Food prices and politics: the IMF agrees with Bob Marley

I usually prefer ‘man bites dog’ research that comes up with unexpected answers, but sometimes it’s helpful to have the opposite – number crunchers who back up what you always suspected, thereby increasing your certainty and confidence. Food Prices and Political Instability, a new paper from the IMF, is in the latter category. Some highlights, with an executive summary c/o Bob Marley’s classic, ‘Them Belly Full‘:

“In Low Income Countries increases in the international food prices lead to a significant deterioration of democratic

Evidence-based food riot in Mozambique

institutions and a significant increase in the incidence of anti-government demonstrations, riots, and civil conflict. In the High Income Countries variations in the international food prices have no significant effects on democratic institutions and measures of intra-state conflict.”

[BM: 'Cost of livin' gets so high,
Rich and poor they start to cry:
Now the weak must get strong;
They say, "Oh, what a tribulation!"]

“We examined in this paper empirically the effects that changes in the international food prices have on measures of democracy and intra-state stability in a panel of over 120 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding was that during times of international food price increases political institutions in Low Income Countries significantly deteriorated. To explain this finding we documented that food price increases in Low Income Countries significantly increased the likelihood of civil conflict and other forms of civil strife, such as anti-government demonstrations and riots.

[BM: 'A hungry mob is an angry mob']

Increases in the international food prices had real macroeconomic effects that went beyond average per capita income: they were associated with a significant decrease in consumption and a significant increase in the gap between rich and poor.

[BM: 'Them belly full but we hungry']

All in all, our empirical results are broadly consistent with the often made claim by policy makers and the press that food price increases put at stake the socio-economic and political stability of the world’s poorest countries.”

So people riot when food prices go up. And the effect is bigger in poor countries, where food can constitute 80% of a household’s expenditure. Well duh. But still, now we know that it’s true (because the IMF says so). And that Bob Marley was right (and Chris Blattman wrong).

So if food price spikes punish poor people and lead to political instability, what should we be doing about them? That conversation is, I think, is for another day, but if you want to kick it off, feel free.

Meanwhile, here’s the man himself, summarizing the research (but losing it a bit towards the end….)

Update: The Spanish Inquisition over at Aid Thoughts reckon that the numbers in the paper don’t warrant the strength of the IMF/my conclusions, but chief Inquisitor Matt admits he commented in a rush and may have missed something. Any data monkeys out there want to check?

Hans Rosling and co on Water – justice, development and liberation through washing machines

Last Tuesday was world water day, and I get the sense that water is one of those issues that is only going to rise further up the development agenda, both in terms of watsan (drinking water and sanitation), and because water is one of the key and ever-tighter pinchpoints of resource scarcity in farming and food systems. So in catch-up mode (and because a new Hans Rosling lecture is always worth a post). Here are a few links

Water and Justice: a 4 minute trailer on the struggle for water in the slums of Delhi, from the STEPS Centre

“Water supply and sanitation are extremely important, but water is also important for energy security, food security and basic urban security. So we’re seeing this integrated view of water as a central core development issue emerging more and more.” An overview of current debates from a big water conference in Cape Town.

“Almost 1 billion people lack access to safe water supplies, and 2.6 billion are without access to basic sanitation. Approximately 10% of the global burden of disease worldwide could be prevented with improvements to water, sanitation and hygiene and better water resource management…… hygiene and sanitation promotion cost respectively $3 and $11 per DALY averted (disability adjusted life year – a measure of overall disease burden), compared to $922 per DALY for the provision of antiretroviral therapy against Aids for example.” Sophie Trémolet the lead author of a new OECD report on the benefits of investing in water and sanitation, blogs here

And the incomparable Hans Rosling works his magic: What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? The washing machine, by turning wash day into a day of learning. Watch it – well worth 9 minutes of your life.

What’s New in Development?

An edited version of this piece went up on the Guardian Development website yesterday, summarizing the latest round of horizon-scanning powerpoints:

How people understand and think about development is in a state of constant churn and upheaval. Some ideas are genuinely new, prompted by new technologies and ground-breaking political movements. Other ideas are old, previously discarded for reasons both bad and good, that resurface, often to be acclaimed as radically new; new concepts are pulled in from other disciplines such as medicine and physics, or from rich-world debates. Here are a few examples from recent months.

Firstly, something that may feel a bit retro, but that is definitely on the way back: the role of resource constraints in prompting violent spikes in food prices and a disastrous turnaround in global progress on ending hunger. Planetary boundaries on atmospheric space (how much CO2 we can produce without screwing the climate), water use, fertile soil, available energy and the like are starting to become much more serious constraints on economic activity.

If resources are limited, who gets what becomes much more pressing, and the danger is that poor people will be sent to the back of the queue, potentially undoing decades of progress on development. ‘Feeding the 9 billion’ reports are proliferating, but they often focus on technical solutions, ignoring the issues of power, politics and who gets what. In June Oxfam is launching a global campaign on precisely this issue.

Secondly, development types have long talked of the ‘North in the South’ – rich elites in poor countries – and the ‘South in the North’ – marginalised groups and rising inequality in the rich world. What we are now seeing is a much more comprehensive obliteration of the North-South distinction as a range of supposedly ‘Northern’ policy issues become more pressing in poor countries: aging populations, rapid urbanization; the role of domestic taxation rather than just aid in confronting poverty and inequality; the case for universal welfare states, guaranteeing healthcare, education and social protection; mental illness; disability and even obesity. On this last point, Mexico is the second most obese country on the planet after the US, and obesity and malnutrition coexist in many developing countries, bringing sharp rises in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Most traditional development organizations have struggled to address these topics either in their public messaging (can you imagine an Oxfam campaign on obesity?) or conceptually (for example ‘peasant romanticism’ and a focus on rural poverty remains deeply entrenched despite rapid urbanization). More generally, the ‘them and us’ mental frame, that poor people in poor countries have different lives, experiences and issues to those in the North, is proving hard to overcome.

Thirdly, the multipolar world is just as big a cliché in development circles as everywhere else. The rise of the BRICS and the relative decline of the West, epitomised by the marginalization of the EU at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, and accelerated by the two speed response to the global meltdown of 2008-9, have changed the landscape at an astonishing speed. We have barely begun to understand what such tectonic activity means.

The new world order will be one of networks and variable groupings, rather than fixed hierarchies like the G8. And aid agencies won’t like every aspect of what is generally a welcome redistribution of global power – the G20, the new top table, seems much more interested in growth than aid, for example. OK, it is ‘growth with adjectives,’ sustainable, resilient, inclusive, but will such words prove window dressing and will the world return to the disastrous delusions of Thatcher-Reagan ‘trickle down economics’? If so, expect inequality to leap and poverty reduction to stall.

Finally, the way we think about development, the concepts we use, is constantly evolving. Take theories of change. NGOs and others frequently call themselves ‘agents of change’, yet they invest remarkably little in honing their understanding of change processes and how to react to them. There is no Department of Change Studies’ we can turn to for help.

What kinds of change are predictable; which ones can we plan for? Which, like the Arab Spring, are entirely unpredictable and ‘emergent’ and how good are we at responding to those? In general aid agencies are better at understanding and responding to discontinuous change when it comes to natural disasters than political events – why is that? And is there an advocacy role for NGOs to play in these rapidly-changing societies?

Of course a focus on ‘what’s new’ runs the risk of ignoring ‘what isn’t new’, such as. the bread and butter issues of development: reducing poverty; supporting active citizens and their efforts to build effective, accountable states; fighting for universal health care, education, access to water and food; and equal rights for all women and men.

Contrary to the gloom of the aid pessimists, there has been genuine progress in many of these areas, as ‘Getting Better’, the new book by Charles Kenny, eloquently argues. The challenge for those engaged in aid, development and politics is to continue that effort, responding to what’s new, so that poverty and hunger in the coming decades rapidly go the way of slavery in the 19th Century.

Limits to environmentalism; a fire in New York; best job in Florida; how to influence China; Rwanda and James Bond on women’s rights: links I liked

The Limits to Environmentalism: Matthew Lockwood delivers a brilliant series of critiques of Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without growth’ on the Political Climate blog. Firstly, he argues that decoupling growth from carbon emissions may be difficult, but remains the best (or least worst) solution, and a lot better than giving up on growth. Secondly, he explores the dodgy (or lack of) politics of PWG as I did (but not as well) on this blog last year.

In a similar vein, ‘“Environmentalists are fiddling while Rome burns,” says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. Could the Manhattan Project scale effort to achieve low carbon transition be driven by venture capitalists? This one thinks so.

Laura Freschi on Aid Watch commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire in New York, which killed 146 people and ended up transforming US labour law.  

The best job in Florida?

China in Africa traces the origins of China’s new foreign corrupt practices law to the gentle pressure from the UN and OECD Conventions against Corruption

And finally, some International Women’s Day overspill: Go Rwanda- still world leader, (way ahead of the Europeans) on women’s representation in Parliament

And hats off to Dame Judi and Daniel Craig for this take on gender inequality. Thanks to We Are Equals for creating this gem [h/t Gonzalo Fanjul]

Really CGD? Really? The perils of attack blogs.

Update: A graceful apology from the CGD here.: ‘I deeply apologize to Oxfam and its partners and to our readers for the tone of my post. I should have dialed way back on the snark. Mea culpa.’ Kudos to Amanda Glassman for that. She doesn’t give on inch on the issues, so there will doubtless be disagreements in the future, but at least now we can have the argument without the stupid stuff.

I hope regular readers will agree that I generally don’t do shrill – I prefer respectful discussion to puerile mud slinging. But I have the occasional lapse, and this post is one of them, written more in anger than sorrow. I’m a big fan of the work of the Center for Global Development (CGD), as Monday’s glowing review of Charles Kenny’s new book shows, but their health team seems to have been taken over by the policy equivalent of shock jocks – shock wonks? – who on occasion prefer abuse to debate, and ideology to evidence.

What prompts this whinge? CGD’s Amanda Glassman’s post ‘Really Oxfam? Really?’, pouring scorn on a new paper co-published a number of Ghanaian thinktanks and NGOs, along with Oxfam. This comes on top of previous attacks on our health work.

I’d like to take CGD to task on three areas: tone, process and content

Tone:
Snark sells in the blogosphere (hell, I’m not immune to clicking on a good Easterly-Sachs style punch-up), but at what cost? Firstly of course, if you dish out abuse, you have to expect to get some back, but the downside is bigger than that. It’s a bit like the mud-slinging in the British Parliament (something at which it excels) – people love a row, and it doubtless boosts the blog traffic, but in the long term, it dumbs down complex debates and erodes confidence and trust. Not clever, especially coming from a think-tank like CGD.

Process:
Amanda slags off the ‘Oxfam report’ – cue abuse of ‘an international NGO judging a developing country government’s

Gosh, wonder who published this?

efforts to provide health care and financial protection to its population in such pejorative and unscientific terms’. Did she fail to notice all the other (Ghanaian) organizations and researchers involved in the publication? (Helpful hint, look at the four logos on the cover, or the author credits on the back page). She did apologise when one of the organizations she ignored pointed this out, but the apology was buried in the comments and went up 5 days after the post – an eternity in blog terms, since most hits occur in the first couple of days.

Actually, I recommend the comments section on the post, which is full of robust defence of the paper, and criticism of CGD from a number of serious commentators, both Ghanaian, such as report co-author Patrick Apoya, and beyond, e.g. a pretty unrestrained post by my predecessor at Oxfam, Kevin Watkins). But the sad truth is that only the determined read the comments, while the rest of us browse and move on, thinking ‘ha! Oxfam screwed up on that one’ (witness this gleeful post from Aid Thoughts). In retrospect we should have insisted on a right to reply post, rather than a comment (I trust CGD would have accepted, and if they want one to this post, they are more than welcome, subject to quality control, of course…..)

Content:
CGD accuses ‘Oxfam’ of ‘ignoring or dismissing’ publicly available survey data and research. Actually, that criticism seems to apply rather better to CGD, in that they appear to have skim-read the report at best, before opting to condemn it. I’m not a health or Ghana specialist, but the authors of the report – Patrick Apoya and Anna Marriott – are, and the crux of the disagreement between them and CGD seems to come down to numbers – how many people are actually able to benefit from the scheme? The government says 68% of the population are enrolled, but actually, to benefit from the scheme, you need to renew your card every year, and only 3 out of every 10 do that, so the real number is 18%. The report clarifies that 18% is an estimate and sets out in detail the methodology to arrive at it, before challenging the government to come back with more accurate figures. So far it has not.

For more detail, here’s the rebuttal on the CGD comments section from Leonard Shang Quartey, Convenor of the Essential Services Platform, one of the Ghanaian civil society organizations that published the report:

‘The paper is clear that the NHIA (National Health Insurance Authority) was a welcome and progressive step towards improving access and ‘recognised the detrimental impact of user fees and the fundamental role of public financing in the achievement of universal health care’. The paper was also clear that for its members the NHIS (National Health Insurance Scheme) has brought benefits. Benefits include a higher rate of attendance; better financial protection, as well as the very positive impact on health outcomes for pregnant women in the study to which you refer. Do note however that the benefits you cite for pregnant women are thanks to the government decision in 2008 to make their membership to the NHIS automatic and free.

On the other hand NHIS coverage has been hugely exaggerated and the majority of citizens are not enjoying these benefits despite paying for the NHIS with their taxes. The NHIA has conceded in the latest independent review of the health sector and in their own annual report that their coverage data is an accumulation of all those ever registered with the scheme – not those with a valid membership card at any one point in time. You seem to have missed the clear explanation of why the 2008 household survey cannot be relied upon – not due to poor methodology but due to the fact that at the time it was impossible to distinguish between a valid and an expired membership card. We are transparent about the methodology we have used to arrive at the 18% coverage estimation and welcome the NHIA challenging this estimate with evidence based figures.

Your response appears to condone the status quo while ignoring many of the problems with the current system including unsustainable cost escalation, inefficiency, poor transparency, fragmentation but most importantly the fact that the majority of Ghanaians excluded from the scheme cannot afford to pay the insurance premium on top of the taxes they already pay. In this context your call to the government to enrol more members seems a little simplistic.

You assume that Ghana does not have the fiscal resources to extend access and perhaps you also missed this point in our paper. With efficiency savings, an improvement in the quality of aid, but primarily through improved progressive taxation of Ghana’s own resources we have estimated that per capita health spending could increase by 200% by 2015. Thank you for your suggestion but Ghanaian civil society is not willing to settle for a reduced benefits package when our government can afford to deliver a comprehensive benefits package to all.

In the paper we congratulated rather than condemn the Government of Ghana for their commitment to health but say that much bolder steps are now required to implement their own commitment to deliver free health care for all. We are optimistic that our engagement with the government going forward will be productive in pushing through the necessary changes to achieve our shared national goal of universal health care.’

CGD also misses the key point that Ghana’s health system is actually financed 75 percent by VAT and that this means every Ghanaian is paying for a health system only accessed by the minority who have a valid insurance card.

Do the CGD attacks matter? Not that much – the main issue is the paper’s impact in Ghana, where it has prompted an initially angry and defensive response from the NHIA to what it saw as an attack on the whole scheme (Leonard explained why that is to misunderstand the report). Click here for the NHIA response, and here for our five page, point by point response to the NHIA. Subsequent discussions in Ghana have been more constructive, with radio debates between civil society organizations and the NHIA, and a planned round table to try and get to the bottom of the numbers. So the report seems to have catalysed a useful discussion, at least in Accra.

Beyond Ghana, one reason for the CGD attack is the heated debate over the best way to provide healthcare to poor people – universal free services, or more market-driven approaches? Oxfam and CGD are clearly on opposite sides of that argument. It’s a really important debate, and it’s much better if cases like Ghana’s NHIS are not misrepresented by either side. On the basis of its blog, at least, I reckon CGD is more guilty of that than Oxfam and its Ghanaian partners

Final word to Kwame, another commenter on the CGD blog:

‘Sadly it does seem to me that point scoring was the main intent of your blog, from the title onwards, and that your subsequent rebuttals don’t really add up as [report author] Mr Apoya shows. CGD is widely read and respected, and this blog was to me a real step down from your usual quality.’

Sorry for the length of this post – annoyance is fatal for brevity.

Yemen: Arab Spring meets Fragile State + Resource Constraints

Our regional director for the Middle East, Olga Ghazaryan, recently pointed out just how many development buzzwords are being bloodily explored in her region right now – transition to democracy in Egypt; Responsibility to Protect in Libya, and Yemen is looking like a combination of revolution in a fragile state and a dystopian vision of a resource-constrained future.

So what to read on Yemen? In a way it doesn’t matter: in all the media and academic coverage, one name keeps cropping up – Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani appears to enjoy a complete monopoly on analysis for the outside world. He must be a very busy man. But of the various al-Iryani inspired pieces that I’ve come across, my favourite is a new paper by Sarah Phillips, (based on local field research by Mr Al-Iryani), ‘Yemen: Developmental Dysfunction and Division in a Crisis State.’ It’s part of the excellent ‘developmental leadership program’ research, which I’ve linked to before. It mainly focuses on the political players and institutions involved, but as they are changing so fast, I’ll highlight instead some interesting background on the history and context of the current upheaval:

“Several political and economic structures form the basis for beliefs about what is politically possible, including:

• Historical coincidence. In the 1970s and 80s, north Yemen was largely a remittance-based economy. At the same time as almost one million Yemeni workers were expelled from the Gulf as punishment for Yemen’s stance on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the country’s oil exports began to increase dramatically. The balance of power rapidly switched from a remittance-rich (and therefore relatively autonomous) citizenry and a poor state, to a poor (and relatively economically dependent) citizenry and an oil-rich state. This shift was reflected in the renegotiation of the political settlement, favouring the regime rather than Yemeni social forces.

• Ongoing access to external rent. The implicit message from Western donors and Yemen’s neighbours is that Yemen poses too serious a security threat to be allowed to descend into chaos, and that the regime must be supported politically and economically against that outcome. For example, in 2009, Saudi Arabia made a direct payment of $US2.2 billion to the Yemeni president, and the United Arab Emirates followed suit with a payment of $US700 million. This makes the total known to have been received by the regime in direct support around 70 percent of what Yemen earned from oil exports when revenues peaked in 2008. In this context, the depletion of oil revenues appears far less threatening, and the perceived need for the regime to plan for a post-rentier economy greatly reduced.

Declining Resources

The most serious short-term threat facing Yemen is that oil production has fallen faster than the government had anticipated and there is no other source of income likely to replace it before oil revenues drop to, or below, subsistence level. The Yemeni economy is in serious trouble: the budget deficit was estimated to be 9.3 percent of GDP for 2010 and the country’s main export (oil) is depleting by around 4 percent per year. In 2010, for example, the government’s operating costs are expected to exceed its income by around 30 percent. The regime now has less money to distribute through its networks. Oil revenue dropped by around 40 percent in 2009, further hamstringing the government’s already strained budget, and the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that Yemen’s real GDP growth for 2011-12 will drop to an average of less than 3 percent, which is less than the country’s annual population growth, and “insufficient to prevent increasing economic hardship”. That 40 percent is not being recouped through gas exports, greater foreign investment, or labour remittances, for reasons that are largely political and are discussed below. While the regime has publicly claimed that the revenue from gas exports would largely replace the income from oil exports, in May 2010 it admitted that the income from gas was less than one-quarter of what had been hoped for 2010. Despite these declines, almost nothing of substance has been done to plan for a post-rentier economy.

Water, Food, and Vulnerability

Like much of the Middle East, Yemen has a large youth bulge, though like most issues of concern, this is particularly pronounced in Yemen. Over 75 percent of Yemen’s population is now under the age of 25, in a country where unofficial estimates usually place unemployment at around 40 percent. Yemen is also one of the most water scare countries in the world and it is widely believed that the capital city of Sana’a could run out of freshwater within 15 years. Finally, Yemen now has one of the most food insecure populations in the world, with 42 percent of children being malnourished. In a recent survey on food security, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported that: “about 6.8 million Yemenis (31.5 percent) are food-insecure and, within this group, 2.5 million people (11.8 percent) were found to be severely food-insecure”. As food prices reach all-time highs in early 2011, these percentages will continue to climb, which will increase pressure on the Yemeni regime to increase economic opportunities for the vulnerable.”

What emerges for me is the kind of question it feels like one shouldn’t even ask: is Yemen a non-viable country? Shrinking and squandered oil; booming population; a patronage system running out of the cash it needs to keep the system together. What are the options – mass aid-funded social protection? A return to the migration that kept things going before the oil started flowing? Any other ideas?

Update: here’s Sarah Phillips’ recent powerpoint on the Yemen

Inequality: what difference does it make to NGOs’ work?

What difference does an inequality ‘lens’ make to the way we think about development and advocacy at national level? I’ve just been reading ‘Time for Equality: Closing Gaps, Opening Trails’, an excellent paper by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean – one of the most innovative and interesting bits of the UN system, in my experience.

ECLAC (more commonly known by its Spanish acronym, CEPAL) sets out the dismal history of inequality and Latin America, as well as some of the encouraging recent trends (it’s probably the only region in the world where inequality is falling right now). In terms of policy ideas, it proposes a twin focus – an enhanced role for the state and a series of ‘covenants’ between states and wider society to attack inequality on six main fronts:

1. Macroeconomic policy
2. Production convergence
3. Territorial convergence
4. More and better employment
5. Closing social gaps
6. The fiscal covenant as a key to linking State and equality

What struck me is that advocacy NGOs are probably only working on (or even thinking about) number 5, and some bits of 4 (labour rights) and 6 (tax havens). If you’re looking for a wider set of ideas on tackling inequality, this paper is a pretty good place to start.

Macroeconomic policy: inflation, investment, financial instability etc. Possible targets could be capital controls and capital flight; Central banks to target jobs not just inflation; a finance system that serves small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as the big guys.

Production convergence: Huge technology and productivity gaps divide Latin America from the rich countries, and rich and poor sectors within each country. NGOs could advocate for improved industrial policy, state spending on R&D, technological inclusion through e.g. support for SMEs.

Territorial convergence: In OECD countries, per capita GDP in the richest region is no more than twice the figure in the poorest region. In Latin America the difference can be more than eight times. Ditto within cities. Advocacy could include CEPAL’s proposal for ‘territorial cohesion funds’; more focus on urban and housing policy, or calling for social conditions on government procurement (eg if a company wins a contract to build houses in richer areas, it has to build some in poor ones).

More and better employment: Between 1990 and 2002, average wages in Latin America’s micro-enterprises compared to small, medium-sized and large firms fell from 73% to 62%. CEPAL’s advocacy shopping list is pretty much the standard ILO package: training, unionisation, social protection, minimum wage, government recognition of and support for the care economy. It is also highly critical of traditional World Bank calls for ‘flexibilization of labour markets’ (i.e. fewer labour rights), not least on the grounds that ‘history can produce no examples of sustained growth with equality achieved through pro-flexibility labour reforms’.

Closing social gaps: this is comfort zone advocacy territory for the NGOs – the state should spend more and better on health, education, housing etc. But CEPAL does think it may be time to move towards a Universal basic income guarantee, and does some useful costings for the bill (see graph). 

Fiscal covenant: In Latin America, taxation does not have the same progressive impact on equality as it has in the OECD countries, mainly due to low levels of direct taxation, especially income tax, along with widespread evasion and exemption. CEPAL reckons tax evasion in the region ranges from 40% to 65%, accounting for a loss of potential revenue equivalent to 4.6% of GDP on average. That would buy a lot of social protection….. Possible advocacy targets? Changing public attitudes and beliefs by promoting a fiscal covenant – ‘paying tax is a citizen’s duty, spending tax wisely is the government’s duty’; arguing for a more progressive tax structure (eg shift to direct taxation); closing down loopholes and exemptions.

CEPAL also discusses the implications of breaking the cycle of inequality between generations, namely a much greater focus on pregnant women and children, and on climate change: today’s decisions on production and consumption must not undermine the future ability of poor people to produce and consume.

If organizations are interested in taking inequality seriously, it’s a pretty good advocacy shopping list. One way to narrow it down is to look at where NGOs might have more/less credibility and legitimacy (eg debates on inflation targeting probably not our strong point….) and what sort of partnerships might strengthen that. [h/t Constantino Casasbuenas]

Land grabs: what’s in the contracts? And an Indian land grab in Ethiopia

One of the problems with so-called ‘land grabs’ is secrecy. Most of the contracts that seal such deals are hidden from public scrutiny, which makes it very hard to establish what is really going on. The International Institute for Environment and Development, which is rapidly becoming the ‘go to’ thinktank on a whole range of resource and development issues, has managed to dig up 12 such contracts and sent in the lawyers to have a look. The result is ‘Land deals in Africa: What is in the Contracts?’ Here’s what IIED found:

“A number of the contracts reviewed appear not to be fit for purpose: some are short, unspecific documents that grant enforceable, long-term rights to extensive areas of land, and in some cases priority rights over water, in exchange for little public revenue and apparently vague and potentially unenforceable promises of investment and/or jobs. Also, a number of the deals are being negotiated in legal contexts where safeguards for local interests are weak, and some contracts do not properly address social and environmental issues.

A few contracts feature better terms. A deal from Cameroon features higher and better distributed revenues, while a contract from Mali involves a sophisticated partnership with the host government and local farmers and applies international social and environmental standards. Three contracts from Liberia stand out for their more flexible duration, their clearer identification of the land being transacted, their more specific investor commitments on jobs, training, local procurement and local processing, their greater attention to local food security, and their tighter social and environmental safeguards. The Liberian contracts have been ratified by parliament and are available online.

In Liberia, determined political leadership, a strong government negotiating team, world-class legal assistance, effective use of financial analysis, and simultaneous (re)negotiation of agricultural and mining contracts (which led to productive cross-fertilisation) have made this outcome possible. Development agencies can play an important role in helping host governments access the capacity support they need.

But irrespective of contract terms, process is critical. In several of the contracts reviewed, local people appear to have been marginalised in decision-making – it is the government that usually calls the shots in contracting and land allocation procedures. So even in the better negotiated contracts, the gap between legality (whereby the government may formally own the land and freely allocate it to investors) and legitimacy (whereby local people feel the land they have used for generations is theirs) exposes local groups to the risk of dispossession and investors to that of contestation.

More generally, contracts are only part of the story. They only work if they are properly implemented. Wherever local rights are insecure or social and environmental safeguards are weak, there is a need for radical reform in national legislation, and for effective mechanisms to translate law reforms into real change. In this context, legal empowerment of local landholders is key. This means that people must have more secure rights to their land and greater control over decisions affecting it. It also means that legal rights alone are not enough – adequate capacity is needed to exercise them in practice, and collective action can help give real leverage to legal rights.

In addition, there is a need for inclusive debate in host countries. Much discussion about large-scale land acquisitions has so far been led by players and processes based in the global North. It is time for the people who are most directly concerned to have their say. The belief that large-scale plantations are needed to “modernise” agriculture is dominant in many government and investor circles, but there is no evidence to back it up. The literature suggests that many recent land-based investments are not economically viable, while family farmers have proved to be highly dynamic and competitive on global markets. It also shows that, where outside investment is required to improve productivity and livelihoods, productivity gains and commercial profitability can be achieved through working with local farmers.”

To see why this matters, read the Guardian’s John Vidal’s account of one such land grab in Ethiopia, by Bangalore-based food company Karuturi Global.

“It’s very good land. It’s quite cheap. In fact it is very cheap. We have no land like this in India,” says Karmjeet Sekhon, project manager for what is expected to be one of Africa’s largest farms. “There you are lucky to get 1% of organic matter in the soil. Here it is more than 5%. We don’t need fertiliser or herbicides. There is absolutely nothing that will not grow on it. To start with there will be 20,000 hectares of oil palm, 15,000 hectares of sugar cane and 40,000 hectares of rice, edible oils and maize and cotton. We are building reservoirs, dykes, roads, towns of 15,000 people. This is phase one. In three years time we will have 300,000 hectares cultivated and maybe 60,000 workers. We could feed a nation here.”

So does it create jobs or displace local farmers? Improve poor people’s food security or undermine it? Pay taxes or pocket a load of incentives? All depends what’s in the contract. John Vidal’s 11 minute video here.

Update: Ethiopia’s UK ambassador defends the deal here

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding. Review of Charles Kenny’s new book

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More, published this month, is an exercise in ‘framing’ – trying to shift the way we feel, as well as think, about development and aid. It does it rather well. Two big frames:

1. Lives are getting better everywhere, including in Africa. People are healthier, live longer, lose fewer children, learn to read and write, and have more rights. The negative discourse of crisis epitomised by Tony Blair’s disastrous ‘Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world’ soundbite is factually wrong, as well as patronising and counter-productive in making aid seem like a waste of money.

2. The best way to spend aid is on areas where we know it works. That means encouraging the spread of relevant technologies and ideas. Interestingly, Kenny accepts that we don’t know how to create growth and so advises against it being a focal point for aid. Stick to vaccines and education, much of it delivered by the public sector. It’s a seductive message which reminds me of the speech by Mr and Mrs Gates in London last year, which had me sorely tempted to say ‘forget all that politics and power stuff, let’s just get the vaccines out there.’

Sample quote: ‘Abandoning an excess focus on income as a catch-all of development progress might, in the end, be the best way to achieve more rapid growth in the incomes of the poor.’ Not only that but he’s one of those economists who delights in ridiculing the excesses of his profession, from the ‘conga-line of formulae [required before a paper] is worthy of publication in the American Economic Review’ to their abiding belief that worldwide incomes will converge, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Wonder what his colleagues at the World Bank make of him downgrading the role of growth? Kenny’s a fellow at CGD, on sabbatical from the Bank – hope his job’s still there when he gets back.

As an unabashed polemic, he goes over the top in places (at one point I thought ‘Dr Pangloss, I presume?’ might be a better title), ignoring or dismissing evidence that runs against his views, and skating over holes in the argument. The biggest sleight of hand is on resource constraints (no mention of water scarcity, for example) and climate change, where he dismisses concerns as just another bit of misguided ‘neo-Malthusianism’. On the contrary, there is a pretty overwhelming scientific consensus that they represent a real game-changer – development is going to have to happen differently, North and South, in a resource-constrained world.

I’m caricaturing a bit here – Kenny stresses that the issue is consumption, not population: ‘A doubling of the incomes of the World’s poorest 650 million people would take the same resources as adding a little under one percent to the incomes of the World’s richest 650 million’. Hence his recipe for population control: ‘Sterilize the world’s billionaires first, then move on to a one-child policy for Switzerland, Luxembourg and the US’. But joking aside, he doesn’t pursue the issue.

[Malthus’ writing style is a revelation by the way – I wish development people wrote this well. Check this out:

‘The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.’]

And of course, there’s not much in the way of power and politics, which probably falls into both the ‘too messy and unpredictable’ and ‘too hard to measure’ baskets. That matters when it gets to recommendations for what health ministries and others should/shouldn’t do, as there is no discussion of which they might adopt/reject, and what to do about that.

His writing is good ‘pop economics’ – chatty, humorous and at times elegant, praising ‘the beautiful banality of health, learning and security’. He’s also an ace killer fact merchant and a voracious trawler of research and stats – definitely a gold mine for time-starved development advocates.

In passing, ‘Getting Better’ even provides an excellent run-through of the shifting (and frequently circular) tides of received wisdom on growth and development. The resulting picture reminds me strongly of the complexity literature – growth as an emergent property of a complex, tightly interconnected system, which means that it is essentially impossible to predict when and how it will occur (so similar policies in different countries at different times will have completely different outcomes). Sounds about right. Needless to say, Keynes got there first:

“We are faced at every turn with the problems of organic unity, of discreteness, of discontinuity—the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, and the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied.”

That was written in 1933 – does that make JMK the unwitting father of complexity theory? (Although there’s usually an Adam Smith quote to trump him.)

On technologies (broadly defined), he stresses the simple stuff: ‘vaccines, boiling water, civic organization, basic education’, and is damning about internet kiosks and other examples of excessive techno-whizzery. He points out that because of the spread of these, a better quality of life can be achieved at a lower level of economic output than in the past, and growth is not the main story in the improvements that do occur: ‘a country that saw absolutely no income growth over the entire century would still have experienced a near two thirds decline in infant mortality over [the last] hundred years.’

Getting Better distinguishes between process and product technologies: ‘Process technologies—institutions—are central to increasing GDP per capita. But the second set of technologies—ideas and inventions—have played the central role in improving health, education and security in developing countries to date.’ And process technologies are much harder to export and transplant, whereas ideas and simple products flow like water around the globe.

The result is that whereas growth is country specific, improvements in human development are largely accounted for by global ‘tides in the affairs of men’ – ideas and inventions etc. ‘All country-specific factors added together can account for only about one seventh of the average change in infant mortality across 68 countries for which we have data between 1950 and 2000. The other six sevenths of mortality change in these countries can be better accounted for by the global pattern of decline.’ In economist-speak, growth is largely endogenous, whereas human development exogenous.

This is not to say that nothing needs to be done – that influx of exogenous ideas and technologies has been propelled by an increased state role in health and education (of which Kenny approves) and legions of healthworkers and social entrepreneurs.

On health he goes further: the evidence suggests that primary care, health education and the spread of ideas (give babies with diarrhoea more to drink, not less) has far greater impact than building hospitals. Kenny thinks the key is boosting public demand for healthcare and education, not just building stuff. Despite record growth, health in China has deteriorated because the country has moved from ‘a system that once provided near-universal access to basic care to one that now provides limited coverage which extends to expensive, often unnecessary, medical techniques—all at seven times the price.’ Sounds a bit like the US…….

That spread of ideas and inventions can be accelerated by social marketing: ‘social marketing programs have shown strong results over the last thirty years in promoting the use of sugar-salt solutions to treat diarrhea, breastfeeding over bottle feeding and the use of contraceptives. A diarrheal disease control program which focused on social marketing in Egypt in the early 1980s saw the number of targeted mothers which recognized the danger of dehydration rising from 32 percent to 90 percent. In addition, within the first year of the marketing campaign, the number of mothers who used oral rehydration solution correctly increased from 25 to 60 percent.’

Finally, he has some neat ideas for how to speed up that flow of appropriate technologies and ideas that drives improvements in human welfare. Why not take the CGIAR global network of public agricultural research institutes and do the same for child mortality, or innovative forms of social marketing?  What about a Global Innovation Bank, which uses advance market commitments, prizes etc (as well as more traditional research funding) to push pro-poor R&D  – sounds like an argument for taking the Gates Foundation into (global) public ownership – globalization rather than nationalization?……

Arab uprising update; Wellbeing v GDP in China; IMF analyses cricket; aid reality checks in Bangladesh; India’s cyber-city; DFID and India; another aid satire: links I liked

Arab Uprising Update: Alina Rocha Menocal assesses Egypt’s transition to democracy. Is the Arab Revolution a women’s rights revolution? Yes argues Soumaya Ghannoushi - Exhibit A:  International Women’s Day in Cairo’s Tahrir Square [h/t Caroline Sweetman]. And protests in Burkina Faso – is the ferment spilling over into sub-Saharan Africa?

Rich in misery? Wellbeing v GDP in China

Not only has the IMF acquired a redistributive urge (see previous posts), but it now appears to have acquired a sense of humour as well. Check out What Can International Cricket Teach Us About the Role of Luck in Labor Markets? By Shekhar Aiyar and Rodney Ramcharan [h/t Chris Cramer]

In Bangladesh ‘the Reality Check has field teams visit and spend quality time with ordinary households living in poverty in different parts of the country. Each year, teams spend five days and four nights living with the same families, listen to their stories, and document their experiences. These are written up into am annual report for policy-makers and widely circulated’. Interesting longitudinal research effort to keep aid donors and others in touch with the lives of the people they are trying to help.

India’s new geek city hits some snags and anyway is probably a terrible idea – have they not been to Brasilia?

An enjoyably patronizing Indian take on the heated ‘should DFID give aid to India’ debate that so enrages the right-wing press in the UK , from Swapan Dasgupta in the Times of India (where else?) [h/t Michel Anglade]

Yet another of those animation + voiceover thingies, this one quite good – US evangelical aid worker meets African villager. Tt’s a grotesque caricature, right?………[h/t Nicholas Colloff]