
the state from administered development such as settlement schemes has been so
widespread and so comprehensive that we find ourselves now, in the 21st century,
looking back on the 1960s as another world.
Legacies of earlier irreversibility have, though, lingered on, with twists in their
tails and tales. The Perkerra Irrigation Scheme has survived. For a long time it was
probably still a costly recurrent liability.^11 Reportedly its performance improved
somewhat in the 1990s with diversification of crops, and contracts from the Kenya
Seed Company for growing hybrid maize seed. A research station was established
at Perkerra, jointly under Horticulture Research International and the Kenya Agri-
cultural Research Institute. The irrigated area remained low. Papaya and maize
were grown on 350 hectares out of the 2350 hectares designated for irrigation.
Perkerra was reported to perform relatively well compared with other irrigation
schemes such as Hola, West Kano and Bunyala, which were ‘virtually dead’
(Akumu, 2002). But the vulnerability and financial dependence of the scheme
continued.^12 In December 2002, floods in the Perkerra River destroyed the weir
and 259 houses. ‘The embankment of the water reservoir which used to flow
through the canal to the scheme, and which was built way back in 1954, collapsed
under pressure from the waters’ (Njeru, 2003). So the history of vulnerability to
flash river flows, which in 1919 broke the sill of rock on which the Njemps built
their brushwood weir for irrigation, was repeated in 2002. For reconstruction the
NIB (National Irrigation Board) was to put in US$20,000^13 and the United
Nations Development Fund Kenya, US$100,000.^14 It remains to reflect on the
relative ease and low cost of closure in 1959 and for a few following years when
there was the option of resettlement in the (as they were) ‘White Highlands’, and