On the need for a broader approach

Rejoinder On the need for a broader approach

Leonardo Paulino and John Me//or’s paper on ‘The food situation in developing countries: two decades in review’ (FOOD POLICY, Vol9, No 4, pp 291-303) performs a signal service in bringing together disparate data on food production, consumption and trade and in making sense of trends affecting them, especially since the 1974 World Food Conference. Particular/y useful is their attention to a//ocations of foodstuffs between humans and animals (Table 2) in the LDCs; particularly gratifying is their refusal to jump on the current/y fashionable ‘Africa bandwagon ‘, (‘The most massive poverty is still in Asia A shift of focus to Africa in dealing with the world food problem should not divert attention from Asia’.) For these, and other reasons, Paulino and Mel/or are likely to find themselves frequent/y and gratefully cited.

‘Rejoinders’ all too often reproach authors for not doing what they never set out to do in the first place. This will be therefore less a critique of a valu- able piece than a plea that in future scholars of the calihre of Paulino and Mellor broaden their framewlork enough to encompass the social questions which neo-classical economists generally consider beyond their ken: that they take more seriously the implications of the questions they themselves raise. If these authors were dealing wjith trends in the production. consumption and trade of cement or steel ingots. one would need only to applaud their thoroughness and have done; the problem here, however. as Paulino and Mellor would be the first to recognize. is that the issue is food.

Forgive the banality. but food is something that people must have. unlike cement or steel ingots, ever); day, or perish. Whether they do. or do not, manage to obtain it is of para- mount importance to us all. not mere- ly on moral grounds ~~ though the hunger of hundreds of millions of people is scandalous enough - but for reasons of r&polirih as well. Several governments have risked destabiliza- tion during the past year because of food riots, Such crises are likely to become more frequent and acute as pressures working against peoples’ food security grow in force and viciousness; the victims will be ever more numerous. and they may well

FOOD POLICY February 1985

decide that they will not starve quiet- ly.

It is not that Paulino and Mellor neglect such issues. rather that they do not take them far enough. They are certainly concerned with poverty and malnutrition. but their analysis of food trends provides few clues as to how these trends work and will continue to wjork against satisfaction of the poor majority’s food needs and why more and more people are going hungry, whatever the aggregate levels of production and consumption. Because basic social and political questions are not asked. it follows that the authors’ proposal5 of ‘possible strategies for improving the (Third World) food situation’ fall short of grappling with the issues. Oscillating between the descriptive and the prescriptive. their paper tends to run into contradictions. most of which can be traced to the (mistaken. in my view) notion that the right technology and crop choices will somehow change social relationships for the better and provide access to food for the most deprived.

Thus. while they rightly point out that ‘a vital issue is the continuing problem of malnutrition and poverty. particularly in Asia. in the face of major improvements in food production’ they simultaneously claim that ‘technological change w’as the answer to the Asian food problem The substantial acceleration of Asian food output of course reflects the success of

modern high yield varieties in the

region’ (pp 296297). Either the Asian food problem has

been solved or it has not: here, in Paulino and Mellor’s ‘descriptive’ mode, we have an implicit recognition of a major contradiction, the divorce between production and consumption. Green-revolution techniques, though they may have been the ‘answer’ and whatever their ‘success’, have not got rid of malnutrition however much food output may have increased. (The authors might argue that the hunger situation would have been substantially worse without these techniques; this is not stated.) In their ‘prescriptive’ mode. they want to see poverty (the basic cause of malnutrition) reduced. ‘The two most powerful forces for reducing poverty in developing countries are increased food production and declining food prices The only MV~’ both can occur simultaneously is through cosr-dccrcasirlg recllnolo- gical chaiz~e in agriculture.’ (p 300).

Fair enough. Apart from a few diehards, everyone agrees that increased production alone will not do the trick -that is why half the popula- tion of India still lives below a string- ently determined poverty line. Many people have argued that India’s occa- sional accumulation of grain reserves reflects not so much improved nutritional status as the inability of hundreds of millions of poor Indians to buy them. The standard come-the- revolution solution is also inadequate,

or. as Paulino and Mellor put it, ‘radical redistribution of income without attendant increases in food supplies’ will be self-defeating. The Chileans under the Allende government learned this to their cost. when redistributed income resulted in a 13% jump in food demand in a single year, local supplies were unequal to the task, the US and other suppliers flatly refused to extend credit for grain

purchases and domestic prices soared, largely wiping out the redistribution. In the unlikely event that any Asian governments are contemplating ‘radical redistribution’, they would do well to heed Paulino and Mellor’s warning.

For the authors, the only way out of this double bind is to reduce food prices through ‘cost-decreasing tech-

75

nological change’, which is thus label- led but unfortunately not otherwise specified. Given the crucial importance of this proposed strategy in their paper, one would like to know what they have in mind. Surely it cannot be a more-of-the-same spreading of green-revolution technology, which is cost-increasing. For example, in 1972. fertilizer averaged about $50 to $75 a ton. In 1974 it hit $300 a ton and now hovers around $250 to $275.’ During the decade chiefly under review (1973~83), it is true that yields of paddy and wheat have improved: eg in India by 27% and 44% respectively.’ But was this greater output enough to compensate farmers for fertilizer costs that increased during the same period by a factor of 4 or 5? Agricultural systems relying on petroleum-based inputs are unlikely to have escaped the ‘OPEC effect’ and the higher cost it has brought since 1973, even though output may have gone up as well.

Furthermore, at the national level, many countries still cannot produce all their own imports and must depend on imports paid for in hard currency whose upward fluctuations have lately been particularly stressful for LDCs. It is possible to purchase a measure of food self-sufficiency in this way, but at the cost of another kind of economic dependency. Finally, at the personal level, the average per capita cereal intake of an Indian in 1983 has been calculated as 173 kg (down 6 kg from 5 years previously) which works out at less than 1500 calories per day.’ Since we know that average figures are not much use for describing the plight of the poorest, surely we may conclude at the very least that this is far from an affluent diet.

If green-revolution technology fit- ted the authors’ bill and reduced food prices, we would know it by now. Countries that have based their agri-

culture on such energy-intensive methods would have already reaped the benefits of ‘cost-decreasing technology’ in the form of better nutrition and diminishing rural poverty and Paulino and Mellor would not have made their proposal since it would have been ipso facto redundant.

What other technological change might be cost decreasing? Can the

authors be thinking of compost, greater economies of scale through more land concentration and mechanization, biotechnological advances like nitrogen-fixing varieties or more wide- spread irrigation? All these would present specific drawbacks.

Inconceivable

A return to traditional ‘eco-farming’ methods, though it might be desirable, appears almost inconceivable given the web of social and economic arrangements that have grown up around 20 years or more of green- revolution practices. Further land concentration and mechanization, already a disaster for the poor, would precipi- tate that many more landless labour- ers and near-landless people into the ranks of the hungry. Biologically en- gineered plants like nitrogen-fixing varieties (1) are still in the lab stage (2) would yield about 30% less than ordinary fertilized varieties because of the energy expended in the fixing process (3) and will in any event be controlled by transnational corpora- tions which will hardly give them away.’ Finally, Paulino and Mellor’s own institution, IFPRI, has indicated that new irrigation would cost $2 000 per hectare in India and $2 400 in the Philippines (in 1975 dollars), while major and minor improvements to existing irrigation systems would cost $700 and $300 respectively in both c0untries.s Such sums fall into the ‘wildest dream’ category for the vast majority of poor Asian farmers and would not be cost-decreasing - at least not until amortized over a good many years.

There are, of course, agricultural systems which would be cost- decreasing as well as risk-reducing for the people using them. Such systems would be based on scientific compre- hension and improvement of traditional peasant farming practices, or what is left of them. Large-scale destruction of peasant food production techniques through cash cropping, ‘development’ schemes stressing monoculture and the like, would in many societies require a quasi- archeological effort to resurrect them.

In any event, favourable, yield-

increasing associations between tree, bush, standing and root crops would need to be (re)discovered or en- hanced, biological anti-pest and dis- ease measures generalized and natural protections against erosion, saliniza- tion, and desertification ensured. Naturally, such systems would have to be finely tuned to specific and relatively limited physical environments as well as to specific cultural (as opposed to agricultural) preferences. Such emphases would make for multi- disciplinary, participatory (with the peasants concerned) and extremely complex science of a kind little favoured in most research establish- ments which, understandably, would rather deal with more easily resolved problems - like how much N, P, or K should one apply here or there‘? A good deal of rhetorical attention has lately been paid to farming systems in multilaterally-funded research cen- tres, but their budget allocations have not kept pace with their declarations.

All of which is tantamount to saying that in order to reduce the price of food through ‘cost-decreasing technological change’ (unless Paulino and Mellor supply an alternative) we would need to dismantle and recon- struct from scratch practically the whole international agricultural R and D system; official development agen- cies would have to change totally their present approach which is almost in- variably geared to monoculture, standardization and supposed ‘mod- ernization’ along western lines. Re- search would need consciously to take the unprecedented step of making the poor peasantry its chief collaborators and its major benficiaries. If this is the kind of cost-decreasing technological change Paulino and Mellor actually have in mind, I, for one, wish they would come out and say so: such eminent voices would add consider- ably to the volume of those now crying in the wilderness.

But I rather fear that this is not what they are thinking of, since they do not exploit the opportunity to say so in the case of Africa. On the contrary, ‘policies for Africa now are probably less propitious for the food sector than in Asia two decades ago. The nature of the technological breakthroughs

76 FOOD POLICY February 1985

Rejoinder

increasingly marginalized and unable,

through no fault of their own, either to produce or to consume food. The deepest contradiction the authors, like the rest of us, must face is that millions of such people serve no purpose in a world system which regards food ~ like cement, steel ingots and everything else - as a commodity.

They are useless for production when machinery and green-revolution techniques ‘improve labour productivity’ on larger holdings and are fully capable of satisfying existing demand. They are not needed for consumption either so long as greater quantities of fruit, vegetables, meat, and animal feed can be exported to the industrial- ized countries; so long as appreciable quantities of vegetable calories can be converted to animal calories (as Pauli- no and Mellor demonstrate to be the case) to feed those who can express their wants in money, the only lan- guage the market understands. Nor, as the Marxist argument would have it, are these vast numbers of poor people even needed to provide a reserve labour army to keep wages depressed - beyond a certain point. the idea becomes ludicrous. Local and seasonal labour shortages may exist, but with 1000 million under- or unem- ployed people expected by the IL0 in the year 2000, employers need not, on the whole. worry about rising salaries!

What are we to do with these millions of ‘superfluous’ people? Be- sides their proposal for unspecified ‘cost-decreasing agricultural technology’ which is supposed to reduce food prices and thus somehow incorporate the landless and the jobless into the ranks of consumers, Paulino and Mel- lor also suggest another remedy for the condition of the poor. I admit defeat in trying to follow their argument that growth in demand for livestock and livestock feed ‘has a number of potential benefits to the poor’, including job creation (p 300). Where, in the LDCs, is livestock production ‘innately a labour-intensive process’, except in pastoralist societies currently undergoing rapid destruction? Cer- tainly not in Central or South America where millions of hectares are now devoted to pasture from which peasant food producers have been

needed are less clear. hence the focus on a technological answer is less sharp’ (p 298). As far as I can determine, this means ‘we do not have a cut-and-dried Green Revolution to propose for Afri- ca’ rather than a plea for a social reorientation of research and technology to benefit small peasant food producers.

Improving productivity

Paulino and Mellor recommend that in Africa ‘technological research

should focus substantially on improving labour productivity .’ At first glance, one hesitates to take issue with a call for ‘improving labour productivity’, but second thoughts prevail when one recalls what such ‘improvements’ have entailed in our era for the smal- lest and weakest food producers. Im- proving productivity, unless it is done through the equal sharing of research and other benefits as outlined above, can only imply adding capital or other scarce resources to which few peasant producers have access. The USA, where agricultural labour productivity is the highest in the world, also holds a record for farm losses and concentration of production in few hands. In 1981, fully two-thirds of net farm incomes went to one percent of US producers; while just 112 000 farms out of 2.4 million received over 86% of this income. Seventy percent of all those the USDA classed as ‘farms’ actually had negative farm income and made up their losses in off-farm revenues.h Where are the victims of this kind of ‘improvement’ to go in poor societies? Where are those ex- cluded to find alternative jobs?

Besides noting the need for ‘new agricultural technology’ and for ‘improving labour productivity’, the authors also provide a laundry list of nearly everything else that needs fixing in Africa (transport, marketing, better choice of commodities, a varie- ty of undesignated ‘complex political adjustments’ and ‘ancillary policies’, ~tc). In fact, the only things they miss are the two most significant present constraints on improved food production in Africa, ie government prefer- ence for cash crops and the role of women.

In these omissions they are not alone. Despite all the lamentations by the FAO and other official bodies over the abysmal state of African food production, it remained for a non- governmental organization to point out that nearly all cereals in the Sahel are grown in rain-fed areas, yet of the $7.5 billion in aid that poured into this region in 1975-80 - ostensibly to improve food production - a mere 16% was devoted to rain-fed crops.’ Bourkina Fasso, for example, has increased its cotton production by a factor of 32 since its independence but in 1983 it grew the same amount of millet and sorghum as in 1960. Unfor- tunately, falling commodity prices have served only to reinforce the stress laid on export crops, as African governments compete to sell more in a desperate attempt to keep their revenues stable.

The sexual division of labour is another incontrovertible factor in Africa’s failure to produce enough food. Men generally take care of cash crops and monopolize most of the existing technology; women take re- sponsibility for family food crops and are expected to make do with whatever inputs may be left over, if any. Since they must also care for children, fetch water and firewood over increasingly long distances, and usually try to earn some cash income as well, the time and energy they can devote to growing food is severely constrained.x

Women’s special contributions and needs have received a lot of lip service, but litle else. A recent UN report discloses that ‘women play an impor- tant role in the production and marketing of farm products in many developing countries, and yet less than one-tenth of one percent of all United Nations system resources were allo- cated to programmes for rural women. Furthermore, the rate of growth in the allocation of resources to these programme activities was well below one- half the rate for all (other sectors of food and agriculture receiving aid)‘.”

One would have welcomed some attention from Paulino and Mellor to the actors in food systems - not just women, but the poor peasantry and the landless throughout the Third World. Such people are becoming


forcibly removed, which provide minimal employment and which have, if anything, further reduced their nutritional status.“’ The industrial poultry and animal-raising schemes which are everywhere preferred in the LDCs, are imported from the USA or Europe and use capital-intensive methods. Perhaps, as the authors believe, some ‘relatively poorer farmers’ producing cassava for animal feed will prosper, but this does not yet seem to be true in Thailand, the largest LDC exporter of cassava for this purpose.

Nor do I understand how, ‘during periods of poor harvest, the demand for food can be flexed on the livestock front, rather than the common practice of reducing the consumption of the low-income groups’. Has Paulino and Mellor’s supply-and-demand uni- verse suddenly collapsed? Will those able to pay, out of altruism and a sense of moral obligation, stop con- suming the meat, eggs and dairy products to which they have become accustomed in order to leave more cereals available to the poor? Might we ask on this point one or two modest historical or contemporary ex- amples? Most Third World governments are unlikely to impose this sort of alimentary sacrifice on the very classes that keep them in power.

As to food trade trends, some regard by Paulino and Mellor for the forces creating mounting and danger- ous imbalances would have been help- ful. One might quickly cite several factors contributing to the unfavour- able import/export ledger in the Third World, which emanate from the indus- trialized countries.

1) The demands of the IMF on inde- In the real world - the one Paulino bted countries especially in Africa and and Mellor well understand - the one Latin America, which force them to that functions ruthlessly according to export come what may and whatever laws of supply and demand for food their internal food situation. These production, consumption and trade, policies not only prevent investment in scarcity induces neither national nor food crops but will also prove an personal altruism and self sacrifice but ecological disaster weighing on future higher prices for the poor. Liberal food production as soils, forests and economists, if consistent with their waters are ‘mined’ to earn hard cur- beliefs, should regard food specula- rency. tion, maximization of profits, land 2) The durable, multi-faceted and concentration, the exclusion from pro- successful efforts of US ‘market duction and consumption of those who cooperators’ (wheat, feed grain, soy- cannot pay and increased exports, beans, etc producers’ associations) even during times of shortage and

which, with the help of government funding, create new markets for US agricultural products abroad.” 3) The 30 year contribution of Amer- ican ‘Food for Peace’ (PL 480) and other national or international food aid programmes to changing food habits and so creating commercial demand in recipient countries for products they cannot grow themselves (eg wheat). This causes them to move. in the time-worn phrase, ‘from aid to trade’. 4) The consistent refusal of the North to make any moves towards fairer and more stable prices for southern prim- ary products in the framework of a New International Economic Order.

The net result is that the LDCs which had a $20 billion agricultural trade surplus as recently as 1977, in 1981 paid out for agricultural imports nearly everything they earned for their agricultural exports ($74 billion worth of imports, $79 billion of exports - if the Asian centrally planned economies are included, 19X1 export earn- ings were totally wiped out by the cost of imports).12

LDC dependence on cereal imports is especially distressing at a time when bilateral sales agreements are increasingly used between major suppliers and clients (eg the USA and the USSR), thus substantially reducing the size of markets on which smaller and weaker LDCs must buy. Any future climatic or commercial shock could send prices on these ‘residual’ markets skywards, creating even greater hardship for needy purchasers. Food aid cannot be expected to palli- ate such difficulties.

famine as normal - even praiseworthy ~ marketplace behaviour. It is, however, true. as Emerson said, that con- sistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Let us then credit Pauhno and Mellor with large ones and not ask them to reconcile, as they try to do, trends in food production, consumption and trade determined solely by market forces with the real, unmet needs of the poor and hungry.

Susan George Institute for Policy Studies/

Transnational Institute Washington, DC and Amsterdam

The author can be contacted at 10 rue Jean-Michelez, 91510 Lardy (Essonne), France.

‘World Bank, World Development Report 7987, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1982, and FAO Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, March 1982 and March 1983, FAO, Rome, Tables 2. ‘Calculated from data in FAO, Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural Economics and Statistics, Vol 25, No 2, Feburary 1976 (Table 6 for rice; Table 9 for wheat), and FAO, Month/v Bullefin of Statistics. Vol 7. No 6, June 1984 (Table 7 for rice; Table 10 for wheat): 3Per capital cereal availability in India (non-seed use; includes imports) in USDA, World Food Aid Needs and Availabilities, 1984, Economic Research Service, July 1984, Table 40. Figures for 1978 per capita available in USDA, Global Food Assessment, 7980, ESCS, Foreign Agri- cultural Economic Report No 159, July 1980, Table 6. The calculation of calories per day is arrived at as follows: 1 kg of grain equals about 3000 calories (figure used by Selowsky when he made similar estimates for the World Bank). 3000 x 173 kg = 519000 calories f 365 days = 1422 calories per day. To these dispiriting figures should nonetheless be added a theoretical annual availability of 16 kg of pulses and 6 kg of vegetable oils. 4For details on biotechnology, see Jack Kloppenburg and Martin Kenney, ‘Biotech- nology, seeds and the restructuring of agriculture’, The Insurgent Sociologist, Volume 12, No 3, Summer 1984, and Susan Georqe. ‘Biobusiness: life for sale’. paper presented at the Institute for Policy Studies Conference on ‘Meeting the Corporate Challenge’, 6-10 June 1984 (available from IPS, 1901 Que St NW, Washington, DC 20009, USA). 5Peter Cram, et al, lnvestmkt and input Requirements for Accelerating Food Pro- duction in Low-Income Countries by 1990, IFPRI Report No 10, September 1979, IFPRI, Washington DC, cited in William R. Gasser, Survey of krigation in Eight Asian

78 FOOD POLICY February 1985

Nations, USDA, Economics and Statistics Service, Foreign Agricultural Economic Report No 165, July 1981, pp 32 and 100. ‘US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Economic indicators of the Farm Sector: Farm Sector Review 1982. ECIFS 2-1, May 1983, drawn direct- ly calculated from data in Table 3. 7Nigel Twose, Why the Poor Suffer Most: Drought and the Sahel, Oxfam Public Affairs Unit, Oxford, UK, 1984. *See for example Ophelia Mascarenhas, ‘Women’s control of resources and its implications for the food and nutritional status of their families’, paper presented at the Tanzanian Food and Nutrition Centrel UNICEF Workshop on ‘Hunger and Socie- ty’, Soliwayo, lringa Region, Tanzania, 59 December 1983. For a non-scholarly sum-

-

mary of this paper, Susan George, ‘What women need is a 48 hour day’ in my monthly column (‘Target Practice’) for AFRICASIA, April 1984. 9World Food Council, Global Assessment of Resource Flows through the United Nations System to the Food and Agricul- ture Sector (prepared in response to a request of the Economic and Social Coun- cil of the United Nations) WFC/1984/9, Rome, May 1984, paragraph 32. “‘See Alan Berg, The Nutrition Factor, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC 1973, pp 65ff and Bernard Roux, ‘Expan- sion du capitalisme; L’AmBrique centrale et le march6 mondiale de la viande bovine’, Tiers Monde, (IEDES-Presses Universitaires de France), Avril-Juin 1975. One can also find a great many capital-

Kejuinder

intensive livestock raising schemes de- scribed in the Annual Reports of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (the government insurer of US companies in the LDCs) or the Latin American Agri- business Development Corporation (a consortium of US transnational corpora- tions and banks). “Details in Susan George, ‘ “L’Agribusi- ness” et I’Etat; le cas des [email protected]’ in Jorge Niosi, ed, Firmes Multinationales et Autonomie Nationale (Proceedings of the 2nd Colloquium of the Political Economy Association, University of Quebec at Mon- treal) Editions Saint-Martin, Montreal, 1983. “FAO, World Food Report 1983, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Trade Table, p 53.

Rejoinder Development or national security first? With a human tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions now unfolding in Ethiopia and much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, the use and abuse of food aid is very much in the spotlight of public scrutiny. Under these circumstances, Raymond F. Hopkins’s article on ‘The evolution of food aid: towards a development first regime’, ’ is a timely and well-conceived analysis both of the operating principles of the global food regime that have evolved since the 1974 World Food Conference and of the substantial need that remains to establish a solid, developmental basis for future food aid policy.

As the Ethiopian horror demonstrates only too well, many donors find it philosophically difficult and politically inopportune to decouple food aid programming. decisions from the foreign policy context. Thus, a Marxist regime that has allied itself closely with the Soviet Union and has been openly critical of the USA and other Western donor countries has encoun- tered, not surprisingly, a great reluct- ance among these same donors to respond quickly and generously even on a purely humanitarian basis. While US food aid policies have evolved substantially since the early days of unbridled surplus disposal and market development - and even since the most blatant uses of ‘food for war’ during the 1970s in Vietnam and Kampuchea - only the most naive would suggest that foreign policy considerations are not (and, in all likelihood, will not continue to be) the


critical deciding factor in most food aid allocation decisions. Clearly, this reality is well understood by Hopkins, who offers a number of intriguing prescriptions for ‘working around’ this constraint in order to promote stable, long term development.

While I find myself in general agree- ment with most of Hopkins’s thesis, I am much less sanguine than he about the basic possibilities for system change. In my judgement, economic and political considerations pervade, and eventually come to dominate, virtually every international rela- tionship involving the transfer of food resources, whether bilateral or multilateral, governmental or non- governmental. Thus, whether one is concerned with the reformulation of national food aid policies or with changes in the scope and authority of multilateral organizations such as the Committee on Food Aid Policies and

Programmes (CFA) of the World Food Programme or the World Food Council (WFC), it is difficult to find much evidence that, despite the pros- pect of long term food deficits on the African continent and elsewhere, the major donor countries are not any more willing today than they were in 1974 to sacrifice political flexibility in the interests of increased developmental impact.

My own view is that, generally in keeping with the history of the international food aid effort since the end of the second world war, system change will continue to be in- cremental, situation-specific, and often subject to reversal as the result of political exigencies. In the case of the USA, which remains the single most influential actor in the food policy arena, Hopkins appears correct in his assessment of new signs of flexibility on such issues as commodity selection or long-term programming guarantees. In all likelihood, the USA will continue to demonstrate a margin- al willingness to modify the terms and conditions of its aid agreements as long as the global food situation does not return to the crisis conditions of the early 1970s and pre-emptive foreign policy applications do not inter- vene. But there is little evidence to suggest that those close to the seat of power (primarily the National Secur- ity Council and State Department) are likely to modify their views on the attractiveness of food aid as a means of promoting US strategic and di- plomatic objectives, particularly as other sources of leverage become less

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Documents

On the need for a broader approach