‘Resource Futures’: good new report on how to confront resource scarcity and conflict

Looks like this is going to be crystal ball week on the blog – must be the time of year. Just read Resource Futures from Chatham House (inventors of the ubiquitous Chatham House Rule). The analysis is pretty good, but it really raises the bar on communication, with great interactive infographics and killer facts. Advocacy wonks everywhere, take note.

The paper summarizes the key trends and flashpoints in global resource use, including:

• Resource trade has grown nearly 50% from a decade ago in weight terms owing to expanding trade in oil, iron and steel, coal, oilseeds and cereals
• Large-scale resource extraction remains concentrated in a handful of countries (China, the United States, Australia, the European Union, Brazil, Russia, India and Indonesia)

And then boils it all down into 5 ‘key findings’:

Volatility is the new normal

Volatility (see graph), driven by shrinking ‘buffers’ (eg reserve stockpiles) is spurring resource nationalism and needs to bedampened down by government and international action. The report has some clever ideas on how to design price smoothing mechanisms for oil, food and metals.

Environmental change and degradation are challenging traditional approaches

Environmental boundaries are starting to bite, notably climate change and water scarcity. Not much new in the way of ideas here (remove fossil fuel subsidies, improve water-sharing agreements etc), more ‘just do it’.

Trade as a frontline for resource conflicts

‘Trade is becoming a frontline for conflicts over resources’. Interesting – trade wars on the way back, eg over unilateral export bans by food producers, but in a different guise from the old WTO style struggle over import liberalization

Resource politics matter

‘Resource politics, not environmental preservation or sound economics, are set to dominate the global agenda and are already playing themselves out through trade disputes, climate negotiations, market manipulation strategies, aggressive industrial policies and the scramble to control frontier areas.’

Likely flashpoints that will need international action include resource production in highly eco-sensitive areas like the Arctic and ‘extreme engineering’ such as weather modification. The report picks up Alex Evans’ suggestion for a high profile annual ‘State of the World’s Resources’ report.

Collaborative governance is the only option

The report’s main big idea, in terms of policy proposals, is to set up a ‘new club of the world’s principal resource-producing and -consuming countries to fill existing governance gaps on resource and scarcities governance. This ‘Resources 30’ or R30 grouping, conceived as a ‘coalition of the committed’, would comprise leaders and officials from thirty countries of systemic significance as resource producers, consumers, importers or exporters.’

And here’s report co-author Bernice Lee introducing the findings

Why the World Bank is wrong (so far) on large land deals

You’re getting a lot of guest posts this week, not least because I’m in India – expect a spate of India posts next week. Here’s Hannah Stoddart, Oxfam’s Head of Economic Justice Policy, responding to the World Bank’s response to Oxfam’s call for a freeze on large land deals.

Oxfam’s land grabs campaign, launched on 4^th October, highlights the alarming increase in the speed and scale of large land deals in the past decade. It calls on the World Bank – as an investor in land deals, as a global standard setter and as an adviser to developing countries on their land policies – to freeze those of its agricultural investments that involve large land deals for 6 months while it reviews its policies and practices to ensure land grabs are prevented.

The World Bank has responded through official statements, blogs and interventions on panels. Here’s Oxfam’s response to some of the Bank’s main counter-arguments:

• Extent of World Bank involvement in land-grabbing

Some at the World Bank have suggested that it is not the right target – it is only involved in a ‘few cases’ that could potentially constitute land grabs and at any rate it is not as bad as most other investors. Oxfam stands by its focus on the Bank for a number of reasons. First, given the Bank’s mandate for poverty alleviation, even one land-grab case is a case too many.

Secondly, in reality we know that there are very likely more than a few controversial cases relating to land. 21 cases involving land disputes have been brought by communities since 2008 (Oxfam is involved as a complainant in a number of them). We also know that between 2000 – 2012, 56% of the complaints to the Compliance Adviser Ombudsman (CAO) have been in relation to land. The CAO also confirms that in the past 4 years there has been a growing number of complaints in relation to agri-business.

Lastly, while the World Bank may not the worst culprit when it comes to land-grabbing, it IS the only global bank with a mandate for poverty alleviation and it is a crucial institution for setting the bar high in this area. In other words, we believe that if Oxfam can’t convince the World Bank to raise its standards, we have no hope of getting other financing institutions to do so. If the Bank takes leadership, we hope we can leverage change in other institutions as a result, from regional development banks to private investors.

• World Bank’s role in agriculture

In reaction to our call for an investment freeze, the World Bank contends that it has increased its agricultural investments precisely in response to calls from organizations such as Oxfam for it to focus on a sector that has been neglected for too long. It argues that to suspend its agricultural investments – which overwhelmingly benefit smallholders – will only end up harming the very people that Oxfam seeks to support.

In response, we have never argued – and never will – that the World Bank should not be investing in agriculture. We welcome increased investment in agriculture by the Bank that genuinely benefits smallholders. This is why we are not arguing that the Bank should get out of agriculture altogether. And this is also why we are not calling for a freeze of all agricultural investments, but for a temporary 6 month freeze on agricultural investments that involve large-scale land acquisition – which the Bank acknowledges is not the majority of its investment portfolio. To put it another way, we’re invoking the precautionary principle – something the Bank has done itself in the past when it froze lending to the palm oil sector as a result of a controversial case in Indonesia.

As the World Bank’s investment in agriculture has increased from $2.5 billion in 2002 to $6-8 billion in 2012, the risk of some of these investments involving problematic land acquisition is heightened (for the record, this figure was misquoted by some media as being up to $8 billion in land investments, Oxfam has always been clear that the overall figure is for agriculture more broadly, some of which will involve land acquisition).

We welcome models of agricultural investment – both large-scale and small – that benefit communities and genuinely lead to shared benefits based on consultation and consent. We have recently published a paper outlining models of positive agricultural investment, and Oxfam GB CEO Barbara Stocking reiterated this message recently in the Financial Times. What we oppose is a model of agricultural investment that involves the mass transfer of land rights away from poor farmers and communities, a model that  frequently leads to conflict and for which there is very little evidence of pro-poor outcomes.

• Transparency

The Bank has suggested that it is a leader in the area of transparency. While Oxfam agrees that it has made great advances over the years, we feel that there are still some real areas of concern. First, we can’t even tell the full extent of the Bank’s investment in this area: there is no clarity on the overall size of its land portfolio. For an institution that rightly prides itself on the huge advances it has made in making  its data accessible, this is disappointing.

Second, 17 of the 21 complaints involving land raise issues relating to inadequate transparency. Third, over 50% of lending through the International Finance Corporation (the private sector lending arm of the World Bank) is channeled through financial intermediaries: these investments are far more opaque, and these bodies are also not subject to the same standards as the World Bank. And it makes it almost impossible for Oxfam to judge whether the Bank’s claim is true that ‘only 2% of IFC agribusiness loans in the past financial year involved land acquisition’. Furthermore, the trend towards new lending instruments and technical assistance makes it far more difficult to hold the World Bank accountable for cases where it might not have directly funded a project that results in controversy, but has provided the advice that made it possible.

So if the Bank wants to know #whatwillittake to end poverty, Oxfam thinks taking leadership on stopping land grabs is a great place to start.

Hannah Stoddart is Head of Economic Justice Policy at Oxfam GB

Mouthwash or Global Leadership? What the Hunger Summit will tell us about Britain’s commitment to development

An edited version of this article appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters website yesterday

When it comes to debates about world hunger, mouthwash – more fragrant PR than finding long-term solutions to feeding the planet without destroying it – is just as much of a problem as the greenwash the abounds in environmental fora.  And the Listerine test will be ready and waiting for recently-announced Hunger Summit, to be hosted by Britain during the Olympic Games.

But before we descend into full NGO curmudgeon mode, let’s step back and appreciate the significance of the announcement that David Cameron intends to use the Olympic spotlight to debate world hunger (his spin doctors can’t have been happy at him harshing the national mellow in this way). This is not an isolated gesture – the UK is one of the few European countries to stick to its promises to spend 0.7% of national income on aid from 2013 onwards, and is pushing hard for a tough international treaty to regulate the global arms trade. This kind of leadership earned the Prime Minister an invitation from the UN to chair (along with the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia) a ‘High Level Panel’ to explore how the world can set collective long-term targets for reducing poverty and achieving sustainability.

And leadership is desperately needed. In a world that produces enough food to feed everyone, 1 in 7 of us currently go to bed hungry. In Yemen, the number of food insecure people has doubled since 2009, and Oxfam is about to scale up to reach a million of them. In West Africa, over 18 million people are at risk. The crises are cyclical and deepening – this is a systemic issue, not a one off.

As to why Britain is taking the lead in this way, explanations run the gamut from a continued effort to detox the Tory brand (i.e. mouthwash), to a broader push to use aid to pursue national security goals, to a search for international statesman glory, to (shock) the Government actually understands and is committed to the importance of ending hunger and world poverty.

How will we know which of these is true when the Hunger Summit comes around? By whether it is a one-off event, or the launchpad for a genuine effort to tackle the global perfect storm of climate change, pressures on land and water, high and erratic food prices and rising consumption. Next year, Britain chairs the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies, providing David Cameron with the chance to repeat the developmental coup of the Gleneagles summit of 2005, when a combination of political leadership and mass campaigning produced breakthroughs on debt and aid. Should he so wish, the G8, along with his membership of the High Level Panel, will provide ample opportunities for British leadership on global development and sustainability.

Early signs also suggest that the Summit will echo the Obama Administration’s reliance on private sector solutions. While some private sector companies are showing a real lead (Unilever  is aiming to involve 500,000 smallholders in its supply chains by 2020), companies can be nasty as well as nice. The state has a crucial role both in regulating private sector behaviour, but also playing a hands-on role in agricultural development (as has been the case in almost every successful agricultural take off to date). Whatever the fiscal temptations, the summit needs to avoid passing the buck.

Beyond the paraphernalia of photo-ops and ‘announceables’, Oxfam, along with many other NGOs, will be looking for concrete commitments in several areas: putting a stop to the spate of land grabs in poor countries by large foreign companies lured by high commodity prices and the prospect of future scarcity; tackling the perverse impact of biofuels, which in the name of rich world energy security, are ousting hundreds of thousands of small farmers from their land, deepening poverty and hunger; greater investment in the 500 million small farms that 2 billion of the world’s more vulnerable people rely on for their sustenance, and reforming an international tax system that allows western tax havens to actively encourage capital flight and tax evasion, sucking  billions of dollars out of poor economies.

Without such progress, the hunger summit will not be nearly enough. Tackling hunger today is welcome, but the prospect of rising hunger for future generations has to be on the table too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can the UN get its act together on food and agriculture?

On Tuesday incoming FAO boss José Graziano da Silva (right) gave his first press conference, so I did one of those rabbit in the headlights interviews down the line for Al Jazeera on the role of the FAO (results below). Al Jazeera is rapidly becoming my favourite news channel – not just for its unrivalled coverage of the Arab Spring but for its wider development coverage. Which other major global news outlet would devote 20 minutes to how to sort out the multilateral food system?

Anyway, back to Graziano. He reiterated the five priorities he has set out for his leadership of the FAO: end hunger; move towards more sustainable systems of food production and consumption; achieve greater fairness in the global management of food; complete the FAO’s reform and decentralization; and expand South-South cooperation and other partnerships.

All good stuff (although the FAO also needs to do much more on gender, as I say in the interview), and everyone wants him to succeed – as we grapple with the ‘perfect storm’ of high/volatile food prices, resource constraints and climate change over the next few decades, we really need a fully functioning, effective, non-sclerotic FAO leading the way. One ground for optimism is that Graziano was in charge of implementing Brazil’s hugely impressive ‘zero hunger’ campaign, and at the press conference he stressed the importance of that kind of top level political backing to getting things done. He also emphasized the need for the FAO to get out of its bunker and talk to governments, civil society organizations, farmers and others. Fingers crossed.

More from Lawrence Haddad here. Or read Graziano setting out his stall in the HuffPo (where, to be fair, he tackles the gender issue much better).

New and harder evidence on climate change, hunger and food prices

New research published in Science magazine  shows climate change is already hitting food production, but the journos reporting it seem to have got themselves in a tangle. The Guardian reported it as saying that prices would be pushed up by ‘as much as 20%’, while the Economist put the figure at about 5%. It pains me to say it, but the Guardian got it wrong.

The origin of the discrepancy appears to be that the Guardian article glosses over the research’s finding that the fertiliser effect of higher CO2 concentrations (CO2 is the basic input for photosynthesis, so more CO2 means more plant activity) works in the opposite direction to other aspects of climate change, increasing yields and bringing down the 20% figure for the reduction from climate change impacts on the weather to something more like 5%.

The numbers on food prices are actually: 18.9% gross impact of higher temperatures (and precipitation trends, though these are far less significant than the temperature effects) from 1980 to 2008, and 6.4% net impact of higher temperatures plus estimated benefits of the fertilisation effect.

The study points out that this approximately 5% increase in food prices is equivalent to around $50bn per year of additional spending on food (out of the total of around $1 trillion the world spends annually).
 
So… we have a study which (for the first time, I think) quantifies the impacts of climate change on today’s yields and prices, due to changes in temperature and rainfall – both of which are projected to become more severe as a result of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere (note that higher temperatures are shown to be much more significant than rainfall patterns over the period of this study). It finds a 4% decline in maize and 2-3% decline in wheat yields (i.e. around 4% less maize and 2-3% less wheat was produced globally than would have been the case without global warming.) In real terms, these percentages are equivalent to the annual production of maize in Mexico, and of wheat in France.
 
Putting some of these elements together, the study shows that changes to the climate (higher temperatures, changed rainfall, increased CO2 concentration) has meant that:
- global food prices have risen by 6.4%
- the world has spent an additional $50bn per year on food
- crops equivalent to one year’s production of maize in Mexico and wheat in France have been lost
 
These may seem like relatively small numbers so far, but the key driver identified in the study – temperature rises – is projected to increase at significantly faster rates in the coming decades than occurred in the period of this study (global average temperatures have risen by 0.13C per decade since 1950, and are projected to rise by 0.2C per decade over next 2-3 decades, according to IPCC, with higher rises likely in areas of cultivated land – so local impacts in food growing areas will be more extreme, even assuming that there are no tipping points along the way).

All clear? [h/t Tim Gore]

Genetics and food doesn’t have to be just about GM: genetic markers

The most interesting article in the Economist special report on ‘Feeding the World’, reviewed here yesterday, was on the question of new technologies. Quote: ‘The only reliable way to produce more food is to use better technology’. Some excerpts here:

“There will not be big gains in food production from taking in new land, using more irrigation or putting more fertiliser on existing fields. Cutting waste could make a difference, but there are limits. The main gains will have to come in three ways: from narrowing the gap between the worst and best producers; from spreading the so-called “livestock revolution” [i.e. battery farming]; and—above all—from taking advantage of new plant technologies.”

“The change likely to generate the biggest yield gains in the food business—perhaps 1.5-2% a year—is the development of “marker-assisted breeding”—in other words, genetic marking and selection in plants, which includes genetically modifying them but also involves a range of other techniques. This is the third and most important source of growth….

The public debate on plant genetics focuses almost entirely on the pros and cons (mostly cons) of genetic modification—putting a gene from one species into another. A gene from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, for example, when spliced into maize, makes the plant resistant to herbicides; this enables farmers to plant maize, spray the crop with a weedkiller and end up with a field of nothing but maize. In Europe it is illegal to plant such maize. The biggest advantage of genetic selection, however, is probably not that it makes it possible to grow transgenic crops (“Frankenfoods”), but that it allows faster and more precise breeding.

Imagine the genetic material of plants as a vast library, with billions of books. This library has no catalogue, and none of the books has an index or table of contents. It is still possible to discover what is in the library by reading every volume. That is roughly what plant breeders have done in the past, painstakingly planting hundreds of varieties of a single species and discovering traits by breeding numerous generations from them.

Genetic marking is the equivalent of giving every book a title, table of contents and index—and with much greater speed and accuracy than any librarian could manage. Monsanto has a “corn chipper” which takes a small amount of genetic material and generates a DNA profile of hundreds of maize seeds simultaneously in seconds. It leaves the seed alive, so breeders, having mined the computer data from this and every other seed in Monsanto’s vast library, can go back to a seed they like and breed from it. It is possible literally to find one plant in a billion.”

Nice to see the discussion getting away from the normal trench warfare over GM, and to look at a wider range of technologies. However, the usual issues that dog the ‘nice v nasty technology’ debate still apply – who controls the R&D budget and agenda? Who benefits from implementation? Do poor producers benefit or lose out? See previous post for more on this.

But before you conclude that GM isn’t a big deal, here (from a different section of the paper) is the latest data on GM use, which is booming in several developing countries. “Over 15m farmers planted GM crops in 2010; 94% of them come from developing countries, which include 19 of the 29 countries where GM technology is used.”

Feeding the 9 billion: where to agree/disagree with the Economist?

[Update: The author, John Parker's, response to this post is here]

This week’s Economist has a timely special report (accompanying editorial here) on the ‘Future of Food’, which definitely merits a couple of posts. I (along with hundreds of colleagues) have been developing the content for Oxfam’s forthcoming campaign on ‘food justice in a resource-constrained world’, so reading something like this is very helpful – where do we agree with the Economist, where do we disagree, and (always the hardest question), what’s missing from its analysis?

Like most mainstream analyses of ‘feeding the nine billion’, the report is strongest on ‘the production challenge’, fluently setting out the likely trends in demand from growing, more affluent populations, and going into some fascinating detail on the new techniques and technologies that will help feed the world. More on that tomorrow. 

It’s also good on the growing ecological challenge – how to produce more food within the kinds of environmental and resource boundaries (climate change, water etc) that are becoming ever more constraining on human activity. Within that, the waste of 30-50% of all food produced also gets some clear attention. The Economist, like Oxfam, thinks biofuels are particularly bonkers, quoting Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, saying that government biofuel targets are ‘the craziest thing we’re doing’, diverting huge amounts of food into fuel tanks, often with negligible environmental benefits.

So top marks on biology, botany, chemistry, ecology and the other natural sciences. The big gaps (as always) concern what you might call ‘humanities’ – people, power and politics. The Economist seems to prefer technological solutions to political ones.

First distribution/equity: there’s nothing on gender (just giving women farmers, who produce most of the food in many countries, equal access to credit, seeds etc would massively increase output, as well as respecting their rights). Nothing on the case for massively scaling up investment in smallscale agriculture (in fact, very little at all on the heated debates on small v large production models). No recognition that if small producers (whether peasants or labourers) constitute most of the world’s poor people, then a response that ignores them is unlikely to tackle hunger – nutritional trickle-down is far less likely to succeed than including small producers in growing the food in the first place, rather than just consuming stuff churned out on high tech, low job large farms (when they have enough cash to buy it).

If a fairer distribution (of assets, opportunities and power itself) is to happen, then discussions like this have to grapple with messy political issues: producer organization to improve poor people’s bargaining power (leading to better prices, higher income, and less hunger); tackling the lobbies of vested interests, north and south, that skew government decision-making; what to do about corporate control of value chains that suck out the wealth, and leave producers fighting over the scraps.

A notable throwaway line on India encapsulates the weaknesses: ‘for reasons no one understands, Indians of all income levels now eat less food, and of a lower quality, than they used to, and than you would expect.’ Eh? No one understands why hunger persists in India despite high levels of growth? Who did they ask? The bottom line for the Economist is that all that tricky power and politics stuff is just too difficult: ‘Pushing up supplies may be easier than solving the distributional problem.’ Let’s just skip it and get back to sorting out vitamin A deficiency. How convenient.

Finally, the report has little on how to boost resilience, whether to food price spikes or other forms of volatility such as climate change. Being charitable, issues such as reforming the chaotic food aid system or using social protection to smooth over such shocks may simply have been beyond the remit of the piece. That may also explain the odd absence of any discussion of how bad trade rules can contribute to hunger – trade reform is usually a stock part of Economist recommendations on any issue, however tangential.

Here’s a table summarizing overlaps and differences – please correct any oversights, or add other issues. I urge any Oxfam staff or supporters reading this blog to try and read the Economist piece in full, not least as intellectual preparation for the next four years of campaigning.

Economist v Oxfam slide

The new Future of Food and Farming Report: excellent diagnosis; patchy cure; no power and politics

I attended the launch at the UK Treasury this week of The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability. It’s a high level UK government report from some top scientists, and should have significant influence over the next few years on much of the terrain Oxfam will be exploring in its new campaign on food and resource constraints. Here are some initial impressions, based on the 40 page (!) executive summary.

Overall Message: ‘The food system is failing humanity’, John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK Government at the launch.

The report argues that there are both major failings in the food system today, and five key future challenges, namely:

1. Balancing future supply and demand sustainably (i.e. feed the 9 billion without destroying the planet)

2. Managing volatility and protecting the vulnerable from unavoidable volatility

3. Ending hunger (the social justice/Amartya Sen bit)

4. Mitigating climate change in agriculture

5. Maintaining biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ (which seems to be what we now call the environment)

It sees small farmers as ‘an important component of both hunger and poverty reduction’ (p. 25)

In terms of policy asks, it lists the key priorities for action for policy makers as:
1. Spread best practice.
2. Invest in new knowledge.
3. Make sustainable food production central in development.
4. Work on the assumption that there is little new land for agriculture.
5. Ensure long-term sustainability of fish stocks.
6. Promote sustainable intensification.
7. Include the environment in food system economics.
8. Reduce waste – both in high- and low-income countries.
9. Improve the evidence base upon which decisions are made and develop metrics to assess progress.
10. Anticipate major issues with water availability for food production.
11. Work to change consumption patterns.
12. Empower citizens.

What do I disagree with? Not much. The report is maybe a bit too starry-eyed about science and technology, both old and new (hardly surprising given its authorship), but even there, with caveats:

‘New technologies (such as the genetic modification of living organisms and the use of cloned livestock and nanotechnology) should not be excluded a priori on ethical or moral grounds, though there is a need to respect the views of people who take a contrary view….. Decisions about the acceptability of new technologies need to be made in the context of competing risks (rather than by simplistic versions of the precautionary principle); the potential costs of not utilising new technology must be taken into account.’ (exec sum, p. 11)

Economically, the report is fairly liberal – arguing strongly for liberalized trade and against government intervention in a number of areas such as the regulation of corporate oligopolies (exec sum p 21). In contrast to its explicit criticism of export bans, it is more ambivalent (and vague) about land grabs.

The limits to liberalism are particularly evident in the lack of ideas on reducing volatility, where the report prefers transparency, information and safety nets to any kind of more forceful regulation (pp. 23/4). It says the jury is still out on whether speculation is a significant cause of volatility and is sceptical on global and virtual reserves apart from for WFP stocks for specific emergencies (p. 24).

It is pretty timid on the need to reduce meat consumption, merely mentioning it as a future possibility (p. 22)

But what worries me much more are the gaps. The report follows the unfortunate standard pattern of strong diagnosis, weak cure and absolute vacuum on issues of power and politics. There are several welcome but vague references to empowering women and northern consumers, but there it ends. There is almost no mention of producer organizations or more generally how to achieve a fairer distribution of power in markets, even though it is clear that the benefits of participation in such markets are shaped to a large extent by the relative power of the players involved.

When it comes to a model of change, there isn’t one. No discussion of what to do when those who profit from the status quo resist change. Instead the report takes refuge in the passive tense ‘a stronger constituency for hunger reduction needs to be built’. No power analysis, or sense of how the reforms it proposes might actually come about, and which are more/less politically feasible. No discussion of the likely role of climate and economic shocks like the food price spike in triggering change. Another depressing ‘if I ruled the world’ technocrats’ report, in fact.

It really is striking how many of these reports and processes refuse to stray from the happy sunlit uplands of evidence-based policy-making and win-win solutions. They see the global food system is dysfunctional, but talk as if this is just through some kind of accidental oversight or lack of research, rather than as an outcome of historical processes, including distributive conflicts and political struggle. Instead, the authors assume they can talk of a collective ‘we’, with shared interests and common solutions. The contrast between the subtlety of the science and the crudity/absence of politics (beyond largely vacuous appeals to ‘political will’ and ‘good governance’) is striking. It echoes the kind of ‘magical thinking’ on climate change that ran aground in Cancun, and which is regularly and brilliantly critiqued on the Political Climate blog.

When confronted with trade-offs – win-lose issues – such reports generally deny or avoid them, and have little idea how to discuss, let alone influence, non evidence-based approaches, even though those are an essential (some would argue much more important) part of political reality. The gulf between the polite debate in Whitehall and the turmoil on the streets of Cairo and Tunis (driven in part by high food prices) could not be greater.

In a sense, I guess that’s OK. Reports like these try to influence governments and other decision makers by expanding the boundary of rational policy making against the forces of ‘irrational’ (or at least non evidence-based) conflicts and political power. Talking of conflicts and power could mean taking sides and would risk compromising their objectivity in the eyes of their target audience. Instead, they aim to strengthen the hand of the Platonic guardians, be they civil servants or scientists, in shaping public policy and that is (generally) a good thing.

But even if the rationalist bubble is expanding over time, this approach still leaves a huge chunk of real life outside the remit of such reports, and that seems a serious weakness. Wouldn’t it be great if some body had the courage and the funding to take 10 of the major international reports (Stern on Climate Change, others on development, MDGs etc etc) and produced a parallel series of ‘the politics of X’ reports for each (and Anthony Giddens’ effort on climate change doesn’t count)? Any takers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

problem or solution?

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

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

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