How to write winning research funding applications

Recently I’ve been involved in some fascinating exercises in allocating large dollops of institutional funds for research (can’t give any more details, sorry). This has involved reviewing and discussing dozens of applications from different academics. Here’s a quick download of what I learned about the art of writing winning applications:

Mixed methods rock: Quants and quals seem to have a really hard time talking to each other, but proposals that manage to integrate the two (genuinely, rather than have entirely separate processes) go down well.

You need serious impact plans: a surprising number of proposals still seem to think that once the research is done, you publish in a couple of journals, organize a seminar or two, and it’s job done. If you want research to actually have an impact, you need to try a bit harder – think about who you are trying to influence, when they might be most interested in listening to you, perhaps involve them in the governance of the project (see ODI’s RAPID programme for more on this).

A bit of innovation really helps: Yes, using mobiles either in data gathering or dissemination still gets brownie points, but not all innovation has to be tech-based – I have seen a roomful of profs and luminaries gurgling with delight because a proposal has included street theatre among its dissemination plans.

Make sure the Principal Investigator is not just a figurehead: The PI leads the project, but an alarming number of proposals reckon he/she can do that on a couple of hours a week. Not usually very convincing.

Have a clear research question or hypothesis to test: seems obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare to get a really clear crisp hypothesis with a good explanation of how the research proposes to test it.

Don’t be greedy: If the application range is £100,000 to £300,000, don’t automatically stick in for £300,000 – it’s more credible if the budget gets to £275,000. But if you do, think about value for money (as funders increasingly do). If the day rate for your researchers is at the top of the range, then reviewers start to get irritated.

Don’t be tokenistic about involving southern researchers: reviewers notice if the ‘capacity building’ element is not much more than employing a lot of African PhDs to do data collection at bargain basement rates. You need clear evidence of ownership by local universities in both research design, and dissemination.

The topic matters as well as the research: panels like research on new/sexy issues, as well as well-designed research processes.

How you respond to referees matters: most proposals are sent out for review and the anonymised comments sent to the applicants. Take the comments seriously – if you just dismiss them, or question the reviewer’s credibility, it makes you look brittle and unconvincing. But yes, they can be very annoying, so if you suffer from ‘reviewer rage’, read the referee’s comments, then walk away for a day or so before replying……..

Finally, remember you are writing for a mixed audience: you may have specialist referees who like nothing better than a pointy-headed exchange, but there will also be generalists like me in the room, so make sure you tell us important stuff like what’s new in your proposal and why it matters, preferably in a language approaching English.

Any other do’s and don’ts from reviewers our there?

How good/bad are different countries at turning carbon emissions into development?

One result of the doughnut economics discussion is that we need to think much more about the carbon efficiency of development. So which countries are getting the best return on rising carbon emissions, in terms of life expectancy and per capita income?

Here are two animated graphics of 13 country trajectories. The thirteen major countries comprise more than half of the world’s population and carbon emissions. Territorial emission trajectories are green; trade-adjusted emissions (recognizing that if you import something to consume, that that should count as an emission) allowing for carbon are blue, contrasted with the global trend fit curves (dotted lines) for consumption-based carbon in 1990 and 2005. You can freeze, go back and forward etc to get a better grip of what is going on.

First life expectancy v carbon emissions

Next income per capita v carbon emissions

What do they show?
• Countries vary a whole lot in their pathways.
• Some are good and getting better at creating good development outcomes while not emitting much.
• Some are bad and getting worse, especially when we consider trade in embodied emissions.
• It’s getting easier to get longer lives for less.
• It’s currently apparently NOT possible to have long life and low emissions with high incomes.

[h/t Timmons Roberts. c/o Tim Gore]

Madonna v Malawi; rebuilding Somalia; Rodrik loves nation states; everyone’s wrong on Europe; Economist wants more taxes (in China); results agenda(s); life on hold: links I liked

‘I don’t understand how she can work like that. For someone to go to the papers and say, ‘I’m building schools’, without telling the government, I find it a strange way of working.’ Madonna reinvents parallel provision and bad aid in Malawi

Is it possible/desirable to try and build a nation state in Somalia? Got any better ideas? Brilliant thoughts from uber blogger Chris Blattman 
 
‘People still must turn for solutions to their national governments, which remain the best hope for collective action. The nation-state may be a relic bequeathed to us by the French Revolution, but it is all that we have.’ Dani Rodrik argues the case for strong nation states

Paul Krugman on why both the Republican and German  explanations of Europe’s economic malaise are completely wrong

‘Under Chairman Mao, taxes on private property all but vanished along with private property itself. Today’s Chinese set no store by the old socialist doctrine that “property is theft”. But many urban Chinese now think of taxation that way. They feel, with some justification, that they already pay too much to a state that provides too little.’ The Economist reckons it’s time for China’s local governments to introduce a property tax. They have previously relied for revenue on expropriating land from local farmers and flogging it to property developers, but as the real estate boom slows, land sales are falling and revenue is drying up.

What do aid people mean when they talk about ‘results’? At least four different things apparently – from the always thought-provoking Owen Barder

‘Life on hold’, powerful 6 minute Amnesty film with the voice of a Somali teenager living in a refugee camp in Tunisia, waiting to find a home in Europe

Hyperventilation Friday – winning ‘best organizational blog 2011′

I know I’ve been a bit rude about the contrived acronym of the ABBAs (Aid Blogger’s Best Awards), but I just want to say that I think it’s an incredibly rigorous and accurate reflection of opinion in the online development community. This has nothing to do with the fact that this blog just won one of the categories – best organizational blog. Here’s the commentary from Tom Murphy, ABBA host and the thinking wonk’s Ricky Gervais:

“The heavy hitters came out in full force with a race between the Center for Global Development, the World Bank and Oxfam (UK). Two group blogs against Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power ended in the triumph of the individual.

Center for Global Development – 27.8%
USAID Impact – 2.8%
Oxfam UK (From Poverty to Power) – 31.8%
Peace Dividend Trust – 3.4%
CGAP – 4.7%
Global Voices by American Jewish World Service – 12.5%
World Bank Development Impact – 17.0%

What stands out is that the blogs are of a much more academic bent. There were no nominations for blogs from the big NGOs. FP2P is an exception of sorts, but it is largely Green’s wonky musings that make it much more similar to CGD and Development Impact. This illustrates what I have observed to be a gap between the social media community represented by these nominees and the traditional NGO world.

Looking at the ABBAs as a whole, there are very few NGOs represented. That is in part due to the half where I reside which then has an impact on who this is reaching [no, I don't know what he's on about either], but it also shows that there is a significant audience who does not care for or is unimpressed by what NGOs are offering through social media.

There are people who crave understanding more and getting into the wonky debates that are not limited to academics. Practitioners participate in the space just as fluidly, but are nearly always in a personal capacity. What links the nominees in this category is that they talk less about their organization and more about aid and development at large. FP2P and PDT talk about themselves from time to time, but their bread and butter posts are looking at the industry. Is it possible that is why people go to read the blogs by these organizations?”

Heartfelt thanks to Tom, all those who voted for FP2P and to Oxfam for giving me the space to do this (and putting up with the occasional own goal…). As for the rest of the acceptance speech, I leave it in the euphoric hands of Cuba Gooding Jr at the Oscars. Mental.

And here’s some Abba. Worth it for the flares and stack heels.

Still to come, best overall blog, where FP2P was also shortlisted, but I reckon Chris Blattman has that one sewn up.

Update: yep, Blattman cruised home in the overall best aid-blog-in-English vote, but at least this blog came a distant second. Results here. He teaches, he has a new baby. How many Chris Blattmans are there? It’s time we were told.

Getting Somalia Wrong and other background reading for today’s big conference

On 3 February, the UN declared that there were no longer famine conditions in southern Somalia, but six months since that famine was declared, Somalia is still in the throes of its worst humanitarian crisis in decades. Nearly a third of the population remain in
crisis, unable to meet essential food and non-food needs. Key governments and institutions from the region and the wider Islamic and Western worlds are meeting in London today to chart a way forward. So expect the usual grim media coverage and talk of failed states and famine. Oxfam summarized the state of the famine response and the need to move beyond foccusing only on terrorism and piracy to put Somali peoples’ interests at the heart of a sustainable peace process in a paper published yesterday.

But there’s a lot more to Somalia and Somalis than is likely to surface in the media coverage today – for a quick intro try reading Mary Harper’s excellent new book, ‘Getting Somalia Wrong: Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State.’ Harper has reported for the BBC on Somalia since the outbreak of civil war in 1991, and she has little time for the usual story. Some extracts:

‘These images and labels act as barriers to other ways of seeing Somalia. More than two decades of conflict and crisis have forced Somalis to invent alternative political and economic systems. They have enthusiastically seized modern technology, fusing it with pre-colonial traditions to create some of the most advanced and effective money transfer systems on the continent and one of the cheapest, most developed mobile phone networks in East Africa.

Somalia has never had a stable, fully functioning nation state, democratic or otherwise. A new model of statehood needs to be developed for Somalia, perhaps one that combines traditional and modern types of governance, and also one that gives a degree of autonomy to the different regions.

The perspective of the country as a ‘failed state’ is dangerously limiting; in spite of the apparent chaos and lack of central authority, there are aspects of society that have continued to function effectively, even in the regions most badly affected by conflict. Some such as trade and communications, have thrived, particularly in the money transfer, mobile phone and livestock sectors. [more on that here]…. Large areas are quite peaceful, with their own administrations, legal systems and economies.’

Crisp, accessible chapters cover the clan system, history, Islamism, Somalia as failed state, piracy and Somalia’s extensive Diaspora and links to the outside world (especially the Gulf states and ‘Greater Somalia’ in the Horn).

Harper’s conclusion?

‘Portrayals of Somalia as the world’s most comprehensively failed state, inhabited by pirates, Islamist extremists and starving people, have exacerbated the problem and have, in all likelihood, contributed to many misguided policies.

Approaches to Somalia were squeezed into the post-9/11 paradigm, leading to a blinkered perspective; Somalia became part of the ‘War on Terror’ narrative.

For more than twenty years, outside powers have struggled to sort out the problems of Somalia. Perhaps, like the Somalis themselves, the approach needs to be more creative and adventurous. The rest of the world also needs to recognize that Somalis can be very good at doing things for themselves.’

A much needed corrective. Wouldn’t it be great if today’s conference started with what is working in Somalia, rather than another round of foreign blueprints? Alex de Waal says more or less that in the New York Times. Plenty more coverage on the Guardian development site.

What causes bad nutrition – not enough power or not enough vitamins?

As a general rule, the further The Economist magazine’s subject matter departs from economics, the better it gets, as information and analysis replace the ideological drumbeat of its market fundamentalist ‘priors’. Thanks to its coverage, vital development issues such as gendercide or resource scarcity reach a global mass audience. This week’s issue has an excellent analysis of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood on the back of the Arab Spring, but the piece that caught my eye was a two page overview on poverty and nutrition, one of those issues that seems to be rising rapidly up the development agenda (see last week’s Save the Children report). Some highlights:

“In the 1960s and 1970s, ending hunger and malnutrition seemed relatively simple: you grew more crops. If the harvest failed, rich countries sent food aid. But the Ethiopian famine of 1984 undermined this approach. Here was a disaster of biblical proportions in a country where food was available. It was a reminder of what an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, had long taught: what really matters with food is not the overall supply, but individual access.

So in the 1990s and early 2000s the emphasis switched to helping people obtain food. This meant reducing poverty and making agricultural markets more efficient. Between 1990 and 2005 the number of people living on less than $1 a day in poor countries (at 2005 purchasing-power parity) fell by a third to 879m, or from 24.9% of the total population to 18.6%.

Yet the food-price spike of 2007-08 showed that this approach also had limitations. Prices of many staple crops doubled in a year; millions went hungry. The world remains bad at fighting hunger. Experts argue about exactly how many people are affected, but the number has probably held flat at just below 1 billion since 1990.

Even where there is enough food, people do not seem healthier. On top of 1 billion without enough calories, another 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they lack micro-nutrients (this is often called “hidden hunger”). And a further 1 billion are malnourished in the sense that they eat too much and are obese. It is a damning record: out of the world population of 7 billion, 3 billion eat too little, too unhealthily, or too much.

More than 160m children in developing countries suffer from a lack of vitamin A; 1m die because they have weak immune systems and 500,000 go blind each year. Iron deficiency causes anaemia, which affects almost half of poor-country children and over 500m women, killing more than 60,000 of them each year in pregnancy. Iodine deficiency—easily cured by adding the stuff to salt—causes 18m babies each year to be born with mental impairments.

Malnutrition is associated with over a third of children’s deaths and is the single most important risk factor in many diseases (see chart). A third of all children in the world are underweight or stunted (too short for their age), the classic symptoms of malnourishment.

The damage malnutrition does in the first 1,000 days of life is also irreversible. According to research published in TheLancet, a medical journal, malnourished children are less likely (all things being equal) to go to school, less likely to stay there, and more likely to struggle academically. They earn less than their better-fed peers over their lifetimes, marry poorer spouses and die earlier.

Paradoxically, malnutrition can also cause obesity later in life. In the womb and during the first couple of years, the body adjusts to a poor diet by squirrelling away whatever it can as fat (an energy reserve). It never loses its acquired metabolism. This explains the astronomical obesity rates in countries that have switched from poor to middle-income status. In Mexico, for instance, obesity was almost unknown in 1980. Now 30% of Mexican adults are clinically obese and 70% are overweight.

These are among the highest rates in the world, almost as bad as in America. India has an obesity epidemic in cities, as people eat more processed food and adopt more sedentary lifestyles. And with obesity will come new diseases such as diabetes and heart disease—as if India did not have enough diseases to worry about.

Nutrition is also attracting attention because of some puzzling failures. In a few big countries, notably India and Egypt, malnutrition is much higher than either economic growth or improvements in farming would suggest it should be. India’s income per head grew more than fourfold between 1990 and 2010; yet the proportion of underweight children fell by only around a quarter. By contrast, Bangladesh is half as rich as India and its income per head rose only threefold during the same period; yet its share of underweight children dropped by a third and is now below India’s. Egypt’s agricultural value-added per person rose more than 20% in 1990-2007. Yet both malnutrition and obesity rose—an extremely unusual combination.

The good news is that better nutrition can be a stunningly good investment. Fixing micro-nutrient deficiencies is cheap. Vitamin supplements cost next to nothing and bring lifelong benefits. Every dollar spent promoting breastfeeding in hospitals yields returns of between $5-67. And every dollar spent giving pregnant women extra iron generates between $6-14. Nothing else in development policy has such high returns on investment.

If malnutrition does so much damage and the actions against it are cheap and effective, why is the affliction only now being taken seriously? Some countries have successfully tackled it. Brazil cut the number of underweight people by 0.7% a year between 1986 and 1996 and reduced stunting by 1.9% a year. Bangladesh reduced both rates by 2% a year in 1994-2005.

But in many countries the problem of “hidden hunger” is hidden from victims themselves, so there is no pressure for change. If everyone in a village is undernourished, poor nutrition becomes the norm and everyone accepts it. This may also explain the reluctance of poor, ill-fed people to spend extra money on food, preferring instead to buy such things as televisions or a fancy wedding. When asked about his spending choices, an ill-fed Moroccan farmer told Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Poverty Action Laboratory, a think-tank: “Oh, but television is more important than food.”

Education can help change attitudes by persuading people they would benefit from a better (if more expensive) diet. But people in rich countries consume vast quantities of junk food knowing full well that it is bad for them. It is unrealistic to expect consumers in poor countries to behave differently. Hence the idea of doing good by stealth.

HarvestPlus, a research group, breeds staple crops with extra nutrients and distributes the “bio-fortified” seeds. It released a vitamin A-rich cassava in Nigeria in 2011. This year it will bring vitamin A-rich maize (corn) to Zambia and iron-rich beans and pearl millet to Rwanda and India. Companies do something similar with processed foods: Kraft’s Biskuat biscuits (sold in Indonesia) have nine vitamins and six minerals added.

But education or fortified foods alone will not overcome the most intractable barrier to better nutrition, which is the sheer complexity of the task. Some problems of development are relatively straightforward. You can improve education by building schools and paying teachers. Nutrition is not like that.

A successful effort to improve nutrition has to push all the buttons at once. Brazil’s Fome Zero has 90 separate programmes run by 19 ministries. It embraces everything from a conditional cash-transfer scheme, called Bolsa Família, to irrigation projects and help for smallholders. Such an effort is hard to organise and cannot work unless politicians support it.

Hence the importance of Mr Graziano, the FAO’s new boss. Interest in improving nutrition is growing; so is alarm at the failures of fighting malnutrition so far. He will not find it easy to cajole more countries into a large, broad-based effort. Governments are reluctant to change and want clear evidence. And just as the damage from malnutrition builds up over a lifetime, so better nutrition reveals its benefits only over many years, as well-fed mothers pass on good health to well-fed children.

At a recent FAO conference someone was heard to remark that “at the moment nutritionists are in a position similar to environmentalists in the 1990s.” That is depressing, because it means progress will be slow; but it is encouraging, because progress will come eventually.”

My immediate reaction to this analysis  is ‘where’s the politics?’ – it seems to discuss only apolitical problems (ignorance, bad policies) and proffer technical solutions. Politics, power and inequality help explain those ’surprising’ failures in India and Egypt. But maybe poor nutrition really is at least partly soluble with technical fixes – iodine in salt, vitamin supplements etc. What do you think? Does helping the one billion people who are wrongly- (rather than under- or over-) nourished particularly lend itself to technical solutions?

27 countries are meeting today to try and stop Europe doing something about climate change

Today there’s one of those meetings that bears out the conspiracy theorists. 27 countries, including India, China, Russia and the USA, are meeting in Moscow to discuss how to block new European climate change regulation to charge airlines for their carbon emissions on flights into and out of Europe. China has reportedly ‘banned’ its airlines from participating in the scheme.

According to the Economist

“As an effort to make airlines pay for their pollution, the EU’s action is overdue. In global terms, their emissions are modest, about 3% of the total. Yet they are rising fast: between 2005 and 2010 they grew by 11.2%. Meanwhile the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), which was charged with taking steps to mitigate them, has done nothing of the sort. In 2004 it ruled out negotiating a global deal to curb the emissions of all airlines, and instead recommended that countries include their airlines in whatever national mitigation scheme they had in place. In 2010 it changed its mind, announcing that it would, after all, initiate a “framework”—whatever that might be—for a global deal to address airline emissions.

Unconvinced, the EU decided to push ahead with its plan to make all flights into the EU subject to the emissions-trading scheme (ETS). This is now enshrined in European law. The only ways foreign governments could extricate their airlines from it would be to stop them flying into the EU, or make them subject to an equivalent mitigation regime of their own.”

I’m not clear how much, if any, of the money raised will go on funding the EU’s promises on climate change adaptation (readers please help out), but in any case the proposal is a highly progressive form of taxation – air travel remains the preserve of the rich, as the EU sets out in a background paper:

‘While the impacts of climate change tend to create most difficulties for people in poorer regions of the world, increased ticket prices resulting from the EU ETS will be predominantly borne by the wealthier segments of the population both within the EU and globally. Despite the advent of low-cost services, air transport is still very much the preserve of the well off at both the regional and global level. The argument that higher ticket prices will strike poorer people hardest is therefore not credible – the facts indicate that the opposite would be the case.’

The main objection to the EU’s policy is that it applies to air-miles clocked up outside European airspace. But the vast majority of emissions captured by the EU ETS scope are from EU and US operators (See chart).  By implication, if India and others genuinely want developed countries to act to cut GHG emissions it would seem against their own interest to try to block the EU ETS, because obviously the EU would never apply it just to its own carriers – so if they were to be successful they’d also prevent us doing something about the large majority of emissions from EU/US carriers.

So far most of the outrage has been circulating in private emails rather than public. This is a typical (anonymised) example:

‘Climate finance from aviation is one of the few realistic ways to “tax the rich” to protect the poor. What could be more worth fighting for? Where is the climate justice movement in this fight raising its voice? Because it is so busy preparing the next resolution against the unwillingness of the North to act on climate change?

If this coalition succeeds in bringing the EU to back down (which I hope it won’t), it will be a major blow to international equity and climate justice. Isn’t it high time to break the silence and speak out? What the hell are Cuba or Burkina Faso doing on the list of countries fighting against the aviation ETS – defending the right of their citizens to their annual holiday flight? And as to Egypt: What would the fellah in the Nile delta prefer – the right to untaxed international flights, or rather some help to build seawalls against the rapidly rising sea level?’

If the naysayers in Moscow aren’t persuaded on climate change, they may want to think a bit harder about public health. Back to the Economist:

‘Besides cooking the climate, aviation also causes local pollution, which poor countries suffer more grievously than rich ones. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge University have estimated the impact on the ground of emissions from aircraft flying at cruise altitude (about 35,000 feet), a problem typically ignored by regulations. They have shown that emissions of nitrous oxides (NOX) and sulphur oxides (SOX) combine with gases already in the atmosphere to create very fine particles that are especially dangerous to human health. Such pollution is a huge problem in China. The researchers found that though most aviation emissions currently occur over North America and Europe, about 3,500 of the 8,000 resultant premature deaths per year happen in China and India…..With air travel in China booming, the worry is that this underreported public-health problem will also boom.”

Estimated cost per passenger? Paris to Beijing, somewhere between an extra €1.50 and €7.52.

Bill loves geoengineering; Europe v access to medicines; we’re getting happier; Martin Wolf saves capitalism; mental health in India; Big Oil v transparency; can aid be sexy? Links I liked

Yep, been waiting for this to happen – the momentum behind geoengineering is building, as Bill Gates and others weigh in behind a pain-free (?) tech fix to climate change as a ‘plan B’ if attempts to reduce emissions continue to fail. Sensible precaution or dangerous Dr Strangelove distraction from getting our carbon emissions under control?

South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign weighs in on the threat posed by current negotiations on an EU-India Free Trade Agreement to access to medicines across the developing world. Guardian analysis here.

Still, at least the world is getting happier, according to an Ipsos Global poll of 18,000 people in 24 countries [h/t Beyond Aid]

Martin Wolf’s seven point plan for saving capitalism – brilliant (always assuming you want to save it, of course)

“That son that used to be tied up to the bed, today is working in the fields.” The impact of training lay community mental health workers in India

US campaigners, including Oxfam, are fighting against a rearguard action by the oil industry to overturn new legislation on transparency

Wondering where to go to hang out online with other aid and development workers (as well as students aspiring to be aid workers)? Check out AidSource – the new Humanitarian Social Network site. Here’s the promo video, a determined (desperate?) effort to make aid hip and sexy – good luck with that…….

Working in development; cartoons of injustice; how many slaves work for you?; Valentine’s day silliness: graphics I liked

What it’s like to work in development – the picture version  [h/t Alex Evans]

Cartoons that highlight injustice and insecurity, (with mixed success) – here’s one of the better ones.

How many slaves work for you? Very pretty interactive graphic, but it takes ages, and the methodology is probably dodgy. [h/t 3500 Millones]

‘Shall I compare thee to an RCT? Though art fairer and more accurate.’ Valentine’s day tweets for policy wonks, c/o CGD’s David Roodman. Very silly and almost enough to make me start tweeting. Chris Blattman adds his bit (Trotsky definitely my favourite)…

Ending world hunger is possible – so why hasn’t it been done?

Time for something a bit less wonky than usual. Yesterday the Guardian asked me to bash out a quick response to the new Save the Children report on hunger (which got amazing coverage). It went up on their Comment is Free site, which always gets loads of comments. Often they are very nasty, but this time around, the conversation seems to be pretty polite. Here’s the piece:

Save the Children is to be applauded for reminding us all of one of the most extraordinary and humiliating aspects of living in the modern world: child hunger. Drawing a parallel with the fight to abolish slavery, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently asked what future generations will condemn us for. One sure candidate is the needless human carnage wrought by hunger. Some 850 million people (one in eight of the world’s population) go to bed hungry every night. Many of them are children, for whom early hunger leaves a lifelong legacy of cognitive and physical impairment. The human and economic waste is horrifying.

Such hunger is not due to a shortage of food – globally there is enough to go round and if (a big if) we make the right decisions now, we can continue to feed the world despite population growth and climate change. By some estimates, stopping the waste of food after harvest due to poor storage or transport infrastructure, and then in our own kitchens, could free up half of all food grown. The number of overweight and obese people in the world, suffering their own health problems, including a sharp rise in heart disease and diabetes, is roughly equal to the number of hungry people. That highlights one of the underlying causes of hunger – extreme levels of inequality, both within and between countries.

Ending hunger is entirely feasible (indeed, once achieved, the only question will be why it took us so long). It requires action at several different levels. At a national level, progressive governments in Brazil and Ghana have shown how to cut hunger sharply, through cash transfers to poor people, raising the minimum wage and investing in smallholder farmers (especially women), who both produce food, and are some of the poorest and hungriest people in the Alice in Wonderland world of a brutally unfair farming system.

That focus on national decisions and national politics highlights how fast the world is changing. In many cases, aid is no longer the main story – countries like India, growing at 8% a year and with a mushrooming middle class, need to take responsibility for their hungry masses, introducing proper taxation and effective social services to end hunger and malnutrition. Oxfam is working with people’s organisations within the country to bring that about. Elsewhere, though, international food aid remains essential, but should be improved, for example by ending the waste and delay of transporting food thousands of miles from donor countries and giving cash instead.

Beyond supporting aid for food and agricultural investment, what else can we in the well-fed countries do? Start by putting our own house in order. The rich countries are part of both the solution and the problem. Europe and America’s push to reduce their dependence on imported oil and gas has led them to introduce targets and subsidies for biofuels, but these compete directly with food production, forcing up prices for poor people. Rich country greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change at a pace that outstrips even the most pessimistic projections of the climate modellers, and there are few signs of governments agreeing (still less achieving) the kinds of reductions needed to avoid catastrophic temperature rises that will particularly harm tropical agriculture. We urgently need an international effort to find a way to feed the planet’s growing population without destroying its ecosystems, yet current investments are feeble.

Hunger is both a cause and a symptom of poverty. Damaged bodies and brains are a moral scandal and a tragic waste of economic potential. That hunger exists at all shows the urgency of redistributing income and assets to achieve a fairer world. Providing the additional calories needed by the 13% of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply. That that redistribution has not already taken place is truly something to be ashamed of.

Any other views on the Save report?