Food prices – US bad, IMF worried; Big Oil transparency; India shifts on cash transfers; blog news; the state of global education: links I liked

Food prices update: Alex Evans berates the Obama Administration’s silence on biofuels as a factor driving up corn prices. Meanwhile, the IMF warns “Since the turn of the century, food prices have been rising steadily – except for declines during the global financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009 – and this suggests that these increases are a trend and don’t just reflect temporary factors.”

 “Britain is throwing its weight behind European efforts to force oil and mining companies to publish details of every penny they pay to governments in poor countries where they operate.” Britain backing a French initiative? Whatever next… More analysis on Aid Thoughts. And rather than just slagging off governments, Transparency International has helpfully turned its attention (and league tables) to oil companies. For most countries, country-level disclosure on international operations is the Achilles’ heel.

India shifts from fuel and food subsidies to direct cash transfers to poor people. [h/t Steve Price-Thomas]

Some blog-related stuff: What’s the best way to spend £11m on development? Help Lawrence Haddad with his dilemma. For Spanish speakers, my friend Gonzalo Fanjul has moved his brilliant blog to El Pais’ website, where it should flourish.

Calling all development bloggers – do you want to be researched? If so, contact Jane Sparrow:
“I am a research student in international development at the University of Bath, UK. As part of my studies I am looking at blogs in development (specifically the blogs of international NGOs). You are invited to share your experience of blogging and participate in this study which will take place during March 2011. Please send an email to: jsn23@bath.ac.uk and I will send you a short questionnaire by email to complete. All information, including your identity, will be anonymous and I will of course send you my research report if you would like a copy. ”

“What do you think offers the best value for money? A global education initiative that could put over 67 million kids in school, or a week’s spending on military hardware.” Kevin Watkins launches his latest UNESCO broadside on the failings of the global education system, with a focus on the impact of armed conflict.

Or watch UNESCO’s 7 minute video

What can poverty researchers in the UK learn from the South and vice versa?

[Sorry the comments button was switched off on Tuesday's post on the Economist food report. That's now been sorted so if you were a frustrated commenter, feel free to unburden yourself......]

The best ideas often come from bringing groups of thinkers together from disciplines that normally have nothing to do with each other. The Santa Fe Institute is perhaps the best-known example of this. Sadly, disciplinary siloes are alive and well in much of academia, with some notable exceptions such as the Oxford Martin School. IDS and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are trying to run an exercise along these lines, cross fertilizing between work on poverty and exclusion in the UK and in developing countries. Oxfam set up its UK Poverty Programme in 1996 precisely to explore these kinds of synergies.

A seminar in November (report here) discussed the degrees of overlap between poverty-related thinking in ‘North’ and ‘South’, and found it to be expanding rapidly (migration, food prices, financial crashes, climate change, gender justice etc etc), yet another demonstration that the distinction between North and South is becoming increasingly artificial, and a block to creative thinking. It produced this useful table on what areas of cross-learning look most promising (sorry some of the borders of the table have gone missing – no idea why). [h/t Kate Wareing]

any additions?

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

Egypt’s bloggers; MDGs v revolution; brides for toilets; UN Women; a Green Wall across Africa; Gadaffi as fashion icon: links I liked

So much to read, so little time….

Two Egyptian bloggers reflect on events:
‘I’m not sure how long the general Egyptian public can maintain the bizarre idea that the army is so great. This is the army that took power in a coup in 1952 and ended political pluralism, lost tons of wars after that and continued to justify its predation on the national budget despite not having had to fight anyone since 1973.’ Reality check from blogger Issandr El Amrani.

“In that moment, I could feel the joy, relief, and release of every Egyptian in the world that had followed the revolution. In that moment, I cried with the people in Alexandria. In that moment, I laughed with the people in Suez. In that moment, I sang Egypt’s national anthem with the people in Meydan Tahrir. It is something that I never thought I would see.”  Sophia Azeb [h/t Texas in Africa]

“A recent initiative gauging progress on the millennium development goals ranks Tunisia as joint first among 137 countries, while Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iran are ranked joint third.” Alasdair McWilliam wonders why if the Muslim tigers are apparently doing so well on human development, their peoples are so dissatisfied – what are the MDGs missing?

“If you don’t have a toilet at home, you might not get a bride in India. In a silent revolution of sorts, Indian women across the country, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, have a single condition before they agree to a match – the groom must have a toilet in his home.”

After years of planning, fundraising and consultations, U.N. Women was officially launched by its Executive Director, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet. Formally known as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, U.N. Women combines four pre-existing U.N. agencies into one. So what should it do? Oxfam released a report called the ‘Blueprint for U.N. Women’, based on a comprehensive survey of grassroots women’s groups, leaders and activists from over 25 countries. An overwhelming majority of women believe that ending violence against women must be the first and most urgent priority of U.N. Women. Anyone listening? [h/t Bert Maerten]

“Imagine a green wall – 15km wide, and up to 8,000km long – a living green wall of trees and bushes, full of birds and other animals. Imagine it just south of the Sahara, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east, all the way across the continent to Dakar, Senegal, in the west. The wall envisioned by 11 African countries on the southern border of the Sahara, and their international partners, is aimed at limiting the desertification of the Sahel zone” Green geoengineering anyone?

And a little light relief: Gaddafi as fashion icon (or not), c/o Vanity Fair. (doubtless politically incorrect, but it’s OK, humour is always in the frontline against oppression).  [h/t Ian Bray]

How to use research for influence on climate change and Arab meltdown; why aid donors are losing the plot; green growth v degrowth; Darth Vader on youtube: links I liked

The Washington-based Center for Global Development is great at spotting opportunities for influence, not least by dusting off and recycling previous work in response to events – a key, and often under-used, way of getting research into policy (academics are often too caught up with their next project, and NGOs with their next campaign, to spot opportunities in this way).

The Korean government wants an international ‘Climate Vulnerability Index’ to steer allocation of funding for adaptation? Here’s one the CGD’s David Wheeler made earlier. Any views?

Upheaval in the Arab world? Off the shelf comes CGD’s Arvind Subramanian’s proposals for turning oil revenues into direct cash transfers.

Plus a nice summary of the increasing divorce between geopolitical reality and the assumptions of Western aid donors from CGD’s Todd Moss.

Another of my favourite blogs, Political Climate disagrees with the de-growthers at New Economics Foundation (alas, much more politely than in this previous assault)

Political Climate also looks at how the UK is running to stand still on carbon emissions: ‘As energy efficiency increases, we use part of the savings we make to consume more energy, and overall the impacts of energy efficiency are much less than we think. Despite the fact that the UK economy is almost two and half times bigger than it was in 1970, the UK now uses almost exactly the same amount of energy in total as it did then.’

Any contradiction between those two posts? Discuss.

Finally, it may be entirely irrelevant (at least to international development), but because it’s Friday, a decidedly ‘ah, sweet’ VW ad [h/t Global Dashboard’s Alex Evans, who seems to spend even more time on youtube than I do]

It’s not the best Darth Vader youtube though – that honour belongs to the legendary lego version of Eddie Izzard’s Darth Vader in the Death Star canteen sketch. Click here to start the weekend  in a good mood.

Food prices: what’s happening in local currencies and how are governments responding?

Most of the discussion around the renewed food price spike is conducted in terms of world prices, dollar denominated. But people buy food in local currencies, which may or may not follow the dollar trend. UNICEF has a helpful new (30 page) paper out which looks at local food prices across 58 developing countries in 2010 and fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge. Here are some highlights:

“Our analysis shows that, on average, local food price indices in developing countries trail the global food price index closely, with a lag time of roughly one month in the current price run-up.”

The graph compares local v global food prices and shows both this lag, and more interestingly, the fact that local prices appear to be stickier – they rose with global prices in the first price spike, but then fell much less, and now are rising less fast as well, at least so far. However, there the good news ends:

“Low-income countries have experienced much larger food price increases than richer, middle-income countries. This trend appears to be consistent over time, becoming magnified during the 2007-08 food crisis and, again, growing pronounced in late 2010. For example, whereas low-income countries were paying an average of 8.3 percent more for foodstuffs in August 2010 compared to middle-income countries, this difference jumped to 12.6 percent as of November 2010.”

The paper examines policy responses to the price spike at both global and national levels using the same three pronged framework: supporting consumers to promote household food security, supporting producers to enhance the food supply and managing/regulating food markets to reduce the volatility of domestic food prices. The global stuff is fairly well known, so I’ll just focus on the national policy responses:

“Supporting consumption: Policy responses included food assistance (e.g. direct food transfers, food stamps/vouchers and school feeding programmes), price subsidies and controls, cash transfers, reduced consumption taxes and food-for-work schemes.

 Boosting agricultural production: This mainly focused on providing subsidies and reducing taxes on grain producers, although some countries also offered other types of incentives to spur agricultural output, such as credit programmes for small farmers.

Managing and regulating food markets: Many developing countries tried to lower domestic food prices by encouraging imports and discouraging exports, most commonly by reducing import tariffs and/or introducing different export restrictions. Building up and releasing strategic food reserves was another frequently employed strategy to stabilize local food prices. A number of governments also intervened in food markets by restricting stockholding by private traders, imposing anti-hoarding measures and restricting futures trading of basic foods.

Out of 98 developing country governments, 75 have supported consumers, 57 have promoted agricultural production and 76 have intervened in food markets. Developing countries in Asia appear the most proactive in terms of supporting consumers and managing/regulating food markets when facing higher food prices, while countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are most inclined to foster agricultural production. Using an income lens, poorer countries are, on average, more reactive to higher food prices across all policy categories when compared to wealthier, upper middle-income countries.

Analysis of specific responses to rising commodity prices suggests that food assistance, production subsidies and lower tariffs are the most commonly adopted policies by developing countries… A large proportion of developing countries in our sample have also focused on stocking strategic food reserves in order to stabilize domestic market prices (43 percent).”

See the bar chart for the breakdown.

The paper goes into more detail on such responses, finding that low income countries opted for emergency food aid and universal price subsidies, while middle income countries preferred school feeding programmes. Overall, it found that most responses were (understandably) short-term and argues for a longer-term policy framework that acknowledges that price spikes are here to stay. Unsurprisingly (given that it’s UNICEF) it argues for a greater focus on children in the response.

What’s New in Development and ‘Why I don’t have a girlfriend’: talks from the Warwick Economics Summit

I spoke at the ‘Warwick Economics Summit’ at the weekend – an annual event meticulously organized by students. The corridor talk was all about jobs and internships – the banks are apparently back and hiring en masse. Well organized? Thinking about jobs? Students have changed since my day…

My talk was on ‘What’s New in Development’. Powerpoint here – feel free to cut and paste. Main points:
- lots of topics haven’t changed and remain central (pro-poor growth; effective aid; universal essential services; gender justice and human rights)
- hunger and resource constraints are a big ‘new-old’ topic
- increasing prominence in development discussions of hitherto ‘northern’ issues – aging, domestic taxation, mental health, disability, obesity/non communicable diseases
- an ever-wider set of global rules and institutions is being born, but no-one is in charge, so it’s chaotic and ad hoc
- as well as new themes, new ways of thinking are emerging – how change happens, what to measure

You can watch me present it here, but to be honest, you’d probably have more fun skipping to ‘Why I don’t have a girlfriend’: a delightfully silly paper by PhD student Peter Backus, written during what he describes as ‘the Great Loneliness’ of 2008. He decided to employ the Drake Equation (used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy) to calculate the number of potential Backus-compatible girlfriends in the world. He arrived at the number 26. If you think that’s depressing, a gay Canadian came up with a number of less than one…… Not surprisingly, the paper has gone viral, been picked up in the media etc, and Peter rightly fears nothing he writes in the rest of his academic career will ever do as well.

There’s a happy ending though – since he wrote the paper, he’s found one of the 26 and they’re doing fine. Mind you, if anything goes wrong, he’s now down to 25…..

Drivers of Change in Egypt: Mulling over the comments on last week’s post

Here’s my reaction to a couple of dozen very helpful comments and links on last week’s posts on this blog and the Guardian site, along with a couple of new articles.

There are two main clusters of comments: the most important is probably the one that distinguishes between the drivers of change, and the dynamics of change. Thinking in terms of drivers (as I largely did in my first post) is a bit static, despite the name – you unpack context, institutions, agents and events to get a reasonably comprehensive X-ray of the actors in the drama, but just knowing the cast-list doesn’t tell you much about the play. That’s where the dynamic comes in.

I sometimes use this diagram to show the different kinds of dynamics. Some (on the right hand side) are fairly predictable and linear – if you build more schools, fund education and train more teachers, you can predict improve educational outcomes. Others, like the revolution in Egypt, are much less so. And here the comments from Ben Ramalingam and Chris have focussed on the topic of Complexity (on which Ben is writing a book, by the way). I blogged a while back on this (based on a 2008 paper by Ben) and reckon it’s worth going back to – particularly the comments from Chris Roche, Chris Mowles and others.

Ben sees what has happened in Egypt as an example of dynamic, self-organized, non-violent and entirely unpredictable change, almost completely outside the sphere of ‘usual suspects’ in development – state, NGOs, trade unions, old media etc. The key mechanisms driving such ‘emergent change’ include feedback (e.g. the army failing to repress early protests) and amplification (via social media and others).

To which my reaction is, “is this a purely descriptive exercise, or does it give us useful information either about what is happening in Egypt, or elsewhere? What is the ‘so what’ of this analysis, eg in terms of advocacy and influencing in the post-revolutionary environment?”

The second cluster of comments further refines the breakdown of drivers of change. On the Guardian, Apollo13 asks (and answers) the fascinating question, why did Mohammed Bouazizi’s act of self sacrifice trigger a revolution, when similar previous acts by others caused barely a ripple? Rosemary points to the power of example, in this case learning from peaceful protest movements in Serbia. Cristina and Kate ask what role was played by more ‘formal’ civil society organizations, and all the funding for capacity building and training programmes, whether national or international – anyone got any info? Jennifer points to the importance of ‘power within’ – the lightbulb moment when people lose their fear.

The Economist this week dwells on the generation gap, likening today’s upheavals to 1968 in Europe:

“The frustration of the vast throngs in Cairo and Tunis was directed not so much at the leaders themselves as at what they stood for: paternalistic, unaccountable authority….. [They] echo the upbeat message and youthful promise of the 1960s in the West. Like the Western youth of that era, young people across the Middle East have inherited a world of immensely greater possibilities than the one inhabited by their parents. Even in the tribally conservative, religion-saturated cities of Saudi Arabia, drag-racing, daredevil youths take over quiet boulevards on weekend nights. By internet and text, they exchange jokes about ageing royal princes.

Since the fall of Mr Mubarak, numerous mini-revolutions have taken place across Egypt. Journalists have overthrown their editors, workers their union leaders, professors their university deans. Even the police have returned to the streets, striking to demand the removal of the senior officers they blame for their disgrace.”

Finally, Soren, Ben and others wonder what happens next, in particular what role the army will play. To see the wisdom of whoever warned ‘never make predictions, especially about the future’, have a look at successive weeks’ graphics from the Economist. The first is an attempt at a table of at-risk countries, the second shows what was happening a week later – top marks on Yemen, Egypt and Libya, but what about Bahrain and Tunisia?

So. Anyone fancy doing a drivers of change analysis on Yemen or Libya?

Arab meltdown live; T shirts and development; what’s changed because of the global crisis?; MDGs 2.0; big news on climate science; Schwarzenegger c/o a 9 year-old Tanzanian: links I liked

What to follow on the Middle East Crisis? How about a single site with the twitter feeds and Al Jazeera live feed on breaking events across the Arab World? [h/t Wronging Rights] Or a pleasingly splenetic ‘Top Five Myths’ about US media coverage of the crisis? [h/t Chris Blattman]

World Vision gets a blogosphere battering for shipping thousands of unwanted T shirts to Africa, and responds here. Texas in Africa summarises the T-shirt and development research here.

“The crisis has accelerated the arrival of our future. Even for the winners, this is quite a shock.” Martin Wolf explores the political and economic trends that have been galvanized by the financial crisis.

As the 2015 MDG deadline closes in, Andy Sumner surveys the debate on what comes next – MDGs 2.0 anyone?

Some big news in climate science: we seem to be getting to the point when we can attribute specific disasters (partially) to climate change, with numbers attached. Lawyers everywhere must be licking their lips….

And finally, I have no idea what point about the construction of masculinity this video is making, but watching a 9 year old Tanzanian boy lovingly recall the plot of his favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is strangely riveting. [h/t Alex Evans]