How we saved agriculture, fed the world and ended rural poverty: looking back from 2050

As Oxfam’s two week online debate on the future of agriculture gets under way, John Ambler of Oxfam America imagines how it could all turn out right in the end

It is now 2050.  Globally, we are 9 billion strong.  Only 20% of us are directly involved in agriculture, and poor country economies have diversified.  Yet we all have enough food.  Technological innovation has played its part, but increased production has been largely driven by institutional reform.  For example, industrialized countries have eliminated the subsidies that once undercut poor country agricultural production and exports.  Land reform has spread in Latin America.  Water reform has proceeded in Asia.  Irrigation, which once constituted 70% of freshwater use, now consumes less than 50%.  New agronomic practices are taking hold worldwide. The world is eating more healthily and locally.   The sustainability of our agricultural systems is taken as non-negotiable by the world’s politicians.

The key?  Institutional reform.  And the key to institutional reform has been placing citizens and primary producers in more central oversight and ownership positions, with governments stepping back and taking more responsibility for managing at watershed and ecosystem levels.

The institutional structure of innovation

Governments are investing more in public sector agricultural research, while multi-stakeholder “trustee panels” provide broad oversight.  Public agricultural research institutions rely for 15% of their budget on licensing their innovations to farmers, creating an additional accountability linkage.  In poor countries, farmer-to-farmer innovation is partially subsidized by the government, as is improved agricultural information.

Private agricultural research is encouraged, but publicly-funded innovations are jealously preserved for the public domain. Local “agricultural boards”, with a mix of government, farmer, and civil society representation, have a large say in setting the research agenda.  Income from agricultural patents accrues to the creators, but the state sometimes intervenes for the public good, as it once did for HIV/AIDS medicines.

Biological or chemical innovations in agriculture are now supervised by FDA-like mechanisms at national and global levels, which assess potential impact on human, animal, and environmental health. Patents produced from government-funded programs are held in public trust. Income from such patents is divided equally between inventors and state agricultural programs. Special efforts are taken to advise government and communities on the economic and social implications of agricultural innovations produced by public research.  Major breakthroughs have occurred for crops that grow well under saline conditions and under the higher temperatures associated with climate change.  New drought and heat tolerant varieties especially suited for the tropics and for some breadbasket areas of the North have been developed.  GMOs are selectively used but heavily regulated, and are limited primarily to industrial crops.

Investment in innovative water-saving technology is flourishing, incentivized by better valuation- worldwide, water is now acknowledged as an economic good and has a price.  Water use efficiency for agriculture is up 50% compared to 2012.  The state has stepped up in its oversight roles, and guarantees base flows for ecosystem sustainability.

The institutional structure of production

Small-holder farmers now get significantly more attention.  Governments support cooperative storage facilities – to manage stocks, flows, and prices.  They have also improved transport links to major agricultural areas and provide loan guarantees for agricultural cooperatives. Both rich and poor countries have developed a clearer understanding of the role of the state in all this: where markets already function reasonably well, they should be left alone, within the confines of reasonable regulation.  Where the markets themselves are not functioning properly, as in many poor countries, the State should play a role, not least to ensure that the very large number of poor people who are still dependent on agriculture benefit from their involvement. In consequence, rich countries have stopped subsidizing food production, leaving market forces to determine agricultural prices, while poor governments have extended their assistance to small-scale agriculture fourfold, primarily through co-investment rather than through full subsidy. Market systems, even in statist countries, are allowed to signal supply and demand.  Most countries have disbanded their inept and corrupt ministries of cooperatives, replacing them with wholly farmer-owned “cooperative companies,” which have at least the same status and legal persona as any corporate entity.

All over Latin America, major land reform has peacefully taken place, with compensation to the former owners. The beneficiaries, mostly peasants, pay for the land over time at a discounted rate. Land reform has served the triple bottom line: higher productivity, more equitable income distribution, and greater ecological sustainability.  Strengthened regulatory safeguards govern the buying and selling of agricultural land.

Heavily dependent on irrigation, Asia, home to nearly half our population, has accomplished major reform in water management, including revamping its water rights frameworks.  Significant water rights have been invested in companies controlled by farmers.  But multi-stakeholder water boards closely supervise transactions and form the first point of adjudication for disputes.  Even large irrigation systems formerly run by government are now managed by farmer-owned cooperative companies or by public utilities. Irrigation engineers work for the companies, not the government, thus increasing the incentives to raise productivity, reduce water consumption, increase equity, and tackle waterlogging and salinity.  Water cooperatives sell the water they save to other users, including growing urban areas. Proceeds from sales are reinvested in irrigation infrastructure and in research.  For its part, governments now focus on issues above the individual irrigation system, especially ecological sustainability and inter-system water distribution.

In many countries, some agricultural extension services have also been privatized, providing the incentive for agronomists and extension agents to develop and disseminate products that the farmers want and are actually willing to pay for.

The debate is over about whether large-scale mechanized production is more efficient than small-scale peasant production.  We acknowledge that both are necessary. In countries such as the USA, grain production stays under large mechanized farms. However, fruits and vegetables, which respond more to higher inputs of labor, is increasingly managed by smaller farms.  Many developing countries have benefitted from selective mechanization, such as power tillers and small tractors, but except for areas with major labor shortages, wholesale mechanization has been found to be neither necessary nor advisable.  And, in some places, such as terraced rice fields, the mechanization possibilities remain extremely limited.

The proliferation of advanced agronomic techniques continues. The plant root management techniques that started with the system of rice intensification in Asia have spread to new crops and continents.  For many crops, combinations of newer and older agronomic wisdom appear to yield superior results.  Restructuring the incentive and ownership frameworks for agricultural research and extension has been instrumental in producing new knowledge appropriate for the small holder.  GMOs have gone through periods of alternating approach, avoidance, and ultimately cautionary adoption mostly limited to industrial crops.

We have mostly organic solutions on how to enrich the soil. Even soil-rich countries had, mistakenly, often considered soil as inexhaustible. When the nutrients disappeared, treatment overly relied on chemical fertilizers. Now, chemical fertilizer consumption is down 75% because of reduced  costs to spread organic material (largely through new solar and hydrogen-powered transport vehicles), better recycling of organic urban waste, improved crop rotation, and more widespread use of nitrogen-fixing cover crops.

Fisheries and watersheds/forests are now under new management.  In the case of the former, international bodies with advanced surveillance equipment now monitor fishing fleets in open water to make sure they comply with stricter international fishing quotas; while artisanal fisherfolk have stronger legal rights and technology to protect their coastal fishing rights.  Regarding watersheds, the practice of downstream urban areas paying for upstream environmental protection services is now widespread. In selected areas, urban areas also pay agricultural producers to use less climate changing production techniques. New solar and hydrogen-based energy and better battery storage technologies greatly reduce the use of arable land for bio-fuels.

The institutional structure of consumption

Over 1 billion farmers are both sellers and buyers of food; and another billion rural people must buy all their food.   With rising incomes, we have faced the severe challenge of high grain prices due to rising demand for grain-fattened meat animals.   We still produce large quantities of grass-fed beef, lamb, and goats, but we have managed to reduce per capita consumption of grain-fed meat through public education, new “grain-meat” taxes, and social programs that emphasize the reduction or elimination of meat in the diet.  Grain-fed meat consumption in emerging economies has grown relatively slowly due to good public education.    Health professionals have helped reduce grain-fed meat consumption in the West, while poor countries have been able to better meet their protein needs through new crop-based amino acid combinations rather through grain-fed meat.

In conclusion, politicians around the world have learned that for agriculture to successfully produce food, stabilize the ecosystem, and generate employment, institutional reform is critical.  This particular reform path is difficult because it requires nuanced policies—selective mechanization, appropriate application of artificial fertilizer, judicious GMO use, equitable land reform, improved valuation of water, fairer structure of knowledge creation, and more citizen control over regulation and enforcement.  The underlying policies and institutions are the product of continual negotiation.  And, new technology has been at the service of these institutions rather than the institution being driven by the technology.  Special efforts are needed to ensure that poor farmers and women benefit from the new structure of ownership and authority.  These changes have gotten us to a new place, one more meaningful because it centers around equity, sustainability, and distribution, and not so much on profit, extraction, and comparative advantage, as it did back in 2012.

‘Don’t leave this to your children’: could climate finance unlock a deal on Climate Change?

Just back from the Doha climate talks, Oxfam’s Campaigns and Policy Director Phil Bloomer discusses the tensions and relative climate change records of rich and poor country governments.

The UN summit on climate change in Doha this week is entering the end game, amidst increasing frustration from all sides at the glacial pace of negotiations (and this glacier shows no signs of melting).

Amidst the rancour, Professor Nick Stern, perhaps the leading thinker on climate action and negotiations, has thrown a huge challenge into the talks, by explaining the ‘brutal arithmetic’ of our greenhouse gas emissions. To stay below an average global temperature rise of 2C, “stronger action will be required from developing countries, even if developed countries reduce their emissions to zero by 2030”. Stern goes on to say that in the interests both of fairness and getting results, developing countries’ efforts will have to be supported by rich countries’ know-how, technology, and finance.

This really matters: equity (let’s just call it fairness) is not a barrier to ambition in the talks, but rather its enabler. Rich countries’ willingness to support developing countries’ shift to low carbon development, and their adaptation to the climate change that already threatens poor people’s lives and livelihoods, is key to unlocking higher ambition from all countries. Ambition for emission cuts and equity are two sides of the same coin. The failure to grasp this at the talks in Copenhagen in 2009, led to that failure. We cannot let it destroy Doha too.

But the Doha talks look dangerously mired on this. Developing countries are facing their own financial cliff this month, when three years of $30 billion in ‘Fast-Start Financing’ for emissions reduction and adaptation come to an end. This was mostly not ‘new and additional’ money (as was the promise), but mainly diverted from aid funds to ‘climate finance’. But at least it was reasonably predictable. Developing countries now find that rich countries are refusing to recommit to scaling up this funding, preferring broad assurances that bilateral climate finance will ‘continue’ (not necessarily ‘increase’). The UK is an honourable exception to this, pledging £1.8bn over the next two years. This reluctance may be understandable in a recession, but there are innovative sources of finance like the financial transaction tax, a tax on aviation and shipping, or closing tax loopholes and havens, which could raise billions, were they to be implemented.

Despite this lack of finance, developing countries are not standing around waiting for our cash before acting: the Stockholm Environment Institute calculates that the developing countries’ pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are already larger in absolute terms than rich countries’ promises. This extraordinary disparity looks set to be reinforced at Doha as the rich countries refuse to join an extended climate change agreement (USA, Canada, Russia, New Zealand and Japan), or improve on their lowly targets for reducing emissions (the US has said no further action should be expected before 2020) or only promise reductions they have effectively already achieved, partly through the economic recession (EU).

Meanwhile the least developed countries’ main concern is supporting their vulnerable citizens to adapt to climate change that is already wreaking havoc through increased droughts, floods and temperature extremes. This needs finance. As Yvette Abrahams, an Oxfam partner from South Africa, said to rich country negotiators in Doha: “My family is meeting this Christmas to discuss moving (from our ancestral land). We cannot stay, as the heat has stopped the grass growing, and there will be nothing to feed our livestock. So the very little we have managed to preserve through slavery, colonialism and apartheid, we are about to lose to climate change. That is why we do not understand why climate finance is so difficult to deal with (in these talks). What I have paid is all I have. Whatever it is your ancestors have done, I appeal to you to not leave this to your children.”

Stern calls for the principle of ‘equitable access to sustainable development’ to replace the vested interests, zero sum games, and redlines that currently paralyse the negotiations. Every country, and especially the high emitters, will have to take on higher targets if we are to avoid runaway climate change. The question is whether that will be done fairly or not. This is a collective action challenge like no other and we need collective and fair action. We need to hang together or, assuredly, we will hang apart.

How do we work out the returns to campaigning? Nice example from the Philippines

Like any campaigning organization, Oxfam has limited funds, and so needs to know whether its investment has paid off. The push from everyone and their dog to pursue a ‘results agenda’ and ‘value for money’ has added further momentum to that effort. That’s fine if you’re doing something that’s easy to measure, (say vaccinating kids, or cash transfers), and where attributing an effect to a particular cause is relatively straightforward, even if sometimes technical and expensive to establish. But what about influencing government policy, where there are dozens of voices, numerous events, and establishing any causal chain is both elusive and (inevitably) disputed (did anyone else grind their teeth watching Bono and Bob making poverty history the other night………?)

This matters because Oxfam increasingly sees a big part of its role as working with others to influence government policy, especially in developing countries, through programmes, partnerships and advocacy.

I got involved in a brain-bending conversation about this when trying to help out with a ‘killer fact’ on some smart campaigning by our team in the Philippines. At first glance, the success of the campaign for a ‘People’s Survival Fund’ was ideally suited to the task. Oxfam and partner iCSC (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities) commissioned research, and then launched a campaign in July 2010 calling on the government to set up a climate change adaptation fund. We did all the usual stuff – backgrounders for policy makers, popular mobilization, media work, celeb endorsements etc and (voila!) a US $25m a year People’s Survival Fund (PSF) was passed by the Philippine Congress in June 2012 after a two-year campaign. Result!

But was it value for money? At first glance it seems pretty easy to calculate the return on the money invested in the campaign – it’s just how much cash reaches poor people over a period of time, compared to the amount Oxfam spent on the campaign, corrected to take into account the fact that Oxfam wasn’t the only organization campaigning on the issue, and so shouldn’t take all the credit.

In mathematical terms, it’s even easier: Return to Campaign (RtC) = (AxBxC/D)

Where

A = The total new expenditure on climate change adaptation resulting from the PSF.

B= the proportion of that money that reaches poor people.

C = plausible % of attribution to the Oxfam campaign

D = Oxfam’s expenditure

We calculate the value for A, B, C and D as follows

A: P$1bn a year, taken over say a five year period, making it P$5bn (about US$125m).

B: If the money is equally distributed among all the people in the areas receiving PSF funds, some 45% would go to poor people (based on the 30-60% poverty rates in the relevant areas). But experience suggests that richer people may be more likely to get their hands on the cash. As we are looking for a conservative estimate here, we therefore assume that only 20% of the money would go to poor people

C: As the main funder, and lead agency in the lobby effort that led to PSF, it seems reasonable to take half the credit for the victory, so D = 0.5

D: Oxfam’s total expenditure over the three years of the campaign comes to P$7.4m

So using $Pm as the unit of calculation

Return to Campaign = (5000 x 0.2 x 0.5)/7.4 = 68

i.e. over a 5 year period, Oxfam’s campaign generated at least 68 times more resources for climate change adaptation than we invested in the campaign/for every $1 we spent we generated $60 for climate change adaptation for poor people.

Enter the nagging self doubt (otherwise known as Claire Hutchings in our monitoring and evaluation team). Every single one of those terms can be challenged:

A: assumes all the budget is disbursed and that none gets eaten up by overheads – any underspend or overhead costs would obviously reduce the amount available to reach poor people.

B: how do we know if that is a reasonable estimate of the proportion of the PSF that will ultimately reach poor people?

D: but what about all the other money Oxfam has spent globally and within the Philippines on raising awareness of climate change, supporting partners etc – didn’t that play a role in the victory?  What about cost of programming we’ve done in the Phillipines and other countries that have contributed to building the Oxfam brand, enabling us to ‘sit at the table’, participate in these conversations, influence etc.

And then we get to C: let’s assume for a moment that we can get an accurate costing of all the resources Oxfam has spent national and globally that have contributed to getting this issue on the agenda in the Philippines, and can reach a credible estimate of the proportion of PSF that will reach poor people.  The question remains how can we credibly attribute a % of any decision to the influence of the campaign?

For example, suppose years of global and national campaigns, by Oxfam and others, had got the issue to a tipping point, where only a small nudge was needed to persuade the government. Should the credit go to the patient slog of a multitude of actors, or the last minute glory-grabbing campaign (back to Bono and Bob)?  A light touch approach might be to ask people – staff, partners, government officials and perhaps most importantly, independent experts – to give us an estimate. But such questions risk being pretty leading (‘please attribute a percentage of attribution to the campaign’ is likely to get an inflated estimate), and open to bias. But doing something more rigorous, to investigate the main factors that contributed to the Parliament’s decision, would be expensive and still may not find the evidence needed to reach credible conclusions.  Now there’s a whole measurement challenge around evaluating campaigns and advocacy efforts, and through our Effectiveness Reviews we’re investing in trialing and refining an impact assessment approach for this work, one that builds from process tracing, to explore what it takes to reach credible conclusions about the contributions of our work to policy change (watch this space).

Let’s assume (for the moment) that such evaluations would allow us to credibly attribute our influence.  The fact is that these evaluations take time and resources.  Do we really need to commission an evaluation any time we want to talk about the resources that are being leveraged through our campaign work?  Or can we identify a rule of thumb, with all the necessary caveats and qualifications, that’s ‘good enough’, at least for cases that seem pretty clear cut.

What would be good enough in this case? Your thoughts please

Science Girl; Starbucks and tax; NYC carbon; adaptation in America: videos I liked

Some Friday video light relief (well, light-ish) on climate change (with an eye on dismal dialogues in Doha) and tax evasion.

First the totally adorable Science Girl on climate change, clean energy + a surprise upside – wildfires melt Barbie & Ken before your very eyes

Next up, a sweet and funny Starbucks tax sting – two Welsh Activists decide it should return its 28% tax dodge to its customers. Background here

If greenhouse gases were visible, would it be easier to persuade publics and politicians to take them seriously? This smart video from New York City suggests the answer is yes. [h/t John Magrath]

Finally, climate change adaptation in America. Vicki Arroyo from the Georgetown Climate Center in a rather disturbing TED talk. Makes you wonder if some kind of climate survivalism is on the way

The World Bank’s new chief economist on redistribution, taxation, economists, climate change and, errm, multi-player sudoku

The World Bank’s new chief economist, Kaushik Basu (right), came through London last week and had a good initial exchange of views with some NGO wonks. I went to a similar exercise with his predecessor, Justin Lin (blogpost here), and the comparison was interesting. Whereas Justin focussed on industrial policy and structural upgrading, Kaushik talked a lot about governance, inequality, taxation and growth. Justin focussed more on the economics; Kaushik on the politics – how to get governments (and his World Bank colleagues) to do the right thing. That probably reflects their different backgrounds (China v India; Kaushik just crossing over from a period in the Indian Ministry of Finance where he learned to understand ‘the hierarchy of government’) more than any great change in public debate in the last four years.

Kaushik suggested a change of tone was needed among the Bank’s economists and researchers – paying as much attention to policy-makers’ need for narratives and big ideas as to demonstrating your mastery of whizzy maths. Damnit, not only have they nicked our killer facts techniques, but now they’re going to start telling good stories too! Throughout, he stressed the importance of the battle of ideas, ‘consciousness’ and ‘raising awareness’. Gramsci on 18^th Street? He was also keen to push climate change and environmentalism, which he thinks is probably still insufficiently prominent at the Bank.

He received some good, pointed questions from the wonks. Peter Chowla from the Bretton Woods Project (the premier Bank watchdog in the UK, maybe anywhere) pushed him on the role of the Bank’s researchers in ‘paradigm maintenance’ – Peter argued that the Bank has a good varied set of research outputs (it probably allows a freer exchange of ideas than the UN, or for that matter, most NGOs and Kaushik is determined to protect that), but there’s some kind of institutional filter in place which squeezes out the heterodox fringe, and amplifies the neoclassical core, especially as ideas start to reach Bank country programmes. Everyone got a kick in on the Bank’s notorious Doing Business report, which Kaushik defended (he says it, along with the World Development Indicators, were the two documents he found most useful in government). He did however acknowledge that there might be some ideological ‘Trojan horse agendas’ being introduced.

Kaushik acknowledged that ‘if you begin in neoclassical economics and you don’t have enough imagination, you get locked into things like rational expectations’, but argued that lots of economists have quite sufficient imagination to think outside these reductionist stereotypes.

Where I started to get worried was on his apparent acceptance of the ‘race to the bottom’ on corporate taxation. This reflects his experience in his home state, West Bengal, where despite a Communist government committed to poverty eradication, the demands on industry were so severe that industry fled the state and poverty and unemployment remained high. But surely a key role for the Bank is to take up these kind of collective action problems?

However he does support redistribution. ‘I am not a trickle down believer, you need direct action on inequality’. He thinks that while we have to be mindful of the risk of capital and skill flight, there is scope for more efficient and redistributive forms of tax. There ought to be some inheritance tax, he believes, because to allow people to be born poor and destined to poverty as happens in today’s world is akin to a caste system. He reckons that with current levels of wealth ‘basic food should now be a fundamental right and access to healthcare is close to that.’

I think he could prove to be an interesting and innovative voice at the Bank, introducing an Indian sensibility on rights, human development and governance – he recently suggested an approach on bribery rather similar to decriminalizing cannabis: make it legal to pay bribes, but not to receive them, so that people forced to pay bribes would no longer be deterred from denouncing graft. You can follow him on twitter at @kaushikcbasu

One final revelation from the meeting – a diligent wonk had uncovered Kaushik’s true claim to fame, as inventor of a multiplayer version of Sudoku, clunkily named Duidoku (left). If that catches on, he may end up explaining to the Bank why he has single-handedly destroyed decades of global progress on productivity…….

From superstorm Sandy to climate solidarity: How extreme weather can unlock climate action

From a battered New York, Oxfam climate change policy adviser Tim Gore (right) considers the wider impact of major ‘weather events’ on the climate change debate

I live in New York, half a block outside Evacuation Zone A on the East side of Manhattan. My partner and I, like many others, had our quick-run bags packed as the power went off on Monday evening (which is yet to be restored) and the storm surge grew. In the days since, we’ve been struck by the messages of good will we have been sent from all over the world. One of the first was from a friend and colleague who two years ago took me to visit the hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis living on mud embankments shattered by Cyclone Aila.

Could such disasters, wherever they hit in the world, offer opportunities to build a global solidarity movement for action on climate change? They could, if we are smart about it.

First, let’s be clear – as CNN, Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Bloomberg have all been in the last days – that Sandy was another clear cut case of climate change in action. With increasing rigour (as I described here), scientists can now show that global warming driven by excess greenhouse gas emissions, either makes extreme weather more likely or more severe, or both. Bloomberg Businessweek’s front cover on Sandy should surely be a contender for headline of the century.

This increased confidence in attributing climate change to specific impacts on people’s lives, and on the bottom lines of businesses and entire countries, means weather extremes like Sandy should now be treated as major opportunities to leverage political action on climate change. It’s an idea that has gained increasing attention in recent years, from Alex Evans to David Attenborough (and in Oxfam, Duncan Green’s been haranguing us about getting better at seizing “windows of opportunity” for years).

In the context in which an abrupt change of course is needed to address the climate crisis – one some have compared only to mobilisation for war – crisis moments can create unique windows of opportunity for non-linear political change. That is precisely what we need. They can catalyse clear shifts in the values and priorities of citizens, business and political leaders around the world. Climate disasters in the global North and South alike are reminders of the common threat we face, and of the need to act collectively and urgently to avert yet greater harm.

While no-one could wish for a future disaster, the science shows events like Sandy and this year’s US megadrought are the new normal. So it makes sense for Oxfam and many of our partners in civil society to try to put this approach at the heart of our climate change advocacy and campaigning. To do so, we must get at least a couple of key things right.

First, we must recognise that while we are all now increasingly affected by climate change – rich and poor, in the global North and South alike – we are not all affected equally, and our struggles to fight climate change are not all the same. In fact, our common enemy of climate change will further exacerbate the inequalities between us. Sandy showed again that New York is highly vulnerable to climate change, but I was still thankful to be facing a hurricane there rather than in Haiti, Bangladesh or the Philippines. The US farmers who saw their crops devastated this year – sending world food prices rocketing – had losses tempered by access to drought-resilient crop varieties, investment and insurance mechanisms that could have saved lives and livelihoods amongst their counterparts in the Sahel in recent years.

It’s the poorest everywhere who are hit hardest. But we’ll only build a movement of global climate solidarity if we recognise these

Fire damage at Breezy Point, NYC

inequalities and differences up front, and make sure they are at the heart of the responses and solutions we demand. That’s how our campaigning can be inclusive, ultimately reaching more people, and building more power for action.

Second, we must assert that global climate solidarity goes beyond charity and stands for justice – it must link our basic humanitarian impulse to help those in need to passionate political action. This means knowing who or what is the source of climate injustice, who stands in the way of redress and how they can be moved. This week our friends at 350.org are doing a fine job at showing how that can be done. Their rapid response webpage helps concerned citizens donate to help those hit by Sandy, while putting the energy companies – who have kept climate change out of this year’s Presidential debate – in the frame, and demanding political action from whoever wins the White House next week.

Expressions of global solidarity in the windows of opportunity following climate disasters will likely not be the only approach we need to jump start climate action. But we can’t just rely on incremental strategies either.

To close the energy poverty gap, we need ideas, investment…and natural gas. Todd Moss responds to Hannah Ryder

CGD’s Todd Moss responds to Hannah Ryder’s critique of his ‘let them burn fossil fuels’ line on energy poverty

Thanks to Hannah for raising some good questions about my proposal that the US agency OPIC partially exempt the world’s lowest-income, lowest-emitting countries from the greenhouse gas cap. I think we both agree that 1.3 billion people without access to electricity in the 21^st Century is inexcusable. It’s a development problem that can and should be solved. We also agree that the past approach to power has been insufficient, and that to close the energy poverty gap we need new ideas and new technologies. Here’s where we disagree:

• Greater investment is necessary if we want to close the energy poverty gap. The data on additional generation capacity and access do not, as she suggests, show that increases in the former have no relation to decreases in the latter. Rather those IEA graphs in an apples-to-apples (global-to-global) comparison show the opposite: a clear decline of roughly 25% between 1985-2000 in the total number of people without access to electricity. Yes, this decline is driven by East Asia, but this is also likely to be precisely where the bulk of the investment and capacity additions have occurred (IEA doesn’t provide ungated data on capacity addition disaggregated by region – I’d love to see that). More recent estimates (in World Energy Outlook 2011) show that the number of people without electricity has continued to decline by some 300 million in the past decade. In other words, is seems safe to assume that where massive investment takes place (e.g., China), millions of people are gaining access to power. Thus, the conclusion, including in the paper Hannah cites, is that even more investment is needed (they suggest 5x current levels). If this is the case, it seems odd that we would question whether capacity should really increase or, worse, hamstring our agencies tasked to boost this investment with environmental mandates that have nearly zero effect on global emissions targets.

• Off grid renewable may be better, but it’s not realistic everywhere. Certain populations may benefit from new technologies and new models, such as off-grid renewable sources. We should absolutely leverage our policy tools to deploy these where we can. But the scale of the problem is such that sizeable populations will still require old-school on-grid power that is (at least based on current economics) probably going to come from fossil fuels. This is especially likely for underserved urban populations and heavy industrial projects. This World Bank paper reports that barely half of poor residents in Dakar and Nairobi have access to electricity.  Reaching the rest will come, not from some high-tech solar system, but from hooking up more homes to the grid and boosting generation capacity in big power plants. Ditto for the 97% of large firms in Nigeria that rely on (costly, inefficient, and polluting) diesel generators to provide nearly 2/3 of their power. Similarly, Ghana’s Valco aluminum smelter in the industrial port of Tema is running at 20% capacity for the sole reason of a shortage of low-cost power. Getting Valco to capacity, with all the jobs and spin-off industries that would accompany full production, is going to require new power investments in large-scale power.

• Natural gas will be part of the solution. My proposal specifically excludes coal, but not natural gas. This distinction is partly political, but it’s mainly pragmatic: many of the same countries that have substantial energy poverty gaps also have natural gas reserves that could be transformed into domestic energy.  Just in Africa in the past few years, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire have had major new gas finds. And Nigeria still flares much of its gas. Why should we stand in the way of these countries turning these resources into electricity and jobs for their people? We shouldn’t—especially when we have placed no such constraints on ourselves.

Why high carbon energy is the wrong solution for low income countries

DFID staff break their duck as guest writers on FP2P with this post from Hannah Ryder (right), a regular blogger on the DFID site and Senior Economist specialising in climate change and low carbon growth

Economists have a reputation for being sceptical – there is even a book called “the Skeptical Economist”. This has a lot to do with how it is taught. For instance, we are encouraged to be sceptical of the idea that one thing (a “variable”) might directly cause another variable to change. A number of development economists have recently been stressing that “complexity” should make us even more sceptical of these relationships.

Now, I usually avoid wearing the sceptic’s hat. But the other day I came across an article that assumed a linear, causal relationship between two variables. The article was by Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development. He was arguing that the American organisation that provides investment to developing countries “OPIC” should be able to help low-income countries invest in high-carbon energy – such as coal or diesel powered stations, to help stimulate access to energy in those countries. He argued that the limits that OPIC has on this kind of investment are “strategically counterproductive and morally dubious”.

I, like Todd, certainly feel strongly about access to energy. Around the world, 1.3 billion people have no access to electricity. Over 80% of those people live either in sub-Saharan Africa or in South Asia. Access can vary dramatically within regions – over 95% of people lack electricity access in Chad and Liberia versus 25% in South Africa. Although problems are currently worse in rural areas than urban areas, even so about 56% of urban dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity.

Han’s Rosling’s latest TED talk cleverly explains why increasing energy access helps reduce poverty. It can expand people’s choices and productivity, particularly for women. It also helps business. A recent survey of manufacturing firms in Nigeria showed that 83% of respondents identified electricity as their top problem. In many cases, even when people or firms get access to electricity they still suffer from blackouts (such as experienced recently in India) and lack of affordability. Related problems exist in developed countries. In the UK, around 19% of households were “fuel poor” in 2010 – meaning they had to spend over than 10% of their income on fuel for adequate heating. Energy poverty matters.

The problem is that, from a quick skim of historic data, there is no good reason to expect that investment in conventional high-carbon energy will solve the energy access problem. These two graphs from the 2003 and 2002 IEA World Economic Outlooks (respectively) illustrate:

Although the dollars invested in the power sector and installed capacity – most of it based on conventional fuels such as coal, gas and oil – have increased strongly since the 1970s, the number of people with access to electricity has increased somewhat, but not a great deal.

Of course, the problem couldsimply be population growth outpacing investment growth, but the data suggests it isn’t. A 2011 study by a set of global energy experts foundno distinguishable relationship between investment in energy infrastructure and the degree of energy poverty once you control for total population. These expertsinsteadsuggestedthe problem was inequality.  Effectively, in many countries, new energy investment tends to benefit people that already have access. They therefore recommended a five-fold increase in overall energy sector investment in low-income countries, particularly in grid extensions, off-grid solutions and renewable energy – rather than the conventional, high-carbon methods used to date.

Added to this, looking forward, reports such as the European Report on Development and McKinsey’s Resource Revolution provide evidence that commodity prices are likely to rise and become more volatile in future. A number of economists such as Shalizi and Lecocq think some developing countries might regret building infrastructure now that locks them into needing to buycoal or oilor relying excessively on their volatile revenues. While there isn’t much evidence on this yet, it’s probably sensible for most countries to begin to plan for a diversified energy sector, especially if they are also going to try to target poor energy consumers more strongly in future.

These are the reasons why I was sceptical when I read Todd Moss’s article calling for OPIC to invest in high-carbon energy. It’s also why the UK supports the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy For All Initiative, and why DFID specifically helps low-income countries invest in diverse sources of energy, particularly through vehicles such as the Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program, the Results-based Financing Facility and Green Africa Power. Pushing OPIC and others to look in new directions and help forge a new relationship between investment and energy access might actually be a good thing. And with that, I shall remove off my sceptic’s hat.

Todd Moss responds tomorrow

Meetings with Remarkable Women: Lan Mercado’s journey from megaphone to microphone

A while back, I wrote about some amazing Oxfam women I met in East Africa. Here’s another, this time from the Philippines.

Lan (real name Lilian, but Filipinos never use real names) is one of those quiet but effective (and very determined, and maybe not so quiet….) women that abound in development work. She

Lan, the megaphone years, circa 1985

was formerly our country director in the Philippines, but has now moved to head up a project on ASEAN (more on that below). She is also yet another Oxfam woman with a remarkable story. In 1988, as a 28 year old Communist Party activist in the Philippines civil war, her own Party denounced and arrested her on trumped-up charges of being involved in an intra-Party assassination. They held her for 6 months in the mountains, blindfolded and handcuffed in a cage. She and the other prisoners were tortured physically, mentally and emotionally. At least she avoided the fate of prisoners in other camps, who were forced to play ‘eeny meeny miny mo’, with the loser taken out, killed, and their blood smeared over the remaining prisoners.

Lan says she stayed sane by thinking about food, shopping malls, ‘normal life’. After her release, she felt compelled to try and understand how Party cadres became torturers, the various pressures that transformed what were otherwise good people. ‘Had I not done this, I would have turned into an angry and bitter woman, consumed by vengeance. It helped because it prevented me from thinking that all those years of being a CP member were a waste, and I was able to resume working for the same issues of justice and democracy, albeit outside of CP organs.’ She also sought out and interviewed 15 known torturers from the military.

The Party killed over 2,000 people in an orgy of purges and paranoia, before sanity returned as its leaders realized it was ‘eating its own tail’. Even after her release, Lan could not risk going home for two years, because the military would ‘seize me and show me as exhibit A, a ‘victim of the Communists’.’ Other people now working for Oxfam suffered similarly, one even wrote a book about it. A younger staffer’s father was a ‘military asset’ – a university lecturer who informed on leftwing students who were then disappeared by the military.

25 years on, Lan chairs the Peace Advocates for Truth, Healing and Justice (PATH), a group of survivors and the families and friends of those who perished. She is also seeking a way to erect memorials and establish ‘sites of conscience’ at the mass graves of those who died. ‘The search for truth and justice goes beyond impugning individuals, casting blame or sowing hatred. It is about reflecting on the dark moments of the Philippine Left’s history, and promoting healing and closure anchored on restorative justice rather than vindictiveness.’

Lan seems remarkably matter of fact about it all – ‘sure you can write about it, it’s on my Facebook page!’ she tells me, sipping beer in a bar where a guitarist covers ‘Wake up Little Suzy’, Tracy Chapman and Bob Marley. Another Oxfamista is appalled to hear that her hero in the movement was one of Lan’s torturers. It all feels quintessentially Filipino.

These days, Lan has come a long way from cages and guerrilla war, pursuing her activist agenda in the very heart of the Asian establishment – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The region is prone to typhoons and earthquakes, accounting for 14% of the world total number of disasters, against just 9% of its people. Poignantly, ASEAN signed the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) just 3 weeks before the deadly Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, but then, as so often, it languished in bureaucratic in-trays, wending its way through ratification by ASEAN’s ten member governments and eventually coming into force on the 5th anniversary of the tsunami.

But Lan and other civil society activists saw the potential: ‘That was the opportunity. They had the text and no implementation strategy’.

and now, with microphone

A coalition of CSOs lobbied the ASEAN secretariat and member nation ambassadors and got them to accept their support, in the form of the APG (AADMER Partnership Group), which Lan now works for on secondment from Oxfam: ‘The deal was we would help write the strategies for the implementation of AADMER provided there was a good country-level consultation process on how to make AADMER pro-people.’

Working as an advisor to the ASEAN secretariat, she now speaks the language of committees, acronyms and procedures ‘We’re now embedded. Our contributions have been recognised by the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management and our programme to facilitate partnerships between ASEAN and CSOs was accepted by the Conference of Parties.’

Some of the main achievements of the APG to date:

• The formation of the APG and the secondment of Oxfam advisors demonstrated to the ASEAN that there is a non-threatening way of engaging with CSOs; and showed CSOs that there is another way for civil society to engage with the ASEAN apart from lobbying and mass actions. The ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management has agreed to develop a framework for partnership with CSOs, with the APG facilitating the process.

• APG activities at the country and regional levels increased public and civil society awareness of AADMER, which was previously known only to specialised agencies of government. AADMER had been used by country actors in Myanmar, for example, to engage with the national government on humanitarian concerns.

• APG advisors drafted a range of AADMER implementation strategies (training, knowledge management and so on) and is currently co-organising the ASEAN Day on Disaster Management, which highlights the role of women in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR).

It all sounds very bureaucratic and unheroic, but Lan sees her work on ASEAN as just another step (from megaphone to microphone?) in a life devoted to social justice. People working in NGOs are often like icebergs, with a below-the-waterline history that can be quite astounding. Discovering such histories (usually by accident, often over a beer) is just another perk of the job.

Prices that bounce – Naomi Hossain on the human face of the food crisis

Oxfam and IDS are starting work on Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility, a 4 year project combining qualitative and quantitative methods to track the human impact in communities in 10 countries, building on the methodology behind our 2011 report, Living on a Spike. Richard King at Oxfam and Naomi Hossain at IDS are running the project. Here, Naomi (right) reports back on one research trip to the rubber tappers of Indonesia.

I’m just back from South Kalimantan, part of Indonesian Borneo, where the idea that future food prices are likely to be jump even higher because of extreme weather events feels very real. Climate, energy, food and global economic crisis all feature in an alarming combination of volatilities. In the Banjarese community where IDS/Oxfam partners SMERU have been researching the social impacts of crisis since 2009, most people are rubber tappers. The past year has been particularly up-and-down, mainly down, even by the elastic standards of rubber producers.

We went to see one family, where the newly-single mother and household head – call her Siti – panicked when she saw us. ‘I’ve already paid’, she said. ‘I’ve paid for this month’. She thought we were debt collectors and was already behind on her first (I suspect also last) instalment for her new motorbike, easily the most popular means of getting about Indonesia. Siti needed it because she had recently shed her violent unfaithful husband, and was looking after four children on the wages of a rubber tapper (her working hours are 2am till 10am, when the rubber is fresh and the weather is cool).

The wages of rubber tappers are well down on last year, mostly because rubber prices have been affected by the double dip in the global economy, but partly due to the unusually dry season. Sofian told us he and his wife Fatiyah were earning 2.25 million (about US$ 240) rupiah per month this time last year; now they were getting 600,000 to 700,000 (US$ 63-73), depending on quality and quantity of their rubber. That is for two adults putting in a shared 7 hour shift between 4 and 9am, 6 days a week.

But as the price of rubber has sunk, the price of most food has steadily risen. People still eat rice in the same quantities or mix it with noodles – work is physical and they need the energy – but have cut down on fish. And, presumably because of the soybean crisis in the US, the high protein staple of the poor, tempe (soybean cake), has doubled in price. As the motorcycle grocer explained as he sped off, the price is the same, so he halves quantities.

Focus groups told another story. Their main problem, they tell us, is water. Some people think it is deforestation that has caused the water problems in Kalimantan, but in this part of Banjar, people point to the growing presence of the coal-mines. A popular community development  programme (PNPM) devised a water pump project in an area with a water source, only to find that by the time it was installed, the water had disappeared, sunk without a trace, as the coal-mines dug deeper into the earth. The mining company has bought up lots of local land, at cheap but still attractive prices, so many local people no longer farm their own land. But they are also too poor to get the education they need to work for the mining companies as drivers or mechanics. It’s all lose-lose here, at least until the rubber price picks up or food prices go down again.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS. This piece first appeared on the IDS team website.