Another aspect of Third World food situations which has received far too little attention is the quite obvious fact that agriculture is a 'seasonal' activity. On the whole, we Westerners have forgotten how great an impact seasons have on rural people's lives. Here again, agency staff and managers should learn to map events on a monthly basis - and, in time of impending crisis, even a weekly one. Certain times of the year are particularly hard on poor people - especially the lean season just before the harvest or the rainy season. These two may coincide. Food prices always tend to rise as the agricultural year wears on, while employment may be available to some labourers only at sowing and harvest time. Even pregnancies and births may be lumped together at the worst possible time of the year when there is the least food or the most work for women. This may happen for the simple reason that conceptions occur most frequently after harvest when people are happier and better fed.6
Let me suggest a basic training exercise for agency people of my own concoction. I can see a set of overlapping, transparent seasonal calendars - one for each of the important activities in a given rural community. Naturally, we need a production calendar that charts sowing, weeding, harvesting and the like, because this will tell us both when the most physical work is required and about times of greater and lesser food availability. It would be better to have one calendar apiece for women and for men, because stresses on each sex may come at different times of the year - or be unfairly shouldered by women throughout the year, as so often happens in Africa.
Then we will need a financial calendar for income and outlays. When can people expect to sell harvests for cash or to earn wages, and when must they pay taxes? What other activities may bring in cash (like beer-brewing for the women, or artisanal work, or seasonal outmigration for the men)?
Do school fees and expenses come due just when people have the least money, and could this be one reason so many children are left out? Do other essential commodities besides food fluctuate with the market - like kerosene or soap? What about contracting and repayment of debts - these too will very likely show peaks and valleys.
A third calendar for health will reveal the worst periods of illness and mortality, as well as concentrations of births and weanings. Often women must wean babies abruptly because their work schedule demands it. Superimposing the health and production calendars should tell agencies at a glance when extra nutritional and health services would be most needed.
These are some of the ways we can learn to interpret danger signals, but they do not tell us much about how individuals and communities actually experience a food disaster. An anthropologist who made an extensive survey of the literature on famine world wide looked for the responses of individuals and societies and found a consistent three-stage pattern emerging.
First comes the alarm reaction. People redouble their efforts to seek food and outside employment and/or relief. At this stage, social cooperation and sharing of resources generally prevail.
Second, if people have found neither food, employment nor relief, they enter the stage of resistance. Except for the efforts needed to find food or other necessities, people conserve their energy. Families stick together but withdraw from the com-munity, and social ties start to weaken. Sharing and cooperation cease.
Thirdly, and finally, if no food arrives, individuals reach the stage of exhaustion. At this stage, society becomes completely atomized as even family ties break down and individuals make desperate attempts to survive. Total social chaos ensues.7
Naturally, any agency would rather intervene during stage one when cooperation, sharing behaviour and social dynamism can only enhance its efforts. However, as we all know and deplore, it is very difficult to alert public opinion and donor governments to the gathering danger until stage two - or, worse still, stage three - has overtaken the hapless victims.
Stages two and especially three are those of camps - which I've heard more than one relief worker describe as cancers. Like famine, cancer builds up slowly, but when it has metastasized the doctor may have to make some very quick decisions if the patient is to be saved. Real stage-three famine situations require equally speedy decision-making, for which many agencies are simply not equipped.
Last month, a young relief worker just back from Sudan told me how 5,000 Ethiopians were arriving daily at his camp. This means, he said, the time scale for decisions has to be hours, not days or weeks. You may need to buy or lease motor tankers, or get pumps or other equipment urgently. The UN system is structured to demand three tenders for every purchase, and the contracts all have to go back to Geneva. He spoke of the people on the terrain as very good, completely dedicated and totally frustrated by the administrative procedures they're expected to follow.
We concluded that if agencies are supposed to be dealing with emergencies, they have to be structured to do so. I can only hope that telling this story is superfluous, and that it is not applicable to anyone present. In any case, the best advice an outsider can give to an agency is that it hire the best people possible, then give them substantial autonomy and the financial means to sustain it. Better they should have orders to be flexible rather than work to rule.
Let me conclude this outline with some remarks about politics. I'm aware that the very word politics is anathema to many voluntary agencies. It seems to me, however, that there is no avoiding the subject, in the broadest sense, because all action ultimately has a political impact. Agencies and their people are actors in history, whether they like it or not.
There is currently a huge controversy about what is called, unkindly I think, the band-aid approach versus the long-term development assistance approach. Those who are providing emergency relief in the camps of Ethiopia or the Sudan today would probably think it black humour even to speak of long-term development just now. It is still scandalous that the United States government specifically refuses in certain cases to provide development assistance and limits itself to emergency relief. If this attitude were universally shared, agencies would become nothing but cadres of firemen racing to put out one blaze after another.
There are, of course, less extreme cases. In stage one or stage two food shortages, many agencies try to contribute to development assistance through food-for-work projects. These have lately come under heavy fire.8 The point the critics are making is a valid one and it is a political point. Who, they ask, are going to be the real beneficiaries of food for work? Only too often, work accomplished by the poorest and most vulnerable adds to the assets of those who are already the wealthiest and most powerful in the society. Since these additional assets will increase the repressive capacity of the local elite, food-for-work projects may, in some cases, actually be asking the poor to contribute to their own future oppression!
At the very least, agencies must ask serious questions about the impact of their projects on local hierarchies and they must try to weigh this in the balance against the local social and political structures that set the stage for disaster in the first place. The more inequitable the society, the more likely are disaster situations, including famine. More.and more private voluntary organizations (PVOs) recognize now that their role is to help the most vulnerable to gain more control over the circumstances of their own lives, and that this may mean acting consciously against the interests of the elites, whatever the pressure.
This leads to the delicate, even terrible, moral questions agencies must so often face when they choose to work with certain governments. How relieved I am that I need not personally come to grips with this issue! I honestly do not know if saving some lives can morally justify working with a government whose avowed aim is to use famine as one instrument that will contribute to subduing seditious provinces. All I know is that no man - and no agency - is an island. We cannot be neutral. We must bear witness.
This means that agencies must choose to inform their own constituencies in the developed countries on the real issues. More development education today in the rich countries would lead to a more effective approach tomo
rrow. Agency people could stop being firemen and become masons, carpenters and architects. Public opinion would begin to understand that to erase the images of starving children from our television screens for ever, longer-term work is needed. People would further understand that this work will require changes - political changes - in both the North and the South. I hereby make a proposal for a levy of at least 10 per cent on agency budgets for development education at home, even and especially when their principal mission is to alleviate suffering abroad. Emergency aid is by definition aid that arrives too late.
One final note of caution. I really must share my fears with you. Have you noticed how popular you've become lately? Haven't you been flattered to be courted by so many rich, handsome and, let's face it, unlikely suitors? Today, everybody loves the NGOs. The monster agencies like the World Bank, the tentacular inter-governmental organizations like the OECD have set up their own special units to liaise with the private agencies; the most reactionary governments cajole and coax them to cooperate. There are probably two major motives for this behaviour, one only slightly more cynical than the other.
The first is that the large, wealthy official agencies know they've failed. They've had over thirty years to promote something called development and they've totally blown it. This is not the time or place to discuss the reasons, only to note the fact. Consequently they are casting about for solutions, and they think the NGOs may have some of the answers. Hence their interest. Beware the agency that has so much money that you - and the people you want to help - could easily drown in it.
The other motive, this one mainly of governments, is avarice. Certain governments, which shall be nameless, have an obvious desire to worm their way out of commitments to public, intergovernmental agencies while displaying an uncanny interest in private ones. Their ultimate aim is doubtless to spend infinitely less on overseas aid than they did before, but to get enormous public credit by giving whatever tiny sums remain to the NGOs.
I call upon the agencies here present to turn a flinty eye and a deaf ear to these blandishments. I implore you to guard your independence as you would the proverbial crown jewels and the honour of your family escutcheon. Just remember, if somebody still dislikes you, you must be doing something right.
In conclusion, I would like to put forward two general principles and two personal prejudices:
• First general principle: No progress is possible without concentration on, and cooperation with, small farmers. Food security and anti-famine strategies must be based on them.
To Implement Such a Strategy
1. The North must stop trying to modernize other people's farming systems: modernization along Western lines leads to land concentration, loss of employment, outmigration to cities, and other harmful consequences. The purpose of any agricultural strategy should be to keep people in the rural areas, by improving their chances of a decent livelihood there and improving the quality of life. Real modernization would involve much more research on actual peasant practices, which are based on biological complexity.
2. The South must devote the aid it receives to these same goals. Of $7.5 billion worth of aid sent to the Sahelian countries from 1975 to 1982 (amounting to about $44 per capita per year) only 4.5 per cent was spent on improving rain-fed agriculture (and another 4.5 per cent on animal herding). Yet virtually the entire peasantry of these countries (80 + per cent of the overall population) depends on rainfed agriculture.
NB: Especially in Africa, a great proportion of food producers are women. The UN has forgotten this: according to the World Food Council, of all UN system aid going to Food and Agriculture over the past decade, only one-tenth of one per cent (.001 per cent) has gone to programmes for women.
• Second general principle: The debt crisis is undermining development efforts by official agencies and NGOs alike. We need a concerted strategy /campaign on alleviating debt which amounted to $895 billion at the beginning of 1985 and will probably reach $1 trillion by the end of this year.
In Africa (according to figures used by J. Nyerere) debt is $150 billion, which means about $15 billion in yearly interest payments alone. We have now reached a situation of overall transfer from poor countries to rich ones ($21 billion in 1983 = reimbursements minus new loans).
Possible solutions must not further deprive the poor nor provide rewards for profligate and non-representative governments. An immediate cap on interest rates is one feasible step - one expert calculated that every time the interest rate goes up a point, the land equivalent of two Nicaraguas goes under cash crops. Governments may have to bail out private commercial banks that hold 50-60 per cent of Third World debt (especially in Latin America) but this should be accompanied by transfer of ownership and decision-making power. Governments should continue to pay back interest, but in local currency and into a revolving development fund which could be managed by local development organizations, perhaps in cooperation with the UN. IMF conditionality should hit military and other non-essential budgets first, rather than eliminating poor people's meagre safety-nets.
• First personal prejudice: Tigre. Many agencies now fear that they cannot work in Tigre without incurring the displeasure of the Ethiopian government. This is not borne out by the experience of some agencies which are already working with both the Derg and the Relief Society of Tigre. Without increased NGO involvement, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of deaths in Tigre - the government seems more determined than ever to use the famine to bring the rebellious province under control.
• Second personal prejudice: Nicaragua. Here we are witnessing the strangulation of a successful experiment (as a recent OXF AM publication's title puts it, The Threat of a Good Example). The present UNDP Nicaragua Resident Representative with twenty-five years' field experience says this is the first country he has ever served in where the government was making real and heroic efforts to supply basic needs to the whole population, urban and rural. The French have a legal concept called non- assistance a personne en danger which means that those who witness a crime or who see a person in danger and do not give assistance can be prosecuted exactly like the criminal. We need a concept of non-assistance a peuples en danger. Small countries should have the right not to become a part of great power straggles; this goes for Afghanistan as well as for Nicaragua.
The recent report for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (Famine: A Man-Made Disaster?, London, Pan Books, 1985) says, 'In Africa, liberation movements have been an acceptable channel through which to pass inter-national refugee assistance, whatever the government concerned might say. Where there is major disaster, humanitarian considerations must override sovereign prerogatives. Bluntly, the UN should be prepared to trespass on State's rights when these are in conflict with the rights of disaster victims.' ICVA members could usefully make this recommendation their own, and fight for it.
4
FOOD STRATEGIES FOR TOMORROW
'Food Strategies for Tomorrow' first appeared in The European Community's Development Policy: The Strategies Ahead, edited by C. Cosgrove and J. Jamar, a collection of contributions to the College of Europe's annual symposium, held at Bruges, Belgium, 4-6 July 1985. It was subsequently reproduced in booklet form by The Hunger Project as No. 6 of The Hunger Project Papers series (December 1987) and distributed in over 20,000 copies. It is thus one of the few papers collected here to have reached a sizeable audience already. Directed, mostly, at policy makers, it is written in the sober style one assumes such people prefer.
Allow me first to set the context for my remarks: food strategies and indeed the question of the European Economic Community's development policy can be usefully discussed, in my view, only in a broader geopolitical framework. I should therefore first like to suggest why it is important for Europe to establish a different and original relationship with the Third World(s),1 of which alternative food strategies could be a cornerstone.
I. The Community's Development Policy: an Assessment
Until relatively recently, European history was full of fratricidal wars, stained by colonialism and marked by brutal class relations. But at the same time, Europe had a project (in French, 'projet', encompassing the notions of 'undertaking' and 'grand design' - not fully translatable by 'project'). She had a projet of culture, of civilization, as well as of the State: the Enlightenment was one expression of this; revolutionary and national unity struggles were another. These manifestations were accompanied by an outburst of creativity in arts and letters, science and technology.
Today Europe - like the rest of the world - is undergoing a crisis. None the less, in the 1980s a war between Western European nations is as unthinkable as one between the US and Canada. The stain of colonialism has been wiped out, however painfully, by national liberation struggles. The material and political gains of workers, farmers and women over the past hundred- odd years have made life in Europe a lot more bearable for the least well-off, however much may remain to be done. In sum, Europe is now rid of the major blights and blots on her past. But in the process, she seems to have lost her civilizational projet as well.