What We Are Reading 27/01/2012
By Fiorenzo Conte
There is general consensus about the grievances voiced during the protests in Egypt which led to the toppling of the Mubarak regime. People were protesting against a corrupt regime which proved unable to secure them even the most basic right: the right to food. A significant proportion of the protesters was comprised of peasant farmers who moved to the city because they could not eke out a living in rural areas. This movement was enormous in Egypt as 4 million have quit their land in the last 20 years. The conventional development discourse blames the current status quo on natural factors: a narrow river valley hemmed in by the desert with a fast growing population caused the production of staples food not to keep up with the growing needs of the population. As a result, so the argument goes, Egypt has been a net importer of agricultural commodities since 1974. In this story, however, the concept of nature obscures rather than illuminates the underlying dynamics and the fundamental causes of the problem: politics. When the analysis looks at other factors the story turns into one of social inequality, powerlessness, and Western- backed market reform rather than one of nature.
Social Inequality and Shifting Consumption. As professor Timothy Mitchell brilliantly explains what caused the dependence on wheat import was not population growth but a shift of the consumption from basic staples to meat. Grains were increasingly used to feed animals so that grain for human consumption had to be imported. This shift mirrored the divide between rich and poor in society as meat was primarily consumed by tourists and upper-class urban residents while Egyptians continued to suffer from high rates of malnutrition. This shift towards luxury goods was incentivized by the international regime. Grain imports were in fact partly financed by US subsidized loans partly by further borrowing which swelled the external debt so to reach 165% of its GNP in1989. This raises the first question: why the US was willing to finance such large scale wheat import thus fostering a condition of dependency? If the reason was to help the poor – the American loans were called Food For Peace– it would have made more sense to shift locally produced grains towards human consumption while favoring the import of animal feeds. Yet, it did not do this. The reason behind this choice was to find a market for the surplus wheat produced by subsidized US farmers. This shift in consumption and production towards meats ignited a vicious cycle which worsened Egyptian dependency on grain imports: as Egypt struggled to pay back its debt, new loans by the US were made conditional upon a shift towards export crops (grapes, strawberries and other luxury produce) away from staple food to gain more hard currency to serve its debt.
Powerlessness and Land distribution: Another push factor for people to move to urban areas was the condition of landlessness. By 1982, 10% of the landholders controlled 47.5 percent of the country’s cultivated area: a sign of a skewed concentration of the land in the hands of few and not of overpopulation as somebody claimed. This was compounded by law 96 in 1992, which returned the land given to small farmers under Nasser to the original landowners. Even if the unequal distribution of the land was at the roots of the chronic undernourishment of Egyptians, it was never taken into account in the official development discourse. Such concentration of land was encouraged by USAID in order to favor the production of the new export crops.
Decentralization, Market Reform and Crony Capitalism: Another intervention which worsened the states of thing was the reform towards decentralization pushed through by USAID and the Bretton Woods institutions. Originally intended to promote a functioning market without the distortions created by the government, such reform shifted the centers of exploitation from the central state to local authorities and landowners. This shift of the centre of power did not weaken the class of crony capitalists whose fortunes were built upon their connections with the authorities and made at the expenses of the majority of the population.
In sum, the chronic difficulties in buying their daily bread that most Egyptians experience was not the result of the natural forces of population growth. The chronic shortage of grains in the country resulted from the shift in consumption towards luxury goods ignited by the power of a certain part of the population, supported by the prevailing international regime which served its own interests. This shift was accompanied by the persistence of an unequal distribution of land which left many landless while the market reform promoted by international organizations only favored those entrepreneurs well connected with the state. The idea of nature served to conceal this complex networks of power relationships. To ignore the role of politics is tantamount to ignoring the fundamental cause of the issue thus perpetuating the status quo.
What We Are Reading 21/01/2012
1. CIDA and UNDP: Making the Most of the Debris in Haiti
2. Lending To Repression, Again SCAF and US Military Aid in Egypt
3. History of Malaria Drug Artemisnin
4. Boko Haram: The Answer Lies in Providing More Meaningful Human Security
5. The Zambezi Valley: China’s First Agricultural Colony? Fiction or Fact?
When Two Worlds Collide: A Review of “The River Between”
By Fiorenzo Conte
The River Between by Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o narrates the story of Kenya at the time of the early white settlement. The arrival of the white men spelled a radical change for two communities living on the opposing edges of a river. The white men were, infact, the pioneer of a new way of understanding the world and mastering it: in other words what the Gikuyu community (one of the Kenyan ethnic groups) faced was not only a new representation of the same world they used to live in but a very new world shaped by new sciences and new power relations whereby the land was expropriated and a monetary tribute was levied. The choice which confronted the indigenous communities was one of acceptance of the new world or rejection and loyalty to the purity of the tribe. One village embraced white men and Christian world by rejecting the old, the other village pursued to preservation of the independence of the tribe: in this way the river that once united the people on its shore became the river between, the river which divided.
The River Between is a powerful exploration of the dilemma which tore apart the Gikuyu communities in Kenya when the colonial power settled in. The whole story revolves around a fundamental episode: the choice a girl, whose family had converted to Christianity, to undergo circumcision, a ritual considered by the tribe as necessary to enter womanhood and therefore become marriable. Following complication in the surgery she dies and her death is interpreted in a diverging way: for some it was the sign that the arrival of the new religion had upset the spirits, for the others it meant that the old customs were the devils and had to be eliminated. Each interpretation flowed out of the world to which one belonged to. Her death symbolized the death of the possibility of an existence which went beyond division: an existence which embraced both worlds without renouncing to any.
The fictional tale created by Wa Thiong’o is rooted in a real episode which occurred in the early time of colonialism: the attempt of the Christian missionary to ban what they considered the barbaric practice of female circumcision. This practice however was foundational for the Gikuyu community and therefore spurred the contempt of many Gikuyu who thought of the new religion as not reconcilable with theirs. The split the followed between the loyalist to the new colonial authority and the Gikuyu loyal to their tribe was at the root of independence war which in fact was a civil war: Gikuyu loyalist on one side and Gikuyu tribalist one the other. The impossibility of an existence which straddled upon the two colliding worlds was sanctioned in the death of the girl: the inevitable consequence was conflict.
One merit of this novel is to put the finger on a theme which cannot by any means be relegated to the colonial time. It is a matter which is, in fact, part and parcel of our contemporary world: the dilemma brought about by the collision of two worlds and the struggle to reconcile them. Think about immigration in the western countries: the debate is often framed as the clash of two cultures. Migrants are asked to give up their customs, their languages, their food, their names because it could water down the purity of the other world: if you want to fit in, we say, you must just look like us. As one of Chimamanda Adichie’s character poignantly puts it :
“Look at the people who shop here; they are the ones who immigrate and continue to act as if they are back in their countries.” He gestured, dismissively, toward a woman and her two children, who were speaking Spanish. “They will never move forward unless they adapt to America. They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this”.[1]
The power and importance of the message in The River Between is that when adaptation becomes synonymous with rejection of the other possible world, when the possibility of embracing both worlds without renouncing to any is labeled as impossible the inevitable outcome is collision and conflict. A fundamental cautionary message for our societies.
[1] The story whose title is “The Arrangers of Marriage” is taken from the book “The Thing Around Your Neck”
Making AIDS History
By Fiorenzo Conte
In the last decade the expansion of people with access to ART (antiretroviral therapy) has been dramatic: from 100,000 in 2003 to more 6 million at the end of 2010. This in itself it is a success to be celebrated insofar as human lives have been saved. However, it poses the question: as new people get infected with the virus and as those currently enrolled on first line ARV are forced to move to more expensive second line ARV, who can bear such an economic burden? The dramatic expansion of ARV has been achieved through aid money and it is unlikely that any donor (US included) is willing or able to sustain the ballooning economic burden associated with expanded access to ARV. The reason behind the growing need for treatment is that efforts to prevent new infections has fallen short of its target. A new book by Mead Over, researcher at the Center for Global Development, makes a very basic yet often ignored point about infections and treatment: to make the latter sustainable one needs to prevent the former. Over has the merit to explain in very clear terms that the goal should be to stabilize the number of people infected so that 
the costs for treatment does not increase over time. To do so policies should aim to drop the number of new infections below that of AIDS deaths: this is what the book calls an AIDS transition.
So if the ultimate goal is to hold down AIDS mortality and at the same time to bring down new infections, what are the policies which could incentivize government to pursue such goal? Mead proposes a policy instrument called cash-on-delivery. The principle behind it is very simple: donor and recipient country agree on a specific target; if the recipient achieve such a target it will receive an economic reward. The novelty of such an approach is that the target needs to be an outcome, for example number of infections prevented or number of new people who accessed ART. Such focus on outcome is a necessary step away from current approaches stuck on inputs: for far too long the focus had been narrowed to how many people attended prevention events (inputs) rather than on how many people changed their behavior and therefore prevented infections.
Such cash-on-delivery address in my view another pitfall of HIV/AIDS policies: the lack of economic incentives to engage with HIV/AIDS project. A comparative study of AIDS policies in Uganda and Botswana by Allen and Health revealed how the presence or lack of financial incentives played a role in tipping government into investing time and efforts into AIDS policies. In Botswana, the international aid community had largely withdrawn by the mid 1990s on the assumption that Botswana has enough resources to deal with the new epidemic. Yet, the three main sources of income for Botswana i.e. cattle, diamond and tourism were never directly affected by the epidemic and as a result the political class showed very little interest in tackling the growing AIDS epidemic. On the other hand, Uganda could count on a donor involvement and continuous cash flow which created institutionalized economic incentives to engage with HIV/AIDS policies on a day-to-day basis.
What We Are Reading (and listening) 13/01/2012
1. The Role of Religion in Nigeria Turmoil by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka
2. Stop Saving The World, Start Reinventing by Virgin Unite CEO
3. The Other Side of Revolution: Egypt Goes Back to the IMF
Whose Reality and the Possibilities that Never Were. A Review of “The Thing Around Your Neck”
By Fiorenzo Conte
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stories have the merit to shed light on how the definition of reality is not a given but is contested and continuously produced . Adichie tells us that often Western media packaged a reality which is presented as a definitive account. It is a single story, it is one of the possible perception of how things look like; yet this account is established as THE reality, THE story. Her book The Thing Around Your Neck tell us the other stories and in so doing it highlights the partial and often incorrect nature of THE single story.
One of the example of the partiality of each account is the way the strife between Hausa-speaking Muslims and Igbo-speaking Christians are reported in western media. Such clashes make the headlines so often that they have come to be quintessential of Nigeria in the Western imaginary. Yet the daily experience of so many Nigerian is sometimes a very different one: it is an experience of peaceful and respectful interaction; it can be the experience -recounted in the story “A Privete Experience” – of an Hausa woman who lead an Igbo girl in a store where they could hide together from the riots that broke out in the market. Their story is one of gentleness and mutual support which does not fit into the framework of violence and hatred. It is not a surprise that stories like these do not make the headlines.
The same status of non-existence is reserved to those novelists who decide to touch topics which are considered by someone not plausible, not realistic enough for contemporary Africans. One of the novels of the book “Jumping Monkey Hill” is the story of Ujunwa, a Nigerian writer, who participates to an African Writers workshop organized by the British Council. She decides to write about a women who had obtained a job in banking only to quit later on because she did not stand to sexually please male customers into opening a bank account. Afterall she was educated and she had a degree: she could obtain more. Other participants in the workshop however did not agree. They claimed that the story was implausible or that “it isn’t a real story for real people”; women in Africa afterall have very few opportunities to find a job so if they find one they wouldn’t let it go so easily . They said so only to find out later that the woman’s story was Ujunwa’s story: what part of it was not real or African enough?
The world that comes out from these other stories is one where the opportunities for the Nigerian characters are not as many as for their American counterparts; is a world where the choice for somebody (who is most of the time American) is acceptance for the choices of others for somebody else (most of the time Nigerian); it is one where the subject of their lives are well aware of the external boundaries, that they are not the only authors, the makers of their stories; it is a world where the characters often wonder what would have been, pondering about the possibilities which never were because something bigger than them happened.
This realization translates into the acceptance that the destiny is somehow ineluctable, a concept so alien to the American culture to which each of the Nigerian character is exposed to or interacts with. Such life full of opportunities does appeal: the book is full of characters waiting outside the American embassy to get a visa or that consider a green card as a blessing. And yet these people accept what it comes as much as they searches for these opportunities or let other do the search (they let other chose for they husband, for their job). This acceptance however is neither hopeless nor passive: it is rather stoic. It is in fact the acceptance of a superior order which is necessary because it governs and maintains the order of things. Accepting what the arrangers of marriage decided for Chinaza – the main character of “The Arrangers of Marriage” – was necessary for her to say thanks to her aunt and uncle who cared for her when the parents died. It is an acceptance which feeds into an awareness that the destiny compensates at some point, that life is a cycle and that “what is ahead is better”. As one of the character puts it when asked if his life is a good life “it is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters”.
What We Are Reading 06/01/2012
Rice Crisis and the Shortage that Wasn’t: Looking at the World in Someone’s Else Shoes
By Fiorenzo Conte
In 2007-2008 rice prices tripled over six months (yes you are reading correctly: tripled!). Many analysts asked why this took place and why at that specific time. According to IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) the fundamental cause of the price spike is that demand outstripped supply as demonstrated by the steady price increase over the previous 7 years. If the prices had not increased more suddenly before it was because the world was drawing on rice stockpiles whose level in 2007 was the lowest since 1988.
This analysis however fails to explain why the rice crisis happened at that specific time. In fact if one looks at the rice market fundamentals, they were sound: rice production kept pace with the demand and the stocks were constant the three years preceding the crisis (see here the graph). So who pulled the trigger and set off a chain reaction which culminated in the rice global crisis?
NPR Planet Money has a fascinating account of how the price spike was ignited by a series of decisions which made a lot of sense from the perspective of every individual actor who took them. Each of this “rational” choice was dictated by the goal of achieving food security in each country in face of a growing fear that the world was running out of rice. More precisely the fear that there might have been a shortage because the shortage never materialized in reality. Rational choices compounded by fear determined the very irrational outcome of a price spike.
The first culprit was the government of India which made “food for all” its flagship. This implied that the government needed 60 million tons of rice and wheat. Afraid of not being able to get as much wheat as he needed the government thought to substitute rice for wheat. To do so it banned the export of rice out of the country. Why did it make sense to the Indian government to do so? Rice in India as in the rest of Asia is part and parcel of life and as such constitutes a topic of national security for governments. Banning exports served to secure food security for Indians.
The next thing was that rice prices soared by 20% overnight. Governments all over Asia rushed to buy as much rice as they could and hoard it in the expectation of a future scarcity of rice signaled by the price jump. If you are a rice exporting country you can hoard rice by banning or restricting exports. This is what Egypt, Vietnam and Thailand made one after the other. If you are a rice importing country you do not have much choice. What government officials in the Philippines did was to tell their people to eat less rice so that the government could have bought less rice (and this was probably the least reasonable of the reactions). In response to this Filipinos rushed to buy as much rice as they could because they understandably interpreted the message from the government as “we are running out of rice”. All of these choices made perfect sense from the point of view of those who took them because they served to ensure that everybody could have rice on the table. What made sense for millions of people in Asia- i.e. going and hoarding rice – did not make sense to people sitting in other part of the worlds, where rice is not the centerpiece of life and can be substituted by another staple. The perspective from which you view the world determines what makes sense for you.
The same principle holds with regard to the lessons to be learned from the rice fiasco. In a best case scenario (what an economist strives for) governments would not tamper with rice markets so that rice could go where is most demanded. From a government perspective however this does not make sense because it is just not feasible. If the lives of your citizens revolve around rice you cannot let the market decide where the rice goes. The governments which did restrict exports did not experience price spikes in their own countries. The political reality which determines what is rational is in other words that governments are responsible for guaranteeing the food security of their own people. If you put yourself in the shoes of the Vietnamese policy makers it made a lot of sense to ban exports because they insulated their citizens from the prices spikes, even if they cause other people in other countries to suffer from it. So next time you think about the world try to look at it in someone’s else shoes.
Book Review: Poor Economics – A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
I recently finished reading Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The co-authors who are rockstars in the field of experimental development economics have pioneered the randomized control trials (RCTs) movement, which offers a rigorous evaluation of development interventions. The book draws on the evidence generated from RCTs but complements them with vignettes, which offer a nuanced rethinking of how we understand poverty and subsequently design anti-poverty policy.
In a nutshell, the book illuminates the multi-faceted economic lives of the poor. What sets it apart from numerous other books on similar topics is the anthropological approach taken by the economists. The book shines in the authors’ visible efforts to engage closely with the poor and understand how they make decisions and adopt certain coping strategies as narrated through anecdotes in the text. They highlight the inherent contradictions in the choices the poor make while steering clear of romanticizing them. Poor Economics is an excellent resource not only for development economists or students of applied development economics but also anthropologists. Duflo and Banerjee summarize their approach as:
If we resist the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choices; if we accept the possibility of error and subject every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox of effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do. Armed with this patient understanding, we can identify the poverty traps where they really are and know which tools we need to give the poor to help them get out of them. (Page 272)
From the outset, the authors recognize that poverty alleviation is complex and believe that there is little merit in posing generalized questions such as does aid work and consequently coming up with universal responses. Their focus is very much on applied microeconomics research and seeking to explore puzzles such as why don’t more families start new businesses when they do have access to capital at affordable rates, why having fewer children does not translate into healthier or better educated children and why the poor don’t prioritize life-saving immunizations but pay for medicines they don’t need?
The book is divided into two parts. The first part titled “private life”, is split into separate chapters and explores the relation of poverty with food, health, education and family size. The second part focuses on institutions such as banking, entrepreneurship and corruption.
In the ultimate chapter of the book titled, In Place of a Sweeping Conclusion, the authors argue that while we are incapable of predicting where growth will happen, and although we have no magic bullets to eradicate poverty, we do know a number of things about how to improve the lives of the poor through particular policy interventions (Page 268). They outline 5 key lessons that emerge as a result of their empirical work and analysis. One of them is that poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor or because they have historical misfortune. While it is true that policies often don’t work in these countries, many of these failures have less to do with a conspiracy of the elites to maintain their hold of the economy and more to do with a rectifiable flaw in the detailed design of policies and due to the 3 Is – ignorance, ideology and inertia. Duflo and Banerjee, rather contentiously, argue that with the right expression it is possible to change governance and policy without changing the existing social and political structures. They give examples of marginal actions in “bad” institutional environments such as monitoring government workers and politicians and holding them accountable for failures.
One critique of Poor Economics could be that it is dismissive of the role of politics as being vital to sound policymaking. Tim Besley points out that while Duflo and Banerjee do touch upon political economy, this appears only towards the end, largely as an afterthought and even when treating broader political questions, their approach is focused on the micro level. Personally, I don’t see this as a shortcoming of the book. In the penultimate chapter, Policies, Politics, Duflo and Banerjee challenge the institutionalist view in development economics that is more concerned with macroeconomic policies and holds the belief that if the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. They assert that there is no reason to believe that politics always trump policies as exemplified by the example of absenteeism amongst health workers in Udaipur, India where a new policy to tighten the rules for nurse attendance was instituted. Initially, nurse attendance increased but within months the tide turned mainly due to supervisors looking the other way and not adhering to the monitoring responsibilities and nurses taking advantage of a system they knew was doomed to fail. As this examples illustrates, policy failure often happens not due to a deep structural problem but because of lack of agility in policy design thereby reaffirming good politics are not always prerequisites for good policies.
The crux is, therefore, that marginal reforms hold more promise of success than mega plans for poverty alleviation. As the authors state optimistically towards the end:
The political constraints are real, and they make it difficult to find big solutions to big problems. But there is considerable slack to improve institutions and policy at the margin. Careful understanding of the motivations and the constraints of everyone (poor people, civil servants, taxpayers, elected politicians, and so on) can lead to policies and institutions that are better designed, and less likely to be perverted by corruption or dereliction of duty. These changes will be incremental, but they will sustain and build on themselves. They can be the start of a quiet revolution. (Page 265)
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