Cambodian silk producers
|
Am I the only one who thinks we cannot ‘make poverty history’? Let me re-phrase that. Am I the only one who cares greatly about the need to address poverty in the world’s poorest countries, but still believes there will be many poor people around for a long time to come? Even worse, am I the only one who doubts whether a million Europeans chanting ‘make poverty history!’ will have any real impact on how many people are still poor in, say, 20 years from now?
Perhaps I exaggerate. I cannot be alone, because anyone who has worked in poor countries as long as I have must surely worry about how the present wildly popular campaign has grossly simplified so many problems. And raising the profile of the debate about poverty cannot be all bad. Who knows, it might actually result in a more effective approach to tackling what is certainly one of the world’s greatest challenges.
The risk is that the celebrity grandstanding that has graced so many of our recent news bulletins will lead people to believe there is a quick fix within the grasp of the G8 leaders or that requires only more generosity from western tax payers and volunteers. The ugly truth is that there is no quick fix, and the heroically great British public will need much patience before they can expect to see any real change.
There is no doubt we can be generous. Consider the amazing response to the tsunami appeal six months ago when the voluntary aid agencies were overwhelmed by the money people sent them and the fund-raising activities they supported. Our own Shelterbox programme here in Cornwall (www.shelterbox.org) is a fine example of highly practical assistance targeted precisely at a clearly defined problem. If they could visit the areas that benefited I am sure Shelterbox’s supporters would be more than pleased with the way their money was spent.
 |
Bhutanese farmers
|
But ‘making poverty history’ is another matter. It is not a question of providing humanitarian assistance to help victims get through a crisis brought on by a natural disaster. Making poverty history means, among other things, poor farmers with minimal resources and little education must produce more. They need to produce not only enough to eat, but something extra to sell in their local markets. And they must do it on a regular, sustainable basis, year in and year out, so they can gradually build up a safety net of savings to deal with the health, educational and other demands of normal family life.
They will need not only more production, but also better services like supplies of clean drinking water and access to basic health and education. However, to simplify the discussion let’s focus on their farms. How will they increase their production, and what can outsiders like us do to help them?
To see what we are up against, consider a few of the poor areas that I have visited and worked with over the last few years, including their plans for advancing themselves and the problems they faced.
There are villages in northwest Cambodia with a history of producing silk, and they see a revival of their craft as their best chance of escaping poverty. Production often fails because of disease among the silkworms, the farmers have little or no money to buy even the most basic equipment, road access is uncertain and painfully slow, few people are prepared to visit to buy their silk yarn, cheaper (but lower quality) silk smuggled in from Vietnam undercuts their prices and many of the officials who might help them are underpaid, inactive, technically incompetent and often corrupt enough to demand a share from anyone who begins to succeed.
Farmers in remote valleys and mountainsides in Bhutan in the Himalayas could become better off by producing more fruit or high-value crops like shitake mushrooms, once they manage regularly to grow enough basic food to eat. They are plagued by problems of communication among themselves as well as with the outside world, which means they do not see much of the government services that should guide and support them, and they often cannot sell any surplus that they may produce.
|
|
An eco-forestry group, PNG
|
Remote communities in Papua New Guinea look to their forests for their livelihoods, and they could make a reasonable living by extracting and selling timber and other forest products on a sustainable basis. But sustainable ‘eco-forestry’ requires skills and discipline that are not ‘natural’ and have to be taught and learned. The communities are not ‘naturally’ well organised for the purposes of forest management or small-scale business, and they are often divided by land disputes. And nobody is knocking on their doors asking to buy what they can produce. Government services are generally weak, and any competent and dedicated officials commonly find themselves struggling against powerful interests vested in the status quo.
Most farmers in the northern communal areas of Namibia, southern Africa, have tiny, barren farms where they struggle to raise a few animals. They could do better with hardier varieties of their traditional crops, better veterinarian services for their livestock, small-scale irrigation systems, more efficient local markets and sources of loans that do not charge exorbitant rates of interest. Among other problems, the government’s research priorities lie elsewhere and local officers are not trained to respond to local interests and needs. The AIDS epidemic has become so bad that officials spend a great deal of their working time attending funerals.
|
A Namibian extension officer
|
I’ve chosen these examples to illustrate the kinds of local problems that must be solved to ‘make poverty history,’ but more optimistically to show that, daunting as they may be, the problems can be identified, addressed and often solved. Each of these cases benefited from an internationally financed project, and as far as I could see during the months of my official evaluation visits, in the end each project made a pretty good fist of helping the people concerned, resulting in anything from a few hundred to several thousand families becoming significantly better off.
So, as the Queen said to Red Rum, why the long face? Because under the present circumstances in the poorest countries, it is so difficult to imagine these projects being repeated and copied enough times to make a real dent in the numbers of poor people on a national or international scale. My biggest reservations about many international development projects are that they are expensive in relation to what they achieve, and they do not do enough to strengthen the capability of the national and local government agencies that are meant to learn from them, maintain them and implement the lessons from their experience. Far from strengthening, outside assistance often creates a sense of dependence in those agencies, and leaves them weaker when the projects end.
Hilary Benn, Britain’s Overseas Development Minister, put it well when he said a few months ago: 'Development in the past spent a lot of time working round the fact that effective government did not always exist'. The price we will pay for that is the decades it will now take before we can talk confidently about ‘making poverty history’.
|
|
|
