73.
Africa
Food Crisis Is A Policy Crisis
By James Tulloch, July 28, 2011
Bad policies, not just bad weather, have created the East African famine. That’s the message from experts battling the hunger.
Starving people appear to most of us as an indistinct mass of human misery. Their pain is what moves us. Their needs compel us to help. They look and suffer alike. Who they are is not really important.
But to understand why East Africans are starving, and to really help them, we need to know who they are and where they came from, says Karol Boudreaux, a poverty economist with USAID.
Then we’ll see that it’s not just drought that has caused the East African famine, it is bad governance. The food crisis is a policy crisis. Unless policies are changed, she warned the TEDGlobal 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, “the same thing is going to happen over and over again”.
So who are these people? And what are the policies that have pushed them to the brink?
Starving people appear to most of us as an indistinct mass of human misery. Their pain is what moves us. Their needs compel us to help. They look and suffer alike. Who they are is not really important.
But to understand why East Africans are starving, and to really help them, we need to know who they are and where they came from, says Karol Boudreaux, a poverty economist with USAID.
Then we’ll see that it’s not just drought that has caused the East African famine, it is bad governance. The food crisis is a policy crisis. Unless policies are changed, she warned the TEDGlobal 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, “the same thing is going to happen over and over again”.
So who are these people? And what are the policies that have pushed them to the brink?
Pastoralists In Peril
“The people most affected are pastoralists who live in these arid regions of northern Kenya, Somalia and eastern Ethiopia,” explained Boudreaux afterwards. “They rely for almost all their needs on their livestock.”
They have been dealing with drought for centuries, moving their livestock between pastures, their nomadic existence a strategy to keep one step ahead of hunger. But their capacity to live this way has been crippled by the gradual loss of their grazing lands, lands held under traditional custody rights, lands that may at times appear unoccupied.
Governments moved in, ignoring those communal rights, created national parks and sold land and water sources to farmers. They also tightened border controls and so blocked pastoralists’ movement between wet and dry season pastures.
“For decades they have tried to get pastoralists to settle down. And in the development community there was a sense that pastoralism was not as viable a production system as we now know it is,” Boudreaux explains.
The result was too many farmers settling in places with too little rainfall and so squeezing pastoralists into smaller areas. This all makes it harder for people to find food when times are tough. The ongoing conflict in Somalia has made things much, much worse.
“In conflict-prone South and Central Somalia, a stable government and peace are the only solutions,” to the immediate crisis, says Christoph Mueller, Head of the German Red Cross in Eastern Africa.
But what should be done in the medium to long term to prevent the endlessly repeating cycle Boudreaux warns about?
They have been dealing with drought for centuries, moving their livestock between pastures, their nomadic existence a strategy to keep one step ahead of hunger. But their capacity to live this way has been crippled by the gradual loss of their grazing lands, lands held under traditional custody rights, lands that may at times appear unoccupied.
Governments moved in, ignoring those communal rights, created national parks and sold land and water sources to farmers. They also tightened border controls and so blocked pastoralists’ movement between wet and dry season pastures.
“For decades they have tried to get pastoralists to settle down. And in the development community there was a sense that pastoralism was not as viable a production system as we now know it is,” Boudreaux explains.
The result was too many farmers settling in places with too little rainfall and so squeezing pastoralists into smaller areas. This all makes it harder for people to find food when times are tough. The ongoing conflict in Somalia has made things much, much worse.
“In conflict-prone South and Central Somalia, a stable government and peace are the only solutions,” to the immediate crisis, says Christoph Mueller, Head of the German Red Cross in Eastern Africa.
But what should be done in the medium to long term to prevent the endlessly repeating cycle Boudreaux warns about?
Power Back To Communities
Karol Boudreaux thinks pastoralism should be supported as it is often “more sustainable than farming” in arid areas. “They need help restocking their herds, they need secure land and water rights, and they need access to livestock markets,” she says.
“Those who live off their livestock have a very, very difficult time now.”
~Ali Abdi, a former herder
Her model is Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). The poster-child for this approach is Namibia.
Since 1996 black Namibians have had robust rights to manage the lands they live on and the wildlife that shares those lands. Communities organized themselves into ‘conservancies’ and now about 10 percent of Namibians are members of the 59 conservancies that in 2009 earned about 5.5 million dollars. Wildlife numbers recovered too– between 2004 and 2009 buffalo and elephant numbers tripled.
“This is considered the gold standard worldwide for handing power back to communities,” says Boudreaux, “and the impact on the wildlife has been nothing short of astonishing”.
Also these countries lack food storage and transport facilities. Up to 40 percent of wheat grown in sub-Saharan African countries is lost to rodents or rot because it doesn’t get to market quickly enough.
Warehousing food securely for the bad times is also essential to help “get over the boom and bust cycle,” said Sheeran.
Considering that hunger costs poor countries an average of 6 percent of GDP, fighting food insecurity is clearly an economic imperative. “If a child doesn’t get adequate nutrition in its first 1000 days the damage is irreversible… we see brain volumes of 40 percent less than normal. The earnings potential of children can be cut in half,” Sheeran explained.
And fighting hunger is perfectly affordable. The World Bank says it would cost 10.3bn dollars to deal with malnutrition in the worst-affected countries. India, home to the highest numbers of malnourished children in the world, this year plans to spend 11bn dollars on 126 fighter planes.
Bad policies, unlike bad climate changes, can be quickly reversed.
Since 1996 black Namibians have had robust rights to manage the lands they live on and the wildlife that shares those lands. Communities organized themselves into ‘conservancies’ and now about 10 percent of Namibians are members of the 59 conservancies that in 2009 earned about 5.5 million dollars. Wildlife numbers recovered too– between 2004 and 2009 buffalo and elephant numbers tripled.
“This is considered the gold standard worldwide for handing power back to communities,” says Boudreaux, “and the impact on the wildlife has been nothing short of astonishing”.
Also these countries lack food storage and transport facilities. Up to 40 percent of wheat grown in sub-Saharan African countries is lost to rodents or rot because it doesn’t get to market quickly enough.
Warehousing food securely for the bad times is also essential to help “get over the boom and bust cycle,” said Sheeran.
Considering that hunger costs poor countries an average of 6 percent of GDP, fighting food insecurity is clearly an economic imperative. “If a child doesn’t get adequate nutrition in its first 1000 days the damage is irreversible… we see brain volumes of 40 percent less than normal. The earnings potential of children can be cut in half,” Sheeran explained.
And fighting hunger is perfectly affordable. The World Bank says it would cost 10.3bn dollars to deal with malnutrition in the worst-affected countries. India, home to the highest numbers of malnourished children in the world, this year plans to spend 11bn dollars on 126 fighter planes.
Bad policies, unlike bad climate changes, can be quickly reversed.
The right time to eat is: for a rich man when he is hungry, for a poor man when he has something to eat.
-Mexican Proverb
