Global Trade Mailing List Archive

["Peter Robbins" <<address removed>>]

Dear Duncan,
 
The contributions to this and the other themes in this forum amount to a 
vignette of the current nature of agricultural development - tens of thousands 
of projects and policy decisions each of which have to be designed, implemented 
and assessed in exquisite detail. Each probably requires a series of 
consultations, background research, workshops, feasibility studies, pilot 
projects, budget forecasts, staff recruitment, funding applications, etc. 
Limited aid funds are  expended as much on we 'experts' and our administrative 
tools (including this forum) as they are on the farmers who are the target 
beneficiaries of these projects.

 

Brilliant and dedicated, as those engaged in this work are, the system has 
become institutionalised. There is an assumption that the skills-profiles of 
most existing agricultural development experts (biologists, agronomists, 
product processors, sociologists, entomologists, biochemists, veterinarians, 
etc.) will be the very skills needed to bring the greatest success. And, 
indeed, when it comes to the desperate need to help farmers to feed themselves 
and their fellow citizens, they are. But we tend to think that the solutions to 
these problems can be found with the application of technology and our debate 
mostly concerns the nature of the policy apparatus within which these technical 
'fixes' will be allowed to do their magic.

 

Whether subscribers are convinced or not of the case for supply management 
(linked to mechanisms to stimulate competition among trading companies), I 
would like to make the following point. It seems to me that we must be prepared 
to re-examine the wider environment in which our work takes place. Firstly, we 
must understand how the markets of these products work and try to understand 
the completely different, and often shadowy, world of commodity trading. 
Secondly, we must understand that, what are essentially political decisions 
made in Geneva and Washington, affecting international trading and economic 
rules and systems, can have an impact  many times greater than a thousand 
individual agricultural development projects, producing results with a tiny 
fraction of those projects' administrative costs.



Peter Robbins