The Lighter Side of Poverty and Unemployment

Some of these are a touch old, but it's one of those "the more things change" things.

World Food Prize 2 - a few short summaries

Howard Buffett keynote address:

“We cannot solve other people’s problems, no matter how much we spend.”

I like technology. It is an important solution, but it is not and cannot be the only solution.

Soil is more important than seed. You cannot correct low soil fertility by piling on chemical fertilizers. Our high-tech solutions promote monocropping, which isn’t good. None of the poorest farmers have had a soil test done, so we’re guessing at what their soils need. Dead soil has no biological activity: fertilizer is like putting oxygen mask on a deadman.

Farmers are willing to take risks on seed. They buy unmarked bags and unmarked cans because they are cheaper.

Secretaries of Agriculture panel

Ghana – fertilizer subsidies and mechanization are the future.

Mozambique – 4 pillars to increasing agricultural productivity: extension, markets and information, natural resource management, and public-private partnerships. Discussed comparative advantage of different zones of Moz and the need to support farmers in their comparative advantages. We are developing new exports, like cashews.

Q: Tanz and Moz – how are you going to avoid monocropping in your focus on corridors and comparative advantages?

A Moz: We are using crop rotation. We aren’t subsidizing other crops, but we subsidize fertilizer and encourage farmers to compost as well. “But don’t worry” we’re also building a phosphate factory.

A Tanz: Don’t only grow one crop – grow other crops in the same season as well.

Sheeran (WFP)

Farmers in many poor countries reduced production during food price crisis because input prices rose faster than food prices.

Asked a market trader how he set prices. “It’s easy. I go online every morning and find the price on the Chicago markets and give a 10% discount – we are a poor nation, after all.”

Using an analogy from IT – where you use some of your computer capacity to ensure the stability of the rest – what investments and inefficiencies do we need to make/accept in order to get the rest of our food production more stable? Ex: Could WFP reduce dependence in South Sudan down the line by buying food there, even though it is more expensive than in neighboring countries?

When leaders say “not on my watch” it is powerful. It gives accountability.

OXFAM Reactions

The headline from Oxfam's GROW initiative, started yesterday, is their prediction that food prices will double by 2030. I imagine someone might have predicted much the same about the year 2000 in 1975 at the tail end of the last major food price crisis. I hope they are equally as wrong. Even if they are not equally wrong, there is little doubt that they are trying to estimate something with an enormous standard error looking at it from this far back, says Bellemare.

Matt at Aid Thoughts:

Of course, while Oxfam may believe this prediction now, they are trying to change behaviour so it doesn’t come true – this means that the claims will be incredibly difficult to (dis)prove. If food prices happen to double in 20 years, Oxfam will say “Look! We told you so.” If they don’t, they will say “Look at the disaster we averted!” Either way, the winning narrative will be constructed ex-post.

Evans thinks that the kind of holistic, systems-approach Oxfam is taking is the right way to go, as indeed our textbook says policy analysts need to think:

This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.

The report is upfront about some of the political economy challenges their proposed changes will face, but not enough is said about how to change the incentives of the "vested interests" (you may also know them as "stakeholder groups," depending on your ideology), says Ranil, who is also skeptical about putting quite so much faith in smallholder-led growth. Ranil also thinks they aren't being all that holistic, focusing too much on agriculture and not enough on growth in the rest of the economy.

Former Brazilian President da Silva puts his faith in the benevolence of governments: "If the political will is there no one will be denied their fundamental human right to be free from hunger."

Lit in review: Applications of Grossman/Helpman 94

Gawande has two papers applying the Grossman-Helpman 1994 model of lobbyists purchasing influence in government. In the basic model, governments maximize a weighted sum of citizen welfare and lobbyist contributions. This provides the basic insight that you can measure governments' political will benevolence by observing how much distortion they provide and at what cost.

For development practitioners, the main problem is a lack of data on lobbyists' contributions. Thankfully there is a way around this since trade protectionism is most obviously against the general public interest and heavily favors one particular group. So trade protectionism = evil government, right? Of course right. Oh, and that whole correlation thing between low average tariffs and high levels of development implies that highly developed countries are very benevolent and less-developed are ... not. Oh dear. So is development caused by benevolence or trade? Or by the same institutional set ups that lead to both (or to all three!)? The whole thing muddies the waters quite heavily.

In the 2006 paper, they put the problem thusly, "The main implication from the estimates of the preference parameter ... is that ... the US government is approximately a welfare maximizer. But welfare maximization would lead to free trade and trade in agriculture is by no means free! The deadweight losses from protection are considerable. ... The distortion in agricultural prices is substantial." So there are some significant kinks still to work out in GH94.

Gawande and Hoekman (2006) [ungated World Bank version] and Gawande, Krishna, and Olarreaga (2009) [ungated WTO version] both apply and expand on the framework by looking at trade policy. Both are published in International Organization.In some ways the second paper really ought to have come first in that it largely ignores the insights from the first and sets at the problem in a much more naive way, so I'll talk about it first.

Political Will and African Agriculture

At the African Green Revolution Forum, leaders of countries and Kofi Annan got together to say that we would have a Green Revolution in Africa already if we only had the political will. The article hints at, but does not outright state, that the Real Problem is that African governments have not been free to choose their own policies. Structural adjustment prevented agricultural growth for decades, and "Until African countries shape their own policies, they won’t have a Green Revolution."

Fertilizer Subsidies in Ghana: Politics Matter

A new IFPRI publication discusses Ghana's 2008 fertilizer subsidy program, enacted while fertilizer prices rose 35%:

Governments previously overlooked other aspects of agricultural development, such as improved infrastructure, in favor of costly universal subsidies, and fertilizer was distributed through centralized state monopolies that crowded out private importers and sellers. A more sustainable approach to the role of subsidies in agricultural development calls for temporary vouchers that target smallholder farmers, cultivate demand for private retailers, and exploit the efficiency of private markets.
... The pattern of voucher allocations was not determined by a district’s poverty level. In fact, slightly more vouchers were granted to less-poor districts, which may have undermined the subsidy program by displacing unsubsidized purchases.
A closer examination reveals that the government targeted vouchers toward districts in which the ruling party was defeated in the last election. A district received 2 percent more vouchers for each percentage point by which the party had lost ... The vouchers were apparently wielded to bolster the party’s popularity where it was lacking....
Banful warns that without a mechanism to curtail political misuse, the new subsidies advancing across Africa will likely fall short of their potential to help farmers and stimulate agricultural productivity.

As we discuss in our forthcoming textbook on global food policy, policies are enacted for a variety of reasons to benefit a variety of causes. Is the relevant policy choice between a program that reduces poverty less efficiently and one that reduces poverty more efficiently, or is it between a program that reduces poverty and no program altogether? Efficiency cannot be determined without reference to the goal: improve electoral chances? reduce poverty? increase production? promote long-run fertilizer markets? reduce hunger? keep urban wages low? some combination of all the above?

USAID

We're 18 months into the administration and among the things that have been put on the back burner (something has to be, after all) is development. CGD worries that USAID has a director ... and all other appointments are still empty.

Also 18 months into the administration, USAID has announced its grand strategic plan (which will be difficult to carry out without its leadership) to accomplish the MDGs ... with 5 years left. Freschi over at Aid Watch is confused:

But a curious feature of the new US strategy is its failure to mention the goals by name, or to strategize progress specifically towards any of the agreed-on indicators. From the critics’ point of view, this is certainly better than the UN Millennium Project’s strategy, which created a 449-step comprehensive strategy to reach the 8 goals and 18 targets. But with no concreteness on goals or indicators at all, one wonders what exactly was the point of the new US strategy

She wonders if this is nothing more than PR: Could it b that "... the MDGs are a politically costless way for any given aid donor to create a positive image of benevolence towards the world’s poor, which is sadly unrelated to whether the goals are actually achieved?"

Aid Thoughts has a different take that could readily be worked up into a proper game theory model. The USAID announcement acts as if we were the only donor out there. After discussing why the conslidation of donor groups is unpopular with national governments and their electorates and why coordination is scarcely more popular, we get this delightful comparison to Monty Python's Life of Brian:

By announcing “this is what we are going to do regardless of what anyone else is doing,” USAID might be allowing more flexible, more thoughtful donors to pursue complementary strategies. In essence, by declaring openly that they are going to kidnap Pilate’s wife [You can watch the scene here (fast-forward to 5:00)], they nudge other groups to focus their efforts elsewhere. Let’s hope they respond to that nudge.

Political will: measured while you wait

I have a paper making the rounds that measures the political will to reduce hunger. One part of that index is based on what people talk about when they attended the World Food Summit and its follow up meetings. Now this is a little qualitative/poli-sci for some economists' tastes. But it's really quite easy to see in practice:

Africa News Blog:

Britain’s new coalition government made its priorities on Sudan very clear as Henry Bellingham, the minister for Africa, used 90 percent of his opening remarks at his first press conference in Khartoum to outline how Britain could increase trade with Sudan.
The other 10 percent dealing with the run-up to the south’s referendum on secession... and the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide all seemed like just an afterthought.

IRIN:

At the end of the three-hour long session we had to put together the key messages for political leaders. When the AU assembly opened the following day, no political leader mentioned nutrition in their address. The main theme - maternal and infant health - got little mention. A substantial portion of the speeches were devoted to the conflicts raging in the continent. ... Mkandawire [head of NEPAD's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme] added optimistically, "We just need the political will to drive the process, and it can happen."

Derrill Watson's CV

My 2010 CV has been removed from this site. An updated CV will appear elsewhere on this same blog.

Aid Thoughts

On political will and development fads

by constantly invoking Governance as an issue of concern, even in documents or policies that can have no hope of influencing it, we reduce it to white noise. We constantly hear the word, and even if it once referred to something real and important, we tune it out because it’s been reduced to meaninglessness. ... This week, I saw the first signs that climate change is going down this path. ... we cannot fall into the trap of using words as a substitute for action. Getting reference to climate change into a document is not a win. Getting a policy implemented that makes a real difference to it is.

On social entrepreneurship

while social entrepreneurs obviously have an altruistic objective, the sine qua non of their work is profit. However morally objectionable you might  find the idea of poor people purchasing goods and services, without the expected profit, many of those goods and services would no longer be available. Entrepreneurs aren’t sitting on huge piles of cash, just looking for ways to spend it: they have investors who will only commit when they smell a future return (even if they might accept a lower-than-average return for socially-beneficial enterprises). ...

The aid-giver’s dilemma is huge: identifying and meeting true need through a haze of mixed signals, political problems and changing priorities, then attempting to identify the impact of that aid by leaping back over the same hurdles.

The entrepreneur’s problem is much simpler: design and offer a product. If it is valuable to the poor then there will be demand and hopefully profits will ensue. If not, the product fails. Either way, all the risk (and the cash!) is borne by the entrepreneur, which creates enormous incentives to get things right. ...

[Markets give poor customers a voice that entrepreneurs listen to.] Entrepreneurship is not the ultimate solution to all our woes, but it plays an intriguing and perhaps crucial role in the big picture. I find it much more disconcerting knowing there are people out there wasting millions of dollars of aid money on bad projects than knowing that a few people make an honest buck on products that the poor value.

Lit in Review: Presidential Speeches

I've been diving into the poli sci literature related to a paper where I attempt to measure the political will of various governments to reduce hunger. One of the measures relies on a content analysis of the speeches made by delegates to the World Food Summit. Here are four papers related to the effects of US Presidential speeches (working from home, my access to the online versions of papers is lacking, so no links today):

1) Ragsdale (1984), "The Politics of Presidential Speechmaking,"Am. Poli. Sci. Review, Vol. 78, 971-984.

2) Cummins (2008), "State of the Union addresses and presidential position taking: Do presidents back their rhetoric in the legislative arena?" Soc. Sci. J., Vol. 45, 365-381.

3) Wood (2009), "Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy," Am. J. of Poli. Sci., Vol. 53, No. 3, 695-709.

4) Peake Eshbaugh-Soha (2008), "The Agenda-Setting Impact of Major Presidential TV Addresses," Political Communication, Vol. 25, 113-137.

Lit in review: 2 of 4 on Insider/Outsider Model

2) Soule, McAdam, McCarthy, and Su (1999), "Protest Events: Cause or Consequence of State Action? The U.S. Women's Movement and Federal Congressional Activities, 1956-1979," Mobilization: An Interational J., Vol. 4, No. 2, 239-256

All you need is ... political will

The simple story: the newly elected Malawian president said "Hey, I didn’t get elected to be a beggar nation, and right now we’re begging for about 45 percent of our food. Do you have any suggestions?" They enacted fertilizer and seed subsidies

Within two years, Malawi went from famine to food exportation. Now the fertilizer subsidies have caught on among neighboring countries—10 are testing similar policies, including Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia. Faced with the evidence of success, USAID, the World Bank, and many European donors are putting their support behind subsidy programs.

“The dogma was that you don’t subsidize African farmers, even though we subsidize American, European and Japanese farmers to the tune of 1 billion U.S. dollars a day,” Professor Sánchez says. “Things have changed. It was basically the political will from one president.”

One man saved the day. A similar story is being told in Zambia. But now let's talk about the seeds:

A major criticism of the Malawi model is that it encourages farmers to turn to a single staple crop (and yes, it's corn, in case you were wondering...). Horticulturist Linda Larish notes that the traditional Malawian staple, a taro-like plant called manioc, has largely been abandoned by farmers switching to imported hybrid corn.

“Even though they are self-sufficient and can grow their own food, they are at the mercy of the seed and fertilizer companies,” Larish says.

Not by coincidence, Malawi’s policies gave Monsanto a foothold for its hybrid maize in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it philanthropy, PR, or simply shrewd business?

Meanwhile, other scientists are finding ways to improve native rice varieties themselves, rather than merely splicing genes from African varieties into the more popular, commercialized Asian varieties.

WIDER Panel: Global Food Crisis and Response

Per Pinstrup-Andersen (yay!): The Political Economy of Food Price Policy (our next project)
The former and current heads of IFPRI largely agree on where the world is and is heading.
He references my work: almost all the increase in hungry people in Africa is from the Dem Rep of Congo
"I do not believe FAO's recent numbers."
Why? 1 - Price transmission from int'l to national is very low in countries with poor infrastructure and in China
US rice prices spiked highest for international Thai rice, 20% lower in Philippines and Egypt, 60% lower in India and China
But if prices didn't increase in China and India, the number of hungry people must have increased enormously in other countries based on FAO
Wheat prices went up more in Egypt than internationally. Maize prices went up in Kenya but didn't come down for national, not int'l reasons.
Global stock increase: 25% for rice and wheat
Terrible lack of commitment to putting plans into action. (more of my research behind that one)
Agrees with Fan's #1 Priorities. Priority #2: double public investment in ag to increase production sustainably: win-wins are possible
3 - incentives for private sector to invest in sustainable ag (saving and credit institutions for farmers, risk management, public goods)
Need to regulate land grabbing (and enforce them) and internalize environmental externalities (full-costing, PES, polluter pays)
Full costing will have to be international to be effective, and I'm not very optimistic if we can get the agreement.
He puts up our diagram of a modified environmental kuznets curve showing win-win-win: reducing poverty, hunger, and soil degradation at once.
"I'm probably the only one in the room who believes real food prices are going to continue down again. Please talk to me."

Alain de Janvry and Joachim von Braun below the fold

Sentences to Ponder: Governance and Development

On Fungibility by Ranil Dissanayake

It’s interesting that no-one has actually looked and examined how many of the countries ‘guilty’ of reallocation have been - audited ... The donor’s role here is to remove all excuses for not holding the audit... But once it’s been established that spending is legitimate (i.e. developmental in intention, as opposed to personal consumption using state funds) then the decisions should be out of donor hands. They advocate, but must be prepared that the final decision goes against their advice. This is meaning of Ownership.

The whole wedding is alleged to have cost about GBP 2 million, part of which paid for a twenty-eight tier wedding cake. ... Is aid money facilitating this kind of opulence? ... Even if state funds were used ... it’s quite possible that the same wedding would have taken place, with the same cost, but with developmental spending suffering even more. If this is the counter-factual, then aid money isn’t facilitating bad spending but mitigating the damage it causes.

On Accountability (courtesy Barder, quoting he head of economics for the UK aid program in India.)

New technologies for crowd-sourcing significantly bring down the transactions costs for collecting and ‘mashing’ data from many stakeholders. Examples include SMS-based systems (e.g. Ushahidi’s crisis reporting), smart-phone systems (e.g. Kenyan crop insurance) and web-based systems (e.g. eMoksha’s Fix Our City). What other examples are there?

On Political Will, Barder

Donors are almost never able to use aid to create incentives that work for developing countries, and they probably should not try. ... First, donors do not make credible threats. ... Second, the incentive created by aid is not strong enough to influence decisions of government officials.
I don’t believe that most developing countries need incentives ... what they need is money. The problem is that donors won’t give that money without a whole rash of conditions, milestones, benchmarks, policy dialogues, missions, evaluations and reports. Donors are forced to impose all that paraphernalia because they need to demonstrate to their taxpayers that the money has achieved something. ... I believe that Cash on Delivery can cut through all that: by providing money on the basis of results, donors can put more money into countries that are willing and able to deliver more and better services, without imposing hassle on either donor or recipient.

On Development Policy as opposed to aid policy, Barder again. His list of important policies:

• Trade: Let them in
• Agriculture: Stop using food aid as welfare for US/EU farmers
• Climate change
• Conflict
• Immigration: It helped both US and EU in the 18th century. Do it again now.
• Intellectual property
• Corruption: "the money for corruption comes from and often returns to industrialized countries"
• International governance: more democracy, less plutocracy

On Methods, How to do accurate guesswork when you don't have enough data: "ballpark is all he's aiming for. Trying to be too exact can be paralyzing; or, as he likes to say, rigor leads to rigor mortis."

and how to get more data: Duflo, 2010 John Bates Clark Medal winner, makes another pitch for RCTs:

Big Bag

Problems in Ethiopian governance:

The problem with foreign aid in Ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this country not as individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights but as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary education and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness. It is this rigid focus on the “backward masses,” rather than the unique human person, that typically justifies appalling cruelty in the name of social progress.

 A moving account titled "Springtime in Kigali", hat tip: Texas in Africa.

When I think of the spectacular growth around Kigali, or those miles of trenches laid with fiber-optic cable across the country, or the latest signs of a growing crackdown against the opposition, they all seem to be different ways to answer the question – for better or for worse – of how to deal with the legacy of 1994.

Yglesias' vision for the world - celebrating idleness, fan fiction, school, retirement, and open source software as transcendent escape from capitalist masters:

So that’s the agenda I have to offer. For rich countries—productivity growth, social insurance, and efforts to improve public health all aiming at allowing people to live more and more of their time outside the bonds of commercial work. For poor countries—capitalism, to get the process of prosperity and social betterment rolling. At the interface between the two—a generous and humane approach to migration issues so that people can have the freedom to escape bad situations, and a trade regime that aims at facilitating the exchange of goods rather than coercing poor countries into adopting the preferred policies of rich world companies. And for all of us, an overhaul of energy systems so the world doesn’t boil and we all get to keep enjoying our prosperity.

Cornell researchers find that SOME jurors are statistically more likely to find unattractive people guilty and give them harsher penalties.

LDS in Haiti

“Immediate help was sent by the Church to members and nonmembers and was distributed under the direction of the local priesthood and Relief Society leaders,” said Elder Francisco Viñas, the Church area president based in Santo Domingo. “They not only received medical aid, food, water and other basic supplies, but they also received counsel, guidance and comfort from their local leaders.” ...
 “The nine chapels in and around Port-au-Prince were mostly undamaged—another remarkable miracle,” said Elder Wilford W. Andersen at the recently-concluded 180th Annual General Conference of the Church. “During the weeks that followed the earthquake, they became shelters for over 5,000 Haitians and bases from which food, water, and medical attention were distributed. Basic needs were met, and order began to emerge out of chaos.”...

In the case of Haiti, local Church leaders worked to complete a head count of members of their own congregations and formulated an assessment of their needs.

Despite the devastation in their homeland, order quickly returned to Mormon congregations in Haiti. Patrick Reese, manager of planning and administration in the Humanitarian Services Department of the Church, said “The (Church) leaders knew the principles of welfare, of communication and self-reliance long before the catastrophic event occurred and they knew how to implement these principles for the benefit of their members.”...

Since the earthquake, the Church has sent 1.4 million pounds of aid to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in addition to teams of doctors who treated patients in Mormon meetinghouses after the quake. 

For the Next MDGs

Matt at Aid Thoughts has some good thoughts about the MDGs:

For one, the MDGs are a broad set of international goals, but they do not comprise a one-size-fits-all policy, yet we continue to treat them as comparable indicators and implicitly weight them equally (this is reinforced by the structure of the MDGs). Why should India, where less than 80 children per 1,000 die before their fifth birthday, put the same weight on halving under-five mortality as Malawi, where over 130 children suffer the same fate? What if Indonesia decides it wants to put more weight on industrial policy than agricultural policy, with the expectation that the former will do more to reduce poverty in the long run? I think policy-makers and researchers often confuse the normative aspects of the MDGs (what we want to achieve) with the operational side (by trying to directly target each of the things we want to happen). ...

Several months ago, I suggested that the next set of MDGs to be built from the ground-up, an aggregation of the goals of multiple development strategies. Instead of the international community telling developing countries what their priorities should be, then scouring planning documents to ensure adherence, the structure should grow from the opposite direction. Governments and civil societies in poor countries need to determine their own objectives for development, after which the international community should do its best to help them achieve it.

High Hopes for Rwandan Ag Development

Roger Thurow's report casts political will and ownership in the hero roles for Rwandan agricultural development. The only question he asks is if donor governments and institutions will step up to the plate, rather than if the plans themselves will be implemented and will work once implemented. The US rhetoric has been that developing government ownership and partnership is the new way of doing business. This has been promised before also.

And so, in December 2009, the U.S. and other western governments and leading development institutions came to Rwanda and finally put their words into action.

Note that words have already been put into action merely by the majestic appearance of the western representatives. The US representative, not incidentally, is a member of the US security council. In my paper measuring political will based on delegates, this would indicate a low commitment on the US side. On the other hand, the President of Rwanda is present, a sign of rather more commitment. Can we close the commitment gap?

While their food aid once again poured into other east and central African nations to rescue millions from starvation, the donors gathered in Kigali and ignited a Global Food Security Initiative that aims to help farmers grow more of their own food rather than merely feeding them. If it is successful and spreads to other countries on this most malnourished of continents, it could change the way hunger is fought and development aid dollars are spent, and usher in an agriculture revolution in Africa.

No, expectations are very realistic and not at all over the top.

A few facts about what needs to be done:

Typical of sub-Saharan Africa, about three-quarters of Rwanda’s population depends on farming for its own food and a bit of income. Agriculture provides one-third of the national income. Yet Rwanda’s rural infrastructure is underdeveloped. A lack of irrigation leaves it almost wholly dependent on rain. The hills are scarred with erosion. Markets are weak, transport is difficult, seed research is scarce. Since the genocide of 1994 ravaged the countryside, hunger reigned.

Here are some of those Rwandan hills, courtesy the Rwanda Development Gateway. The hills make mechanization rather less effective.

A few notes on what is being done:

"In 2007, the Rwandan government, anxious to cut its dependence on food aid, embarked on its own push to boost farm production. Since then, it has more than doubled its spending on agriculture, to 6.6% of its 2009 budget with a goal of 10% by 2012, according to the agriculture ministry. Rwanda was the first country on the continent to complete an investment strategy under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) of the African Union. ...

Within days of the Rwanda meeting, several countries, included Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Uganda and Zambia, told the African Union they wanted to push ahead with their own agriculture plans.

From the agriculture ministry, Agnes Kalibata says Rwanda, after a long period of darkness, is eager to show the way. “We began this process feeling like a guinea pig,” she said, “but now we feel like a lighthouse.”

I do hope this works out. I am encouraged by the importance being given longer term agricultural development, particularly by the government itself. The rhetoric has the benefit of being the prescription of the day. I think it's a step in the right direction and hope that actions live up to the rhetoric. It has several more hopeful signs in terms of self-determination than the Millennium Villages, whose decisions are made for them "by a Professor in New York" as discussed recently by Barder. But this is the beginning of the path, not the end. Declaring success and saying we're up to lighthouse mode seems a bit premature.

I bring this up because when rhetoric sets expectations too high, anything realistic that happens is going to be a let down and a disappointment, fueling aid fatigue and giving the critics of all aid or your particular program more ammunition. The more we claim aid, markets, microfinance, international cooperation, or anything else will accomplish, the more we sound like an infomercial promising too much. More realistic, humble rhetoric leaves you free to celebrate the genuine successes you have and build on them. Being upfront about how results will be measured and evaluated would also be useful.