Freeing African Trade

David Cameron is calling for a 'free trade area' in Africa to increase GDP across the continent by an estimated $62 billion a year.  He says that this can be achieved primarily by cutting red tape and reducing tariffs in African countries.  I recently did a survey of community-based, income-generating projects in Malawi and discovered that these worthy activities were not benefiting the participants financially because the potential customers were too poor to buy their products.  


Is there a danger that this could happen regionally?

South Africa is currently the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has a well-developed industrial sector, while all her neighbours depend on agriculture, a sector which is severely under-developed. This is despite the fact that investment in agriculture underpins a developing economy by creating jobs and producing food and raw materials.

A report by the Global Harvest Initiative, entitled Enhancing Private Sector Involvement in Agriculture and Rural Infrastructure Development, estimates the overall agriculture investment gap in developing countries at nearly $90 billion annually.

African producers continue to be constrained by unfair import tariffs that protect producers in Europe and the USA.

Support for a free trade area in Africa should not be a substitute for reforming the Common Agricultural Policy or reviving the Doha Round talks to rebalance world trade in favour of developing countries.

Megacities

I just watched ‘Andrew Marr’s Megacities’.  Mr Marr said that megacities are the future and he obviously found them to be extremely exciting places.  However, he did point out that they have huge food footprints.  For example, London needs to produce food on an area that is equivalent in size to the whole of the UK.  His solution was to grow food indoors, hydroponically – this is probably okay for vegetables but I think it would be difficult to produce wheat and beef (essential for the fast-food burger) with such a system.…

A report commissioned by the Greater London Authority claims that Londoners eat a staggering eight billion meals a year and produce nearly 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.


Can this really be our future?  

Global warming puts slum dwellers at risk of extreme weather events and severe water shortages

Despite contributing little or nothing to the world’s Green House Gas emissions, slum dwellers are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change - especially flooding, landslides and infectious diseases due to lack of clean water. 

Almost 1 billion people or 32% of the world’s urban population already lives in slums; this number is expected to rise to 1.8 billion by 2030.

Slums are defined as areas with

• Inadequate access to safe water;

• Inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure;

• Poor structural quality of housing;

• Overcrowding; and

• Insecure residential status

62% of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa are slum dwellers; ironically, many of these people have been forced off their farm land due to declining rainfall,  resulting from climate change.  All slum dwellers suffer from water shortage, which is defined as having less than 100L per person per day.

Recent computer modelling shows that 150 million people who live in mega cities such as Abidjan, Cotonou, Lagos, Beijing, Delhi, Mexico City and Tehran, currently endure perennial water shortage and by 2050, demographic growth will increase this figure to almost 1 billion people.

Furthermore, 30-50% less water will be available in Africa if there is a 3˚C temperature rise and this will cause water shortage for an additional 100 million urbanites.

According to the World Bank, world-wide demand for water is doubling every 21 years, more in some regions - this means that water supply cannot remotely keep pace with demand, as populations soar and cities explode.

How the scramble to score Millennium Goals has increased hunger and poverty in the rural areas

The world’s major donors are continuing to strive to meet the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015.  The ultimate goal is to halve world poverty during this time.  DFID’s recent review confirms that the UK is targeting universal education, maternal health and child mortality in order to achieve Goals 2, 3, 4 and 5. 

Unfortunately none of the MDGs relate directly to the agricultural sector and donors have realised that it is quicker and easier to reach these goals if efforts are focussed in the overcrowded, poverty stricken, urban slums of Africa and India.  Such efforts also have the advantage of contributing to Goal 7, i.e. improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.  This narrow approach has led to the neglect of the rural poor and a massive and accelerating increase in rural to urban migration over the past decade.

It was expected that Goal 1: the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, could be achieved by creating economic growth in urban areas, leading to ‘full and productive employment and decent work for all’.

This expectation has been thwarted by the recent global economic crisis which has caused a massive rise in unemployment in developing countries.  According to the UN ‘more workers have been forced into vulnerable employment and find themselves and their families living in extreme poverty’; ‘rising food prices have meant that progress to end hunger has been stymied in most regions’.  The neglect of the agricultural sector has resulted in ‘children in rural areas being nearly twice as likely to be underweight as those in urban areas’ and almost 1 billion people, worldwide, are still suffering from chronic hunger.  

As a result, DFID has been urged to increase its funding of agricultural research in order to increase smallholder food production.

According to IFAD, global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon – with 70 per cent of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people living in rural areas.  Key areas of concern are Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

This means that future Development Goals should address the many factors that perpetuate the marginalisation of rural economies and lead to mass urbanisation:  Rural women, men and youth need to be able to participate in economic growth, and develop ways to better deal with risk.  Greater investment and attention are needed in infrastructure and utilities: particularly roads, electricity, water supply and renewable energy.  Also important are rural services, including education, health care, financial services, communication and information and communication technology services, which will turn rural areas from backwaters into places where the youth of today will want to live and will be able to fulfil their aspiration.

The vicious cycle of low productivity and exposure to price hikes

Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food says that the urbanisation trend can be slowed by implementing a form of sustainable, low input agriculture, known as agroecology, as this would improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and preserve healthy ecosystems for future generations.

"In the short term, lower import tariffs to let in food ensure urban populations are fed, but in the long term it is a disaster because local farmers can't compete," says de Schutter, adding that cheap food imports make the country extremely vulnerable to price hikes in the global markets – such as those we are now seeing in North Africa.

The cycle of poverty that is driving urbanisation

DFID Review defies expert advice and fails to address food security crisis

Despite the looming world food crisis and the fact that one billion people are already undernourished world-wide, DFID’s new funding priorities completely exclude all mention of the need to improve food security or support smallholder agriculture. 

The recent expert report on Food and Farming has lamented DFID’s long neglect of smallholder farmers and urged greater priority be given to rural development and agriculture as a driver of broad-based income growth, and to provide more incentives to the agricultural sector to address malnutrition and gender inequalities.  Amongst their recommendations for low and middle income countries are the revitalisation of the extension services, the facilitation of market access and the strengthening of land rights.  

Last year, a report sponsored by the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development, also criticised DFID for its poor record of funding agriculture, particularly African agriculture, which is just 0.3% of the total DFID budget.  Twenty-nine local and international experts in agriculture and food security expressed concern that DFID is not taking advantage of the considerable agricultural expertise that is present in British institutions to seize upon the opportunity to take the lead in such a vital sector for rural development. 

In his preface to the report, FAO’s goodwill ambassador said that agriculture must be put back at the top of the international development agenda because of the crisis that is stalking the small-scale farms and rural areas of the world, where 70 percent of the world’s hungry live and work. 

In recent times UK’s pubic funds have been channelled through multilateral, mainly UN institutions, such as FAO and UN Habitat, which DFID has simultaneously sought to reform. 

One of DFID’s priorities has been to support UN Habitat’s work in improving the lives of slum-dwellers in an effort to reach the poverty reduction Millennium Goal.  The UK government considers that urbanisation is positive because ‘cities are the engines of economic growth’ in a globalised world.  

This policy is now in disarray following the Coalition Government’s recent review: 

DFID will soon cut the funding of UN Habitat because it has failed to prove that it was delivering significant change on the ground.  There are also threats to cut funds to the FAO, if its performance does not improve. 

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food said recently:

‘Only by supporting small producers can we help break the vicious cycle that leads from rural poverty to the expansion of urban slums, in which poverty breeds more poverty.’