Author: WHES

The World’s Banker

This is a very entertaining and very informative book about international development. This book is about James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank, the World Bank itself, the largest institution charged with assisting the development of poorer countries, and the development challenges the Bank and Wolfensohn faced and how they met them. This is the book I would recommend as an introduction to contemporary development issues and how they are in fact addressed.

The book describes how “international development” is accomplished in reality. The World Bank is certainly a key example of where the “rubber hits the road:” the intersection of multi-country, very self-interested politics (including that of the United States), bureaucracy (of the World Bank, the developing countries, and others), personal ambition (of Wolfensohn and numerous others) and the grave problems of international development. Mallaby has given an excellent, and rarely if ever achieved, description of how this multidimensional process plays out in real life: how Wolfensohn, the Bank, the United States and other developing countries, and the developing nations and– last and possibly least– the people of the developing nations interacted to affect economic development in the last 10 years.

The book is extremely entertaining, in part because it follows Wolfensohn closely, and leaves in details that a more sanitized biography would omit. The story of how the President of Mali gave Wolfensohn a goat, and what became of the goat, is a classic tale, worth retelling to your children if you want them to become development specialists. Mallaby includes a great many informative details, quite a high number of them amusing. He also does an excellent job in describing the debate and political and bureaucratic struggle over development issues.

The first three chapters set out Wolfensohn’s life before the Bank, including a very successful career as an international banker and the highly political way in which he became World Bank president. These chapters also give a history of the Bank and development issues to that point. Each subsequent chapter up to the last, which is an evaluation of Wolfensohn’s career at the Bank (he will not be reappointed for a new term), describes a particular issue: the challenge of Africa, the World Bank’s role in Bosnia, corruption (and the World Bank blindness to it), the (partial) evolution from structural adjustment to participatory development thinking and the (lack of adequate) response to AIDS.

Mallaby has done an impressive job in weaving together many strands to tell the story of Wolfensohn and development during his tenure at the Bank.

Lane Vanderslice is Editor of Hunger Notes.

Rethinking food production for a world of eight billion

Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article was adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion Well,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm

(July 22, 2009) In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade–in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Dealing with this problem requires addressing the long-term trends leading to growth in demand for food outpacing growth in supply. One key to the threefold expansion in the world grain harvest since 1950 was the rapid adoption in some developing countries of high-yielding wheats and rices (originally developed in Japan) and hybrid corn (from the United States). The spread of these highly productive seeds, combined with a tripling of irrigated area and an 11-fold increase in world fertilizer use, tripled the world grain harvest. Growth in irrigation and fertilizer use essentially removed soil moisture and nutrient constraints on much of the world’s cropland.

Now the outlook is changing. Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.

The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

This calls for fresh thinking on how to raise cropland productivity. One way is to breed crops that are more tolerant of drought and cold. U.S. corn breeders have developed corn varieties that are more drought-tolerant, enabling corn production to move westward into Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Kansas, the leading U.S. wheat-producing state, has used a combination of drought-resistant varieties in some areas and irrigation in others to expand corn planting to where the state now produces more corn than wheat.

Another way of raising land productivity, where soil moisture permits, is to increase the area of multicropped land that produces more than one crop per year. Indeed, the tripling in the world grain harvest since 1950 is due in part to impressive increases in multiple cropping in Asia. Some of the more common combinations are wheat and corn in northern China, wheat and rice in northern India, and the double or triple cropping of rice in southern China and southern India.

The spread in double cropping of winter wheat and corn on the North China Plain helped boost China’s grain production to where it rivaled that of the United States. Winter wheat grown there yields 5 tons per hectare. Corn also averages 5 tons. Together these two crops, grown in rotation, can yield 10 tons per hectare per year. China’s double cropped rice annually yields 8 tons per hectare.

Forty years ago, North India produced only wheat, but with the advent of the earlier maturing high-yielding wheats and rices, wheat could be harvested in time to plant rice. This wheat/rice combination is now widely used throughout the Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. This practice yields a combined 5 tons of grain per hectare, helping to feed India’s 1.2 billion people.

A concerted U.S. effort to both breed earlier maturing varieties and develop cultural practices that would facilitate multiple cropping could substantially boost crop output. If China’s farmers can extensively double crop wheat and corn, then U.S. farmers could do the same if agricultural research and farm policy were reoriented to support it.

Elsewhere, Western Europe, with its mild winters and high-yielding winter wheat, might also be able to double crop more with a summer grain, such as corn, or with a winter oilseed crop. Brazil and Argentina have an extended frost-free growing season that supports extensive multicropping, often wheat or corn with soybeans.

In many countries, including the United States, most of those in Western Europe, and Japan, fertilizer use has reached a level where using more has little effect on crop yields. There are still some places, however, such as most of Africa, where additional fertilizer would help boost yields. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure to transport fertilizer economically to the villages where it is needed. As a result of nutrient depletion, grain yields in much of sub-Saharan Africa are stagnating.

One encouraging response to this situation in Africa is the simultaneous planting of grain and leguminous trees. At first the trees grow slowly, permitting the grain crop to mature and be harvested; then the saplings grow quickly to several feet in height, dropping leaves that provide nitrogen and organic matter, both sorely needed in African soils. The wood is then cut and used for fuel. This simple, locally adapted technology, developed by scientists at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, has enabled farmers to double their grain yields within a matter of years as soil fertility builds.

Despite local advances, the overall loss of momentum in expanding food production is unmistakable. It will force us to think more seriously about stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and using the existing harvest more productively. Achieving an acceptable worldwide balance between food and people may now depend on stabilizing population as soon as possible, reducing the unhealthily high consumption of animal products among the affluent, and restricting the conversion of food crops to automotive fuels. It also calls for a concerted effort to raise water use productivity, similar to the gains achieved for land use, and to stabilize climate to avoid crop-withering temperatures and more frequent droughts. These efforts combined can help put us on the path to ensuring enough food for all.

Isaias Afewerki and Eritrea: a nation’s tragedy

(July 11, 2009) It is rare that a country’s entire condition can be summarized in a single word. That is true of Eritrea today, however, and the word is tragic. There are many indices of this tragedy, among them Eritrea’s appalling record in hunger, poverty, human rights and freedom of the press. But the most painful is that of stolen promise. Eritrea’s people fought so hard and succeeded in so much that was deemed impossible, only for their achievement to be snatched away from them. Today, Eritreans both inside and outside their Horn of Africa homeland are living with the consequences, and trying to understand why their nation’s history took such a cruel twist. The answer, for very many of us, lies in the political character of one man: Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afewerki.

Africa’s newest nation-state won its de facto independence in May 1991 after an arduous 30-year struggle against rule by Ethiopia (a status confirmed by international recognition in May 1993). By then, every Eritrean family had been touched by war, and many were blighted by its devastation. But the post-independence spirit was optimistic, even noble: Eritreans had maintained their ideals even under pressure of conflict, and vowed to build a state that embodied them. They were determined that their social cohesion, strong work-ethic, low levels of crime and corruption, and scarcity of ethnic or religious tension would become trademarks of their new state, a country worthy of its dignified citizens, a lasting tribute to those who sacrificed their lives to attain independence, and solace to their families. This was to be something new under the African sun.

Some falling short from such high aspirations is forgivable, but the cracks that started to appear in the first decade of independence were the harder to bear for being largely self-inflicted. Eritrea fought with every one of its neighbors, accumulating smoldering political and economic animosities with each crisis. This cycle culminated in a renewed conflagration with Ethiopia over the two countries’ disputed border; the result, in the war of 1998–2000, was the death of countless young Eritreans and Ethiopians. The war, moreover, left the issue unresolved; it threatens periodically to erupt and create renewed devastation.[1]

The domestic repercussions of this war pushed Eritrea towards the abyss. In September 2001, President Isaias Afewerki – who had by then been in power for a decade – unleashed the full power of the state to crush opposition and dissent. He arrested 11 of his former comrades, all veterans of the independence struggle and members of parliament in independent Eritrea, closed all private media sources, and followed up by restricting or expelling global and regional organizations working in the country (including NGOs and charitable organizations who stood by Eritrea and the president himself during the independence struggle). The effect of all this was to turn Eritrea into a prison for its citizens.[2]

The pathology of power

Eritrea’s fall has led many today to describe it as the North Korea of Africa, and Isaias Afewerki as its Kim Jong-Il: a paranoid, irrational, eccentric and reclusive leader. There may be some truth in each of these descriptions, but in seeking to make sense of decision-making in today’s Eritrea, they may also mislead. For to consign Isaias Afewerki to the realm of near-madness is to underestimate him; an examination of his political record during and after the fight for independence reveals him to be an often astute political leader, far from random or erratic in his approach.

Isaias Afewerki himself has attempted to explain the move to a more hard-line policy as necessary to maintain ‘national integrity’ against foreign plots and influences when ‘the nation has and continues to suffer under exceptional circumstances.’ The problem is that the same formulae were used when concerns about his authoritarian tendencies were raised in earlier years; this suggests the existence of a long-term pattern of ideological rationalization rather than a genuine response to new circumstances. The increased centralization of power in Eritrea and the erosion of other centers of influence seem to reflect the view that all actions are justified if they serve the president’s needs and ambitions.

Everything comes back to the excessive need for power, which is manifest too in forceful actions that can include physical assaults, verbal threats, accusations and reprimands for even the mildest challenge.

Some of those who were close to President Isaias during the pre- and post-independence years add a further layer of understanding. They say that he takes an immensely detailed interest in policy- and decision-making, finds it very difficult to delegate tasks, and has a strong (perhaps inflated) sense of his own ability to influence what happens outside as well as inside Eritrea.

By a familiar historical twist, the very traits that fuelled Isaias Afewerki’s rise to power allowed him to consolidate it in ways that damaged everyone around him. Eritreans and to a degree the rest of the world had been beguiled by the dashing hero’s charisma and ability to get results. But in time it became evident that he saw power not as an instrument for social and national progress but as a weapon of self-aggrandizement that nothing would be allowed to put at risk.

The lost sacrifice

President Isaias’s conduct during the 1998–2000 conflict with Ethiopia is a case study in his political character. In February 1999, the international community – shocked at the unfolding brutality in the Horn of Africa – mounted a great diplomatic effort to bring it to an end. The combined influence of the United States, the European Union and the Organization of African Unity (OAU – later the African Union) contributed to a peace deal agreed by the Eritrean cabinet and backed by an OAU-organised mediation committee. At that point, President Isaias declared to the national media that to withdraw from the town of Badme – the flashpoint of the war whose evacuation by military forces was a central element of the peace accord – would be equivalent to the sun never rising again. The deal fell apart.

The Ethiopians responded by launching an offensive on 23 February 1999, which they named ‘Operation Sunset’. By 26 February, the media in Eritrea announced that the country’s forces had withdrawn, leaving Badme in Ethiopian hands. A year and much carnage later, an agreement was signed that ended the war, established a United Nations force to monitor the ceasefire, and put the issue to international arbitration (in April 2002, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague settled the border and implicitly awarded Badme to Eritrea, a decision that Ethiopia refuses to accept).

Afewerki, required to account for his decisions and actions amid the fallout of war, responded by severe repression, which, in addition to the measures described above, included elevating to power a new cohort of handpicked cronies who owed their promotion to their obedience to and fear of the president’s whim.

Issaias Afewerki is surrounded by military associates whose single purpose is to maintain him in power, while those who played key roles in Eritrea’s astonishing feat of winning independence against so many odds either languish in unnamed dungeons or survive in temporary homes as exiles and refugees. Many others have fallen victim to the president’s suspicious plotting.

Today, Eritreans in the diaspora are discussing an unconfirmed report that Chinese bank accounts hold millions of dollars of funds in the names of President Isaias Afewerki (who trained at a military college in Nanjing in 1966–67) and his son. If true this would be yet another insult to tens of thousands of hardworking Eritreans – housekeepers in Italy, domestic workers in the Middle East, taxi drivers in the US, factory workers in Europe – including many who long supported the president, lived austere lives in the greater cause of their country’s well-being, and once considered Afewerki one of them: a brother, a son and a fellow-combatant.

There are no systems of accountability or free information in place which could allow the Eritrean public to verify or dismiss a report which, if true, would align their country with Gabon or Equatorial Guinea. The Eritrean tragedy continues. It seems, after all, that there was really nothing new under the African sky in May 1991.

Selam Kidane is an Eritrean human rights activist. This article was originally published by openDemocracy and Pambazuka News and may be viewed at http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/isaias-afewerki-and-eritrea-a-nation-s-tragedy

NOTES
[1] See Edward Denison, ‘Eritrea vs Ethiopia: The shadow of war’, 18 January 2006.
[2] See Ben Rawlence, ‘Eritrea: Slender land, giant prison’, 6 May 2009.

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Global Woman describes with firsthand insight the global patterns of relationships among people struggling to survive in the domestic service sector and in the illicit sex trade. The editors are among several others who have authored essays within, including Cheever, Salazar Parrenas, Hondagneu-Sotelo, Rivas, Anderson, Constable, Zarembka, Brennan, Lan, Gamburd, Bales, Hung Cam Thai, and Sassen. Robert Espinoza outlines current migration trends with the most recent data available through maps and charts, as well as listing other migration route detail as text. Valuable contact information including website addresses is given for activist organizations involved in assisting women in fighting low wages, poor working conditions, trafficking, domestic violence, problematic immigration status, and other human rights violations. As a suggested “read,” this book is to be considered along with others in the Hunger Notes subspecialty of women in developing countries as its main focus, as there is only brief mention of food issues in a few essays.

The Politics of Food

Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. 1985. Hardcover. 238 pp.ISBN: 0871568462.

Reviewed by Paula Smith-Vanderslice

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

This landmark book describes the changes in agricultural policy in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Solkoff describes Earl Butz’s tenure as Secretary of Agriculture from 1972 to 1976, under then-Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. One president was too busy with the Watergate scandal, and the other didn’t care, so Butz had to have a power of his own (p.3). The book was written in 1985, and so needs to be taken historically to that year. Solkoff describes periods of surplus in this country as “boring,” and periods of shortage as exciting.

Butz’s most lasting contribution was to emphasize the importance of food. Until Butz arrived in office, farmers were paid by the U.S. government not to grow corn, wheat, rice and some other crops. The government was also using that money and legal mechanisms to keep prices of milk, oranges, sugar, meat, tomatoes, and other food artificially high. Congress opposed Butz’s view that agriculture was big business, as they had been writing policy for decades geared toward the family farmer. Butz opposed paying farmers not to grow, and keeping prices artificially high. His rhetoric was controversial, designed to get the government out of agriculture, and generated opposing congressional rhetoric by the Senate Agriculture Committee. In 1971, 4.6 percent of Americans lived and worked on farms. This was less than the population of New York and Philadelphia. There were fewer farmers than unemployed people. Most people didn’t know where their food originated, and had difficulty locating the nearest farm. Solkoff says that few understood that a cow needed to be pregnant to give milk, and what followed from that was increased productivity per cow from artificial insemination. For people living in the city, the geographic isolation of the farms’ row upon row of mass production was uncontemplated because it was invisible, and not experienced by them.

The Imperial Valley in California has become the 4th-richest agricultural county in the country because of irrigation and diversion of Colorado River water, serving the Eastern United States, and growing every commercial crop. Solkoff says that “except for baseball players, drug smugglers, army bomb testers, illegal aliens on the run, and people who love the desert, agriculture is the only reason for being in the Imperial Valley” (p.11). As farms were removed from America’s consciousness, the way they had been, small, was how they were still nostalgically remembered when thought of. Iowa was another place where agriculture did and does predominate, with the railroad taking people West in the late 19th century to more land and less expensive homes.

The American consumer became more aware of the high cost of not only the creation, but the maintenance of irrigation, such as Imperial Valley, through Butz’s actions while in office. The authority he had as Secretary of Agriculture was to control price and supply of food products. In the early 1970s, a combination of bad weather and drought worldwide, and several countries’ per capita income increase and changes in their policies upgrading the need for grain created a demand for U.S. grain, since the rest of the world’s supply was depleted. Another factor at the same time was the reduction in world fish catch, creating less fish meal for livestock feed. Also, world food production was not keeping pace with population increase. As the U.S. government was keeping prices high and increasing surpluses, it was difficult to believe that the world food shortage was real. During the Nixon administration, Butz raised prices, which were passed on through the retail system to the consumer’s household food budget. The Soviet grain deal was a part of this, as the Russians did not abandon their five-year plan to increase livestock grain feed, due to food riots and a desire to add meat to the bland diet of bread, potatoes, and other starches (p.47). The U.S. grain surplus was suddenly gone, and experts testified to Congress that maybe the surplus had been a reserve against world hunger (p.56).

In October, 1976, then-President Ford accepted Earl Butz’s forced resignation after a racist comment Butz made to singer Pat Boone on a plane after the Republican Convention. Pat had asked Butz why he thought the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, could not attract more Black voters. Butz made derogatory comments regarding sexual preference and defecation. The New York Times printed the comment, and in his resignation statement Butz said the “joke” didn’t represent his true feeling. He summarized his accomplishments as Secretary of Agriculture, saying that, “Farmers have had the yoke of bureaucratic control lifted from them,” with the marketplace replacing the government as “futures,” “cash prices,” and “commodities” became key words in discourse. The marketplace did away with congressional control and established food policy that involved adequate supplies at moderate prices as Butz’s legacy.

As consumers’ food costs were no longer kept artificially low, large corporate-like farms were discovering that reliable agricultural labor was becoming more scarce. In order to attract an efficient labor force, farms had to pay workers more. Cesar Chavez demonstrated that by improving farmworkers’ conditions, their work would become more efficient. In 1970, Chavez forced farmers, through his rhetoric, to sign union contracts with their fieldworkers. In 1962 he had formed the National Farm Workers Association, later called the United Farmworkers Union, or UFW, first competing with the Teamsters and AFL-CIO under George Meany. Later, the UFW became an AFL-CIO affiliate.

Chavez’s strong Chicano ethnic identification was essential to establishing his leadership. He understood from experience what discrimination was, where in the Imperial Valley some places had signs that said, “White Trade Only.” He successfully combined a religious, non-violent ethnic base as a force for change, and used the television medium to demonstrate to the world discrimination by local police against use of the Spanish term, “huelga,” instead of “strike,” during a grape strike on the picket line. By boycotting grapes, he hit the growers at the supermarket. He signed contracts with corporations including Tenneco, United Brands, Purex, Heublein, and Coca-Cola (p.123). The UFW represented workers nationwide and controlled a large part of fruit and vegetable crops by 1972. Migrant workers, according to a Labor Department report, were excluded from basic employee benefits such as worker’s compensation, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and other equal protection under Federal and states’ rights. Although during Butz’s tenure the term “migrant” was interpreted by five Federal agencies with six different definitions for purposes of program funding consideration, migrants began to receive food stamps, welfare, and general job training. The USDA’s publication, The Hired Farm Working Force, highlighted what was happening with migrant workers. The Department of Labor, HEW, and Agriculture began this assistance due to the national attention brought by the UFW (p.130).

After Butz’s resignation, the United States returned to a government food control policy (p.225). Solkoff warned in this book in 1985 about “…new global shortages that could reappear through drought, pestilence, or other plagues not even contemplated” (p.4). One year later, mad cow disease appeared in the United Kingdom, a brain disease that scientists think cattle developed when eating sheep by-products where it was present. In 1996, CJD, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a similar prion disease also affecting the brain, in humans, was linked to the tainted beef. Although hundreds of thousands of cattle were destroyed, as of 2000, the disease continues to appear in other countries (ref. World Book online).

Paula Smith-Vanderslice, B.S., is copy editor of Hunger Notes.

Scaling Up, Scaling Down: Overcoming Malnutrition in Developing Countries

Thomas J. Marchione, Editor
Gordon and Breach. 1999. Hardcover, paperback. ISBN: 9057005476

Reviewed by Steve Hansch
This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Many non-governmental organization (NGO) projects are first established as “pilot” efforts in order to test and learn about what works best, both in terms of an optimum package of deliverables and in terms of what can succeed in the particular local environment. Often, though, in pilot projects that are successful, that success turns out to be dependent on an intensity of attention and inputs that can be managed for small pilot projects but are not feasible when the approach is taken from a particular village to a whole region or country. This challenge has in past years defined the challenge of “scaling up” from proven, effective narrow interventions to larger regional or countrywide programs. At the other extreme, some programs focus on working through the international arena or through national governments, and need to be “scaled down” to become practical and to deploy scarce resources (for example, food aid) to those most in need– i.e., “targeting.”

This text is the best contribution to date in describing how these challenges can be met. Each chapter explores the ways that aid and development organizations are learning to grapple with hunger and nutrition issues by replicating programs that work, and also by devolving control to grassroots level ownership. As such, it makes excellent reading for NGO staff or in courses on program intervention, nutrition planning, or NGO organizational development.

Several parts of the book’s focus analyze trends in malnutrition in developing countries. Peter Uvin looks at global food trends, observing that overall, “the world produces enough food to feed its entire population on a basic diet, and has sufficient stocks to protect itself against disasters. However, the margins seem to be slim.”
Because of WTO/GATT and because of the decline in subsidized agriculture in wealthier countries, Uvin expects “as world food prices rise, food production in the Third World should increase, as should Third World food exports: local farmers would not suffer anymore from artificially low-priced, subsidized, import competition, and would thus be able to increase their own production.”

David Pelletier’s chapter summarizes current knowledge about the public health consequences of malnutrition in large populations: “mortality is elevated even among children with mild-to-moderate malnutrition (and) is not due simply to the confounding effects of socioeconomic factors and inter-current illness.” Applying the latest epidemiological formula to the poorest countries, Pelletier finds that “malnutrition, through its potentiating effects on infectious diseases, contributes to 56 percent of all child deaths.”

Editor Marchione’s chapter reviews the evolution of concepts in food security, comparing, for example, vertical (technique-specific) with horizontal (integrating with general health care) approaches. Unfortunately, food aid has decreased in recent years. Marchione refers to the U.S. government’s international contribution which “has decreased its commitment… its food aid resources have declined from 7.9 million metric tons in 1993 to a projected 2.7 million metric tons in 1997. Marchione calls on food aid programmers to recognize the changing environment, including the proliferation of democratic regimes that claim to acknowledge international conventions such as the Convention on the Rights of the Children, reaffirmed in the 1992 International Conference on Nutrition. Marchione finds that “civil society has begun to flourish, opening development activities to NGOs.” Marchione projects that “planning and control is coming more under the influence of grassroots communities, local governments, and local NGOs.”

Much of the book deals with the process of finding approaches that are feasible for large populations. For example, such is the case in Togo, West Africa, where a community sense of ownership was the goal for the programs that promoted a regional store of essential drugs to improve household access to basic health services.

Peter Uvin, in a separate chapter, elaborates a typology of different ways that an effort can be “scaled up,” including, for example, 1) quantitative, whereby a program increases its membership or geographic spread, 2) functional, whereby a program expands to types of activities it includes, or, 3) political, whereby organizations take on activities beyond service delivery and advocate for policy change at higher levels. Drawing on a review of key developing country-based NGOs that have won the Feinstein Hunger Awards in the past, Uvin also identifies how NGOs undergo “organizational scaling up” in which they improve their strength, effectiveness, and sustainability, largely through improving their financial base, through expanded partnerships and enhanced management skills.

An excellent example of how one project was first tested in a small area and then replicated much more broadly (or “scaled up”) to a number of regions is given in a chapter about Save the Children’s work in Vietnam to help reduce malnutrition in poor rural families. Save The Children’s “Poverty Alleviation and Nutrition Program” was begun in the coastal/delta Thanh Hoa Province, focusing on growth monitoring, mother education and social marketing of nutrition and hygiene messages, supported also with a targeted revolving loan fund that provided egg-laying hens. Conceptually, Save used the “positive deviance” concept to identify what feeding practices seemed to work among those mothers whose children were well nourished (had high growth attainment). The positive deviance approach led to an emphasis which led the program to encourage mothers to feed their young children shrimp, crabs, and green vegetables, inexpensively available in the local area.

Although the pilot Save the Children program was very successful in reducing malnutrition, many visitors doubted its ability to be scaled up, given how much administrative attention Save had injected into the small pilot project. Nevertheless, in 1993, Save the Children successfully expanded the program to 10 more communes, adapting key components, and eventually reached over 200 communes and over 1 million poor Vietnamese. “Save the Children made a strategic decision to minimize the number of interventions required to… impact nutritional status. Although it is clear that water and sanitation projects, increased agricultural productivity and income generation would certainly further enhance nutritional impact, the cost of these additional components would militate against broad program replication. Hence, Save the Children placed replicability above optimum impact in prioritizing ultimate program objectives.” The Save experience in Vietnam could represent a best-case example, given that “classless, casteless Vietnamese may be easy to mobilize because of their discipline and reverence for education and training.”

Another successful example is provided about a cost-efficient program to provide nutrition education to poor mothers in Haiti, following the “Heath model” which uses local foods and builds on the positive deviance approach. The intervention, described by G Berggren et al., reached out to mothers in poor communities with a two-week intervention including training of mothers in the use of inexpensive local foods, referral care of sick children, growth monitoring and deworming. Mothers learned by doing. Because of extensive community involvement, the program was able to scale up to the district level and was adopted in other regions.

The case study from Bangladesh is very valuable reading because it so clearly explains the roles of various regional, domestic and international NGOs, various donors, and how different nutritional goals were attacked one by one. The main organization involved, the Worldview International Foundation (WIF), is headquartered in Sri Lanka, but has been at the forefront of promoting programs to combat vitamin-A deficiency through different routes than the standard capsule distribution approach that had been strongly supported by UNICEF and the Swedish government, though without ever reaching more than 65 percent coverage of the population. WIF’s approach was built from the grassroots up, educating families, by means of various traditional and mass media, including billboards, folk singers, schools, and trained women volunteers, about the importance of obtaining and including vitamin A-rich foods in the diet. The program scaled up geographically, to include increasing districts, and also functionally, to address iron and iodine deficiencies as well as parasitic Helminth infections and infant feeding practices. By devolving ownership and communication channels to the community level, WIF found that the impacts were long lasting: “When adequate knowledge, changes in dietary patterns and the desire to grow nutrition crops have been achieved, the people themselves, supported mainly by commercial markets (but also to some extent the educational system and agricultural extension) will sustain the necessary behaviors.” In addition to encouraging cooperation among NGOs, the case recommends attention to the balancing act between the size and the management needs of successful new programs: “If they are too large in scale, then the many changes required in design, training and management result in debilitating shifts in project routines and high costs for retraining. If the scale of pilot projects is too small, then the lessons learned may not be applicable to the wider society. Failure to find mid-level managers with vision and motivation may explain the failure of most pilot projects to go to scale successfully.”

The last part of the book reviews field methods of inquiry into food insecurity. Ellen Messer gives a historical review of rapid rural appraisal techniques– originally developed by anthropologists and now used extensively by nutritionists and project planners. Building on this is the example by CARE’s food specialists, Tim Frankenberger and Cathy McCaston about the recent development of CARE’s “rapid food and livelihood security assessment,” which involves at least six randomly chosen villages and takes up to four weeks, using a multi-pronged approach that examines livelihood security of households and the community in a way that informs program design and targeting. Large group interviews, which tease out general community facilities, consumption and common resources, are followed by smaller focus groups on livelihoods. These are complemented by semi-structured household surveys as well as by nutrition and health surveys. CARE’s surveys have now been completed for many poor countries and other organizations should benefit from learning more about their findings and their approach.

Several further chapters round out this text that addresses, better than any other, the subtle planning aspects of growing an intervention, which is successful in technical terms, into something that can sustainably reach a sizeable population. As Marchione concludes, “this book puts to rest the notion that scaling up a nutrition program is only a matter of increasing its size… the programs that were most cost-effective were found to work in small settings that were replicated by governments and NGOs with careful consideration of the particularities of new coverage areas. …Critical to all scaling up is how to make a grassroots nutrition organization financially sustainable. Given the scarcity of resources, managers must become ever more adept at project self-financing and competition for scarce donor funding.”

Hansch consults widely on refugee issues and is an editor of Hunger Notes.

World Hunger: 12 Myths

by Frances Moore Lappe, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset with Luis Esparza
2nd edition, 1998. New York: Grove Press. pp. 270. ISBN 0-8021-3591-9

Reviewed by Leo Vox

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

At a time of unprecedented wealth, when almost one-half of all Americans own stocks and are able to watch their wealth and economic power grow on the nightly news, it is good to remember that over 800 million people worldwide are passing the same nights unable to feed themselves and their children. A full quarter of other Americans, especially children, have much in common with the world’s hungry, experiencing their own hunger intermittently. Frances Moore Lappe and co-authors Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset in World Hunger: 12 Myths are there to remind us. Remind us of the plight of the world’s hungry, as Frances Moore Lappe has done for over 20 years, and remind us too that there is enough food; that hunger is not necessary; that hunger is a social creation; hungry people a social phenomenon, and consequently one that depends on us and that we can change.

While Frances Moore Lappe has been alerting the “baby boom” generation, as it has grown wealthier and older, to the alarming plight of the world’s poor and to the destruction of the environment to which their marginalization has contributed, she, herself, has remained as vibrant and timely as the search for an evening meal is in a poor household. World Hunger: 12 Myths includes snapshot reports from around the world, gathered from research, personal experience and the life situations recounted by the poor, which together create a picture very different from the one we receive nightly on the news, when we receive one at all.

A bit like the internet, in “hit” after “hit,” 12 Myths exposes how some of the most simple givens of “common wisdom” about the lives we lead and the world in which we live, when turned on their head and properly understood, show the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of the poor, and the bad conscience with which the actions of our corporations and politicians leave us. Some of these insights into the lives of the poor and the role we play in perpetuating them, which have led me to reexamine my own assumptions, include: the role of multi-national trade of agricultural products in disrupting local farming and destroying the environment, the role of freedom and empowerment in preventing hunger, the importance of land reform in the economic growth of Korea, Taiwan and earlier Japan and the same importance of the lack of such reform in continuing food problems in much of the Third World. Multinational corporations and multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the G-8, are all seen as reinforcing a logic of profit and exploitation of the land and people. Does this system work for the betterment of all as proponents of the “free market” would contend? In a telling exchange reported in the book with Milton Friedman, a leading economist of the free market school, the authors answer his claim that the logic of the market best allows for the expression of individual preferences in the production of goods and services. The authors reply that it could hardly be the preference of much of the world’s population to suffer from hunger in the midst of plenty. What the market really achieves is the expression of the will and desires of those with money; these desires including keeping their money and possessions whatever the consequences. Other myths also go the way of chaff from wheat, lightly carried in the wind of cumulative human experience. The penultimate chapter, “Myth 12. Food vs. Freedom,” contains an excellent analysis of the disquieting effects of the growing disparity of wealth and incomes in the United States on our political process and ultimately on our freedom. The close relationship of the loss of freedom and empowerment, and the social phenomenon of hunger, should help explain the phenomenon of a society with an ineluctably growing “hunger” problem in the midst of unprecedented human riches.

World Hunger: 12 Myths is an excellent introduction to the world the majority of people live in as opposed to the world of stock market reports and Christmas shopping. It is also an excellent challenge to many of the “givens” of our other world and a call to us to rethink our priorities and where we are going.
— Leo Vox

Leo Vox is the pen-name of an economist from the United States Agency for International Development.

The global financial crisis and its effect on poor people in the United States (shunted aside in times of prosperity and even more in recession)

(May 13, 2009) As everyone knows, there has been a world financial crisis leading to a world economic crisis. This editorial indicates how poor people and others in the Unites States have been affected by the financial and associated economic crisis.

Before the financial crisis

Since the Reagan Administration poor people (and ordinary working people) have been increasingly marginalized in the US political process, both because of ideology, principally the Republican/”conservative” notion of “let the market take care of things” (including reducing poverty), the active role of Republican administrations in reducing or eliminating laws favorable to working and poor people and (more importantly) supporting laws favorable to corporations and rich people, and the marginal role of poor people in the political process. Poor people are marginalized because they are now in a minority and do not have substantial amounts of money to contribute to the political process. On the slightly positive side, they are viewed by many in the majority with some, but fairly distant, concern. Thus, before we got to the current financial and economic crisis poor people were already in trouble. For example:

income distribution The income distribution has changed dramatically, especially the gap between the top 1 percent and the poorest fifth of Americans. In 1979, the incomes of the top 1 percent were 22.6 times higher than those of the bottom fifth. Top incomes continued climbing to 72.7 times higher by 2006 — more than tripling the rich-poor gap in 27 years. The average after-tax income of the top 1 percent of the population more than tripled, from $337,000 to over $1.2 million, while the average after-tax income of the poorest fifth of the population rose only from $14,900 to $16,500, an increase of $1,600 or 11 percent.1
poverty The nation’s official poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent, with 37.3 million people in poverty in 2007, up from 36.5 million in 2006. 13 Although the incomes of the richest people in the US rose substantially since 1979, the percentage of those in poverty in the United States has actually risen slightly between 1979 and 2007. 14
hunger and food insecurity In 2007, 36.2 million Americans, including 12.4 million children, either did not have enough food or feared that they wouldn’t have enough at some point during the year. 4
minimum wage It took nearly 10 years from the previous increase in the minimum wage for the United States in 2007 to begin to raise the minimum wage in stages from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour (although the income of the richest 1 and 20 percent was rising greatly and US government workers, for example, received yearly wage increases over the period).2 Even the higher minimum rate will not allow families to escape poverty with the resulting $15,080 of income from a 40 hour week, 52 weeks a year, still being below the poverty line—the poverty line for a family of three in 2007 being $17,170.3 . There was no major nationwide attempt to raise wages of the working poor to a satisfactory level.
The financial crisis

While things were bad for poor people while the US economy was doing well, things are now worse. Unregulated/minimally-regulated capitalism has brought about a major worldwide financial and economic crisis. This has made poor people even poorer.

It is important to note that a financial crisis typically does lead to serious economic crisis. This has happened many times in the past in the United States and elsewhere and has been the main cause of depressions. The overvaluing of prices on the upturn, and then the failure of financial institutions because of declining valuations, leverage by financial institutions, and linkage between financial institutions, can cause everyone who has money invested, deposited or backed by these institutions to lose money, plunging the economy into depression or serious recession. (See Wikipedia, the Financial Crisis of 1873 where economic and financial over-expansion was ended, in part because of the collapse of a key financial firm, Jay Cooke and Company.) We have been spared a very serious financial crisis for many years because, as the result of the great depression, sound financial system regulatory policies were introduced. These policies and oversight have been increasingly dismantled since the Reagan presidency beginning in 1980, and set the stage for the current major financial crisis.

The United States was the center of the financial crisis (although certainly banks and other financial institutions in other countries and their national institutions that were supposed to regulate them share some of the blame). In the United States, many (not all) banks, other financial institutions such as insurance companies (especially AIG), mortgage companies, and investment bankers, made some very stupid decisions which put a lot of people at risk. The tangled web of this stupidity is too complex to unravel here, but…a few key illustrative examples!

Housing Prices Housing prices rose very rapidly in the 2000s. From an index value of 100 in 2000, national housing prices, as measured by the Case-Schiller index, rose to 189 in 2006. This dramatic rise, far outstripping the usual rate of increase in housing values, is why it was called a housing bubble early on by a few including Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Nouriel Roubini, an NYU professor, and by everyone later on. Beginning in 2007 and accelerating greatly in 2008, the housing bubble burst. Housing values (as measured by the index) declined in value in 2008 to 132 (the last figure available when this was written). This means that if you bought an house in the United States for $189,000 in 2006 it had declined in value, on average, to $132,000 in 2008. Thus see the housing crisis in a nutshell. This is a decline of 30 percent. If the housing buyer had just put 10 percent down, s/he had lost money on the house and would be tempted to walk away from the house. The bank, or whoever held the mortgage (a very complicated tale, since mortgages are not held as single entities but bundled and held as mortgage-backed securities.5 As banks (see immediately below) and other financial institutions use other people’s money (deposits in the case of banks) and only have in ballpark terms about 10 percent of their own capital at risk, a decline of 26 percent in housing values can easily eliminate both the homeowner’s equity and the bank/financial institution’s own capital.

Banks. Banks make profits from other people’s money. A bank owes a lot of money to its depositors. It takes this money and lends it out. A bank’s capital position–how much of its own money it has at risk–is about 10 percent of the money it has loaned out. (The ratio of owned money to owed money is called leverage.) Thus if the assets that a bank has declines by more than the percentage it has as capital, its capital will be eliminated, and it is at risk of being taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Not only banks but other financial entities such as investment banks and hedge funds were also highly leveraged, with a similar unfortunate result when values of assets that they held began to decline sharply. To get an idea of how this has unfolded in the past, and is unfolding now, see Wikipedia, Bank Run, Financial Crisis, and Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Credit default swaps and AIG. Credit default swaps are a very arcane financial instrument, something like insurance.6 If I buy insurance it says I pay a price to insure something like my house, and if something happens, according to the legal document of the insurance, I get reimbursed. The difference between credit default swaps and insurance is that you do not need to own the underlying asset in order to obtain a credit default swap. So you–or say a hedge fund–can just bet on the price of the asset–such as a mortgage-backed security–going down. AIG was actually stupid enough to write credit default swaps in a big way, and when the housing market went down substantially, it was immediately on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars that it did not have. The US bailed out AIG, because if it did not, many banks and other financial institutions would have failed, as these financial institutions had ‘guaranteed’ themselves against loss by writing a credit default swap with AIG! The thinking in the US government was that a default by AIG on its myriad obligations would have provoked a major financial crisis and depression. The price tag was high–the US government has thus far ‘lent’ AIG $182 billion.7

We can thus see in a nutshell how the financial crisis came about. The current crisis proceeded similarly to others, first with its overvaluation of real estate and other assets, such as commodities and the stock market, and then, as the downturn began, the possibility of quite a number of key financial institutions failing from declines in these prices, when combined with financial firm leverage. The decline in real estate values wiped out or drastically reduced the equity of large numbers of new homeowners (and real estate companies), and then as the decline continued (and is continuing) wiped out or reduced drastically the equity of banks and other institutions that owed the mortgages and securities. Though institutions thought they were protected because they had obtained insurance on their liabilities, this was not so. AIG, to name the most egregious example that had written insurance on such declines, was not able to meet the volume of claims. and thus insurance could not play a large role in offsetting losses on mortgage-backed securities, Thus, banks and other financial institutions faced large losses with a key minority becoming nearly or actually insolvent. The US government including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, which up to this point had followed a hands-off ‘capitalism knows best’ approach to financial and other markets, suddenly launched rescue efforts worth thousands of billions of dollars in an attempt to minimize the financial, and accompanying real economic, meltdown. This would have occurred, since financial firm failure would have created losses for all those who held financial assets such as short-term borrowing, lines of credit, bonds or stocks from those institutions, possibly in turn bringing down these institutions and individuals in a cascading chain. (Before the banking reforms of the 1930s, people who had money deposited in banks that failed, lost all or a significant fraction of their money. Though the reforms of the 1930s, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, did reduce depositors’ risk, the current financial crisis, if left to the FDIC alone to resolve, would have easily and rapidly overwhelmed the financial reserves of the FDIC.)

Impact of the financial crisis

A financial crisis typically leads to a depression or severe recession. Though we have not had a financial crisis for a while, that is what happens. It is useful to focus on Keynesian economics, developed as an attempt to explain the Great Depression, and how the United States and other countries might get out of it, which focuses on and explains the links between production/output and spending. (See Wikipedia “Keynesian Economics” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynsian .) A Keynesian insight was how production was related to demand. Demand for goods in 2008/09 shrunk for several reasons including

a major decline in the value of housing and of stocks, the two biggest wealth classes for people in the United States
broadly based fear for the economy resulting in large part from the above
a reduction in business investment, which can be deferred if output is declining
Major impacts of the financial crisis and the resulting contraction in demand include the following.

Unemployment The unemployment rate (8.5 percent in March 2009 and rising) is the highest since the Federal Reserve under Paul Volker created a credit crunch to reduce stagflation in the early 1980s.8 With a more normal employment rate at something like 4.5 percent, 8.5 percent unemployment means that an additional 4 percent of the US workforce (and families) do not have a regular income and thus are much poorer.

Decline in housing values and, for many, losing one’s house The decline in housing prices has meant that many people have lost all their equity in their house. They thus must consider if it is prudent for them to give up their ownership. Moreover, much housing ownership was financed through low percentage down payments (of the houses’ value), and low initial interest rates (adjustable rate mortgages) which have subsequently risen. So this has caused additional hardship.

Increase in poverty In 2007, before the financial crisis/recession, one in eight Americans were poor, a very high level for a rich society. The recession will push an additional 7.5 to 10 million people into poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated.15

Increase in hunger As mentioned above, in 2007, 36.2 million Americans, including 12.4 million children, either did not have enough food or feared that they wouldn’t have enough at some point during the year. This number of food insecure people has certainly increased dramatically during 2008 and this year due to spikes in food prices and the recession. While the official statistics lag behind by 1-2 years, there is significant supporting evidence for a dramatic rise in hunger including the very large rise in unemployment, and the rise in TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) applicants and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) applicants.

Setting aside or minimizing effective action to help poor people Perhaps ultimately the major impact of all will be is that once again what happens to ordinary people is once again far down the list on the political agenda of the United States. During the Bush years, poor people were ignored. The magic of the market, the genius of American capitalism, were extolled in order to ‘unleash capitalism’ to produce benefits for everyone. This proved to be to be, if perhaps technically not a lie, certainly a giant falsehood involving self-deception (that permitted giant profits and income for the corporate elite) and the deception of others on a grand scale. Now what is happening that a pro-poor Administration is expending vast sums of attention, money and political capital to bail out capitalist institutions. Trillions of dollars are being spent on this. AIG–one firm, extremely stupid or greedy–for example has received $182.5 billion.9 $182.5 billion dollars, given to the 36.2 million food insecure people, would be $5041, or at an extra $30 a week for groceries, would move most of these people from being food insecure for three years. We are highly unlikely to see a check for $5041 mailed to the food insecure to make them food secure!

The Republicans in Congress profess to be ‘enraged’ by the current large budget deficits, indicating that efforts to help lower income people such as improved health insurance, sick leave, and unemployment benefits will face a difficult path in Congress.10

Adding up the government’s total bailout tab as of February 2, the government made commitments of $12.2 trillion and spent $2.5 trillion.11 In addition to bailout funds, there was a first fiscal stimulus package of $787 billion, with more to come.12 It is impossible to say what the final fiscal impact/cost will be for all of this for various reasons, but take as a low ballpark figure $3 trillion. There are approximately 40 million poor people in the United States according to Census Bureau estimates. As defined by the Office of Management and Budget and updated for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, for a family of three, $16,530. A $3,000 increase in income per person would move most people out of poverty. $3000 times 40,000,000 people equals $120 billion. So (a low estimate of) the bailout/stimulus package funds would fund 25 years of moving poor people out of poverty.13

The United States has first been enthralled by capitalism, and then ensnared by capitalism, leaving few resources for those who would most benefit from increased help.

This stinks.

Endnotes

1. Arloc Sherman. “Income Gaps Hit Record Levels In 2006, New Data Show.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. April 17, 2009 http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2789 )

2. Lori Montgomery, “Congress Approves Minimum Wage Hike,” Washington Post, May 25, 2007.

3. United States Department of Health and Human Services, “Prior HHS Poverty Guidelines and Federal Register References,” http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/figures-fed-reg.shtml Accessed February 25, 2008.

4. Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews and Steven Carlson. “Household Food Security in the United States, 2007.” Economic Research Report No. (ERR-66) 65 pp, November 2008. USDA. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR66/

5 See Wikipedia, “Mortgage-backed securities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_backed_securities The Case-Schiller index can be accessed from http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_csmahp/0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,3,0,0,0,0,0.html or if this doesn’t work do a Google search on Case-Schiller index.

6. See Wikipedia, Credit Default Swaps.

7. See Reuters “How AIG fell apart.” September 18, 2008. http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSMAR85972720080918 .

8. See US Department of Labor, Department of Labor Statistics, “United States Unemployment Rate” http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=LNS14000000

9. Hugh Son and Zachary R. Mider. “AIG results are said to exclude more bailout cash.” Bloomberg News May 4, 2009 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=anLdzOeVM_tc&refer=news .

10. Lori Montgomery. “Congress Approves Obama’s $3.4 Trillion Spending Blueprint” Washington Post April 30, 2009 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042901033.html.

11. New York Times “Adding Up the Government’s Total Bailout Tab” February 4, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/business/20090205-bailout-totals-graphic.html

12. fxstreet.com. “Fiscal Stimulus Package in a Nutshell” February 15, 2009 http://www.fxstreet.com/fundamental/analysis-reports/daily-global-commentary/2009-02-15.html .

13. US Bureau of the Census, “Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Unchanged,
Number of Uninsured Down” August 26, 2008 http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/012528.html

14. See US Bureau of the Census, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007” p.12 table. http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf .

15. Eric Eckholm. Rising unemployment could push an additional 7.5 million to 10.3 million United States residents below the federal poverty line in the next two or three years, study says New York Times November 24, 2008

Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses, and Prevention

By Joachim von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu, and Patrick Webb

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1998
International Food Policy Research Institute
Washington D.C. Hardback, 1999. ISBN: 0801861217.

Reviewed by Tom Marchione

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’bookstore.

The economics of famine does not lend itself to scientific treatment. Research such as this book summarizes must be done under the most difficult, dangerous and unpredictable of institutional and environmental hardships. Research contrasts with the horror and moral judgment most observers experience when famine strikes. Famines and poisonous snakes are things one would rather not meet in the wild, and in chance encounters the compulsion is either to avoid or eliminate them as soon as possible. However, for those of us faced with the task of dealing with their anatomy and effects, there is no substitute for good science. Famine in Africa is good science.

The soundness of the research is assured in that the three authors early in their careers were the Institute for Food Policy Research. Joachim von Braun is now at the University of Bonn, Germany where he heads the Economics Department in the Center for Development Research, and Patrick Webb is now on the faculty of Tufts University’s School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston, Massachusetts.

The book synthesizes much of the best micro-economic research done on famine in Africa over the past two decades, particularly in Ethiopia and Sudan, supplemented with key work in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The research is organized around a conceptual framework consisting of a matrix of three determinants of famine: 1) policy, institutional and organizational failures, 2) resource poverty, climate shocks, and 3) population pressures. Each of these are interrelated and connected to a country’s strategic policies, organization and governance, program interventions, and household income, nutrition, mortality, services, and migration during a famine event.

The three chapters devoted to the three determinants advances our understanding through new empirical studies, but the overall analysis is limited by the general lack of understanding of the complexity of the interplay of natural and human forces behind the famines analyzed. Perhaps the most original contribution in these chapters is the urban unemployment problems created by rural famines.

The following two chapters are more assessable with the empirical approach taken to market success, market failure and household food insecurity. The patient and imaginative reader can begin to see the plight and struggle of the families undergoing famine. Some the best information on household food insecurity and its relationship to child nutritional status under the coping dynamics of famine stresses can be found in this book.

The final chapter applies the analysis together with reviews of policies and relief, employment (particularly labor intensive employment programs) and agricultural programs that have been tried in African famines. The strengths and weaknesses of empirical studies of each approach to famine are carefully summarized. The chapter concludes with six hard won conclusions about the dynamics and lack of political, financial and research commitment to deal with famine in Africa by the international community.

As I began writing this review, I was reminded of two experiences I had related to famine in Ethiopia. Although I believe this book is a required part of the library of all workers on the relief situations so characteristic of the post-Cold War era, neither of my experiences is illuminated by it.

The first was on a rapid assessment of CARE food assistance programs in 1992. The long war with Eritrea had just ended. Although it was very clear that authorities in Addis Ababa maintained some degree of overall control, the government had no local capacity or will to implement the policies that would effect local relief or rehabilitation efforts one way or the other. International NGOs, such as CARE, had considerable latitude and in effect were a shadow government in some of the poorest sections of the country. It is not clear that the authors give enough attention to the role or ingenuity of local or international NGOs.

The second experience was on a brief sabbatical at Brown University’s World Hunger Program in 1995, managing research on the Ethiopian conflict, specifically the work of an Ethiopian and an Eritrean graduate student. It became increasingly clear to me that the perspectives on the history and events surrounding the conflict and famines in Ethiopia were very different between persons from different parts of the country. The book touches ever so lightly on the complex ethnic, political and human rights questions behind state failures in the famines in Sudan, Ethiopia and Rwanda.

While the authors prescribe better institutional and policy contexts for improving the responses and prevention of famine, their methodology leads them to assume too much of governments and economic institutions in these most costly famines. The book should not be faulted for this since it is written from the perspective of western economics. However, it does clearly illustrate that famines take us far beyond the horizons of empirical economic analysis.

The reviewer, Tom Marchione, is an anthropologist employed at the United States Agency for International Development, where he advises on food security and nutrition. He is a Hunger Notes contributing editor. His research focuses on the relationship of nutrition to national development and human rights (This review in no way represents the views or policies of the United States Government).

Contested Frontiers in Amazonia

by Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood
New York: Columbia University Press. 1992. 387 pp. ISBN: 0231076606

Reviewed by Keith Forbes

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

This book deals with the colonization of the southern part of the state of Pará, Brazil in the Amazon rainforest region. This is a region that has been subject to massive deforestation, food scarcity, and numerous, often violent, land conflicts. The authors, an anthropologist and a sociologist-demographer, present the results of a 15-year longitudinal study in this work. They examine this human and environmental catastrophe, and demonstrate the complex dynamics involved at local, regional, national, and international scales.

In the settlement of Pará, as elsewhere in Amazonia, competing land uses led to conflicts between almost every possible combination of small scale miners, peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, mining industries, large scale private land development companies, and loggers. The results of these inter-group conflicts were determined both by their differing degrees of economic and political power, and by the interaction of this inter-group conflict with competition for power between municipalities, states, the federal government, and disparate agencies within the federal and state governments. Federal and state agencies would often find themselves with radically different agendas for land use in a particular area, one favoring large scale industrialization and the other small landholder resettlement in the context of agrarian reform. These priorities for land use would themselves change in a highly dynamic political environment depending upon whether the support of local voters was seen as more important than that of well-heeled industries from other regions.

The book is divided into three parts. The first examines the history of land use in Amazonia, summarizing neatly the various approaches taken by military and civilian Brazilian governments toward this region. These approaches varied from corporatist, capital-intensive development policies, to agrarian reform through land redistribution, as well as garnering political support from locally important constituencies such as small-scale miners. The second part examines the state of Pará, and the complex interactions between municipal, state, and federal government agencies, competing for the power to manifest their particular visions for the development of the region. Finally, a detailed socio-economic profile of one town provides an in-depth look at the effects of competition between the various stakeholders on the everyday lives of migrant settlers. This last section contains the bulk of the quantitative analysis of standard data such as immigration patterns, livelihoods, food consumption, and so on.

Throughout the book, a convincing case is made against the “developmentalist” paradigm– the emphasis on capital intensive development, the capitalization and privatization of land use versus community-owned and usufruct models of land ownership. One is made keenly aware of the irony and tragedy of landless peasants full of hope, immigrating from other parts of Brazil to government sponsored resettlement programs, only to find the majority of new lands once again concentrated in the hands of a few large landowners. However, the successful resistance of small landholders, indigenous peoples, and small-scale miners, against forces that would impoverish them through appropriating their land and destroying their resource base is also a growing phenomenon. The case of the Kayapó Indians winning their lands back and small scale miners in Serra Pelada wresting control of the mines from the State are but two examples of these dynamics of resistance.

If there is a difficulty with the book, it is in its organization. Each part of the book summarizes changes over time. The chronological overlap between the sections of the book can make it difficult to follow the chronological sequence of events happening at regional, state, and municipal scales. All in all, this is a small problem with an otherwise excellent book that should be of great value to anyone seeking a better understanding of the interplay between agrarian reform, social tensions in frontier areas, and environmental destruction. The attention given to the resistance efforts of marginalized groups and their sophisticated understanding of events that shape their lives is of additional value to those seeking remedies to similar problems of land distribution and competition for land use in other regions of the world.

At the time of this review, Forbes was senior research analyst with the Research and Reference Services Project, managed by the Academy for Educational Development, of the United States Agency for International Development.