Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses(Questions 160-164)

TUESDAY 14 JANUARY 2003

MR MAX LAWSON, DR GRAHAM MACKAY, PROFESSOR JONATHAN KYDD AND DR ANDREW DORWARD

Tony Worthington

  160. Just taking your point, which sounds profoundly pessimistic, Dr Dorward, we have a situation where there is no internal source of fertiliser in any adequate way at all and it is unaffordable and provided externally, land is severely depleted and population is rising, and there is no answer.
  (Dr Dorward) I am afraid I would entirely concur with that. What we are proposing is a way to reduce dependency and the vulnerability of individuals but we have to ask if we get the fertiliser use up, how is the economy itself going to pay for that fertiliser in order to feed itself in 20 years' time, if you were to get a process going? I am afraid I do not have an answer to that. We have a country which, as you say, has all of these problems and has very little in the way of resources. It should be able to have some comparative advantage, according to neo«classical theory, but in fact it is surrounded by neighbours who have better access to the sea and it has, as far as we can see, very little other advantages. The only other comparative advantage it could have would be lower labour costs, which means low income and poverty. I agree it is very pessimistic[2].

  161. The public works programme, which includes food-for-work, cash-for-work and agricultural-inputs-for-work these are the programmes in some of the countries, how can public programmes contribute to both short-term food security and long-term development?
  (Professor Kydd) As you probably know these are an important feature of the landscape in India and one of the very admirable features of India is the fact that these are capable of being scaled up very quickly when needed. The most general answer is that they are needed in Malawi and elsewhere in the region and the ability, the administrative capacity of whoever is doing the work—which I hope on the whole would be NGOs rather than government—to scale-up and scale-down rapidly is important because it is critical to exit from this activity when it is not needed on that scale. That would be the first point. The second point, of course, is that HIV and other forms of ill health pose a huge dilemma for labour intensive public works because it is an entirely inappropriate response to the problems of an HIV infected household to require the remaining household members and perhaps the HIV/AIDS affected individual themselves to work on the roads or in some other public infrastructure. There is obviously a need to provide direct food assistance to those people and so sorting out who is eligible and who is not is a huge dilemma. The third point on public works is, as I think you have indicated, we need to move to be more clever in the way in which people are rewarded for this, for participating in these programmes. Work for inputs schemes hopefully will be work for input vouchers so that the development of an input market would be sustained. We think that is a good idea, we think an even better idea might be, as I mentioned earlier, work for partial repayment of credit. If you put yourself in the position of a poor household in Malawi you may thereby access finance, apply more fertiliser and better seeds than you would otherwise do. Perhaps you will consume more but have work less on other people's land, and therefore give your own land better cultivation: you do not have to weed someone else's land, you weed your own land and thereby produce three or four more bags of maize a year more than you would otherwise do—but not necessarily thereby produce a cash income but simply remove the requirement to go into the market to buy maize yourself. There are lots of Malawians in that position, how do you make it possible for those people to access finance? Ideas include the possibility of them engaging in dry season trading activities, and so on. There is a limit to what can be done. It may well be that another positive way forward is for people to be able to , as least in part, pay off micro finance loans through participation in this kind of work.

  162. Do they put limitations on the liberty of the individual to make a charge?
  (Dr Dorward) I guess they provide an opportunity that they would otherwise not have, in that sense they brought an opportunity. If you provide them with cash then you are saying that cash could be spent in any way they like, that is assuming that the market operates for them to use that cash to buy, for example, input vouchers. Is it paternalistic? Yes, it may be in some ways, but in other ways it may be recognising the failures of the market in the environment that they live. Also the difficulties that poor people often have in saving. Poor people often pay to save, to remove money from the temptation to spend it, and that is widely observed. Giving them cash is often problematic because it does not help them to save it up for later, unless you provide some sort of saving mechanism at the same time. In a way this micro finance is providing them with some sort of cash recompense but in the context of a financial market.

John Barrett

  163. If I can move on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the region. Specifically I would like to ask how thought can be given in the longer term when at a local village level there are so many child-headed households or grandparent-headed households and the problems are the short-term and at a national level decision-makers may individually not survive in the long-term because they too may be infected, how do we get a long-term strategy to deal with the HIV/AIDS problem at a village level and at a national level?
  (Dr Mackay) Starting from a very long time horizon, Uganda is a good example where they had quite aggressive policies around sex education and practice and that has constantly brought down the HIV infection rates in Uganda. That is a good model to work from and that can be applied long-term in Southern Africa, but it is not going to solve the medium-term problems. Issues over access to anti-retroviral drugs is important but we are talking about the poorest of poor here who cannot afford to buy maize so that is probably not relevant. Policies that will help people that obviously have no physical ability to farm land is important, we have spoken about orphans who are 15 and below, much older people who are trying to run families but simply cannot plough land. As I said earlier we are having difficulty thinking that through, we are trying to think of a small-scale kitchen garden but there are really quite weak strategies and we are really struggling with that. HIV for us is an important component of this whole crisis, you have a short-term shock arrives in a population, like a bad harvest, that really cannot recover itself and there will be a very long, slow curve out of this difficult situation. Food aid is not really a solution. We have to think in terms of how we can allow children to be productive and support themselves, how can you allow 50 year old people, who are much weaker than 50 year olds in this county, to be productive as well. That is a medium-term solution we have to try and work on. It is not a large answer to your question. We are struggling on that one I think.

  164. It is a big question to end on. If we accept that people have the right to food, are there any alternatives to year-on-year increases in those sorts of resources into these countries? Do we see an alternative to that?
  (Dr Mackay) Again, going back to an earlier conversation, food aid is imperfect, the logistics of it are difficult and the distribution of it is difficult—you are going to miss people out. It is obviously a lot better to have a healthy, indigenous production of basic foodstuffs, and that is why we would like to go on that diversified route with investing in agriculture, because we need to make sure there is enough maize accessible to people either just outside the border so that they can purchase, or within the country that they can grow themselves. How to make that more sustainable? Again, we have had lots of conversations about that, but something brings to mind a visit to Zambia which I made, where the rains had failed and therefore they were unable to plant a sufficient amount of maize, but there was this huge river flowing through Southern Zambia. The water is there, it is just in the wrong place; it is not irrigating the fields. So people were planting within 50 yards of the riverbank and beyond that it was just scrubland. There has to be a better solution round that, promoting small-scale irrigation, water harvesting and allowing smallholders that can produce locally to produce their own food.

  Chairman: Thank you very much for your help. These are, as I think we all agree, fairly massive issues; some fairly complex and intertwined issues which you are grappling with and we are grappling with and, I suspect, quite a lot of us will go on grappling with for some time. Thank you for bringing that academic rigour into our inquiry, for which we are extremely grateful. Thank you very much.





2   Ev 95

Mr Khabra Back


 
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