Urgent Evoke

A crash course in changing the world.

Dear fellow Agents, for the past week or so we have been discussing different ways we can grow enough food to feed the globe sustainably and affordably.

In many developing countries smallholder export horticulture is aleady proving to be a powerful new engine for growth in rural economies. My country Kenya has been one of the quickest to develop as a supplier of air-freighted fresh vegetables from smallholder fields to consumers in Europe. More than a 1 million livelihoods have been created in farm production and a further 3 million in associated employment. Now other African countries including Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia want to follow suit.

However with rising concerns over climate change, consumers, environmentalists and politicians in the developed world are debating whether it makes environmental sense to continue to import foodstuffs with high food miles. The debate on if emissions caused by the airfreight of our fresh produce from Africa v/s this growth in rural economies is HOT.

Please share - are you FOR air-freighting of fresh produce from one country to or another or AGAINST?

Views: 143

Comment by Lynn Caldwell on March 17, 2010 at 3:00pm
Oops, i forgot - the lure of the rural is loosing it's appeal in Africa and Asia, and many are fleeing to the cities and urban areas - if THE INFORMATION IN HER POST is examined, you can see that by doing the horticultural export thing, it may intice people back onto the land because of the job creation....I don't think it's an either/or question - there's an AND missing. No exporting food whatsoever, will force the tide of people being happy to live in the rural areas because of the farming jobs - BACK into the urban centres. If a percentage of food gets exported for profit, and a certain amount kept, and managed as my idea above, then, I personally think it would help?
Comment by John D. Boyden on March 17, 2010 at 6:23pm
Like jen(above) "I am against air freighting of food long distance if it means that local food security is decreased to supply far away markets. People need to feed themselves first." However, Air freight is really a bogus issue. The true issue is better ways of distribution. +1 Collaboration for starting this discusion!
Comment by Samuel Freilich on March 17, 2010 at 9:19pm
Who could object to local farmers making a better living selling their crops on the free market?

But there are a few problems with the rhetorical question above. First, the market in question is often hardly free. The global food system is flooded with cheap subsidized staple exports, which is one of the reasons why such farmers can't make a living selling staple crops. ("Fair trade" proponents don't seem to worry too much about grain subsidies, but if a country tries to block the import of subsidized crops, the Friedmanites will flip out.)

Second, the farmers in question aren't making a better living as a result. They've just been switched from barely making a living selling staple crops to barely making a living selling vegetables for exports. If anything, their financial security has been reduced: Not only do they have to worry about precipitous drops in production due to local conditions (droughts, floods, extreme weather), they have to worry about precipitous drops in demand due to global conditions (farmers in some other country start switching to the crop in question, speculative financial bubble pops). It's a lot easier to predict what people in one's community will be eating and growing next year, much harder to predict such trends in the entire world, especially once the complexities of financial markets get involved.

Third, externalities, and guess who gets to bare the brunt of those?

How to deal with this problem:

Eating Fair Trade products or others that enforce labor standards ensures that the farmers in question get more of the resulting wealth, which is good, though I feel that many of those programs don't go far enough. However, that may amount to a lock-in at a just-better-than-worst solution, not a real solution to systematic problems.

The biggest solution is political. Fight grain subsidies. Agricultural subsidies hurt the poorest people in the world. If we subsidize farming, those subsidies should focus on encouraging specific sorts of beneficial or innovative agricultural practices, not just on encouraging farmers to increase their yield. If we need to help farmers or those too poor to afford food, we should focus on programs that help those groups directly.

This video suggests eating less meat and more grain. I'm not sure that actually helps in the context of the current global food system. Sure, food sellers might have to reduce prices to convince someone to eat the meat I'm not eating, but you can guess whether that lower price will result in lower profits for the rich or further squeezing of the poor. A mass exodus to vegetarianism would result in substantially lower staple crop prices, but cheap staple crops don't necessarily alleviate poverty if that excludes farming staple crops as a viable job option, as above.
Comment by Samuel Freilich on March 17, 2010 at 9:20pm
By "this video" I mean the same video as above. Sorry, should give credit where credit is due.
Comment by Victor Udoewa on March 18, 2010 at 5:44am
Thanks, Simon (EVOKE mentor), for adding +20 for the discussion. It's a good one, and hopefully something good comes out of it.

Thanks, Rahul, for the invite. I became a friend, and we'll discuss more.

Great comments, Samuel. The point you highlight is a HUGE one which I made about Zimbabwe's food insecurity. Though the EVOKE game tries to educate us (if you really do the work and don't worry too much about the points) about different issues facing the world, in reality they are all intertwined. And in many cases (like many of the developing countries in Africa) it will be difficult (and amazingly innovative) to solve the food insecurity issue without solving the related political instability issue or political policies that don't just cause stagnation but actual economic regression in some cases (like Zim).

Fair trade is seemingly nice, but it tends to lock countries in the bottom billion (Collier 2007) into the same crops since it raises the revenues; it doesn't encourage them to diversity into other activities and crops (which helps them compete on the global market).
I will add that there are both bad trade policies by developed countries (protectionist policies) and bad trade policies inside many developing countries that hurt the most vulnerable while supporting people in government and patrons of politicians. And we need to work against both.

So it would be wonderful to see innovative solutions that don't just attack symptoms but the systemic roots. And that is hard. It will take more thought.

Ayala, I'm still going through thoughts in my head. I don't have any perfect solutions now. But I know there are two general categories of choices. Somehow figure out how to get producers to sell in-country (this is possible with governmental policies; governmental policies already favor in country firms and protect them from external competition in both developing and developed countries but for different reasons) OR go with the flow and involve the poor in agricultural exports. I'm thinking about the latter right now. How we can involve the poor in agricultural jobs and farming so they directly receive the benefits of agricultural exports and then can use the money to provide for themselves and their livelihood.

Ayala, we can talk more about this off-line. But this is currently what I'm thinking.

Or what about this: In exchange for assurance of food export contract of a certain length and for a certain minimum amount of food, the farmers agree to sell the food for a discount since it's in such bulk. And the receiving countries still pay the full price but set aside the amount that was discounted into a separate fund which they then donate back into providing food security for the different countries on the food-social-security plan, divided up according to the impact of each crop on the food security of the recipient country.

How about that? Just thinking out loud.
Comment by Simon Brookes on March 18, 2010 at 12:07pm
How about that for a starting point then "Food Miles" team? +20 for creativity Agent Udoewa. +20 knowledge share to Agent Freilich for your amazing economics insights. Lets keep this pot bubbling!
Comment by Rahul Dewanjee on March 18, 2010 at 2:13pm
I feel a little disappointed to see my contributions in specific context of this blog to have been completely ignored by Simon Brookes. What I found more startling was an instant recognition of Samuel Freilich and what he proposed.

What startles me further is the fact that the underlying economic fundamentals associated with trade between two countries in any given situation is disregarded. There has been an almost implicit acceptance of a number of things where it shows how obsessed we are to create an ideological construct of what trade and commerce should be no matter how removed they are from reality. I am aware that we are in a discourse of social innovation but none can truly happen if we show no regard for the fundamental principles of economics, global trade and the monetary policy that are all interlinked. This is sad.
Comment by Victor Udoewa on March 18, 2010 at 2:35pm
No, what you said Rahul is correct. It's not that everything Samuel said would work or is correct. It's simply that he is going in a direction that is more holistic and is seeing interconnected pieces of the puzzle like economics. And you are also one of those people.

I wouldn't worry too much about point awarding. The goal isn't to get the most points but to find people who think similarly and hopefully actually come up with some plan that is implementable whether you are funded through Evoke, Endeavor, Skoll Foundation, Ashoka, or whomever. So rather encourage each other for trying and attempting solutions and offering thoughts and help us when we go astray with our thoughts from your knowledge.

For instance, Samuel mentioned fair trade, and I added that it sounds good, but it doesn't seem to have the ability to raise a country out of poverty (however you define that) and doesn't encourage a country to diversity exportable products which is important for economic growth globally.

I've said before all these traditionally silo-style disciplines are interconnected, and it's important to think holistically. These are the social sciences which involve the politics and political science and the economics to name just a few. And you're doing that. So what you said is right, the economic and trade policy must change.

I think the question is rather how do you change it? Do you do it directly which is the traditional approach? Or is it possible to change it in an innovative indirect way where pressure comes because you have a de facto model that is better. Collier, in the Bottom Billion, talks about some interesting ways that pressure was placed on countries, for example, through international standards and charters. I'm sure you know this or can read more. I just know that there are many routes to resolutions.

The other problem is that in development economics, the experts disagree. Most famously you can jump around from Sachs to Easterly to Collier. In reality, similar to what Easterly says, no one REALLY knows what causes sustained macroeconomic growth; no one REALLY knows how to scale up models that have worked in small ways so that we can apply the scaling model to all working micro-interventions. We struggle with these questions. That's why Ashoka's changemakers sight and the Unreasonable Institute all ask about scalability. It's important. But if we had that model down, we would be much further. I suspect, as most development economists know, that context is everything. And the problem of reproducibility and scalability at the core might be related to the fact that different contexts for interventions and innovations produce different results. So it's beautiful when you look at countries like Thailand and Uganda and how they both had HIV/AIDS problems but solved them in different context-specific ways. I should say they mitigated the problem. I could name other countries as well.

So I think we SHOULD consider trade and monetary policy. You're right. I applaud anyone that opens us up to thinking about macroeconomics. Thank you for that. I welcome all ideas. And I realize that no one has all the answers. We must work together.
Comment by Rahul Dewanjee on March 18, 2010 at 2:40pm
Fair Trade is an ideological construct that we wish to achieve in the longer run. But to deconstruct the narrative of what global trade can be for an under-developed country and make interpretations that suits the narrative of the developed world is a wrong direction almost pushing the centrality of our existence here at Evoke towards a left leaning economic agenda that is okay to play the game at Evoke but could be potentially disastrous in the context of incubating an enterprise based on social innovation. What is relevant for the developed world must not be pushed down as the necessary change apt for the developing country or a underdeveloped region like Africa as a wh***. The contexts are totally different.

Food security and food miles are apples compared to oranges. In the backdrop of compulsions from WTO to phase out quantitative trade restrictions (tariffs and quotas) and subsidies to agriculture sector as well as heightened awareness for environment among the general public, rich industrialized nations tend to gravitate towards linking quality issues, labor issues and environment issues to enable a negative shift in the cost advantage that developing countries enjoy on account of currency devaluations, low labor cost, local subsidies for exports and a low cost supply demand linkages that exist within the context of a developing country to survive and grow. It is financially efficient to buy agricultural produce from African countries and other places in Asia that are synonymous with exports of agricultural and farm produce.
Comment by Rahul Dewanjee on March 18, 2010 at 2:50pm
Fair Trade is what we aim for. But such aim should not be pursued in absence of linkages we need to create to compensate those whose livelihood is agricultural and hence the comparative advantages lie in this sector. To be obsessed with food miles in the absence o any other change on ground on how we reduce our carbon footprints and at the same time recognising that Africa needs liquidity and capital inflows to help generate manufacturing. No country anywhere in the world historically has shown us to leap ahead without productivity gains from industrialisation.

We cannot and we should make those in Africa suffer for reasons which are caused prima facie by the developed world, notably global warming. So food miles is a fancy cosmetic change not worth anything in the context of any developing country. It sounds good in Europe or United States where it is in vogue.

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