The global food crisis II

Following on from Nursel’s recent post, I’d like to draw readers to a recent New York Times article about the “global food crisis”. According to the article, rising commodities prices, especially fuel and food prices, are producing unprecedented stress and anger across the globe, resulting in unrest and even riots. The article includes disturbing descriptions of people in Haiti eating concoctions made in part from mud in order to still their hunger pains. It is worth being reminded that what is experienced as a bit of additional pain at the checkout for the world’s wealthy can be an issue of survival for the world’s poor.

The article states:

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Significantly, the article also acknowledges the interconnectedness of the global economy in that rising prices have “pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies”. The production of biofuels putting upward pressure in prices is mentioned, though the competition between animals and humans for grains is not.

Given the likely future impact of rising fuel prices, climate change, the expansion of economies such as China and India on food production and prices, the fact that the situation appears already to be so bad is worrying indeed.

See also the NYT’s index of articles on food prices.

The Global Food Crisis

George Monbiot’s latest article ‘The Pleasures of the Flesh’ on 15 April 2008  is about the causes of the current global food crisis. Currently there are food crises in 37 countries. Monbiot says “the price of rice has risen by three-quarters in the past year, that of wheat by 130%(1).” and according to the World Bank one hundred million people could become poorer by the high prices. Actually there is no scarcity of food; for example “at 2.1 bn tonnes, last year’s global grain harvest broke all records” and “it beat the previous year’s by almost 5%”.

A significant amount of food produced are used as biofuels; for instance according to the World Bank “the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol … could feed one person for a year”. And according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this year 2.13 bn tonnes is likely to be consumed, and only 1.01bn will feed people. Monbiot complains that now in the UK, all sellers of transport fuel have to mix fuel with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. He says: “In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate. “

Monbiot also discusses the other cause of the food crisis, which “is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer”. This year 100 m tonnes food will be used as biofuels, and a bigger amount, 760 m tonnes, will be used to feed animals. Since meat consumption in Asia and Latin America has been booming, and the UN estimates that the population will rise to 9bn by 2050, Monbiot tries to answer the question “What level of meat-eating would be sustainable?” and he says “ If you care about hunger, eat less meat”.

At the end of his article, George Monbiot says:

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

Link to applied neuro-anthropology

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

development 2.0.

Lately I have kept a very low profile on Culture Matters. One of the reasons for this is a project I would like to put up for discussion today: www.betterplace.org, an internet platform I co-founded and have been working on for the past 10 months. It went online last friday and I would greatly appreciate the feedback of all Culture Matters contributors and readers. Its a very applied project and I hope to learn from those of you who have a much deeper understanding of the development field than I do.

betterplace connects people who need help with their social projects, with others, who want to contribute to them by giving time, knowhow, donations in kind and money. It combines Web 2.0. tools with the world of development projects and aims to improve the way people can organize support for their projects, as well as give donors the chance to find the very initiatives they want to support. The platform is designed to make development projects and transactions as transparent as possible and and enable donors to get real feedback for their contributions.

betterplace is a non-profit foundation and its use is free (we finance the operational costs with the help of private sponsors, as well as the fees companies pay in order to be able to show their CSR on the platform).

The great thing about such a platform is that it can continuously be adapted to the interests and needs of different participants. We have many features in the pipeline and are open to any suggestions. Thus, please let me know your thoughts: Is the format suitable for the self-presentation of grassroots projects and social entrepreneurs? Does it encourage the exchanges we envision? And – which social projects do you know well and would you like to see on betterplace?

The dangers of biofuels

George Monbiot has just written a powerful article about the dangers of biofuels.   Amongst other things, he points out the enormous social impact they will have if agricultural land is increasingly used for vehicles during a time of unprecedented demand to produce food in the Third World.  Essentially, the increasing production of biofuels, unless strictly regulated, means that the cars of the rich will compete with the poor of the world for food — and market forces will determine that cars win this battle.

I see here shades of the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s, in which advanced agricultural techniques, the use of chemical fertilizers and machinery was sold to Third World farmers as a panacaea that would bring them out of a state of ‘underdevelopment’.  In effect, the benefits for the West were much greater.  Consumers benefitted from a drop in global food prices, but the Third World farmers encouraged to mass produce monocrops were left with large debts and diminishing returns on their harvests.  In a similar way, biofuels, presented as a Good Thing will turn out to be anything but for the global South.

Monbiot writes:

Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”(5) This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”(6). Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%(7). Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices. They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and - as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week( - keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometre mark for the first time last year(9). But it doesn’t matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.

And, because they only apparently benefit the environment, but in fact produce much greater levels of greenhouse gases when deforestation and the fertilisers used to grow them are taken into account, they are going do more harm than good for everyone.

Two recent Chinese articles about China’s role in international development

I have been following, off and on, Chinese media articles on China’s participation in international development, a topic I am eventually hoping to do fieldwork on (along with three of our PhD students, from Venezuela to Indonesia). There has been lots of media attention to the topic, but no accounts so far of whether and how the Chinese presence, and the potential clash between Chinese and World Bank approaches, is affecting locals in these places.

Recently I came across two interesting articles on the topic on one of the most popular mainstream Chinese news sites, sina.com. One is about Burma, published on 10 October, in the immediate aftermath of the violent crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations. The article , entitled “China and Burma conduct joint sweep of border zone casinos,” points out that, while “some countries, headed by the West, use the excuse of the political situation to pressure Burma,” they ignore that the Burmese government has been cooperating with China trying to crack down on border-zone casinos, run, according to the article, by antigovernment (I suppose Wa) ethnic militias but patronized by Chinese tourists. It claims that the crackdown has resulted in the reduction of the number of casinos from 149 in 2005 to 28 today. (If true, this raises interesting questions: did Chinese military or police actually cross the border, or was it sanctions against casino-going officials or pressure on the militias that had such an effect? One can more or less rule out the possibility that the closures are the result of Burmese police operations.) The worldview of the article is clear: while the West goes on about democracy, it hinders the Burmese government in carrying out real development — i.e. eradication of vice and imposition of order — that is taking place with Chinese help.

The other article (”Chinese aid to Africa draws Western criticism”, 17 October) is on the topic that has seen most public contention (and World Bank alarm) lately regarding the motives and effects of China’s rapidly expanding investment and development aid commitments. According to the article, the IMF’s representative in Congo-Kinshasa warned the country’s government against taking out a $ 6.6 billion Chinese state loan while negotiating the rescheduling of its $ 8 billion World Bank debt. This came just after the EU’s ambassador to Zambia cautioned the government there not to take “the4 old road to indebtedness.” The article counters that, in fact, the loan is not a loan but the value of three development project agreements, signed respectively by China’s state railway construction corporation, water and electricity infrastructure construction corporation, and China Export-Import Bank, and dismisses Western carping about China being the “new colonialist” as an old record. The story highlights that China is reluctant to use the same terminology as the international development institutions do to describe its projects (precisely to avoid such comparisons), but it is involved in the kind of large-scale, high-impact infrastructural projects that used to be typical for the Western development industry in the 1960s and ’70s, with the exception that it brings its own workers.

More on the dreaded Intervention

I feel like it deserves capital letters — The Intervention — such is the gravity of the recent government push to restructure the way remote indigenous communities are managed. Already a number of the more dubious policy changes seem to be bearing fruit.

For example, one of the more disastrous aspects of the Intervention would appear to be the dismantling of community-based employment projects that have provided government subsidised work in remote communities. Anthropologist Jon Altman has written this article criticising the scrapping of the Community Development Employment Programmes (CDEP). The article also provides some background on the rationale for setting up the scheme in the first place.

Accounts are emerging of the damage scrapping the CDEP is causing. For example, an anthropologist who recently returned from doing fieldwork in Arnhem Land, Jennifer Deger, has cited cases of people who have had community-based roles for many years, such as collecting the garbage, and have effectively been left without jobs since the CDEP funding ran out. There also doesn’t seem to be any plan in place for replacing such vital services or offering similar sorts of employment opportunities. Instead, Aborigines are being forced onto Work for the Dole schemes, a move which would seem to increase welfare dependency rather than providing any meaningful employment.

On a larger scale, entire projects have been scuttled by the sudden shift in the management of employment and community development. Margaret Carew, a lecturer from Alice Springs writes:

I don’t know how you are all feeling about the intervention, but the reports coming in are making me angry, sad and sick to the stomach. We keep hearing of terrible stories from places like Titjikala (Successful tourism enterprise forced to close) Utopia (existing training doesn’t fit into new compulsory work for the dole being introduced on 29 Oct) and Tennant Creek (Pink Palace Arts Centre is closing its doors because they have abolished CDEP).

It seems pretty obvious that these sorts of developments are going to negatively affect communities. I also don’t understand what scuttling the CDEP has to do with the original issue which set off The Intervention in the first place, the protection of children from abuse.

The motivation for making these changes seems to be designed to maximise government control and leverage rather than being based on sound social or economic policy. According to Altman, the key objectives of this change are to increase the coercive power tying welfare payments to certain behaviours, such as parents sending their children to school, and to neutralise the political power of Aboriginal organisations. He writes:

One part of the agenda seems to be to sacrifice CDEP positions, many that generate extra hours of work and extra income, to bring participants and their earnings under the single system of quarantining that will apply to welfare payments. It is as if the Government is happy to sacrifice work and income to deal with a perceived expenditure problem: cash is spent on unacceptable goods.

Another part of the agenda seems to be to further depoliticise Indigenous organisations, in this case robust CDEP organisations, perhaps to give government-appointed community administrators greater powers.

In other words the policy is designed to reduce Aboriginal independence, centralise power, and create more docile subjects. This is of course in accordance with other moves, such as doing away with the permit system that gives Aboriginal communities control over who enters their land.

If readers would like to express concern about the Intervention I recommend the Women for Wik website, which has been following developments and also includes a petition against The Intervention.

Grounding those narratives

Joana’s earlier post about uses of ICT in low-income communities emphasised the value of ethnographic research to challenge widely-held assumptions. When I read it I was reminded me of a post on Savage Minds from about the same time which referenced a Guardian article on British anthropologist Melissa Leach.

Working in the field of development studies, Leach makes clear her disdain for “bullshit research”: i.e. research which constructs grand narratives about a topic without being grounded in empirical, field-based research. In her opinion, this kind of research primarily serves to reinforce assumptions and stereotypes about a particular topic rather than accurately representing what is happening “on the ground”. I tend to agree that one of the primary virtues of good ethnographic work is to challenge and “talk back to” orthodoxies of various kinds by throwing up uncomfortable details “from the world”.  This was illustrated at a seminar I attended some time ago when a historian who was giving a paper threw up her hands in mock despair at yet another “but what about?” question from an anthropologist and exclaimed “That’s the problem with you anthropologists; you’re always ruining our nice neat theories!”

Leach also shows how ethnographic research can ruin a perfectly good master narrative:

“It’s easy,” she argues, “to come up with narratives about deforestation: all the world’s trees are disappearing fast; or, water scarcity will lead to water wars. But these are often contradicted by evidence on the ground about how environments are really changing.”

And the article lists another couple of examples:

Leach and her colleagues had shown how experts can reach wildly wrong conclusions if local knowledge and history are not taken into account. Their findings became a book, Misreading the African Landscape, and a film, Second Nature: Building Forests in West Africa’s Savannahs. A decade later, they are still being used to illustrate the power of anthropological methods.”It shaped my entire career,” she says. “A lot of my work since has been about trying to bring to life the knowledge of local people.”

Seven years later, she struck another blow for social anthropology. Leach and a local anthropologist in northern Nigeria uncovered the reasons for villagers’ fears about taking the polio vaccine, administered to them by the World Health Organisation. Polio was either not seen as a priority, they found, or it was perceived as a spiritual affliction that was impossible to prevent. Leach argued that the polio vaccination campaign was using resources that weakened, rather than strengthened, local primary care health systems.

Original article

See also this recent post on Leach on antropologi.info which also emphasises the value of “local knowledge”.

Rich ethnographic reports about the uses of ICT in low-income communities

I lately came across a number of exciting papers I would like to share. Let me get started with one of these today, a long report initiated by the UK Department for Development, written by a number of researchers from British and Australian Universities, about the social and economic benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in low-income communities in Jamaica, India, South Africa and Ghana.  

The working papers strongly re-enforce the benefits of an ethnographic approach for the wider world – something which we have explored at some length on Culture Matters regarding the corporate world (especially in product design and marketing) - but which is also increasingly seen as contributing to sound development policies.   

One of the most convincing by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst juxtaposes conventional ICT policy making in Jamaica with ethnographic findings and uncovers that the assumptions concerning internet use held by the government as well as international NGOs diverge hugely from the realities. The background to the study was that, while the cell phone is very popular in Jamaica (with an average of 3 phones per household), the Internet is not so (only 3% of the population were online in 2004). In order to boost internet access (and implicitly solve all sorts of problems the country has – primarily in the crisis-ridden primary and secondary educational sector), the government plans to use a special tax to finance computers and virtual teaching resources and has applied for funding to several international organisations.  

Let me juxtapose some of the current policies with Miller’s and Horst’s recommendations: 

Instead of more computers in secondary schools invest in post-educational training for young adults
Merely putting computers into schools will not of itself be of any great benefit. Miller and Horst interviewed school children and found that due to security fears, computer access in schools was highly restricted and only available to high achieving children, many of whom came from higher income families and had access to the Internet anyhow. Despite school policies which stated that all children would have at least weekly access to computers, in actual fact, many had not been granted access to the computer lab in months. Secondary school children in Jamaica are often very badly motivated and drop out of school early. Yet the same people resume their interest in schooling when they have reached their late 20s and early 30s. “We witnessed a deep thirst for gaining qualifications and secure employment … long after they have left school”. Thus the authors propose that the government puts more resources into tertiary education (evening schools, day-time TV). “Jamaica has a huge demand for skills training and general education at the post-educational level, quite beyond that of other countries, and one that does not fit the global pattern of education as child-centered. Use of cable-TV and the Internet in adult education (hospitality industry, basic literacy, typing, office procedures and IT skills such as Microsoft office as well as general education) would do justice to the specific nature of Jamaican society and would transform the effective skills base of the society.”  

Instead of investing into expensive high-end computers invest in low-price computers without gaming facilities
Studies worldwide show that personal computers are more used for gaming than for any other single purpose. Many manufacturers therefore strive to optimize technology mainly to create a satisfactory gaming experience. But from an educational perspective this sophistication is unnecessary (even detrimental). Thus the Jamaican government should consider investing in low-tech, low-price computers. 

Instead of investing in new educational content, create trustworthy portals
Instead of creating their own educational and informational content at high costs, a lot of money can be saved by kitemarking, i.e. creating portals which identify useful and high-quality web resources. 

Instead of investing in community computers, offer Internet access via individual mobile phones
Currently the main influence on the direction on ICT investment are well-meaning bodies such as NGOs and aid agencies who see an important role for ICTs in supporting what they call ‘community’. Large loans to the Jamaican government by the Inter-American Bank and the UNDP are destined to set up community computers.

“Many millions of US$ have been, or will be, dedicated to community computing. However, the emphasis on community centers for computing represents what we would call global rather than local thinking. The same recommendations may be found regardless of whether we are in Croatia or India. Aid agencies want to fund communities since it justifies expenditure as a social rather than as individual benefit and because they want to encourage communities per se. But this may result in a tendency to see ‘communities’ as uncritically positive or useful sites for disseminating information and access to computing and to wish them into existence even when there is no evidence for them.”  

Yet not only did Miller and Horst find little evidence for the vibrancy of ‘community’ in highly individualistic Jamaica, they go so far as to state that there is “evidence that most Jamaicans possess a negative view of ICTs that must be shared and instead stressed the need for private ownership. ‘Community’ is associated with churches (who sometimes offer computer access), yet these were seen as exclusive rather than inclusive points of access. Similarly, there are ‘community events’, often sponsored by local elites, which are seen to serve their own interests rather than a broader community. Lastly, there are neighbourhoods which could be constructed as ‘communities’, yet there is little emphasis on sharing consumer goods. Past provisions of community computers in post offices and libraries have been singularly ineffective in Jamaica. Miller and Horst found several Internet access points that had never been used.  

Many Jamaicans cited cultural reasons for their disregard for the internet in general, such as being part of an oral, highly individualistic culture, whose members are very private and thus don’t like sharing communication devices. Whatever the “real” reasons for the rejection of the Internet, Miller and Horst advise the government to “restrict its support and approval of commercial philanthropy to those cases that have carefully dovetailed to agreed programmes shown to be of value to low-income Jamaicans.” One promising way would be to provide limited internet access through the (highly popular) cell phone.  The whole report is full of examples for ethnography’s ability to check (and often disprove) common-sense beliefs concerning the benefits of new technologies: Thus ICT doesn’t necessarily have a positive impact on employment and income generation (as is often thought). In the poor households studied the cell phone proved vital in income distribution, but not generation. More than half of the households incomes were derived through social networks and personal contacts rather than through employment or work. Phones were used to maintain and access the huge but shallow social networks, which could be called upon in times of crisis. The only people who did use ICT for entrepreneurial purposes were not the very poor, but those that already possessed regular employment. (This reminds me of Appadurai’s concept of “the capacity to aspire”, a capacity which the poor are lacking in many ways and which results in better-off members of society to benefit disproportionately from aid). 

I also found the reports from Ghana by Don Slater and Janet Kwami fascinating.

Photo essay on Chinese factories

BoingBoing reports on a Wired photo essay on factories in China.  It provides some interesting, if none-too-surprising, images of factory life and the urban landscape produced by China’s capitalist boom.