Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-99)
DR CAMILLA
TOULMIN AND
MR BILL
VORLEY
30 MARCH 2006
Q120 Ms Barlow: Can you
tell us of any other projects?
Dr Toulmin: On the China and India
fronts, those were examples that a couple of colleagues came up
with and I do not have the chapter and verse in front of me, but
I would be very happy to provide that for you.
Q121 Ms Barlow: Thank
you; that would be very helpful. You have mentioned the need for
DFID to convert the generic case it has made for investment in
the environment for poverty reduction into specific projects.
Can you suggest how you think it should do this, how you can convert
the generic need to highlight the environment in poverty reduction
into a sort of specific game plan? How would you suggest they
go about that?
Dr Toulmin: As I say, I think
it takes us back to trying to understand what leads to good environmental
management in practice and good environmental management which
also is good for poverty reduction and income generation for poor
groups. That then takes you back to issues to do with institutions,
governance, very often secure access and property rights and a
lot more locally-based sets of activity. As I say, there is the
example of the Mumbai investment fund. There is the example equally
of this joint fund which has been established in Mozambique, where
again DFID and Swedish SIDA have joined forces to set up what
is called a `land fund' which will support communities trying
to secure firmer rights over the lands around their community,
and in particular help them in the negotiation process with foreign
investors seeking access to those resources. That kind of joint
approach, with one or several donors, in terms of making funds
and other forms of technical support available, is a route which
I would strongly urge DFID to go down. Then perhaps they could
rely on another donor somewhat more for that technical assistance
and back-up in-country if they are better equipped, in terms of
available people and advisers, whilst being able to shift this
money out of their central budgetary support model and into a
more locally-accessible form of support. I think what everybody
recognises is that it is not just money that counts, it is not
just finance that brings development; certainly finance is useful,
but finance by itself may often bring a perverse form of development.
It is only when that finance is allied to an understanding of
how you strengthen both institutional but also political systems
at sub-national level that you have got some chance of development
being both more equitable and more sustainable.
Q122 Ms Barlow: To continue
on that theme, you describe a `resource curse' at macro level
and a `poverty trap' at micro level. Can you explain exactly what
you mean by that?
Dr Toulmin: I think that is again
this fact that you have got, obviously, particularly in countries
which have got the resource curse, as a result of huge amounts
of revenue flow coming in at the top, highly concentrated, and
the oil and gas producers and some of the major mineral producers,
particularly are referred to as `resource curse countries', and
very little in the way of a mechanism by which ordinary people
can gain access to or have their views heard, in terms of how
the allocation of those resources takes place. The Government,
with its sponsorship of the EITI, obviously is trying to help
shift resource curse countries towards some greater recognition
of the need for transparency and accountability in the use of
that money. Our feeling is, that sort of redistribution and changed
allocation does not come from above, very often, it comes as a
result of stronger argument and mobilisation from people below.
That is why putting more money into strengthening civil society
groups and a whole variety of local-level structures, including
media and other ways in which you can hold government more firmly
to account, will be essential, in terms of turning around the
resource curse into something which does bring really positive
benefits, as the case of Botswana shows. Botswana is a very good
case for where the resource curse does not apply. If one finds
reasons for that, it is to do with political culture, it is to
do with the relatively small size of the country and it is to
do with a whole set of social and cultural factors which mean
that people in power feel responsible and accountable for their
population, to a very large extent. That sort of accountability
and responsibility seems to be absent in a very large number of
other countries. You have something to say on the resource curse,
too.
Mr Vorley: Only to make the point
that DFID has its own resource curse at the moment, which is this
larger budget which is difficult to spend, other than through
these very centralised projects, which do not tie in very well
with the very local nature of environmental issues, whether it
is access to resources or exclusion from assets. It could be that
you could use the natural resource curse language for the current
state of DFID and the environment.
Q123 Ms Barlow: You feel
that, at the moment, the management board of DFID does not maintain
an environment risk profile or carry out any horizon-scanning
to inform long-term development. Do you think this has anything
to do with the actual composition of the management board, all
five members of which have primarily an economic and financial
background?
Dr Toulmin: I think that is an
inevitable consequence of that, yes. That said, I think it has
been quite helpful, with the White Paper process, that there has
been a series of more long-term scenario planning exercises, which
have included environmental considerations within some of those
scenarios. I think that if your senior management are all macroeconomists
and if they all come from a sort of World Bank/IMF school, that
gives you a particular sort of view on the world and that gives
you a set of assumptions about what development is, what matters
and how it happens. Inevitably, if you have a different composition
then you are going to get a rather different set of assumptions
and set of directions in which the organisation might go, within
the constraints of HMT saying, "You've got to spend more
money with fewer people."
Q124 Ms Barlow: You say
that this reflects in actual country offices, where they face
few incentives to employ anyone but economists, governance advisers
and administrators. Can you expand on that a little?
Dr Toulmin: There has not been
the sort of high-level emphasis on environment and natural resource
issues and the personnel required to take those forward as there
has been on things like economics and governance. It is just a
difference in emphasis, essentially.
Q125 David Howarth: You
have mentioned agriculture several times, which obviously has
a large role to play in rural development and poverty reduction.
I wonder whether you could summarise for us your view of how agriculture
could be an effective tool for development and poverty reduction?
Mr Vorley: I think DFID has got
it right, to some extent, that focusing on agriculture as a productive
sector, rather than as a refuge for people who cannot get to the
city, for instance, is a good policy push and with the emphasis
on areas where you can get productivity growth. Definitely there
are gaps in there, as we point out in the submission. Doing that
to the exclusion of agriculture's role in poverty reduction through
self-provisioning, for instance, rather than growing for market,
that is the role of agriculture as a safety-net, when you get
through economic cycles, clearly is missing from the policy strategy.
We also point to the fact that the natural resource base behind
agriculture, and of course behind agriculture's ability to deliver
on sustainable poverty reduction, soil and water conservation,
for instance, now has gone off the radar, after being very high
in there in the eighties and part of the nineties. You have to
be careful not to make a complete shift to the marketing end of
agriculture without attention to the resource base. Another part
that I find missing is the issue of commodities. Commodities have
a huge role in poverty reduction and, as you know, commodities
have been through some drastic price declines, yet now there is
so much interest in commodities, as providing fuel as well as
food, and I do not think we have got our brains around this at
all. Now that the agricultural frontier will start to move again
quite fast for fuel and food production, how you get the sustainability
message in there, it is really tricky. You know the WTO is a very
blunt tool for getting a sustainable commodity, because any preferential
trade for commodities which are being grown sustainably, sets
off alarm bells of protectionism which go off. For sustainable
commodities, do we put all our eggs into the industry baskets,
we have got industry groups getting together to say do we have
a round table on palm oil or on a sustainable soya bean project.
There are so many question-marks around this and there is so much
danger of natural resource depletion that I think it behoves DFID
to invest in research here, really to find out what the leverage
points are in sustainable commodity production to get ahead of
this issue, otherwise we are going to be running behind it.
Q126 David Howarth: Your
conclusion about what DFID's policy is, and DFID you say has a
commercial focus aimed at national economic growth, which is the
point we were making all along, but your conclusion is, to remind
you of it, "the problems faced by poor people in accessing
environmental assets are not addressed as a priority; neither
are the impacts of agribusiness gaining preferential access to
such assets." Is that an environmental point or is it also
a distributional point? What makes you conclude that?
Dr Toulmin: It is a bit of both.
One of the things that we feel is very important is the way in
which you understand access to resources. Environment is as much
about institutions and governance as it is about anything technical,
and the question of access to resources and strengthened rights
to land is essential if you are going to get agriculture playing
its role, in terms of providing incomes and livelihoods particularly
for poorer groups. I think that many African governments at the
moment feel that they must attract urgently a lot of foreign direct
investment, and this kind of investment promotion activity we
feel occasionally to be at the expense of the rights and livelihoods
of poorer communities. Which is where the case of Mozambique is
a particularly interesting and important one, because there DFID
and Swedish SIDA are coming in behind local communities so that
they can negotiate better those terms on which foreigners come
in and gain access to their land. We are worried about agribusiness
being in a much stronger position in their negotiations with government
and that governments may not respect the rights and interests
of their local communities, in terms of access to water and access
to land, when they see the potential gains that can be made by
letting a private investor come in.
Q127 David Howarth: Do
you see that having a resource depletion consequence in itself,
and why is that; is that because governments themselves are not
particularly concerned about resource depletion issues, and when
negotiating with agribusiness corporations tend to let that go
by the wayside? Are you saying, in contrast with that, that locally-based
organisations and people have more concern about the resource
base; is that the point you are making?
Dr Toulmin: There is the question
of equity around who controls and continues to gain benefit from
those resources, which is an important issue. I think it is also
the case that local farmers are likely to have a longer-term interest,
very often, in those resources. To be honest, people in government
often may be seeking a short-term gain from allowing people access
to certain key resources rather than thinking about the longer-term
consequences, because that is not particularly of interest to
them, that is not where they are going to be living and relying
on for the next generation or so. I think the other important
thing to say is that this term `commercial' often can be a bit
of a minefield. In west Africa, most farming is done by smallholders
and they are thoroughly commercial and they are fully engaged
in the market, and this idea that you contrast commercial with
small-scale farming and, small-scale farmers, they are subsistence
non-commercial farmers only, is a false dichotomy and one which
I think then leads one to think that smallholders will never be
able to enable a country to develop. In practice, certainly in
the west African context, most agricultural production, most agricultural
exports, have come from precisely that supposedly backward, subsistence-oriented,
smallholder sector, who have been remarkably innovative in lots
of ways.
Q128 David Howarth: Can
we look a bit more at DFID's documents; there are two documents,
the Strategy for Sustainable Agriculture Research and its
Agriculture Policy Paper. The Policy Paper is particularly
interesting, I think; it mentions the possible environmental impact
of different approaches to agriculture but then kind of fades
out and does not seem to say anything about what to do about it.
Then it goes on, and this is a statement which I think struck
all of us, it makes the statement that sustainable agriculture
is "unlikely to drive productivity gains up the scale required
to meet market demand and tackle poverty on a world scale."
I wonder if this is a central policy point about sustainable agriculture?
Mr Vorley: There was a huge debate,
as you may know, in the consultation process which led up to that
report. The fact that it is still in there is shocking, because
here sustainable is being equated with organic, I would assume,
and, as you and I would agree, agriculture will not be sustainable
if it does not meet the growing needs of the increasing populations
and deal with the resource base. It is a contradiction in terms.
Q129 David Howarth: Yes,
because it raised the question, if it has no potential, why are
they spending so much money on it? The other matter you refer
to several times is land tenure. Could I give you a chance just
to say what your approach would be to land tenure issues, why
it is so important in poverty reduction and rural development,
and how you see the Government's approach and whether it is different
from yours?
Dr Toulmin: That is very much
my special subject, so you are going to have to stop me talking,
if I ramble on. I think the whole land tenure issue, land and
property rights issue, in the African context, is particularly
important at the moment, largely because land is coming under
increasing competition and pressure and because, in many parts
of the continent, there is absolutely no formal documentation
of land rights, a situation which some people can take advantage
of in order to try to claim those assets for their own. Consequently,
a large number of governments have been thinking about how they
should try to bring a bit of order to the whole land and property
rights field and now are thinking about whether or not they should
go down some kind of titling approach or simpler systems of registration.
Much of the work that we have done, some of which has been with
DFID support, has been to see how you can get good lessons from
practice on the ground, feeding into policy design and new legislation,
in many parts of the continent. In fact, the meeting I was at
in Addis, that I have just now come back from, was an Africa Union-wide
meeting to see how you could get all African heads of state signing
up to broad principles which would govern the way in which land
and property rights should properly be handled at national level.
I do not think that I have any particular grumbles with DFID's
approach to land administration and land tenure. I would like
to see just a bit more of it. There is good work going on in support
of the process in Ghana. There has been good work going on in
South Africa. As I say, there has been good work in support of
the process in Kenya. What I think needs to happen is that there
is greater focus on these difficult political institutional issues
within DFID as a whole, because they are absolutely at the heart
of protection of property rights for poor groups and hopes for
income generation and poverty reduction associated with that,
as well as broader environmental management. I think there has
been hesitancy perhaps within headquarters, because I think DFID
was rather traumatised by the whole Zimbabwe situation. I know
that, certainly in Clare Short's time, it had the effect of people
saying, "Oooh, we just don't want to go there any more,"
because obviously what happened in Zimbabwe was extremely going
in the wrong direction, in terms of what one would hope for, in
terms of an accountable process of land redistribution.
Q130 Chairman: I will
have to draw the session to a close because we are about to lose
our quorum again, I suspect. We do have some outstanding questions,
and we were delayed a little bit earlier in the session, indeed
before you came, so if that is okay for us to write to you with
those three or four questions perhaps outstanding?
Dr Toulmin: Yes, and there are
one or two things that I promised to provide you with more information
on, the China and India examples.
Chairman: Yes. Thank you very much for
your evidence this morning. I hope you have not got too much jet-lag
to deal with. It has been a fascinating session. Thank you again.
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