Ban Ki-moon and the Malawi Model

July 3, 2008

The UN head Ban Ki-moon has an op-ed in the Washington Post, Globe and Mail and the Guardian pushing the current G8 summit on several issues. One of them is agriculture in Africa. He writes:

Begin with the global food crisis. It has many causes, among them a failure to give agricultural development the importance it deserves. What’s needed, in effect, is a second green revolution of the sort than once transformed south-east Asia, this time with a special focus on small farmers in Africa. With the right mix of programs, there is no reason why productivity cannot be doubled within a relatively short span, easing scarcity worldwide. We’ve seen it happen in Malawi, which with international assistance has gone in a few years from famine to become a food exporter.

Was ‘international assistance’ really the reason Malawi achieved food security and could even export food stuff? No:

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain.
…
The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.

So the point Ban Ki-moon is making is a false one. The Malawi government took the right step by ignoring ‘international assistance’ and doing what was the best for its people.

Of course subsidies are inherently problematic as they always come with some corruption. People acquire cheap subsidized fertilizer and sell it to a neighboring country for a 100% profit. Better government control could prevent most of that. In many cases targeted subsidies are a much better policy than to follow the free market advise the usual suspects always try to press upon nations in trouble.

But why is Ban Ki-moon writing this? Is he ill informed and really believes that ‘international assistance’ helped Malawi, or is he, in a twisted way, telling the G8 to stop their free market peddling?

I for one suspect the first to be the case but hope for the second. What is your take?

Posted by b on July 3, 2008 at 09:06 UTC | Permalink

Comments

FARC has an airforce?
Sorry for being OT. However just can not believe that the FARC guerrillas actually believe the arrival of a FARC helicopter. The hostages, like the public and the press will believe anything. But the concocted drama of this great escape does not pass the laugh test. Though good news for the hostages why does the entire world have to laud the corrupt Colombian government?

Posted by: YY | Jul 3 2008 9:35 utc | 1

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
Confucius

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 3 2008 9:40 utc | 2

“In a country where 400,000 people have been laid off in the past few months and even the middle class will have to chose between heating oil and medicine this coming winter, it is a shame to run up a $750,000 credit card bill for shopping and self indulgence when you husband is running for President.”
Pissed-off Diogenes

Posted by: Diogenes | Jul 3 2008 11:56 utc | 3

@YY – I agree – there is a story behind the FARC hostages freed that has yet to be told.

Posted by: b | Jul 3 2008 13:04 utc | 4

Like, Columbian Supreme Court intending to cancel Uribe’s election on charges of corruption, and said Uribe wanting some big propaganda victory so that he can convince the people and continue to rule, even if illegally from now on?
That said, this trick might not go as well as he wished for; a living and free opposition leader can be a serious thorn on his side if she cannot be controlled in a way or another – I suspect he hadn’t a choice and had to free her, alive, instead of letting her die a hostage, as seemingly had been the plan all along.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Jul 3 2008 13:27 utc | 5

The problem here is moral superiority as well as intellectual superiority.
When subsidies are applied in African countries, Western “experts” tend to spontaneously key on the wasteful/corrupt element of the concept. But when same is done in Western countries, the benefits suddenly become self-evident. And this goes across the board on all issues.
Worse, these Western experts never make the effort to identify locals who have a valuable grasp of what the real issues are. In fact they are not very interested in finding out anything that challenges their pre-conceptions.
Fortunately, the colonial structures that obstruct the emergence of better leadership is giving way and more leaders & managers like Bingu wa Mutharika are on the way.
Africa can do very well in agriculture if the right people (in Africa) are acknowledged and not obstructed.
And actually, without doing anything differently, farmers in Africa have always had the overall capacity (and beyond) to produce enough indigenous staples to feed the entire continent. Its distributing the food thats the problem. The food distribution mechanisms are still colonial in nature and favor the imports of expensive food products including wheat/rice/corn (often via “aid-with-strings-attached”) from outside of Africa rather than the development of beneficial bilateral agricultural relationships within Africa.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Jul 3 2008 15:27 utc | 6

no time to expound right now, but ban ki-moon is an empty vessel used to do the bidding of the regular interests
some related materials on africa & agriculture
walden bello: Destroying African Agriculture

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.

ips: Food Crisis Symptom of Dubious Liberalisation

A large number of developing countries have conscientiously implemented World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions and World Trade Organisation (WTO) commitments. They have applied the given structural adjustment policies — and have seen the damaging consequences to their domestic agricultural sector.
The consequence has been the certain erosion of their capacity to produce their own food.
…
..Investment support to farmers was done away with. Small farmers were told to produce for the international market, and their markets were opened to producers from outside. Rather than supporting staple crops, government support went to the export sector. Since all would specialise in the products where they had ‘comparative advantage’, gains were supposed to accrue all round.
But rather than producing winners, millions of the poorest subsistence farmers were knocked out of their own markets. Imports took over what was previously produced by local people. Over the last 20 years, the production capacity in many countries has severely diminished.

ips: Lack of Food Is a “Persistent Myth”

TIERRAMÉRICA: Many public officials and institutions are calling for increased food production to solve the food crisis. What do you think?
MICHEL PIMBERT: It is a persistent myth that there isn’t enough food to feed everyone. There is still enough food grown to feed everyone. Food distribution and income inequity are the real issues.
The FAO (Food and Agricultural Organisation), CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agriculture and Research) and other agriculture research centres are calling for more research on boosting crop yields. That’s more of the same thing. No one is looking at access to food and land. It’s much easier to talk about technology fixes rather than the big picture.

food first: From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty: Urgent call to fix a broken food system

The first major development in the rise of the agri-foods complex was the spread of the industrial model of food production through the “Green Revolution.” Starting in the 1960s, the Green Revolution marketed “technological packages” of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, to developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A project of Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (thereafter financed with public money), the Green Revolution raised yields per acre by developing rice, wheat and maize hybrids that could be densely planted and responded to irrigation and high applications of fertilizer. In the West, world per-capita food production increased by 11%. But the number of hungry people also increased by 11%. This is because the Green Revolution’s technologies were more easily adopted by large-scale farmers who took over rich bottomlands, displacing peasants. Many smallholders, pushed out of agriculture, migrated to the city slums now common throughout the Global South. Others, encouraged by government “land reforms” cleared new agricultural land in tropical forests and on fragile hillsides. Development projects soon followed, offering cheap credit so smallholders could buy the Green Revolution technological packages. In fragile forest and hillside conditions, Green Revolution packages degraded soils rapidly, requiring higher and higher fertilizer applications. Yields fell, and the tremendous diversity of local varieties planted by traditional farmers was reduced by as much as 90%, destroying centuries-old agro-biodiversity. To compensate, more and more forest and hillside land was brought into production, causing massive environmental damage. The Green Revolution, ostensibly a project to save the world from hunger, undermined the ability of the poor to feed themselves by displacing them from their land and degrading the agroecosystems they depended on to produce food.

i’ve linked to multiple sources re the AGRA push on other threads

Posted by: b real | Jul 3 2008 16:02 utc | 7

The whole piece is very standard UN fare to the general public.
What is surprising about it is that it was written at all, for the press. (Kofi made speeches and let the press cherry pick em.) BKM probably didn’t write it himself – such is the nature of the UN – but I think one can feel his touch, either thru oral words being transcribed, or possibly a draft, etc.
The ‘second green revolution’ part is horribly lame, sort of popular double speak, and should not have been included. (The Green Rev = industrialization, mechanization of agri, including Monsanto, water pumping, etc.) It is swiftly scotched in the next sentence with ‘a mix of programs’ – quite – but ‘doubling production’ is vague or technotopic once again; then:
…We must act immediately to get seeds, fertilizers and other agricultural inputs to farmers in vulnerable countries in time for the coming harvests.
…as in Malawi, I suppose.
Next sentence is on trade barriers, and it includes mention of subsidies in the developed world, which is quite unusual.
Who ever heard of Malawi anyway except those who would know what was meant? It is the *only* country mentioned, it really sticks out, and even seems odd, which is probably why ‘international assistance’ was tagged on, to take the sting off.
I suppose it was deliberate, either by the man himself or one of his writing team.
But then, over-interpreting such a short piece is hazardous.
I wrote this before reading the posts. b real’s post just above is grand..and I am no fan of BKM. .. but there are always odd twist and turns, hidden messages, symptoms of slow realization, little digs, etc.

Posted by: Tangerine | Jul 3 2008 16:41 utc | 8

inner city press on BKM = UN’s Ban Dodges Questions While His Spokesperson Blocks and Ignores Them

UNITED NATIONS, July 10 — Returning from a two week tour through Asia, including five days in his native South Korea, Ban Ki-moon on Thursday held a half hour press conference. Again from his opening statement and the questions allowed, one would not know of the growing dissatisfaction about his 18-month tenure from throughout the UN system. As simply three examples, member states in the General Assembly were told they would be consulted before Ban names a new human rights commissioner. Wednesday Ban’s spokesperson said that consultation will only take place after Ban names the winner. The spokesperson, despite having a list of journalists who’d signed up to pose questions, did not allow one on this. Nor on the controversy about Ban’s pending appointment of Rwanda general Karenzi as the number two peacekeeper in Darfur, despite Karenzi being indicted in a Spanish court for war crimes.
…
Only this week at the Security Council stakeout, the Ambassador of Russia, which could veto any second term by Ban, said the Ban was acting unlawfully in reconfiguring the UN Mission in Kosovo, ceding powers to the European Union’s EULEX without Council approval. No question was allowed on this topic, and Ban did not bring it up.
…
Before his left on his two week trip, the UN Staff Union in New York strongly criticized Ban and his appointees. The Geneva Staff Union dropped out of the Coordination committee that Ban has been pushing. None of those issues were addressed; the most recent Town Hall meeting was closed to the press. During the meeting, Inner City Press is informed, a question was asked about why top officials in the UN never face accountability, but rather are transferred and promoted. That’s not what we mean by accountability, was the answer.
Ban’s Spokesperson’s Office controls who can ask questions in the briefing room. Even at at stakeout, the Office has been known to tell the technicians who hold the microphones — technicians whom the Secretariat was ready last month to have replaced by scabs — to not allow the microphone to particular reporters. It’s not if they are trying to channel more difficult questions to themselves to be answered daily or by email: the Office simply leaves unanswered many questions to which responses are promised.
Again just a few examples, merely from the six business days so far in July:
…

Posted by: b real | Jul 11 2008 3:42 utc | 9

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