The Five Standard Excuses of all politicians, everywhere, for everything: this week’s Friday Formula

Listening to the exchanges in the British Parliament recently brings back the genius of Yes Minister, a long gone British political comedy that, I am told, has been used to train French civil servants in understanding their Brit rivals, counterparts. The references are from 1981 (with links for younger readers, non-anglophiles and amnesiacs), but the excuses are as good as ever. The exchange is between Jim Hacker – the Minister, and his senior civil servant, Sir Humphrey. Script here.

Jim: Five standard excuses?

Sir Humphrey: Yes. First there’s the excuse we used for instance in the Anthony Blunt case.

Jim: Which was?

Sir Humphrey: That there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security forbids its disclosure. Second there is the excuse we used for comprehensive schools, that it has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limits.

Jim: But that’s not true is it?

Sir Humphrey: No, but it’s a good excuse. Then there’s the excuse we used for Concorde, it was a worthwhile experiment, now abandoned, but not before it had provided much valuable data and considerable employment.

Jim: But that is true isn’t it? Oh no, of course it isn’t.

Sir Humphrey: The fourth, there’s the excuse we used for the Munich agreement. It occurred before certain important facts were known, and couldn’t happen again

Jim: What important facts?

Sir Humphrey: Well, that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe.

Jim: I thought everybody knew that.

Sir Humphrey: Not the Foreign Office.

Jim: Five?

Sir Humphrey: Five, there’s the Charge of the Light Brigade excuse. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual, which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures.

Clip here YM – five standard excuses

[h/t Wayne Diamond]

Feel free to add to the five. In development I would probably add the ‘Sex Pistols’ excuse  – when the punk band’s lead singer was asked why he had just flatly contradicted an earlier statement, he replied ‘that was then; this is now’. The development equivalent is ‘The case for [industrial policy, capital controls, taxation etc] may have been convincing in the past, but because of globalization, we should now all default to [insert random ideological preference here], despite the absence of any historical example of its success.’  

What does the end of North-South mean for the development sector?

I spoke last night at an event in the House of Commons. It was held at Portcullis House, an architectural monstrosity next to Big Ben which despite its name is a new bit, so no-one’s been executed there. Yet. The subject was a BS (blue skies) session on ‘Beyond the MDG Summit: What next for global poverty reduction?’

The thread of the discussion that most struck me was ‘the end of the South’. There seems to be a convergence between the old North and South at the level of economies, social indicators (see Hans Rosling on child mortality) but also of ideas. What are some of the implications?

First, it could energise thinking on development. At least in my bit of the development jungle, there is very little interaction between experts on social policy, politics etc in the UK/Europe/US and those working on similar issues in what we previously called ‘the South’. So if we were to lock them in a room together to cross-fertilize, they would be likely to come up with some very interesting ideas – importing Brazil’s Bolsa Familia scheme to New York could be just the start.

Second it presents us with a massive re-education challenge. How do we explain to the public that development is not the rolling out of some neat technocratic plan, but a messy, conflict-ridden and highly political process, and still retain their support for aid?

needs updating?

Third, all conversations lead to inequality. The ubiquitous Andy Sumner was presenting his paper (previously discussed here) showing that 75% of the world’s poor people now live in middle-income countries, so domestic arguments over distribution of income and assets and tax and spend will become increasingly central both in the old North and the old South.

Fourth, it means being less naïve about South-South processes. Yes there is sometimes a bit more solidarity than in the North-South equivalents, but there are also power struggles and the abuse of the weak by the strong. We can’t leave our political analysis at the door when talking about these.

One interesting area of divergence noted by the chair, Ann McKechin MP. While rich countries are seeing an anti-state backlash, most notably in the US, the development debate is moving towards recognizing and strengthening the role of the state in development.

Implications for official aid? Let’s not forget that plenty of the poorest countries still need outside help with investment in health, education, social protection, infrastructure and the like. And even middle income countries often need support when disasters strike. In general, there needs to be more emphasis on accountability, drivers of change and building political literacy among aid workers so that they can understand (and influence) domestic processes that lead to or block development. But a more political approach raises real difficulties in terms of being seen to be interfering in the sovereignty of developing countries.

And for activists? Don’t worry – a huge agenda remains in the shape of solidarity with struggles in developing countries and ‘Do No Harm’ closer to home (climate change, intellectual property rules, tax havens, bad migration laws, corporate corruption, the arms trade etc etc). Plus the impact of excessive northern consumption – MDGs for the top billion anyone?

For international NGOs like Oxfam, working on the ground in developing countries, it means giving much more weight to political skills and analysis, building links between programming and influencing in a so-called ‘one programme approach’ in which programmes/projects are designed as pilots to influence public policy – see this example from Vietnam. And an ever-greater emphasis on working with partners, and playing a facilitating role, e.g. bringing together private sector, civil society and the state, not least to avoid those accusations of political interference. Then there’s also the question of whether an old North-South mindset persists within some parts of the NGO movement, and needs a BRICs insurgency to rebalance internal power relations…….

Book Review: Small Acts of Resistance

Writing a blog is a mixed blessing when it comes to freebies. You get sent some real turkeys in the shape of papers and books to review. But every now and then an unexpected treat drops into your pigeon hole. One such is ‘Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World’, by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson. It’s an unashamed paean to activism, bringing together 80 examples from across geography and the last 100 years.

There’s a passing attempt to cluster these (e.g. sport, the law, women, digital), but not much in the way of analysis – this is definitely a dip-into-for-fun-and-inspiration feelgood book, rather than a serious piece of political science. There is no discussion of why some protests succeed and some fail, the importance of coalitions with progressives or reformists in positions of power, the impact of shocks, or the differences between movements aiming to overthrow repressive regimes and those seeking reforms within the given system. And there are some very overblown claims for the actual impact of these ’small acts’ that should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

My favourites? The Solidarity activists in Communist Poland who, to demonstrate publicly both that they didn’t believe the state TV news and were boycotting it, took their disconnected sets out for a walk in baby buggies (strollers); one of the acts covered is even the one that gave rise to the word ‘boycott’ – the unfortunate Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a much-disliked land agent in British-ruled Ireland whose name became a byword for protest when his servants walked out on him, in protest against unjust rents and evictions. Local shopkeepers joined in, refusing to serve the captain and his family; the post office stopped delivering mail, and in the end the Captain eventually gave up and returned to England.

Then there are the Peruvians who protested against the Fujimori regime by washing the national flag in public every Friday in the centre of Lima. And the Turkish dissidents who clogged and eventually defeated the courts by getting hundreds of people to sign up as co-authors to dissident texts. But my favourite is another story from Poland– the Solidarity activists who dumbfounded the authorities by organizing ironic demonstrations in support of the regime, demanding an eight hour day for secret police and showering police cars with flowers. The government could hardly jail them, and the Polish public loved it.

Some common themes jump out in these more modern, urban versions of what James C Scott famously termed the ‘weapons of the weak’. Humour and irony usually baffle dictators; using repressive regime’s rhetoric and symbols against them often confounds the bad guys (I remember how the Argentine junta, with all its rhetoric about the sacredness of the family, did not know how to deal with the Mothers of the Disappeared – how could they jail mothers?). Protesting en masse, without identifiable leaders, can bring safety (the protesters banging pots and pans at night in Latin America’s cacerolazo protests are invisible and untouchable).

Targeting the most absurd aspects of a repressive regime – as when Gandhi marched to the ocean and made salt, a practice banned by the British, can be particularly effective. Bad guys seldom have a grasp of youth culture – under Slobodan Milosevic one Serbian radio station fought back against a media crackdown by broadcasting rock music with lyrics that implicitly criticised the regime (the Clash’s ‘White Riot’; Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’)

But often, cleverness is not enough – plenty of the small acts described in the book involve straightforward courage – people taking huge personal risks to ‘speak truth to power’.

Looking for a Christmas present for an activist friend? This might be the answer. Check out the book website for photos, videos etc, plus you can add your own stories of small acts. And here are the authors hyping their book in a short promo video:  Small Acts of Resistance Final.

Whose bottom billion?; another disease eradicated; the world’s richest women; what price aid?; crazy food prices; Africa from the outside and death by consultation: links I liked

“My bottom billion is better than your bottom billion”: Andy Sumner v Paul Collier on an IDS podcast (and Paul comes out swinging – these academics take no prisoners). Further briefings on Andy’s boat-rocking Bottom Billion paper (previously reviewed on this blog) here. And if you’re in central London at 5pm tomorrow, why not drop in to the House of Commons to hear Andy, me and others discuss ‘Beyond the MDG Summit: What Next for Global Poverty Reduction?‘

Good news, anyone? Scientists have eradicated a killer virus in the wild, only the second time such a feat has been achieved in human history. Rinderpest, a virus that causes devastating cattle plague, has been wiped out, the first time such an announcement has been made since the end of smallpox more than 30 years ago.

Over half the world’s richest women are Chinese [h/t Penny Fowler]

So Britain’s aid budget has, miraculously, survived the cuts in last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review, but at what long-term cost in terms of aid quality (e.g. halving DFID’s staff), asks the LSE’s Nilima Gulrajani

Six examples of crazy food price swings, from Korean cabbage to Russian Bread,

Chris Blattman posts this great mental map of Africa – anyone got versions from the other continents?

So you’re in an interminable meeting, bored and on-line.  Why not take part in an online discussion? Death by consultation is a constant threat for outnumbered NGO policy wonks. Here’s a couple of options:

USAID is having an online forum on broad-based growth. Register here

And DFID’s Private Sector development people are at it too, saying they are ‘planning to undertake a major research programme on private sector development (PSD) in low-income and fragile countries with the aim of improving policies to deliver economic growth and poverty reduction.’ Sign up for the six week consultation.

Some good news from Africa: Burkina Faso’s farming miracle

Just been reading ‘Helping Africa to Feed Itself: Promoting Agriculture to Reduce Poverty and Hunger’, a paper by Steve Wiggins and Henri Leturque, both of the ODI. It’s a brilliant and to my mind, very fair overview, with one of its main messages being that regional generalizations about Africa are usually misleading – some subregions of Africa (eg West and North) have actually done very well in producing food and feeding their populations (not always the same thing), while others (e.g. southern Africa) have bombed. One box particularly jumped out – on the extraordinary success of Burkina Faso.

“The statistics are remarkable. Since the early 1960s output in cereals in Burkina has grown at an annual average of 3.5% a year, well ahead of population growth, a rate that matches that of Vietnam (see chart).

Soil and water have been conserved, most notably by use of stone bunds and improved traditional planting pits (‘zai’) to retain water and topsoil;

Trees have been planted, livestock have been kept in semi-intensive systems and the manure gathered and applied to the fields; and,

Collective institutions to manage wells, natural resources, village cereal banks and schools have multiplied.

Hans Binswanger-Mkhize (2009) comments:

‘The change is visible to the naked eye: On [my] recent visit … crops looked greener and healthier than [I] had ever seen them before, crop livestock integration had happened in many parts, degraded arid lands were being recuperated via traditional and new techniques, and a number of new crop varieties had been introduced, there were more trees on the land.

These changes have not been revolutionary, but rather evolutionary: they draw mainly on local knowledge and organisation, facilitated and assisted by government, donors and NGOs.

The results can be seen in the national statistics, but there is local detail as well. In Bam province, millet and sorghum yields rose from 406 and 446kg/ha respectively in 1984/88 to 662 and 669kg/ha in 1996/00. Water levels in wells have risen in areas that have conserved soil and water. More greenery is evident in aerial surveys. Migration is still common, but less so than in the past. Above all, rural poverty has fallen.’”

So what? At the very least, see what one country or region can learn from the successes of another within Africa, before trying to import new models wholesale from very different contexts in other continents.

How to write the recommendations to a report on almost anything: introducing Friday Formulae

I really enjoyed (if that’s the right word…) the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, but when it got to its recommendations, it struck me as incredibly formulaic. In that respect, it resembled an awful lot of the stuff I read (and, I fear, write) from thinktanks, international organizations and NGOs – fascinating diagnosis; shame about the cure.

So based on the MAE, and in the spirit of a jaded Friday morning blog, here’s my ‘Friday formula’ for how to write the recommendations section of a report on almost anything:

Start with Governance: Any issue requires improved governance, including integration of issue X with everything else, coordination between all actors working on issue X and of course, transparency and accountability. Motherhood and apple pie an optional extra.

Voice: Who’s not at the table, but should be?

Move onto economic incentives: getting rid of bad ones (eg fossil fuel subsidies), introducing good ones (eg feed in tariffs) that align economic activity with the activities you are trying to encourage.

Social and behavioural aspects: Include something on curbing northern consumption, but if you want to be a bit edgy, talk about the need to change attitudes and beliefs in developing countries too

Technologies: OK, now it’s getting tricky, but there’s a technological aspect to most discussions on development, so you can’t ignore it. You may want to distinguish between nice and nasty technologies. Always say there is no magic/silver bullet.

More and better data: Phew, back on safe ground again – there is never enough, it’s never gender disaggregated, and it omits vital aspects of the issue in question.

How to achieve all this? Political will, of course (aka, we’ve got no idea).

And end with what I now call by its initials, NMR – Needs More Research. After all, we don’t want to be out of a job, do we?

There’s nothing wrong with these recommendations – most of them are entirely sensible, but they aren’t sufficient. What’s missing? Power, politics, argument. These reports seem to inhabit a cosy world, in which enlightened technocrats endlessly seek (and find) win-win answers to any given problem – such solutions do exist, but not always. That may explain why the diagnosis is almost invariably more enlightenening than the recommendations. Real solutions often emerge unpredictably, often involving ‘contestation’ (i.e. win-lose) and shocks (economic meltdowns, conflict, natural disasters). Much trickier to predict, write about, or even understand.

What have I missed? Please add your bits to the recommendations template. Next week: The five standard excuses of (all) politicians.

An evening with Bill and Melinda Gates and the decade of vaccines: is this the future of aid?

On Monday night I joined the besuited masses of the UK development scene to sit at the feet (OK, in a crammed 400 seat lecture theatre) of Bill and Melinda Gates as they promoted the ONE campaign’s ‘Living Proof’ project on effective aid. It was great to hear an optimistic message on aid and development for once, especially when it was laid out brilliantly in front of an audience that included a good number of journos.

But it was also weird, not least because they took an hour to try and convince an audience made up largely of aid workers of the merits of aid – not the toughest ask Bill has faced in his career. In fact it sometimes resembled a viva, as the Gateses strutted their stuff before their peers, ably supported by Dr. Debrework Zewdie (right), deputy director of the Global Fund. And they definitely passed, especially Melinda who managed to combine authority and passion, while stopping just short of cheesy.

The chief object of their praise was the British government – two days before the announcement of its Comprehensive Spending Review (aid implications here), this was a very public endorsement from some pretty big fish of the coalition government’s commitment to increasing aid to 0.7% of GNI by 2013, despite the mayhem taking place in other departments. Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, was in the audience, and the Gateses dropped in on David Cameron to drive home their message. As they stressed business thinking, ‘return on investment’ and the need to increase impact assessment, backed by a blizzard of stats, it became clear just how influential the Gates Foundation has become in terms of the aid discourse both here and in the US.

Their main call was for what they termed a ‘decade of vaccines’: get universal distribution of existing vaccines for polio, measles etc and develop new ones for diseases such as malaria. I was struck by both the can-do optimism and the seductive certainties of the vaccine business – so many vaccines distributed = so many millions of lives saved and made healthy and productive. Inspiring stuff, and free of the messiness, complexity, politics and power struggles that usually characterize development. Just technology riding to the rescue, driven by philanthropy’s cash and willpower. And a stark contrast with the gloom that surrounds other issues like the failure to tackle climate change, or the huge complexity of trying to understand (let alone influence) political change. I was tempted – maybe this is what Big Aid should limit itself to – delivering concrete benefits, keep people alive, and leave the rest to national politics?

And yet. And yet. Inside my policy wonk head a nervous tic of ‘yes buts’ stopped me being completely won over. Bill played fast and loose on correlation v causality – OK, aid undoubtedly helped in countries like South Korea, but did Asia as a whole really take off because of aid (maybe I misheard that bit….)? Where do the effective state systems needed to deliver all these vaccines come from, and are big players like the Global Fund strengthening them or weakening them by setting up parallel systems? Surely, aid should help generate good politics as well as immunize kids, for example by empowering citizens to demand accountability? OK, it’s hard to do and hard to measure and a lot less easy to explain than vaccines, but we need Big Aid to do politics if it is going to work. Bill seemed to imply that the messy stuff was what other donors like DFID should be doing, but the danger is that vaccine-style aid actually crowds out the harder-to-measure activities.

The event was in a fantastic location – the British Science Museum. As I left through the half-lit exhibition halls, I passed lifesize replicas (or the originals, for all I know) of the Lunar Lander, and Stephenson’s Rocket. Science and Progress resplendent –technology is all you need. If only it was that simple.

3 minute Living Proof video here, but if you have an hour and half to kill, you can watch the whole event below (but make a cup of tea while it downloads……)

Social scientists v advocates; Europe’s worst lobbyists; GSK’s free pills; China’s rare earths; suffragettes in Ethiopia; thirsty farms; communist facebook; intro to scarcity and resilience: links I liked

Texas in Africa is running a ‘how social scientists think’ week, in particular examining the differences between social scientists and advocates. Part I: what constitutes evidence?

Sylvia Pankhurst, heroine of Ethiopian independence as well as her better known role as leader of the British suffragette movement

Want to help select the worst lobbyist in Europe? This year’s focus is climate and finance – send your nomination to

And just to show I’m not anti-private sector, GSK donates a billion tablets a year for neglected tropical diseases

Paul Krugman is worried by China’s rare earth diplomacy, or the lack of it

Agriculture is pumping groundwater for irrigation at such a rate that the runoff equals the contribution from melting of glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica, according to a new study. Most water extracted from underground aquifers ends up in the ocean. The ceaseless pumping contributes about 0.8 millimeters of sea-level rise annually, about a quarter of the 3.1 millimeters per year scientists are observing worldwide [h/t John Magrath]

The Facebook revolution:Vietnam’s Communist Party reckons if you can’t beat ‘em…… [h/t Aid Watch]

A remarkably dapper Alex Evans on resilience and scarcity, and what they mean for development. Great summary

What does ageing mean for development? Guest blog from someone who knows

Last week I blogged on the rapid pace of global ageing (even though I’ve just noticed that I can’t spell ‘ageing’), and asked for suggestions on what it might mean for development policy. Mark Gorman, HelpAge International’s Director of Strategic Development, obliges with this guest blog.

“So what does ageing mean for development? Will low and middle income countries grow old before they grow rich? What can be done to meet the challenges of the global age wave, and especially for the older poor?

Ageing is largely absent from development debates and action, yet it has impacts across many areas of development. Take migration. A major pull factor of international migration is the ageing of work-forces in the rich world; at the same time migration from poor communities leaves behind disproportionate numbers of the old – and the young. From Latin America to Asia migration has changed the age profile of relatively “young” countries, leaving “skipped-generation” households of older people caring for grandchildren left by middle-generation migrants. With remittances infrequent, inadequate or non-existent, old and young in these households are sharing poverty and vulnerability. 

The same effect is seen in sub-Saharan Africa, where in a number of countries grandparents of children orphaned by HIV and AIDS are the main care providers (in Zimbabwe and Namibia 60% of orphaned children are cared for by their grandmothers).

Look at rural development, where the emphasis is on improving the productivity and incomes of small producers, but little attention is given to including older farmers. This matters, because many poor countries are seeing the ageing of their farming populations. In Mozambique over two-thirds of the members of the Small Farmers’ Union are over 50, a pattern repeated in the Caribbean and elsewhere. But older farmers in many countries say that they are excluded from programmes because they are seen as “too old” to benefit.

Finally, think about health. Little effort is made to make health care “age friendly” despite the promotion of this approach by the World Health Organisation. For example, reproductive health programmes largely ignore the fact that multiple pregnancies in poor health conditions mean that many poor women spend their old age with chronic, life-limiting, but treatable conditions. 

So we need ways forward to tackle the challenges of an ageing world. Firstly we need to see older people not as a problem but as part of the solution. Older people in poor communities are survivors, with lifetimes of experience to contribute. Enabling older people to organise has had a dynamic effect not only on improving their own lives but also on the wider community. Older people’s groups in rural north India for example, have drawn in other community members to campaign for village schools. In the Philippines and Bangladesh older people’s groups have played a key role in the initial response to climate emergencies, providing help to the most vulnerable before the arrival of humanitarian relief.

Income and health are older people’s priorities everywhere. Lacking an income, most poor people work far into old age; with lifetimes of experience they have skills to hand on, given the opportunity. In rural Kyrgyzstan for example, older community groups are financing their activities by providing “consultancies” to younger farmers on agricultural techniques. 

The rise of chronic diseases has meant that in many poor countries more people are dying from heart disease and cancers than from communicable diseases. Yet the focus remains on the latter. Screening and treatment for the heart disease, cancers and diabetes could have a major impact, not only improving older people’s health but also that of middle generations who will otherwise age with chronic illness. A pilot health screening programme for retired plantation workers in Sri Lanka shows what is possible – identifying and treating hidden health problems, helping to avoid later crises.

Choices need to be made. Much is in the hands of today’s 2050 generation (the mid-century 60-year olds). They will be the policymakers and professionals driving change in all fields of development. Demography is not destiny, and their choices will decide how successfully the world ages.”

Agriculture is key to development – why I (partly) disagree with Owen Barder

It was World Food Day on Saturday, in case you missed it, and Owen Barder had a typically thought-provoking reflection on the links between agriculture and development. He starts off by quoting Amartya Sen’s words from 30 years ago, ”Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat” and the subsequent much-quoted passage from Development as Freedom. “It is not surprising that no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Owen then laments that the current debate has forgotten these insights:

“We still talk about hunger as if it were, at heart, a problem of food production. (For example, see these remarks yesterday by the Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, calling for a 70% increase in food production). When we understand that hunger is a problem of poverty, the policy options look quite different.”

Owen acknowledges that three quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and most depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, but disagrees with the ’story of the agricultural lobby’, which he summarizes as:

“The fact that the majority of the world’s poor work in agriculture means that the best way to improve the incomes of the poor, and so reduce hunger, is to increase agricultural productivity. More adventurously they claim that more effective agriculture can drive the whole process of development, by increasing farm incomes, leading to rising savings and investment and so kick-starting industrialisation.”

Owen believes “This is a plausible story, but it is not as persuasive as the alternative interpretation of the high correlation between poverty and agriculture: the fact that most poor people work in agriculture suggests that the best way to escape poverty is to get out of agriculture. If this second view is right, if you want to tackle hunger, reduce poverty, and improve food production you should focus your investment on more rapid industrialisation and job creation, not better farming. I am not against investing in agriculture. Better access to existing technologies, and the development of some new technologies, could make a big difference to the lives of farmers in developing countries.  But I am against promoting the romantic idea of happy peasant farmers. Farming in developing countries is an unremitting, unrewarding life and it is likely to stay that way for many generations until industrialisation pushes up farm incomes.  And we should not accept uncritically the claim that agricultural productivity is an especially important driver of poverty reduction and industrialisation.”

I think he’s half right – power and inequality explain why a billion people will go to bed hungry tonight; peasant romantics (especially urban ones) are very annoying and the goal of almos every peasant I have ever talked to is to help their kids get out of farming. But I think he’s wrong in at least two important respects:

problem or solution?

Firstly, the ‘springboard argument’, namely that countries need to increase productivity in agriculture so that they can then transfer the surplus into industrialization, has a lot more historical foundation than Owen’s ‘just dump agriculture and start building factories’ version. As the FAO notes, “Growth originating in agriculture, in particular the smallholder sector, is at least twice as effective in benefiting the poorest as growth from non-agriculture sectors.” See also Ha-Joon Chang’s excellent paper on the history of farm policy in take-off countries such as Vietnam and Chile.

Secondly, Owen assumes that nothing has changed since the 1970s to qualify Amartya Sen’s argument. Yet resource constraints resulting from climate change, population growth, water stress, declining soil fertility and the slowing down of the yield improvements that characterized those earlier times means that while access and distribution will remain crucial, the ability even to produce enough food for the 9 billion people that the world will hold by mid Century is far from certain (see John Beddington slide on the challenges ahead).

The point here (and I imagine Owen would agree on this one), is that the way the world tries to feed the nine billion is crucial. A technological magic bullet route that ignores small farmers and farm labourers in favour of large high tech solutions wil drive up poverty and inequality, whereas a focus on labour intensive and small scale agriculture will boost incomes for the poor, help ensure their families are educated and well nourished, and (should they so wish) enable them in due course to leave for the cities as a matter of dignified choice, rather than as an act of desperation. So development advocates face a ‘polar bear moment’. Just as we have spent the past few years making the case that climate change is about people, not just polar bears, so we now have to argue that meeting the food production challenge is about poor people, especially farmers and labourers, not just clever technology.