The rising price of food has been a subject of many news stories over the past few months, with the intensity of attention ratcheting up recently upon news that the FAO’s food price index has just surpassed its 2008 peak. Stories about this issue – well, at least the good stories – point out the highly variable way in which this increase in the price of food has played out in different places. One good example of this sort of reportage is from Saturday’s Washington Post.
This variability, however, tends to be illustrated instead of interrogated, with explanations remaining remarkably shallow (see my earlier complaints about how explanations related to “local specificity” and “cultural difference” tend to obscure important processes and blame the victims of larger processes). However, a quick examination of the information we have about food prices and their impacts points to the fact that global food prices are not all that useful for understanding the variable food outcomes we see in the Global South. First, we have to understand that the increase everyone is talking about is in an index of food prices – that is, the price data drawn from a number of different foods. Though the index is going up, this does not mean that the prices of all foods are rising equally. As the WaPo and others have noted (and is quite clear in the FAO presentation of the data), when you disaggregate the crops and their prices, the biggest increases globally are in sugar, cooking oils and some fats (there are, of course, local surges in price for particular crops, but those are often independent of the larger global markets). While cereal prices are increasing, they are not rising as quickly as these other foods, and they remain below 2008 levels. So who is hit by these prices has a lot to do with who consumes sugar, or products heavily constituted by sugar and oils. Oils are widely distributed in diets, but sugar is not – the poorest tend to have the least access outside the Global North (ironically, this is reversed in the Global North, as noted by Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me). Meanwhile, staple crop prices are not rising anywhere near as rapidly. So the principal drivers of the rising price index are not a huge portion of the diets of those in Global South . . . with one key exception: urban populations. More on that in a second.
Second, who is hit by these prices has to do with the degree to which producers and consumers are linked to global markets. Many rural producers are consumers of their own produce, or the produce of their neighbors. As a result, they are somewhat insulated from shifts in commodity prices. I’ve seen this at work in Ghana firsthand – it is a disaster for incomes in these areas, but not for food security. Instead, people just eat the crops they might otherwise have sold at market. Of course, this comes with other costs, such as in terms of the purchases of needed household goods, and sometimes in terms of children’s education (in places where school fees are still charged). But in terms of food security, not so much. FEWS-NET has offered this same interpretation of the impact of rising food prices on the countries in which it operates, arguing that this increase in this index is not as worrying as what we saw in 2008. This is one of those instances where integration with global markets, long seen as a goal of development programs and a clear pathway to prosperity, can also produce significant new challenges for the global poor . . . or at least that segment of the rural poor whose livelihoods and production are highly integrated with global markets.
So, where people are dependent on global commodities that are internationally sourced for their food or incomes, shifting global food prices are more likely to result in direct shocks to their food security. While there are certainly rural populations that fit this description, once again it is the urban poor who are most generally and directly exposed to this challenge. With little food production of their own, they are dependent on purchased food that has passed through one or more middlemen from the source of production. By definition, their food supply is more commodified, and more connected to global markets, than most of their rural counterparts.
Therefore, there isn’t a whole lot of point to looking at global price indexes to understand the relationship between these prices and food insecurity. Instead, we have to look at who is affected by these prices, and how – the connections are complex and often involve tracing what appear to be unrelated factors as they radiate out from these price changes. This is the only way to appropriately design interventions to address these issues . . .
Don’t tell us that the food price index is rising – tell us why it is rising . . . then we can do something about it.
Category: globalization
Development isn't impossible, just hard to understand
A few comments on the blog related to some earlier posts on a Grand Challenge for Development have gotten me thinking a bit about development (the concept and the project) and if it is achievable. There are those who would argue it is not, that development is an ill-conceived idea that invokes pathways of change that are now closed due to the changing global political economy, and treats life in the advanced economies as the apotheosis of human existence toward which everyone else is (and should be) marching. To the extent development is taken to mean this sort of change, I agree completely – development is unattainable and meaningless. There are not enough resources on Earth to allow everyone to live the way we do in the advanced economies, so the idea of a march toward that standard of living as a goal is gone regardless of how one might feel about it morally/ethically/etc.
But that does not mean that change cannot happen, that things cannot improve in a manner that is appreciated by people living in particular places. Certainly, a shift from a post-subsistence income of $1 a day to $5 a day is a huge change that, in many parts of the world, would enable very different standards of health, education and well-being. Surely this is worth striving for – and certainly, the people with whom I have worked in Ghana and Malawi would take that kind of a change over no change at all – and they would much rather than kind of change, than endless, pride-killing aid dependence. There is no doubt that this sort of change can be attained in many, if not most places. Indeed, it has been accomplished. Further, there are places where life expectancy has risen dramatically, infant mortality has fallen, nutrition and education levels have improved, and by any qualitative measure the quality of life has improved as a direct result of aid interventions (often termed development, but this should only count as development if the changes are sustained after the aid ends). The real question at hand is not if it can be done, but why the results of our aid/development efforts are so erratic.
You see, for every case of improved life expectancy, there is the falling expectancies in Southern Africa. For every case of improved nutrition and food availability, there are cases of increasing malnutrition and food insecurity (such that in sub-Saharan Africa, the balance has tipped toward less food availability per capita than two decades ago), and so on. What works in one place often fails in another. And the fact is that we don’t understand why this is in a systematic way. I am a geographer and an anthropologist, so I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the local specificity of culture and society have a lot to do with the efficacy of particular interventions, and therefore explain a lot of the variability we see in project outcomes. However, “local specificity” isn’t an answer, it is a blanket explanation that isn’t actionable in a specific way. We persist in this answer because it pushes development (and aid) failure into the realm of the qualitative, the idiosyncratic. And this attitude absolves us, the development community, from blame when things don’t work out. Your project failed? Ah, well, who could have known that local land tenure rules would prevent the successful adoption of tree crops by women? Subtly, we blame the victims with this mentality.
What it comes down to, I think, is a need to admit that we have at best a shaky idea of what works because in many areas (both geographic and technical) we really don’t understand what it is we are trying to transform when we engage in aid and development work. We are better in some areas (health) because, frankly, they do a better job of gathering data and analyzing it than we do in, say, rural development (hey, don’t take my word for it – read some Robert Chambers, for heaven’s sake!). But, in the end, we are driven by our myths about how markets and globalization work, how development/aid is linked to change, and how the problems we claim to address through development and aid came about in the first place. This argument is the heart of my book (Amazon link here) – and I spend the first half using the story of two villages in Ghana to lay out how our assumptions about the world and how it works are mostly wrong, the next quarter explaining why this is a major problem for everything from economics to the environment, and the last quarter thinking about how to change things.
My take is but one take – and a partial one at that. We need more people to think about our assumptions when we identify development challenges, design programs, and implement projects. We need to replace assumptions with evidence. And we need to be a lot more humble about our assumptions AND our evidence – so we stay open to new ideas and evidence as they inevitably flow in.
Challenging development dogma
On his blog Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, has a post discussing the debate about the performance and results of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP). The debate, which takes shape principally in papers by Matt Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes of Center for Global Development and Paul Pronyk, John McArthur, Prabhjot Singh, and Jeffrey Sachs of the Millennium Villages Project, questions how the MVP is capturing the impacts of its interventions in the Millennium Villages. As Devarajan notes, the paper by Clemens and Demombynes rightly notes that the MVP’s claims about its performance are not really that clearly framed in evidence, which makes it hard to tell how much of the changes in the villages can be attributed to their work, and how much is change driven by other factors. Clemens and Demombynes are NOT arguing that the MVP has had no impact, but that there are ways to rigorously evaluate that impact – and when impact is rigorously evaluated, it turns out that the impact of MVP interventions is not quite as large as the project would like to claim.
This is not all that shocking, really – it happens all the time, and it is NOT evidence of malfeasance on the part of the MVP. It just has to do with a simple debate about how to rigorously capture results of development projects. But this simple debate will, I think, have long-term ramifications for the MVP. As Devarajan points out:
In short, Clemens and Demombynes have undertaken the first evaluation of the MVP. They have shown that the MVP has delivered sizeable improvements on some important development indicators in many of the villages, albeit with effects that are smaller than those described in the Harvests of Development paper. Of course, neither study answers the question of whether these gains are sustainable, or whether they could have been obtained at lower cost. These should be the subject of the next evaluation.
I do not, however, think that this debate is quite as minor as Devarajan makes it sound – and he is clearly trying to downplay the conflict here. Put simply, the last last two sentences in the quote above are, I think, what has the MVP concerned – because the real question about MVP impacts is not in the here and now, but in the future. While I have been highly critical of the MVP in the past, I am not at all surprised to hear that their interventions have had some measurable impact on life in these villages. The project arrived in these villages with piles of money, equipment and technical expertise, and went to work. Hell, they could have simply dumped the money (the MVP is estimated to cost about $150 per person per year) into the villages and you would have seen significant movement in many target areas of the MVP. I don’t think that anyone doubts that the project has had a measurable impact on life in all of the Millennium Villages.
Instead, the whole point here is to figure out if what has been done is sustainable – that is the measure of performance here. Anyone can move the needle in a community temporarily – hell, the history of aid (and development) is littered with such projects. The hard part is moving the needle in a permanent way, or doing so in a manner that creates the processes by which lasting change can occur. As I have argued elsewhere (and much earlier that in this debate), and as appears to be playing out on the ground now, the MVP was never conceptually framed in a way that would bring about such lasting changes. Clemens and Demombynes’ work is important because it provides an external critique of the MVP’s claims about its own performance – and it is terrifying to at least some in the MVP, as external evaluations are going to empirically demonstrate that the MVP is not, and never was, a sustainable model for rural development.
While I would not suggest that Clemens and Demombynes’ approach to evaluation is perfect (indeed, they make no such claim), I think it is important because it is trying to move past assumptions to evidence. This is a central call of my book – the MVP is exhibit A of a project founded on deeply problematic assumptions about how development and globalization work, and framed and implemented in a manner where data collection and evaluation cannot really question those assumptions . . . thus missing what is actually happening (or not happening) on the ground. This might also explain the somewhat non-responsive response to Clemens and Demombynes in the Pronyk et al article – the MVP team is having difficulty dealing with suggestions that their assumptions about how things work are not supported by evidence from their own project, and instead of addressing those assumptions, are trying to undermine the critique at all costs. This is not a productive way forward, this is dogma. Development is many things, but if it is to be successful by any definition, it cannot be dogmatic.
On Aid and Development
An interesting post at Blood and Milk yesterday led a commenter to note that we shouldn’t use the terms “international development” and “aid” interchangeably – that the “real big story about development is exactly that it is NOT all about aid, but about domestic elites establishing pro-growth rules.”
For me, this raises two issues – the first is about the relationship between aid and development, and the second about the character of development itself. Alanna Shaikh, who writes the Blood and Milk blog, added a new post today that addressed the first. In this post, Shaikh argues “You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.” Well, sort of. I currently work in one of the world’s largest development/aid organizations. I am the climate change coordinator for the Bureau most directly responsible for our aid activities (as opposed to our development activities). This puts me in something of an odd position – I am a development/environment person tasked with thinking and program-building for the long-term in an aid organization that is often reactive in its programming and its mandate. Why, then, did I take this position? Because of the need to better connect aid to development (and vice versa). Right now, aid and development exist in very different worlds – even in the same building, there is little communication or coordination between these two missions. This galls people on both sides of the divide, from leadership down the line. The vision of an agency like mine is that aid should transition to development, ideally seamlessly (though at this point we would take any sort of transition). Adaptation to climate change is one area where such transitions can be created out of existing programs – our aid teams work on hydrometeorological disaster risk reduction (DRR), and our development side works on adaptation to climate change. These are very similar areas of work, differentiated largely by timeframe. One of my jobs over the next few years will be to better connect our hydromet DRR and adaptation programming to build one connection between aid and development – a thread that we might use to close other aid/development gulfs (such as in food aid and agricultural development).
Aid may not be the same thing as development, but it should not be seen completely separately from development – my Bureau sees its constituency as that component of the population that is largely left behind by economic growth programming. Nobody debates that a significant percentage of the population slips through the cracks of economic development programming – our job is to ensure that those who slip through the cracks do not remain there, but have an opportunity to recover and participate in society, politics and the economy. So, when I hear someone argue that there can be development without aid, I strongly disagree – at least at the national scale (communities are a different issue). At the national scale, you cannot have socially or environmentally sustainable development that abandons a significant portion of society to its fate. Aid is critical to development – or it should be, if only we could better coordinate aid and development efforts.
Second, I am deeply concerned by the continued connection of development to economic growth. The linkages between human well-being and economic growth are shaky at best (most correlations can be readily challenged and dismantled) – largely because development, globalization and growth do not really work the way people seem to think they do (my book is an exploration of this point). Further, economic growth cannot be eternal. 3% growth per year for everyone forever is simply beyond the physical capacity of the planet. I’m pretty sure that development is going to have to detach itself from economic growth (ironically, this would mostly entail simply acknowledging the reality of what’s been happening around the world for the last 60 years) if it is ever to accomplish its end goal – the improvement of the human condition in this world.
Finally, a thought on the two metastories of development that Shaikh raises at the end of her post. I agree that development is neither all success or all failure – it plays out differently in different places, and we have better understandings of why in some areas (health, for example) than in others (transportation development, for example). I would argue that this is a symptom of a larger problem – we really don’t understand what is happening in the Global South most of the time, and as a result we are often measuring and analyzing the wrong things when we do project scoping or evaluation work. Our assumptions about how the world works shape the way we frame our questions about the world, and the data we gather to answer those questions. The problem, simply put, is that we are often asking the wrong question. Sure, every once in a while our assumptions align with events on the ground, and a project works. But the rest of the time, our assumptions do not align with reality, and we run into difficulty understanding what is happening in particular places, and why particular projects fail. The end result? A seeming random set of project outcomes, where things work in one place but not another for reasons that seem hard to discern. There are more fundamental metanarratives of development out there than success or failure – they are narratives about how globalization works and how development works that shape our very ability to assess success or failure. And those narratives actually misinform many of our best efforts.
Apparently the cocoa markets aren't that worried about one third of their supply . . .
Hmm, the last month of cocoa pricing, via the International Cocoa Organization
Prices are only up 7%? Despite everything going on in Cote d’Ivoire? I can only assume there is a massive oversupply out there cushioning this market . . .
Well, this should be interesting . . .
Ah, The Leaks that Shall Not Be Named (if you work for the US Government, at least) seem to have some amusing data on one of our banks here in the US. This is not new news – Assange mentioned this last month. But I like this piece on DealBook on who really is freaked out by this . . . turns out it is the government, again. I agree completely with the author – pretty much nothing that is dumped would surprise me or much of the public anymore. We know we got screwed . . . well, at least some of us have figured this out. The rest of the population seems to be preoccupied by . . . well, honestly I have no idea what the hell people are looking at anymore. Where is the collective rage? Why hasn’t Congress rammed serious regulation of the financial industry through in fear of a pitchfork-wielding constituency? Oh, right, Simon Johnson covered that . . .
All that aside, as the piece in DealBook points out this new dump of documents might shed some light on just how close the relationship between the financial industry and the government really is. If, as Johnson claims, the financial industry has more or less captured the government in a sort of quiet coup, there may well be evidence of this – such as clear instances of regulators ignoring evidence of illegal acts, or warning institutions to change their behaviors before the regulators were forced to act.
Who knows what is in the documents . . . but given the remarkable Officer Barbrady impression pulled by the SEC in the “flash crash” case, I have a feeling something ugly is in there. I just don’t believe the regulators are that blind, or that stupid . . .
But here’s what I am wondering – and I’ve not seen it raised yet: what if these documents contain evidence of the conscious manipulation of wheat pricing that triggered the 2008 global food price spike, and appears to be behind at least some of the current food price increases we are seeing. It is one thing to screw around with financial instruments until you collapse the economy . . . but it is entirely another to quite literally starve people to death for profit. It would be interesting to see if such behavior qualified as a crime against humanity. It damn well should.
This strikes me as especially pertinent because the document dump, by placing the documents in the public realm, makes them usable by various governments (including our own) in prosecutions of criminal acts. While the documents were illegally obtained, they were not obtained at the behest of the government (I think we can all agree that Assange and the US Government are not colluding on much of anything these days) and therefore may not be “fruit of the poisoned tree.” Would regulators/the Justice Department dare ignore evidence there for all to see? Would the ICC get involved? And how ugly would this get, if indeed there was evidence of collusion between the regulators and the financial institutions? Are the regulators liable for actions in commodities markets if they allowed manipulation to take place?
Measurement matters . . .
Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development has a post about Ghana and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Overall, he makes some good points about the purpose of MCC compacts, and whether or not it makes sense to re-up with Ghana in 2012 for a second compact. While Moss makes a number of good points in his post (including the fact that Ghana has a lot of capital incoming from oil, and a ready market for its debt, both of which seem to negate the need for continued grants), I was brought up short by one stunning statement:
Ghana is (suddenly) just barely “low income”. A recent rebasing of its GDP found the country was 63% richer than everyone thought. Ghana might still technically qualify for the MCC but the rationale for another huge compact drops pretty significantly.
Now, to be fair to Moss, he has an excellent post here on the implications of such rebasing. Importantly, the second lesson he takes away from this sudden revaluation of Ghana’s economy is:
Boy, we really don’t know anything. Over the past thirty years Ghana has been one of the most scrutinized, measured, studied, picked-over economies in Africa. (yes, I too did my PhD on Ghana…) Yet, we were all taking as gospel a number that was off by a tremendous margin. If we are nearly two-thirds wrong on Ghana’s GDP, what hope can we possibly have in stats for Chad? Everyone knows that data is dubious, but this seems to add a whole new level of doubt.
His fourth point is closely related:
I’m still confused… but it probably doesn’t matter. The Reuters article quotes the government statistician as estimating GDP per capita at $1318 instead of $753. This doesn’t add up to the total GDP figures also given since this implies a 75% increase. If the $1318 is correct, then that either implies that the government thinks there are only 19.4 million people instead of the normal estimates of about 24 million. Or, if the total GDP number of $25.6 billion is right, then per capita GDP is really $1067 per capita. (I think I’m already violating my lesson from #2.)
I have a chapter in my book dedicated to understanding why our measurements of the economy and environment in the Global South are mostly crap, and even when the data is firm it often does not capture the dynamics we think it does. I then spend a few chapters suggesting what to do about it (including respatializing data/data collection so that it can be organized into spatial units that have social, economic, and ecological meaning, and using basic crowdsourcing techniques to both collect data and ground truth of existing statistics). Even better, this is rooted in a discussion of Ghana’s economy. I give Moss credit for being willing to point out the confusing numbers, and acknowledge that they confuse him. They should.
But Moss gets it totally wrong here:
Ghana has long aspired to be a middle-income country by 2020, and this now seems like it will happen many years early. Accra certainly feels like a middle-income city.
This statement explains how he can label Ghana “barely low-income”, even after he has called the very statistics that make such a claim possible into question: he’s focused on Accra. Accra has very little to do with how the bulk of the Ghanaian population lives – and most of that population is very, very poor. Ghana is not barely low income – it is still quite low income, with some pockets of extreme wealth starting to distort the national statistics. It doesn’t matter how Accra feels – that city is home to at best 10% of the population. Kumasi is home to between 5-8% more. Generously including Tamale and Takoradi in the middle-income city categories (this is very generous) nets you probably 25% of the population – nobody else is living in a middle income country. Like Moss, I did my dissertation work in Ghana. I still work there. The difference is that I did my work in rural villages, and still do. $1 a day beyond subsistence is a common income in the rural areas of the Central Region, even now – and the Central Region has a lot more infrastructure than most of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions. This population remains poorly educated – failed by poor rural schools. They cannot support a transformation of the Ghanaian economy. Most of Ghana is still a very low income country, not ready for any sort of sustained economic growth. The country has seen enormous success in recent years – I am stunned by what I have seen in the past 13 years – but the fruits of that success are not distributed evenly. While the cities have boomed, the villages are nearly unchanged. This is Ghana’s new challenge – to spread this new wealth out and foster a diverse, resilient economy.
This is not to say that an MCC compact is the right tool to foster this, or that Ghana is the best place to be putting MCC money. However, declaring “success” too soon creates its own set of risks – let’s use some nuance when considering how a country is doing, so we can identify the real challenges to overcome and successes to build on moving forward.
Militarizing aid
The role of the military in development is a terribly fraught issue – and it has been with us for a very, very long time. In my book, I argue that globalization and development turned into each other long ago – insofar as development has largely been reduced to a means by which we connect different parts of the world into a global market and political economy. This is not because development is some sort of militaristic economic movement (though, of course, sometimes it has been used as such), but because one of the dominant assumptions in development is that free markets and a globalized political economy are the best ways to bring about improvements in human well-being (my book is an extended, empirically-based critique of this assumption). If you accept this definition of development, colonialism was really the first phase of “development” as we understand it today. Military force was an important part of colonial efforts to open new territories to these markets (often couched in terms of peoples “own good”), thus creating a remarkably negative association with the military in development circles.
Today, the military has largely taken on a very different role – it is a critical means by which relief supplies are delivered to disaster-stricken areas. And, in conflict zones like Iraq, the military has been forced to take on development work, despite the fact that its personnel are not trained for that mission (something most folks in the military are well aware of, and would like to see changed). Underdevelopment has been viewed as a national security issue (such as the very poorly substantiated assumption that poverty breeds terrorism), especially in the context of climate changes which are presumed to negatively impact the poorest and most vulnerable such that they will threaten state stability in many parts of the world. Engagement with the military is something that is nearly impossible to avoid if one works for a major agency.
I’ll be frank, here – I’ve never been comfortable with the military’s engagement with development. As I mentioned above, they are at best highly disciplined amateurs who have little experience and no real knowledge base when conducting “aid work”, which as we all know can make anyone more dangerous than helpful. I also think it is unfair to ask people trained for one mission to go out and conduct another for which they are not prepared – it’s never good to set someone up for failure. But the New York Times ran a story today that really gets to the heart of my issues with the militarization of development – it makes it impossible for anyone to do good development work. When development work is conducted alongside military operations, especially as conscious parts of a hearts-and-minds campaign, development becomes a tool of war. This makes the practitioners combatants, at least in the eyes of the opponent. I am in no way justifying the kidnapping or killing of those who work in development in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but I think we have to be honest about why otherwise unarmed civilians working on projects that are intended to have a community benefit might end up becoming targets. It is not because “the enemy” is utterly depraved and indifferent – indeed many on the other side might see the use of development as a tool of war as itself depraved, a sort of holding people’s well-being hostage to larger geopolitical ends.
This post is not, in the end, a critique of the military – I certainly wish we lived in a world where they were not needed. I imagine many of those serving in the military feel the same way. But that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where the military is doing development because someone has told them they have to. This is not their fault. However, I would ask that the military step back and think carefully about using development as part of larger combat campaigns – the association with conflict and combat gives our entire endeavor a bad name.
“Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,”
Well, there’s nothing like continued empirical evidence for the arguments I have been making about Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and thanks to a Tweet from Michael Clemens, I’ve now got more. Clemens is one of the authors of a report that is very critical of the MVP, and that report was good enough to find and cite my work on this topic – but how he dug up this story from a Liberian newspaper, I will never know:
“The project is a new approach to fighting poverty in post-conflict Liberia, but residents in the District have complained that they had seen no evidence of the project getting off the ground. In a brief statement to the President, Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah indicated that the project, which seeks to improve the socio-economic and infrastructural development of the District lacked the residents’ involvement and that there was not tangible impact being felt by the villagers. He added that the people of that District were discontent about the way the project is being implemented in their village.”
But the brutal sentence is the one by Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah that titles this post: “‘Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,’ he said.”
Clemens’ report is here. My article is here.
Easterly says what most of us are thinking . . .
Bill Easterly is one of the better public intellectuals in the area of development – I enjoy his writing, and I think that his work since leaving the World Bank has become more and more valuable as it takes on an ever-more critical edge. I take him to task for some of his earlier work in my book, and I think that he does not quite question the workings of globalization and development to the extent necessary to really start to get at what is happening in the world, but by and large I think he is a tremendously valuable asset for the development community.
My belief in his value just went up tenfold, however, with his op-ed comparing the celebrity activism of Lennon to that of Bono. While I take his points about Lennon’s activism, I suspect that Easterly overstates the case for Lennon’s importance as an activist a bit – it is hard to change the system from completely outside, as there is often no way to engage with people constructively – all you get is parallel conversations. But Easterly’s criticism of Bono is dead on:
While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise – doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.
Bono becomes a problem not through any fault of his own, really, but because he becomes a mouthpiece for people like Jeff Sachs (I have plenty to say about him, but look here, here and in the peer-reviewed literature here) who really seem unable to think about power relations, history and political economy when considering development. Asserting that poverty is the result of a lack of development asserts a problem and a solution all at once, without ever really addressing a cause. Further, as I tell my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention – even putting in a well will have variable impacts across a community, creating winners and losers. The technical is not the hard part in development – if it was, we’d have accomplished a hell of a lot more than we have up to this point.
I also must admit that I really appreciated Easterly turning his guns on the other celebrity activists:
Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.
But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?
Why indeed? I sure as hell don’t plan to lecture Clooney or DiCaprio on acting. Affleck, well . . .
But I must take issue with Easterly a tiny bit here – yes, Bono is the frontman, but shouldn’t our frustration be directed at those who fill his and others’ heads with the belief that we can fix it all, with just a little more money (I’m looking at you, Dr. Sachs)? I have no doubt that Bono, Clooney and all the rest have the best of intentions, and work hard to inform themselves rather than run around blind, but in the end they are manipulated by people with greater experience and what appears to be greater expertise to further agendas that these celebrities do not understand – Bono is backing Sachs’ push for more aid (which is in conflict with Easterly’s and others’ view that we need to focus on institutions, political systems and corruption). Clooney is supporting a group that has one idea of how to address issues in Sudan, but may not have the best or the only ideas because they tend to deal in moral absolutes (like supporting an ICC warrant for Kony, which derailed peace talks in Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan/Congo/CAR). We need to make sure we dig past the celebs to those who feed them these ideas, and address the problem at it source . . .