A debate has thus arisen on how use of counterpart funds might become subject to negotiation, to a kind of 'conditionality' and to quasi-contractual arrangements. Because European (as opposed to American) food aid did not begin on this basis, partner countries have sometimes been quick to see 'interventionist' or 'neocolonialist' designs in any suggestions for consultation. In the case of Mali, however, agreement has been reached on how counterpart funds could better contribute to development (by improving producer prices, for example). It is too early to evaluate such innovations.20
Food for Work projects should theoretically contribute to development. All too often, they contribute far more to the capacity of elites to repress the poor, as Tony Jackson's research has shown.21 Furthermore, it is often the people who need food most who are least able to work - the very young and old, the ill, pregnant and nursing mothers. Other project food aid (school lunch, mother-child health programmes and the like) may simply bypass the groups most at risk (the child fed at school may get less at home; preschoolers may get nothing).
European food donations devoted to Food for Work or other 'project' aid should be subject to the kind of critical checklist Jackson's work suggests: Who will ultimately benefit from the projects? Do they increase the material assets of the privileged minority (for example, wells or canals dug on their lands)? Do they promote social cohesion or dislocation? Are the really malnourished being reached by the programmes? Those who have found Jackson unduly abrasive ('his solution is like suggesting to someone who has a toothache that he cut off his head'22) should recognize that the best refutation would be to remove the grounds for criticism he has so ruthlessly uncovered.
Some small and highly successful experiments with triangular food aid have been carried out with the cooperation of European non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The basic idea is to purchase grain in a Third World surplus area and transfer it to a deficit area. Sales revenues are committed to a revolving fund to supply rural credit or to support other development projects (improved storage and transportation, for example). These operations have none of the drawbacks of foreign food aid: they involve locally grown products, so they do not induce new and dependency-creating food habits; they encourage peasant production; they generate cash for development purposes; and they can be managed by local NGOs.
The official aid programmes both of individual European countries (France, Belgium, Holland) and of the EEC itself now recognize the value of these triangular operations. The European Parliament and the Commission have established excellent working relations with the' European NGO collective called 'For the Right of Peoples to Feed Themselves'; the latter has proposed specific amendments that have met with varying fates. NGOs, concerned Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their supporters must continue to call for more flexible aid provisions in subsequent Community budgets.
In particular, the EEC must not penalize countries which are making a genuine effort to implement their own food strategies to increase self-sufficiency. In practice, this means that cash aid for development projects (or simply for balance of payments support) should replace the value of food aid as the latter is phased out. If the Commission continues to refuse substitution measures, then we will have to recognize that its food aid is after all only about surplus-dumping and all the rest is mere window-dressing. Furthermore, if food and financial aid are not made interchangeable - at least during a transitional period - the most improvident recipient governments will reap the greatest rewards!
One final remark on food aid: dairy aid should be eliminated as rapidly as possible (this should become easier as milk surpluses are curbed). It is not adapted to most Third World circumstances or dietary habits and skim milk powder can rarely be reconstituted hygienically. Even the EEC's showcase project Operation Flood (long criticized by Indian scholars and development experts), with the possible exception of Gujarat, is not an unqualified success. 'The often advanced suggestion that Operation Flood is making important inroads in the struggle against rural poverty does not appear to be well founded and has certainly not yet been proven. At best it does provide some extra earning opportunities to some rural poor,' say two conscientious Dutch evaluators whose conclusions have now been substantiated in several studies.23
II The Possible Strategies
Food aid represents about a third of the Community's total cooperation budget. Let us now look at more general strategies that the EEC could pursue in order to help alleviate hunger. Though far from perfect, the Community's aid package still has a number of praiseworthy characteristics. For example, it features an exceptionally high percentage of grants - 80 per cent of total disbursements - as opposed to only 33 per cent of disbursed funds in grants from other multilateral sources.24 Furthermore, European aid to the agricultural sector in the Third World has grown from just 16 per cent in the first European Development Fund (EDF) in 1958 to about 40 per cent today. The share devoted to cash crops, though still too high in an age of food crises, has fallen from 45 per cent to 30 per cent.25
The Lome HI Convention, signed at long last in December 1984 after fourteen months of negotiations, will doubtless never become the exceptional instrument for promoting development in the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACPs) that many hoped for in 1975 when its ancestor Lome I first came into being. It still contains many useful features that can be built upon, and the satisfactory renegotiation of this convention in an era of general Western retrenchment from Third World problems may be seen as an achievement in itself.26
These are encouraging trends. So is the general and widespread debate in the EEC on development issues, and particularly on food strategies, launched by the so-called Pisani Memorandum of October 1982. Though it is difficult for an outsider to determine how pertinent this memorandum remains today, several elements should certainly be retained in any future EEC development cooperation strategy. One such change evident both in Lome and in the Memorandum is that agriculture is now recognized as the priority (and high time too!).
In spite of these signs of progress, all is not well with EEC development cooperation. A major contradiction and danger of the Lome Convention, with its Stabex system,27 is that it may entrench a 'cash crop mentality' in partner countries that produce woefully inadequate quantities of basic foodstuffs. A similar contradiction in the Pisani Memorandum is the absence of any effort to relate the concerns of DG VIII - the Development Directorate28 - to those dealing with EEC internal policy. For example, heavily subsidized Community sugar production directly reduces the amount of sugar that small and highly dependent tropical countries can sell. ACP countries obviously have a far smaller range of export choices than the diversified economies of Europe.29 In a similar vein, the Community's Mediterranean policy is ill-defined, contradictory and likely to become more so with the entry of Spain and Portugal into the EEC. Over the past ten years, southern Mediterranean countries have come to count more and more on exports of fruits, vegetables, oils and the like - and they have furthermore concentrated their export strategy on Europe. Now, with the advent of Spain and Portugal (in addition to Italy, Greece and southern France), the EEC will become self-sufficient in these commodities, just as it did for cereals, sugar, or dairy products earlier in its history. The loss in revenues for several Third World Mediterranean countries will be sizeable, particularly in relation to their inability to diversify their exports rapidly. The EEC-12 have yet to recognize in concrete terms the consequences of Community enlargement on smaller, weaker nations.30
One could cite other contradictions that impede definition and implementation of workable food strategies with Third World partners. For example, European-based transnational corporations are often actively engaged in underpaying for Third World agricultural raw materials. Since countries must earn a minimum of hard currency, they will tend to produce greater amounts of cash crops - which will hog productive resources - just to keep their incomes stable. Food crops will obviously suffer. In the same way, excessive debt, o
ften accompanied by IMF 'adjustment' or 'austerity' programmes, forces countries to export, come what may and regardless of their internal food situation. Aid given with one hand is thus taken away with the other. In 1983, the net financial transfer from the poor countries to the rich (reimbursements minus new loans) amounted to $21 billion. EEC governments, along with the United States, make sure their own commercial banks are paid back; they also help to set day-to-day policy at the IMF.31
These remarks are meant to show that the definition of development policy in general and of food strategies in particular cannot be left to the DG VIII alone if it does not have the active cooperation of the other Directorates. Third World cooperation and development strategies must be seen not as some sort of appendage, but as an integral part of overall European policy - financial, commercial and agricultural.
If the EEC takes development seriously, it must make sure that DG Vin has the resources to carry out its mission. Currently, DG Vm's disbursement per official is about the highest in Europe. 'For example, DG Vm's budget is about the same as the British bilateral aid programme, yet the British programme has nearly three times more personnel.'32 While this may show commendable efficiency in the DG VIII, there are limits - particularly since Lome IE now commits this Directorate to enter into 'develop-ment dialogues' with ACP states. Even worse, the EEC reportedly employs only 'one man and a secretary to supervise the evaluation of all EEC-funded (development) projects. The evaluation unit is too small to spend its budget.'33
The EEC is not the most important donor for most of the ACP countries and, in some cases, is a very minor one. The Community accounts on average for about 10 per cent of the aid received by the ACP group in any one year. The impact of its aid must, then, necessarily be based on quality and innovative ideas, not on financial clout. The EEC has already established partnership relations with four African countries (Mali, Kenya, Zambia, Rwanda) around the idea of the food strategy. Thus it would be useful to examine some of the general conditions food strategies must observe in order to be successful.
The food crisis, particularly in Africa, has at least served to create a consensus that nothing is possible without the participation of the small peasantry. African countries, and the 65 ACP countries as a whole, cannot count on trade to solve their problems; in spite of Lome, their exports to Europe have actually declined, from 25 per cent of all Third World exports to Europe in 1975 to 18 per cent in 1982. To solve their food problem, they must become more inward-looking and not count on export crops to provide revenues to purchase food from abroad. The first principle of a food strategy is that it must increase incentives to producers while protecting the lowest-income consumers.
Lome HI finally mentions the critical role of women in food production. In 1979, the International Labour Organization (ILO) carried out a study of agricultural tasks in Africa. Of seventeen identified tasks, it found that women were responsible for fourteen. If women's special needs are not made a cornerstone of food strategies, they will fail. Placing the accent on poor peasants, and, among them, on women, will require radical changes in present African policies; the EEC should be prepared to make these easier, but also to make its aid conditional upon such changes.
In defence of this proposition, here are two items: of the $7.5 billion worth of aid mobilized by the Club du Sahel between 1975 and 1982, only 4.5 per cent was devoted to rain-fed agriculture (and a further 4.5 per cent to animal raising) on which virtually all poor Sahelian peasants depend. A report of the World Food Council on UN-system aid to food and agriculture informs us that over the past decade programmes specifically designed for women received a contemptible one-tenth of one per cent! (Doubtless even this tiny sum was spent on 'home economics' type programmes!) Clearly, without some judiciously applied pressure, all African governments cannot be presently counted on to direct the money where it is most needed.
The phrase 'policy dialogue' during the Lome negotiations became a kind of bugbear for the ACP representatives, who often saw it as a code word for neocolonialist intervention. Nevertheless, if the EEC is serious about alleviating hunger and about food strategies, it must, by its own behaviour, make this dialogue credible and prove to the recipient countries that it is in their best interests to pursue it. This will mean, among other things, long- term commitments on the part of the Community and the possibility for the recipients to draw upon budgets according to need, not according to an artificial annual schedule.
Human rights was another sensitive issue during the negotiations - prompted by a situation that arose in the course of Lome II, when the EEC was legally bound by Stabex to transfer funds to the Idi Amin Dada regime in Uganda. Some European governments proposed that Lome m allow them to cut off funds to ACP governments guilty of 'serious and continued violations of fundamental human rights'.34
The ACP countries were able to counter that EEC governments maintained relations with South Africa - the major violator of human rights on the African continent - and that this effectively disqualified them from making any judgements on ACP countries. Touche! A clause was subsequently introduced in the Convention committing the EEC and the ACP to 'work effectively for the eradication of apartheid'. Again, in the interests of its own credibility, the EEC and its member governments must implement this clause in their economic and commercial dealings. The link between human rights and eventual aid cutoffs does not figure officially in the Convention, but the EEC will be in a better position to insist upon it when it has put its own house in order.
In short, food strategies must be based on the small peasantry, especially women; be designed in cooperation with the recipient government ('policy dialogue'); and include a strong and credible human rights focus. Part of this focus will mean helping and trusting peasant communities themselves to carry out the strategies. If these are nothing but a product of national governments' planners, without the initial and continuing cooperation of those most concerned, they will become simply another example of 'top-down' development plans, which have notoriously failed. If rural development is to become 'bottom-up', then the peasants must be consulted, and they must be helped to form - or to strengthen - their own representative associations. If a recipient government cannot agree to this basic condition, which will necessarily alter the internal balance of power, then it would be better for Europe to abstain.
Although there has been some effort to make food aid a part of food strategies, as noted above, unless I am mistaken no similar effort has been undertaken to integrate EEC small-scale project funds into such strategies. Lome I allocated 'as an experiment' 20 million ECUs to small projects to be cofinanced with the host government and sometimes local financial input. The success of this initiative resulted in Lome II's allocation of a further 45 million ECUs through to the end of 1983. The European Development Fund (EDF) financed 45 per cent of total costs for the more than 4,200 projects set in motion during this period. This figure testifies to the demand for small project assistance, and Lome III reflects this reality. One innovation with regard to the first two conventions is that an ACP State need no longer make a financial contribution to a given project. This means in effect that the Community could in some cases work directly with a grassroots ACP community.35
Small projects have a proven record of success. Perhaps not all Third World problems can be solved at the local level, but we have surely not yet reached the outer limits of those that can. For this kind of participatory development to occur, however, some overhaul of EEC and ACP machinery will also be needed. One expert, a former Commission official, makes several cogent recommendations:
•'Local communities need much greater help to organize themselves and identify projects. Training and backing local animators is a good way of doing this.'
•'ACP administrations should provide more support for local initiatives. The bureaucratic processing of applications should be streamlined. Local communities who have local authority approval should be allowed to approach the EEC delegation directly.'
br /> •'EEC delegations should have access to, and local decision-making capacity for, a small annual budget for micro-projects [block grants].'
•'The Development Directorate ... should set up an inter- service "Small Projects Advisory Group."'
•'European NGOs should recognize the complementarity of their work with that of official bodies ... They should increase their efforts to provide information to and technical back-up for local communities .. .'36
These recommendations are quoted at length because they pinpoint the present obstacles, which the EEC should eliminate, to a higher level of self-reliant development. These obstacles are more organizational than substantive in nature, but their removal could have far-reaching effects in partner countries. The more local initiative, the more democracy internally; the more people are allowed to accomplish through their own efforts, the more they can achieve in the future. Each successful project builds expertise and self-confidence. Neighbouring villages see progress and seek to imitate it. Replication of small projects is infinitely easier than that of large, capital-intensive schemes which may create islands of development but few benefits for the country as a whole. European NGOs are already on the spot in the ACP countries and can help, when needed, to identify and train local groups. They could also contribute to processing of applications and to evaluation.
Unfortunately, present EEC structures do not lend themselves to this extremely effective kind of cooperation. The DG VIE unit that dealt with micro-projects has been disbanded and responsibility spread among the geographical desks, where overworked officers have little time to devote to such small undertakings relative to their total caseload. Who can blame the official who would rather process one large request than ten small ones?