New Approaches to solve Food Crisis

Scoopit!

The Wall Street Journal has this interesting article on changes in attitude towards farming in the developing world, especially by the World Bank and IMF, who are acknowledging past errors of judgement.

It discusses the change concerning whether farmers should grow for food or export.

The article is a useful one and comes at the issue in a manner somewhat different from that which one might expect from the Wall Street Journal.

PONT-SONDÉ, Haiti — Leonid Eustache coaxes a small rice crop out of his tiny plot here, but he could use some help from his government. He can’t afford fertilizer. His only tool is a hoe. And half of his crop rots because nearby drainage canals are filled with water hyacinth.

“The water stays, and it rots the roots of my plants,” the 62-year-old farmer said on a recent day, standing barefoot in a pool of stagnant water. “They should do something about that.”

For the first time in a long while, someone just might. Haiti is one of many developing nations where a global food crisis is causing both donors and recipients of anti-poverty aid to rethink doctrines about the role of agriculture — and whether poor nations should grow their own food or rely on the world’s trading system.

For decades, poor nations were discouraged from investing too much in agriculture, which was seen as a problem rather than a solution to fighting poverty. Many free-market economists came to believe that the reason billions of people are poor is because they are shackled to subsistence farming. The economists’ solution: find something else for them in manufacturing, tourism or services so that they can make money to buy food instead of growing it.

Poor countries were discouraged from growing much of their own staples, such as rice and wheat, that are usually grown more cheaply in rich countries. Instead, they were told to focus on export crops that might fetch a higher price.

This link is to a related video on whether to drink water of use water for crops.

Later the article comments:-

A growing number of World Bank economists are now convinced most poor nations need a healthy farm sector as the basis of a robust economy. The manufacturing booms that swept Asia only happened after the region’s farm sectors developed. And new research shows that investing in agriculture lifts more people out of poverty much faster than long thought. The 2007 study “Down to Earth” by World Bank economists Luc Christiaensen and Lionel Demery found economic growth of the agriculture sector is at least twice as effective at reducing poverty as any other sector.

later the article considers what the impact of past policies has been:

Since the early 1980s, the World Bank and IMF preached that higher yields from rich countries’ farmers would keep food cheap, eliminating the need for poor countries to spend their meager dollars on boosting agricultural productivity. This held true for years. Most poor countries could usually import staples more cheaply than grow their own, and could focus resources elsewhere.

That advice failed to take into account the possibility that food grown by wealthy farmers might not stay cheap forever. Even though agricultural productivity is still climbing, rising demand for food in Asia, greater use of grains for cattle, and the diversion of crops for biofuels have all helped increase prices quickly.

Now that countries want to revive their agriculture sectors, it’s not going to be easy, given the neglect of the past few decades.

Consider what has happened in Africa. In the 1980s, governments were prodded by the World Bank to get spending under control. Many set about whacking agriculture programs. Irrigation projects dried up. Schools that trained scientists and agronomists fell into disrepair. At an agriculture school in Mozambique, students who are supposed to study mechanized farming rely on broken-down tractors and combines that sit like museum pieces on the school’s lawn. In Ghana, some agents for the government’s agricultural extension service, who are supposed to spread the latest scientific advice to farmers, often must hitch rides or walk to make their rounds.

The situation in Haiti provides an illustration of what happened, according to the article:-

U.S. rice, which Haitians call “Miami” rice, slowly displaced local rice. In the Artibonite, large-scale farming was nearly wiped out by a combination of imports and a land reform. By 2003, the Artibonite was producing less than 80,000 metric tons of rice. Haiti is now the world’s biggest per-capita importer of rice — it imported about 400,000 metric tons last year — and the number four market for U.S. rice growers, buying $112 million worth of rice last year, according to the USA Rice Federation.

“In the case of Haiti, the lowering of tariffs without support for farmers to transition into more-profitable crops was a negative blow to the agriculture sector,” said Diego Arias, a rice specialist who worked in Haiti for the Inter-American Development Bank and is now with the World Bank.

Outside advisers, he says, often failed to see that, to a Haitian farmer, rice is preferred as a low-risk crop — easy to store, and easy to eat in times of low prices. Tomatoes, which experts urged Haitians to cultivate, “could have offered a better return,” Mr. Arias concedes. “But tomatoes also are more risky. In Haiti, they spoil on the way to market, the roads are so bad

This article is worth taking a look at, it provides a counter balance to some of the other material that is available.

Adam is of the view that there is no simplistic answer, nor will one solution fit all circumstances. For example Haiti has been ravaged by war for much of the period as well, further the article suggests that land reform and a reduction in large scale farming was a significant contributor to the problem.

Interestingly, the article would tend to support the view that subsidies to rich world farmers to produce staple crops such as rice are not in the long run helpful. Further, higher value crops might have benefited Haiti, but lack of infrastructure mitigated against that. Thus another key factor identified elsewhere is apparent here – farmers cannot move up the value train without investment in infrastructure and support in initial capitalisation.

Scoopit!