The DFID White Paper – why food and agriculture needs to be front and centre
As DFID prepares a new White Paper, addressing the challenges of food and agriculture must be central. Food – and in turn agriculture – must underpin any response to the financial crisis, and resilient agricultural and natural resource management systems are of course critical for adapting to climate change.
If DFID ignores this theme in the White Paper – and fails to give it a ‘front and centre’ place – this will not only be a ‘betrayal’ of the bottom billion hungry and growing numbers of malnourished children in the world, as Professor Lawrence Haddad suggested at the DFID ‘Eliminating World Poverty: Building our common future’ conference, but it will also look very odd.
How can DFID, a leader in this field, give a signal that it is down-grading its commitment to food and agriculture only a year after the robust UK response to the 2008 food crisis? How can a major international agency not prioritise food and agriculture as central to its endeavours? [read more]
Ian Scoones, Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies and co-convenor of the Future Agricultures Consortium
Food security, agriculture and pro-poor growth
There are very worrying indications that food security and agriculture are again dropping down the list of international and DFID development priorities.
This is remarkable given
- recognition of the importance of food and agricultural production in the 2008 food price crisis,
- continuing high food prices in many countries and the damaging effects of these prices on the poor and on the economies in which they live and on which they depend, and
- the negative interactions of this with the effects of the global credit crunch and down turn.
This suggests that core lessons from research, theory and experience over the last 40 years and over the last 12 months have not been grasped by key decision makers. Successful development of poor rural economies in the past and much failed development in the past and present both show that it is imperative that food security is seen not just as a social security issue but as a critical issue for poverty reduction and growth. The large numbers of poor food insecure people in Africa locked into low productivity food staple production are a major drag on economic growth and poverty reduction, as they lower labour and land productivity and lead to major rigidities preventing diversification out of (low productivity) agriculture.
DFID and development partner strategies have to address this in a joined up way that promotes food staple productivity with lower staple food prices so that the incomes of poor subsistence / food buying producers (around 50% of African farmers) are raised both through greater agricultural productivity and through lower food prices. Higher real incomes will then drive demand for non-staple goods and services (horticultural products, livestock products, petty trading, a range of rural services, etc) while higher land and labour productivity together with more stable and lower food prices also allows a supply response and movement of land and labour out of low productivity staple production into other more productive uses.
Getting the matching / complementary stimulus and movement of both supply and demand for a shift of human resources out of agriculture has been the big development failure in much of Africa and in other poor parts of the world - but it was the critical process that drove and facilitated poverty reduction and growth in other more successful areas. It is of course in many ways more difficult now than it was in Asia in the past – with different global and national agro-ecological, market, political, and other conditions, but this does not make it any less important.
An associated point is that policy analysis and policy need to recognise the different needs of countries at different stages of structural change / development. Many of the current successes in China, India and other parts of Asia have limited relevance to Africa at the moment - we often need to look at how successful countries got to where they are now by examining carefully and critically their policies 30 or more years ago. Developing economies should not try to run before they can walk, the paths to growth can (if well implemented with good fortune and sufficient resources) be eased and speeded up, but there are few actual short cuts in the process of structural economic change.
Andrew Dorward
Professor of Development Economics
Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP)
School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS)
University of London
