19.National Academy of Sciences, Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops, Washington, DC, 1972, p. 1. The best comprehensive report on reduction of seed variety, future germ-plasm resources and the danger of industrial takeover of seeds is Pat R. Mooney, Seeds of the Earth: a private or public resource?, London, International Coalition for Development Action, a special edition for the UNCSTD Conference, Vienna, 1979. Back
20.Cf. Erik Eckholm and Frank Record, The two faces of malnutrition, Worldwatch Institute Paper No. 9, Washington, DC, 1976; Hearings before the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Washington, DC, March, April and May 1973 (in four parts).
21.Nick Kotz, Hunger in America: The Federal Response, New York, The Field Foundation, 1979 (quote on p. 23). Back
22.Susan George, Feeding the Few: Corporate Control of Food, Washington, DC and Amsterdam, Institute for Policy Studies/Transnational Institute, 1979. Back
23.Andrew Pearse, 'Technology and peasant production: reflections on a global study', Development and Change, Vol. 8, 1977. All the UNRISD Studies on the Green Revolution, directed by Pearse, should be consulted on this subject. Definitive conclusions in Andrew Pearse, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want, Geneva, Clarendon Press and UNRISD, 1980. Back
24.Martin Kreisberg, 'Miracle seeds and market economies', Columbia Journal of World Business, March/April 1969. Kreisberg is now the Coordinator for International Organization Affairs of the Economic Research Service, USDA. His more recent volume, International Organizations and Agricultural Development, USDA, Foreign Agricultural Economic Report No. 131, May 19 7 7, is a compendium showing that donor agency aid goes to implementing the dominant model, e.g. 'The IBRD and IDB have put major emphasis on projects ... to purchase needed production inputs, particularly machinery', p. vii. Back
25.K. C. Abercrombie, 'Agricultural employment in Latin America', International Labour Organisation Review, July 1972; and Solon Barraclough and Jacobo Schatan, 'Technological change and agricultural development', Land Economics, University of Wisconsin, May 1973. Back
26.Garrison Wilkes, 'The world's crop plant germ plasm: an endangered resource', The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1977; and Mooney, cf. note 19. Back
27.E. Reusse, 'Economic and marketing aspects of post harvest systems in small farmer economics', FAO Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural Economics and Statistics (a two-part article), Vol. 25, Nos. 9 and 10, September and October 1976. Back
28.Multinational corporations in Brazil and Mexico: structural sources of economic and non-economic power, Report to the Sub-Committee on Multinational Corporations of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (usually referred to as 'the Church Report' from the name of the Committee Chairman), Washington, DC, August 1975, Appendix A, Table 7. Back
29.See Susan George, 'Nestle Alimentana, SA: The Limits to Public Relations', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XHI, No. 37, Bombay, 16 September 1978. Back
30.Details in Charles Medawar, Insult or Injury? 'An enquiry into the marketing and advertising of British food and drug products in the Third World', London, Social Audit, 1979. Back
31.Robert Ledogar, Hungry for Profits: US food and drug multinationals in Latin America, New York, IDOC, 1976, sp. Ch. 6; and Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Annual Reports, 1973 to 1978. Back
32.Taken directly or calculated from data in USDA, US Foreign Agricultural Trade Statistical Report, Calendar Year 1977, Washington, DC, June 1978. Back
33.See Maureen McKintosh, 'Fruit and Vegetables as an International Commodity', Food Policy, November 1977. Back
34.Cf. Susan George, Feeding the Few, op. cit., Part I, and 'Le Tiers- Monde face a ses riches clients', Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1979. Back
35.USDA, Agricultural Outlook, March 1979, p. 4. Wheat prices in relevant issues of Business Week. Back
36.'Untying aid proves to be a slow process', Ceres-FAO Magazine, No. 69, May/June 1979, pp. 4-5 and graph. Back
37.See Annual Reports, P.L. 480 (US Food for Peace law); and OECD, Development Cooperation, Annual Report of the DAC Chairman, 1975, pp. 94-5. This concerns the second and third European Development Fund Commitments. In subsequent DAC reports, the contributions to industrial versus food crops are not broken down, so the situation may have changed since 1975. Back
38.Further details on the Industry Cooperative Programme in Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, Montclair, NJ, Allanheld, Osmun, 1977, and Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, Ch. 9. Back
39.Robert Hirsch, with Boubacar Bah, Some thoughts on the situation regarding food supplies in the Sahel countries and on the prospects on the horizon for the year 2000, CILSS, and the Club du Sahel, the Nouakchott Colloquy, July 1979, mimeograph. See pp. 20-2, 33, 38. Back
40.Effects of US food aid in Susan George's How the Other Half Dies, op. cit., Ch. 8. A case study on how the cancellation of food aid immediately improved the nutritional situation in one country in Thomas Marchione, 'Food and nutrition in self-reliant national development: the impact on child nutrition of Jamaican government policy', Medical Anthropology, Vol. i, No. i, Winter 1977. See also Paul Isenman and Hans Singer, 'Food Aid, Disincentive Effects and Their Policy Implications', Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 25, No. 2, January 1977. Back
41.'A case for community based oil extraction units in small-farmer oil palm rehabilitation schemes versus the large-scale central milling approach in Nigeria', in Proceedings of West African Seminar on Agricultural Planning, Zaria, 1974, Ife, Nigerian Institute of Public Administration. The quote is in E. Reusse, op. cit.. Part 2, note 27, and the study is apparently also by Reusse, of FAO, since no other author is cited. Back
42.World Bank, Annual Reports, 1975, p. 55. and 1978, p. 77. Back
43.e.g., the kind of work being done by UNRISD in the project Pood Systems and Society could lay the ground for much better- defined development projects, but this kind of research cannot be done in the short 'kamikaze' expeditions favoured by most lending agencies. Back
44.For examples, see Khadija Haq, ed., Equality of Opportunity Within and Among Nations, Part IV, 'Women and Equality of Opportunity', New York and London, Praeger Special Studies, 1977. Back
45.SAREC (Swedish Agency for Research Co-operation with Developing Countries), Bo. Bengtsson, ed., Rural Development Research: the role of power relations, Sarec Report R4/1979, p. 38; and Adolfo Mascarenhas, Director of the Bureau of Resources and Land-use Planning (BRALUP), Tanzania, personal communication. Back
46.Michel Cepede, 'Acculturation "Aristophanique" des communautes rurales et groupes "Hesiodiques" dans les societes industralisees', paper presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala, 1978, P- 3- Back
47.World Bank, Land Reform, Rural Development Series, Table 2.2. Back
48.Prof. Dr Kurt Egger (and team), Agro-Technological Alternatives for Agriculture in the Usambara Mountains, Botanisches Institut der Universitat-Heidelberg, December 1976, mimeograph, p. 22. Back
49.Ibid., p. 5. Back
50.E. F. I. Baker and Y. Yusuf, 'Mixed cropping research at the Institute for Agricultural Research, Samara, Nigeria', in Intercroppping in Semi-Arid Areas, Report on a Symposium, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, 1976, p. 17 (emphasis added). Back
51.Mahbub ul Haq, 'Toward a Just Society', International Development Review, Society for International Development, 1976, No. 4, p. 4. Back
52.Jere R. Behrman, International Commodity Agreements: an evaluation of the UNCTAD Integrated Commodity Programme, Overseas Development Council Monograph No. 9, Washington, DC, 1977. Back
3 FOOD, FAMINE AND SERVICE DELIVERY IN TIMES OF EMERGENCY
1.Robert T. Snow, 'The Impact of Famine Relief: Unasked Questions in Africa', in Brace Currey and Graeme Hugo, eds., Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, Dordrecht, Holland, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984, p. 158. Back
2.United Nations Research Institute for Social Development: Famine Risk and Famine Prevention in the Modern World, UNRISD/76/C.19, Geneva, June 1
976, p. 2. Back
3.Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981. Back
4.Bruce Currey, 'Coping with Complexity in Food Crisis Management', in Currey and Hugo, eds Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, op. cit., Table 1 on the sequence of information gathering, in the Bengal Famine Code, 1913, pp. 194-5. Back
5.Id., pp. 187-8. Back
6.Robert Chambers, Richard Longhurst, Arnold Pacey, eds, Seasonal Dimensions to Rural Poverty, Totowa, NJ, Allanheld & Osmun, 1981. Back
7.R. Dirks, 'Social responses during severe food shortages and famine', Current Anthropology XXI: 1 (1980), pp. 21-4. Back
8.e.g. Tony Jackson with Deborah Eade, Against the grain, Oxfam, Oxford, 1982. Back
4 FOOD STRATEGIES FOR TOMORROW
1. Although 'Third World' is no longer a very useful concept, I still prefer this shorthand expression to the euphemisms of 'developing' or 'less-developed' countries. 'Dominated' countries would probably be the most accurate term. Back
2.The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) places levies on agricultural imports to European Community (EC) countries to raise their prices to those of EC-produced commodities. Back
3.F. F. Clairmonte and J. H. Cavanagh, 'Transnational Corporations and Services: The Final Frontier', Trade and Development: An UNCTAD Review, No. 5,1984, Table 9; figures for 1982. Back
4.This was written before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Back
5.For example, 186 people were killed during the 1984 food riots in the Dominican Republic, and long prison sentences have been meted out to captured food rioters in Morocco. Other riots have occurred in Latin America and North Africa. One could add that the present perilous situation in Central America results basically from people rising up against an intolerable situation of hunger, land deprivation, displacement of the peasantry to make room for cash crops, miserable plantation wages and the like, all maintained by local oligarchies under the protection of the United States. Nicaragua, previously the worst-fed country in the region, has redistributed control over food and food-producing resources and is consequently under serious pressure. Nicaragua represents what an Oxfam publication calls 'the threat of a good example' (Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example?, Oxfam, Oxford,1985). Back
6.USDA, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE-180), 10 April 1985, Table 1; estimate includes wheat, coarse grains and milled rice. Back
7.FAO, World Food Report 1984, p. 13. Back
8.The Group of 77 denotes the caucus of all Third World nations in the United Nations. Originally the term applied to the 77 developing countries which formed a coalition at the United Nations Conference of Trade and Development in 1964. Back
9.The Lome Convention is a trade and development agreement between the EC and African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) countries. The main points of the agreement are duty-free access on a non- reciprocal basis to all industrial imports and 96 per cent of agricultural imports to EC countries from ACP countries, stabilization of export receipts for ACP countries, increased development aid for ACP countries, increased industrial cooperation between EC and ACP members and the creation of an institutional framework for the operation of the agreement. The agreement, first signed in 1975, was modified and extended by Lome II and Lome HI. Back
10.The papers from these two sessions are C. Stevens, 'The Importance of Food Aid in Development Programmes: Evaluation and Prospects', and H. Schneider, 'Food Aid Issues from the Recipient Countries' Perspective' (C. Cosgrove and J. Jamar, eds, op. cit., pp. 83-121). Back
11.Franfois Guillaume, French Minister of Agriculture in 1987 and president of the Federation Nationale des Syndicats d'Exploitants Agricoles from 1979 to 1986, interview with the Agence France Presse, 31 August 1983, cited in SOLAGRAL, L'Aide alimentaire, Syros, Paris, 1984, p. 79. This short book is an excellent introduction to food aid. Back
12.Giles Merritt, 'Farm War: The Heavies Won't Suffer Alone', International Herald Tribune, 18 June 1985. Back
13.Cf. EEC Court of Auditors, Special Report on Food Aid, Brussels, 30 October, 1980; also Africa Bureau, Cologne, and Institute for Development Studies, Sussex, An Evaluation of the EEC Food Aid Programme, Cologne and Brighton, June 1982. In 1980 the European Parliament asked the Commission for a proposal on reforming food aid. This was eventually supplied (in April 1983) under the title Food Aid for Development. This document is one of the bases of the ongoing debate, part of which has also been carried out in Food Policy (special issue on food aid), Vol. 8, No. 3, August 1983, various authors. Back
14.SOLAGRAL, op. cit., p. 62. Back
15.'EEC Arthritis', The Economist Development Report, March 1985. Back
16.SOLAGRAL, op. cit., p. 66. Back
17.See Pascal Erard and Frederic Mounier, Les Marches de lafaim, La Decouverte, 1984, esp. pp. 128-9. Back
18.Some disasters, because food may be the last thing needed in others. See Tony Jackson with Deborah Eade (Against the Grain, Oxfam, Oxford, 1983) who explain how Guatemalan peasants were undercut by food aid shipments after the 1976 earthquake, which had not touched the local harvests. Back
19.Susan George, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, Ch. 8, and for greater detail on PL 480 counterpart fund use, Susan George, Les Strateges de la faim, Grounauer, Geneva, 1981, Ch. 6. Back
20.SOLAGRAL, a French research organization, has produced a guide Qean-Marc Beche, 'fitude sur l'utilisation des fonds de contrepartie', 1986), at the request of the French Ministry of Cooperation and Development, on the use of counterpart funds for development. This guide could doubtless serve the needs of other European countries and the EEC as a whole. The guide (in mimeographed form) is available through SOLAGRAL, 185 rue de Charonne, 7501 x Paris. Back
21.Tony Jackson, op. cit., note 18. Back
22.Odette Mengin, writing in Faim et Developpement, May 1983, cited in £rard and Mounier, op. cit., p. 109. Back
23.Piet Terhal and Martin Doornbos, 'Operation Flood: Development and Commercialisation', Food Policy, Vol. 8, No. 3, August 1983. A colleague has also been kind enough to communicate two (unsigned) confidential notes on Operation Flood emanating from the EEC secretariat; these reach similar conclusions. Back
24.OECD, Development Cooperation 1983, taken directiy or calculated from Table C-2. Back
25.Europe Information Developpement, Les Strategies alimentaires: Nouvelle forme de cooperation entre I'Europe et les pays du Tiers Monde, EEC, DE-40, December 1982. Back
26.An exceptionally good source on the issues raised (or not raised) by the Lome Convention will be found in the series of Lome Briefings, 22 issues from 1983 to 1985, prepared by various authors for the Liaison Committee of Development NGOs to the European Communities, rue de Laeken 76, 1000 Brussels. Anyone seriously interested in pursuing the question of European development strategies and Third World policy should have a complete set. Back
27.The Stabex (export receipts stabilization) system provides currency transfers to countries heavily dependent on single commodities for export earnings in years when export receipts drop significantly due to poor harvests or low world prices. Back
28.The administrative bodies of the EC are the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers and the Executive Commission. The Commission, which has the task of implementing treaties, operates through Directorates General (DGs). DG Vm is the Development Directorate. Back
29.The Ecumenical Report Joint Task Force has useful things to say in 'The Pisani Memorandum on the EC Development Policy: Assessment and Recommendation by the Churches' Joint Task Force on Development Issues', JTF/1983/25E, available from the Joint Task Force Secretariat, 23 avenue d'Auderghem, B-1040 Brussels. Back
30.Cf. Laurence Tubiana (INRA, Montpellier) and her paper, 'Les Pays du Sud de la Mediterranee et l'Europe des 12', for the Journees d'Etudes, Strategies alimentaires (12 avenue de la Soeur Rosalie, 75013 Paris), 10-12 June 1
985. Mimeo. Back
31.By 1986, the net transfers to the rich countries made by Latin America alone amounted to $106 billion. Back
32.Tony Hill, 'Lome II Is Dead, Long Live Lome HI', Lome Briefing, No. 22,1985.
33.'Value for Money', The Economist Development Report, April 1984.
34.Quoted in Tony Hill, op. cit., note 32.
35.Brian O'Neill, 'Small Is Beautiful: Micro-projects in the New Convention', Lom6Briefing, No. 21,1985.
36.Ibid. Back
37.Cf. Jean-Marie Fardeau, 'Encourager l'initiative paysanne', in La Lettre de SOLAGRAL, July-August 1984. Back
38.I have dealt in detail with the question of food systems (and the penetration of Third World food systems by Western ones) in Les Strateges de la faim, note 19, and in a shorter and more readable version in Feeding the Few: Corporate Control of Food, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, 1978, as well as several papers collected here.
39.Robert Chambers, 'Putting "Last" Thinking First: A Professional Revolution', in Third World Affairs 1985, Third World Foundation for Social and Economic Studies, London, 1985, p. 85. Back
40.Various methods for 'reading' the signs of impending famine Eire suggested by several authors included in the volume Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo, eds, Dordrecht, Holland, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1984. Back
41.If EEC people can read only one book this year, it should be this book (New York, Longman, 1983), in which they will find much wisdom.
42.The Physician Task Force on Hunger in America (whose chairman is Dr J. Larry Brown of the Harvard School of Public Health) reported in 1985 that: 'Hunger in America is a national health epidemic ... We believe that today hunger and malnutrition are serious problems in every region of the nation. We have, in fact, returned from no city and no State where we did not find extensive hunger... It returned, we believe, because the programs which virtually ended hunger in the last decade have been weakened' (Hunger in America: The Growing Epidemic, Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press,
1985). Back
6 BIOBUSINESS: LIFE FOR SALE
1.David Pramer, Ph.D., Director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University, 'Ensuring quality Education in Biotechnology', BIO/TECHNOLOGY, Vol. I, No. 2, New York, April 1983. Back