Paradigms, lock-ins and liberations: Robert Chambers on rice and shit

 Following my review of his new book, and Robert’s thoughts on immersion programmes (which generated some great comments), here is a third and final piece from Provocations for Development

A lock-in is a paradigmatic syndrome in which there is strong mutually-supporting inflexibility. Let us examine two examples of paradigmatic lock-ins which have been comprehensively turned on their heads to create new counter-intuitive, counter-commonsense, syndromes of startling potency. They raise questions about what Donald Rumsfeld famously described as ‘unknown unknowns’. Looking back at the lock-ins which they have transformed, they can be seen as liberations. The first liberation concerns rice cultivation and the second rural sanitation.

The rice plant can tolerate flooding, but grows better in mainly aerobic conditions. Farmers flood their fields to control weeds, substituting water for labour. Scientists have taken this as a norm. Conventional paddy growing practices are relatively management sparing. Seedlings are grown in a flooded seed bed, uprooted quite roughly when 21-40 days old and transplanted by being pushed down in clumps of 3, 4 or more into flooded, puddled soil, either in lines or at random and close together. Fields are then kept flooded throughout the growing cycle.

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) simultaneously changes all these practices. Seedlings when still very young and small, 8-12 days old, are transplanted carefully (the principle is TLC – tender loving care), 1-2 plants per hill and widely spaced in a square pattern: this reduces plant population by two-thirds or more. The paddy soil is kept moist with mostly aerobic conditions, with intermittent applications of light irrigation. Manual push-weeders control weeds and churn up and aerate the soil. There are many benefits and few disbenefits from this set of practices: plants are supported above ground by more extensive longer-lived root systems, are stronger and healthier and more resistant to pests and diseases and to drought and storms, and produce many more tillers (each of which bears a head of grains) which also give better outturns in milling.  Across many rice varieties, on-farm evaluations in eight countries found yields raised by an average of 47 per cent, with water savings averaging 40 per cent. Costs of production per hectare were reduced by 23 per cent and farmers’ net income per hectare was boosted by 68 per cent.

Traditional rice research, notably that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has been locked into a paradigm of crop improvement through breeding higher-yielding varieties, responsive to chemical fertiliser, and dependent on large amounts of water for flooding. This genocentric strategy led to the Green Revolution. There have been other successes particularly with some disease resistance, and recently with developments in GM breeding for beta-carotene (for Vitamin A). But despite huge investments there have been no broad improvements which work with all varieties equivalent to those with SRI management. Nor which bring such multiple benefits. SRI is a green revolution of a different sort.

Turning to rural sanitation, the conventional approach worldwide has had two thrusts: first, to teach and educate, seeking to induce changes in behaviour (software); and second, to subsidize the installation of facilities (hardware) designed by engineers. The reasoning has been that poor people need to be taught the importance of hygienic behaviour, and that they deserve decent sanitation but cannot afford it. However, didactic strategies of behaviour change have had rather limited effect, and the commonsense approach of hardware subsidies has not worked: the experience in many countries, with both Government and NGO programmes, has been that many of the toilets constructed are not used or are used for other purposes.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), like SRI, turns conventions on their heads, with radical, simultaneous, mutually-supporting changes. Instead of teaching people, there is facilitation of people’s own appraisal and analysis of their own open defecation and its effects. Instead of subsidies for hardware for individual households, people dig their own pits and construct their own latrines. Instead of being handed down engineering designs, people make their own designs. Instead of outside interventions for those least able to construct their own latrines, community members are encouraged to help them. Instead the number of latrines constructed, the focus is more on how many communities have been verified as open defecation-free.

Students learning SRI the hard way

SRI and CLTS have met with similar resistances from the respective professions. Both confront the stasis of accepted commonsense conventions: these stem from and are locked in by professional training and norms – of rice research scientists and of engineers and others who promote rural sanitation. The lock-ins are reinforced by funding.

Both SRI and CLTS entail multiple simultaneous changes of concepts, principles, methods, behaviours, relationships and mindsets. Both are, in a full sense, shifts or flips of paradigm taking us into new spaces with dramatic new potentials. Neither cost much to develop. Both were evolved by doing, hands-on, in local conditions. Both are close to the lives and realities of poor rural people. Both were discovered by remarkable innovators – Father de Laulanié with SRI in Madagascar in the mid-1980s, and Kamal Kar with CLTS in Bangladesh in early 2000. Both have been spread internationally by champions fired with well-informed enthusiasm – Norman Uphoff with SRI, and Kamal Kar himself with CLTS, both of them quickly joined by many other champions energized through the wonder and excitement of ‘seeing is believing’ personal experience of dramatic transformations.

These two movements are unstoppable and spreading on a remarkable scale. The governments of China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, where together two-thirds of the world’s rice is produced, are promoting SRI methods, based on their own evaluations and results. Worldwide, the number of farmers benefiting from SRI practices in over 40 countries is in the range of 2 million and growing rapidly.

In mid-2011, CLTS practices are also found in over 40 countries. Spread has been most extensive in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, with other African countries following hard on their heels.  It is increasingly endorsed by governments as policy or approved practice. As of mid-2011 well over 10 million people lived in communities that had been declared open defecation free, while millions more should be benefiting in communities which are not yet ODF.

Both SRI and CLTS have discovered principles with wider applications. SRI principles and practices have been applied to sugarcane, wheat, finger millet, teff and other crops. Some have renamed it SCI, the System of Crop Intensification. CLTS principles and practices have been applied also to solid waste management, for example in Cairo, and to sanitation in urban slums.

SRI and CLTS raise acute questions. I pose these as challenges to you and to all development professionals:

• Are we disabled by lock-ins to paradigms and mindsets which narrow, focus and frame our vision so that, as with traditional rice research and rural sanitation, we fail to see and find breakthroughs?
• Are there other development liberations from lock-ins waiting to be discovered and promoted?
• If there may be, how should we set about looking for them? How in other words can radical, revolutionary, innovators and disseminators – de Laulanié’s, Uphoffs, and Kamal Kars – be found, supported and encouraged?
• Do we need to take more risks and to celebrate failures in development, as Engineers Without Borders do? Should we judge harshly any organisation that cannot boast of the risks it takes, and of its failures to prove it? Is lack of failures itself a failure?

There may be clues in the commonalities of SRI and CLTS. Both were counter-intuitive. Both confronted and upended unquestioned commonsense and conventions of deeply rooted neo-Newtonian best practice. Both originated from grounded hands-on innovation, observation and awareness. And both followed many years of applied experimental experience – de Laulanié’s growing rice and Kamal Kar’s in participatory facilitation and development. Does this mean that such people and such conditions should be sought out and supported?

So finally – are these transformative international movements of SRI and CLTS one-off phenomena? Or are they forerunners of much else waiting to be discovered and spread? Are there similarly paradigmatic flips lurking latent in other improbable domains? And will future generations look back and marvel at how we could have been so timid, unimaginative and lacking in hands-on creativity, that none of us discovered them earlier?

See also Robert’s guest post on CLTS , or this three minute intro video featuring Kamal Kar

Cereal Secrets: Lifting the lid on the World’s big 4 grain traders

Campaigners and journalists love a brand – targeting Nike, Walmart, (maybe even Oxfam) virtually guarantees you a bigger audience. Unfortunately, that means brand-less companies can get away with murder (hopefully just a figure of speech). Cereal Secrets, a new research report for Oxfam by Sophia Murphy, David Burch and Jennifer Clapp, lifts the lid on some of the biggest and most influential firms you’ve never heard of – the ABCD group of grain traders, whose joint sales are over $300bn (see table) and have been doing very well during the recent food price spikes (see graph – Cargill’s been having a particularly good crisis).

Here’s the headlines from the overview:

“This report introduces the four big commodity traders – Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, often collectively referred to as “the ABCD companies”. It looks at these traders in relation to a number of the global issues pressing on agriculture: the “financialization” of both commodity trade and agricultural production; the emergence of global competitors to the ABCDs, in particular from Asia; and some of the implications of large-scale industrial biofuels, a sector in which the ABCDs are closely involved. It includes a discussion of how smallholders in developing countries are affected by some of these changes, and highlights some development policy implications.

1. The ABCDs matter. They are not alone, nor unchallenged, but they remain the overwhelmingly dominant traders of grain globally, and what they do is central to understanding international markets (and the domestic politics of food in many countries, too). Too often invisible in policy debates about farmers and consumers, these companies are careful about where and when they get involved in such debates, rarely seeking the limelight. They do not have brand names to protect in the way that a food processor such as Nestlé does. ADM is publicly listed and Bunge is also a fully public company. Dreyfus and Cargill remain essentially family-owned businesses. None of the companies is very forthcoming about its activities, and to track their activities requires patience and guesswork. However, despite the difficulties, it is important to understand their role and their interactions with other companies, national and global.

2. The ABCDs are evolving. This is inevitable, given globalization. At this stage in their evolution (and some of the companies are over 150 years old), they have begun operating in some cases like banks (and banks, in turn, have found themselves trading on commodity exchanges). The ABCDs continue to trade grain, but grain is not their only activity, nor is it where their growth is most impressive. As they grow, they need more capital, and there is constant pressure for the historically family-owned company, Dreyfus, to undertake public share offerings. With that will come legal demands for greater transparency, although probably not enough to satisfy concerns about the potential for abuse of oligopolistic market power.

3. The ABCDs do not operate in a vacuum. New realities, particularly the rise of new economic powers, including China, Brazil, and India, as well as the re-emergence of Russia and some of the former Soviet republics as agricultural powerhouses, are reshaping the global economy. The ABCDs are responding and adapting to those changes, as well as playing their part in deciding the direction that events should take. The new emerging powers are not as wedded to open trade, deregulated markets, and deregulated capital flows as are the governments they now challenge (the United States and the European Union, in particular). One effect of this change in the balance of power has been to make the likelihood of a meaningful outcome to the Doha negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) improbable.

Between 2006 and 2008, average world prices for rice rose by 217%, wheat by 136%, maize by 125%, and soybeans by 107%. Rising and volatile prices define the context in which policy debates on food and agriculture are taking place today.

Many explanations have been offered for these steep increases, and recent summaries can be found in the intergovernmental agency report to the G20 and the High Level Panel of Experts’ report on food price volatility. Explanations ascribe higher food prices to increasing demand for meat-based products, which require animal feed made from grains; higher oil prices, which have led to higher costs for fertilisers and other inputs; the increased use of maize and soybeans for biofuels production, in part due to government policies in Europe and the USA; and deregulation of financial markets opening the way for commodity derivatives, which link food commodities in significant ways to other commodities in financial markets.

There has been a particularly heated debate among economists over whether the increase in investment in agricultural commodities futures markets via new financial derivatives is a main driver of recent food price volatility. However, a growing number of analyses link at least some of the food price volatility of recent years to increased investment in these markets. The Bank for International Settlements, for example, has noted that financialization affects commodity prices, especially in the short term; a conclusion that several UN reports have also recently come to recognize.

While supply and demand fundamentals remain important, herd behaviour among investors, which is often linked to the availability of imperfect information, may make price swings more dramatic than they otherwise would have been. Financial actors who know little about the physical production of food are affecting the real world of food production and consumption through investments on commodity futures markets. As such, financialization has further abstracted food from its physical form. This financialization has occurred in a broader context of capital deregulation that has reshaped the way in which food markets interface with financial markets.

The report does provide some new evidence on these complicated issues and suggests some avenues for further work. It starts from the analysis (by Oxfam and others) that (a) food price volatility is a problem and (b) speculation and biofuels, alongside other factors such as export bans, are helping to drive volatility. It goes on to show that the role played by the ABCD trading firms is important, but that how to address them and limit their power is not obvious, and regulations and changes will probably need to target broader reforms. But understanding the economic and political power of the ABCDs is essential to developing a smart strategy to realize changes that will protect the interests of smallholder farmers and poor consumers in developing countries.”

Obama v Kofi Annan: Who has the best model for agriculture in Mozambique?

This guest post from Joseph Hanlon (right) was also published today on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog

Mozambique is a development paradox. Rural poverty is increasing despite high growth rates and billions of dollars in aid. Now the country has been targeted by two contrasting models of agricultural development. The Obama model was backed by the G8 in Washington in May, while the Annan model was proposed by the Africa Progress Panel (APP). Which works better for the poor?

The APP is heavyweight and conservative, chaired by Kofi Annan and with members including a former IMF head and a former US Treasury Secretary. It says one of the biggest dangers in Africa is the growing inequality between rich and poor, which is creating a threat of social instability. In sub-Saharan Africa “the current pattern of trickle-down growth is leaving too many people in poverty.” And the panel warns that Mozambique is one of the more unequal countries in Africa. The APP points out that Mozambique is a net importer of staple foods, despite having huge agricultural potential.

The APP report calls for “fundamental change” in both donor and African government policies. “Raising the productivity of smallholder farmers is critical. Smallholder agriculture must be placed at the centre of a green revolution in Africa.” This will require more government action and more support for small farmers.

Let’s call this the Annan model.

The second agricultural model for Mozambique was agreed in Washington in May, when G8 leaders adopted a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition proposed by President Barack Obama and USAID. The idea is to use giant agribusiness to end hunger in Mozambique and five other countries. The first project in Mozambique will be to support Cargill, the giant grain trader and largest private company in the world, to take 40,000 hectares of farmland. US officials say this will include some small-holder contract farming, which means Cargill will not make enough profit from the investment, so the giant transnational grain trader must be subsidised from G8 aid.

Let’s call this the Obama model.

The two models are incompatible. The Africa Progress Panel report points specifically to the very large land concessions in Mozambique,

Annan model

and warns that “for Africans, the benefits of large-scale land acquisitions are questionable.”

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently issued its Africa Human Development Report 2012 which points to “the recent international scramble for land in sub-Saharan Africa” and urges caution on big foreign investors.” Much agricultural technology for producing crops is scale-invariant (it is as efficient on small farms as on large), so large farms should not be expected to be inherently more efficient.” The report warns that “private investors naturally prioritize their own objectives, not the well-being of the poor and vulnerable.”

To be fair, Mozambique’s experience with large investors has not been all bad. Indeed, a single US multinational has probably done more to reduce poverty in Mozambique than any donor action – and without subsidy and without grabbing any land. Universal Leaf Tobacco has agreements with 150,000 peasant families, and their earnings from tobacco have lifted thousands of families out of poverty. How ironic that the antidote to poverty should be a poison, tobacco.

But Universal’s success is due to a different model to that of Obama – out-grower or contract farming. The company provides seeds, fertiliser and other inputs as well as extension services, and guarantees to buy the crop. In return, the farmer must sell her tobacco to Universal. This package works because of two factors: first, risk is shared, so if a drought or cyclone destroys the crop then farmers do not have to pay Universal for the seeds and fertilisers they received. Second, the market is guaranteed; if a farmer grows tobacco, she can be sure to sell it.

Obama model

Elsewhere, Mozambique has the lowest agricultural technology levels in southern Africa, because under the present free market policies, peasants are expected to carry all the risk – of weather, pests and a lack of market. Mozambican farmers are very poor – the average rural cash income is $31 per person per year. That is less than the price of a bag of fertiliser. Very few peasant farmers are willing to risk their whole year’s income on fertiliser, or better seed, or a different crop. The problem for Mozambican peasants is that foreign companies will only share the risk with tobacco and cotton, and are not interested in other crops. And under the present free market system pushed so hard by the international community, the state is not allowed to share the risk for maize and other domestic food crops.

Nearly all Mozambican farmers still use only a hoe, and do not have a tractor or oxen to plough, so they can only farm 1.5 hectares. Now, international investors are noticing that this leaves vast tracts of underused land. The difference between the Annan and Obama models is how that land is to be used. The Obama model is that giant northern agribusinesses like Cargill with G8 help should take that land and end poverty through what the APP calls “the current pattern of trickle-down growth”. The Annan model would upgrade million of peasant farms to up to 5 hectares each, using most of the available land, but providing initial support with mechanical ploughing, inputs and assured markets.

Will the Annan or Obama model lead to the biggest reduction of poverty and the best use of Mozambique’s land?

Joseph Hanlon is visiting senior fellow at the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics and honorary research fellow in the School of Environment and Development of the University of Manchester. He has been writing about Mozambique since 1978,

Fighting for food security in India

Biraj Swain (right) is Oxfam India’s Campaigns Manager and Co-Editor and author of the IDS-Oxfam India Special Bulletin “Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India”, launched in Delhi this week

In India, over the past 15 years the debate about food, under a rights-based perspective, has become increasingly complex. Earlier concerns about famines, emergency relief and technology-driven green revolutions have given way to discussions on the state’s failure to deliver public distribution programs, the discriminatory biases these programs perpetuate, legal entitlements to land use and ownership by men and women farmers, climate change, domestic and international price volatility and the role of non-governmental and social actors – from the media to INGOs, farmer’s networks and social movements. In other words, the debate has shifted from starvation and subsistence to dignity and justice.

2001 saw the scandal of the country bursting at the seams with 60 million metric tonnes of food grains as starvation, death and distress migration afflicted six states of India. The People’s Union of Civil Liberties, one of the first groups to organize, sued the government, arguing that it must open its grain reserves to feed the hungry. The writ also demanded that the government provide jobs to people in drought-affected villages and support those who could not work.

Eventually, after over 150 judgments and interim orders, India’s Supreme Court agreed that the state was indeed responsible for providing nutrition and public health. The most persuasive argument to the court is that the right to food is directly related to the constitutional guarantee of a “Right to Life”. The court expanded the original writ – which covered Rajasthan only – to the entire country. When the government said it simply couldn’t afford to provide every citizen with the right to food, the court replied that lack of money was no excuse and even ordered the state to extend some of its local food programs.

The National Food Security Bill is an outcome of the 11 plus years of litigation, street protests and the continued media and public scrutiny of the Right to Food case by 2500+ civil society organisations and a trade union coalition called the Right to Campaign. In response to such pressure, the current government, when it came to power in 2009, made universalisation of food security one of its electoral promises. The draft bill was finally tabled in parliament on 22nd December 2011.  While much could be said about the omissions in the draft bill, it still marks a great step forward  and food rights champions hope that when it does get passed into legislation, it will be far more progressive and inclusive than its current avatar.

To discuss the background to this path-breaking legislation, 21 prominent authors and commentators have joined hands with Oxfam India and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex to put together the special Bulletin ‘Standing on the Threshold: Food Justice in India’. This will be launched at a dedicated two-day event at New Delhi’s Constitution Club on the 17th and 18th of July.

From the father of India’s green revolution, MS Swaminathan, to public intellectual CP Chandrasekhar and Supreme Court Commissioners on Right to Food NC Saxema and Harsh Mander, the contributors agree that the approval of the National Food Security Bill is an important step forward for India, but a law, alone, can do little. India is still in the top 10 for child malnutrition, infant mortality and land grabbing – a gloomy picture produced by complex institutional failures, gaps in legal frameworks and a lack of political will at the central and state level as much as the weak monitoring mechanisms of existing public distribution programs.

If India’s second green revolution is to contribute to an accelerated reduction of poverty, hunger and malnutrition, it undoubtedly has to be a state-led project: far from being old-fashioned, the state’s pricing policies, legal entitlement system, public distribution and natural resource management programs are key to reaching the poorest of the poor. There are currently no quick-fix alternatives to a desirable good-quality universal Public Distribution System (PDS) and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). What’s more, the current food, nutrition and agriculture programmes are failing to tackle deep-seated discriminatory practices (in society as much as within state institutions), but rather re-inforcing them. Stronger, transparent monitoring by accountable state agencies is an absolute must.

If food security is about having certainty about the future, the common goal must also be that of a gendered growth in agriculture and food security that gives the same rights on the land to men and women farmers. A complete halt on any new land acquisition is required until a way of calculating and compensating social, economic and environmental costs is in place, particularly with regards to tribal communities for whom the right to the land is still particularly uncertain. National mainstream media also have a crucial role to play: the most common references to food by them still revolves around restaurant reviews, food festivals and cooking and dieting (!) books.

Finally, India must realize that any global climate policy will be shaky without solid domestic foundations, reflecting the concerns of poor people, including farmers and fishermen, in India as elsewhere. In sum, putting access and equity at the heart of debates on climate, natural resources, institutional accountability and agriculture must be a priority. In this regard, India could play a pioneering role, as it has in areas such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or the Right to Information legislation.

The future will belong to nations with grains and not guns. We have enough grains for all  – we need to open and expand our thinking on what can be done, and how to build a future where everyone on the planet always has enough to eat.

And edited version of this blog also appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters site today

What does the UN’s first Africa Human Development Report say about food security?

A guest post from Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right), who is taking over from me as head of research at Oxfam in a couple of weeks, (I’m not leaving, just changing jobs within Oxfam – more on that later).

Over the past two years, I spent most of my time working on the first Africa Human Development Report (left), which was launched yesterday in Nairobi. It was about time for the first African HDR, especially given recent famine in the Horn and repeated threats of humanitarian food crises in the Sahel. The report focuses on food security – for a large number of Africans (some 220 million), hunger is a daily threat – and often one with permanent consequences.

The premise of the Africa HDR is simple: food security, through better nutrition, can improve education, health, productivity, and other important social and economic factors that allow people to have a good life (see figure).

In contrast, malnutrition can be a long lasting burden:

“The perverse dynamic between food insecurity and poor education, bad health and poverty can last generations. Hungry children with weakened immune systems die prematurely from communicable diseases such as dysentery, malaria and respiratory infections that are ordinarily preventable and treatable. They start school late, learn less and drop out early. Malnourished mothers are at greater risk of dying in childbirth and of delivering low-birthweight babies who fail to survive infancy. Undernourished babies who make it through infancy often suffer stunting that cripples and shortens their lives. As adults they are likely to give birth to another generation of low-birthweight babies, perpetuating the vicious cycle of low human development and destitution.”  

Recent evidence reveals a jarring paradox in Africa. Several countries have been progressing very rapidly in the last years – between 2004 and 2008, African economies grew on average 6.5% annually; child mortality is decreasing; school enrollment is improving; and the Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education, and income) has risen faster than anywhere else since 2000. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa has not been able to turn improvements in human development into better nutrition indicators – especially compared to Asia’s progress in the last two decades. In sub-Saharan Africa the number of malnourished children increased by 55 million in the last 10 years. 

The stubborn persistence of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is partly the result of a brutal neglect of the rural sector for decades, which led to widespread rural poverty, low agricultural yields, poor infrastructure, and limited basic services in rural areas:

- 93% of the arable land is rain-fed.
- African farmers use less than 20 kgs of fertilizer per hectare of arable land, compared to nearly 350 kgs in Asia.
- Since the early 1960s, production of cereals per capita has fallen 13% — the only region to suffer a decline. Today, cereal production in Africa is around 150 kgs per capita; in Latin America it is close to 300 kgs, and in Asia more than 350 kgs.
- Only 30% of Africa’s rural population lives within 2 kilometres of a road. In South Asia, 58% do.

This policy bias reinforced a vicious circle of high levels of inequality, skewed control over resources, and access to opportunities against certain groups – for instance, women have less ability to own and inherit land (figure). As the African Progress Panel Report (launched last week) mentions, the new wealth is not creating the necessary employment or reaching marginalized groups. Add to that the detrimental effects of some international practices – including the lingering effects of structural adjustment, lavish northern agricultural subsidies, the production of bio-fuels, and neglect of agriculture in official development assistance.

African governments face important policy decisions, mostly on how to transform the recent economic growth and advances in other development indicators into long-term opportunities. The report focuses on four areas of intervention: increase agricultural productivity, strengthen nutrition policies, build resilience, and empower marginalized groups. 

These are interventions that each African country will need to weigh against other national priorities. There is evidence that African people recognize the attempts that governments make to improve access to food. And they also notice when they don’t: about 60% of respondents on the 2009 Gallup World Poll special issue on food security in Africa disagreed with the statement: “The government of this country is doing enough to help people get food”.

Creating better institutions and investing more resources are part of the solution. But any real improvement in the food security situation of African societies will need to make sure that all groups participate actively in the decision-making process. Solving the food security conundrum in Africa requires strong public action. The role of the agricultural sector in development and poverty reduction has been explored at length. But the role of nutrition, social protection, and civic participation has not been duly recognized. Active citizens can play a critical role in ensuring that governments are held accountable and that any policy related to food is participatory and equitable (a very important issue given the recent spate of land grabs).

Too often in Africa (as well as other developing regions), governing elites do not reflect the public interest in their actions and policies. Issues of governance, agency, and democracy might seem unimportant for food security but, increasingly, we have learned that hunger and starvation are closely related to politics and political economy. This is why empowerment and resilience are important. Access to information, roads, and well-designed social programs allow people to make better decisions and better participate in markets and societies. The power structures that keep certain groups from accessing land or that bias public investment towards leaders’ constituencies must be clearly identified – and African governments, civil society, and other stakeholders will need to alter these power relations and give everyone a fair chance to avoid the perils of hunger and its negative consequences for human development.

And here’s the 6 minute launch video

What have we learned from trying to help poor farmers use markets better?

After some pretty rarified policy wonkery on agriculture and development last week, Erinch Sahan, an Oxfam private sector adviser, summarizes what we have learned from our work in the field  (for once, the right expression). And no, there doesn’t appear to be much obvious overlap with the topics covered in the earlier posts, but I think it’s there if you dig a bit.

Like most NGOs, Oxfam has lots of ‘livelihoods programmes’ that try and find ways to use markets to improve people’s incomes and economic security. Usually, this is around agriculture, as we see the huge potential in smallholder farming. Recently, we’ve been trying to capture the underlying philosophy behind this work. By ‘we’, I mean a bunch of livelihoods advisers, led by markets guru David Bright. I’m not sure there’s a definitive set of interventions that constitute an ‘Oxfam approach’ to ‘gendered market and enterprise development’ (sorry), but we have found that our philosophy doesn’t fit neatly with the standard models floating around in this field, such as value-chains, sustainable livelihoods and making markets work for the poor (M4P). This is because, at its heart, Oxfam programmes are sceptical about getting just any kind of economic growth. We’ve seen that this can leave the poorest behind and fail to address inequality between men and women. However, triggering the right economic opportunities for poor people is tricky and the approach can look very different in different contexts. So having said all of that, here’s where we’ve got to on an alternative:

1. Intervene to rebalance power in favour of poor producers, particularly women

Sounds good, but how can it be done?

a) Support producer organisations. Ok, there are probably as many bad examples of collectives, co-operatives and other producer organisations as good ones, with most excluding women, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. Collective market action is a great way to get to the volume of production you need to interest buyers, and also means you have the power to get better deals on inputs and services. There is a plethora of research on this and we wrote a book that attempts to describe what good ones look like, as well as running a research project on women’s collective action.

b) Support specialised enterprises that help smallholders trade. We love smallholders here at Oxfam and think that businesses that try to help them are just as super. If we can create a business that goes and finds different market options for smallholders, we’ll support this business with financing, training, information, machinery or whatever is needed to make it viable. These businesses can also provide services to ensure women and other marginalised smallholders can access markets and help them get their product quality right. All this can really empower smallholders to choose the best deal, rather than take whatever is on offer. Sometimes money can be made by doing these things, but the enterprise must be focused on being an intermediary for smallholders. It’s even better when smallholders themselves own these enterprises.

c) Give direct support to allow the poorest to make a start. Especially to small businesses that are creating jobs and market opportunities for poor people. This can be a crèche so women are freed to participate in business or sometimes it’s providing finance, such as match funding for a harvesting or processing machine. Where possible, we want the business, business partners, markets or the local government to provide support for these things, but where these fail, we are willing to step in to get things going. However, the end goal is always to create a business that can stand on its own feet. The challenge is doing it sustainably, so the asset (e.g. easily repairable machinery) is used to generate a revenue stream, rather than being left to go rusty.

d) Change the rules of the game. That means helping poor people gain a voice with their governments or in how a company operates. It could mean setting up the right forum for them to talk or getting people to speak collectively, so the many small voices become one bigger voice. It could be about building coalitions with those who share their interests (including local businesses). It could be as simple as having somewhere to resolve contract disputes between a company and a farmer or working to ensure women can take higher value roles beyond the low or unpaid roles customarily considered ‘women’s work’. Here’s an example from Colombia.

e) Build on catalytic events. It’s as much about the when as the how. We do this by being opportunistic and jumping in when something big has happened to shake things up. That can be a new government that is changing the regulatory landscape, a major new investor who’s challenging existing monopolies or even a natural disaster that means much of the local economy is being rebuilt. These are situations where we can take the ‘market systems approach’ (see below) and look for ways to shift the balance of power in favour of small producers

f) Ask the question at every opportunity, how is this empowering women? The focus needs to be on women right from the very beginning (starting with research on the roles women play in the market and the home).

2. Look at the whole market-system

The points above are key to our livelihoods programmes, but how do you choose where or how to intervene? We do this by putting on a market-systems lens. We’re most like M4P in this respect and least like value-chains (which essentially focus on connecting producers to buyers). By market-systems I mean spending time to understand all the things that surround poor producers and their enterprises, including government, infrastructure, and hidden forces such as cultural beliefs and practices. It’s about identifying and ‘unlocking’ hidden problems that cause the whole market-system to fail for poor people. An example is providing finance for remote, rural and women-owned enterprises. We also try and work out who is going to ‘drive’ that new service or change the policy or grow the trade in the system when we withdraw. We often have to help out to pilot the new service or prove the benefit of changing the policy etc. 

3. Also intervene outside the market system

Poor people don’t only interact with the market system but also with their household system and the eco-system. Women in particular are heavily constrained by what happens in their homes as well as the market and everyone can be held back when nature stops cooperating (e.g. soils becoming infertile or rivers running out of water). Often, we intervene in all three systems. For instance, a programme may try to free women up from onerous chores at home (intervention in the household system, such as installing local water standpipes to avoid a 2 hour daily walk), while helping a new producer-owned business get off the ground (intervention in the market system, such as helping locals demand a new road), and also teaching new ways of conducting sustainable agriculture (intervention in the eco-system, such as knowing how to adapt to heavy but infrequent rain). We’ve found that intervening in one system alone while ignoring the others can be ineffective.

4. Intervening directly where facilitating is not an option

If we find a way to play a direct role to help poor people, we’re happy to play that role. This could mean giving cows to women with absolutely no other assets so they can get on the ‘first rung’ of the economy to produce, consume and sell small amounts of milk. But what we can do on our own is always going to be a drop in the ocean, so we search for ways to get those already in the system to play this role. This could be a local bank lending people money so they can buy their own cow, or a local company who’ll benefit from the improved productivity agreeing to provide farmers with training. However, too many of the people we want to help are too poor for those in the system to bother doing business with them. And where we can’t find a way to get markets to work for the poorest, we’re open to intervening directly. This may be as simple as paying for analysis to show how women producers are key to a business. This is probably where we disagree most with the M4P crowd (we agree strongly on the systems stuff).

These are just snippets of things we’ve noticed in the programmes we like best. Feel free to comment/add your own.

Agricultural policy, poverty and the role of the state: the OECD responds

Today Jonathan Brooks author of the OECD’s new book on agricultural policy and poverty reduction, responds to my rather critical review. (For footie fans, the photo behind him is taken in a Brazilian bar, and celebrates the lobbing of the English goalkeeper David Seaman by Ronaldinho in the 2002 World Cup)

Duncan, Thanks for this review, and the opportunity to reply.

I wouldn’t make quite so much of the counterpoint with Ha-Joon Chang’s book, as we at OECD would concur on the general need for countries to be able to adopt agricultural strategies that are tailored to their structural circumstances and stage of economic development, and would agree that there is no one-size-fits-all development template.

In policy terms, our main point is that direct interventions in markets – be that through subsidies for seed and fertiliser or price guarantees – are not ideal in the long term, for precisely the reasons you quote. In that sense, you’re right that we see a narrow role for government in directing markets. However, we see a potentially much broader role in getting those markets to function properly. It is perhaps worth adding, for readers not familiar with OECD, that while we are direct in our policy advice, we have no formal powers to limit a country’s “wiggle room”.

In terms of broader strategy, I think there were more areas of agreement at the meeting than of controversy:

Because smallholder farmers dominate the rural economies of poorer countries, and because many of them are poor, raising their productivity is critical to poverty reduction strategies. I fully accept Michael Lipton’s point that smallholder farmers are operating efficiently given the constraints that they currently face. The key challenge is to ease those constraints. You can’t do many things better than build a road that enables the farmer to get her product – and the majority of them are women – to market.

Equally, I would endorse the view that there is a need to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture. The good news is that the potential for that investment to pay dividends is better than it has been for many years. High food prices have imposed real hardship on poor consumers, and on the large numbers of farm households who are net buyers of food. Yet our current Agricultural Outlook, which we produce jointly with FAO, projects that prices will remain strong for the foreseeable future. In the long-term, that has to be an opportunity for developing country farmers. For decades we have complained about the effects of low food prices on developing country farmers, and it is worth remembering that there were 850 million undernourished people in the world in 2006 – when world food prices were at an all-time low.

But our main message – and I think the discussion could have picked up on this better – is that focusing on agriculture is not enough. All countries that have developed and raised incomes from a few hundred dollars per capita per year to a few thousand dollars per year have developed their agricultural sectors, but they have also diversified their economies and created better paid jobs outside farming.

Much is made of the need for a Green Revolution in Africa, to follow the Green Revolution in Asia. This is absolutely necessary. If agriculture is the heartbeat of the economy and the heart is not working properly then you need to fix it. Yet forty years after its Green Revolution, much of India’s rural population remains mired in poverty and more than 40% of children are underweight. Although India’s economy is growing rapidly, and generating unprecedented wealth, agriculture has been effectively excluded. Indeed, the sector accounts for nearly two-thirds of all employment, yet commands just 16% of national income. And India is not unique: two-thirds of the world’s poor live in middle income countries where rural incomes languish. What we were suggesting – and this is something that agriculture specialists often accept grudgingly – is that in addition to raising agricultural productivity we need to hook rural populations into wider engines of growth. If we seek to generalise from the circumstances of the poorest agriculture-dependent economies, such as Ethiopia and Malawi where there are few sources of potential employment outside agriculture, then we risk missing a vital route to resolving the global poverty problem.

Steve Wiggins’ point is an interesting one. The difficult question – and we don‘t pretend to have all the answers here – is when do the investments that he describes smooth the transformation of the sector and when do they impede it? The package of investments he outlines – with roles for government, the private sector, donors and NGOs – can help broaden agricultural growth. But it is important that new development projects can survive the expiration of funding and that they do not deter farmers from seizing opportunities elsewhere.

To sum up, we need a broader strategy that widens opportunities both within and outside farming, and creates diversified rural economies, so that rural incomes catch up and we do not witness distress migration to squalid shanty towns.

I’ve never been to a Trotskyist meeting or belonged to a religious sect, but I agree that some of the discussion became a bit esoteric. I think that reflects the propensity of agricultural economists (and I confess to being a member of that particular sect) to become embroiled in technical questions such as the optimal farm size, and in some cases to view any wider discussion of multi-sectoral dynamics as somehow “anti-agriculture”. Agricultural development is necessary – but it is not sufficient.

What agricultural policies worked in today’s successful economies? Important new book from Ha-Joon Chang

OK, time for a series of posts on agricultural policy. Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan (as well as friend) of Ha-Joon Chang. Routledge recently published a book edited by Ha-Joon that I think is very important indeed. Unfortunately, it’s only come out in very expensive hardback (a snip at £85), and the FAO, which funded it, is not known for its publicity machine, so here’s some background and excerpts.

‘Public Policy and Agricultural Development’ aims to do on agricultural policy what Ha-Joon’s 2002 book ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’ did on industrial policy, namely reclaim the lessons of history to refute the ideas of the Washington Consensus and instead suggest a much more activist role for the state (although its conclusions on ag are less statist than Ha-Joon’s work on industrial policy in books like Kicking Away the Ladder).

The book builds on detailed case studies of 11 developed countries in their earlier stages of development and the experiences of 10 developing and transition economies in the last half century. It presents six detailed case studies of agricultural policy in the last half century in two Latin American countries (Chile and Mexico), two African countries (Ethiopia and Ghana), and two Asian countries (India and Vietnam).

It covers a huge range of ag policy issues, including land policy (land tenure reform and land quality improve¬ment), knowledge policy (research, extension, education, and information), credit policy (specialized banks and agricultural credit co-operatives), physical inputs policy (irrigation, transport, electricity, and divisible inputs such as fertilizer, seeds, and farm machinery), policies intended to increase farm income stability (price stabilization measures, insurances, and trade protection), and policies intended to improve agricultural marketing and processing.

The core message is that ‘despite distinctive country-specific issues, agricultural policy challenges that confront countries at earlier stages of economic development, today and in the past, are remarkably similar across countries….. today’s rich countries all grappled with landlessness, fragmentation of holdings, lack of irrigation and other rural infrastructure, backward technologies, limited availability of credit to small farmers, excessive price fluctuations, limited availability and poor quality of farm inputs (especially fertilizers), poor warehousing and marketing facilities (which often force farmers to sell at the wrong time and wrong prices), food insecurity, and trade shocks.”

This means that there is a lot that countries can learn from other experiences, both historical and contemporary’. It frees our “policy imagination” by showing that the range of policies and institutions that have produced positive outcomes for agricultural development has been much wider than any particular ideological position – be it the pre-1980s statist one or the pro-market ‘New Conventional Wisdom’ of the Washington Consensus (NCW) – would admit. It also shows that the willingness to experiment with new policies and institutions, and the willingness to learn from other countries’ successes and improve upon their solutions, were important in all agricultural success stories.

‘Rethinking Public Policy in Agriculture’ has the potential to be highly influential in changing the way we think and talk about agriculture and development, reclaiming the lessons of history, and providing a rich set of experiences and ideas for policy and institutional reform. At the core of these experiences is the role of smallholder agriculture, and what governments need to do to help them become a driver of development. At first glance, that fits in very well with some of the core messages of the GROW campaign, but Oxfam’s women and ag specialist, Sally Baden, will address that tomorrow.

And if you’re still hungry for more, here’s a bit more detail from Ha-Joon’s overview chapter.

“Land reform is today supported in only very muted and market-based forms (e.g. no ownership ceilings), but Japan and other East Asian countries had a very successful comprehensive land reform system that included strict landownership ceilings.

State-backed specialized rural banks and credit subsidies are only reluctantly accepted by the NCW, but all of today’s rich countries used these devices. Profit- driven micro-finance is favoured over credit co-ops in the current orthodoxy, but many of today’s rich countries used the latter successfully. Ghana’s rural banks, half owned by the government and half by the local community, are an innovative variation on the theme.

While marketing boards are routinely denounced by the orthodoxy, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Denmark and some other European countries had benefited from effective export marketing boards.

Co-ops are these days not exactly discouraged, but the central role that they played in the development of agro-processing and marketing in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Japan are not sufficiently emphasized by the proponents of the NCW.

Price stabilization measures are frowned upon by the NCW, but many of today’s rich countries used them and some had great success with them, such as the USA and Japan. More recently, Chile has used a very effective price stabilization scheme.

Facilities like state-subsidized agricultural insurances, public provision or subsidization of warehousing facilities, and input (e.g. fertilizer) quality control were some of the very effective policies used by today’s rich countries (and some of today’s developing countries, like Chile in the case of state-subsidized insurances). These policies are not actively objected to by today’s orthodoxy, but they are not given sufficient attention.

All these issues suggest that the contents of the agricultural policy tool-box for today’s developing countries will be significantly enriched if history is taken more seriously.

Third, our study reveals that the exact institutional forms of successfully delivering critical needs of the agricultural sector vary enormously across time and space.

There were successes with all forms of delivery in all sorts of countries – public provision (e.g. agricultural research in the USA, extension in the Netherlands, irrigation in Vietnam, seeds in Mexico, rural credit in Germany), private provision (e.g. marketing services through contract farming in Zambia, machinery services in Egypt), private delivery subsidized by the state (e.g. agricultural insurances in Chile, certain types of research in The Netherlands), public– private partnerships (e.g. irrigation in Sweden), cooperatives (e.g. butter and bacon processing and marketing in Denmark, credit co-ops in Germany), state–cooperative partnerships (e.g. rural banks in Ghana, export marketing in Denmark, fertilizer supply in Korea) – which suggests that the standard dichotomy between the public sector and the private sector is crippling our policy imagination.

Likewise, our study reveals cases of failures with many of these delivery modes. Public provision failed miserably in agro-processing in Ghana before the 1980s. Private provision failed spectacularly in fertilizer supply in post-socialist Hungary, agricultural education in post-socialist Ukraine, and extension and fertilizer supply in post-reform Ghana. Sometimes both the public sector and the private sector failed in the same area, suggesting that the causes of the problem lie deeper than ownership form – rural credit in Zambia and seed supply in Ghana. Cooperatives in many developing countries were not very successful, giving them a bad name.

All these examples suggest the importance of a pragmatic approach not hidebound by pro-state or pro-private sector ideologies. Indeed, one important common characteristic of success stories is their willingness to pick solutions that do not neatly fit into ideological boxes.”

Or you can read his summary in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Why seasonality is back and that’s a good thing

A Welsh friend of mine once came back home after a long stint in Nicaragua. A mate picked him up at the airport and on the long drive back to Cardiff, Alun turned to him and asked ’so, how’s the harvest been this year?’ His friend looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Which brings us seamlessly to this guest post on seasonality from John Magrath……

Seasonality describes the fact that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about – or bring to a peak – all sorts of effects – most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt.

It was a regular theme in development studies from the late 1970s – when it was pioneered by the great Robert Chambers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies – to the 1990s. Then it rather fell from favour. Now a new book, Seasonality, Rural Livelihoods and Development, the result of a conference at IDS in 2009, aims to revive the topic.

I declare an interest, as the book opens with a scene setter of a chapter written by myself and Steve Jennings about the growing influence of climate change. It draws on Oxfam research to describe how farmers in many countries perceive that their seasons are changing, throwing up new challenges.

Advocates for taking seasonality more seriously argue that, by showing how “normal” seasonal vulnerabilities underpin tip-overs into crisis when the weather is particularly bad, seasonality can be a powerful argument for proper planning to even out seasonal variations and enable people to have “a-seasonal” livelihoods.  Furthermore, seasonality affects every aspect of people’s lives, and understanding the complex and ratcheted (to use Robert Chambers’  favourite word) interactions enables one to intervene holistically, rather than sectorally.

But seasonality has always been neglected by governments and by aid workers because they don’t tend to live in rural communities – especially not during the rains. There are urban,  “tarmac” and  dry season travel biases in their understanding.

Then on top of those, in the 1990s interest faded away, largely because of the precipitate decline in public investment in agriculture generally.  With that went the abolition of many of those counter-seasonal measures that actually were in place (though not always effective), like grain reserves.

Many things have changed since the 70s: the growth of towns, communications that reduce isolation, the spread of social protection systems such as India’s employment guarantee schemes.  But the seasons have not gone away. Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Richard Longhurst and the other authors argue that understanding and building seasonality into policies is still relevant – in fact maybe more relevant than ever as climate change bites. And that still isn’t happening; they say that disaggregated data on seasonal poverty is still hard to find, and one of their recommendations is that poverty statistics should reflect seasonal variation, instead of reporting a single poverty headcount for a given year.

They also make the point that seasonality isn’t, fundamentally, about “blaming the weather”; rather, the weather exposes fundamental inequalities in resource distribution – that is, social injustice. But maybe the fact that seasonality is triggered by weather has made campaigners for social justice wary of embracing the subject and contributes to its neglect.

As I say, I declare an interest because I think that seasonality is one of those things that is staring us in the face so closely that we don’t see it properly; we take it for granted as “just another thing poor people have to put up with” when it could illuminate our understanding, analysis and practice. But am I right? Or do people working in development say a) we recognise seasonality but actually, we don’t see it as particularly important compared to other influences on poor people’s lives, or other ways into helping them tackle their problems? Or b), we think it is important but we think that it is already incorporated sufficiently into planning for long-term development, humanitarian response and, in particular, social protection initiatives?

Mobile phones and farmers – what are the benefits?

There’s a ridiculous amount of hype talked about mobile phones, but they clearly are having a significant impact on poor people everywhere in lots of unexpected ways. Last year I met a group of Ethiopian coffee farmers who had no running water or electricity in their homes, but each family had a phone. When I asked what difference they make, the answer was always the same. You can check in on your relatives, talk to the sick, or sort out a meeting without going in person. By skipping the landline stage and moving straight from having to walk miles to see someone (public or private transport is rare, beyond mules and horses), without any certainty that they will be there when you arrive, to calling them on the mobile, the new communications technology has brought huge time savings.

That’s pretty typical of discussions of mobile phones and development – another uplifting anecdote and not much data. But now Vodaphone have teamed up with Accenture and Oxfam to try and take a more systematic look in order ‘to stimulate the necessary engagement between mobile operators, governments, NGOs and businesses to realise these opportunities and explore others.’ The result is a new report ‘Connected Agriculture:  The role of mobile in driving efficiency and sustainability in the food and agriculture value chain’. Here’s some highlights:

“The study concentrates on 12 opportunities for mobile technology, in four key areas highlighted by stakeholders: improving access to financial services, provision of agricultural information, improving data visibility for supply chain efficiency and enhancing access to markets. Where possible, researchers modelled the anticipated total number of mobile connections to each service in 2020 and the associated potential increase in agricultural incomes and reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions…… Each of the 12 opportunities was modelled across 26 countries in Africa, India, Australasia, Europe and the Middle East.

Mobile communications can help to meet the challenge of feeding an estimated 9.2 billion people by 2050. The 12 specific opportunities [see table - keep clicking on it if you want to expand] explored in this study could increase agricultural income by around US$138 billion across 26 of Vodafone’s markets in 2020.

They could also cut carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 5 mega tonnes (Mt) in these markets and reduce freshwater withdrawals for agricultural irrigation by 6%, with significant savings in water-stressed regions. These benefits assume there will be around 549 million mobile connections to relevant services in 2020.

Mobiles can help farmers improve agricultural productivity by giving them access to basic financial services, new agricultural techniques and new markets, in turn helping them to secure better prices for crops and a better return on investments. As their income improves with each harvest, they can invest in better seeds, fertiliser and chemicals.

The greatest potential for improving farmers’ income comes from access to financial payments and agricultural information via mobile, together delivering approximately 75% of the total increase in agricultural income from the opportunities studied.”

I have to admit that from what I could read in the report, I wasn’t convinced by the big numbers. They reckon the $51bn from improved access to financial services would come from an additional 240 million connections – that’s over $200 per mobile per year, which seems an awful lot for a typical small farmer (and the report claims to focus on smallholders). The methodology annex is pretty sketchy but says ‘the increase in agricultural income was based on the potential uplift in average value added per agricultural worker. The potential uplift factor was based on empirical field studies where available, rather than attempting to model the complex individual drivers responsible for increasing smallholder income.’ What it doesn’t say is the extent or whereabouts of those field studies.

But in any case, on the basis of my own (ahem) in depth research in Ethiopia (i.e. the conversations described in the first para), I’m not sure dollars and cents are the best metric for measuring the human impact of mobiles. Has anyone seen or done any research on the broader (and perhaps more important) impact on the time/care economy?

In her foreword to the report, my boss Barbara Stocking distances Oxfam from the number crunching (we had our doubts about that bit), welcomes the focus on mobile financial services, on moving this discussion away from corporate philanthropy and into discussions of core business models and applying these to smallholders, and urges the phone companies and others to go further in three areas:

• How mobile technology could improve the efficiency of government safety net systems that assist the poorest and most food insecure small farmers – rather than looking only at the role that mobile technology can play in increasing farmer productivity and income from agriculture

• How companies such as Vodafone can better understand, document and address barriers to the use of mobile technology affecting women. Getting new technology owned and used by women often carries significant challenges, for example overcoming illiteracy and cultural norms which mean that men tend to be the early owners and beneficiaries of new technologies

• How mobile technology could drive new agricultural practices rather than simply greater efficiency in current practices, particularly around climate change adaptation, and ensuring focus is given to a full range of opportunities around climate change adaptation.

To which I would add the bit about the time economy.