Economic Opportunity Mailing List Archive

["Clive Robinson" <<address removed>>]

Dear Colleagues

This will be my single contribution to the e-conference. It is sent to the 
'growth and poverty' and 'economic opportunity' groups but tries to address the 
'bigger picture' of the whole conference so forgive me if it oversteps 
boundaries. I have read all the contributions sent to the two groups. This 
contribution of four points combines reactions to some of those with comments I 
sent to DFID in January, just after publication of the paper Unlocking the 
potential.

1        DFID should be warmly congratulated on launching the conference and 
facilitating the pooling of expertise which is taking place. There remains a 
risk that a focus on agriculture, which is essentially a sector or an 
instrument, could distract attention from poverty eradication or food security 
which are the real people-centred objectives for which DFID exists. To achieve 
food security, we need to address the availability of food, access to food and 
food utilisation (agriculture, through production and livelihoods, plays a 
major part in the first two of those conditions). It is welcome that Unlocking 
the potential states that agriculture is central to the livelihoods of the 
rural poor. Policies for agriculture and food security sometimes use the 
frameworks of sectors or of agro-ecological zones. If agriculture is central to 
livelihoods, the analytical framework should be the people in agriculture and 
their access to the key productive assets: land, labour, livestock, water and 
cash. 

2        Contributors have observed that economic growth is not essential to 
poverty eradication. In terms of defeating hunger, this was one of the 
substantial conclusions of the seminal work by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen 
Hunger and public action (1989). They argued for priority attention to the 
resource needs of vulnerable rural people, in preference to waiting for 
economic growth to do the trick. By comparing countries with and without 
records of recent economic growth, the authors showed that public intervention 
in entitlement protection, food distribution, health and education is 
responsible for raising nutritional standards in both rich and poor countries. 
(Andy Bullock quotes a similar argument from FAO (AT 2020/30).) Likewise, in 
1995, FAO's World Agriculture towards 2010 explained that emphasising 
smallholder food production results in increased demand for domestically 
produced inputs and domestically produced consumer goods: in contrast, export 
agriculture demands modern inputs, of which a large part 'leaks' into the 
international economy. Poverty is the cause of food insecurity but simply going 
for economic growth does not eradicate hunger. Per Eklund's emphasis on 
nutrition might encourage us to redefine the meaning of 'growth and poverty': 
did the e-conference managers intend us to consider economic growth or the 
growth of infants?

3        In January I shared with DFID a prophetic concern that, one small 
reference apart, there was no mention of gender in Unlocking the potential. 
With the admirable exception of Per Eklund's contribution on nutrition, there 
have been a couple of very passing references to women in the two e-conference 
groups but I have read no gender analysis of the role of women in agriculture. 
Agriculture places a huge labour demand on women who are also responsible for 
most aspects of food utilisation. Their productive and reproductive roles 
combine to make them, "farmer, fetcher of water and woodfuel, caregiver to 
children, the aged and the ill, preparer of meals and income-earner from 
off-farm employment" (Government of Ethiopia Food Security Strategy, 1996). An 
Africa-wide FAO survey reports that women contribute much more than half the 
labour to food production, hoeing and weeding, harvesting and marketing, food 
processing, storage and transport from farm to village, water and woodfuel 
fetching. A recent survey in Eritrea has echoed findings elsewhere that, though 
female-headed households dispose of fewer assets than male-headed households, 
they consume slightly more food and achieve better nutrition for their families 
(CARE, ERREC and WFP: Rural livelihood security assessment, 2003). Enhancing 
women's access to and control over resources, assets and decision-making is 
crucial to improving the outcomes of agriculture.

4        As a guide to DFID's future agriculture policy, Michael Lipton's Plan 
A (that poverty reduction should be initiated by employment-intensive, 
small-farm agricultural growth, first for staple foods, then for cash crops) is 
totally convincing. There is no substitute for finding ways for DFID to deliver 
as many resources as possible into the hands of small farmers in pursuit of 
this vision. DFID is among donors whose resources are currently diverted away 
from smallholder farming into two blind alleys: food aid and budgetary support. 
In Eritrea I found that, over the last three years, donor contributions to food 
aid under the UN's Consolidated Appeals Process had been 61 times greater than 
their contributions to agriculture. This is not sustainability. Faced with 
cash-starved bureaucracies in low-income countries, it would be extremely 
difficult for DFID to prove that poor farmers and consumers had benefited from 
the concentration of aid on budgetary support or sector investment programmes 
even where pro-poor policies seemed to meet DFID's criteria on paper. 
Fungibility frustrates the best intentions. As Vinay Chand said, "Help needs to 
go through as near the ground as possible in contrast to paper allocations to 
global programmes which are often too general or removed to be truly useful." 
Delivery channels exist (governmental, multilateral and NGO) which will allow 
DFID to transfer resources directly to smallholder agriculture for the 
technical purposes which contributors to the e-conference have richly described 
from their experience. Transfers to improve village-level access to water, 
livestock, microcredit and nutrition will achieve most for DFID's true 
objectives and the Millennium Development Goals. 

Clive Robinson