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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