Feeding the poor in Africa.

“Masauto Fraxon, a 13-year old Malawian boy, dropped out of school in 2003 after his parents died and he was no longer being fed.  He supports himself and his grandmother by doing odd jobs in other people’s fields.  A full day’s work can pay (about a dollar a day) but if Masauto has not eaten, he can only (work for a fifth of a day) before he has to stop, exhausted.  He then comes home, spends his paltry wags on food, and rests for the rest of the day. At the best of times, his wages buy only slightly more calories than he expends to earn them”.

This story came from a report on Nutrition in Malawi in The Economist July 31st 2004. Half the children under five in were then underfed to the point of stunting.  Now things are probably getting worse for Masauto and many Malawians still have trouble finding something to eat<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

According to Danielle Resnick at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI),  a half of Africa’s people live below the poverty line and a third are under-nourished – the highest proportion in the world.  A quarter of African children are underweight and a third are stunted.  It is even worse in South Asia (<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Bangladesh and India), still the places where most underfed children live. Until the recent food crisis, children under five who were malnourished to the point of stunting fell from 39% in 1990 to 30% in 2000.

Malnutrition, according to The Economist report, is the largest single contributor to disease.  Hunger weakens the immune system and infections lead to appetite loss or prevents nutrients reaching the blood system. Malnurished people need more food.  They also better food.  Too many people in Africa eat little more than cassava or sorghum. Five hundred million people eat these two products.  They are cheap, yet they are notoriously lacking in nutrients.

The malnurishment figure in Africa has hardly changed between the mid-1990s and 2000. Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for 65 percent of Africans.  That is about 30-40 percent of African GDP.  Contrary to what most of us believe from press stories of big farms hogging the limelight and making all the money, it is the small scale farms that account for more than ninety percent of all farms in Africa. Three quarters of Africa’s underweight children live on these smallholder farms.  Across the world in general, far more people in the countryside suffer from malnutrition than do in the cities.

If things don’t change, the World Bank estimates that more than 42 percent of Africans will be in poverty by 2015, compared with 24 percent in 2004. Resnick (IFPRI) says:  “Reducing high levels of poverty and hunger will require greater agricultural and rural development”.  A bit of an understatement if you ask me!

Food Aid:

Africa does not have enough food to feed itself, partly due to conflicts, lack of government accountability (Zimbabwe and Ethiopia are but two), droughts and famines. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Winner for Economics, argued in his book Poverty and Famine, that no famine has occurred in a country with democracy.  By this he mean that countries with a robust and free media were able to argue the case for changes in policy before famines occurred.  He also argued that people were hungry, not because of famines but because food prices rose so much that they could no longer afford to buy.  In the Gambia, smallholders near Banjul, the capital, grow fruit and vegetables for the hotel trade.  Local people cannot afford them.  In Pakalinding in central Gambia, there is hardly more than a few over ripe tomatoes for sale in the local market each day!  The lucky people are those who have a small patch for growing vegetables (but these are usually the schoolteachers, at least in Pakalinding)!

Africa has to rely on food aid to feed its hungry. Some three million tons of cereal food aid arrived in 2004 as food emergencies for 24 African countries.  The US earmarks about $2 billion a year on food for the world’s hungry. The bulk of this comes from the farm surpluses in the US. According to an article in Business Week (July 9th 2008) by Avi Salzman, Americans like to see TV  pictures of food aid being sent across the world in boxes with labels ‘USAID Food From the American People!’

Transport:

She also points out that almost two thirds of USAID money is spent on stuff other than food.  This is because the current $290 billion (yes, I got that right – 290 billion) farm bill (dishing out the farm subsidies this year) as usual requires the food to be bought in the US (thus benefiting US farmers) and shipped to needy countries But, as shipping and delivery costs have risen, the amount of food being delivered has dropped by 52 percent between 2001 and 2006.  President Bush (bless him!) wants less US food shipped and 25% of the food aid budget spent on food bought in the receiving countries, but Congress did not agree, insisting instead on just 1% of the aid budget being spent on a pilot project of local food purchases

To make matters worse, the farm bill mandates that three quarters of the food traveling abroad must travel on US-flagged ships, Business News point out.  It says that USAID has seen average shipping costs jump from $160 a ton to $270 per ton last month. And Maersk Line Ltd are lobbying hard for the present system to continue! .  According to Business News, David Beckman of Bread for the World, says “It’s a scandal that we’re taking more than half of this money and giving it to these companies”.

Business News points out that Canada plans to shift to a cash-only system. And Gawain Kripke of Oxfam America says he thinks moving to a local purchase could cut costs by 40-50 percent. 

Subsidies

Barbara Stocking from OxfamUK  went further.  She pointed out last night in a BBC interview that this American grown food is devastating African agriculture, since they cannot compete with this American subsidized food.  Cheap/free food imports has depressed the price of crops in Africa and this tends to discourage African farmers from trying to increase their productivity  Says Resnick: “(West Africa) has benefited from the recovery of prices for its primary export commodities, cocoa and cotton.  But the US$6 billion in annual subsidies for domestic cotton producers in the US, European Union, and China have made it difficult for African smallholder farmers to compete in world markets”.  The result? In West Africa, countries use only a third of their potentially arable land and irrigate about one percent of arable cropland.  I pointed out in an earlier piece (The Rising Cost Of Food): that ‘the West donated a mere $1.2 billion to help Africa's 400 million small farmers (the same amount in money terms donated annually more than 30 years ago’).

Alternatives:

In the present world food price crisis,  Barbara Stocking wants countries to give poor people money to buy food.  She says there are sound economic reasons for believing that this will stimulate local farmers to be more productive in the short run.  Farmers would once again be motivated to remain in farming rather than think about moving to the growing cities in search for work (or commit suicide as they do in India).

She also pointed out that the G8 countries at their Gleneagles meeting in 2005 promised to double aid to Africa to $50*billion a year by 2010. Some countries have almost done this (including Gordon Brown’s government in good old UK!).  But others have not.  She singled France as particularly slow to do anything here. (I think it's also true of Italy). President Sarkozy keeps talking about the need to protect French agriculture.

I think we Npers should all club together to get Nper John Summerton pour visiter chez le President a la Palace d’Elysee pour avoir un tete-a-tete seriouse avec lui!

Well, if we want something done, we have to do it ourselves.  Look what happened at the G8Summit!  There’s no point in leaving it to our esteemed leaders.

I say:  Make a Noise, Make a Noise, Make a Noise, until they start to listen!

NOTE: I Wus wrong! *Owing to a mechanical failure in my cutting edge calculator because of a power surge, I incorrectly wrote 25 when it should have been 50 billion a year total!  I deeply regret the incident and will ensure it never occurs again.