Migration, Sir Duncan, instant spouses and inflight Barry Manilow: final impressions of the Philippines

As always after an intense ‘immersion’ in our programme work, I left the Philippines with my head buzzing. Here are some impressions, memories and ideas that don’t fit into a more structured blogpost:

Migration: One in 9 Filipinos are outside the country, constituting a major export sector (the government deliberately trains more nurses than the country needs, to encourage outmigration). On the way in from Qatar, I sat next to a Filipino gold miner, working for an Australian/Filipino company in Tanzania, 2 months

on, 1 month off. OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers – this country loves acronyms) even have their own immigration channels at the airport (see pic).

I rather  like being called ‘Sir Duncan’ – makes me feel vaguely like an Arthurian knight. Alas it applies to all older people.

Philippines signage: ‘Sorry, instant spouses not allowed’ (at a hotel reception); ‘goat for sale, cell #7635420’ (by roadside).

Jessan, our livelihoods guy, neatly sums up the feel of Filipino culture as ‘300 years of convent; 50 of Hollywood.’

Work seems to be accompanied by a lot of food, even (especially?) in food justice workshops: forget the half-hearted British biscuits, we’re talking snacks, bowls of noodles, cakes, fruit, and that’s just during the seminar  – full meals follow straight afterwards. Can’t work out why everyone isn’t huge.

And music is everywhere – as we left the rubber project we passed one motor bike lugging a videoke machine up almost impassable roads. Inflight entertainment on one domestic flight included air crew singing snatches of Barry Manilow or Adele, and then prizes for the first passenger to guess the singer.

And a lot of positives:

Civil society space is opening, not closing as in so many other countries (that extends to the new government nicking many of its best

leaders). A sense of political optimism, with new laws on reproductive health and land use currently before Congress.

Anecdotal evidence that the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme (CARP) has made a difference over the last two decades. It broke up many plantations, handed out title to small farmers, but shortchanged them on the support services, as with so many agrarian reform programmes.

A massive spread in the government’s conditional cash transfer programme – reaching 76% of the population in one area we visited, with models based on Brazil’s Bolsa Familia.Women get US$7 a month per child under 15 (up to a max of 3 kids) and US$12 for the mother. They say it helps them with school and healthcare.

But some things don’t change: ‘when men sell the abaca, they come home drunk. When women sell it, they spend it on rice and school.’

Finally, no trip would be complete without a photocap competition – here’s a choice: inspecting some kind of pruning exercise for rubber saplings or slurping a coconut. Pics c/o the indefatigable Ipe. Over to you.

And one last plug – if you want to follow Oxfam’s work in the Philippines, sign up to its blog

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

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

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

Lan, the megaphone years, circa 1985

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and now, with microphone

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

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

Some of the main achievements of the APG to date:

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

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

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

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

Development Theory v Practice: Visiting Oxfam’s work in Mindanao

For me, one of the most fruitful aspects of ‘field trips’ such as last week’s visit to see Oxfam’s work in the Philippines is the exchange it sets up in my head between the academic literature and debates I’ve been ploughing through in the UK, and the reality of our work on the ground. A good trip confirms, improves or adds to your thinking, and occasionally shows you that you have got it all wrong. This was particularly true on this occasion as our staff and partners in the Philippines are both real thinkers (one guy passed a long car ride by listening to a lecture on Hegel on his laptop ‘for fun’) and activists (more on that tomorrow). The quality of discussions in a Manila seminar on active citizenship and food justice was truly impressive – nuanced and open minded, with no sign of the dogmatic, fissiparous Left I saw on my last visit in 1998 (when I had to give the same lecture twice because different fractions refused to sit in the same room). First some (relatively minor) new insights from all these interactions:

What role for INGOs in peripheral regions? This is a frequent situation – we work in remote areas, where a substantial part of the problem is neglect by central government and others. Per capita public spending in Mindanao is significantly less than in Luzon, home to the capital, Manila, as is aid spending. The same pattern is repeated in pastoralist areas in Africa, and indigenous areas everywhere. One thing we’ve never really got involved with much (as far as I know) is trying to shift national attitudes and beliefs (‘pastoralists are lazy – there’s no point in helping them’; ‘indigenous groups are backwards and need to be assimilated’). We do some work in the capital, typically raising specific issues like human rights or conflict, but what about applying our skills at framing, brand-building etc, and all those offers of pro bono work from ad companies, to shifting attitudes in capital (‘Marvellous Mindanao’)?

But local advocacy may well be more useful than national: Complaints about the state of the roads are universal (and well justified, if ourexperience is representative). They are an obvious advocacy target – do something about the illegal loggers (right) that are destroying the roads, spend more on fixing them, and get the local community to chip in some free labour if necessary. Another potential candidate is finance – the rubber farmers get into debt to the buyers, and then can’t negotiate better prices, (‘if we can break out of debt, maybe we can try new things’) partly because state banks won’t lend to long-gestating crops like rubber. So why not do some advocacy on local bank lending? More generally, who gets elected mayor at the municipal level is hugely influential on the level of priority the local government gives to small farmers – yet up to now we haven’t seen working around elections as a relevant ‘critical juncture’ for our model of change. Often, we seem a bit trapped in a combo of national advocacy + local programming, maybe because of the friend v critic tension (see next point).

We struggle to be partner and critic of the same institution: eg we work with local government on agricultural production, and that somehow prevents us challenging it on dismal road maintenance. Ditto the private sector – it takes a relatively sophisticated approach from both sides to both work with private companies and simultaneously to criticise them in public. One option is to get better at differentiating within institutions – we work with the agriculture ministry, but give public works a hard time on roads. Ditto leaders and laggard companies within industries. But often, we find this tension quite disabling – more for emotional reasons than practical ones, I suspect – it’s very hard to criticise someone in public and then have a meeting with them where you want to establish a rapport.

And some familiar issues and quandaries

Our secular blindspot: The Philippines is a very Catholic country (opening prayers before meetings etc); in addition there are the citadels of the homegrown variant ‘Iglesia ni Cristo’ (estimated 3m congregation) and the mushrooming churches of evangelical sects. Yet staff laughingly concede that we only engage with Islam (on women’s rights in Mindanao). They say it’s because of the Church’s opposition to the Reproductive Health bill currently before Congress, but that doesn’t really convince (the Imams aren’t exactly pro-reproductive health either).

Working with local government: The role of local government units (LGUs) has been central ever since the decentralization process began some 20 years ago. LGUs are authorised to lend money, hire extension workers, take out infrastructure loans and supply inputs (often subsidised). Yet many fail to raise local income and are heavily dependent on revenues from central govt. The level of underspend in Mindanao is currently running at around 25% (another target for local advocacy). What’s more important, supporting local government with finance and capacity building, or lobbying it to do a better job?

Is climate change adaptation just good development? Not entirely, but a high degree of overlap. New elements include climate-based weather insurance, getting farmers to use weather forecasting rather than traditional predictions, developing drought-resistant strains and new cropping techniques on things like water retention, and prior site suitability assessment. But it also includes more traditional good practices like income diversification and producer organization.

How well do we, or our partners, understand the local economy? I was struck by our partners’ insistence that farmers don’t save anything. This is in flat contradiction to the rich savings ecosystem discovered by Portfolios of the Poor. I suspect a more rigorous study would find both local savings systems, and a much higher level of income diversification, especially through non farm income, than we currently recognize.

Are we thinking widely enough? Apart from Imelda’s shoes and a national karaoke obsession, Filipinos are famous for two things – text messaging and migration. Yet we don’t work on either in any systematic way (eg partnering with Diaspora Filipinos, or building in mobile comms to our livelihoods work). Maybe that’s because what looks distinctive from outside doesn’t feel so important from the inside, but if we want to make the most of our global spread, shouldn’t our programming partly reflect such national specificities?

What about the youth? The Philippines is a young society – median age 23. How do we connect with it, if young people don’t relate to formal politics or NGOs and social media only deliver shallow links? Answers on a postcard please.

But this doesn’t really do justice to the warm bath of intelligent debate in which I was immersed – Filipino staff, feel free to put me straight! And if you want to read more about their work, take a look at their blog.

In the Philippines: does Oxfam’s livelihoods work go beyond trad income generation?

Last week I visited Oxfam’s Philippines programme. Such trips follow a pretty standard format – our national staff and relevant partners

with the moringa farmers

whisk me through a series of site visits and conversations with farmers, civil society organizations, local government officials and anyone else who’ll talk to you. For a few days, I’m engrossed, wrestling on multiple levels, first to understand the intricacies of the projects, and then to try and get at the meta-questions: what are the strengths and weaknesses in our work? What could we be doing better? Is there a clear power analysis and theory of change? Discussions continue in vehicles to and from the visits, over dinner and (sometimes) in the bar, as everyone grapples with the incredibly difficult business of ‘doing development’. It’s intense and definitely the best bit of the job.

I went to Mindanao, one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden islands in the Philippines archipelago, and home to 23m of its 94m population. The focus was our livelihoods work (I hate the term, but can’t think of anything better to describe the complex ways poor people find to put food on the family table). Such work forms the backbone of many of Oxfam’s programmes. In Mindanao, we’re working with women farmers to introduce new crops or upgrade existing ones:

Crop 1: Moringa – a magical tree whose fruit is x7 more rich in Vitamin C than oranges, has x4 more calcium than milk, and x3 more vitamin E than Spinach. The leaves can be made into a herbal coffee or poultry feed. The plant has medicinal properties – arthritis, blood pressure etc. It’s also a good crop for women farmers – easy to plant and harvest (those I talked to had an average of over 4 kids each). The problem for local partner AADC is linking up moringa producers in the idyllic forested mountains of northern Mindanao with the market chains that can deliver reliable customers and improved prices. Possibilities include a herbal remedy exporter to the US and a Philippines health food producer, but for the moment, the main customer is a poultry feed company.

Crop 2: Rubber. Not a new crop, but one which was previously produced on a plantation model, and then replaced by oil palm. Now small farmers are picking it up, but with low grade seeds and poor quality control, and at the mercy of buyers who advance them credit and then force them to accept rock bottom prices. Our partners there are developing a big seedling nursery and bringing in new ideas on climate change adaptation (a real issue here – for example, the project encourages farmers to plant ground cover crops like legumes to retain moisture, as climate change is producing months without rain where previously the two settings for the weather were ‘wet’ and ‘very wet’.)

Crop 3: Abaca: a traditional crop, and relative of the banana. The fibrous bark is stripped and woven into a hard wearing rope. It’s also used in paper manufacture (hence the ‘manila envelope’ – 85% of world production comes from the Philippines). The issue here is how to add value, find better markets and develop women’s participation – Oxfam identified Abaca through a feasibility study as one of the crops with best potential for women farmers in this area (Agusan del Sur).

I could write a post on each one of these, but I want to highlight the common challenges. In particular, how do these projects differ from

rubber farmer, credit: Felipe Ramiro

traditional income generation? For decades, NGOs have been showing up in communities and persuading people to raise chickens or rabbits, open tailors, or plant the latest new wonder crop. The record is decidedly mixed. What’s different about this latest round? I think Oxfam is trying to pull off a really difficult trick here, known in the execrable jargon of the business as ‘leverage’ or ‘scaling up’ – how can a limited intervention trigger a much wider and long-lasting process of change that benefits poor producers? The key differences with the old give-em-a-chicken-coop school include:

-          Involve local government and private sector from the outset – they are the only long term guarantors of ‘sustainability’. Similarly, the NGOs’ exit strategy, whether as funder and implementer (often a local NGO) has to be built in from the outset.

-          Scale – it’s no use just running a pilot and then crossing your fingers. From the outset, you have to think how your intervention needs to be designed to benefit 100,000s of people , rather than 100s

-          It’s about value chains, not just production. Often the real barrier is not growing or making stuff, but finding the credit you need to keep you going between planting and harvest, getting the product to market (the roads here are terrible, gulleyed by rain and gouged by illegal logging trucks), or finding a reliable buyer who pays decent prices.  Multiple actors need to be involved – it’s no use just funding a local NGO to hand out seedlings. Systems analysis is essential, which in Oxfam’s case includes analysing the gender aspects of the value chain.

-          Advocacy: a systems approach resembles a micro version of Dani Rodrik’s bottlenecks to growth. Resolving one bottleneck (eg supplies of decent seeds), allows the effort to move on until it hits the next one (roads, access to finance, quantity and quality). Some of these can be incorporated into the programme, but many require local level advocacy (eg lobbying the public works department to do something about the roads, or the state bank to start lending to long gestating crops like rubber).

This new dispensation often seems ridiculously ambitious/quixotic – with relatively limited spending we presume to ‘transform’ (another favourite buzzword) whole systems. Unsurprisingly, staff can get frustrated and ‘just want to get on with the project’, but I think we have to aim high, and every now and then something really comes off and it’s worth it.

Western failures; the case for small farmers; Mexican miracles; DFID consultancy row (and plebgate); global food waste scandal: links I liked

Important institutions saying stuff I agree with (always a warm feeling):

‘Amidst their fragile recovery, an unreformed (and unrepentant) financial sector and macroeconomic policies that are timid at best, and counterproductive at worst, the developing countries will find it difficult to sustain their own growth dynamic, let alone that of the global economy.’ UNCTAD’s 2012 Trade and Development Report is unimpressed on financial reform and the West’s failure to pursue growth with equity (remember that?).

‘Smallholder farmers in Africa and elsewhere can drive sustainable agricultural development, contribute to global food security, and catalyze economic growth worldwide’ according to IFAD president Kanayo F. Nwanze

Michael Clemens finds an aid project that increases poor Mexicans’ wages by 1000%. Only it’s not an aid project.

Mixed emotions – DFID’s getting a lot of bashing about its consultancy bill. Looks like fair criticism, but can we please sort it out while also defending the overall case for aid? The Guardian asks is the £500m a year effectively a form of back door tied aid to UK companies? And exposes fat cats at the ultra free market (any irony there?) Adam Smith International with their snouts in the DFID trough ‘Over 70% of ASI’s income now comes from the Department for International Development. The ASI’s managing director, William Morrison, received £1.3m in total pay and dividends in 2010.’ Meanwhile DFID’s former boss, Andrew Mitchell, seems to be rather over-compensating for no longer having to wear a bleeding heart on his sleeve.

But before DFID’s staff (and consultants) hurl themselves from Vauxhall Bridge, take heart – South African Kate Orkin says the UK should be proud of its aid programme (and this is based on her PhD research, not being a consultant – at least as far as I can tell). For the record, I largely agree with Kate, at least for the non-Adam Smith bit.

Mixed emotions part deux, and I’m not quite sure why, when I listened to this talk. Maybe it’s some kind of subliminal battle between the ‘we should help poor countries to export more’ message of Make Trade Fair and the ‘we must learn to live within planetary boundaries’ of the Grow Campaign. Or maybe it’s  because he’s a bit annoying. And is called Tristram. Hey ho, deal with it. Tristram Stuart on the global food waste scandal. [h/t Richard King]

A world of friendship networks revealed – great interactive infographic

After a few days in the migrationtastic Philippines (more on the visit next week) this post seems particularly apposite. The world’s friendship networks revealed, or at least that chunk of them that are on Facebook (large and growing – 910 million and counting). This exercise in big data crunching is fascinating: click on the country and it tells you how many FB links its citizens have with people in other nations, and lists the top 5. It even offers background notes to help you interpret what you find.

It’s a window on migration and cultural affinity and makes you wonder – is UAE so prominent (eg biggest link for India and Philippines), just because of numbers, or are the expats there more homesick?; what is the connection between DRC and Ecuador (its second biggest set of links after Zambia)? How rigorous can the data be when Canada’s first link is Australia, not the US? Can Kazakhstan’s number 1 really be the Central African Republic?! Worth digging around and getting a sense of a world on the move, but staying connected.

Why don’t Africa’s politicians invest more in small farmers? The political economy of ag policy.

Interesting if rather impenetrable new(ish) paper from the Future Agricultures consortium on the political economy of Africanagricultural policy. It seeks to answer an important question – why hasn’t the spread of democracy produced more investment in the smallholder farmers that form the majority of the electorate in many countries? Here’s the summary:

“Theories of policy neglect of, or discrimination against, agriculture in Africa include urban bias and the narrow self-interest ofautonomous elites. Whilst structural adjustment removed much of the previous tax burden on African agriculture , the sector also saw declining investment from international development partners and through national budgets. Whilst there has been some recovery in public investment in agriculture over the past decade, signalled by the 2003 Maputo Declaration, investment in the infrastructural and institutional public goods needed to support smallholder-led agricultural growth remains disappointing. As a result, the contribution of the agricultural sector to growth and poverty reduction objectives in Africa is widely believed to have been below potential.

In theory, democratisation, which has proceeded unevenly across Africa during the past two decades, should encourage pro-poor agricultural policy, as the majority of voters in many countries remain rural and poor. This paper draws on case studies of recent policy change (attempted and actual) in eight African countries, plus an analysis of the political systems in these countries, to explore the evolving role of competitive electoral politics in agricultural policy making.

An important observation is that politicians are as likely to rely on ethnic allegiances and forms of social or political control to secure votes as they are to engage in policy competition. Moreover, the political incentives facing senior policy makers in the agricultural and rural development sphere may be inimical to the development of strong institutions to promote smallholder agricultural growth. Instead the paper finds that it is exogenous factors – macroeconomic dependence on agriculture and, most strikingly, sustained threats to regime survival – that create positive incentives for agricultural investment, even where social or political control is relied on to secure votes.”

So what I think Colin Poulton, the author, is saying is that since many African leaders don’t rely on having good policies to win elections, it doesn’t matter much whether those policies are popular with voters. As he later explains:

‘Critically, the argument that democratisation may strengthen political incentives for policy support to smallholder agriculture in Africa assumes that politicians primarily exchange policies for votes. Drawing on existing literature and the country case studies, the paper  argues that this assumption does not hold in most of Africa.’

In fact, they only start worrying about investing in agriculture where, as in Burkina, Malawi or Ethiopia, it is particularly vital to generate the foreign exchange they need to run the government (or buy a new Mercedes), or the whole government is under actual or potential military threat (Rwanda, Ethiopia). When those moments arrive, then political leaders are more likely to remember small farmers and listen to well-meaning technocrats, but at other times they will largely ignore them.

There are a few exceptions like Ghana, where policies do seem to matter more (some great policy debates going on in the current election campaign on issues such as healthcare).

Can civil society help fill the democratic deficit and generate the pressure for change? According to Poulton:

‘In Latin America mobilization of poor groups by diverse social movements (Vanden 2007) arguably began to exert an influence on electoral outcomes around 15 years after the return to democracy. However, there are various reasons why such mobilization might take much longer to achieve in much of Sub-Saharan Africa than in Latin America, including deeper levels of absolute poverty, lower education levels (although recent increases in school enrolment are a positive sign in this respect) and little prior history of awareness raising amongst the rural poor in Africa (some early cooperative development activity aside).’

Your thoughts?

We hate jargon; grain giants respond; evidence v ideology at the Bank; community paralegals; Africa, Brazil and flying geese; top site on human development: Links I liked

Just arrived in the Philippines for a week’s visit, heading off to Mindanao tomorrow morning if tonight’s  torrential monsoon downpour allows it. Back in Manila on Friday for a round table debate on active citizens and fragile states. In the meantime, here are a few things I’ve been reading:

Development jargon we hate, (in the field, capacity building, local) and chance to vote for better alternatives

The four big ‘ABCD’ cereal traders respond to Oxfam’s recent report about them (we found out by accident). Only Louis Dreyfus seems to be ready to engage (and disagree) properly.

The World Bank painfully torn between evidence and ideology. Its research shows state banks played a positive role in responding to the financial crisis, but (oh dear) it hates state banks. The result? Enjoyable contortions.

‘Community paralegals’ in 36% of Sierra Leone’s chiefdoms offer new way to access basic health services. Interesting idea.

South-South cooperation, Africa and Brazil to collaborate on cotton

Does Africa stand to benefit as China responds to rising incomes by shedding low skill manufacturing jobs (i.e. the latest twist in the East Asian flying geese story)? [h/t Tim Kelsall]

‘The Human Development Resource Centre (HDRC) provides DFID advisers with high quality advice, expertise and knowledge in health, education and nutrition.’ But it appears to be open to the public (tho not sure if we can get them to do our work for us….).

The Hunger Grains: new research shows EU biofuel policies drive food prices and land grabs

Oxfam economic policy adviser Ruth Kelly (right) unveils her new paper, published today, on a really simple, bad policy that rich countries can fix – biofuels.

The past five years have seen two record spikes in the price of food; and prices are rising again, with corn and soy hitting record highs in summer 2012. There is intense disagreement about what causes food price spikes and how to address them, and this often gives rise to confusion and inaction. But, unusually, there is one thing most experts agree on: scrapping biofuel policies would make a real difference. In June 2011, ten international organisations were so convinced of this fact that they made an unprecedented call for G20 governments to scrap biofuel policies. Last week, the European Commission and the French government finally woke up to the fact that it is simply unacceptable to burn food while millions around the world go hungry.

In 2009 EU governments agreed that by 2020 all ground transport fuel sold in the EU would contain about 9 parts biofuel to every 91 parts petrol or diesel. In a new report published in advance of today’s meeting of EU Energy Ministers to discuss renewable energy, Oxfam shows that EU biofuel mandates are inextricably connected to hunger and land grabs in developing countries. Modelling by the UK government suggests that suspending the EU biofuel mandate in 2018 could reduce international price spikes by up to 35 percent. And that is just the impact that is relatively easy to model. A drop in local or regional food production has a much greater impact than international commodity prices on retail prices, especially in regions that are relatively isolated from international markets, like sub-Saharan Africa. As biofuel production displaces local, national and regional food production, not only do people have to buy the food they would otherwise have grown, but there is less for sale; increased demand and reduced supply push up local prices.

The leaked European Commission proposal is welcome in so far as it recognises, for the first time, that EU biofuel mandates exacerbate both climate change and hunger. But, as the proposal stands, it is no solution and could in fact make matters worse. At the moment about 4.5 percent of ground transport fuel used in the EU is made up of biofuels, of which about 90 percent comes from food crops. Not only would the Commission proposal increase that amount to 5 percent, but it would allow biofuel made from non-food crops to make up the difference – which uses up scarce resources of land, water and soil when they should be used to produce much-needed food.

According to Oxfam’s calculations, the land used to produce the biofuels used in the EU in 2008 has the potential to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 127 million people. As the proportion of biofuel in our petrol and diesel rises, so does the amount of land it gobbles up. Most land deals happen in the poorest countries with the weakest protection of people’s land rights, according to the IMF and World Bank; economic regressions show that other variables, like availability of land and ranking on the Doing Business indicators, are simply irrelevant. Affected communities rarely have a say, and women are the least likely to be consulted even though they are often the most seriously affected. The overwhelming consensus from research on the welfare impact of large-scale biofuel production shows that benefits are reaped by a small elite. As research from Indonesia concludes, ‘there are some winners but many losers’.

EU governments have it within their power to make a difference to the lives of millions of hungry people. It is completely unacceptable that we are burning food in our petrol tanks while poor families go hungry and millions are being pushed off their land. Fighting hunger has never been so simple: it’s time to scrap the mandates.

Ruth Kelly is an economic policy adviser for Oxfam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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