Examination of Witnesses(Questions 180-199)
THURSDAY 23 JANUARY 2003
RT HON
CLARE SHORT
MP, MR ANTHONY
SMITH AND
MR ROB
HOLDEN
John Barrett
180. Can I take you back to something you mentioned
earlier and that was the plummeting life expectancy in Botswana.
Uganda turned the corner and life expectancy is increasing. We
have Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia where life expectancy is still
continuing to decrease. Clearly, again, it goes back to the AIDS
epidemic. A lot of people are working to change behaviour and
we saw the sexual health programmes, antiretroviral drugs have
been mentioned, and also promoting the use of condoms to reduce
infection rates. Is there an issue over people who appear to be
not 100% on board in the war against AIDS. I am thinking particularly
of the States where there are organisations which are reluctant
to fund projects if they are not heading in the same direction,
possibly even the Catholic Church where there is an issue over
promoting condom use for reproductive purposes when everybody
else is promoting condom use to minimise HIV and infection. Is
there a battle that has to be fought there to help change behaviour
and help increase the resources in the fight against AIDS?
(Clare Short) There has been an enormous battle to
get governments to be willing to talk about it openly. It has
changed in Africa in the last couple of years. Uganda was a trail
blazer and President Museveni and leaders in every village were
talking openly right across the country about how the infection
was spread, but other governments would not. It is understandable.
One by one, as things have escalated, it started coming out as
an issue so there has been a real attitude problem right across
the piece and you cannot make proper preparations until society
faces up to it and talks about what is causing it and what can
be done. The US is very active in HIV/AIDS. It is big part of
what USAID does in Africa. They have declared AIDS a national
emergency, they see it as a security threat to the United States,
so somehow HIV is in a different part of the head in the United
States than most other development and they are very much for
taking urgent action and they are quite active and public opinion
is quite mobilised about it. It is odd. At the same time the United
States is being very difficult with UNFPA and the provision of
sex education to young people. The biggest new infections occur
in young people and they need sex education. All the evidence
is that good sex education makes young people more careful and
the age of first sexual experience rises. Those are the tools.
There you are, that is that muddle. The Catholic Church on condoms?
It goes wider, some Muslim teachers and some non-Catholic leaders
in traditional societies do not like advocating condoms or contraception.
On the ground, most Catholic workers do not bother with the teachings
from on high and they have been getting on with it for ages. It
is there as a problem, it is not the biggest problem, and it links
into conservatism and traditionalism and not wanting to talk about
it. As the pandemic has spread, that is dropping away and you
cannot stop a society talking about it. I am told in Mozambique,
for example, that people still do not say somebody died of HIV,
everyone pretends it is not. A black African woman, a friend of
my sister in Southern Africa whose relationship ended (she is
training to be a doctor) decided to get into good shape, she went
to the gym and lost weight. Her mother said stop it. The way in
which this thing goes through their society, anyone who is losing
weight has AIDS. Here she was just getting herself fit and her
mother said, "For goodness sake, all the neighbours are commenting."
It is still a hidden thing and there is all this fear in talking
about it, and that is the problem rather than just, say, US opinion
or the opinion of the Vatican.
Mr Walter
181. Secretary of State, to go back to the situation
with regard to hunger, your strategy paper Eliminating Hunger
says that a special effort is needed to supply early warning systems
and disaster preparedness measures. We have heard something of
the situation in Malawi. Can you tell us how effective and accurate
those famine early warning systems were elsewhere in Africa in
2001-02 and what DFID has learned from that crisis with regard
to those early warning systems?
(Mr Holden) I think more needs to be done. There is
a recognition, not just in Africa but globally, that there does
not seem to be a consensus on what makes a good early warning
system. It is one thing assessing prices and watching rainfall
but tracking that into household economies and so on needs to
be done. More work needs to be done in terms of building institutions,
particularly in Africa, so we need good level baseline data and
regular data coming in so that when we get blips in the system
we can respond rapidly to check that and to obtain some more detailed
information coming through. More important is to have an institution
and mechanism that will give us the level of analysis and give
us credible data on which we can base a response in a more timely
manner. The information that is available, certainly in Southern
Africa, and the systems that are in place are giving us some of
that, but there is certainly more work that needs to be done,
and that is much wider than Southern Africa itself. Certainly
with the likes of the vulnerability assessment, with FEWSNet,
which is a US-funded early warning system, that is going some
way to address that and there is work going on with DFID and other
donors to look at how we can further strengthen those to stay
on top of the crises so we do not miss the indicators that are
out there.
(Clare Short) There has been a strengthening in recent
years and we have worked on it because you need a system all over
the world, but you have to build local capacity to respond. In
many very poor countries we are experiencing a collapse in state
capacity so you cannot put in a good early warning system on hunger
if everything else is weakening. We have to put it in a context
that works. The other thing I would say is that it does seem that
global warming is creating more turbulence and more frequent problems
so the whole system is stretched on top of that.
182. Can I refer to the memorandum that you
submitted to the Committee when you say: "Zimbabwe alone
accounts for half the people in need and over half the food aid
requirement", and you go on to say: "The fact that Zimbabwe,
normally a food supplier and a key transit country, has suffered
such a collapse in agricultural production has made the situation
in neighbouring countries worse and weakened the prospect for
recovery; for the longer term it throws into question one of the
bases of food security planning in Southern Africa for the last
20 years, namely that surpluses would normally be available in
Zimbabwe." Secretary of State, could I just broaden that
out slightly in the sense that Zimbabwe does seem to be a major
part of the problem here and if there was a country in which we
might wish regime change in order to turn the clock back that
might be it. In answering that general point about Zimbabwe, do
you have anything further to say on what you said yesterday with
regard to how we are treating sanctions on Zimbabwe, because there
did seem to be some confusion in what you had said to the House
and what Downing Street was saying in terms of whether or not
we were consistently going to apply sanctions in order to try
and bring about a change in that situation?
(Clare Short) I have not got anything to add because
it is not my lead. I am sure there has been a lot of flurry since
yesterday and I do not know who is saying what or what people
are thinking. I am talking about sanctions on the elite—the
last thing Zimbabwe needs is sanctions on the people—so
it is only meant to hit the governing elite with things like freedom
to travel. I am afraid I am not in a position to update you. There
is no doubt that the core of this crisis is the situation in Zimbabwe
otherwise we would have a drought which the traditional kind of
responses in the international system would have coped with quite
well, and there is the regional capacity to deliver food without
the political parts of the crisis. Thus it deepens the collapsing
economy because it is not just the land thing in Zimbabwe, the
whole economy is collapsing because of the way the economy has
been managed, and a country that would normally be part of the
answer to the region's problems is a central part of the problem,
and then there are transport links and the rest. The Zimbabwe
crisis and tragedy is the explanation of this being such a monumental,
serious catastrophe. If Zimbabwe was not in trouble it would be
a fairly easily handleable crisis which we could cope with well.
183. Do you have a view as to how we solve the
situation where we have a country which has, as your own submission
said, for the last 20 years been providing food surpluses for
that area in Southern Africa and now requires half the food aid
required for the region? Looking slightly longer term what should
be the British Government's policy towards solving the problem
with regard to Zimbabwe, which is really at the core of this whole
situation?
(Clare Short) Frustrating as it is, other governments
cannot stop a government wrecking its country if it is on that
path. You can do everything in your power to try and stop it.
Burma is in a very, very bad condition. The international community
has tried to take boycotting action and it has got worse and worse.
We could go all around the world. North Korea is very badly governed
and there are lots of very hungry people there, etcetera, etcetera.
My view is that the UK government has tried to do everything in
its power to try to get a change or make an inroad on the destruction
of that economy, and we have failed, but I do not think there
was anything else that could be done, although you can never say
you have done enough. It is a tragedy. I have been working on
it since 1997. It has been coming and coming because the economy
has been shrinking and the failure of the government to respond
to the HIV crisis has grown and grown. How will it be resolved?
I have said more than once my own intuition is that this crisis
is now so severe it will go on affecting more and more people
and the economy is declining and declining. I am told that hungry
people with money are turning up at UN places offering money for
food because there is no food in the shops and people are not
being paid. The whole thing is falling apart. You never know how
one of these terrible crises in the world is going to end. We
had the same sort of situation in Serbia after the Kosovo war
with Milosevic still being there. We all expected him to fall
and it came in the end but it took longer than we expected. My
own intuition is that this is so big and so destructive of the
whole Zimbabwean economy that there will be an eruption of the
people that will throw the regime off quite soon. It will come.
It is one of those situations that is completely unsustainable
and an ending will come. As you will know from the press, some
of the regional powers have talked about whether there could be
an agreement that the President would step down. Lots of people
talk as though it is just a matter of the UK helping the Zanu-PF
government but that is not a true diagnosis. The economy is destroyed,
it is not just the land. There should be land reform in Zimbabwe,
there should have been more land reform in the past 20 years,
but it should be done in a transparent and proper way that enables
people to go on using the land of their country. It is a change
that either is a change of regime, a collapse of regime, or there
has been talk of President Mugabe stepping down and the transitional
government of National Unity that then could engage with the international
community and change absolutely everything that they are doing
about the economy and then we would all engage. We would have
to keep up our efforts on the disaster but they could start to
rebuild the economy. That will come at some point, the sooner
the better, and then we will all engage. It has got all these
tragedies but it has got very educated, good people and basically
it has got good systems compared with other poor countries in
Africa. I just pray and hope that that is coming very soon. In
terms of my poor department it is growing but it is a delightful
task to look forward to. That will be another set of resources
that we are going to have to find.
184. Just one final point. You would agree that
it would not send the right message in order to bring about that
change of regime if Mr Mugabe turned up at the conference in Paris
next month?
(Clare Short) As I say about cricket, and people make
comparisons, it is just the thought of seven, eight million people
starving and a government not co-operating, bringing this about,
not even co-operating properly with the international system to
keep its people fed and engaging in all sorts of brutality. It
just seems to me unimaginable both to play cricket or to invite
the person who is doing that to a conference. I can only think
that in Paris they are just not following what is going on. I
think a lot of people have got in their head that it is Britain
and him in conflict over white farmers and they are not attending
to the reality of the suffering of the people and the brutality
of the destruction. That is the only kind of excuse I can think
of.
Alistair Burt
185. Bringing you back to the wider crisis,
if I may. Every time there is a major crisis like this we get
constituents and others who are particularly interested, looking
at the response and wondering whether there is sufficient co-ordination
between the various international agencies in order to make things
happen on the ground. You referred earlier to the slowness of
response, particularly in Malawi because of particular factors
there.
(Clare Short) No, we are not saying it was particularly
slow. That is an allegation being made but we do not think it
is true, just for the record.
186. But quite often there is a suspicion that
perhaps the co-ordination could be better, the international response
could always learn from previous instances and what actually happened
in relation to a particular crisis. What is your analysis in this
particular instance of how the international effort worked, how
co-ordinated it was between governments, donors and various agencies?
Do you have a sense of that at this stage?
(Clare Short) As a department we have been working
for the past five years or so very hard at improving the co-ordination
of the international system. We need a system that can move anywhere,
that has got the capacity to pick up when crises are coming, that
has got stocks pre-positioned, has got the professional capacity
in it. The building up of OCHA as the core centre part of the
UN system that is capable of moving has strengthened enormously.
My department and the people in CHAD have been leading workers
on that. Overall we think things are strengthening and improving.
It used to be you would get a catastrophe and everyone would send
what they felt like and you got too many tents and not enough
food. That was not very long ago. There used to be lots of politicians
who wanted to be on the television to boot, there was a chaos
response and then lots of stocks of things that were not useful
to people. We have improved on that but, as you say, you can never
say it is good enough. Early warning cannot work unless there
are good systems in countries and that takes some building.
187. Is there anything specific that you have
learned from this particular crisis that you could pass on to
them and say "Look, we have spotted something else to change
to improve it"?
(Clare Short) I think the biggest new thing is the
interaction with HIV, we have never seen that before, and it makes
it much deeper and harder and recovery is going to be much harder.
Do you want to add?
(Mr Holden) If we just look at the UN co-ordination
mechanism here, it is always an easy target to say it was too
slow, it was not good enough, it was not strong enough, it did
not show enough leadership, but if we put it in the context of
the scale, the severity and the complexity of this operation,
yes, it could be better next time and we should always take a
lesson learning approach, but on the whole they have done a lot
and there is a lot of credit that needs to be given. I think that
the particular pattern that they have used here, which I have
not really seen anywhere else, is because they have got a regional
programme they have actually set up a regional hub to act as the
overarching body which is headed up in—
(Clare Short) This "they" is the UN.
(Mr Holden) Sorry, the UN. In Johannesburg, which
is an inter-agency mechanism which has also got the Red Cross
in there. It pulls all the UN agencies and the Red Cross together
in one building so that they can take a collective view and a
collective approach to dealing with the problems on the ground
and providing direction and support to the country teams at the
coal face. It is quite an interesting test case in some respects
and I think on the whole it has added a lot of value to the operation
and has helped enormously.
188. On a specific, does the Government have
a particular view about any changes to the World Food Programme,
particularly how it is funded and whether or not it should change
its funding so that it does not have to appeal for funds for each
new crisis that comes along?
(Clare Short) I think we would say that the World
Food Programme has improved its effectiveness in recent years
and has done some very impressive work in Afghanistan which is
phenomenal. I still think it is astonishing that all that kept
going right through the crisis and the World Food Programme really
deserves respect for it. In the Kosovo crisis they were slow at
the beginning and we kind of made a fuss and they rose to it.
The level of crisis we have got in the world now and the way they
are performing as an organisation, we should all give them a lot
of credit and praise. We do not think that the World Food Programme
should go on doing food- for-development, we think that is a distraction
and not the best way of doing development. I think it is part
of its mandate. Is it in the mandate or just the tradition? As
you know, we think that countries should give money, not food.
It is much more flexible and you can source regionally and have
less effects on local markets. If you give food there are the
costs of getting it there and the delay of getting ships and so
on. Back here in the real world the two biggest donors to this
crisis are the US and the EC and it is food in kind and it is
all tied up with subsidised food and surpluses which is damaging
to the developing world. We need to improve it all but we have
got to build from where we are. We are going to have a big crisis
next year because apparently there is a drought in the US and
their maize production is going to go right down and they are
the biggest contributor. There are lots of changes that need to
be made but we have got to manage them from where we are. The
other thing that was in your question was appeals one by one and
then responses one by one, would it not be better to have WFP
funding and say "what is the appropriate share of each OECD
country" and have a block of funding so it could move? I
am sure that could be improved. You would have to have some flexibility
in the system. We moved money over to the crisis in Malawi from
our long-term development programme. A lot of development organisations
of the world have very rigid budgets and cannot do that. The EC
has a separate bit that does humanitarian emergency and it does
not touch the other money they seem to be incapable of spending.
I think on that funding of an international humanitarian response
mechanism the world systems could be improved. I do not know if
Rob wants to come in because this is his professional area. We
have to build from where we are and we have to cope in the meantime
and we have got all of these extra strains on us in the meantime
which is not always the best time to get fundamental institutional
change.
(Mr Holden) I think the only thing I would add, Secretary
of State, is for us to continue to work with other donors when
donors make pledges to make sure that they come through with the
cash quickly. There is a tendency with some of the traditional
donors that they make great announcements, pledges, and then it
is some weeks, in many cases it is some months, before those funds
actually come through and the World Food Programme can start to
use them to procure the food and move the food as required, so
it makes their life difficult in terms of planning and making
sure that the pipeline remains healthy.
189. I am sure what you say about the timing
and pressure of change is right but there will always be pressures
on the system and getting institutional change at any time is
never easy. You spoke earlier about the need for flexibility between
budgets and it is going to have to be pushed because sooner or
later the time will be right for it.
(Clare Short) There is renegotiation of the Food Aid
Convention every few years, because we had one a few years ago,
really pressing on getting cash, not in kind, and that is part
of trade reform anyway. I think an opportunity might arise out
of what could be very serious with the US not having any surpluses.
That would mean WFP will not have the massive amounts that they
get from the US. I was talking to Jim Morris about it in Addis
Ababa a few days ago and he said he had talked to the US President
about this. If the US move to some cash, because the US always
lead that agency and they put a lot of food through it so they
have got responsibilities and a position there, that could bring
something good out of bad because if they got more of a cash system
they might be able to make a lot of improvements in the way they
work.
Mr Colman
190. If I may ask the first of a series of questions
on agriculture, food security and sustainable livelihoods. When
your officials, including Mr Holden, gave evidence at the beginning
of this inquiry back in October they said "Certainly agricultural
liberalisation has had a role in food insecurity . . . the private
sector has clearly not come in to meet the need in the way that
the people who designed these programmes, and governments themselves
when they signed up to these programmes, envisaged." Do you
think there is a need to reconsider the withdrawal of governments
and donors in recent years from providing direct support to agriculture
and rural livelihoods? If we go back in how do you think we should
go back in: subsidised fertiliser, credit or food prices, guaranteed
markets through parastatals, or invest further in agricultural
research and extension services?
(Clare Short) I think the old system of total government
control, government parastatals, government control on food prices,
was a disaster. There have been problems about the transition
but let us not romanticise what was there before. It was often
subsidised food for populations living in urban areas working
in very inefficient manufacturing government owned parastatals
and poor rural people getting paid tiny prices, or not getting
paid, and even the food that they grew not being picked up and
rotting by the side of the road. There was a very inefficient
bureaucratic system that was biased against the rural poor. Probably
in hindsight you have got to manage change in a way that ensures
that you do not do away with something that is maybe inefficient
and over-subsidised without making sure that something else is
coming in to take it over. I think it was probably done a bit
too absolutely and there were lots of views that the private sector
would come forward supplying seeds and fertiliser and purchasing
but those institutions did not appear as quickly as was predicted
and there should have been more preparation. We do not think in
any way the answer is to go back to the bad old ways, it is to
look at it afresh. There are still loads of agricultural extension
workers, big bureaucracies of them, and they often know less about
agricultural conditions and what is good seed than the peasants
themselves. The evidence is clear that if you spend that money
that goes on them on rural roads you would increase production
more. There are loads of them still out there in the world. Doing
livelihoods and better development for rural people needs to go
down the road that we have shifted the whole department's work
to, sustainable livelihoods, and not looking at it only through
an agricultural telescope but rural populations: where is their
production; where is their land; how can they get fertiliser and
grow food; do they do some fishing; do the women do some handicrafts
that they take to the market; how can you enhance the income levels,
the access to markets, the little roads that enable people living
in poor communities and rural communities to improve their income
levels? I remember when I was in Malawi saying "What about
animals" because there just is not enough land, "You
can have these processes giving out two goats and then people
give back the young and you give it to someone else, restocking"
and people said it is no good, the criminality is so high people
steal their animals. We are working on justice in Malawi. You
have got to make a well ordered society. In Tanzania since the
withdrawal of parastatals there are markets breaking out and growing.
I know in Mozambique, which has got loads of land, we supported
rural roads built by local contractors who would maintain them
and we thought it would lead to increased production, and it did
because these were subsistence farmers and they never grew a surplus
because they had nowhere to take it. A rural road meant that they
could get it to market and get some cash savings, so it was not
just when their food ran out. We found that attendance at school
and health care also went up. We need to look at it in that slightly
bigger picture, how do you improve the lives and the livelihoods
in every conceivable way of rural populations?
Chairman
191. Last year the Department published a paper
called Better Livelihoods and held, or found, "The
proportion of ODA directed towards agriculture and rural development
has fallen by almost two thirds between 1988 and 1998". Was
that a sort of nomenclature issue in that it has now been re-branded
Sustainable Livelihoods? This is a serious question because
it is sometimes about terms. Is it simply that less money is being
given to agriculture and, if so, it is difficult to understand
that—I appreciate it is probably not from the UK but from
other donors—given the importance of agriculture in so many
poor countries?
(Clare Short) The people who are the real experts
on this, Mike Scott and so on, we have not got here today. They
have lived right through these changes. There used to be this
big commitment to integrated rural development and masses of investment
and it was seen to be a failure and there was a withdrawal from
the failed model of development in which the international system
invested a lot of work and money. Then, of course, people moved
to opening up markets, more movement to the social sector, getting
functioning modern states, that sort of shift. Well, it was not
even that, was it? They moved to projects then and moved away
from failure. You get some of the old agronomist types, people
from the CDC, agricultural people, just saying "Agriculture,
agriculture, put more money into agriculture". We do not
think that is the right approach. You have got to look at rural
populations and, indeed, they interact with urban populations
because humanity is urbanising and there are interlinkages. Improving
their lives is not just agriculture. Getting agriculture working
well is not spending lots of ODA on subsidising it. I think the
swing away went too far and we need to look again at how you can
pay more attention to improving the livelihoods of poor rural
communities. We need to do more. I think the work that Mike Scott
and his team in DFID have done on sustainable livelihoods has
influenced the whole international debate on these matters. It
is a big subject in its own right. The move away from agriculture
has been too big. To go back to simply looking at agriculture
would be an error.
192. Secretary of State, you have just come
back from the Horn and one of the most alarming things that strikes
me about Ethiopia is that even in non-drought areas the number
of food dependent people is increasing. Would you like to share
with the Committee your assessment of the present situation in
Ethiopia and what sort of scale, because I think in a lot of what
you are saying this afternoon you are putting the Committee on
notice about the sheer scale of what you will have to deal with
next year? What sort of scale is it going to require, setting
aside the food aid for a country like Ethiopia, getting a situation
whereby we are not getting more and more food-dependent each year
because they are actually getting into sustainable livelihoods
apropos the 1997 White Paper definitions?
(Clare Short) Ethiopia is very, very poor, $100 a
head GDP. It is massively poorer than Uganda and so on. This is
a very, very poor country and it is very populous, 60 million,
a big African country. Lots of people are living on what nature
gives, pastoralists or subsistence farmers, and if you live like
that, if nature just does not rain this year, you have nothing
and that is the situation which is linked to the levels of poverty.
I think the government has had a real shock about that this year.
It is five million people every year who are food aid dependent
and there are real problems in Ethiopia of creating dependency.
If you keep chucking in food then people are never going to be
able to get back to production and no-one will buy anything that
they produce in certain parts of the country. You cannot stop
feeding people but it is this refining what you do, food-for-work,
and keeping up people's capacity to not be dependent. I think
real errors have been made in that kind of way in Ethiopia. The
other thing that the government fears because of the growing turbulence
in weather, global warming that seems to be happening all over,
is the crises are more frequent and they now see the danger of
more frequent crises and bigger numbers each time until it reaches
catastrophic numbers. We are getting to 14 million this year.
The only way to look at that is you have got to keep going and
refining the food aid and humanitarian effort but you have got
to promote long-term development so people have got more resources.
When I was there I signed a memorandum of understanding for a
10 year commitment to a partnership with the Ethiopian Government.
I am very optimistic that they are very committed in a new way
to a development effort and fully understand in a way that they
have not in all previous governments that the private sector has
got to be unleashed to grow the economy, both the domestic private
sector and then the prospects of inward investment. Prime Minister
Meles did ask me some time ago to get our private sector to tell
him what it would take to source in Ethiopia and I approached
Tesco and some others and some of their sourcing companies and
we did a study led by the private sector, not us—
Chairman: You shared that with us[1]
(Clare Short)—saying if this and
this were going on, and he is working to implement it. Then we
are back to that crucial thing on agriculture, processing agricultural
goods to get the value added. That is one of the crucial things
for Africa. I feel optimistic about all of that. They are looking
very much at the best models of development, long-term PRSP, getting
the donors to harmonise, they know where their institutions are
weak, they know they have got to decentralise but they have got
very limited capacity. Everything has got to be fixed. I think
they have got the right analysis and a real determination this
time to get long-term development to work. The perspective is
stick with that and grow the economy, refine the food aid so it
is not so destructive and creating dependency, and then over the
years hopefully dependency on food aid will reduce and will reduce
as the economy grows. We are going to have to think 10 or 15 years
to get Ethiopia out of food aid dependency but if we do not think
like that there will be just repeated crises with more and more
people affected.
John Barrett
193. If the pendulum has swung too far away
from concentration on direct investment in agriculture and it
is swinging back slightly, where does the Food and Agriculture
Organisation fit into this system now and what should the FAO's
role in the future be?
(Clare Short) I did not say that we should be investing
in agriculture. The other thing is that good development work
is not always spending money, different parts of the system need
different interventions. You cannot always measure what you are
doing by how big the spend is because in agriculture it is getting
markets to work and so on, getting more processing of agricultural
goods, more value added and more jobs, and that will not be ODA.
ODA might involve itself in creating the institutional capacity
to be able to do that or improve the transport links or whatever
it is that is required, more attention to rural developments,
the agriculture sector, how it can go forward, but not just lots
of ODA into agriculture. There is a lot of technical capacity
in FAO that serves the whole international community, not just
developing countries, about agriculture and crises and they have
a monitoring system of where there are different diseases in agriculture
and so on. In its approach to agricultural development, sustainable
livelihoods, hunger, it is a very, very old-fashioned institution
that is much less effective than it might be and its idea of food
security is countries being self-sufficient in food, which is
hopeless because you can have a country self-sufficient in food
with lots of hungry people or you can have a country not self-sufficient
in food and everybody fed. We have been working on that and I
have been quite sharp in some of my criticisms deliberately. We
need the agency and the international system but it needs to move
its thinking forward. I think it is feeling more and more challenged.
The documents we have produced on eliminating hunger and so on
are meant to be part of that challenge. There are people working
in the FAO who really want to rise to it and change but the institution
needs a good shake and I am trying to give it that.
Hugh Bayley
194. We all seem agreed that the nature of famine
is changing. In the past you looked at a famine as something that
would take a year or two to get through and now we are looking
at the need for more food to be provided than a country can produce
in quite a number of parts of Africa over an extended period which
means that you need to change the nature of food aid in order
to prevent, as you were saying yourself, the destruction of local
productive capacity. One way which we saw in Malawi which may
help to do that is through public works programmes. We saw roads,
and it is interesting that you talked about the value of building
roads, roads and bridges being built in return for cash. What
do you see as the relative benefits of cash-for-work as opposed
to food-for-work and also agricultural-inputs-for-work?
(Clare Short) I think you cannot be absolute because
if there is no food in the region it is no good giving people
cash, the price will just go up. Sometimes you have to bring food
in when there just is not enough food. You should then get on
to food-for-work as soon as possible and then cash, if you can.
It is happening in Afghanistan, the north is recovering but the
drought is still in the south. I think the system has not been
targeted enough and focused enough on recovery as rapidly as possible
for people. The Southern Africa crisis needs to move there and
I think the whole international food aid system needs to sharpen
itself up on this. I would like to bring in Rob who, as I say,
has given his life to expertise in this area.
(Mr Holden) That is absolutely right, Secretary of
State, it is a question of having a range of tools and interventions
at your disposal and using them as and when appropriate. This
is something that we brought up with the Secretary-General's Special
Envoy, James Morris, who is actually travelling throughout Southern
Africa at the moment to do a review of the—
(Clare Short) And he is the Chief Executive, or whatever
the title is, of the World Food Programme.
(Mr Holden) This is something that is a very strong
message that we have given him, that there has been good work
done up to now and food has got in but it is time to take stock,
it is time to make sure that where the need for food is required
that should continue but we need to take a more analytical, more
strategic approach making sure that the continuing operation is
clearly targeted, it is based on assessed need and, more important,
it does very minimal damage to people's recovery systems and people's
coping systems. That is a strong message that we have given James
Morris and that is something he is taking round and looking at
and we are hoping to get some feedback from that at the end of
next week.
(Clare Short) Ethiopia needs that badly because it
has got this continuing dependency eroding people's ability to
provide for themselves.
195. If there is going to be an increased emphasis
on food-for-work or cash-to-buy-food-for-work or the inputs-to-grow-food-for-work,
how does that leave the growing number of people in Sub-Saharan
Africa who, because of AIDS, are too weak to work?
(Clare Short) That is why you need the flexible systems.
It is not just food, health is in this emergency much more and
the crumbling systems in Zimbabwe. We have really worked to get
health as part of the emergency and then we need the emergency
to be dealt with in the long-term. Orphans have got to be provided
for but you must not end up with hand-outs and dependency. That
is often done and it just destroys local production. It destroys
good people. You cannot grow food and try to sell it if everyone
around you is getting hand-outs because no-one will buy it from
you. Do you want to come in on this?
(Mr Smith) Only to follow up really. The range of
tools you need is wide. When there is lots of HIV you cannot use
tools which rely on people being able to work if they are orphaned
children or young people who are unable to work. There are other
tools, such as voucher systems, which can be tried as well where,
instead of providing food, you provide vouchers to allow people
to buy locally produced food and that would strengthen local production
as well. It is a range, there is no blueprint that is applicable
across the region.
(Clare Short) But you have got to keep people fed
and then be looking for a recovery as rapidly as possible and
then refining what you provide to help people to recover. It includes
health. In Zimbabwe children are dropping out of school and getting
food to children in school gets food to children but it also keeps
children in school, which in terms of their future lives is important
for them. That is an aspect of recovery too.
196. While we were in Malawi the DFID office
there and most of the other bilateral donors were developing with
the government a programme to provide subsidised food for middle
income families, by which I mean those who were absolutely destitute
were getting free food from the World Food Programme, they were
about a third of the population, about another third of the population
had income to buy food at market prices and the other third had
some income but not enough to buy sufficient food at market prices.
So DFID and others were proposing a targeted food subsidy. By
contrast, the government went to the World Bank and received a
£50 million part grant, part loan package to buy enough food
to sell subsidised food to the whole population at, I think, roughly
half the market price. Apart from adding to the country's debt
at the very time the donors were trying to reduce Malawi's indebtedness,
does that not also destroy the incentives for local farmers to
grow food if the government is selling food at half the local
market price that farmers who produce food can sell off to other
people?
(Clare Short) Tony Worthington raised this and I have
already said that we think it was an error and too blanket, but
it was well-intentioned and not malign. It was the government
saying "We are in desperate trouble". Of course, one
of the things that happens in food shortages is prices do go shooting
up, so some intervention to bring them down while organising a
recovery is not necessarily ruled out. We agree with the criticism,
as you know, and I think the World Bank made an error in being
willing to look at going for a blanket system. They do not agree
that it is an error, there were arguments in the board when we
discussed it. It was well-intentioned but an error.
197. What they are doing is contradicting directly
what you have just been telling the Committee.
(Clare Short) I know. We think it was a mistake, too
blanket, but it was not badly intended, it was failing to consult
and properly consult with enough people who have worked on helping
countries recover and have more understanding of the need to target.
198. Has the Bank given you any assurance that
it will not repeat those errors, that is to say it will consult
those donor agencies on the ground better in future crises?
(Clare Short) Not on this one. Calisto Modavo, who
is the Vice-President dealing with Africa, who I love and admire,
is a very fine man and I have a deep regard and friendship for
him but he does not agree with us on this. In the meantime we
are working more and more closely with the Bank, so they will
not concede on this in the argument but in practice the kind of
way in which we are changing and enhancing our working so is the
Bank and we are working more and more closely together. We have
just had a conference in Addis Ababa of all our Africa people
and all their people. Do you want to say a word about that?
(Mr Smith) I think they are ready to consult more,
not admitting that their policy was wrong. They do want to consult
more with us and that is part of what we talked about with the
Bank in Addis on Monday. We do intend to follow up, particularly
in Malawi.
199. It was said to us by a number of people
on the ground at the time, before the World Bank's decision, that
the government's wish to go for a food subsidy for everyone had
obvious political benefits in a pre-election year. Is it right
to buy votes and then expect the world community to relieve the
country of a debt that they have incurred to do so?
(Clare Short) Of course not. Again, Tony Worthington
raised this point and I responded by pointing out that the election
was coming. I think the World Bank thought it was mobilising support
for a country in trouble to help it recover from the trouble and
did not consult enough and did not hear or understand the criticisms
that you have made, that we made, that are our view. They still
do not conceive that they did the wrong thing but they do agree
that they should talk more often, and I think we can probably
avoid such a thing happening again. As I say, even we, DFID, after
we did the starter packs and they worked so well, made the same
error in widening it too much. It was fully-well-intentioned.
I remember then the government came back and asked us for starter
packs again and I was saying "No, we are not doing it so
widely" but you have got a starving country. Now, I have
been around for long enough to begin to learn but you can see
how people make the error. If someone comes to you and says "Please,
help, my country is starving" you are inclined to say yes,
although it is a mistake.
1 Horticulture Exports from Ethiopia and EU Supermarket
Sourcing, Report of a Scoping Study by Peter Dearden, DFID,
Peter Greenhalgh, Natural Resources Institute, and Ed Havis, Consultant,
Fisher Foods. Copy placed in the Library. Back
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