‘Squeezed’: how are poor people adjusting to life in a time of food price volatility?

Ace IDS researcher Naomi Hossain introduces the first results of a big Oxfam/IDS research project on food price volatility

If the point of development is to make the Third World more like the First, then we aid-wallahs can pack our bags and go home. Job done.

The most striking finding of Squeezed, the first year results from the four year Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility research project, is how like the people of the post-industrial North the people from the proto-industrial South now sound:

• Stressed and tired
• Juggling work and home
• Surrounded by selfish individualists, led by uncaring politicians
• In strained relationships
• Constantly pressed for time
• Never enough money, even for the basics.

‘Squeezed’ is how the UK has been describing its middle classes, beset by austerity and recession. But the countries in our research have high growth rates and apparently a lot of poverty reduction.

So what’s squeezing them? The accumulation of five years of cost of living – particularly food price – rises, is the short answer. The early research results suggest price rises are bringing about social change by stealth, as people and their relationships to food (and each other) are being commodified faster than ever before. Policymakers seem oblivious to these changes, obsessed as they are with changes they can measure.

What does it matter if food prices rise? Economists tell us it doesn’t, at least not in the long run. Wages adjust, they say. High food prices mean more people will grow food, is the theory. People substitute cheaper alternatives for newly expensive foodstuffs.

Well, yes, wages adjust, people grow more food and substitute. But these are not costless adjustments. Wages are rising, for most people, but at a price: more dangerous jobs (work in a Bangladeshi garments factory, anyone?), less reliable work, more competition as women flood the informal sector. People don’t feel better off. Home life is less harmonious, with the unpaid work of care left undone or shouldered by harassed working mothers, tired grandparents or children. People see their wages rise but know this is a mirage: they are not, in fact, getting any better off. It is more difficult to save and so also more difficult to hope or aspire. Small wonder the period since 2008 has been replete with global disgruntlement: riots, protests, even the odd revolution.

Higher prices should mean people try to grow more food, but returns are unpredictable even while input costs rise. No sane young person wants to be a farmer when they grow up. The only appetite for growing more food seems to be in kitchen gardens: wherever people have a patch of land and the time, they are trying to avoid food markets by growing their own.

And yes, people substitute. They eat more tasteless food, protein-less staples tarted up with monosodium glutamate and e-numbers, cheap and cheerful sauces that the food companies are selling more of. They eat more dangerous food – smelly rice, broken eggs, fish of uncertain origins, pesticide-sprayed vegetables.

In these days of food price volatility, food is further from being a right than it has ever been. The change in how people relate to food – and each other – is one of kind more than quantity: uncertain and relatively high prices mean prioritising earning the cash needed for food above all else.

The squeeze is tighter in Nairobi than in London, true, but in both places, price rises force people onto the uncertain mercies of charity – NGOs and aid in Nairobi, food banks in London. Global food policy makers need to check their assumptions about adjustments to food prices, and decide whether they want the kinds of societies where cash matters above all else.

Pushing back against the squeeze on everyday lives means policies that protect people – stabilising prices for farmers and consumers and developingemergency ‘spike-proofing’ cash or food subsidies. It means policies that ensure everyone has the right to eat well and to be part of decisions about the food they eat, rather than relying on faceless global markets.

Ignoring the squeeze on everyday life that rising and volatile food prices create for people in poverty everywhere is dangerously short-sighted, and not only for people in the poor South. In the long run, we are all commodified.

And here’s Naomi introducing the report (6m video)

What’s the link between land grabs, trade rules and climate change? Good new briefing from Sophia Murphy

You can rely on Sophia Murphy for crisp, credible analyses of agricultural trade and food issues. Her latest paper, Land Grabs and Fragile Food Systems, is up to her usual standard. She locates the current row over land grabs in some broader debates that have rather fallen off the agenda, namely globalization and trade rules. Made me come over all nostalgic for the WTO-bashing of yesteryear.

Sophia argues that the globalization and the free trade agreements of the last 20 years have combined with fears over climate change to create the conditions for the current wave of land grabs. But the immediate trigger was the 2008 food price spike, which eroded the confidence of food-importing countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that they could rely on the trading system to feed their people (so many of them started grabbing land instead).

The problem with the WTO is that its insistence on removing import tariffs (which we campaigned on when prices were low) was not matched by any effort to discipline export controls, making it completely irrelevant when prices rose and exporting countries slapped on export taxes to try and keep the food at home, thereby compounding the price spike. Sophia also takes a swing at the WTO’s inability/unwillingness to do anything about corporate concentration in the food sector. When the price spike hit ‘the four companies that between them control an estimated 75 percent or more of the inter­national grain trade saw their profits soar.’

Failures in other areas have aggravated the problem. Food reserves have been run down, biofuels have added a new degree of uncertainty by tying food prices to those of oil and gas (when fossil fuel prices rise, more land gets turned over to biofuels, so less food is produced, so food prices rise). Climate change, both current and rapidly approaching, has only added to that sense of vulnerability on food security.

How to reduce the pressures that are driving the wave of land grabs? The report has a rather convincing policy shopping list arising from this analysis:

• Reformed trade rules that ensure export measures are subject to transparency and predictability requirements and that allow all countries policy space for food security policies. She also proposes ways to ease food price spikes by reducing biofuel production during price surges
• Publicly-managed grain reserves to dampen the effects of supply shocks
• Readily accessible funding for the poorest food importers, which would be triggered automatically when prices increase sharply in international markets
• The development of strong national and international laws to govern investment in land, respecting the principles and guidelines set out in the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure. Tanzania’s recently announced limits on how much land foreign and domestic investors can lease is a hopeful example of a national government taking the initiative to get serious about regulation.

At 12 pages, a very useful addition to the land grabs literature. And in case you missed it here’s what the fuss is about.

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

Food fight at the WTO: de Schutter v Lamy on whether trade leads to food security

The WTO ministerial (there was a ministerial?) was predictably forgettable, apart from the accession of Russia (the last major economy still to sign up) and a pretty outspoken attack on WTO boss Pascal Lamy (right) by UN Food Security czar Olivier de Schutter (below), who accused Lamy of ‘defending an outdated vision of food security’.

‘We must ensure that the debate starts from the correct premise. This premise must acknowledge the dangers for poor countries in relying excessively on trade. We must also assess the compatibility of WTO disciplines and the Doha agenda with the food security agenda. Without such a fundamental reassessment, we will remain wedded to food systems where the most efficient producers with the biggest economies of scale are relied upon to feed food-deficit regions, and where the divide only gets bigger.

This may look like food security on paper, but it is an approach that has failed spectacularly. The reality on the ground is that vulnerable populations are consigned to endemic hunger and poverty. 
 
The food bills of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) increased five- or six-fold between 1992 and 2008. Imports now account for around 25 per cent of their current food consumption. These countries are caught in a vicious cycle. The more they are told to rely on trade, the less they invest in domestic agriculture. And the less they support their own farmers, the more they have to rely on trade.

By promoting this trade-centric approach, we miss the simplest of win-wins. If we were to support developing world small-holders, who are often the poorest groups, we could enable them to move out of poverty, and enable local food production to meet local needs. In this context, trade would complement local production, not justify its abandonment. The urban poor would have access to fresh and nutritious foods, and the gap between the farmgate price and the retail price would narrow. This however requires policy space to limit price volatility at domestic level: it is this policy space that the WTO rules are reducing.

The policies currently shaped by the international trade regime are not supportive of these small-scale farmers. Instead, we impose a lose-lose upon them. They do not benefit from the opportunities that access to international markets represents for some. But it is they who are the victims of the pressure on land, water and natural resources on which they depend, for which they increasingly have to compete with the agro-export sector.

In the long term, poor net-food-importing countries will not be helped by being fed. They will be helped by being able to feed themselves. This is the consensus of the post-global food price crisis world that even the G20 has recognized. It is disappointing that the WTO continues to fight the battles of the past.”

Lamy replied with a letter (“I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that countries need to limit reliance on international trade to achieve food security objectives. On the contrary…”) and a detailed critique by WTO staff of de Schutter’s paper, “The World Trade Organization and the Post-Global Food Crisis Agenda: Putting Food Security First in the International Food System”. 

Interesting seeing how much more critical of trade-based food security a number of commentators (and governments) have become since the food price crisis. I remember being told in the early 90s by Costa Rica’s Central Bank governor that there was no reason why his country should grow any food at all – much better to export pineapples and buy food cheap from the US. Now governments have seen how volatile world prices can be, they have come to see the wisdom of rebalancing trade and domestic production. I still don’t buy the food sovereignty line about farmers in all countries having the ‘right to produce’ – that ignores issues of prices and consumers – but the debate has definitely moved away from seeing trade as the answer to everything.

One other postscript on the ministerial. The ODI’s Yurendra Basnett argues that it’s time for the ‘decoupling of the WTO and trade liberalisation’. Based on this exchange, good luck with that, …..

Introducing Growbag, a round up of new research on food, farming and climate by guest blogger Richard King

I can’t keep up with the flood of research on the issues related to the GROW campaign, so my ever-hungry colleague Richard King is riding to the rescue……

This occasional ‘blog series is a nutritionally dense (but non-exhaustive) collection of links, highlighting major recent publications and miscellaneous happenings that are relevant to Oxfam’s GROW campaign.

Like any growbag, this series requires planting and watering (to overextend a shocking pun). Seedlings for inclusion in future posts (along with any suggestions for improvements) can be emailed to research@oxfam.org.uk. Let’s get started:

1. ‘Price volatility and food security’ - UN Committee on World Food Security’s (CFS) High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE)

The report considers the causes and solutions to higher food prices and higher levels of food price volatility. It proposes three different explanations for recent international food price increases.

“The first explanation defines food price rises as a problem of agricultural price volatility‘ (implying that high prices will not last) and as a quasi-natural and permanent problem of agricultural markets. The second explanation points to the existence of periodic international food crises (1950s, 1970s, and present) and claims they can be explained by the dynamic of investment in agriculture. The third explanation sees current price increases as an early signal of coming and lasting scarcities on agricultural markets. The report does not choose between these three explanations. Instead, it emphasizes their complementarities. For example, the need for significant public investment in agriculture will be conceived of differently if the third explanation (coming scarcities) is taken into account. The main concern here is that short and medium-term measures should be compatible with and even contribute to resolution of the long-term problems.”

Key policy recommendations to address price volatility and its consequences for food security fall under six objectives:

- Building a food security oriented trading system
- Precautionary regulation of speculation
- International coordination of national storage policies
- Food reserves and the World Food Programme
- Refocusing public investment to achieve long term food security
- Curbing the growth of developed country demand for agricultural products

One aspect of the report that has been widely picked up on is the relative contribution to growing cereal consumption of biofuels and emerging markets’ demand for food. From Triple Crisis:

“…despite continued claims that growing demand for meat in China and India is driving food and feed demand, the growth in demand for cereals, excluding biofuels demand, averaged 1.3% since 2000, only slightly higher than in the 1990s and slower than in the previous three decades. Biofuels demand added half a percentage point to that global demand.”

Thus, one of the report’s more striking recommendations is “Given the major roles played by biofuels in diverting food to energy use, the CFS should demand of governments the abolition of targets on biofuels and the removal of subsidies and tariffs on biofuel production and processing.” 

The similarities with the earlier inter-agency report for the G-20 are striking.

2. ‘Policy Solutions to Agricultural Market Volatility’ - ICTSD
This takes a more pessimistic view of what is doable in the face of price volatility:

“A review of possible options for reducing volatility on international markets shows that none of them is likely to work… The conclusion is as disappointing as it is important. There is no effective way of doing much about price behaviour on world markets for agricultural commodities. These markets will continue to exhibit volatility, including the occasional extreme price spike, and there is no recipe against that malady. The only available policy response, then, is to try and minimize the negative implications of volatility.”

Developing countries, it seems, have more limited options: Trade policies can help shield domestic markets from international volatility, but they can’t target the most vulnerable and they exacerbate international instability. Domestic market interventions are deemed ineffectual, as are national stock policies (though there may be a role for emergency stocks in import dependent countries). Social safety nets can help poor consumers ride out the storm, but they need to be implemented when the sun is still shining, not when the storm is raging.

3. ‘Price formation in financialized commodity markets: The role of information’ – UNCTAD
UNCTAD makes the case for “soft regulation” of financialised commodity markets (increased transparency of both physical commodity stocks, and in financial exchanges and OTC markets; tighter regulation and limits on financial players’ positions). It also suggests considering a financial transaction tax to slow down investors’ activities in financial commodity markets. Why? Because, in the absence of full information, financial traders are like rampaging sheep (above): “Trading decisions are… taken in an environment of considerable uncertainty. In such a situation, it is rational to follow other participants’ trading decisions… In an environment of herd behaviour there are limits to arbitrage. Acting against the majority, even if justified by fundamentals, may result in large losses, often of borrowed money. It may therefore be rational for market participants to ignore their own information and follow the trend.”

4. ‘A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself’ - New York Times
“For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double. In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change. [the ‘carbon fertilization effect’] Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.”

5. ‘Biofuels and Climate Change Mitigation’ - World Bank
“If biofuel mandates and targets currently announced by more than 40 countries around the world are implemented by 2020 using crop feedstocks, and if both forests and pasture lands are used to meet the new land demands for biofuel expansion, this would cause a net increase of greenhouse gas emissions released to the atmosphere until 2043, since the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions released through land-use change would exceed the reduction of emissions due to replacement of gasoline and diesel until then.”

Pretty remarkable finding. However, “if the use of forest lands is avoided by channeling only pasture lands to meet the demand for new lands, a net increase of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions would occur but would cease by 2021, only a year after the assumed full implementation of the mandates and targets.” Better. But this would still require mass-scale livestock intensification and much-improved productivity on remaining pasturelands to prevent second-order, knock-on deforestation by people who would otherwise be using the pasture lands given over to biofuels. And there’s still the small issue of having enough land to feed 9 billion people by mid century…

6. Meanwhile, a report for ICTSD ‘The Impact of US Biofuel Policies on Agricultural Price Levels and Volatility‘ finds that US ethanol subsidies may have artificially inflated maize prices by as much as 17 percent in 2011. 

7. ‘Protein efficiency per unit energy and per unit greenhouse gas emissions: Potential contribution of diet choices to climate change mitigation’ - Food Policy journal
Interesting new paper on the impact of our dietary choices on climate change. Looking at the production and transportation of 84 common animal and vegetable foods to a port in Sweden, it finds “animal-based foods are associated with higher energy use and GHG emissions than plant-based foods, with the exception of vegetables produced in heated greenhouses.”

Importantly, it also considered the nutritional value (in terms of protein) of the foods per unit of energy and GHG emitted. “Whether in terms of energy spent or emissions of GHGs, this study showed that the efficiency of delivering protein… was much higher for plant-based foods than for animal-based. In addition, plant-based protein had the specific attribute of increasing efficiency with increasing protein content of the food. Therefore, strategies aimed at feeding a growing world population and reducing contributions to climate change should include measures to encourage a more vegetarian diet with the focus on consuming vegetable products with high protein content, such as legumes, nuts and grains.”

For further analysis related to this, see the excellent Food Climate Research Network

Africans and food security: what do opinion polls tells us?

I don’t normally associate opinion polls with development (apart from the exhaustive UK and other market research conducted by our campaigners) but in recent weeks a couple of powerpoints have swum in front of my glazed eyes showing some interesting results from opinion polls in large numbers of poor countries, conducted by Gallup and Globescan, two polling companies.

Gallup does an annual ‘world poll’ in 100 countries and this year focussed on food security, especially in Sub Saharan Africa. Findings?

Sub-Saharan Africans perceive agriculture (20%) and jobs (19%) as the most important issues for their governments to address

–Two-thirds (66%) of sub-Saharan Africans say their government is not doing enough to help people get food

–Nearly 6 in 10 (59%) say there have been times in the last 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy the food that they or their family needed

–Over a third of sub-Saharan Africans say they or their families have gone without food in the last 12 months several times, many times or always

–Sub-Saharan Africans across 26 countries rank reducing poverty and reducing hunger as the top two most important goals

The full powerpoint is here. More from Gallup on how Africans rank the MDGs here

Meanwhile Globescan annually surveys 26,000 adults in 26 countries, and their latest round up finds the following:

A significant decline in enthusiasm for free market capitalism

NGOs remain the most trusted institutions – must be all that high quality research…. – followed by (in descending order), ‘people in general in this country’, the UN, large national companies, religious groups, global companies, the press/media and bottom of the heap, national governments.

The most serious global problem in the eyes of the public is extreme poverty, followed by corruption. Least important of those suggested are religious fundamentalism and international migration (so either the populist politicians, or the pollsters have got something seriously wrong….)

Concern has ebbed on many environmental issues, particularly climate change, but interestingly, has fallen quickest in the rich countries, so public concern over what’s happening to the planet is now greater outside the OECD than in the traditional home territory of the environmental movement.

I don’t set huge store by these attempts to take the global pulse, but they are thought-provoking if nothing else. They also offer a potential solution to INGOs’ poor track record in doing longitudinal surveys to track how poor people’s lives change over the long term – why don’t we sit the pollsters down in a room with some of the participatory research gurus and come up with a stripped down, periodic version of the World Bank’s epic, but very complex and expensive ‘Voices of the Poor’ exercise – any takers? [h/t Andrew Rzepa, Gallup and Doug Miller, Globescan]

Which governments are best/worst at ending hunger?

League tables are a powerful weapon in the armoury of NGO advocacy. Politicians in the country that ends up in the top slot feel like they are getting some fleeting recognition for their efforts, while those at the bottom are annoyed and hopefully prodded into action. Newspapers love them too as they reduce a complex issue to a nice simple ‘heroes and zeroes’ story.

But doing them well is hard work, so hats off to ActionAid, who have published a ‘HungerFREE Scorecard’ in the run up to next week’s World Summit on Food Security (Copenhagen isn’t the only important international summit between now and Christmas).

The Scorecard ranks 29 developing countries according to 14 indicators across four issue clusters: hunger, the legal framework, sustainable agriculture and social protection. (It tries to do something similar for developed countries, but I found that exercise much less convincing.)

What are the policy conclusions?

‘Ability and commitment to fight hunger does not depend on wealth. Some relatively poor countries have made striking progress. On the other hand, some middle income countries have allowed rural misery to deepen in the midst of growing wealth. Pakistan, for instance, is performing no better than desperately poor and conflict-torn countries such as Sierra Leone, despite having a per capita income over two and half times higher. India ranks below Ethiopia and Cambodia.

Brazil tops our league table, showing what can be achieved when the state has both resources and political will to tackle hunger. President Lula da Silva has made it his objective to eradicate hunger. Within six years, the program Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) has introduced food banks, community kitchens and locally procured school meals along with simultaneous support for smallholder family farmers and land reform settlers. The result: child malnutrition has fallen by 73 percent and child deaths by 45 percent.

China (2nd place), through heavy investment in supporting its poor farmers and a relatively equitable distribution of land, has reduced the number of undernourished people by 58 million between 1990 and 2001. Now less than 9 percent of the population goes hungry.

Ghana (3rd place) has made food security a national priority and backed this with consistent support to smallholder farmers and democratic, stable governance. Ghana has made remarkable strides in reducing hunger – especially for a low income country.

Vietnam (4th place) pursued equitable land reform and investment in smallholders, and with relatively strong social policies has made unprecedented progress, reducing poverty by half in the decade of the nineties, with comparatively low levels of inequality.

Even Malawi (5th place), one of the poorest countries in the world, and burdened with a devastating HIV epidemic to boot – has reaped rich results within three short years. Through a massive boost of investment to small scale farmers, it has trebled production to halt a famine that threatened to leave nearly a third of its population hungry.

In line with their different circumstances, our top five countries have followed different paths. However, they have some interesting things in common.

• Rejecting the conventional wisdom of the free-market era, all retained – or reclaimed – a central role for the state in agriculture, and especially in developing and supporting poor farmers (whether through credit, research and extension, technology, income or price supports, input subsidies or a combination of these, targeted on smallholders).

• While these countries have also invested in commercial agriculture for export, they have maintained or introduced specific policies to ensure that production of staple foods for domestic markets continues to thrive.

• They either already had a relatively equitable distribution of land or introduced land reforms (although land reform in Brazil needs to go much further).

• Finally, all have introduced basic social protection measures (although in Malawi and Ghana, which endured donor-imposed cuts in social spending in the 1990s, these are still at an early stage). ’

And if you want to dig down a bit, each of the 29 countries gets its own scorecard.

G8 sees rising hunger as a threat to global stability

A significant new addition to the growing chorus of voices expressing concern on hunger and food prices. The food crisis has not gone away since last year, even if the general economic meltdown has driven it from the headlines. World Bank officials have been warning that plantings may be down this year; the FAO has found that consumer prices in poor countries have got stuck, and are diverging from falling world prices (see here) and now Javier Blas at the Financial Times has got hold of a grim report to the upcoming G8 ministerial meeting on agriculture in Italy from 18-20 April. Here are some excerpts from Javier’s piece:

‘The report, entitled “The global challenge: to reduce food emergency”, warns that global food production needs to double by 2050 to feed a surging population while at the same time dealing with “pronounced climate changes” and higher input costs.

“Without immediate interventions in agriculture and agri-marketing systems, the 2007 crisis will become structural in only a few decades,” the document, drafted by the G8’s Italian presidency and seen by the Financial Times, warns. It adds that a further food crisis will have “serious consequences not merely on business relations but equally on social and international relations, which in turn will impact directly on the security and stability of world politics”.

A combination of lower growth, rising unemployment and falling remittances together with persistently high food prices has pushed the number of chronically hungry above 1bn for the first time. Although agriculture commodity prices have fallen since then by up to 50 per cent, they continue well above their pre-crisis level. “The issue of price volatility remains a crucial element for world food security,” the report says. “There is a need for a fast increase of agricultural production in developing countries.”

In the US, the world’s largest exporter of agricultural commodities, farmers are set to break with five years of cropland expansion, cutting their acreage by 7m, the largest fall in 20 years. Elsewhere, the concern is that cash-strapped farmers, particularly in breadbasket countries such as Ukraine, Argentina and Brazil, will reduce their use of high-yield hybrid seeds and fertilisers, hurting output.
The main nightmare scenario among food aid and agriculture officials – and the food industry – is that an unexpected spate of bad weather harms the next crop. With agriculture commodities stocks at multiyear lows, that could push prices up, triggering another crisis on top of the economic one.’

What would a global food security policy look like?

Sticking to yesterday’s theme of food, check out ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion‘, an excellent new paper by Alex Evans. Alex combines the skills of academic and consultant with his insider experience as a former special adviser to Hilary Benn, then UK Secretary of State for International Development. He specialises in what George Lakoff calls ‘reframing‘ – here he pulls together a number of trends into what he calls an ‘age of scarcity’ (of carbon, energy, water, land). These will together produce a ‘food crunch’ as the population rises to 9 billion over the next 40 years, unless we come up with a ‘global food security policy’. Read More …