World Food Prize Symposium 2003
The Fight Against Hunger:
Report from the Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Dowswell
The Early Action Plan
DR. CHRISTOPHER DOWSWELL
UN Hunger Task Force Member
Special Assistant to the President, Sasakawa Africa Association
Good morning. We’ve been through a lot of this already, but my presentation is the activities that we’re already engaged in in Africa, and most of it has been related to supporting NEPAD, which I’ll talk about in most detail. I won’t say too much about the second point, and the third point, Dick Beahrs will be talking about this and I think Kevin as well.
NEPAD, the new partnership for African development is a homegrown Africa-wide initiative. It’s not very old and is really only about a year old and really starting to move. In July of this year the heads of state that form up the countries that form NEPAD approved a comprehensive agricultural development plan, but this plan is still very sketchy.
It’s built on four pillars – land and water, infrastructure and markets, food and nutrition in reducing hunger, and institutions, particularly research and extension. They have a very small secretariat that’s based in South Africa, extraordinarily small. So far they have identified, but only as almost line items or as titles, most of them, more than 30 what they call “flagship” or “bankable” projects, most of which will be operated at the national level, although they’re very concerned in trans-border collaboration and building up these sort of regional economic communities so that they work more... There are 49 or 48 countries south of the Sierra, 53 or 54 in the total of Africa. They need to work more in regional cooperation. But most of the projects will be implemented.
And these flagship products, they need to develop these, at least reasonable business plans with budgets, so that they can start to engage much more productively with donors. So right now their major task is to move these from just titles to actual plans.
So far NEPAD, when you talk to them, and from what they tell us at the meetings with the heads of state, even though poverty reduction and environmental protection are also in their objectives, they’re really talking, their first priority is growth and getting agriculture moving. They want to go to some extent to the more, higher payoff or the higher potential areas where they can get payoff, sort of pick the lower apples on the tree first. And the hunger reduction goals to some extent are secondary. And one of our roles in working with them is to show how those can be complementary and be done at the same time.
Pedro, after visiting the NEPAD secretariat, agreed that Hunger Task Force members, and as the task force and individually in their various organizational capacities, would help NEPAD to develop this catalog of bankable projects as soon as possible. Five of us went there to their secretariat in July, and we worked with their staff on developing these tentative project proposals with business plans in three areas.
One was soil fertility restoration and management and farming systems of food-insecure people, and linked to that are crop development projects. School feeding with domestically produced foods and then... work on the markets part yet, but we will.
We produced with them a project proposal, which is titled, “Making and Managing African Tools for Improved Livelihoods.” It has three components, a range of soil fertility interventions, from those that are based on externally purchased inputs but also internally generated ones like agroforestry, green manures and things like that; developing small holder input delivery systems, particularly for fertilizer and seed; and also ways to invest in the environment or in ecoconservation, public works, but using food programs, but particularly the ecological part of it.
We also worked on some crop proposals. One of them was... so that clean planting stocks can be produced and prepared. Another one since we first were there was on maize, focusing on helping to grow the African maize economy, in this case making it sensitive particularly to the circumstances and needs of poor farmers. So that means more open pollinated varieties rather than hybrids, quality protein maize rather than normal maize, things like that.
And we are, as part of the Hunger Task Force, trying to help sensitize and build this plan so that the hunger part or the needs of the really poor people, the hunger hot spot areas, are considered. So we want to help them do project proposals on cassava, on cow peas, on millet, on sorghum, on crops like this that are very much the key crops in these hot spot areas.
I worked on the soil fertility one. In this case it was somebody from kind of an organic approach and my organization which has emphasized more fertilizer. But trying to look, develop a range of options, given the conditions of the farmers. There are many farmers in Africa that are in marginal lands with serious agroclimatic stressors, very remote, where it’s just too risky and too costly to use fertilizer at the present time, or at least to depend completely on that. So we need to look at things like agroforestry, green manures, and develop combinations.
But we also, there’s lots to be done to improve the efficiency of fertilizer use to better formulations, proper application, and also the efficiency of supply – there’s lots of market failures in the supply chain in Africa. The prices don’t need to be two and three and four times what farmers pay in other parts of the world. So this was an important part of our interventions on the soil fertility part.
We also realize that the environmental degradation in the highlands and some of the other areas (not just in the highlands) is so severe that we can’t think sequentially, we’ve got to think concurrently. And something has to be done now to begin to reclaim those things. But the key is to tie the reclamation to efforts to get the kind of small holder commercial agricultural sector moving.
And so we developed a section on different types of interventions for reforestation. How much does it cost to stabilize gullies? – small-scale irrigation – water harvesting – and some of these other things like... and other things to conserve. And we think this is very important, and it should be tied in such a way to encourage the development of the economic or the growth sector of agriculture.
We did work with them. NEPAD had already established with the World Food Programme to work on school lunch programs. And they were sort of not so interested in the beginning when WFP proposed it, because they saw it as a charity thing. They are not interested in being based on donated food from outside, but when you start talking about using that as a vehicle to increase agricultural growth, employment, and meet nutritional objectives, then their interest got much stronger.
And we would like to work with them to try to focus on these hot spot areas, particularly where the hunger is most severe, and to work with them also as they build coalitions with the World Food Programme, NGOs, national governments, etc.
This is an area that we all know is very important, but we didn’t have the right people in our first consultancy, and it’s one that all of us need to work on, but there’s lots of parts to this.
One is to get input delivery systems so that there are stockists or dealers nearby that can sell seed and fertilizer and crop protection chemicals and veterinary supplies – trying to get that system working so that these are closer to the farmer.
Storage is a big problem, and a big opportunity, because there are such fluctuations in the price over the year. In Uganda after the 2001-2002 harvest, corn prices dropped to $17 a ton. Then they can come back to $200 a ton. Storage can help even that out so it becomes sort of a bank. Working to get significant storage programs going is an important objective.
Agroprocessing and adding value – in this case it’s making gari, fermented flour from cassava – these types of small-scale projects they’re very much interested in.
And then the other – getting markets more in tune with demand, so we’re not overproducing, so farmers have information to sort of see where their opportunities are.
So these are areas that we will be working with the NEPAD to develop project proposals with other actors – it’s not just us, but using our task force membership as a task force and as all of our individual organizational linkages to see how we can help them get this plan developed as fast as possible so they can enter into dialog, individual countries with the donors.
The hunger hot spots is one where we think we can have some special insights. But we realize there is certainly more in planning the interventions that we’ve got to get on the ground. So of these eight that we’ve identified, we’re now strategizing how to get out there, how to see what’s going on, how to work in trying to develop integrative programs that deal with these hot spots. I don’t think this is the highest priority for NEPAD, but if we can show how this can link to getting the agricultural sector growing, the interest will be much higher.
And then the... is advocacy. I mean, part of it is getting heads of state out to the field and involved in seeing what can be done in getting agriculture and hunger reduction onto their agenda. But it’s a much bigger effort than that. They’re very concerned about it. Once they have their bankable projects and their plan together, then they want to move.
And again I said they have to think concurrently to begin to develop much more effectively their resource mobilization. And resource mobilization means developing that political will, break through their communities to do so.
Thank you.