Jun 10, 2008
One wonders whether the World Food Programme isn't run by a group of half-witted shopkeepers. When they learn that some of the poorest countries are short of grain, their immediate reaction is to buy grain and ship it to them. Of course the easiest grain to get hold of, and the cheapest to buy is that derived from diseased crops. If there is one thing the third world doesn't need it is a supply of diseased grain.
Furthermore, in countries that are short of food, the local price of grain is high, but local producers will not be encouraged to produce more if the market is flooded with free or cheap grain from the World Food Programme. So local production is reduced, or the food aid grain is left to rot on the wharf as I have seen it doing in Bangladesh, or both. So next the World Food Programme decides it will buy grain from the poorer countries, if they have some available, and thus increase the price there, but of course that diminishes the locally available supply and a different lot of people starve. Then they send it to the other poor countries so as to collapse their price, and further diminish their local production. Brilliant !
What the poorer countries need is clean, high quality grain crops planted on their best land. Alas, this is not what they get. In Ethiopia the best land is used to grow delphiniums for export, while people are starving on the poorer land. In Uganda, the best land is growing roses, for export, while starving people are being encouraged to grow coffee, for export. Of course these countries need foreign exchange, not only to buy diesel for the SUV's of the privileged, but also to service the foreign debt that the privileged have already run up. No matter that the world is already awash with coffee, selling at dismal prices. No matter if Brazil has refused to export coffee until the price improves. If you want aid from the rich countries, you had better grow what they want you to.
So what should we be doing? When I was in Uganda in 1992 I met a fellow Kiwi called John Campbell who had been sent there by United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, to "strengthen horticulture". He was told that his main function would be to increase production of coffee, tea, and cocoa, but when he discussed the project with the lady who was Minister of Agriculture, she agreed with him that increased production of local food crops was a far more urgent necessity. As it happened he had just completed a similar project in Samoa, in which he had introduced high yielding varieties of many local tree crops, such as mangoes, papayas, breadfruit and soursop, so he set to work to introduce some of the same planting material to some propagating houses that some previous project had built in Uganda. When he had the propagating houses well stocked, he invited the inhabitants of various villages to come in for a field day, at which he showed them how to grow and care for the various trees, and then gave them each an armful of selected plants to take home with them. This went on successfully for a couple of years, but then the project was for some reason cancelled by FAO. I wonder why.
Another aid worker I met had been teaching the hill tribes in Laos how to grow their own rice. So little did they know about it that they had to be taught that the root of the plant went into the soil, and the shoot went uppermost. No wonder people are starving.
