Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 105)
TUESDAY 25 MAY 2004
DR MICHAEL
LIPTON CMG, PROFESSOR
JOHN MUMFORD,
PROFESSOR GEORGE
ROTHSCHILD AND
DR COLIN
THIRTLE
Q100 Mr Colman: I am assuming it
does not deal with Ms Clwyd's slugs, but does it have a commercial
application in Europe?
Professor Mumford: Yes; indeed.
There would certainly be a potential for export, provided there
was suitable regulation for the movement of the live insects and
fungi to make sure that they were not a threat to some other aspect
of European agriculture.
Professor Rothschild: These techniques
of biological control and alternative approaches to managing pests
and diseases are widely used throughout the world. In the African
context certainly there has been quite a long history of this.
For example, in Nairobi there is a large international institute
devoted to that called ICIPE, the International Centre of Insect
Physiology and Ecology, and quite a strong national programme.
Then, through partnerships which DFID has supported with its own
research programmes, work has taken place on the strategic research
and to take that out commercially with Dudutech has been a way
of doing that. This is all really a component of what these days
is called integrated crop management or integrated farming systems
where it is a very broad kind of thing. One of the issues of course
is with the burgeoning population in Africa and in other parts
of the developing world the need to produce perhaps half as much
food again means that any of those losses become critical. It
is estimated that with pest diseases and weeds perhaps as much
as one third of all food production is lost, if you include the
post-harvest side of it, what is in store. If you are trying to
feed that number of people, an extra half as many again, and you
lose one third of what you have, it is pretty serious stuff.
Dr Lipton: There are also some
things which are not conventionally considered the sorts of pests
scientists do a great deal of research about such as quelea birds
and rats, which take an enormous amount of crop, perhaps more
in sub-Saharan Africa even than in South Asia as a proportion.
Clearly, if it were possible to design promising research which
would control those things, there would be a huge impact on humanly
consumable food output.
Q101 Chairman: This takes us on to
our last area which is the brain drain. I remember as a child
the father of one of my friends worked at the Tropical Storage
Institute; it was a very early offshoot of the ODA, way back under
Judith Hart. Have we advanced at all? Have we done anything? Have
we ticked any of these boxes in that one had thought way back
in the 1950s and 1960s perhaps we had done things on crop storage
against rats and so forth? Or is it just that we thought we had
done these things and—I choose my words carefully, because
they are not meant to be pejorative—post-independence some
of the things like the national agricultural research organisations
in certain countries have just disintegrated, agricultural leadership
has disintegrated and we are back to less than subsistence farming
in some countries?
Dr Lipton: May I come back first
of all to the stored products issue? As far as the main cereals
are concerned, the rate of return from improving crop storage
is quite surprisingly small when one looks at it.[15]
It tends to be over-estimated because people look at the tail
end of farmers' own stores and they find them pretty badly messed
up by various pests. Of course those stores are controlled on
a day to day basis, usually by the wife; and when there is an
infected area that is removed. When one actually measures losses
in store, which is a very tricky thing to do, they are much smaller
as far as grains are concerned than the popular impression. This
does not at all apply to fruit and vegetables or to dairy produce,
but the idea that there is an enormous bonanza to be made in staple
crops by improving on-farm storage is probably a bit too optimistic[16].
Yes, some sub-Saharan African research systems have decayed very
badly on account, principally, of the extreme fiscal stress. I
think of my good friend Dunstan Spencer, a very fine Sierra Leonean
agricultural economist: this idea that people like that just fly
off to get the highest income they can elsewhere is insulting.
I know you are not saying this, but some people say this, and
it is really not the case. They try desperately hard to work with
their national systems, find it infeasible and then go to see
whether they can do something for African agriculture somewhere
else. Some systems really are at a breakdown point; very many
are not. The Kenyan agricultural research system is certainly
thriving; the Ethiopian system is recovering to some extent; the
South African system is very good. There is a whole lot of sub-Saharan
African research systems which are managing but desperately short
of funds.
Q102 Chairman: Do you think this
is an area where DFID should be doing more to help agricultural
research in Africa? What would you see as the policy returns on
that?
Dr Lipton: I am a believer in
this area in some sort of matching grant concept. There have been
too many cases in sub-Saharan African agricultural research of
a donor coming in with a package and the government saying "Oh,
we do not need to do any more of that, then!" I do not wish
to malign the governments; they are under incredible fiscal pressures
and pressures from all parts of their population and that is how
they are extremely tempted by democratic processes to behave.
But, it is very important that a system of agricultural research
support should be that: support, and not doing it instead of the
countries concerned. In the countries where that can be achieved,
it is a very high return operation, if there are promising research
lines, as there usually are.
Professor Rothschild: May I make
a general comment? You referred to the Tropical Products Institute
and all those institutions which were very strong on partnerships
with developing countries research partnerships. It is true to
say that there is as much a crisis in loss of capacity and institutional
strength in this country and in other OECD countries for institutions
engaged in partnerships with the African agricultural research
systems and others as there almost is in some of those countries
themselves. So my view is that if you want to get sustainable
outcomes of what you are doing, first of all there has to be a
major commitment to building up the national institutions. This
has been talked about endlessly.
Q103 Chairman: National institutions
in Africa?
Professor Rothschild: In Africa
and in other parts of the world too where these are not well developed.
That does imply that even if, as a stage in that, you have capacity
building through partnerships, that is one of the best ways of
achieving that. That may well mean either south-to-south partnerships
or north-to-south partnerships and that is where we are seeing
a major attrition of capacity, not least in this country, of institutions
which still have the capacity to be able to do that. If we lose
that and maybe even change to programme direct budgetary support
for science and technology, if agriculture and even less so agricultural
research is not on the agenda of the poverty reduction strategies
of countries in Africa, it is not going to get anywhere anyway.
There are some very important fundamental issues which I would
certainly urge this Committee to look at, as well as just the
"What?" of what we are doing, but also the "How?",
the "Which?" and the "Who?". That is an expression
which several of us have been using in this forum which DFID is
currently conducting.
Q104 Chairman: You are all academics
and we are very grateful to you for sharing your experience with
us. George, as I understand it, you are Co-ordinator of the Independent
Advisory Committee of DFID's Renewable Natural Resources Research
Strategy Programmes. Is that right? Quite a mouthful. Presumably
you are giving advice to DFID on exactly that, on what they should
be doing in that sort of research, are you not? Is that right?
Professor Rothschild: Yes.
Q105 Chairman: There must be a fear,
if we move consistently to budgetary support, that work such as
this work is just going to get missed out?
Professor Rothschild: Yes, and
may I just say that one of the biggest problems is to build the
research into mainstream development, to have a system where that
happens so that the research you do is needs driven; it is driven
by the real needs of those in poverty, but is not seen as something
abstract which you can dovetail with the development process when
you feel like it, which is the largest part of what DFID does.
At the moment there does not appear to be a clear mechanism for
achieving that continuum between research development and application
at the farmers' end.
Dr Lipton: May I very strongly
support that, and also your statement that it really all starts
from the government of the country concerned, its civil society,
and their strategy and whether agriculture has a place in it?
Most of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers do not have the
word "agriculture" or "agricultural" in them.
Uganda is a very striking exception and is a much better paper
for that reason. The whole poverty reduction process was supposed
to be driven by each developing country, not by the donor community.
The developing country was to come up with a plan to reduce poverty
by half in 1990-2015. The actual numbers are not all that important,
but there has to be a strategy with targets and some set of priorities
for meeting them. Obviously, if you cannot provide decent workplaces
for people, and 70% of your employment is in agriculture, and
agriculture does not loom very large in the thinking of the people
who are writing a poverty strategy, not very much progress is
going to be made. One does need to start by injecting a basic
agricultural concern into those strategy papers. If you ask what
it has to do with the West, what it has to do with us because
they are their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and we
are just trying to slot in the aid to meet their anti-poverty
strategies, that is absolutely right. What the West has done is
cut its own aid to agriculture in real terms by two-thirds between
1985 and 2003; not as a proportion of anything, but the absolute
value is now one third of what it was almost 20 years ago on the
latest OECD numbers which I just looked at earlier today—while,
of course, constantly putting up new disincentives to agricultural
production in the developing world. Everybody talks quite rightly
about EU and US cotton and sugar subsidies, but we also ought
to talk about the staples: EU and US support for wheat and maize
production, which has the effect of pushing the world price of
those right down. You might say, if you are a deficit country
in sub-Saharan Africa and you have a lot of poor people that it
is good to push the price of these food staples down. In a very,
very short run, like tomorrow, that is true, but if these countries
are going to use 70% or so of their population in agriculture
to feed themselves, then there is not a lot of hope if the most
powerful agricultural producers in the world are doing everything
they can to make the production of those products unattractive.
It is in that context that the agricultural research questions
obviously have to be set. The countries are saying "Here's
our poverty. Here's the role of agriculture in getting rid of
that poverty. Here's what we want to do in that agriculture".
For that, the conditions for agricultural production that we in
the West are creating are a very serious part of the problem.
Professor Mumford: I want to make
a point about the time horizon of these strategies. They need
to reflect the ecological and economic cycles and processes which
create some of the problems. We cannot have a short-term cycle
of projects; we have to have a reasonably long strategy which
allows the people in developing countries and the people in institutions
in Britain to have some commitment to see a problem through to
its solution. That is vital. We cannot have a three-year programme;
we must have at least a ten-year strategy.
Chairman: I do not want to prolong this,
but I just want to make two final comments. Is not part of the
problem with the poverty reduction strategies the same problem
that it was only as a consequence of this Committee badgering
DFID that DFID came up with an agricultural consultation paper?
I cannot remember who it was who said earlier that academic policy
and government policy go in fashions. The fashion for the last
ten years has been sustainable development, so agriculture fell
of the agenda here. In many developing countries agriculture was
regarded as not being a particularly sexy subject, however important
it was. My last point. When we are thinking of the Commission
for Africa and the work the Commission for Africa might do next
year, clearly one of the bits we perhaps ought to be looking at
is how to strengthen this north-south relationship in research.
Listening to what you have all said today, I think it is fair
to say that it has obviously become much weakened in recent years.
That is partially because not sufficient attention has been given
to it here by the donors and there has been too much of a weakening
of capacity in the south. I think that is a fair summation and
I think your nods are confirmation of that. Thank you very, very
much and thank you for sparing us your time and for the references
to other reading, which we will do because these are important
issues. Thank you.
15 Note by witness: Boxall, R., Greeley, M.,
Lipton, M., Neelakantha, S. and Tyagi, D. (1978) Food Grain
Storage Losses in India: A Social Cost-Benefit Analysis, London:
Ministry of Overseas Development. Back
16
See note by Jonathan Coulter in response to this: Ev 41 Back
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