Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.

Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets.

African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.

FROM EXPORTER TO IMPORTER

At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.

Agriculture is in deep crisis, and the causes are many, including civil wars and the spread of HIV-AIDS. However, a very important part of the explanation was the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the structural adjustment programs to which most African countries were subjected as the price for getting IMF and World Bank assistance to service their external debt.

Instead of triggering a virtuous spiral of growth and prosperity, structural adjustment saddled Africa with low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output, all combining to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline.

Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced applications, lower yields, and lower investment. One would have expected the non-economist to predict this outcome, which was screened out by the Bank and Fund’s free-market paradigm. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that the withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market and private sector to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector believed that reducing state expenditures created more risk and failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the predictions of neoliberal doctrine yielded precisely the opposite: the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. In those instances where private traders did come in to replace the state, an Oxfam report noted, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

What support the government was allowed to muster was channeled by the Bank to export agriculture – to generate the foreign exchange earnings that the state needed to service its debt to the Bank and the Fund. But, as in Ethiopia during the famine of the early 1980s, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into more and more unsuitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the Bank’s encouraging several economies undergoing adjustment to focus on export production of the same crops simultaneously often led to overproduction that then triggered a price collapse in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s program to expand cocoa production triggered a 48% drop in the international price of cocoa between 1986 and 1989, threatening, as one account put it, “to increase the vulnerability of the entire economy to the vagaries of the cocoa market [1]." In 2002-2003, a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in many other regions, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Latin America and Asia, the Bank and Fund confined themselves for the most part to macromanagement, or supervising the dismantling of the state’s economic role from above. These institutions left the dirty details of implementation to the state bureaucracies. In Africa, where they dealt with much weaker governments, the Bank and Fund micromanaged such decisions as how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired, or even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached into the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up.

THE ROLE OF TRADE

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair trade practices on the part of the EU and the United States. Trade liberalization allowed low-priced subsidized EU beef to enter and drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, U.S. cotton growers offloaded their cotton on world markets at 20-55% of the cost of production, bankrupting West African and Central African cotton farmers in the process [2].

These dismal outcomes were not accidental. As then-U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost [3]."

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of U.S. products stemmed from subsidies that were becoming more massive each year, despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase out all forms of subsidy. From $367 billion in 1995, the first year of the WTO, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Subsidies nowaccount for 40% of the value of agricultural production in the European Union (EU) and 25% in the United States.

The social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africaadmitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming [4]."

That was, however, a rare moment of candor. What was especially disturbing was that, as Oxford University political economist Ngaire Woods pointed out, the “seeming blindness of the Fund and Bank to the failure of their approach to sub-Saharan Africa persisted even as the studies of the IMF and the World Bank themselves failed to elicit positive investment effects [5]."

THE CASE OF MALAWI

This stubbornness led to tragedy in Malawi.

It was a tragedy preceded by success. In 1998 and 1999, the government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after, however, is a story that will be enshrined as a classic case study in a future book on the 10 greatest blunders of neoliberal economics.

The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About1,500 people perished. The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.”

When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa.

But the World Bank, like its sister agency, still stubbornly clung to the discredited doctrine. As the Bank’s country director toldthe Toronto Globe and Mail, “All those farmers who begged, borrowed, and stole to buy extra fertilizer last year are now looking at that decision and rethinking it. The lower the maize price, the better for food security but worse for market development.”

FLEEING FAILURE

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today. Owing to the absence of any clear case of success, structural adjustment has been widely discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments that once subscribed to it have distanced themselves from the Bank, the most prominent case being the official British aid agency that co-funded the latest subsidized fertilizer program in Malawi. Perhaps the motivation of these institutions is to prevent the further erosion of their diminishing influence in the continent through association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions. At the same time, they are certainly aware that Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to the conditionalities of the World Bank, IMF, and Western government aid programs.

Beyond Africa, even former supporters of adjustment, like the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington and the rabidly neoliberal Economistacknowledged that the state’s abdication from agriculture was a mistake. In a recent commentary on the rise of food prices, for instance, IFPRI asserted that “rural investments have been sorely neglected in recent decades,” and says that it is time for “developing country governments [to] increase their medium- and long-term investments in agricultural research and extension, rural infrastructure, and market access for small farmers.” At the same time, the Bank and IMF’s espousal of free trade came under attack from the heart of the economics establishment itself, with a panel of luminaries headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton accusing the Bank’s research department of being biased and “selective” in its research and presentation of data. As the old saying goes, success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan. Unable to deny the obvious, the Bank has finally acknowledged that the whole structural adjustment enterprise was a mistake, though it smuggled this concession into the middle of the 2008 World Development Report, perhaps in the hope that it would not attract too much attention. Nevertheless, it was a damning admission:

Structural adjustment in the 1980’s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions—reducing their costs, improving their quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t happen. In some places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best, limiting private entry. Elsewhere, the private sector emerged only slowly and partially—mainly serving commercial farmers but leaving smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose huge costs in forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival.

In sum, biofuel production did not create but only exacerbated the global food crisis. The crisis had been building up for years, as policies promoted by the World Bank, IMF, and WTO systematically discouraged food self-sufficiency and encouraged food importation by destroying the local productive base of smallholder agriculture. Throughout Africa and the global South, these institutions and the policies they promoted are today thoroughly discredited. But whether the damage they have caused can be undone in time to avert more catastrophic consequences than we are now experiencing remains to be seen.

*Walden Bello is a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, a program of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) where this article first appeared under the title, "Destroying African Agriculture."

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Notes:

1. Charles Abugre, “Behind Crowded Shelves: as Assessment of Ghana’s Structural Adjustment Experiences, 1983-1991,” (San Francisco: food First, 1993), p. 87.

2. “Trade Talks Round Going Nowhere sans Progress in Farm Reform,” Business World (Phil), Sept. 8, 2003, p. 15

3. Quoted in “Cakes and Caviar: the Dunkel Draft and Third World Agriculture,” Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 1993), p. 220

4. Morris Miller, Debt and the Environment: Converging Crisis (New York: UN, 1991), p. 70.

5. Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their Borrowers (Thaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 158.

The current food crisis has been heralded as the worst since the 1970s. Ordinary people, from South Africa to Egypt, India to Turkey, have been forced to make severe adjustments to their lives to deal with food hikes that continue to rise exponentially since late 2007. A combination of complex factors, including poor harvests, higher energy prices and unprecedented demands exceeding supplies, amongst other contributing factors have led to the current condition. The world is a different place compared to the 1970s though; it is a vastly connected and interdependent globe, highly networked, largely dependent on the dictums of the logic of globalization, where chinks in supplies have a ricocheting effect across the globe, including the first world. We know that such increases have resulted in lifestyle changes and increased vulnerability for those at the bottom, but how similar are these struggles and experiences? The IOLS-Research Unit, UKZN bring together a collection of real stories of how ordinary people are being affected by the current spate of food and oil hikes, compiled by Azad Essa.

MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA by Nomkhosi Xulu

Margaret Shabalala*, 85, is a pensioner and the breadwinner of her household. She lives with two of her unemployed children who are in their mid 40s. She has four grandchildren, all high school graduates, but unemployed, except one. "Whenever I get my pension I have to carefully distribute each and every cent so that all in the family gets some share, said Ms Shabalala. "Obviously my pension is unable to cover buying the food for such a big family. From my pension at the end of the month, I try to buy basic foodstuff like rice, flour, maize meal, oil and sugar. These are the kind of things that should last us for the whole month, but that does not really happen. Sometimes I am left with nothing and I can't even go to church as taxi fares are also increasing with everything else."

"Things are not the same anymore," she continues, "our life situation just keeps on getting worse. I only wish that things were different. I am old and sick and have hardly anything to eat because of rising food prices. My daughters and grandchildren are looking for employment but that is not helping as well. Instead it is emptying our pockets for bus fare and photocopying, faxing and posting of CVs. I even tried looking for land in order to plant vegetables but have not yet succeeded. Every now and then I try to encourage my family to boil food as that will save oil. Things are really bad."

*name changed

here is a growing belief among men in Swaziland that circumcision provides complete protection against HIV, a perception that worries non-governmental organisations (NGOs) battling the highest HIV prevalence rate in the world. In recent years circumcision has been lauded by Swazi public health officials as a procedure that reduces the rate of HIV transmission by about 50 percent, but it is far from the silver bullet solution some men see it as.

Clashes between insurgents and government troops in Beletweyne, Hiiraan region of central Somalia, have created serious food scarcities in the town, hitting thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) hardest, locals said. "Already, two children are said to have died of hunger; many others are malnourished," a journalist, who requested anonymity, told IRIN on 1 August.

South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world with an estimated 5,7-million people living with HIV in 2007. This is according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS’ (UNAIDS) 2008 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic released yesterday (SUBS: TUES), which reports that almost 33-million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS worldwide with 25-million people having died of HIV-related causes since the beginning of the epidemic.

Pervasive gender inequalities mean that girls especially face numerous violations to their sexual and reproductive health and rights, including sexual initiation before they are physically or emotionally ready. Girls who live in extreme poverty, among marginalized populations, without family support, or in situations of conflict and displacement are particularly vulnerable to coerced sexual encounter

The abduction and torture of a Ugandan HIV/AIDS activist who faces trial for holding a peaceful protest reveals the danger to those who challenge the government’s policies, Human Rights Watch, and the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders have said. The three human rights organizations (the Observatory is a joint programme of the World Organisation Against Torture and the International Federation of Human Rights), called on the Ugandan authorities to investigate the abduction and torture and sanction those responsible.

The seizure of farmland for the purposes of commercial diamond mining in Angola’s Lunda provinces is causing widespread hunger and deepening poverty, according to new research to be released on July 30 2008. The report, titled Harvesting Hunger in Angola’s Diamond Fields, focuses on the activities of the Sociedade Mineira do Cuango (SMC): a joint venture led and managed by a British-based mining enterprise, ITM Mining, in partnership with the Angolan diamond parastatal, Endiama, and Lumanhe, a private company owned by Angolan Army generals.

Research conducted by independent Angolan journalist Rafael Marques, in collaboration with a network of local activists in the Cuango municipality of Lunda Norte province, records how SMC usually arrives without warning at night and destroys fields where crops are cultivated. The company then takes arbitrary measurements of the affected areas in order to determine how much to pay the peasants. This practice is leaving thousands of people hungry while SMC expands its concessions. In 2007, SMC had a production turnover of 340,002 carats of diamonds, yet farmers are paid only US$0.25 for each square metre of land that is seized.

The report highlights how the legal framework that governs the diamond industry in the Lunda provinces effectively denies full rights of citizenship to the region’s farming population, putting the commercial interests of the companies ahead of the local people’s land rights. Yet even those aspects of the law which ought to provide some protection for farmers – demanding, for example, fair compensation for land expropriated – are routinely ignored by SMC, whose compensation payments in no way reflect the productive value of the land that is being seized. The company appears to enjoy impunity despite the illegality of its actions.

The report calls on the companies involved to start negotiations with the farming communities of the Lunda region with a view to establishing mechanisms to ensure fair compensation for people who lose access to their land as a result of the granting of diamond mining concessions. It calls on the Angolan government to enforce the laws that govern the diamond industry in the Lundas, and to ensure that the region’s farmers are accorded their full rights as citizens.

*For further information, please contact Rafael Marques at +244 929 419644; +244 912 331034; or by e-mail at: [email][email protected]

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at

The persistent and increasing outbreaks of violence against members of the gay community in Africa are jeopardising efforts undertaken to combat HIV, both within this group and across the population as a whole, AIDS activists warned at a recent meeting in Limbé, Cameroon.

The urban poor in the Horn of Africa are the new face of hunger in a region where up to 14.6 million people now require humanitarian assistance due to poor rains, high food and fuel prices, conflict, animal disease, inflation and poverty.

According to the UNICEF Humanitarian Action Report 2008, there are 16,000 children aged under 14 living with HIV in Lesotho and an estimated 180,000 children orphaned or made vulnerable by AIDS. Some of these children have been forced by the circumstances to head their families and yet there is no programme in place to educate them about HIV.

Cancer care in Africa faces the same challenges as general healthcare, but also needs local data and targeted solutions, says Twalib Ngoma. African countries face many challenges when providing health services in general, and care of cancer patients in particular. Financial constraints are one obvious barrier. But many others exist, and need to be understood by anyone seeking to improve the situation.

With an HIV prevalence of 19 percent -- the highest in the world -- AIDS is having an unprecedented impact on Swaziland. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 years to 31 years, the world's lowest figure, and one in three children are orphaned or left vulnerable from AIDS. Last year, about 40 percent of the population needed food aid.

The soldiers in the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) will be the first men to benefit from a government policy to use male circumcision as a tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS, according to senior health officials. Early in 2008, the Rwandan Ministry of Health declared its intention to include circumcision – scientifically proven to reduce a man's risk of contracting the virus from an infected sexual partner by as much as 60 percent – in its HIV prevention programmes. The voluntary circumcision programme is expected to start in August.

There has been a continuing debate amongst grass root Kenyans as to what is truly causing the high food prices. Theories proposed have ranged from there having been poor harvests due to lack of rain; and the after-effect of the post-elections violence and displacement; the disappearance of traditional foods from the farmers’ options of crops and that the food crisis is a global problem.While there may be some truth in these factors, Kenyans nevertheless see a clear link between the high food prices and corruption.

The wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS
By Elizabeth Pisani Viking Canada,
372 pages, $35

This is an utterly fascinating book. I must admit that it's been growing on me since I read it, the arguments and language reverberating in my mind. Elizabeth Pisani writes with enormous verve and acerbity, her prose alive with anecdote and metaphor. There is, to be sure, a certain adolescent touch, delighting in naughty words and vivid sexual description, but all of that is forgiven in the sweep and force of the narrative. The Wisdom of Whores is a great read.

The title is meant to convey the variety of sexual experience and the savvy that attaches to it. The text is replete with references to "prostitutes, rent boys, pimps and clients ... addicts, cops and rehab workers." The chapter on Indonesia alone is an astonishing foray into the world of female, male and transgendered sex workers, all of them imparting wisdom on AIDS. Even in the preface, Pisani talks of a trip through several Asian countries where "I encountered a world of women with penises who sell anal sex to men who are completely heterosexual. I found men who buy sex from women and sell it to men. I found heroin addicts who fly airplanes and Muslim fundamentalists who run protection rackets for brothels."

Yes, some of it is designed to shock. But as the pages turn, the interlocking universe of bureaucrats and sex work and NGOs and agencies yields fascinating insights into the pandemic. It would be a great mistake to discard Pisani because of the bizarre or the uncomfortable. There are many home truths to be found in the most unlikely of places.

Only three short years after the G8 pledged to ‘make poverty history,’ a global food crisis is making poverty in historically large proportions. And the G8 has so far done nothing to stop it. The ranks of the hungry have swelled to over 950 million this year, and ActionAid estimates that a further 750 million are now at risk of falling into chronic hunger.

At the end of this year, Hivos will commission an external evaluation of its ICT & Media programme "Making Civil Voices Heard", to be carried out in the course of 2009. A call for proposals & Terms of Reference will be circulated in October 2008 to interested evaluation researchers. Would you be interested in this assignment and do you want to receive the Terms of Reference? Please let us know by sending an e-mail with a very brief CV, to Karel Chambille, Hivos Evaluation Manager ([email protected])

Scientists may have finally found out why HIV infection is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, than other regions of the world. American and British scientists say a gene which apparently evolved to protect people from malaria increases their vulnerability to HIV infection by 40 per cent.

Knowledge of sexually transmitted infections and their ability to increase the risk of infection with HIV is “alarmingly” low in rural Tanzania, according to a study published in the June edition of Sexually Transmitted Infections. The researchers found that lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted infections was associated with sexual risk-taking and being HIV-positive.