Category: Uncategorized

Disciplinary history and theory are useful II: Understanding the MVP’s enduring popularity

In my guest post on Aid Watch yesterday, I argued that a basic familiarity with the history and philosophy of development, and some training in critical approaches to development, might have averted at least one of the problems currently associated with the Millennium Village Project (a conflict of interest for project workers when the stated goals and interventions of the project and the needs of MVP communities do not align) before it happened.
A failure of background knowledge also lies at the heart of the MVP’s enduring popularity, even in the face of mounting empirical evidence that it is not working.  It is one thing to ignore the predictions of a lone academic (or a few academics).  It is another to overlook evidence of problems trickling in from around the world. If the MVP is so flawed, why do so many continue to support it?
I argue that the MVP drew its popularity from two sources: its theoretical eclecticism, and from the ways in which it resonated with conventional understandings of development and development practice in the major agencies.  If one goes through the literature on the MVP, one will find echoes of many different bodies of development theory (I say “echoes” purposefully: the MVP has never overtly referenced any bodies of development theory in its publications, forcing critics to read between the lines).  For example, various authors (e.g. here and here) have found in the MVP the influence of “big push” theories with their foundations in the 1950s, while others hear the reverberations of Reagan-era privatization and deregulation.
While drawing upon many bodies of theory to build something new is not a problem in and of itself, doing so productively requires an understanding of each theory from which one is drawing.  The framing of the MVP shows no sign of such familiarity.  Instead, it appears to pluck “useful” bits and pieces of these theories that support the project’s larger political agenda and justifications for its technical interventions.  It adopts the language of “big push” theories when it argues for a concentrated injection of capital across sectors of a village economy to get them all moving simultaneously.  At the same time, it turns to the governance focus with echoes in modernization theory.  As I argued in my article on the MVP:

This focus, insofar as it does not consider the ways in which existing processes do function and places a priori weight on Western modes of administration and governance, echoes earlier, often ethnocentric, tenets of modernization theory, such as the need to convince societies to embrace new, Western forms of administration on their path to ‘development’. (338)

The problem is that these “useful bits” were parts of larger theories that, on the whole, often contradicted one another.

For example, as Cabral et al. (2006) have observed, ‘big push’ theories of development that see a coordinated injection of capital across all sectors of an economy as a productive means of driving economic ‘take off ’ and development (for example, Rostow 1959) run contrary to the claims of modernization theorists like Lewis (1954), who saw unbalanced growth in different sectors of the economy as a key to stimulating the overall economy. (338)

The result was a project that on one hand had something for every development perspective.  However, this came at the cost of internal coherence, and the ability to reflect upon or address the well-known historical problems encountered by those who employed the larger theories from which these bits were taken. A reasonable familiarity with the history and philosophy of development would have made these issues apparent long before there was a need to gather empirical evidence on the performance of the MVP.
But this sort of eclecticism only goes so far in explaining the popularity of a project – after all, most people do not worry much about the underlying assumptions of a given project or program.  What policymakers certainly do notice are the ways in which the MVP nicely aligns itself with conventional understandings of development policy and practice.  For example, there are broad similarities in approach and assumptions between the MVP and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) which suggest that the MVP is not only nothing new, it is nothing revolutionary (or, in fact, even that different from what is already being done by the mainstream development community):

Like the MVP, PRSPs tend to deal with development issues sectorally, without addressing either the tradeoffs or the synergies between different sectors – this is particularly true in the context of sustainable development planning. PRSPs also tend to conceive of solutions to sectoral problems without reference to local conditions. For example, lagging agricultural production is often addressed through the introduction of more inputs, which on its surface might seem like the ‘common sense’ application of ‘tested and true methods’. Such a set of solutions and rhetoric is nearly identical to that seen in the MVP. Finally, PRSPs, like the MVP, do not consider the social context and processes through which problems are identified and solutions shaped at the national or local level. Yet, national politics may influence the identification of a particular harvest as ‘insufficient’ or ‘sufficient’, a label that shapeshow people view that harvest and the needs of those who are dependent on it for their livelihoods. In short, the MVP and the PSRPs are mutually reinforcing – there is no challenge to the development status quo in the MVP, except perhaps in the form of a call for more money to fund the ‘big push’ (Cabral et al. 2006) needed to ‘kick-start’ development in these villages. (338-339)

Again, a familiarity with the conceptual literature in development studies would have allowed those who touted this project as something new to recognize its fundamentally conservative approach to development.
All of this goes to deepen an underlying point in the Aid Watch post: more practitioner training in the history and philosophy of development, and a wider exposure to critical approaches to development, are critical first steps toward the creation of (or simply the recognition of) truly revolutionary, coherent and ultimately successful projects.

Posted on by Ed 1

Where Quant and Qual meet: On speculation, price instability and food insecurity

UPDATE: Marc Bellemare pointed out some issues with this post, which I have addressed here.  These issues, though, strengthen the argument about strategic deglobalization . . .

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There have been an interesting series of blog posts going around about the issue of price speculation in food markets, and the impact of that speculation on food security and people’s welfare.  Going back through some of these exchanges, it seems to me that a number of folks are arguing past one another.
The most recent discussion was spurred by a post on the Guardian’s Global Development blog by John Vidal that took on the issue of speculation in food markets.  In the post, Vidal argues that food speculation is a key driver of price instability on global food markets, which results in serious impacts for the poorest people in the world – a sort of famine profiteering, as it were.
The weakness of this post, as I see it, are twofold.  First, it doesn’t take the issue of price arbitrage seriously – that is, how speculation is supposed to function.  Aid Thoughts, via one of the comments on Vidal’s post, takes Vidal to task for this.  As Aid Thoughts/the commenter point out, the idea behind speculation is to pull future price impacts of shortage into the present, stimulating responses to future shortages before they occur.  Thus, a blanket condemnation of speculation makes very little sense from the perspective of one who wants to see food security enhanced around the world – without speculation, there will be no market signal for future shortage, creating a world that addresses shortages in a reactive instead of proactive manner. This is a completely fair critique of Vidal, I think.
However, neither Vidal nor those responding to him actually address the evidence for significant market manipulation, and the intentional generation of instability for the purposes of profiteering.  This evidence first emerged in a somewhat anecdotal manner in Fredrick Kaufman’s “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.”  In this article, Kaufman uses a fairly limited number of informants to lay out a case for the intentional manipulation of wheat markets in 2008.  It is an interesting read, though I argued in an earlier post that it suffers from trying to be a parable for the pervasive presence of complex investment vehicles in the modern world.  And in the end, its findings can hardly be called robust.
Though Kaufman’s argument might, by itself, be less than robust, it received a serious empirical boost from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the fall of 2010.  In a discussion paper that remains underreported and under-considered in food security circles (trust me, it is difficult to get anyone to even talk about speculation in program settings), Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles demonstrate quantitatively that the dramatic price rises for food in 2008 is best explained by various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets.  Now, we can argue about how large an impact that activity had on actual prices, but it seems to me that Cooke and Robles, when taken in concert with the Kaufman piece, have demonstrated that the speculation we see in the markets right now is not merely a normal market response to potential future shortage – indeed, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has been arguing for months that there are no likely supply issues that should be triggering the price increases we see.  In other words, while it is foolish to simply blame price arbitrage for food insecurity, it is equally blind to assume that all of those practicing such arbitrage are doing so in the manner prescribed in the textbooks.  Someone will always try to game the system, and in tightly connected markets, a few efforts to game a market can have radiating impacts that draw in honest arbitrage efforts.  There is need for regulatory oversight.  But regulation will not solve all our food problems.
But this all leaves one last question unanswered: what is the impact of price instability, whether caused by actual likely future shortages or by efforts to game markets for short-term profits, on the welfare of the poor?  Vidal, Kaufman and many others assume that the impacts are severe.  Well, maybe.  You see, where matters (again – yep, I’m a geographer).  In a very interesting paper, Marc Bellemare (along with Chris Barrett and David Just) demonstrates that, at least in Ethiopia:

contrary to conventional wisdom, the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility would be concentrated in the upper 40 percent of the income distribution, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

This finding may be a shock to those working in aid at first glance, but this finding is actually intuitive.  In fact, in my book (out tomorrow!) I lay out a qualitative picture of livelihoods in rural Ghana that aligns perfectly with this finding.  In Bellemare et al, I would bet my house that the upper 40% of the population is that segment of the population living in urban areas and/or wealthy enough to be purchasing large amounts of processed food.  Why does this matter?  This is the segment of the population that typically has the most limited options when food prices begin to get unstable.  On the other hand, the bottom 60% of the population, especially those in this cohort living in rural areas (it is unclear from the study how much of an overlap between poor and rural there is in the sample, but I am betting it is pretty high), has a much more limited engagement with global food markets.  As a result, when food prices begin to spike, they have the ability to effect a temporary partial, or even complete, disengagement from the global market.  In other words, much as I saw in Ghana, this study seems to suggest that temporary deglobalization is a coping strategy that at least some people in Ethiopia use to guard against the vagaries of markets.  Ironically, those best positioned to effect such a strategy are the poorest, and therefore they are better able to manage the impact of price instability on food markets.
In short, I would argue that Marc’s (and his co-authors’) work is a quantitative empirical demonstration of one of my core arguments in Delivering Development:

2. At globalization’s shoreline the experience of “development” is often negative. The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being. (pp.14-15)

I’m not suggesting Marc endorses this claim – hell, for all I know he’ll start throwing things when he sees it.  But there is an interesting convergence happening here.  I’m glad I met Marc at a tweet-up in DC a few weeks ago.  We’re going to have to talk some more . . . I see the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In summary, while efforts to game global food markets do exist, and have very serious impacts on at least some people, they do not crush everyone in the Global South.  Instead, this instability will be most felt by those in urban areas – in the form of a disaffected middle and upper class, and a large cohort of the urban poor who, lacking alternative food sources, might be pushed over the brink by price increases.  The policy implications are clear:

  • We need to be watching the impact of price increases on urban food insecurity more than rural insecurity
  • Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.
  • We need to better understand the scope of artificially-generated instability and uncertainty in global food markets, and establish means of identifying and regulating this activity without closing price arbitrage down entirely.
Posted on by Ed 9

Don't tell us the food price index is rising! Tell us why . . .

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.

Posted on by Ed 1

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.

Posted on by Ed 3

The missing gigatons . . .

So, I heard a new and depressing phrase today – “the gigaton gap”.  UNEP published a technical report, just before the Cancun COP, on the gap between likely emissions under any global agreement, and our best scientific understanding of what our emissions levels need to be to prevent warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius over the next 90 years.  The findings were stunning (but sadly not all that surprising)

  • To get on a path likely to keep us at or below 2° C of warming, we would need to hold ourselves to emissions levels of  44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (this includes all CO2 emissions, as well as emissions of other greenhouse gases normalized to CO2 by converting their impact to the amount of CO2 required to create that same impact).

Yeah, it is a huge number, so big as to be meaningless – but don’t worry about the huge number – worry about how this number stacks up the next set of numbers

  • If we just keep doing what we are doing, projections have us at 56 GtCO2e in 2020, leaving a gap of 12 GtCO2e.  That is a big, big gap.  Horrifically huge.  Hell, we have a gap equal to 21% total emissions!
  • Low ambition pledges are not that much better.  Lenient implementation of such pledges would lower emissions to around 53 GtCO2e, leaving a gap of 9 GtCO2e.

But this really gets depressing when we look at the “good” scenario:

  • Even under a best case scenario for the agreement, emissions would only drop to about 49 GtCO2e, STILL LEAVING A GAP of 5 GtCO2e.

“But 5 is much better than 12 or 9, right?” you say.  Well, it is better.  But 5 GtCO2e is approximately equal to the annual global emissions from all the world’s cars, buses and transport in 2005.  ALL OF THEM.  So 5 GtCO2e is not good news.
Summary: In Cancun, we kicked any real action down the road a year, making things harder to achieve under any circumstances.  We already knew this.  But, even under the good scenarios, we were going to come up short of what was needed – something many have long suspected, but after Copenhagen and Cancun, we now have numbers people are likely to commit to, so the analysis becomes a lot more read.  Ladies and gentlemen, ditch the global agreement – we can do this other ways.

Posted on by Ed 0

Damn spam . . .

Well, the old spam filter just wasn’t getting it done, so I have upgraded a bit – sadly, this means if anyone wants to leave a comment, you will have to take the additional 10 second step of entering a recaptcha code (one of those boxes where you have to type in the squiggly text).  I’ve got to make it a bit harder on the bots around here . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

We're not all that powerful, really . . . and Jeff Sachs, please shut up. Please.

I somehow missed this NY Times article on our impending failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Hey, it was my first week at work.  In any case, a few thoughts on a topic that should be getting more discussion.
As I’ve told my classes time and again, the MDGs are the sort of thing that everyone can embrace.  The NYTimes gets it right:

For all the bitter debates pitting nations against one another, there is conspicuously little disagreement over the United Nations goal of eliminating dire poverty. Virtually none of the countries that signed onto the endeavor in 2000 faults the idea of eradicating hunger, educating children, improving maternal health or combating disease. It would be like opposing mother’s milk.

Ah, but saying you want to eliminate suffering, and actually doing it, are two different things.  And at the end of the day, we have two big problems.  First, we live in a finite world where some of us consume so much that it creates real challenges for the rest to get to comfort, if not affluence.  Put another way, if we want everyone to live at an average American standard, we need to come up with between 2-3 Earths worth of resources (see posts here and here).  So, there is no way to achieve the MDGs without making hard choices . . . which leads to my second point: the rich countries do not feel an impetus to make these hard choices.  At least for now, poverty/hunger/suffering are things that happen to large numbers of people somewhere else (we conveniently forget our own poverty belts, like Appalachia and the inner cities) for the average policymaker – we’ll just build really high walls to keep all “those people” out.  Big kudos to Esther Duflo for pointing this out:

“If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?” asked Esther Duflo, a development expert at M.I.T. “Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade’ — there is no onus.”

But while this open assertion of the problem was necessary, I think Duflo is wrong about the fact nobody is going to punish us . . . well, perhaps not literally wrong.  However, you can only limit the opportunities of the global poor for so long before we start seeing things like ecological collapse in agricultural systems, or the destruction of the rainforests, as the poor are forced into choices they would rather not make.  No wall is high enough to guard against a changing climate or a disrupted global economy.  We’re playing Russian Roulette, only adding shells to the chamber each time we miss easy goals like the MDGs, or fail to act on the changing climate.  No, the aliens may not come to get us . . . there’s no need.  They can just wait until we get ourselves.
Oh, and the Times felt the need to quote Jeff Sachs.  Again.  And he was wrong.  Again.  Jeff Sachs, for God’s sake shut your piehole.  Really.  You are a supremely arrogant man who has wasted his considerable intelligence by not listening to anyone, not reading any economic or development history, and not really learning any of the economic geography you profess to be furthering.  Your brilliant idea for development, the Millennium Village Project, is a failure – I called that one four years ago – and yet you will not shut up.  Will reality ever intrude for you?  For the press?  You are the D-list reality star of development . . . every time we try to look away, you perform the intellectual equivalent of taking off your top and running around, only we’ve seen this show before and nobody cares or wants to see it again.  Put on your shirt and go read something by someone other than yourself, then come talk to us.

Posted on by Ed 4

More on food prices, shortages, and riots

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I’m in orientation for the new position, which just swallows whole days – useful, but a bit exhausting.
So, a quick post following up on my previous comments about food prices. The Guardian has a good piece on this issue at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel
This piece is much better than reporting from US sources, but it does have a significant flaw driven by the political goal of the author – highlighting the failures of economic/development policy and practice, and how this led to our current situation. While I agree that these are major issues, I am concerned with the way the author downplays the fact that there has been simmering discontent with the government in Mozambique for some time. The riots are locally-specific: tied to food markets, development policy and other geopolitical processes, but crystallized into action through a local lens. This is why we have riots in some places, but not others. It’s just too hard to generalize . . . and we don’t learn much when we do, I fear.

Posted on by Ed 0

Sorry for the lack of posts. I’m mid-move to DC, without home Internet. I’m hanging on by my iPhone. I’ll be back at it, once I have a place to sit down.

Posted on by Ed 0