Category: Africa

Conflict and El Nino: How did this get through peer review?

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I opened my email this morning to a message from a colleague that linked to a new study in Nature: “Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate.” (the actual article is paywalled).  Well, that is assertive . . . especially because despite similar claims in the past, I have yet to see any study make such a definitive, general connection successfully.  Look, the problem here is simple: the connection between conflict and the environment is shaky, at best. For all of the attention that Thomas Homer-Dixon gets for his work, the simple fact is that for interstate conflict, there are more negative cases than positive case . . . that is, where a particular environmental stressor exists, conflict DOES NOT happen far more often than it does.  Intrastate conflict is much, much more complex, though there are some indications that the environment does play a triggering/exacerbating role in conflict at this scale.
Sadly, this article does not live up to its claims.  It is horrifically flawed, to the point that I cannot see how its conclusions actually tell us anything about the relationship between El Nino and conflict, let alone climate and conflict.  Even a cursory reading reveals myriad problems with the framing of the research design, the regression design, and the interpretation of the regression outputs (though, to be honest, the interpretation really didn’t matter, as whatever was coming out of the regressions was beyond salvation anyway) that lead me to question how it even got through peer review.  My quick take:
Let’s start with the experimental design:

… We define annual conflict risk (ACR) in a collection of countries to be the probability that a randomly selected country in the set experiences conflict onset in a given year. Importantly, this ACR measure removes trends due to the growing number of countries.

In an impossible but ideal experiment, we would observe two identical Earths, change the global climate of one and observe whether ACR in the two Earths diverged. In practice, we can approximate this experiment if the one Earth that we do observe randomly shifts back and forth between two different climate states. Such a quasi-experiment is ongoing and is characterized by rapid shifts in the global climate between La Niña and El Niño.

This design makes sense only if you assume that the random back-and-forth shifting did not trigger adaptive livelihoods decisions that, over time, would have served to mitigate the impact of these state shifts (I am being generous here and assuming the authors do not think that changes in rainfall directly cause people to start attacking one another, though they never really make clear the mechanisms linking climate states and human behavior).  The only way to assume non-adaptive livelihoods is to know next to nothing about how people make livelihoods decisions.  Assuming that these livelihoods are somehow optimized for one state or the other such that a state change would create surprising new conditions that introduced new stresses is more or less to assume that the populations affected by these changes were somehow perpetually surprised by the state change (even though it happened fairly frequently).  After 14 years of studying rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, I find that absolutely impossible to believe.  Flipping back and forth between states does not give you two Earths, it gives you one Earth that presented certain known challenges to people’s livelihoods.

To identify a relation between the global climate and ACR, we compare societies with themselves when they are exposed to different states of the global climate. Heuristically, a society observed during a La Niña is the ‘control’ for that same society observed during an El Niño ‘treatment’.

No, it is not.  This is a false parsing of the world, and as a result they are regressing junk.
This is not the only problem with the research design. Another huge problem with this study is its treatment of the impact of ENSO-related state changes on people.  These state changes in the climate do not have the same impact everywhere, even in strongly teleconnected places.  The ecology and broader environment of the tropics is hardly monolithic (though it is mostly treated this way), and a strong teleconnection can mean either drought or flooding . . . in other words, the el Nino teleconnection creates a variety of climatological phenomena that play out in a wide range of environments that are exploited by an even larger number of livelihoods strategies, creating myriad environmental and human impacts.  These impacts cannot be aggregated into a broad driver of conflict – basically, their entire regression (which, mind you, is framed around a junk “counterfactual”) is populated with massively over-aggregated data such that any causal signal is completely lost in the noise.
Most reasonable approaches to the environment-conflict connection now treat environmental stresses as an exacerbating factor, or even a trigger, for other underlying factors.  Such an approach seems loosely borne out in the Nature article.  The authors note that in the “teleconnected group, low-income countries are the most responsive to ENSO, whereas similarly low income countries in the weakly affected group do not respond significantly to ENSO.”  This certainly sounds like a broad stressor (state change in the climate) is influencing other, more directly pertinent drivers of conflict.  But then we get to their statement of limitations:

Although we observe that the ACR of low-income countries is most strongly associated with ENSO, we cannot determine if (1) they respond strongly because they are low-income, (2) they are low income because they are sensitive to ENSO, or (3) they are sensitive to ENSO and low income for some third unobservable reason. Hypothesis (1) is supported by evidence that poor countries lack the resources to mitigate the effects of environmental changes. However, hypothesis (2) is plausible because ENSO existed before the invention of agriculture and conflict induces economic underperformance.

Even here, they have really oversimplified things: the way this is framed, either the environment causes the conflict (pretty much established by the literature that this is not the case), the environment causes economic problems that cause the conflict, or it is something else entirely.  Every other possible factor in the world is in that third category, and most current work on this subject concentrate on other drivers of conflict (only some of which are economic) and how they intersect with environmental stresses.
This paper is a mess.  But it got into print and made waves in a lot of popular outlets (for example, here and here).  Why?  Because it is reviving the long-dead corpse of environmental determinism…people really want the environment to in some way determine human behavior (we like simple explanations for complex events), even if that determination takes place via influences nuanced by local environmental variation, etc.  Environmental determinism fell apart in the face of empirical evidence in the 1930s.  But it makes for a good, simple narrative of explanation where we can just blame conflict on climate cycles that are beyond our control, and look past the things like colonialism that created the foundation for modern political economies of conflict.  This absolves the Global North of responsibility for these conflicts, and obscures the many ways in which these conflicts could be addressed productively.



Posted on by Ed 15

Why should the aid/relief/development community care about global environmental change (Pt. 3)?

OK, ok, you say: I get it, global environmental change matters to development/aid/relief.  But aside from thinking about project-specific intersections between the environment and development/aid/relief, what sort of overarching challenges does global environmental change pose to the development community?  Simply put, I think that the inevitability of various forms of environmental change (a level of climate change cannot be stopped now, certain fisheries are probably beyond recovery, etc.) over the next 50 or so years forces the field of development to start thinking very differently about the design and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects . . . and this, in turn, calls into question the value of things like randomized control trials for development.
In aid/development we tend to be oriented to relatively short funding windows in which we are supposed to accomplish particular tasks (which we measure through output indicators, like the number of judges trained) that, ideally, change the world in some constructive manner (outcome indicators, like a better-functioning judicial system).  Outputs are easier to deliver and measure than outcomes, and they tend to operate on much shorter timescales – which makes them perfect for end-of-project reporting even though they often bear little on the achievement of the desired outcomes that motivated the project in the first place (does training X judges actually result in a better functioning judicial system?  What if the judges were not the problem?).  While there is a serious push in the development community to move past outputs to outcomes (which I generally see as a very positive trend), I do not see a serious conversation about the different timescales on which these two sorts of indicators operate.  Outputs are very short-term.  Outcomes can take generations.  Obviously this presents significant practical challenges to those who do development work, and must justify their expenditures on an annual basis.
This has tremendous implications, I think, for development practice in the here and now – especially in development research.  For example, I think this pressure to move to outcomes but deliver them on the same timescale as outputs has contributed to the popularity of the randomized control trials for development (RCT4D) movement.  RCT4D work gathers data in a very rigorous manner, and subjects it to interesting forms of quantitative analysis to determine the impact of a particular intervention on a particular population.  As my colleague Marc Bellemare says, RCTs establish “whether something works, not how it works.”
The vast majority of RCT4D studies are conducted across a few months to years, directly after the project is implemented.  Thus, the results seem to move past outputs to impacts without forcing everyone to wait a very long time to see how things played out.  This, to me, is both a strength and a weakness of the approach . . . though I never hear anyone talking about it as a weakness.  The RCT4D approach seems to suggest that the evaluation of project outcomes can be effectively done almost immediately, without need for long-term follow-up.  This sense implicitly rests on the forms of interpretation and explanation that undergird the RCT4D approach – basically, what I see as an appallingly thin approach to the interpretation of otherwise interesting and rigorously gathered data. My sense of this interpretation is best captured by Andrew Gelman’s (quoting Fung) use of the term “story time”, which he defines as a “pivot from the quantitative finding to the speculative explanation.” It seems that many practitioners of RCT4D seem to think that story time is unavoidable . . . which to me reflects a deep ignorance of the concerns for rigor and validity that have existed in the qualitative research community for decades.  Feel free to check the methods section of any of my empirically-based articles (i.e. here and here): they address who I interviewed, why I interviewed them, how I developed interview questions, and how I knew that my sample size had grown large enough to feel confident that it was representative of the various phenomena I was trying to understand.  Toward the end of my most recent work in Ghana, I even ran focus groups where I offered my interpretations of what was going on back to various sets of community members, and worked with them to strengthen what I had right and correct what I had wrong.  As a result, I have what I believe is a rigorous, highly nuanced understanding of the social causes of the livelihoods decisions and outcomes that I can measure in various ways, qualitative and quantitative, but I do not have a “story time” moment in there.
The point here is that “story time”, as a form of explanation, rests on uncritical assumptions about the motivations for human behavior that can make particular decisions or behaviors appear intelligible but leave the door open for significant misinterpretations of events on the ground.  Further, the very framing of what “works” in the RCT4D approach is externally defined by the person doing the evaluation/designing the project, and is rarely revised in the face of field realities . . . principally because when a particular intervention does not achieve some externally-defined outcome, it is deemed “not to have worked.”  That really tends to shut down continued exploration of alternative outcomes that “worked” in perhaps unpredictable ways for unexpected beneficiaries.  In short, the RCT4D approach tends to reinforce the idea that development is really about delivering apolitical, technical interventions to people to address particular material needs.
The challenge global environmental change poses to the RCT4D randomista crowd is that of the “through ball” metaphor I raised in my previous post.  Simply put, identifying “what works” without rigorously establishing why it worked is broadly useful if you make two pretty gigantic assumptions: First, you have to assume that the causal factors that led to something “working” are aspects of universal biophysical and social processes that are translatable across contexts.  If this is not true, an RCT only gives you what works for a particular group of people in a particular place . . . which is not really that much more useful than just going and reading good qualitative ethnographies.  If RCTs are nothing more than highly quantified case studies, they suffer from the same problem as ethnography – they are hard to aggregate into anything meaningful at a broader scale.  And yes, there are really rigorous qualitative ethnographies out there . . .
Second, you have to assume that the current context of the trial is going to hold pretty much constant going forward.  Except, of course, global environmental change more or less chucks that idea for the entire planet.  In part, this is because global environmental change portends large, inevitable biophysical changes in the world.  Just because something works for improving rain-fed agricultural outputs today does not mean that the same intervention will work when the enabling environmental conditions, such as rainfall and temperature, change over the next few decades.  More importantly, though, these biophysical changes will play out in particular social contexts to create particular impacts on populations, who will in turn develop efforts to address those impacts. Simply put, when we introduce a new crop today and it is taken up and boosts yields, we know that it “worked” by the usual standards of agricultural development and extension.  But the take-up of new crops is not a function of agricultural ecology – there are many things that will grow in many places, but various social factors ranging from the historical (what crops were introduced via colonialism) to gender (who grows what crops and why) are what lead to particular farm compositions.  For example, while tree crops (oil palm, coconut, various citrus, acacia for charcoal) are common on farms around the villages in which I have worked in Ghana, almost none of these trees are found on women’s farms.  The reasons for this are complex, and link land tenure, gender roles, and household power relations into livelihoods strategies that balance material needs with social imperatives (for extended discussions, see here and here, or read my book).
Unless we know why that crop was taken up, we cannot understand if the conditions of success now will exist in the future . . . we cannot tell if what we are doing will have a durable impact.  Thus, under the most reliable current scenario for climate change in my Ghanaian research context, we might expect the gradual decline in annual precipitation, and the loss of the minor rainy season, to make tree crops (which tend to be quite resilient in the face of fluctuating precipitation) more and more attractive.  However, tree crops challenge the local communal land tenure system by taking land out of clan-level recirculation, and allowing women to plant them would further challenge land tenure by granting them direct control over access to land (which they currently lack).  Altering the land tenure system would, without question, set off a cascade of unpredictable social changes that would be seen in everything from gender roles to the composition of farms.  There is no way to be sure that any development intervention that is appropriate to the current context will be even functional in that future context.  Yet any intervention we put into place today should be helping to catalyze long-term changes . . .
Simply put: Global environmental change makes clear the limitations of our current thinking on aid/development (of which RCT4D is merely symptomatic).   Just like RCTs, our general framing of development does not move us any closer to understanding the long-term impact of our interventions.  Further, the results of RCTs are not generalizable past the local context (which most good randomistas already know), limiting their ability to help us transform how we do development.  In a world of global environmental change, our current approaches to development just replicate our existing challenges: they don’t really tell us if what we are doing will be of any lasting benefit, or even teach us general lessons about how to deliver short-term benefits in a rigorous manner.
 
Next up: The Final Chapter – Fixing It



Posted on by Ed 0

Savings is a social choice, too . . .

Marc Bellemare’s blog pointed me to an interesting paper by Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson titled “Why Don’t the Poor Save More? Evidence from Health Savings Experiments.”  It is an interesting paper, taking a page from the RCT4D literature to test some different tools for savings in four Kenyan villages.  I’m not going to wade into the details of the paper or its findings here (they find some tools to be more effective than others at promoting savings for health expenditures), because they are not what really caught me about this paper.  Instead, what struck me was the absence of a serious consideration of “the social” in the framing of the questions asked and the results.  Dupas and Robinson expected three features to impact health savings: adequate storage facilities/technology, the ability to earmark funds, and the level of social commitment of the participant.  The social context of savings (or, more accurately, barriers to savings) are treated in what I must say is a terribly dismissive way [emphases are mine]:

a secure storage technology can enable individuals to avoid carrying loose cash on their person and thus allow people to keep some physical distance between themselves and their money. This may make it easier to resist temptations, to borrow the terminology in Banerjee and Mullainathan (2010), or unplanned expenditures, as many of our respondents call them. While these unplanned expenditures include luxury items such as treats, another important category among such unplanned expenditures are transfers to others.

A storage technology can increase the mental costs associated with unplanned expenditures, thereby reducing such expenditures. Indeed, if people use the storage technology to save towards a specic goal, such as a health goal in our study, people may consider the money saved as unavailable for purposes other than the specic goal – this is what Thaler (1990) coined mental accounting. By enabling such mental accounting, a designated storage place may give people the strength to resist frivolous expenditures as well as pressure to share with others, including their spouse.

I have seen many cases of unplanned expenditures to others in my fieldwork.  Indeed, my village-based field crews in Ghana used to ask for payment on as infrequent a basis as possible to avoid exactly these sorts of expenditures.  They would plan for large needed purchases, work until they had earned enough for that purchase, then take payment and immediately make the purchase, making their income illiquid before family members could call upon them and ask for loans or handouts.
However, the phrasing of Dupas and Robinson strikes the anthropologist/ geographer in me as dismissive.  These expenses are seen as “frivolous”, things that should be “resisted”.  The authors never consider the social context of these expenditures – why people agree to make them in the first place.  There seems to be an implicit assumption here that people don’t know how to manage their money without the introduction of new tools, and that is not at all what I have seen (albeit in contexts other than Kenya).  Instead, I saw these expenditures as part of a much larger web of social relations that implicates everything from social status to gender roles – in this context, the choice to give out money instead of saving it made much more sense.
In short, it seems to me that Dupas and Robinson are treating these savings technologies as apolitical, purely technical interventions.  However, introducing new forms of savings also intervenes in social relations at scales ranging from the household to the extended family to the community.  Thus, the uptake of these forms of savings will be greatly effected by contextual factors that seem to have been ignored here.  Further, the durability of the behavioral changes documented in this study might be much better predicted and understood – from my perspective, the declining use of these technologies over the 33 month scope of the project was completely predictable (the decline, that is, not the size of the decline).  Just because a new technology enables savings that might result in a greater standard of living for the individual or household does not mean that the technology will be seen as desirable – instead, that standard of living must also work within existing social roles and relations if these new behaviors are to endure.  Therefore, we cannot really explain the declining use of these technologies over time . . . yet development is, to me, about catalyzing enduring change.  While this study shows that the introduction of these technologies has at least a short term transformative effect on savings behavior, I’m not convinced this study does much to advance our understanding of how to catalyze changes that will endure.



Posted on by Ed 0

Remedies for the Horn of Africa Famine? Delivering Development…differently

A number of folks have contacted me asking for a post that discusses how we might address the rapidly worsening famine in the Horn of Africa. In short, folks want to know what is being done, and what they can do, both in terms of the immediate famine and to prevent this from happening again.
First, in addressing the acute situation right now: please understand that aid agencies are moving as fast as they possibly can where they possibly can. There are a lot of challenges in southern Somalia, and these political-logistical hurdles matter greatly because the only remedy for the immediate situation is massive relief efforts to address the acute food insecurity in the area. There are complex logistics behind where those supplies might come from. That said, agencies are already moving to preposition aid materials as best they can.
If you want to help with the immediate relief effort, send money. Yes, money. Don’t send clothes, shoes, or any other stuff. It’s hard and expensive to deliver, and usually the donation of material goods just screws up local economies, making recovery from the crisis much harder and prolonged. Look into the groups, such as the Red Cross and the World Food Program, that are on the ground delivering aid. Examine their philosophies and programs, and donate to those you can agree with. There is a world of advice on donating to aid organizations out there on the blogs and twitter, so do a little research before donating. Oh, and please, please stay the hell out of the Horn of Africa, as you’ll just get in the way of highly trained, experienced people who are working under enough strain. I will make an exception for those with experience in emergency relief work – feel free to work through your networks to see if you are needed. If you don’t have a network to work through, you shouldn’t be going. It’s really that simple.
The question of how we will prevent the next famine is an open one. In my personal opinion (which, incidentally, counts for exactly nothing right now), addressing the causes of this famine, and the continuing sources of insecurity in this region, are going to require a rather different approach to development than that we have taken to this point. In my book (Delivering Development – hence the title of the post) I argue that part of the reason that development programs don’t end up solving the challenges that lead to things like famine is because we fundamentally misunderstand how development and globalization work. We are going to have to step back and move beyond technical fixes to particular challenges, and start to think about development as a catalyst for change. This means thinking broadly about what changes we want to see in the region, and how our resources might be used to initiate processes that bring those changes about. As I keep telling my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention. Even putting a borehole in a village invokes local politics – who gathered the water before? Who gathers it now? Who can access the borehole, and who cannot? If the borehole has resulted in the creation of free time for whoever is responsible for water collection, what do they do with that free time? The answers to these questions and dozens of others will vary from place to place, but they shape the outcome of that borehole.
At the same time, such a process requires redefining the “we” in the sentence “thinking broadly about what changes we want to see in the region . . .,” because it really doesn’t matter what people, living in the United States or anywhere else outside the Horn of Africa, want to see in the region. It’s not their region. Instead, this “we” is going to have to emerge from a real partnership between those who live in the Horn of Africa, their governments, and the aid agencies with the resources to make particular programs and projects happen. For example, we are going to have to use our considerable science and technology capacity to really explore the potential of mobile communications as a source of rapidly-updated, geolocatable information about conditions on the ground to which people are responding with their livelihoods strategies. However, this technology and data will only be useful if it is interpreted into programs in concert with the sources of that data: people who are already managing tremendous challenges with few resources. Information about rainfall is just a data point, until we place it into social context – whose crops are most impacted by the absence/overabundance of water? Whose boreholes will dry up first? Whose cattle will be the first to die off? You can see how even changes in rainfall are nothing more than catalysts for local social process, as the answers to these latter questions will vary dramatically, but in the context of trying to understand how things will play out, they are far, far more important than simple biophysical measures of the environment (or quantitative analyses of the economy, for that matter).
In other words, I think that any effort to really address the next famine before it happens is going to be long and extraordinarily involved – and is going to require the help of agencies, implementing partners, academics, affected governments, and the people on the ground living through these challenges. It sounds utopian . . . but it is not. It is necessary. To end up doing the Horn of Africa famine dance again in a few years for lack of ambition, or because of an unwillingness to take a hard look at how we think about development and how it does not work, is an outcome I cannot accept. We will be judged by history for how we respond (if you have doubts, feel free to read Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts and look at how the British come off).



Posted on by Ed 6

Drought does not equal famine

After reading a lot of news and blog posts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, I feel the need to make something clear: the drought in the Horn of Africa is not the cause of the famine we are seeing take shape in southern Somalia.  We are being pounded by a narrative of this famine that more or less points to the failure of seasonal rains as its cause . . . which I see as a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.
First, I recommend that anyone interested in this situation – or indeed in food security and famine more generally, to read Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts.  It is a very readable account of massive famines in the Victorian era that lays out the necessary intersection of weather, markets and politics to create tragedy – and also makes clear the point that rainfall alone is poorly correlated to famine.  For those who want a deeper dive, have a look at the lit review (pages 15-18) of my article “Postmodern Conceptualizations, Modernist Applications: Rethinking the Role of Society in Food Security” to get a sense of where we are in contemporary thinking on food security.  The long and short of it is that food insecurity is rarely about absolute supplies of food – mostly it is about access and entitlements to existing food supplies.  The HoA situation does actually invoke outright scarcity, but that scarcity can be traced not just to weather – it is also about access to local and regional markets (weak at best) and politics/the state (Somalia lacks a sovereign state, and the patchy, ad hoc governance provided by al Shabaab does little to ensure either access or entitlement to food and livelihoods for the population).
For those who doubt this, look at the FEWS NET maps I put in previous posts (here and here).  Famine stops at the Somali border.  I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have.  Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya.  Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet.
This is not to say that rainfall doesn’t matter – it certainly does.  But it is not the most important thing.  However, when we focus on rainfall variability exclusively, we end up in discussions and arguments that detract from understanding what went wrong here, and what we might do going forward.  Yes, the drought reflects a climate extreme . . . but this extreme is not that stunningly anomalous in this part of the world – we are getting similar (but not quite as bad) results quite often these days.  Indeed, these results seem to be coming more frequently, and appear to be tied to a shift in the climate of the region – and while it is a bit soon to say this definitively, this climate shift is very likely is a product of anthropogenic climate change.  So, one could indirectly argue that the climate change (mostly driven by big emitters in the Global North) is having a terrible impact on the poorest and weakest in the Global South.  It will take a while to make this a firm argument, though.
On the other hand, it is clear that politics and markets have failed the people of Somalia – and the rainfall just pushed a very bad situation over the precipice into crisis.  Thus, this is a human crisis first and foremost, whatever you think of anthropogenic climate change.  Politics and markets are human inventions, and the decisions that drive them are also human.  We can’t blame this famine on the weather – we need to be looking at everything from local and national politics that shape access and entitlements to food to global food markets that have driven the price of needed staples up across the world, thus curtailing access for the poorest.  The bad news: Humans caused this.  The good news: If we caused it, we can prevent the next one.



Posted on by Ed 39

Further understanding the Horn of Africa Famine

We continue to scramble here – believe me, we are scrambling – the sheer volume of work taking place is staggering.  In the meantime, please understand that as bad as things are at the moment, the relief effort MUST be done right because a) things are about to get much worse and b) they will stay worse, at least until December.  We are trying not to sacrifice productive efforts to address the next 3-5 months in this region.  To illustrate, two maps.  The first is a map of current conditions:

As you can see, the two affected areas in southern Somalia (the Bakool agropastoral livelihood zones and all areas of Lower Shabelle) are highlighted.  These are currently the only places where we have hit levels of suffering high enough to be labeled famine.  Everywhere labeled “emergency” is pretty dire, but not a famine.  Unfortunately, this situation has acquired momentum – as FEWS-NET summarizes:

The total failure of the October-December Deyr rains (secondary season) and the poor performance of the April-June Gu rains (primary season) have resulted in crop failure, reduced labor demand, poor livestock body conditions, and excess animal mortality.  The resulting decline in cereal availability and ongoing trade restrictions have subsequently pushed local cereal prices to record levels and substantially reduced household purchasing power in all livelihood zones.

In other words, there is little local food available, no real jobs to earn money to buy imported food, and the livestock are dying, meaning livestock owners cannot sell them off for food (and they are not so great for eating once they get emaciated enough to die).  This means that the resources people normally use to address challenges such as we are seeing in Somalia right now are being drawn down very, very rapidly – they are running out of things to sell, and therefore things to eat.  On top of all of this, we cannot get in to these areas with our aid – so we cannot do anything, at the moment, to stop this backslide.  The result is reflected in this map:

This reflects FEWS-NET’s projections for the outcomes of this backslide in August/September.  As you can see, all of southern Somalia will soon fall into famine conditions.  If we cannot get in there before then, our interventions will not be as effective as they could be . . . it is much easier to fight a small fire than to put out a burning house.
An interesting thing to note from these maps (I will post on this at length soon) – they show the importance of development.  Where we could do development work (Ethiopia and Kenya), we do not have famine.  Yes, things are dire, but nowhere near as dire as in Somalia, where we have not been able to work for two decades.  The fact that things are dire in Kenya and Ethiopia means that development doesn’t work well enough . . . but it does work, at least a little.



Posted on by Ed 7

Finally saying Famine

As of 10am Nairobi time today, the United States Government, along with the UN, is acknowledging the presence of famine in southern Somalia.  This is the first declaration of famine in twenty-odd years, reflecting the fairly high bar for human suffering that has to be crossed before an official declaration can be made.

The declaration is complex.  The full text of the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS-NET) statement is here.  But to summarize:

  • a famine is currently ongoing in two areas of southern Somalia: the Bakool agropastoral livelihood zones and all areas of Lower Shabelle
  • A humanitarian emergency currently exists across all other regions of the south, and current humanitarian response is inadequate to meet emergency needs. As a result, famine is expected to spread across all regions of the south in the coming 1‐2 months
  • FEWS-NET estimates 3.7 million people are in crisis nationwide; among these 3.2 million people need immediate, lifesaving assistance (2.8 million in the south).
  • FEWS-NET projections suggest that assistance needs will remain extremely high through at least December 2011

I think it is important to review what the currently understood conditions on the ground are right now:

  • The crude death rate (simple measure of the number of deaths) has surpassed 2/10,000/day in two areas (Bakool agropastoral, and all of Lower Shabelle).
  • The under 5 death rate has surpassed 4/10,000/day in all areas of the south where data is available, peaking at 20/10,000/day in Riverine areas of Lower Shabelle.  These numbers are horrific.
  • The prevalence of global acute malnutrition (GAM) exceeds 38 percent in 9 of the 11 areas where recent survey data is available – we consider 15% to be an emergency threshold.  Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) exceeds 14 percent in these areas – and the emergency threshold here is 2-4%.

The projections going forward are not pretty.  If, as FEWS-NET projects, we have famine conditions in play across all of Southern Somalia, historical death rates suggest we could be talking about mortality rates somewhere in the range of 2500 deaths a day at some point in August (though this is a high estimate, and a minimum number would be more in line with 700 deaths a day).  I have no idea what percentage of these deaths will be children, but given the extremely elevated under-5 death rates (2X to 10X the global crude death rate), we can assume that the answer is “a hell of a lot.”
The causes of the famine are complex, and FEWS NET reviews them in the link above.

We are trying – and we are all frustrated at how slowly our response is moving.  FEWS-NET’s efforts have been herculean, from data collection (see the picture below) to the organization of reports and data – I am seeing emails from these guys at 3am.  I was impressed with them before I got here.  I am even more impressed with them now.  FEWS is just one part of the equation, though. There are a lot of people who are not sleeping right now, and even more who have dropped everything else they are doing to support this effort. We are trying.

Measuring arm circumference for a nutrition survey in Southern Somalia, July 2011

Please follow developments at FEWS-NET’s site for this emergency here.  There is no better resource on this anywhere.



Posted on by Ed 15

Does being a middle-income country mean ANYTHING anymore?

Andy Sumner and Charles Kenny (disclosure – Andy and Charles are friends of mine, and I need to write up my review of Charles’ book Getting Better . . . in a nutshell, you should buy it) have a post on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters Blog addressing the two most recent challenges to the idea of the “poverty trap”: Ghana and Zambia’s recent elevations to middle-income status (per capita GNIs of between $1,006 and $3,975) by the World Bank.
Quick background for those less versed in development terminology: GNI (Gross National Income) is the value of all goods and services produced in a country, as well as all overseas investments and remittances (money sent home from abroad).  Per capita GNI divides this huge number by the population to get a sense of the per-person income of the country (there is a loose assumption that the value of goods and services will be paid in the form of wages).  So, loosely speaking, a per capita GNI of $1006 is roughly equivalent to $2.75/day.  Obviously $2.75 buys a lot more in rural Africa than it does basically anywhere inside the US, but this is still a pretty low bar at which to start “Middle Income.”
I do not want to engage an argument about where Middle Income should start in this post – Andy and Charles take this up near the end of their post, and nicely lay out the issues.  The important point that they are making, though, is that the idea that there are a lot of countries out there mired in situations that make an escape from food insecurity, material deprivation, absence of basic healthcare, and lack of opportunity (situations often called “poverty traps”) is being challenged by the ever-expanding pool of countries that seem to be increasing economic productivity rapidly and significantly.  The whole point of a “poverty trap”, as popularized by Paul Collier’s book on The Bottom Billion and Jeffrey Sach’s various writings, is that it cannot be escaped without substantial outside aid interventions (a la Sachs) or may not be escapable at all.  Well, Ghana certainly has received a lot of aid, but its massive growth is not the product of a new “big push”, a massive infusion of aid across sectors to get the country up into this new income category.  Turns out the poorest people in the world might not need us to come riding to their rescue, at least not in the manner that Sachs envisions in his Millennium Villages Project.
That said, I’ve told Andy that I am deeply concerned about fragility – that is, I am thrilled to see things changing in places like Ghana, but how robust are those changes?  At least in Ghana, a lot of the shift has been driven by the service sector, as opposed to recent oil finds (though these will undoubtedly swell the GNI figure in years to come) – this suggests a broader base to change in Ghana than, say, Equatorial Guinea . . . where GNI growth is all about oil, which is controlled by the country’s . . . problematic . . . leader (just read the Wikipedia post).  But even in Ghana, things like climate change could present significant future challenges.  The loss of the minor rainy season, for example, could have huge impacts on staple crop production and food security in the country, which in turn could hurt the workforce, exacerbate class/ethnic/rural-urban tensions, and generally hurt social cohesion in what is today a rather robust democracy.  Yes, things have gotten better in Ghana . . . but this is no time to assume, a la Rostow, that a largely irreversible takeoff to economic growth has occurred.  Aid and development are important and still needed in an increasingly middle-income world, but a different aid and development that supports existing indigenous efforts and consolidates development gains.
 

Posted on by Ed 6

Willful misdirection (or, more mendacious crap)

Pat Michaels has a rather astonishing blog called Climate of Fear at Forbes.com.  Too bad for Forbes – they are providing a platform for a serious climate crank who I think is far too well-educated and smart to misunderstand the things he misrepresents in his public statements and writing.  His recent post on climate change and food security is a classic of the genre – and fits very well into the strategies that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway so brilliantly lay out in Merchants of Doubt (which, if you want to understand the professional climate change denial camp, you absolutely must read).  It requires debunking.  Hell, the man’s blog requires debunking, post by post.
So, what does Michaels have to say about climate change and food security?  Well, in a nutshell he doesn’t see how climate change is a problem for agriculture – indeed, he seems to suggest that climate change will do good things for agriculture.  However, a careful read of the article for what it does and does not actually say, and what evidence it draws on (mostly tangential), demonstrates that this is a piece of misdirection that, in my opinion, is criminal: insofar as it causes anyone to doubt the severity of the challenge in front of us, it will cost lives.  Lots of lives.
Michaels begins with a classic of the denial genre – he goes after a New York Times article not on its merits (indeed, he never addresses any of the article’s content), but by lumping it in with every previous warning of what he calls “environmental apocalypse.”  Except, of course, that the only call he actually cites is the now legendary “global cooling” fear of the 1970s – a fringe belief that was never embraced by the majority of scientists (no matter how hard the denial crowd wants you to believe it). That concern was based on patterns of natural cycles of heating and cooling that some felt were timed to push us back toward another ice age, but it was not the consensus view of scientists at the time.  Michaels knows this.  Either that, or he was a very, very bad graduate student, as he claims to have recieved his doctorate on the wings of “global cooling.”
Then Michaels moves to a false correlation (or non-correlation) – temperatures rose by .75 degrees C over the 20th Century (about 1.35 degrees Farenheit), but Michaels argues that since “U.S. corn yields quintupled.  Life expectancy doubled.  People got fat” clearly there is nothing to worry about.  Except, of course, that temperature/CO2 has relatively little to do with these results – biotech and improved farming techniques were much, much more important – and one could argue that these techniques and biotech have persevered in the face of conditions that might have, in many parts of the world, led to declining yields.  Hell, it is well known that the increases in per-capita food availability worldwide are not evenly distributed – According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in sub-Saharan Africa there is less food per person than there was thirty years ago.  Either Michaels has a distressingly flawed understanding of correlation and no real understanding of agricultural development over the past 100 years, or he is willfully misdirecting the reader.  Either case should disqualify him from writing this article.
Besides, temperature is only one concern (it is possible that some parts of the globe will warm several degrees Celsius, pushing some current staple crops out of the temperature bands in which they can germinate) – Michaels makes no mention of precipitation, except to basically trot out the old “CO2 is plant food” argument by saying “greenhouse warming takes place more in the winter, which lengthens growing seasons. With adequate water, plants then fix and yield more carbohydrate.”  This is almost hilarious, as one of the biggest problems we face is finding adequate water. Rising atmospheric temperatures have driven changes in wind patterns and atmospheric moisture content which, in turn, have shifted rainfall patterns over the past century or more.  Today CO2 is not able to serve as plant food in many parts of the world that most need it because the very injection of more CO2 into the atmosphere is creating declines in the rain needed to make that CO2 useful to plants.  Unless Michaels is willing to argue that rainfall patterns have not shifted, and therefore is willing to ignore rain gauge data from around the world, he has just offered the reader another misleading argument.
To address these empirically-documented challenges, farmers have adopted new crops, some biotech and improved irrigation tech has helped (though in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a region in which most agriculture is rain-fed, farmers are getting hammered by precipitation change) , but we are moving into an era where the vast bulk of work on GMOs is “defensive” – that is, trying to hold the line on yields as environmental conditions deteriorate.  This is not a recipe for continued rising yields in the future – which makes a few of his later claims really, really embarrassing – if he had shame, that is.  His claim that the continued increase in per capita grain production is going up means that climate change has had no effect is a logical fallacy – he is not factoring in how much production we have lost because of climate effects (and we are losing production – Southern Africa is one example).  His claims about rising wheat production in the future, even in a world free of wheat rust, presume either current environmental conditions will hold or that there will be significant technological advances that boost yields – but these are assumptions, not facts that can be stated with certainty.
In short, Michael’s alignment of temperature change and improving human conditions are basically unrelated . . . unless one wants to (rightly) note that many of the things that allowed us to live longer and get fatter required manufacturing processes and transport mechanisms that burned fossil fuels, thus warming the atmosphere – in other words, causality runs the other way.  We live longer and better, which is in part causing the warming of the atmosphere.  But Michaels can’t even consider that direction of causality . . .
I do agree with Michaels that using food crops for ethanol is and was stupid.  Of course, I was saying this (along with a lot of other colleagues) at author meetings of UNEP’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook in 2005.  The decision to push biofuels was political, not scientific.  Welcome to the party, Pat – we’ve already been here for a while, but there might still be some beer in the keg . . .
So, to summarize – Michaels has created a post that relies on false correlation, logical fallacy and misdirection to create the idea that climate change might not be a problem for agriculture, and that it might even be good for global production.  But he does not cite the vast bulk of the science out there – and ignores the empirical literature (not theory, not conjecture – measured changes) to create a very deceptive picture that minimizes the slowly intensifying challenges facing people living in many parts of the Global South.  I invite Dr. Michaels to look at the FEWS-NET data – not just contemporary, but historical – on the East African/Horn of Africa climate.  Empirical observation (again, measured, verified observations, not projections) tells us it is drying out* . . . and has been, for some time, massively compromising both crops and livestock, the backbone of livelihoods in Southern Ethiopia, Somalia and Northeastern Kenya.  As all hell breaks loose in that region, and the US Government considers using the term famine for the first time in a decade to describe the situation on the ground, it seems to me that Michaels’ efforts at misdirection rise beyond nuisance to a real question of ethics that Forbes would do well to consider before publishing such mendacious material again.
 
*very important note: FEWS-NET is agnostic as to the causes of the drying out – at this time, they do not care what causes it, they need to document it to better organize US Government and multilateral food aid delivery.  They would have jobs even if climate change did not exist, as the weather does vary from year to year no matter what, and therefore food insecurity would vary year by year.

Posted on by Ed 7

3.36 Billion Africans in 2100?

Schuyler Null has a post up on The New Security Beat on the 2010 revision of the United Nations (UNDESA) World Population Prospects, noting that this new revision suggests that by 2100 roughly 1 in every 3 people in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa – a total of 3.36 billion people.  It is far too early to pick apart these projections, especially as the underlying assumptions used to guide their construction are not yet available to the public. Null is quite right to note:

the UN’s numbers are based on projections that can and do change. The range of uncertainty for the sub-Saharan African region, in particular, is quite large. The medium-variant projection for the region’s total population in 2100 is 3.36 billion people, but the high variant projection is 4.85 billion and the low variant is 2.25 billion.

A few preliminary thoughts, though.  I pulled up the data for a country I know reasonably well – Ghana.  Under this new revised projection, Ghana’s population is expected to reach more than 67 million by 2100.  Peak population growth is supposed to take place between 2035 and 2040, with steady declines in population growth after that.  With life expectancies projected to rise to 79 years by 2100, certainly a lot more Ghanaians will be around for a lot longer than they are today (current life expectancy is just shy of 60 years).  That said, these numbers trouble me.  First, I don’t quite see how Ghana will be able to sustain a population of this size at any point in the future – the number is just too massive.  Second, it seems to me that the life expectancy estimates and the population size estimates contradict one another – as Charles Kenny quite ably demonstrates in Getting Better, as life expectancies rise and more children reach adulthood, the general trend is to lower total fertility.  The only way Ghana’s projection can be made to work is to assume massive demographic momentum that I am not sure will play out in the face of expected declines in infant mortality and the increased cost burden for prospective parents supporting older family members for much longer than they do today. In other words, this seems to me to be a rather dire overestimation of where Ghana is going to be in the future.
Now, this is just a quick cut at what appear to be the assumptions for one country, but I worry that this potential overestimation has a certain political utility.  The Malthusian specter, however inaccurate it may be, remains a great motivator for aid and development spending.  Further, presuming massive demographic momentum requires we assume that adequate reproductive health options are not in place in places like Ghana.  Given that the monitoring of reproductive health, presumably to better direct development interventions, seems to be a large focus of UNDESA’s and other UN organizations’ mandate, they might have a bit of a built-in bias against a lower population number because such a number would presume significant progress on the reproductive health front, thus challenging the need for this particular service.  In a wider sense, it seems to revive fears of a population bomb, albeit in this case limited to Africa.  While I have no doubt that demography will be an important challenge to address in the future, I think the current numbers, even the low estimates, seem overstated.
Besides, any projection of any social process 90 years into the future probably has gigantic error bars that could encompass anything from negative growth to massive overgrowth . . . the problem here is that policy makers often fail to grasp this uncertainty, see the 100-year projection, freak out entirely and reorient the next 5 years worth of aid programming to address a problem that may not exist.

Posted on by Ed 2