Nibbles: Restoration, Dates, Plant health, IRRI, Infrastructure, Agri-tourism, Food sovereignty

Positive or negative: you decide

Jacob takes me to task for being too negative. He says:

Governments play an important role (positive or negative) in making the sort of solutions you propose viable in the long term. That’s why heaping coals of fire on the heads of government leaders is a better strategy than simply writing them off.

Most of the rest of the world has been heaping coals of fire on the heads of government leaders, who last week were gathered in Rome to discuss high food prices, climate change and bioenergy. And what did the assembled government leaders do to rid themselves of the flames? More or less nothing. ((The Economist is, for once, more optimistic than I am.))

It was as if they were blissfully unaware that their heads were on fire.

Pious sentiments were “reaffirmed,” as if that will make some difference. Money was forthcoming for emergency. humanitarian aid, and that’s a good thing, although even in the realm of food aid I suspect that there are more sustainable solutions that could be tried. Everyone talked about the need for more research, but mostly of the same old kind, and without offering a single additional red cent to pay for it.

You may be aware that the head of the US delegation, Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, used his statement to tell the assembly how he’d had a nice chat with Norman Borlaug about how to solve the food crisis. But he didn’t mention that the US has cut its support for research by CGIAR centres, the very centres that Borlaug’s work helped to get going, nor that Borlaug himself has asked several times for this decision to be reconsidered. The CGIAR may or may not not be the most effective route to great agricultural R&D for developing countries, but it isn’t as if the US is putting its money anywhere else that will benefit poor people in poor countries. The US is doing research, of course. And almost every intervention by the US delegate on that topic stressed the need for advanced biotechnology to provide the very poorest people with food security.

Jacob rightly points out that “governments play an important role (positive or negative) in making the sort of solutions you propose viable in the long term”. And my point is simply that I’ve seen very little evidence of a positive role, especially not lately. The reason is that the people heaping coals of fire on government heads are not the poor of poor countries, but the rich of their own countries.

What policy changes would be most effective in boosting food security in developing countries? Dismantling trade barriers of all kinds; subsidies, import tariffs, export taxes. And that’s not just my opinion, it’s the carefully considered recommendation of people who’ve spent a lot of time studying these things, for example the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the UK, to mention just a couple.

And what were the hot-headed government leaders, including 23 heads of state, doing at the FAO meeting last week? Everything they possibly could to keep those trade barriers in place.

Indeed, governments large and small, rich and poor, could play a very important positive role in tackling hunger and poverty, but on past evidence they simply don’t know how to. The very least they could do would be to get out of the way.

Nibbles: IK, Environmental change, Peasants, Sugar, Indians, Ancient wine, Water, Poverty, Food crisis

Just do it

Jeffrey has his heart in the right place, a great job, and a $2 million condo in NYC, but he clearly has failed to consider the microeconomics of aid, farming, finance, corruption, etc. It’s sad that he may actually get people to contribute to his program — and make things worse. [Sachs has a macro background — and you can tell.]

I’ve only recently started reading David Zetland’s Aguanomics blog. Of course I agree with him. But that’s no reason not to link to him. This time, he’s taken on a Godlike directive from one J. Sachs: “The world should set as a practical goal of doubling grain yields in low-income Africa and similar regions (such as Haiti) during the next five years.”

Hop to it, World!

Micronutrients No. 1

The Copenhagen Consensus has just decreed that supplying missing micronutrients — especially vitamin A and zinc — is the most important priority for global development. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

The Copenhagen Consensus website says:

Despite significant reductions in income poverty in recent years, undernutrition remains widespread. Recent estimates from UNICEF (2006) are that “one out of every four children under five – or 146 million children in the developing world – is underweight for his or her age”, and that “each year, …undernutrition contributes to the deaths of about 5.6 million children under the age of five”. The undernutrition associated with missing micronutrients in poor quality diets is even more widespread than that indicated by underweight alone.

Undernutrition in turn has negative effects on income and on economic growth. Undernutrition leads to increased mortality and morbidity which lead to loss of economic output and increased spending on health. Poor nutrition means that individuals are less productive (both due to physical and mental impairment), and that children benefit less from education.

Reducing undernutrition is one of the Millennium Goals (Goal 1 aims to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), and is also a key factor underpinning several others. Achieving goals in primary education, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases all depend crucially on nutrition.

I downloaded the Challenge Paper and the Executive Summary of it. The word “vegetable” does not appear in either. Nor “diversity”. That’s as far as I’m prepared to go at present.