Dear Colleagues
There is a food crisis. Why is anyone surprised?
There are a growing number of appeals for more money so that more food can be bought to be given to people who are hungry. This looks like another example of failed development brought about by years and years of bad decision making by individuals in leadership and powerful organizations. Most of the people who are hungry should have had the opportunity to earn a modest amount to buy the food that is available ... and produce more food for themselves ... but when markets are flooded with donated free food the producer incentives become grotesquely distorted and those living at the Bottom of the Pyramid have to struggle even more.
Over the years I have seen enough of emergency programs to know that they are obscenely inefficient ... high cost with hardly any meaningful management controls over cost and efficiency.
Worse ... these big and intermittent food flows have a role in distorting the local economy that might be just as serious as the impact of subsidy in distorting agricultural production in the United States and the EU. My position is that every community has possibilities and problems ... and that rather little is known about either at the community level. The big international organizations, whether it is FAO and WFP or Oxfam or World Vision, seem to be using an approach that is more like meat cleaver than scalpel for a surgery. Sadly, it seems that they are not organized to support much that is sustainable ... just organized so that they do their own activities according to their own mandates using substantial emergency funds ... with little or no concern about the longer term impact at the community level.
Now I may be wrong ... but my observations over the years support what I am saying ... and none of the organizations has yet got to the stage where they are willing or able to produce data that shows I am wrong. Of course they have an opinion that I am wrong ... but it would be good to see their opinion backed up by data that has some credibility!
Why is there a food crisis? Why is it a surprise? Where is all the wealth going so that more and more people seem to be poor and hungry. I think it was Dr. Yunus who said early this year ... when poor people work so hard and remain so poor, it is not their fault, but something that is wrong wioth the system. What is wrong with the system? Who in the system is wrong and how are they wrong?
When we start getting answers to these questions we will start to have success ... and for this we need data.
Sincerely
Peter
--
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
http://www.tr-ac-net.org
Community Accountancy
Integrated Malaria Management Consortium (IMMC)
+1 917 432 1191 or +1 212 772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com