It is late afternoon on Sunday, May 27.
Yesterday we flew from Jo’burg to Blantyre, Malawi. We were met at the airport by Irving Hoffman from UNC. Irving has worked in Malawi for 15 years, and is spending the summer here this year.
Malawi is a much different country than South Africa. In contrast to South Africa’s vibrant economy, skyscrapers and expressways — Malawi is one of the world’s 10 poorest countries. The roads are filled with people walking or biking, and they are often carrying huge loads, either on their heads or on the backs of the bicycles. They have sticks, sugar cane, anything that they need to move.
The average annual income in Malawi is around $170, and unemployment is a huge problem. The streets and roadsides are filled with people trying to sell something, anything to make a bit of money.
But with all the economic challenges — the Malawian people smile! Everywhere we are greeted with broad and genuine grins, and it is very welcoming. I am told that Malawi is called “The Warm Heart of Africa,” and it’s easy to see why.
Last night Irving told us about his work here, focused on sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS, Tb and malaria. About 15 years ago he and Mike Cohen published a paper that made a major contribution to the world’s understanding of how HIV is transmitted. They showed that men with active STDs are much more likely to transmit the virus that causes HIV/AIDS than men without STDs.
UNC has built a major set of research, service and teaching programs in Malawi, and now spends about $12 million per year here. Much of that is in Lilongwe, where we will go on Tuesday.
I asked Irving whether he is hopeful about the future of Malawi — and he paused and told me how committed he is to this work, and how important it is to be here in this very poor country. He then told me of the successes that the programs have had, including a reduction in the HIV prevalence rate over the past several years. Clearly though, this work takes major persistence and real heart.
This morning, I got up early and went to the 7:30am English language service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, a congregation of the Anglican Church of South Malawi. The church was filled with enthusiastic worshippers — and I was one of the two non-blacks there. The experience was really wonderful, especially the a cappella singing led by a men’s trio, using the call and response style.
Later, after brunch, we were introduced to Mick Royle, a friend of Irving’s, who is a native Malawian. He is a well-trained naturalist, and his business is guiding tours of this region. Irving described him as the real “Crocodile Dundee,” and that is very apt. We rode in his Land Rover an hour east of Blantyre, to the tea estates — vast fields of tea bushes. They are pruned to be about three feet high — and at a distance it looks like acres of finely pruned boxwood shrubs. Mick was raised in that region of Malawi, and knows it well. His father worked for the government in the agriculture department.
We went to Mt. Mulanje, and had a picnic beside a beautiful mountain stream. We ate sandwiches and fruit that we bought along the roadside on the way — pineapple, bananas and sugar cane. We took lots of pictures of the vendors, and they loved getting Polaroids of themselves!
On the way back we stopped at a roadside market where they sell wood carved items, mostly made of very fragrant cedar — we got some beautiful small boxes, carved animals and other things.
It has been a long and very pleasant introduction to this beautiful country. We have dinner tonight with colleagues from Johns Hopkins University, with whom we collaborate a great deal, and then tomorrow is to be filled with visiting a number of research, teaching and service sites.
My vision of global health is getting sharpened and made very real — especially through the insights I am getting from the very committed people who work here — Malawians and Americans. And I can see even more why global health is important, not just for UNC researchers, but for the people of North Carolina. What is learned here will be helpful in back home in NC, as we seek to advance health and medicine in North Carolina.
I have not mentioned until now that I am accompanied on this trip by our son, Will Roper, and by his friend, Jessica Epsten. They both start college this August, and this trip is a great way for them to expand their horizons, quite literally. In my upcoming notes, I’ll tell more about what they are doing. Tomorrow, for example, they are spending the day with the Street Kids Project here in Blantyre.
Bill
Sunday, 27 May 2007
Mtwara Development Corridor gets new push
Member countries of regional projects covered under the Mtwara Integrated Development Corridor (MIDC) have been asked to promptly meet all formalities legally required by donors, financial firms and legitimization processes.
The appeal to that end was made at a two-day joint workshop of stakeholders that ended in Dar es Salaam on Friday where participants concurred that a lot remained to be finalized for earmarked regional projects implementation.
Member countries of the MIDC include Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia which jointly signed an agreement on December 15th 2004 for co-ordination and implementation of the Mtwara Corridor Development projects.
The workshop participants also concurred that compliance to putting the house in order for meeting financial institutions requirements and convincing potential donors on the seriousness and project implementation timeliness had not only to be mentioned but also done lest natural and man-made sweeping changes invalidate the drive.
It was noted that even if one or two members had started implementing regional projects on their land, if the work was not based on legally signed documents to that effect by represeentatives of member countries, they not only lacked regional outlook but also may face stagnation.
Hence the need for strict compliance to meeting all legally validated modalities in the preparation and implementation of the regional projects.
The current MIDC Development strategy is based on the development of five projects which have cross-border impacts in order to anchor the envisaged business and other development and social activities in the region.
The projects include Mchuchuma and Liganga Coal and Iron, gas to industry platform at Mtwara, the Tanzania- Malawi power inter-connector, Integration of Shipping routes in Lake Nyasa, and the Ruvuma crossings.
Closing the workshop, the National Development Corporation`s Director of Project Development, Engineer A.C.Mwakibolwa, said significant progress had been made on the co-ordination and implementation of the Mtwara Development Corridor programme on aspects of preparations of projects, investment programmes and putting the institutional framework in place.
He said since an agreement was also signed on 15th December 2004 by Heads of State of Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia on the implementation of the corridor, two supplementary agreements have been entered on the implementation of the Unity Bridge between Tanzania and Mozambique and provision of the Heavy capacity Ferry between Mbamba Bay and Nkhata Bay.
These agreements have greatly facilitated securing funds for development of various projects in the MIDC. In anzania, a number of projects and investment programmes have been identified to anchor realization of the MIDC, he said.
Eng.Mwakibolwa mentioned a seven-fold task ahead as including preparation of concept papers for discussion with key stakeholders within the country and the MIDC member countries and creation of enabling environment for each project, specifically to put in place the administrative and accounting arrangement for proper coordination and implementation of the project.
Others include the preparation of project information memorandum, the terms of reference to define the scope of work and collaborating regional projects with other MIDC member states in the formation of joint implementation teams for each project and agreement on the champion institution that will implement the project on behalf of others.
He mentioned the last two as ensuring registration and endorsement by the appropriate authorities of projects in national and regional NEPAD projects as well as submitting the applications to African Partnership Unit ( APU ).
The appeal to that end was made at a two-day joint workshop of stakeholders that ended in Dar es Salaam on Friday where participants concurred that a lot remained to be finalized for earmarked regional projects implementation.
Member countries of the MIDC include Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia which jointly signed an agreement on December 15th 2004 for co-ordination and implementation of the Mtwara Corridor Development projects.
The workshop participants also concurred that compliance to putting the house in order for meeting financial institutions requirements and convincing potential donors on the seriousness and project implementation timeliness had not only to be mentioned but also done lest natural and man-made sweeping changes invalidate the drive.
It was noted that even if one or two members had started implementing regional projects on their land, if the work was not based on legally signed documents to that effect by represeentatives of member countries, they not only lacked regional outlook but also may face stagnation.
Hence the need for strict compliance to meeting all legally validated modalities in the preparation and implementation of the regional projects.
The current MIDC Development strategy is based on the development of five projects which have cross-border impacts in order to anchor the envisaged business and other development and social activities in the region.
The projects include Mchuchuma and Liganga Coal and Iron, gas to industry platform at Mtwara, the Tanzania- Malawi power inter-connector, Integration of Shipping routes in Lake Nyasa, and the Ruvuma crossings.
Closing the workshop, the National Development Corporation`s Director of Project Development, Engineer A.C.Mwakibolwa, said significant progress had been made on the co-ordination and implementation of the Mtwara Development Corridor programme on aspects of preparations of projects, investment programmes and putting the institutional framework in place.
He said since an agreement was also signed on 15th December 2004 by Heads of State of Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia on the implementation of the corridor, two supplementary agreements have been entered on the implementation of the Unity Bridge between Tanzania and Mozambique and provision of the Heavy capacity Ferry between Mbamba Bay and Nkhata Bay.
These agreements have greatly facilitated securing funds for development of various projects in the MIDC. In anzania, a number of projects and investment programmes have been identified to anchor realization of the MIDC, he said.
Eng.Mwakibolwa mentioned a seven-fold task ahead as including preparation of concept papers for discussion with key stakeholders within the country and the MIDC member countries and creation of enabling environment for each project, specifically to put in place the administrative and accounting arrangement for proper coordination and implementation of the project.
Others include the preparation of project information memorandum, the terms of reference to define the scope of work and collaborating regional projects with other MIDC member states in the formation of joint implementation teams for each project and agreement on the champion institution that will implement the project on behalf of others.
He mentioned the last two as ensuring registration and endorsement by the appropriate authorities of projects in national and regional NEPAD projects as well as submitting the applications to African Partnership Unit ( APU ).
Does food aid do more harm than good?
In 1987, I was working in Sudan for Unicef: one day in a market in Khartoum I watched sacks of food stencilled "A Gift From The American People" tumbling off the back of lorries into the arms of the traders.
They were slitting them open there and then to sell the wheat flour inside by the kilo to shoppers. "Stolen?" I asked a colleague "Probably, but does it matter? The market is a more efficient way of distributing the food than the NGOs will ever manage. Cheaper too."
I've been fascinated by the economics - and the politics - of food aid ever since.
The story in this month's Observer Food Monthly about American porridge being shipped, at vast expense, for schoolchildren in Malawi, where the same food could be bought locally at a third the price, is just one in a long list of lunacies that punctuate the 50-year history of sending the rich world's food and drink to help the hungry.
Everyone in the food aid business has a story. One from the 1985 famine in Sudan is of a ship stuck at one of the Red Sea ports laden with a quarter of a million half-litre bottles of Italian mineral water. It had been sent by an Italian charity who must have thought: those poor thirsty Sudanese, they've had a drought, they must need water.
But no money had been sent to deliver the acqua minerale (which was past its sell-by date before it left Italy), so there it stayed.
On the face of it, nothing could be simpler than the basic charitable act of giving food from those who have plenty to those who have too little. But simple it has never been.
American economist Christopher Barrett's chief concern is that American governmental food aid - which feeds 70 million people a year at a cost of up to $2 billion is slow, often ineffective and madly expensive - and it may do more harm than good in many of the countries it goes to.
US Food Aid policy, as Barrett, points out, has always had a cynical, subsidiary aim, stated in the 1954 Bill that started the programme - to "develop and expand export markets for United States agricultural commodities". Which it has indeed done.
There's an excellent Oxfam overview (pdf) of the damage food aid has done to local farmers and traders in the countries it's sent to - damage that can set in motion the wheels of the next famine.
There are wider issues though than the mere problem of the US using the developing world as a way of getting rid of its surplus maize, wheat and rice. Food aid addiction is a buzz word among some of the aid agencies - Ethiopia is the example most often used. There, like stitches left in a wound, the emergency treatment of food aid delivered in the Eighties has become key to the country's economic infrastructure.
There are developing world nutritionists who believe that food aid has no long-term effect on the feeding of the vulnerable - malnutrition rates in southern Sudan, where an entire generation has grown up on the hand-outs of the rich world, have not improved in 20 years.
The best debate comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy - a lobby group that dares ask what most won't: does food aid do more harm than good?
"Feed the world," said Bob Geldof back in 1985. The rider now should be: "Feed it in a way that helps it feed itself." The rich world has spent some $100 billion doing it wrong over the last 20 years.
The best - and funniest - illustration of that I know of is Oren Ginzburg's brilliant cartoon book, The Hungry Man. Oren, himself a former Unicef worker, tells of what happens when well-intentioned, well-funded Westerners get together in the developing world to "teach a man to fish", as the saying has it.
They start by flying a team of experts to properly assess his needs. and then they draft a report, and then they conduct a workshop, then they mainstream the gender aspect of the programme.
Just give the hungry man the money - is that the answer?
They were slitting them open there and then to sell the wheat flour inside by the kilo to shoppers. "Stolen?" I asked a colleague "Probably, but does it matter? The market is a more efficient way of distributing the food than the NGOs will ever manage. Cheaper too."
I've been fascinated by the economics - and the politics - of food aid ever since.
The story in this month's Observer Food Monthly about American porridge being shipped, at vast expense, for schoolchildren in Malawi, where the same food could be bought locally at a third the price, is just one in a long list of lunacies that punctuate the 50-year history of sending the rich world's food and drink to help the hungry.
Everyone in the food aid business has a story. One from the 1985 famine in Sudan is of a ship stuck at one of the Red Sea ports laden with a quarter of a million half-litre bottles of Italian mineral water. It had been sent by an Italian charity who must have thought: those poor thirsty Sudanese, they've had a drought, they must need water.
But no money had been sent to deliver the acqua minerale (which was past its sell-by date before it left Italy), so there it stayed.
On the face of it, nothing could be simpler than the basic charitable act of giving food from those who have plenty to those who have too little. But simple it has never been.
American economist Christopher Barrett's chief concern is that American governmental food aid - which feeds 70 million people a year at a cost of up to $2 billion is slow, often ineffective and madly expensive - and it may do more harm than good in many of the countries it goes to.
US Food Aid policy, as Barrett, points out, has always had a cynical, subsidiary aim, stated in the 1954 Bill that started the programme - to "develop and expand export markets for United States agricultural commodities". Which it has indeed done.
There's an excellent Oxfam overview (pdf) of the damage food aid has done to local farmers and traders in the countries it's sent to - damage that can set in motion the wheels of the next famine.
There are wider issues though than the mere problem of the US using the developing world as a way of getting rid of its surplus maize, wheat and rice. Food aid addiction is a buzz word among some of the aid agencies - Ethiopia is the example most often used. There, like stitches left in a wound, the emergency treatment of food aid delivered in the Eighties has become key to the country's economic infrastructure.
There are developing world nutritionists who believe that food aid has no long-term effect on the feeding of the vulnerable - malnutrition rates in southern Sudan, where an entire generation has grown up on the hand-outs of the rich world, have not improved in 20 years.
The best debate comes from the Institute for Food and Development Policy - a lobby group that dares ask what most won't: does food aid do more harm than good?
"Feed the world," said Bob Geldof back in 1985. The rider now should be: "Feed it in a way that helps it feed itself." The rich world has spent some $100 billion doing it wrong over the last 20 years.
The best - and funniest - illustration of that I know of is Oren Ginzburg's brilliant cartoon book, The Hungry Man. Oren, himself a former Unicef worker, tells of what happens when well-intentioned, well-funded Westerners get together in the developing world to "teach a man to fish", as the saying has it.
They start by flying a team of experts to properly assess his needs. and then they draft a report, and then they conduct a workshop, then they mainstream the gender aspect of the programme.
Just give the hungry man the money - is that the answer?
How America is betraying the hungry children of Africa
This little southern-African country has had a rough decade. Staggering under the effects of an Aids epidemic that affects one in five of the population in some districts, there were famines here in 2002, 2003 and one in 2005, when a third of Malawi's 13 million people ran out of food. Until this April, over 300,000 were still being fed emergency rations by the United Nations World Food Programme. Malawi deserved a good year.
But record harvests don't necessarily guarantee good times. 'We have so much maize this year - thanks be to God,' says Felicita Bailoni. 'But we have a problem over where to sell it. It's not just that the price is so low because there is so much maize, there isn't anyone to sell it to. The traders normally visit the village but they haven't come.' Felicita, 59, talks as she rubs the kernels from a cob into a basin before her. Even in the time of plentiful food she's worried. She and her husband Stephen look after her two grandchildren, whose mother died three years ago, and two other orphans.
Most households in their village, Kunthembwe, have taken in the children of those who have died from Aids - which is particularly severe here around Blantyre in southern Malawi. Felicita and her enlarged family have more than enough food for today and for the year ahead - but they need cash to pay the children's school fees, for clothes and other necessities. And maize corn is so plentiful at the moment it fetches only eight Malawian kwacha, or about 3p a kilo - if you can sell it. In 2005, the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo. The Bailonis are hoping to sell 100 50kg bags of corn ears - the cobs are lying round the back of their two-room house in a vast wooden cradle designed to keep the rats away. 'But if we wait till the price goes up, the weevils will spoil our maize,' says Felicita. 'We can only sit and worry.'
'The price is so low,' says Charles Rethman, a Malawi-based analyst of what the NGOs call 'food security', 'that we have a concern now about next year. Farmers will be put off growing maize, and they won't have the cash to buy the seeds for the next planting. So in 2008 we're looking at the possibility of another food crisis. So it's really important that we do everything we can to get the price up to a level that rewards the farmers.'
With so much cheap corn available Rethman is bemused by a US government deal, announced in April, to ship $19.5 million of American corn and soya to Malawi as food aid. 'It's a nonsense,' he says.
Everywhere I go in the little villages in the shadow of Michiru mountain I hear the same story. Plenty of maize but no market. This affects the very poorest. In one village I meet Lena Butao, a 24-year-old whose mother died last year, her father in 2003. (Aids has brought a collapse in life expectancy in Malawi to just 37 years). She looks after her three brothers and sisters, the youngest only 10. They managed to harvest 18 bags of maize from their parents' field, but it won't see them through this year. Lena needs to raise money to pay for school fees, soap, clothes and for medicine. She's in the middle of a bout of malaria; she shivers in the sunshine as she speaks to us. 'Normally I can earn about 500 kwacha (about £1.80 ) a week working in the fields for my neighbours. But at the moment the farmers don't have any money. Life is very difficult.' Lena had to leave school when her parents first became ill and she thinks now that she'll never achieve her dream of becoming a housemaid. The children ate nzima and stewed pumpkin leaves last night: they haven't eaten meat this year.
There's one good piece of news for Lena: her 10-year-old brother Joshua's primary school has become part of the school-feeding programme run by the Malawian government and various aid agencies. This is a huge undertaking that now reaches over half a million children in the country, 20 per cent of all of those in primary school. It is playing a major part in addressing the awful fact that almost half of Malawian children have had their physical or mental growth damaged by malnutrition. And the half a million mugs of porridge served them each day are a guaranteed outlet for the produce of Malawian maize and soya farmers.
The next day, I travel to the village of Kampala and the sprawling red-brick compound of the Catholic Institute primary school. Built in the 1930s by missionaries, when Malawi was the British colony of Nyasaland, the school looks as though it hasn't been touched since. Most windows are broken and the grounds strewn with rubbish - it's pretty average for a Malawian school, I'm told. In her office, deputy head Annie Nakhouhouma is totting up the attendance figures - today the school is teaching an amazing 6,334 children aged between six and 17. Its 21 classrooms can't hold them all so, despite the cold drizzle that's falling, there are crowds of children under each of the big fig trees that dot the school grounds, in front of each group a blackboard and a teacher. I peer into one shabby classroom, and count 190 small children sitting inside. There's no room for furniture, so they are packed on the floor as close as sardines. The 10-year-olds are learning English: 'Hello, mister, how are you?' they chant at me. It's deafening.
There's a stranger sight - straight out of Oliver Twist - on the rough ground behind the classroom block. Hundreds of excited children, each clutching a large mug, are circulating around a camp of vast cooking stoves - 23 of them. Women in brightly-coloured wraps stir vats of grainy yellow porridge. This is CSB - corn-soya blend - a mix of maize, meal and soya flour, vitamins and sugar widely used in emergency feeding around the world. Locally it's called likuni phala. I taste it - it's sweet and nutty, a sort of gritty Ready Brek. Clouds of steam rise in the damp air as the children gulp the porridge greedily from their mugs - for many of them it's the first meal of the day and for some it will be the only one.
CSB is a wonderful product and the teachers are delighted. 'Look at the children - they are now so energetic. They don't fall asleep in class. They don't fight over each other's food, like they used to. They're fatter!' says Gertrude Sonani, who teaches 13-year-olds. But the effect goes further than just feeding the kids up. Children come to the school because of the meal - class numbers are up by about 7 per cent in every age group since the feeding programme began in January.
In a country where only 70 per cent of the children attend primary school, that's an achievement. At another nearby primary, where an Oxfam partner supplies milk to mix into the free porridge, the head teacher, Annie Jana, told me that she now had 800 eight-year-olds, compared to 500 when the programme started a year ago. 'Absenteeism has fallen, and even children who dropped out are coming back, especially girls.' And in Malawi, getting girls into school has always been difficult - which is why half of all women are illiterate.
The logistics behind feeding 6,300 children a mug of porridge are quite something. This programme is funded by the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR), through its local organisation, Mary's Meals. They show me a school storeroom where the bags of likuni phala tower high above the piles of textbooks and papers. Each day the contents of 46 of these sacks, nearly half a tonne, are mixed with water on the stoves and heated and served by volunteers from among the school's parents. The cost of the CSB comes out at about four kwacha, about 1.5p, per child - SIR feeds 175,000 children daily in Malawi at a cost of about £5.30 per child per year. One of the volunteers, Edina Moussa, told me that now her three children actually want to go to school. 'I'm a widow,' she said, 'and often it is hard to find enough to feed them.' She works as hired labour in her neighbour's fields, earning about 75p a day. 'Before January,' she says, 'they were often too tired to come to school. But now they come every day.'
School feeding is such an obviously good idea that the aid agencies and the Malawian government have been bringing more and more schools into the programme since it began in 1999. Most of the CSB comes free from the World Food Programme (WFP), which uses donated corn and soya - some of it from the Malawian government - and more that it buys locally. At the moment 442,000 children are being fed with CSB by WFP at school, 20 per cent of all Malawi's primary-school children. Malawians are proud of the programme: two weeks ago, some 60,000 of them went on sponsored walks to help raise money for school feeding.
Impressed by all this, in April the US Government announced that it wanted to join in. It would give WFP nearly $20 million over three years to help fund an expansion of the programme so, from 2008, 650,000 Malawian children get a daily mug of porridge at school. At the same time it announced similar schemes for Kenya, Cambodia, Guinea and Pakistan - a total spend of $85.9 million. WFP applauds the deal. 'It's a massive donation and a huge boost to the government of Malawi's school-feeding programme,' the organisation's country director, Dom Scalpelli, told me.
But not everyone in the country was overjoyed. 'It's very short-sighted - it doesn't make any sense. It's going to short-circuit the effort to improve nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It's not sustainable and it won't bring about any long-term change to malnutrition rates,' said Charles Rethman, echoing many critics of the plan.
The problem is - though WFP left this detail out of their press release - that the US grant came with a condition: it had to be spent on American CSB to be bought from American farmers and put in American ships to be transported to Malawi. According to WFP, the cost of buying, transporting and packing the annual 8,000 tonnes of US CSB will be $812 a tonne. SIR, which will buy about 3,600 tonnes of Malawian CSB - likuni phala - this year, expects to pay around $320 a tonne (distribution costs add another 5 per cent). Simply, if the American money was spent in Malawi, it could feed nearly two-and-a-half times as many schoolchildren.
Malawians are peaceable and polite people - but there was anger in the voice of one aid worker involved in school feeding when we talked about this. 'This is giving aid with one hand and taking it away with another. It's the Big Man saying: kneel down before I give you the help. These people, they get the food, they are vulnerable, they clap their hands and say, "Thank you Mr Bush". They don't understand what's really going on.'
Someone who does is the World Food Programme's man in Malawi, Dom Scalpelli, an amiable Australian who has spent 17 of his 40 years working for the world's largest humanitarian aid agency. His defence of this particular policy is slick - he and his colleagues have had to make it many times. WFP needs the US: 43 per cent of all the food aid WFP provides comes from America, and 98 per cent of it is 'in kind' - American corn, soya, rice, oil and beans, shipped at considerable expense to where it's needed. America boasts that, through these programmes, it feeds 70 million people a year (it was 100 million during the 1990s). 'Listen,' says Scalpelli, 'the child doesn't care if his porridge is Malawian or American. The important thing is that more of them are going to be getting it. And American CSB is cheaper than Malawian.'
In fact the two cost about the same, but Scalpelli is being disingenuous. The price of shipping and administration - and it is US law that American companies are used for packing and shipping 75 per cent of American food aid - puts the cost of the US-sourced CSB at absurdly high levels. Only a third of the money granted for food aid actually goes on food - the rest is transport and administration. The US Congress's Government Accountability Office has criticised the system, saying that a $10-per-tonne cut in shipping rates would enable the feeding of 850,000 more people. Indeed, Malawi would have done better if the US Government had written WFP a cheque for cost of shipping and administering the grant, and not sent any American food at all.
Surely, I asked Scalpelli, it would be better if the Americans gave cash and you spent it in the Malawian market - you don't just feed the children but you also support Malawian farmers. Isn't it a nonsense, when Malawi has just brought in a record-breaking harvest?
'Yes of course we'd have taken the money and yes, we could have sourced it locally. But the reality of what we're living through is that you take advantage of any grain you can get. The CSB is not displacing the local Malawian CSB - it's going to schools and it's being eaten, it's targeted and it's not going on to the market. The local farmers will still get business from us - and we'll still buy Malawian CSB.'
'It's absurd,' counters Charles Rethman. 'You could feed twice as many children, create jobs, stimulate the maize price and help the farmers. Anything that will increase demand for farmers is a good thing: this flies in the face of the Malawian government's development strategy and its attempts to stand on its own two feet.'
The story of how American corn gets in Malawian children's porridge begins in the great-plains states like Kansas and Iowa, where, as the American food policy critic Michael Pollan puts it, there is 'a plague of cheap corn'. It's a sad tale that begins in 1973, when the Nixon administration started directly subsidising corn (maize) farmers in a way that encouraged them to produce as much as possible. That policy has meant an ever-increasing excess of American corn, which most years costs the US taxpayer some $5-$10 billion to subsidise. As Pollan says, the money, which in 2005 kept the price of corn at around half what it costs to produce, is in effect a subsidy for the big American companies that buy and process the corn - and these companies and their political supporters are the ones that dictate American farm policy. Meanwhile the unwanted corn has to go somewhere - and dumping it abroad has always been one of the answers.
Some 20 per cent of US corn is exported, and at times the proportion going as food aid has matched that. In the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, food aid reached record levels, and the US claimed to feed as many as 100 million people a year in the developing world (some 850 million are said to be chronically malnourished). In 2003 America provided 56 per cent of all the food aid in the world. But an indicator that the richest nation's motives are not entirely charitable is that, throughout those years, America's food aid volumes increased massively at times when prices in the US were depressed - up to 20 per cent of American cereals production goes abroad as food aid when the market is down, but when domestic prices are high this figure falls to just five per cent. In 1993, when global food aid reached an all-time high of 17.3 million tonnes (in 2005, the last year for which there are complete records the figure was 8.25 million tonnes), US prices of staples like corn and rice were at historic lows.
The many critics of American food aid make the point that the buying up of US farmers' surpluses is another way of subsidising them - and, most years, federal payments make up about half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer. Such unprecedented support puts up a wall against farmers from the developing world who want to sell in the markets of the rich. The European Union abandoned food aid in kind in 1999 - all but two per cent now goes as cash - and Peter Mandelson, as Europe's trade commissioner, has called for 'radical reform' from the Americans. 'Food aid for poor countries and emergency relief can be a tool to advance development and for humanitarian relief. But the US programme is designed to give support to US agricultural producers,' he said.
But this was generally seen as pretty hypocritical. Most aid-agency observers reckon the EU has used American intransigence as an excuse to put off reforms of European farm subsidies - like the notorious two euros a day each cow on the continent receives - again, a way of putting up a barrier against the farmers of Africa, South American and Asia. This produces real absurdities - it's often pointed out that the money the rich world gives in aid to poor countries, often to help improve agriculture, is worth less than what those countries could earn if Europe and America simply reformed their subsidies and opened up their markets.
'Sharing our agricultural abundance' is the smug phrase that the US agriculture secretary, Mike Johanns, uses to describe food aid. In most years the US still provides between 55 and 65 per cent of global food aid, 98 per cent of it in the form of food. The price is enormous - up to $2 billion per annum. Even the relatively modest school-feeding programme is worth $200 million this year - 330,000 tonnes of American agricultural products to 17 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Johanns is actually said to be in favour of reforming food aid, but he showed no qualms when he announced plans to flood these countries - many of them with food surpluses - with US-made porridge for school children in February this year. 'These programmes demonstrate America's continued compassion and commitment to improve the lives of people around the world,' he said.
Gawain Kripke, an American who leads Oxfam's lobbying of the US government on the issue of food aid, disagrees. 'The US's food-aid programme is meant to be charitable and helpful in nature but it's been picked apart by private interests so that the majority of the benefit goes to US commerce, rather than to people who need help. There is a debate in Washington over its reform - but the malnourished people of Africa don't have a seat at the table when US budgets are divided.'
It's a stock picture on TV-news reports of wars and disasters - sacks of food tumbling into forests of grasping hands from aid lorries. They often come labelled with a stars and stripes and the words, 'A Gift from the American People'. But the gift often has some unpalatable side effects. 'Emergency food aid in humanitarian situations is of course a good thing, but it can be a terribly blunt instrument,' says Ann Witteveen, Oxfam's food security coordinator for southern Africa. It can and does often do more harm than good. The very promise of free food can cause disaster-hit populations to leave their homes and move to refugee camps. They may become dependent on it, making it harder for them to take up their lives again when the disaster or danger has passed. Farmers leave their fields, prices fall and local traders lose their businesses. Clearly, while food aid saves lives in a disaster, it can hamper the return to normality.
It has done more insidious damage, as detailed by some aid agencies. Food aid can permanently damage the economies of nations it was sent to help. Vast tonnages of rice donated by the USA and Japan to Indonesia after the country's economic collapse in 1997 caused damage to farmers and distributors that has never been repaired: having been one of the world's largest producers, Indonesia is now a net importer of rice.
All the countries, from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, hit by the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, had good supplies of rice available at low cost - yet the US insisted on sending 30,000 tonnes of US rice and other food after the disaster. In Afghanistan it has been suggested that one of the reasons that Afghan farmers have turned to opium-poppy production is that the market for the wheat they used to farm had become too unreliable since the US-led invasion of 2001 opened the door for massive amounts of food aid.
'A lot of food aid is incredibly silly,' sighs Ann Witteveen. 'Markets in southern Africa aren't terribly efficient and it is hard to prove how food aid affects them. But what farmers and traders need is predictability and stability in the market and food aid is a major destabilising factor.'
Malawi itself has a blatant example of the damage that can be wrought by food aid. In 2002, a crisis was predicted, after a shortfall of 600,000 tonnes in the harvest. Unusually, the international community provided exactly what had been appealed for - but the sums were wrong. Malawi was flooded with cheap grain and the price of maize dropped from $250 a tonne to $100 a tonne during 2003. Malawian farmers suffered: the loss to the Malawian economy was estimated at $15m, and local production of not just maize but also of key crops like cassava and rice dropped massively. All this made it harder for Malawi to return to self-sufficiency when the crisis was over. Even last year, when Malawi had a 250,000 tonne surplus of maize, the US still shipped in over 40,000 tonnes of American food as aid.
Some of this food aid is not even for the hungry: it is passed on to favoured US-based NGOs like Save the Children (US), World Vision and Care to be 'monetised' - sold and used for cash to pay their salaries and costs. In 2004, for example, America donated 22,000 tonnes of white-wheat flour for aid agencies working in Eritrea to sell on the open market and use the funds for their operations. This year the US aid agency Care announced that it was going to phase out this system of funding by the year 2010. But in 2005, 22 per cent of all food aid was sold, not distributed, in the countries it was sent to.
From across the world, there are stories of how, once a dependency on food aid has been established and local production destroyed, the aid stops and commercial supply begins - not so different and hardly more moral than the tactics of a drug pusher. This has happened with American soya beans in the Philippines and Japanese rice in Jamaica. Subsidised dairy produce from Europe has, according to Oxfam, put milk farmers out of business in a number of Caribbean countries.
One senior international-agency official once told me he had a new idea for the business of aid delivery. 'It's called the JGTTM strategy: Just Give Them The Money'. And indeed this is becoming a popular strategy. As Dom Scalpelli says, cash handouts are often a good and efficient strategy for helping the hungry, if local markets have enough supply. 'Local and Regional Procurement' is so much talked about in the world of food aid that it has its own acronym - LRP, and it is the stated preferred option of WFP. Scalpelli is proud that his agency will this year buy some of that Malawian surplus in order to feed the hungry in neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe, hit by drought and, in Zimbabwe's case, economic meltdown.
Food aid could be on the way out. Corn prices are high in the US this year, and the futures market is very excited at the prospects of using those great grain mountains for producing ethanol - bio-diesel - and thus addressing another of the rich world's pressing problems. Europe, Canada and Australia have all been persuaded to convert some or all of their food-aid programmes to cash, rather than in kind. Among the major donors only America, Japan and China hold out.
There is mounting pressure in the US for changes in the food-aid system, driven by a damning report from the US Congress about the inefficiencies. It highlighted the $171 a tonne that US carriers charge, compared with the $100 a tonne WFP can normally get from its own contractors. It also found that US food aid frequently is contaminated or infested by insects by the time it arrives in the country that needs it.
The Bush administration's current, modest proposal is that a quarter of the food-aid budget for emergency food (which most years is more than half the total) should be spent in destination countries. This is eminently sensible - emergency food sourced in the US takes more than four months, on average, to arrive, whereas cash spent locally can deliver food within weeks. But the suggestion has twice been knocked back by Congress, driven by a powerful lobby of agribusiness and the shipping industry. The debate will gather steam over the summer as this year's US Farm Bill is debated.
But in any case, as the US department of agriculture told me, school feeding programmes will continue to be supplied with American food - enough for 437,000 children in Malawi this year. Why - with a bumper crop and Malawian corn a fifth the price of American? That's the policy, they said - 'Food aid in kind is valid and effective'.
Increasingly, it seems, the developing world may take matters into its own hands. One government official in Malawi told me that ministries there had not been informed about the latest US grant, and would be very unhappy about it. Last year Eritrea, a food-aid addict for all of the country's brief and tragic history, declared that, for the dignity of its people and in order to end 'a culture of dangerous dependency', it would accept no more food aid.
Back in Malawi, Oxfam's Mary Khozombah works in the countryside around Blantyre helping farmers secure a stable way of life and adequate income. A native of Zimbabwe, she's seen the dire ill effects brought about by ill-advised agricultural policies in Southern Africa. 'People who want to help Malawi need to support agriculture by educating farmers, improving irrigation, helping people find other forms of income. We need empowerment so our farmers can export. Ask us! We might come up with good ideas.
'Food aid,' she says forcefully, 'should be the last resort, in an emergency - and even then it should be bought locally if possible. Of course, if people say we want to give you food, we'll say yes - you can't say no. Poor nations like us too often just accept the charity without looking properly at the effects. But in the long term it really kills our people.'
Just say no how Eritrea refused food aid
In May 2006, at the height of the drought in the Horn and East of Africa, Eritrea declared it wanted no more foreign food aid. The government had already halted the distribution of free food to all but a few thousand people and removed the operating licences of three international aid agencies involved in food handouts. It had locked the warehouses containing 100,000 tonnes of United Nations World Food Programme stocks. No longer, said the government in a lengthy statement posted on its official website, would the people of Eritrea be able to see free food 'as a permanent factor in their life and even as a "right or natural entitlement".'
It was a move that shocked observers. At the end of last year, the UN had predicted that the drought would mean two-thirds of Eritrea's 3.6 million people would need food aid during 2006; 1.3 million people were receiving supplementary food aid in late 2005. But the government of Isaias Afewerki, the charismatic former guerrilla leader who led Eritrea's independence battle with Ethiopia, was adamant. If countries wanted to give aid, then cash would be acceptable. This would be used to pay the poor for work, which would enable them to buy food.
Much of Eritrea has been fed by outsiders for all of the 13 years of the country's existence. Years of free food aid, according to the government, had begun 'to foster a culture of dangerous dependency' in the country. It had 'nurtured lethargy, debilitating idleness and unemployment' and eroded the 'industriousness and hard work ethics of communities'.
Reaction to the Eritrean move was surprisingly muted. A senior UN official flew to Asmara to ask what was happening to the food in the warehouses, and found that the government was considering selling it, and using the cash to pay people who would have received it in return for work. The aid agencies, however, refrained from criticism- chiefly because Afewerki and his ministers were repeating what aid analysts have been saying for years.
Who gives and who gets in the world of food aid
In 2005, 93 countries or territories received a total of 8.25 million tonnes of food aid. More than half of it went to sub-Saharan Africa.
Givers
United States - 49% of the global food aid deliveries
European Union - 18%
China - 7%
Japan and the Republic of Korea - 5% each
Canada - 3%
Australia - 2%
Recipients
The eight main recipients in 2005 shared 50 per cent of the food aid deliveries
Ethiopia - 13%
North Korea - 13%
Sudan - 11%
Uganda - 4%
Eritrea and Bangladesh - 3% each
Top 1960 recipients
India, Poland, Egypt, Pakistan, Brazil
· Does food aid do more harm than good? Join the debate on our new food blog, Word of Mouth
· Alex Renton and Abbie-Trayler Smith travelled to Malawi with Oxfam
But record harvests don't necessarily guarantee good times. 'We have so much maize this year - thanks be to God,' says Felicita Bailoni. 'But we have a problem over where to sell it. It's not just that the price is so low because there is so much maize, there isn't anyone to sell it to. The traders normally visit the village but they haven't come.' Felicita, 59, talks as she rubs the kernels from a cob into a basin before her. Even in the time of plentiful food she's worried. She and her husband Stephen look after her two grandchildren, whose mother died three years ago, and two other orphans.
Most households in their village, Kunthembwe, have taken in the children of those who have died from Aids - which is particularly severe here around Blantyre in southern Malawi. Felicita and her enlarged family have more than enough food for today and for the year ahead - but they need cash to pay the children's school fees, for clothes and other necessities. And maize corn is so plentiful at the moment it fetches only eight Malawian kwacha, or about 3p a kilo - if you can sell it. In 2005, the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo. The Bailonis are hoping to sell 100 50kg bags of corn ears - the cobs are lying round the back of their two-room house in a vast wooden cradle designed to keep the rats away. 'But if we wait till the price goes up, the weevils will spoil our maize,' says Felicita. 'We can only sit and worry.'
'The price is so low,' says Charles Rethman, a Malawi-based analyst of what the NGOs call 'food security', 'that we have a concern now about next year. Farmers will be put off growing maize, and they won't have the cash to buy the seeds for the next planting. So in 2008 we're looking at the possibility of another food crisis. So it's really important that we do everything we can to get the price up to a level that rewards the farmers.'
With so much cheap corn available Rethman is bemused by a US government deal, announced in April, to ship $19.5 million of American corn and soya to Malawi as food aid. 'It's a nonsense,' he says.
Everywhere I go in the little villages in the shadow of Michiru mountain I hear the same story. Plenty of maize but no market. This affects the very poorest. In one village I meet Lena Butao, a 24-year-old whose mother died last year, her father in 2003. (Aids has brought a collapse in life expectancy in Malawi to just 37 years). She looks after her three brothers and sisters, the youngest only 10. They managed to harvest 18 bags of maize from their parents' field, but it won't see them through this year. Lena needs to raise money to pay for school fees, soap, clothes and for medicine. She's in the middle of a bout of malaria; she shivers in the sunshine as she speaks to us. 'Normally I can earn about 500 kwacha (about £1.80 ) a week working in the fields for my neighbours. But at the moment the farmers don't have any money. Life is very difficult.' Lena had to leave school when her parents first became ill and she thinks now that she'll never achieve her dream of becoming a housemaid. The children ate nzima and stewed pumpkin leaves last night: they haven't eaten meat this year.
There's one good piece of news for Lena: her 10-year-old brother Joshua's primary school has become part of the school-feeding programme run by the Malawian government and various aid agencies. This is a huge undertaking that now reaches over half a million children in the country, 20 per cent of all of those in primary school. It is playing a major part in addressing the awful fact that almost half of Malawian children have had their physical or mental growth damaged by malnutrition. And the half a million mugs of porridge served them each day are a guaranteed outlet for the produce of Malawian maize and soya farmers.
The next day, I travel to the village of Kampala and the sprawling red-brick compound of the Catholic Institute primary school. Built in the 1930s by missionaries, when Malawi was the British colony of Nyasaland, the school looks as though it hasn't been touched since. Most windows are broken and the grounds strewn with rubbish - it's pretty average for a Malawian school, I'm told. In her office, deputy head Annie Nakhouhouma is totting up the attendance figures - today the school is teaching an amazing 6,334 children aged between six and 17. Its 21 classrooms can't hold them all so, despite the cold drizzle that's falling, there are crowds of children under each of the big fig trees that dot the school grounds, in front of each group a blackboard and a teacher. I peer into one shabby classroom, and count 190 small children sitting inside. There's no room for furniture, so they are packed on the floor as close as sardines. The 10-year-olds are learning English: 'Hello, mister, how are you?' they chant at me. It's deafening.
There's a stranger sight - straight out of Oliver Twist - on the rough ground behind the classroom block. Hundreds of excited children, each clutching a large mug, are circulating around a camp of vast cooking stoves - 23 of them. Women in brightly-coloured wraps stir vats of grainy yellow porridge. This is CSB - corn-soya blend - a mix of maize, meal and soya flour, vitamins and sugar widely used in emergency feeding around the world. Locally it's called likuni phala. I taste it - it's sweet and nutty, a sort of gritty Ready Brek. Clouds of steam rise in the damp air as the children gulp the porridge greedily from their mugs - for many of them it's the first meal of the day and for some it will be the only one.
CSB is a wonderful product and the teachers are delighted. 'Look at the children - they are now so energetic. They don't fall asleep in class. They don't fight over each other's food, like they used to. They're fatter!' says Gertrude Sonani, who teaches 13-year-olds. But the effect goes further than just feeding the kids up. Children come to the school because of the meal - class numbers are up by about 7 per cent in every age group since the feeding programme began in January.
In a country where only 70 per cent of the children attend primary school, that's an achievement. At another nearby primary, where an Oxfam partner supplies milk to mix into the free porridge, the head teacher, Annie Jana, told me that she now had 800 eight-year-olds, compared to 500 when the programme started a year ago. 'Absenteeism has fallen, and even children who dropped out are coming back, especially girls.' And in Malawi, getting girls into school has always been difficult - which is why half of all women are illiterate.
The logistics behind feeding 6,300 children a mug of porridge are quite something. This programme is funded by the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR), through its local organisation, Mary's Meals. They show me a school storeroom where the bags of likuni phala tower high above the piles of textbooks and papers. Each day the contents of 46 of these sacks, nearly half a tonne, are mixed with water on the stoves and heated and served by volunteers from among the school's parents. The cost of the CSB comes out at about four kwacha, about 1.5p, per child - SIR feeds 175,000 children daily in Malawi at a cost of about £5.30 per child per year. One of the volunteers, Edina Moussa, told me that now her three children actually want to go to school. 'I'm a widow,' she said, 'and often it is hard to find enough to feed them.' She works as hired labour in her neighbour's fields, earning about 75p a day. 'Before January,' she says, 'they were often too tired to come to school. But now they come every day.'
School feeding is such an obviously good idea that the aid agencies and the Malawian government have been bringing more and more schools into the programme since it began in 1999. Most of the CSB comes free from the World Food Programme (WFP), which uses donated corn and soya - some of it from the Malawian government - and more that it buys locally. At the moment 442,000 children are being fed with CSB by WFP at school, 20 per cent of all Malawi's primary-school children. Malawians are proud of the programme: two weeks ago, some 60,000 of them went on sponsored walks to help raise money for school feeding.
Impressed by all this, in April the US Government announced that it wanted to join in. It would give WFP nearly $20 million over three years to help fund an expansion of the programme so, from 2008, 650,000 Malawian children get a daily mug of porridge at school. At the same time it announced similar schemes for Kenya, Cambodia, Guinea and Pakistan - a total spend of $85.9 million. WFP applauds the deal. 'It's a massive donation and a huge boost to the government of Malawi's school-feeding programme,' the organisation's country director, Dom Scalpelli, told me.
But not everyone in the country was overjoyed. 'It's very short-sighted - it doesn't make any sense. It's going to short-circuit the effort to improve nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It's not sustainable and it won't bring about any long-term change to malnutrition rates,' said Charles Rethman, echoing many critics of the plan.
The problem is - though WFP left this detail out of their press release - that the US grant came with a condition: it had to be spent on American CSB to be bought from American farmers and put in American ships to be transported to Malawi. According to WFP, the cost of buying, transporting and packing the annual 8,000 tonnes of US CSB will be $812 a tonne. SIR, which will buy about 3,600 tonnes of Malawian CSB - likuni phala - this year, expects to pay around $320 a tonne (distribution costs add another 5 per cent). Simply, if the American money was spent in Malawi, it could feed nearly two-and-a-half times as many schoolchildren.
Malawians are peaceable and polite people - but there was anger in the voice of one aid worker involved in school feeding when we talked about this. 'This is giving aid with one hand and taking it away with another. It's the Big Man saying: kneel down before I give you the help. These people, they get the food, they are vulnerable, they clap their hands and say, "Thank you Mr Bush". They don't understand what's really going on.'
Someone who does is the World Food Programme's man in Malawi, Dom Scalpelli, an amiable Australian who has spent 17 of his 40 years working for the world's largest humanitarian aid agency. His defence of this particular policy is slick - he and his colleagues have had to make it many times. WFP needs the US: 43 per cent of all the food aid WFP provides comes from America, and 98 per cent of it is 'in kind' - American corn, soya, rice, oil and beans, shipped at considerable expense to where it's needed. America boasts that, through these programmes, it feeds 70 million people a year (it was 100 million during the 1990s). 'Listen,' says Scalpelli, 'the child doesn't care if his porridge is Malawian or American. The important thing is that more of them are going to be getting it. And American CSB is cheaper than Malawian.'
In fact the two cost about the same, but Scalpelli is being disingenuous. The price of shipping and administration - and it is US law that American companies are used for packing and shipping 75 per cent of American food aid - puts the cost of the US-sourced CSB at absurdly high levels. Only a third of the money granted for food aid actually goes on food - the rest is transport and administration. The US Congress's Government Accountability Office has criticised the system, saying that a $10-per-tonne cut in shipping rates would enable the feeding of 850,000 more people. Indeed, Malawi would have done better if the US Government had written WFP a cheque for cost of shipping and administering the grant, and not sent any American food at all.
Surely, I asked Scalpelli, it would be better if the Americans gave cash and you spent it in the Malawian market - you don't just feed the children but you also support Malawian farmers. Isn't it a nonsense, when Malawi has just brought in a record-breaking harvest?
'Yes of course we'd have taken the money and yes, we could have sourced it locally. But the reality of what we're living through is that you take advantage of any grain you can get. The CSB is not displacing the local Malawian CSB - it's going to schools and it's being eaten, it's targeted and it's not going on to the market. The local farmers will still get business from us - and we'll still buy Malawian CSB.'
'It's absurd,' counters Charles Rethman. 'You could feed twice as many children, create jobs, stimulate the maize price and help the farmers. Anything that will increase demand for farmers is a good thing: this flies in the face of the Malawian government's development strategy and its attempts to stand on its own two feet.'
The story of how American corn gets in Malawian children's porridge begins in the great-plains states like Kansas and Iowa, where, as the American food policy critic Michael Pollan puts it, there is 'a plague of cheap corn'. It's a sad tale that begins in 1973, when the Nixon administration started directly subsidising corn (maize) farmers in a way that encouraged them to produce as much as possible. That policy has meant an ever-increasing excess of American corn, which most years costs the US taxpayer some $5-$10 billion to subsidise. As Pollan says, the money, which in 2005 kept the price of corn at around half what it costs to produce, is in effect a subsidy for the big American companies that buy and process the corn - and these companies and their political supporters are the ones that dictate American farm policy. Meanwhile the unwanted corn has to go somewhere - and dumping it abroad has always been one of the answers.
Some 20 per cent of US corn is exported, and at times the proportion going as food aid has matched that. In the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, food aid reached record levels, and the US claimed to feed as many as 100 million people a year in the developing world (some 850 million are said to be chronically malnourished). In 2003 America provided 56 per cent of all the food aid in the world. But an indicator that the richest nation's motives are not entirely charitable is that, throughout those years, America's food aid volumes increased massively at times when prices in the US were depressed - up to 20 per cent of American cereals production goes abroad as food aid when the market is down, but when domestic prices are high this figure falls to just five per cent. In 1993, when global food aid reached an all-time high of 17.3 million tonnes (in 2005, the last year for which there are complete records the figure was 8.25 million tonnes), US prices of staples like corn and rice were at historic lows.
The many critics of American food aid make the point that the buying up of US farmers' surpluses is another way of subsidising them - and, most years, federal payments make up about half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer. Such unprecedented support puts up a wall against farmers from the developing world who want to sell in the markets of the rich. The European Union abandoned food aid in kind in 1999 - all but two per cent now goes as cash - and Peter Mandelson, as Europe's trade commissioner, has called for 'radical reform' from the Americans. 'Food aid for poor countries and emergency relief can be a tool to advance development and for humanitarian relief. But the US programme is designed to give support to US agricultural producers,' he said.
But this was generally seen as pretty hypocritical. Most aid-agency observers reckon the EU has used American intransigence as an excuse to put off reforms of European farm subsidies - like the notorious two euros a day each cow on the continent receives - again, a way of putting up a barrier against the farmers of Africa, South American and Asia. This produces real absurdities - it's often pointed out that the money the rich world gives in aid to poor countries, often to help improve agriculture, is worth less than what those countries could earn if Europe and America simply reformed their subsidies and opened up their markets.
'Sharing our agricultural abundance' is the smug phrase that the US agriculture secretary, Mike Johanns, uses to describe food aid. In most years the US still provides between 55 and 65 per cent of global food aid, 98 per cent of it in the form of food. The price is enormous - up to $2 billion per annum. Even the relatively modest school-feeding programme is worth $200 million this year - 330,000 tonnes of American agricultural products to 17 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Johanns is actually said to be in favour of reforming food aid, but he showed no qualms when he announced plans to flood these countries - many of them with food surpluses - with US-made porridge for school children in February this year. 'These programmes demonstrate America's continued compassion and commitment to improve the lives of people around the world,' he said.
Gawain Kripke, an American who leads Oxfam's lobbying of the US government on the issue of food aid, disagrees. 'The US's food-aid programme is meant to be charitable and helpful in nature but it's been picked apart by private interests so that the majority of the benefit goes to US commerce, rather than to people who need help. There is a debate in Washington over its reform - but the malnourished people of Africa don't have a seat at the table when US budgets are divided.'
It's a stock picture on TV-news reports of wars and disasters - sacks of food tumbling into forests of grasping hands from aid lorries. They often come labelled with a stars and stripes and the words, 'A Gift from the American People'. But the gift often has some unpalatable side effects. 'Emergency food aid in humanitarian situations is of course a good thing, but it can be a terribly blunt instrument,' says Ann Witteveen, Oxfam's food security coordinator for southern Africa. It can and does often do more harm than good. The very promise of free food can cause disaster-hit populations to leave their homes and move to refugee camps. They may become dependent on it, making it harder for them to take up their lives again when the disaster or danger has passed. Farmers leave their fields, prices fall and local traders lose their businesses. Clearly, while food aid saves lives in a disaster, it can hamper the return to normality.
It has done more insidious damage, as detailed by some aid agencies. Food aid can permanently damage the economies of nations it was sent to help. Vast tonnages of rice donated by the USA and Japan to Indonesia after the country's economic collapse in 1997 caused damage to farmers and distributors that has never been repaired: having been one of the world's largest producers, Indonesia is now a net importer of rice.
All the countries, from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, hit by the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, had good supplies of rice available at low cost - yet the US insisted on sending 30,000 tonnes of US rice and other food after the disaster. In Afghanistan it has been suggested that one of the reasons that Afghan farmers have turned to opium-poppy production is that the market for the wheat they used to farm had become too unreliable since the US-led invasion of 2001 opened the door for massive amounts of food aid.
'A lot of food aid is incredibly silly,' sighs Ann Witteveen. 'Markets in southern Africa aren't terribly efficient and it is hard to prove how food aid affects them. But what farmers and traders need is predictability and stability in the market and food aid is a major destabilising factor.'
Malawi itself has a blatant example of the damage that can be wrought by food aid. In 2002, a crisis was predicted, after a shortfall of 600,000 tonnes in the harvest. Unusually, the international community provided exactly what had been appealed for - but the sums were wrong. Malawi was flooded with cheap grain and the price of maize dropped from $250 a tonne to $100 a tonne during 2003. Malawian farmers suffered: the loss to the Malawian economy was estimated at $15m, and local production of not just maize but also of key crops like cassava and rice dropped massively. All this made it harder for Malawi to return to self-sufficiency when the crisis was over. Even last year, when Malawi had a 250,000 tonne surplus of maize, the US still shipped in over 40,000 tonnes of American food as aid.
Some of this food aid is not even for the hungry: it is passed on to favoured US-based NGOs like Save the Children (US), World Vision and Care to be 'monetised' - sold and used for cash to pay their salaries and costs. In 2004, for example, America donated 22,000 tonnes of white-wheat flour for aid agencies working in Eritrea to sell on the open market and use the funds for their operations. This year the US aid agency Care announced that it was going to phase out this system of funding by the year 2010. But in 2005, 22 per cent of all food aid was sold, not distributed, in the countries it was sent to.
From across the world, there are stories of how, once a dependency on food aid has been established and local production destroyed, the aid stops and commercial supply begins - not so different and hardly more moral than the tactics of a drug pusher. This has happened with American soya beans in the Philippines and Japanese rice in Jamaica. Subsidised dairy produce from Europe has, according to Oxfam, put milk farmers out of business in a number of Caribbean countries.
One senior international-agency official once told me he had a new idea for the business of aid delivery. 'It's called the JGTTM strategy: Just Give Them The Money'. And indeed this is becoming a popular strategy. As Dom Scalpelli says, cash handouts are often a good and efficient strategy for helping the hungry, if local markets have enough supply. 'Local and Regional Procurement' is so much talked about in the world of food aid that it has its own acronym - LRP, and it is the stated preferred option of WFP. Scalpelli is proud that his agency will this year buy some of that Malawian surplus in order to feed the hungry in neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe, hit by drought and, in Zimbabwe's case, economic meltdown.
Food aid could be on the way out. Corn prices are high in the US this year, and the futures market is very excited at the prospects of using those great grain mountains for producing ethanol - bio-diesel - and thus addressing another of the rich world's pressing problems. Europe, Canada and Australia have all been persuaded to convert some or all of their food-aid programmes to cash, rather than in kind. Among the major donors only America, Japan and China hold out.
There is mounting pressure in the US for changes in the food-aid system, driven by a damning report from the US Congress about the inefficiencies. It highlighted the $171 a tonne that US carriers charge, compared with the $100 a tonne WFP can normally get from its own contractors. It also found that US food aid frequently is contaminated or infested by insects by the time it arrives in the country that needs it.
The Bush administration's current, modest proposal is that a quarter of the food-aid budget for emergency food (which most years is more than half the total) should be spent in destination countries. This is eminently sensible - emergency food sourced in the US takes more than four months, on average, to arrive, whereas cash spent locally can deliver food within weeks. But the suggestion has twice been knocked back by Congress, driven by a powerful lobby of agribusiness and the shipping industry. The debate will gather steam over the summer as this year's US Farm Bill is debated.
But in any case, as the US department of agriculture told me, school feeding programmes will continue to be supplied with American food - enough for 437,000 children in Malawi this year. Why - with a bumper crop and Malawian corn a fifth the price of American? That's the policy, they said - 'Food aid in kind is valid and effective'.
Increasingly, it seems, the developing world may take matters into its own hands. One government official in Malawi told me that ministries there had not been informed about the latest US grant, and would be very unhappy about it. Last year Eritrea, a food-aid addict for all of the country's brief and tragic history, declared that, for the dignity of its people and in order to end 'a culture of dangerous dependency', it would accept no more food aid.
Back in Malawi, Oxfam's Mary Khozombah works in the countryside around Blantyre helping farmers secure a stable way of life and adequate income. A native of Zimbabwe, she's seen the dire ill effects brought about by ill-advised agricultural policies in Southern Africa. 'People who want to help Malawi need to support agriculture by educating farmers, improving irrigation, helping people find other forms of income. We need empowerment so our farmers can export. Ask us! We might come up with good ideas.
'Food aid,' she says forcefully, 'should be the last resort, in an emergency - and even then it should be bought locally if possible. Of course, if people say we want to give you food, we'll say yes - you can't say no. Poor nations like us too often just accept the charity without looking properly at the effects. But in the long term it really kills our people.'
Just say no how Eritrea refused food aid
In May 2006, at the height of the drought in the Horn and East of Africa, Eritrea declared it wanted no more foreign food aid. The government had already halted the distribution of free food to all but a few thousand people and removed the operating licences of three international aid agencies involved in food handouts. It had locked the warehouses containing 100,000 tonnes of United Nations World Food Programme stocks. No longer, said the government in a lengthy statement posted on its official website, would the people of Eritrea be able to see free food 'as a permanent factor in their life and even as a "right or natural entitlement".'
It was a move that shocked observers. At the end of last year, the UN had predicted that the drought would mean two-thirds of Eritrea's 3.6 million people would need food aid during 2006; 1.3 million people were receiving supplementary food aid in late 2005. But the government of Isaias Afewerki, the charismatic former guerrilla leader who led Eritrea's independence battle with Ethiopia, was adamant. If countries wanted to give aid, then cash would be acceptable. This would be used to pay the poor for work, which would enable them to buy food.
Much of Eritrea has been fed by outsiders for all of the 13 years of the country's existence. Years of free food aid, according to the government, had begun 'to foster a culture of dangerous dependency' in the country. It had 'nurtured lethargy, debilitating idleness and unemployment' and eroded the 'industriousness and hard work ethics of communities'.
Reaction to the Eritrean move was surprisingly muted. A senior UN official flew to Asmara to ask what was happening to the food in the warehouses, and found that the government was considering selling it, and using the cash to pay people who would have received it in return for work. The aid agencies, however, refrained from criticism- chiefly because Afewerki and his ministers were repeating what aid analysts have been saying for years.
Who gives and who gets in the world of food aid
In 2005, 93 countries or territories received a total of 8.25 million tonnes of food aid. More than half of it went to sub-Saharan Africa.
Givers
United States - 49% of the global food aid deliveries
European Union - 18%
China - 7%
Japan and the Republic of Korea - 5% each
Canada - 3%
Australia - 2%
Recipients
The eight main recipients in 2005 shared 50 per cent of the food aid deliveries
Ethiopia - 13%
North Korea - 13%
Sudan - 11%
Uganda - 4%
Eritrea and Bangladesh - 3% each
Top 1960 recipients
India, Poland, Egypt, Pakistan, Brazil
· Does food aid do more harm than good? Join the debate on our new food blog, Word of Mouth
· Alex Renton and Abbie-Trayler Smith travelled to Malawi with Oxfam
Malawi Update
I recently asked one of our St Kizito parishioner who works in the Reserve Bank at Malawi about current general conditions in the country. He told me the warm heart of Malawi continues to bleed with the major problem of continuing AIDS deaths and sickness resulting in a growing number of orphans.More and more elderly people look after very young children.
Malawi is a very poor country without mineral resources, reliant on subsistence agriculture although it has embarked recently on a number of agricultural development programs. In the past when the maze crop failed we assisted with funds for food and to buy new seed. It was pleasing to hear that this years harvest has been excellent, so that past stocks could be exported to Zimbabwe.
The principal exports are tobacco, tea, sugar and coffee and for the first time in 10 years the tobacco crop is fetching good prices. St Kizito is in Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi and St Kizito assists many outlying communities, particularly at Mtsiriza and Katsiyafumbi. In Mtsiriza and Kasiyafumbi the population is growing and a substation of Ntandire has been established as part of Mtsiriza.
Our current project is to fund a new Church/ Hall at Ntandire.Building work is progressing very well. More work has been completed since the last photos were taken and they are currently putting on the ring beam and hope soon to buy the timbers for the roof at a cost of US$1500.00 which includes labour for erecting the roof beams. The roofing sheets will cost US$ 5000.00.
The Parish hall at St Kizito is much more expensive and so far they have dug the foundations only. They are applying to the European Union for a 75% grant for ‘community hall’ and it may cost US$150,000.00. Our latest advice is : “ With Ntandire when we get the roof on we can use it as Mass Centre and Community hall without plaster/paint/furniture – those are luxuries for the time being! Our aim is to open the church for Dec 07.
Malawi is a very poor country without mineral resources, reliant on subsistence agriculture although it has embarked recently on a number of agricultural development programs. In the past when the maze crop failed we assisted with funds for food and to buy new seed. It was pleasing to hear that this years harvest has been excellent, so that past stocks could be exported to Zimbabwe.
The principal exports are tobacco, tea, sugar and coffee and for the first time in 10 years the tobacco crop is fetching good prices. St Kizito is in Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi and St Kizito assists many outlying communities, particularly at Mtsiriza and Katsiyafumbi. In Mtsiriza and Kasiyafumbi the population is growing and a substation of Ntandire has been established as part of Mtsiriza.
Our current project is to fund a new Church/ Hall at Ntandire.Building work is progressing very well. More work has been completed since the last photos were taken and they are currently putting on the ring beam and hope soon to buy the timbers for the roof at a cost of US$1500.00 which includes labour for erecting the roof beams. The roofing sheets will cost US$ 5000.00.
The Parish hall at St Kizito is much more expensive and so far they have dug the foundations only. They are applying to the European Union for a 75% grant for ‘community hall’ and it may cost US$150,000.00. Our latest advice is : “ With Ntandire when we get the roof on we can use it as Mass Centre and Community hall without plaster/paint/furniture – those are luxuries for the time being! Our aim is to open the church for Dec 07.
Former BCI teacher killed on Africa aid trip
A beloved Brantford teacher died Wednesday moments after realizing her long-time dream of visiting Africa.
Sandy Wilson, a retired BCI art and drama teacher, was ecstatic after landing in Malawi where she and companions were travelling to the Home of Hope orphanage.
But as Ms. Wilson and her companions —- former Pauline Johnson principal Jane Enticknap and Elise Destein of Toronto —- neared the orphanage, a tire exploded on their van. Ms. Wilson was thrown from the vehicle and died. The other women were injured but safe.
“Going to Africa was one of Sandy’s all-time dreams,” said Jeff Glaves, a close friend of the family.
“She talked about it forever and after she watched Out of Africa she always wanted to go. She wanted to teach the teachers how to teach art to students.”
With bags filled with art supplies donated by local teachers and friends, Ms. Wilson and her companions planned a six-week stay at the orphanage which is a special project of Brantford’s Jane Glaves and has been in the news lately after visits by pop star Madonna, who adopted a child there.
Glaves said this has been particularly hard on his mother, Jane Glaves, and family since they feel responsible for Ms.
Wilson’s trip to Malawi.
“My mom is devastated by this.”
He also noted that arrangements to have Ms. Wilson’s body returned to Canada are enmeshed in red tape since there is no Canadian embassy in Malawi to help facilitate things.
“Everything takes a great deal of time there so it may be a week or two to get her back. We are dealing with the embassy next door in Zambia but things go at a snail’s pace.”
Ms. Wilson loved travelling, according to her daughter Lesley White, who spoke through Glaves.
A painter and sculptor who loved birds, Ms. Wilson spent every weekend she could at a cottage in Pike Bay.
She had a long and devoted teaching career in Brant County and was known for her intense interest in her students, especially those from Six Nations. Many students continued to keep in touch with her over the years.
“She was known for her dry sense of humour and how caring she was,” said Bobbie Henley, a teacher/librarian at BCI who worked with Ms. Wilson for years before her 1997 retirement.
“Sandy did a lot of work with native kids here, taking them to Albuquerque and the Grand Canyon. She really touched people with her art.”
Henley was one of those who donated art supplies and money to Ms. Wilson’s trip.
“She took lots of paints and scissors and paper. She told me Saturday that her suitcases were bulging.
“It was such a good cause and to have it end before it even started is so sad.”
Valerie Leanage, Ms. Wilson’s best friend and life partner, said Ms. Wilson’s plans for this trip consumed them over the past four months.
“She had containers of pigment, a paper-making machine, millions of brushes, stickers and pencils,” Leanage said. “But the most prized items she carried were murals painted by the students of Queen’s Ward school in Paris that were prepared as gifts to the children who don’t do any art. Also kites made by the kindergarten class.”
Leanage said Ms. Wilson believed in expanding learning experiences for students through travel and had helped organize and participate in trips to Italy, Greece, New Mexico and, in Ontario, to Midland and Georgian Bay, for art, archaeological and Native issues.
She loved all types of music and had recently renewed her interest in the theatre by painting sets and designing costumes for some theatre companies in Hamilton and Burlington.
About 15 years ago, Ms. Wilson battled a serious bout of cancer and believed in living each day fully.
“I see her as a victory figure,” said Leanage, who admitted she was coping by believing Ms. Wilson is still on a big trip in a far-off land.
The others in the crash, Enticknap and Destein, are currently travelling back to Ontario and are expected to arrive home sometime Sunday morning.
Jane Glaves, who spoke to Enticknap by phone, said the former principal had injured her back and both women had cuts on their heads.
Glaves said she was feeling sick for the driver of the van who is the orphanage’s executive director and has been trying to reach her to comfort her.
Ms. Wilson leaves behind her daughter Lesley (Barney) White and grandchildren Ethan, isabel and Alice along with her best friend and life partner Valerie Leanage and Leanage’s daughters Neluka and Vanessa Leanage. She is also survived by her brothers Jim and Mike and many nieces and nephews.
Arrangements will be handled by Beckett-Glaves but a date for services will not be set for some time.
Sandy Wilson, a retired BCI art and drama teacher, was ecstatic after landing in Malawi where she and companions were travelling to the Home of Hope orphanage.
But as Ms. Wilson and her companions —- former Pauline Johnson principal Jane Enticknap and Elise Destein of Toronto —- neared the orphanage, a tire exploded on their van. Ms. Wilson was thrown from the vehicle and died. The other women were injured but safe.
“Going to Africa was one of Sandy’s all-time dreams,” said Jeff Glaves, a close friend of the family.
“She talked about it forever and after she watched Out of Africa she always wanted to go. She wanted to teach the teachers how to teach art to students.”
With bags filled with art supplies donated by local teachers and friends, Ms. Wilson and her companions planned a six-week stay at the orphanage which is a special project of Brantford’s Jane Glaves and has been in the news lately after visits by pop star Madonna, who adopted a child there.
Glaves said this has been particularly hard on his mother, Jane Glaves, and family since they feel responsible for Ms.
Wilson’s trip to Malawi.
“My mom is devastated by this.”
He also noted that arrangements to have Ms. Wilson’s body returned to Canada are enmeshed in red tape since there is no Canadian embassy in Malawi to help facilitate things.
“Everything takes a great deal of time there so it may be a week or two to get her back. We are dealing with the embassy next door in Zambia but things go at a snail’s pace.”
Ms. Wilson loved travelling, according to her daughter Lesley White, who spoke through Glaves.
A painter and sculptor who loved birds, Ms. Wilson spent every weekend she could at a cottage in Pike Bay.
She had a long and devoted teaching career in Brant County and was known for her intense interest in her students, especially those from Six Nations. Many students continued to keep in touch with her over the years.
“She was known for her dry sense of humour and how caring she was,” said Bobbie Henley, a teacher/librarian at BCI who worked with Ms. Wilson for years before her 1997 retirement.
“Sandy did a lot of work with native kids here, taking them to Albuquerque and the Grand Canyon. She really touched people with her art.”
Henley was one of those who donated art supplies and money to Ms. Wilson’s trip.
“She took lots of paints and scissors and paper. She told me Saturday that her suitcases were bulging.
“It was such a good cause and to have it end before it even started is so sad.”
Valerie Leanage, Ms. Wilson’s best friend and life partner, said Ms. Wilson’s plans for this trip consumed them over the past four months.
“She had containers of pigment, a paper-making machine, millions of brushes, stickers and pencils,” Leanage said. “But the most prized items she carried were murals painted by the students of Queen’s Ward school in Paris that were prepared as gifts to the children who don’t do any art. Also kites made by the kindergarten class.”
Leanage said Ms. Wilson believed in expanding learning experiences for students through travel and had helped organize and participate in trips to Italy, Greece, New Mexico and, in Ontario, to Midland and Georgian Bay, for art, archaeological and Native issues.
She loved all types of music and had recently renewed her interest in the theatre by painting sets and designing costumes for some theatre companies in Hamilton and Burlington.
About 15 years ago, Ms. Wilson battled a serious bout of cancer and believed in living each day fully.
“I see her as a victory figure,” said Leanage, who admitted she was coping by believing Ms. Wilson is still on a big trip in a far-off land.
The others in the crash, Enticknap and Destein, are currently travelling back to Ontario and are expected to arrive home sometime Sunday morning.
Jane Glaves, who spoke to Enticknap by phone, said the former principal had injured her back and both women had cuts on their heads.
Glaves said she was feeling sick for the driver of the van who is the orphanage’s executive director and has been trying to reach her to comfort her.
Ms. Wilson leaves behind her daughter Lesley (Barney) White and grandchildren Ethan, isabel and Alice along with her best friend and life partner Valerie Leanage and Leanage’s daughters Neluka and Vanessa Leanage. She is also survived by her brothers Jim and Mike and many nieces and nephews.
Arrangements will be handled by Beckett-Glaves but a date for services will not be set for some time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
