Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
30 NOVEMBER 2009
Q20 Keith Hill: What has been your
conclusion from that exercise?
Ms Hines: I am very positive,
actually, and people in the villages are as well. The BBC were
out there as well, so it was not just me who found this. What
we did find and everybody in the village told us is that there
is a lot of maize around. As the NAO Report says, there is a little
bit of a dispute around the size of the harvest. The official
statistic will tell you this year there is a 1.2 million surplus,
and whether it is exactly 1.2 million is matter for debate, but
what is not a matter for debate within Malawi is the fact that
there is a surplus, that the country has gone from five million
people on food aid in 2005 to now having a surplus and they are
now in the process of exporting maize to Zimbabwe. The turnover
is not something which is in debate.
Q21 Keith Hill: To what extent would
you ascribe that serious turnaround to the role of DFID, for example?
Ms Hines: I like to think we played
a part in it.
Q22 Keith Hill: I bet you would.
Ms Hines: Yes. As Minouche has
said, this programme is something which the government itself
very much owns. 90% of the funding for the programme comes from
government. DFID's own money is about £5 million a year into
this programme. One of the really key things we have done with
our money is to help them to roll out improved variety seeds,
hybrid seeds, which have a much higher yield. Of the £5 million
we provided last year, £3.3 million went on improved seeds.
It is both the seeds and the fertiliser.
Q23 Keith Hill: As a matter of interest,
how did you ensure that those improved seeds became available
to farmers at the district level, for example?
Ms Hines: In fact, it goes way
below the district level.
Q24 Keith Hill: How did you do it?
Ms Hines: It goes down to the
village level.
Q25 Keith Hill: Who does that? Is
it the Malawi government that does it or is it the agencies?
Dr Shafik: It is private.
Ms Hines: It is a whole range
of people who are involved in it. At the village level, there
is a village level beneficiary identification committee, which
is a very complicated way of saying the village get together and
determine for themselves who within the village will benefit most
from the programme.
Q26 Keith Hill: How do they get the
money?
Ms Hines: As I say, 90% of the
money is the government's own money. Development partners, including
DFID, put their money with the government's money to fund the
whole programme.
Q27 Keith Hill: Who administers that?
There is obviously a large element of self-help in this, but who
administers it at the local level?
Ms Hines: At the local level it
is done through something called district agricultural development
officers who are employees of the ministry of agriculture, who
are at the district level, and then there are extension workers
below that level who know every village, who work with every village,
who go out with the vouchers for the individual families on that
list.
Q28 Keith Hill: How do you know they
are doing it?
Ms Hines: We fund two things.
One is a logistics unit, which is a central mechanism which helps
to co-ordinate the whole process and gives us a weekly report
during the agricultural season, to both us and government.
Q29 Keith Hill: Gives DFID a weekly
report?
Ms Hines: Yes.
Q30 Keith Hill: The logistics unit
gives DFID a weekly report. I am not being hostile, I am merely
trying to get behind this issue of budget support. I almost get
the impression now that we might be slightly reverting to the
old, rather more direct, hands-on style that aid programmes and
UK aid programmes would have implemented historically.
Dr Shafik: That report of the
logistics unit also goes to the government of Malawi. The second
thing we do, which Gwen did not get to finish, is that we also
fund civil society organisations to go round and check the distribution
centres, check at the local level, to make sure that farmers are
getting the inputs that they are entitled to.
Q31 Keith Hill: So we also fund civil
society organisations to exert a kind of scrutiny and check on
government?
Dr Shafik: Yes.
Q32 Keith Hill: They are really our
go-betweens at the local level?
Dr Shafik: That is exactly right.
Q33 Keith Hill: So we are really
a bit more hands-on than the principle of budget support would
imply?
Dr Shafik: Good budget support
has that kind of accountability mechanism in it whereby we ask
the government to tell us.
Q34 Keith Hill: Is that something
which has developed over time, or was that part of the original
concept?
Dr Shafik: I think it was part
of the original concept. Where we have got better over time, and
I think the NAO has been helpful in pressing us on this, is in
clarifying the targets, clarifying the commitments, measuring
them on a regular basis.
Q35 Keith Hill: Mr Sharpe, I get
the sense that you are teetering on the brink of an intervention!
Mr Sharpe: If I may, I wanted
to comment on your point about the number of targets that we did
not achieve on time. As a system we have always set stretching
targets without the expectation that we would necessarily achieve
all of them. Our agreement with the Treasury for this three-year
period is that we will try and improve the portfolio quality scores
from 72% to 75%, in other words we will achieve about three-quarters
of our targets. The NAO are rightly asking us as we do project
design to do it a bit differently, to state what would be the
threshold level at which this intervention would deliver good
value for money, what is the expected level and what would be
over-achievement. We need to follow up with what the NAO are suggesting
in that regard, and we will do that. We have never set these targets
on the assumption that the project will have failed if we have
not achieved all of them.
Q36 Mr Curry: Dr Shafik, helping
peasants produce is back in fashion, is it not, in development
programmes? It went out of fashion, did it not?
Dr Shafik: I think that is true.
2008 was a critical year because of the food crisis.
Q37 Mr Curry: The great price spike,
plus climate change, plus the panic of population movements driven
by both of them, has led us to be very anxious that very small
farmers, subsistence farmers, can stay on the land and produce,
has it not?
Dr Shafik: That is correct.
Q38 Mr Curry: Britain has rather
run down its capacity in this area over the years, has it not?
If you look at some of the institutes which used to be involved,
like the Natural Resources Institute, they all say they have got
much less resource than they used to. Are we hoping to build up
our expertise and technologies in this area again?
Dr Shafik: I think it is a fair
criticism that the international donor community neglected agriculture
in recent years because there was a strong focus in the Millennium
Development Goals on health and education. The food crisis in
2008 was a wake-up call to us and we are redressing that by putting
more resources into agriculture.
Q39 Mr Curry: I am interested in
the agricultural side of it. It is quite clear that your programmes
in Malawi are based on subsidy.
Dr Shafik: Yes.
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