Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-33)
MR NICK
GRONO AND
MS ELIZABETH
WINTER
13 DECEMBER 2005
Q20 John Barrett: Has compensation
proved not to be such a great idea on the grounds that you can
compensate people for one year's crops and then they will rush
off the following year and start again knowing more compensation
will follow?
Ms Winter: That was tried in the
beginning and it was realised it is not the way to go. You have
to look at much more sustainable long-term efforts to providing
alternatives, but the reality is there is not any very good alternative
to opium in some areas. It grows very well on poor ground and
so on. There have been various discussions about how it might
be tackled ranging from the production of licit opium to allowing
it to go ahead so that poor people have some way to continue living
until alternative livelihoods appear on the scene, whether that
is going back to the previous production of dried fruit and nuts,
et cetera for which Afghanistan was famous or whether it
is trying to foster local small scale industries. I think what
needs to be done is much more understanding of local rural economies,
what might work and just being a bit more patient than people
otherwise might be. There are no quick fixes. There is not anything
fast that can be done to resolve it.
Q21 John Barrett: Do you have any
information you can share with the Committee about the links between
the revenues from the drugs on the ground to those who have been
elected? Now that we have had elections out there clearly in an
ideal world the bad guys would be on one side and the elected
representatives would be on the other side, but it is not such
a clear distinction. Do you have anything to share with the Committee
on that?
Ms Winter: Not on actual figures.
Certainly I think it is well accepted that there are people within
the government who are involved heavily in the trade and making
substantial money from it. It is linked to corruption and all
sorts of things. It is undesirable. It may well be possible for
us to get you more detailed information on that if you would like
it such as there is.[9]
Q22 John Barrett: More information is
always appreciated. There was also a report on the findings of
the Senlis Council that opium licensing for the production of
opium-based medicines would be a viable alternative as the way
forward. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that.
Ms Winter: I think it is very
valuable to look at this as a proposal. I think it is very good
that they have done a feasibility study and suggested that perhaps
it is a way forward. I think at the moment it would be true to
say that there are varying views on whether it is going to be
practical at the current time. I know the Afghan government has
said maybe in the future but not now. There are other specialists
who have said it is fraught with all sorts of difficulties. I
certainly think it is worth examining as an option. Given that
the West has criminalised the whole thing and maybe we should
not have done that in the first place, yes it is worth looking
at.
Q23 John Battle: Could I ask a little
bit more about understanding local rural economies because I do
not know of anywhere else in the world, apart from Colombia, where
this issue has been got right. In Colombia people are taught to
grow palm oil, but then the value in the palm oil crop is half
the value of the value of the coconut crop. Crop switching has
not worked. I wonder whether there was not any attempt at a more
integrated local economy approach like whole packages for agriculture,
healthcare and education put together in a local community as
part of a group of resources to displace the drugs trade. Has
anybody ever worked at a more holistic and integrated approach
to rural economies? Are any NGOs trying it anywhere in the world
that you know of?
Ms Winter: I do not know about
NGOs in the rest of the world. I do know that people have talked
about the possibility of this in Afghanistan. UNDP runs something
called the National Area Based Development Programme which up
until last year had not really looked at the narcotics issue in
relation to that but I think they probably are doing so now. I
think the Afghan government is interested to see whether in fact
there could be a more holistic approach to tackling these things
because it will only work in the long term if there is going to
be a better rural economy coupled with civil society saying we
do not want to continue producing, which most of them do. Certainly
in the areas where it is new to them they would rather stop. I
think those two things together could help.
Q24 John Battle: Is the military
being used to tear up the crops? Is the conflict being militarised
in that way still?
Ms Winter: I think the military
have resisted being used in that way. I think they have destroyed
labs if they have come across them and so on. They have not wanted
to get involved in the counter-narcotics issue and that is one
of the things I understand they are debating at the moment, ie
what their role is going to be in Helmand.
Q25 John Battle: So it has not been
turned into a Colombia situation where it has been massively militarised
with crop spraying?
Ms Winter: No. The Afghan government
has resisted that strongly and said it would be too damaging for
the local economy and for farmers and it does not want the resentment
it would raise against whoever was doing it and so on, so no,
not at the moment.
Q26 Mr Singh: Elizabeth, you mentioned
NGOs in Afghanistan just a moment ago. I am astonished to learn
that they grew from 50 in 2001 to over 2,000 registered with the
Afghan government by 2004. I am alarmed by the allegation that
50% of the budgets of some of these NGOs is spent on overheads.
Are all these NGOs genuine? What is the truth behind those allegations
that they are spending half their money on their overheads? Who
is daft enough to be funding them to spend that kind of money?
Ms Winter: The allegations by
and large are untrue, that is one thing to say. The other is that
organisations that were registered as NGOs did so at the encouragement
originally of the UN, this is in the past and very often they
were organisations that were actually profit making. Because they
were providing small scale reconstruction efforts they got benefits
if they registered as NGOs. What is being argued for now is that
there should be clarity about what is a real NGO and what their
overheads should be, so a Code of Conduct has been drawn up by
ACBAR[10]
in association with the ANCB[11],
the other coordinating bodies for Afghan NGOs, and gradually what
you could call real NGOs are signing up to this, operating on
principle, et cetera. There have been many unfounded allegations
about organisations. At the same time there is the registration
of private sector organisations separately, so you can distinguish
what is profit making—and Afghanistan needs private sector
profit making organisations—and this is a gradual process
that will take a bit of time. NGOs themselves need to be more
proactive about saying what they have achieved and what their
overheads are. Very often they get the blame either because people
want to use them as scapegoats for things that have not been achieved
or they get the blame because they are assumed to be the same
as the UN, with expensive white vehicles, high rents, et cetera.
When we looked at the amount of money that was going into NGOs
it was by far the smallest proportion of any, and again I can
send you detailed figures on that.[12]
You do not need to be alarmed about the real NGOs, they have stuck
it out through thick and thin and achieved a great deal in Afghanistan
and we are going through a transitional time now just sorting
out who is who and what is what. I think the last registration
figures that I remember seeing showed it was something under 100
had been registered.
Q27 Mr Singh: I would welcome the details
you offered to send. When I hear the term NGO I do have some respect
for it. You are now saying to me that there is no definition of
what an NGO is. Is that true across the world where DFID is operating
and other agencies are operating, that there are organisations
there called NGOs which might not be NGOs?
Ms Winter: In Afghanistan that
is the case because there were financial benefits. This is going
way back to the days when they operated out of Peshawar and the
UN set up the system of registering Afghan NGOs. There is a definition
largely held throughout the world of what an NGO is but it is
not understood in Afghanistan in the same way and that is what
we are trying to clarify at the moment.
Q28 Mr Singh: Is the regulatory framework
which was drawn up in 2005 having the impact that it should have
on trying to sort all this out?
Ms Winter: We have broadly welcomed
it. It is still unclear whether or not organisations that should
not be called NGOs have registered under it and there is a view
that maybe some of them are still profit making organisations
instead. It is going to take a bit of time to sort out. The other
development is that there are civil society organisations coming
along as well, which are also non-profit making and trying to
look at peace building and the development of civil society. I
think in the next year these things will become a lot clearer.
Certainly the Code of Conduct which was launched in Kabul was
very much welcomed by the Afghan government and by the Afghan
media as an example of something really good that the NGOs had
done; it was now much clearer what they were. I think what we
now have to do is to have a better communications campaign of
who is doing what, where and why. It has been used, unfortunately,
as I said before, to make NGOs a scapegoat sometimes. We have
had one particular person, the Minister of Planning, who has gone
out of his way to say how NGOs are not doing what they should
and spending a lot of money and so on and so forth and he has
succeeded in tarnishing the reputation of NGOs so that it is now
almost a dirty phrase, but we are trying our best to address that.
Q29 Mr Singh: You are defending their
reputation very well so far. There is also another accusation
on NGOs which is that in terms of the salaries they offer to Afghan
experienced professional staff, they are not only competing against
each other to get the staff but they are competing completely
with the Afghan government, the local government structures, which
has had a negative impact on governments in Afghanistan.
Ms Winter: That is a perception
which again is not correct. There are several ministries which
have offered large salaries to NGO staff and they have gone and
NGOs have been depleted. It is particularly true of engineers,
for example, but it is true of other people who have been recruited
into the UN and have found that they are not doing the jobs for
which they are qualified, so that skill is lost in Afghanistan.
For example, if they have good English they might be there as
translators or they might be drivers and earning considerable
amounts of money, more than they would have earned in the NGO.
It is really not the case that NGOs have kept people who should
be working in the government. In fact, the NGO semi-training resulted
in several senior cabinet members of the last cabinet, some of
whom remain in this one, being lost to the NGOs but the Afghan
government gained.
Q30 Mr Singh: I think you are doing
a wonderful job defending them. There is still a question mark
hanging over my head about those NGOs because they cannot be purer
than pure and the Afghan government and the people in it cannot
all be wrong. I would like to be convinced further at some stage.
Ms Winter: That is not to say
there have not been NGOs calling themselves that who have been
profit making and doing it in a way that is detrimental to themselves
and those whom they are supposed to be helping. That is what we
are trying to clarify now. I think it is a transition phase. I
do not think, for example, the British government has funded any
organisation that was not a real NGO and that was not doing good
work. Yes, I will talk to you about it at greater length and provide
you with more information.
John Battle: I think it is worth recalling
that the day I visited Kabul an NGO worker was murdered and it
was a local Afghan who had worked for an NGO. The risks that NGOs
are taking in Afghanistan are much higher than elsewhere in the
rest of the world where NGOs, including the Red Cross and other
people, are not touched by violence, but they run a very high
risk as well.
Q31 John Barrett: I wanted to ask
about the scale of the impact such a large foreign assistance
spend in Afghanistan will have on the local economy. Clearly there
are a lot of NGOs doing a lot of good work. I heard years ago
that the per square foot rental space price for an office in Kabul
was greater than it was in Manhattan. I am not sure if that is
the case. There must be a human impact. The figure I had was that
the revenue raising power of the Afghan government was one-tenth
of the foreign assistance budget over there. Is there any work
being done on the long-term impact when the external economy is
out of all kilter to the local economy, possibly with the exception
of the narcotics angle of that? Is somebody looking at the big
picture of the impact on the economy of the NGOs, the impact on
jobs, products and so on?
Ms Winter: The NGO impact is minuscule.
If you look at the numbers of staff of the UN and the different
amounts of money going through those two channels, the NGO channel
is minute in comparison, so I would not accept the premise. As
to whether there is somebody looking at it, I think the World
Bank have examined it, but my guess is that the majority of people
accept that if you have a country like Afghanistan and there are
some sorts of political settlements then people will come in and
rents will go up, and they went sky high, they were nearly up
to Manhattan rates. That meant that you had people who could not
afford to return to Kabul and live in any kind of comfort. Afghans
who were trying to return have had great difficulty. Those already
living there have found it extremely difficult. That is not down
to NGOs. We have taken people to car parks and said "These
are our vehicles," little white scrubby pickups with dents
in them, and "This is where we live". Yes, we have a
certain standard but it is not mansions. You need a vehicle that
is reliable to take you to the field. You need somewhere relatively
comfortable to live. If you look at the comparison perhaps with
people living in mansions bought with drug money, there is no
comparison. If you look in Kabul now, there is even a plaza with
an escalator, et cetera. That economy entirely dwarfs any
kind of aid budget even if you take it all together. So I think
probably what we have to do is to say okay, what is going to have
some impact, what have we already done that has worked, what can
we repeat and what do we need money for? I think those questions
are probably going to get us further forward.
Q32 Joan Ruddock: One of the things
that struck me when I have been there is the fact that the international
community is funding a very significant part of the government
budget and the government is paying all of its workers what, by
an international definition, are poverty wages. I do not know
how you see that situation being resolved because there is reluctance
amongst donors to increase substantially the budget going to the
government and there have been questions about too many government
workers and things like that. It is quite fundamental that if
the government does not pay its workers a decent wage then corruption
is a possibility and real poverty. That is one question that you
might give a thought to. I wanted to take that then into whether
you think the UK government has got sufficient policy coordination
across government because you see one part of the government being
focused on counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, but DFID has
a very clear mandate for wherever it works, which is poverty reduction.
Is there a conflict between those two? Do you see tensions there?
I think perhaps you are going to end up by saying you do think
there has to be a review of the whole lot which perhaps is the
answer to the question, but I leave that to you.
Mr Grono: On the point about the
government paying workers, it is a problem if the salary is $40
or $50 a month and these are people that you are asking to deal
with, among other things, the narcotics issue. There is also a
capacity issue. The domestic government revenue I think was about
$330 million this year, less than half of what its recurrent expenses
are, so an increase in wages has to be considered in this context.
As always when we talk about Afghanistan we come back to saying
everything is linked. It is an issue of building government capacity,
it is an issue of supporting the government in the long term to
enable that capacity to be built, to develop the expertise, to
enable strengthening of the institutions in the provinces and
so on and all of those issues. Because everything is interlinked
obviously from a policy point of view your approach has to be
coordinated because you cannot just focus on poverty reduction
separate from the insurgency because, of course, they are intimately
connected. When you are dealing with counter-narcotics you are
dealing with insurgency and you are dealing with reconstruction
development because your long-term solution is going to be to
build the economic future of farmers and those who are relying
on the income, but you also need to develop the capabilities of
the Afghan National Police and the counter-narcotics police. I
am not familiar with the extent to which the coordination processes
within the British government are interlinked. We support approaches
such as the Conflict Prevention Pool which is a clear attempt
to interlink these and that is the approach you have to take.
One of our criticisms of the international engagement with Afghanistan
over the last few years is this structure which has said that
the Germans are responsible for police training and the Italians
are responsible for judicial reform and so on without effective
coordination mechanisms between them, and I hope that is something
that we will revisit next month with the Afghan Compact to ensure
a greater degree of coordination. So to the extent that there
is not that coordination within the British government, it is
absolutely essential when you are going into Helmand—and
DFID is looking at alternate livelihoods—that there is a
link with whatever activities the British forces are taking on,
eradication or support of the Afghan government on interdiction
and so on because if there is interdiction, if there is eradication
going on and there is no linked up alternate livelihood and development
process then you are exacerbating the problem, you are not solving
it. So I would certainly agree that it is highly desirable.
Ms Winter: I think there are attempts
to have cross-Whitehall coordination and far be it for me to say
whether they are successful or not. On the question of the poverty
strategy that DFID has, they should continue with that in Afghanistan.
Obviously being one of the poorest countries in the world it would
be very important for DFID to continue with that strategy. There
may well be difficulties in pursuing that in a highly politically
charged situation where you have three ministries, all of which
have their own mandates and do need to try and work together.
It is not going to be easy to bring foreign affairs, defence and
DFID under one hat when they have different mandates and different
views about how to pursue them, but obviously if they can then
that would be an improvement. The question of Civil Service reform
comes up when you talked about low wages. I think it is very important
to reduce the numbers on the payroll so that those who remain
on it can be effective and properly paid, but I think that movement
on that is still extremely slow and I think DFID's programme to
assist with public administration reform and the PRR[13]
and so on should be supported. The UK has signed an enduring relationship
with Afghanistan, and that is for ten years, which is the very
minimum Afghanistan now needs to be assisted, and I think we should
provide enduring programmes for that, things that are sustainable
and that will be there for years to come, and that will make a
difference.
Q33 John Battle: Can I thank you both.
Our intention as a committee, the International Development Committee,
is to keep Afghanistan in the forefront of the minds of not only
DFID but the whole of government and, indeed, the wider public,
and let us not pretend it has gone away and the whole caravan
has moved on somewhere else, but to keep returning, checking.
It was before the conflict the poorest country in the world and
poverty is the key focus. Can I thank you for your help this morning
in helping us keep Afghanistan on the agenda. I ought at the beginning
to have offered apologies for our Chairman, Malcolm Bruce, who
is away, with other members of the Committee, at the meetings
in Hong Kong of the World Trade Organization. They clashed with
our session—so while they are there we are here—but
we do appreciate you coming this morning, and thank you very much
for the information you have shared with us.
Ms Winter: Thank you for inviting
us. We are very pleased to come again.
9 See article: Moreau and Yousafzai, "A harvest
of treachery: Afghanistan's drug trade is threatening the stability
of a nation America went to war to stabilize. What can be done?",
Newsweek, 9 Jan 2006. Back
10
Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief Back
11
Afghan NGOs Coordination Bureau Back
12
See Appendix 1, Ev 17 Back
13
Priority Reform and Restructuring Back
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