Our Word is Our Weapon

Here’s a couple of recent articles on the Millennium Villages Project, which I’ve posted about before (here and here): David Biello writing in Scientific American and Sarah Tomlin in Nature. These articles have something for everyone: signs of significant progress in the pilot villages, scepticism about the prospects of scaling up that success when the experts and journalists go home, and Jeffrey Sachs making enough sweeping claims to make William Easterly’s head explode. As hopeful and as wary as anyone are the villagers themselves, as the final paragraph of Tomlin’s article shows:

From Sachs to the president to the governor to the mayor, the ambitions for transforming the country are vast. But in Kagenge, despite the good rains, the villagers themselves remain wary. They are not as confident that they will achieve rapid progress as the project leaders. Anxiety about what to do with the harvest surplus is high. Celestin Ndahayo and other farmers worry about whether they can really afford both to sell corn and store enough for food security; they are not sure they believe Ndahiro’s forecasts for the yields of their smallholdings. And what if the rains don’t come next year? In his experience, says one umudugudu farmer, when a project is here, then the rains come. Back in 2001, an organization helped them to plant cassava and sweet potato and the rains came. But when they left the rains stopped. So as long as the Millennium Villages project is here he believes it will rain again. He doesn’t believe, yet, that his village can learn to flourish in the project’s absence.

What a good idea: the ID21 service of Institute of Development Studies is running a series of articles summarising ‘classics’ of development research. Here’s the initial batch:

Unfair trade: commodity producing poor countries lose out

‘Industrialised and developing countries do not benefit equally from
international trade and investment.’ This was the argument Prof Hans
Singer put forward in 1950. He argued that poorer countries became
locked into exporting primary products (food and raw materials) to
support industrial advance in richer countries. This resulted in a
long-term transfer of income from poor to rich countries

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The meaning of development

The focus on national income as a target for achieving poverty reduction
avoided the real problems of development, argued Professor Sir Dudley
Seers, in 1967. He attempted to redefine how development was measured
and offers policy lessons which are particularly foretelling for today
in light of the Millennium Development Goals.

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Redistribution with growth

Redistribution with growth explores ways in which macroeconomic growth
can be combined over time with measures of redistribution to improve
employment, reduce poverty and achieve more equitable income
distribution. Professor Sir Hans Singer first developed this idea, on
the ILO Employment Mission to Kenya which he led jointly with Richard
Jolly in 1972. The concept was then developed further in a joint study
two years later by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and World
Bank: Redistribution with Growth.

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Why poor people stay poor: urban bias in world development

Why have growth and development in poor countries failed to improve the
welfare of the poorest people? This question was raised by Michael
Lipton in 1977. He then argued that poverty persists mainly because
development was designed by and for people in urban areas. Most poor
people lived in rural areas, but the towns and cities got a far larger
share of national resources. This, he argued, was not only unjust but
also inefficient.

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Rural development: putting the last first

The extremes of rural poverty in the third world are an outrage,’ argued
Robert Chambers, a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK in
1983. Poor rural people are largely unseen by ‘outsiders’ - people who
are themselves neither rural nor poor, such as aid workers, donors,
government staff and researchers.

For once, I agree with Tim Worstall: rich countries are more resilient, because they are more diversified, intraconnected and wealthy. Look at the different impact of a drought:

we appear to be having (despite the interruptions to Wimbledon) something of a drought in SE England this year. People using standpipes is hardly the same level of catastrophe as when the rains fail in poor rural peasant societies and a significant portion of the population die as a result.

All true, so I’m surprised that Tim goes on to dismiss the danger posed to the same poorer, less resilient societies by global warming:

This is the rationale behind one set of suggested actions to deal with climate change: do nothing. As the IPCC Third Report assumes, in 2100 the entire world will be at current US levels of wealth or more and our descendents will have a much more resilient society capable of dealing with the 30 cm sea level rise, and the couple of degrees temperature rise, predicted.

Now, let’s leave aside the fact that there are many scenarios posited in the IPCC report and the ‘entire world’ income figure Tim is reporting is more of an average, which is rather different. My point is that there is a very good reasons why the assumption Tim says is underlying the IPCC’s climate change model won’t be borne out for the poorest region of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa: because its per capita income growth has been static over the last 25 years rather than annual 4% required to get to current US levels of income by 2100, and even if the upward trend of the last few years is not a blip, climate change is expected to significantly reduce future growth.

It would be completely wrong to conclude that because Africa might not get to the posited rich-world income level by 2100, global warming won’t happen. It’s already happening, due mainly to the emissions of the richer world regions, and it’s already had a serious effect:

O’Reilly and colleagues reported in the 14 August 2003 issue of Nature that climate change had contributed to a 30% decline in Lake Tanganyika fish stocks over the past 80 years. Such declines can be disastrous for the villages in the region, where the average income is less than US$250 per year, and where the people depend on the fish from these lakes for all of their protein.

Meanwhile, there is likely to be a huge increase in land aridity as a result of climate change. The knock-on effects will probably not be pretty:

Decreasing pastoral lands, decreasing available tillable land, decreasing wild game, and decreasing available water all add up to more strife, Scholes says. “Subtropical dry, arid areas are going to be a huge source of conflict over the next half-century because we still have very, very high population growth rates in those areas, very low economic growth rates, and deteriorating environment,” he says.

It’s ironic that the world region which has contributed least to anthropogenic global warming will probably be the one to suffer most from it. If that debt doesn’t compel us to act, I don’t know what can. Global warming has started, but future warming can still be reduced, and the impacts mitigated with help. ‘Do nothing’ is not an option.

William Easterly advises Warren Buffett;

It’s not about the money … aid flow reflects the cost of providing services for the poor, not the value of those services.

He’s right, but probably not in the way he thinks. Aid-financed investments have a high rate of return, aid to health programmes has saved millions of lives and overall, aid has a considerable positive impact on growth. The value of aid is generally much greater than its cost.