Agriculture repeats itself

Chapter 10 of my textbook on Food Policy for Developing Countries discusses nanotechnology and the fact that companies have a vested interest in ensuring that nanotech does not become the next great consumer scare. To do that, they need to make sure there is public debate, address consumer concerns early on, openly, forthrightly, and without condescension. Governments have an important role to play also in clarifying up front what standards will be required. Having a clear regulatory framework will encourage companies to invest and make it easier for them to demonstrate openly that their products meet safety standards. Here is M. Nestle agreeing on the scope of the problem and supplying some new reports on the subject.

There is a hefty debate brewing on which framework should be used to debate international agricultural policies. Doha is going nowhere slowly. At COP17 African countries had been reasonably unified, but are less so now that South Africa is calling for a greater environmental focus, with Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania prominent on the other side of the debate. One of the better arguments in the article:

Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International said that farmers with fewer than two hectares would only be able to make $3 a year at the present rate for carbon. He said he did not doubt the intentions of South Africa in "pushing for climate-smart agriculture as the answer to agriculture's problems" but added that "climate-smart agriculture could benefit South Africa a lot because your farmers are large-scale and carbon markets work for agriculture on the industrial scale".

Cote d'Ivoire has announced the (re?)formation of a state cocoa board that will take over most of the higher level market functions. The article seems to be written from a Ghanaian-centric viewpoint, worrying about how the CdI board will be able to compete with Ghana's and the likely impact on world prices [which will be lower, duh, because the civil war kept cocoa production and sales much lower].

And for variety, here is an interview with a Zimbabwean crocodile farmer. He has 10,000 crocs at a time, which he exports to Europe and Asia to sell their skins and meat. Among his major costs are importing the beasts to feed the crocs and trying to get enough eggs to keep the project at that size.

Lit in Review: SSA Development

Wantchekon, Leonard, "Deliberative Electoral Campaigns and Transition from Clientelism: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Benin." Wantchekon got permission from the major presidential political candidates in Benin to run an experiment on their campaigns. The randomly selected treatment villages had two town hall-style discussions about important political topics while control villages had the standard rallies. Among the interesting conclusions from his research, rallies cost $15/person to hold but town hall meetings only $2/person; turnout is 5% higher after town halls; and average spending (cash and gifts) to voters was not statistically different between treatment and control groups so that's not what's driving it. It seems that town hall meetings may be the more efficient way to go in national elections.

Aye and Gupta, "The Effects of Monetary Policy on Real Farm Prices in South Africa." They find using a VAR model that both anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy impacts farm prices in the way we would expect (more money supply --> higher prices, big surprise; but lower money supply does not lower prices) but while statistically significant they don't explain much of the variation in what is happening from 1970 to 2010. I wonder if they would have gotten much different results if they looked at  1975-2005 instead and took out the two major episodes of international food price volatility. How much are they driving the small impacts? They also do not attempt to explain how anticipated monetary shocks could have a significant impact or why negative money shocks don't have price impacts. I would hypothesize at least for the latter that it is because of an inflationary shock to supply that the monetary authority chose lower money supply growth, so we wouldn't see a change that direction because of endogeneity problems.

Clemens and Demombynes' latest salvo in the Millennium Villages conflict: the MVP released a paper for the first time comparing progress in the villages to progress in the rest of SSA. Unfortunately, they still do this improperly. What would they have found doing it more properly?

In rural areas of the Ashanti region where the MVP site is located, stunting has been falling just as much as at the project site. The Millennium Village contains less than 1% of Ashanti Region’s population, so even allowing for a generous “spillover” effect of MVP programs to neighboring areas, it is implausible that the village is driving the trend across Ashanti. Comparing the project site to the national trend is likely to overstate the impact of the project.

Blattman reports on the results of an experiment in Kenya by Friedman, KIremer, Miguel, and Thornton, giving education grants to girls in secondary school. In addition to improved test scores and later marriage years, they find improved knowledge of politics and therefore ... more legitimacy for political violence as a way of solving political problems. Ooh. Blattman notes that his own work is starting to find a similar trend in Ugandan women.

Nicita, Olarreaga, and Porto examine "Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa." They find that the average (of 6) country's trade policies are biased in favor of poorer households, but that developed countries' barriers are biased in favor of richer African households. This suggests, potentially, that reducing average trade barriers in Africa may harm the poor

LDS Aid

Two professors, one a Cornell-trained BYU professor of nutrition, have been working to improve the Atmit porridge that is often given out in LDS care packages. The hope is that it will be even better for small children with a better mix of micronutrients (particularly more iron) but without compromising on shelf-life. Another article describes its dissemination in poor areas of Peru.

A single serving provides 34 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein, 43 percent of calcium, 99 percent of iron, and high percentages for a dozen vitamins and minerals for children under 5 years old. ... 
In 2010, 645,000 pounds of Atmit were shipped by LDS Charities to four countries. Depending upon the age and size of the children, that's enough to feed 100,000 to 130,000 children for one month. The cost? Less than $6 (USD) per child.

LDS efforts to help those suffering from the famine in the Horn of Africa:

In Ethiopia, projects to aid more than 100,000 refugees are under way, including water tanks, trucking services, sanitation supplies and hygiene training for 15 villages; supplementary food for 8,700 malnourished children; nutrition centers and sanitation facilities for Somali refugees in Dollo Ado; and 5,000 hygiene kits.
The Church also plans to provide water catchment and storage structures, as well as soap and washbasins to serve tens of thousands of other residents in the communities surrounding the Dollo Ado camps.

Other projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia are also underway and briefly described at the link.



At the most recent General Conference, Church President Thomas S. Monson reminded members about the General Temple Patron Fund. Donations from members around the world are used to help members who live far from a temple travel there. A recent article highlighted some of the saints in southeastern Africa who have been blessed by the Fund:

Interesting Sentences

The Economist: The world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century’s preferred option, making humans behave like robots.

HT: Grandiloquent Bloviator: “If you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” Also known as: there is no such thing as a free lunch on the internet. If you can’t tell what the website is trying to sell you, they are either selling your eyes to advertisers or your information. 

Beckworth: “money is special: it is the only asset on every other market (i.e. it is the medium of exchange) and thus is the only one that can affect every other market.  Money, therefore, is what makes it possible to have economy-wide recessions.”

Marron: Sometimes, it’s more than $100 lying on the sidewalk: “You can sell 9,999 shares of The Donald …  at $0.52 a piece [on Intrade]. In just that one trade, you can pocket almost $5,200 of free money.” The only question is whether the government decides this is an illegal activity for influencing voting and elections. “For the latest Trump action, click here.”

The Economist: “The [United Arab Emerites] government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.”
 

The history of political cartooning in South Africa: “I tried to define when South African cartooning started … all the way back to a cartoon which was published in 1819 by George Cruikshank who was a leading London caricaturist of the day. I called it the Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon. It shows the white settlers being devoured by these cannibal figures – these huge, hulking monstrous figures. … For me that became an iconic cartoon, a prototypical South African cartoon.”
 

Yglesias on Chomsky’s denunciation of Osama’s death as an illegal assassination: “International law is made by states, powerful states have a disproportionate role in shaping it, and powerful states have obvious reasons to not be super-interested in the due process of suspected international terrorists or the sensibilities of mid-sized countries. Many people are pacifists and/or strong critics of western military power, and that’s fine. But it’s simply not the case that international law is identical with these policy preferences. On the contrary, one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers."

Calzadilla, Rehdanz, and Tol: “Trade liberalization tends to reduce water use in water scarce regions, and increase water use in water abundant regions, even though water markets do not exist in most countries “

Easterly and Freschi: “Belief in Hell raised … economic growth potential. … A different twist than the Protestant Ethic: Scared Rich?

Big Bag of African Agriculture

Fair trade coffee in Uganda, which liberalized coffee export in the 1990s: Prices remained low initially, leading to reduced supply and quality. Organizers of a free trade initiative with 7500-15000 farmers claim that they have known how to produce high quality coffee but haven’t had incentives. The price premium is roughly 25% plus investment in community public goods.

Also in Uganda: mud quarries. “what we get is a fascinating portrait of a village doing the best it can with an informal land system, yet obviously still in need of some sort of formality.” The mud is a valuable building material locally.

South Africa plans that agroprocessers will add 500k jobs over the next ten years and are providing capitalization funds. The funds are coming from the court payments required of Pioneer Foods for collusion and price-fixing. The government also hopes to increase the number of smallholder farmers from 200k to 250k by providing training and extension services. Employment in agriculture and agroprocessing has been declining.

Zambia’s president is not predicting turmoil from the north spilling in, crediting good multiparty elections for his confidence.

Learning African English via Wikipedia

FAO estimates that if rural women had equal access to land, technology, financial services, education, and markets , agricultural production could increase enough to feed an additional 100-150 million people, 12-17 percent of the world’s total. Diouf has called for equality as a means to “win, sustainably, the fight against hunger and extreme poverty.” Again, the question is if we pursue equality as a right, or because it is morally right, or because it pays us to do so.

On the infrastructure constraints in African agriculture:

Statistics indicate that only 34% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population lives within two kilometers of a paved road. In most of Africa, poor road infrastructure accounts for investors deciding to look elsewhere. “Every fifth African needs at least five hours to get to the nearest market….” Beavogui says.

Reasons to be optimistic about Africa, video below the fold. Among the interesting points he makes is that vehicle operating costs in Africa are no higher than in price, but the prices to put goods on ships are the highest in the world. Only 1% of the money allocating for non-wage health support actually gets where it was intended. Yes, this is why he is optimistic. It means that there are obvious problems that can be readily solved. As a result, implementing some simple remedies reduced Rwandan child mortality by 33%.

Big Bag of Ethics: Soylent Green, Mandela, and Aid

Terrible ideas in ethics: run the country like a business, Soylent Green edition. “If you’re trying to look at America from a balance-sheet perspective the problem is very clear … it’s the existence of old people. … The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auctions.”

Much better thoughts on ethics about Mandela’s transformation into the Mandela we (think we) know today: “It was not because he was removed from others, removed from evil, removed from the weaknesses of a frail humanity, that he prevailed. It was by plunging into what was negative in himself and the aching world around him that he was able to develop “whatever is good,” as he puts it in his book. How to do this? One word keeps cropping up, over and over: integrity.”

Beyond a desire to save the world:

Someone very smart once said to me that “the reasons why you stay married are usually different from the reasons why you got married.” And very much like marriage, humanitarian work is one of those things that has good days and not so good days.”

On the ethics of pop stars associating with autocrats.

Mormons in Africa series

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put out a series of news reports last week on the church's activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Church's Africa Fact Sheet can be found here. There are nearly 320,000 Mormons in Africa, roughly 100,000 of them in Nigeria. The fact sheet also provides statistics for the church's humanitarian aid. The initiatives are described in more detail here and I regularly link to more information.

Elder Richard G. Scott, a senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, visited Mozambique in January. In his last visit in 1999 there were 40 Mormons in Mozambique, while there are now over 5000. He spoke to members in several meetings, with some members traveling two days for a chance to be there, as well as to doctors and nurses teaching neonatal resuscitation techniques to 53,000 medical professionals so far. His message was one of hope, reassurance, and encouragement. Another apostle, Jeffrey R. Holland, prophesied in Burundi that “Africa will someday be seen as a bright land full of ... hope and happiness.” Several African Church leaders tell their stories here.

This article tells several personal stories: one from a rural family in Madagascar who spent 27 years searching for religious truth and two accounts from South Africa. One of them describes the love expressed by white and black members for each other during Apartheid:

Dominic had never seen that type of affection generated from a white person toward someone of darker skin. “You don’t understand how big that was, how amazing it was to see that — how shocking. It went against everything society had taught me.” ... He was baptized and started attending church and was again amazed by the acceptance he felt. “They taught the same thing to me as the white boy sitting next to me at church. That broke a lot of boundaries for me. That said to me in my heart and mind that we are equal.”

This is a first-hand account by an LDS Kenyan journalist. Another article talks in a very introductory way about the 7,000 members in Uganda. The fastest Church growth currently is in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Church runs a program called the Perpetual Education Fund which provides low-interest loans to help people to receive education, usually in order to secure better employment. PEF is helping 2,300 people in Africa so far. The average loan in Africa is $1,200 for a year of schooling. 570 people have finished their education with the program and have seen large increases in income. Funds come from donations by members, myself included, and is run by volunteers.

Most genealogical records are preserved orally in Africa. The Church's FamilySearch program is attempting to record and preserve these family history records. The article quotes a Ghanaian proverb: When an old man dies, it is as if a library has burnt down.

Success, Disaster, and One or the Other in the Making: African Agriculture

LDS Charities has been working wth IITA (a Nigerian charity) inLuputa,  DRCongo on a project to increase cassava yields and processing. The local members who devised the project [right] and Brother Squires, director of Agriculture Production Services for LDS Charities, are very pleased with the results:

Families also grow their own cassava, then process it in exchange for a small fee used to maintain the equipment. They often have enough flour to use, preserve for food storage and sell for a small profit in the marketplace. Any surplus is used to help care for the poor and needy.

"This project offers sustainability at its best," said Brother Squires. "These subsistence farmers have improved their self-reliance through increased production, improved marketing and better processing. They have given back to those in need with their surplus product. It's a great success story."

The site supervisor for the project, Nestor Ilunga, is featured in a second article this week as he and his family prepare to visit the LDS temple in South Africa, after a 7 hour bus ride to a plane to the DRC capital to a plane for the 1730 miles trip south. The story was the first time I had heard mention of a "General Temple Patron Assistance Fund" to assist families at great distance to attend the temple. "To date, only one family in the Luputa district has been sealed in the temple: the district president and his wife. Full-time missionaries called from the district have also been to the temple."

Southern Africa has meanwhile been facing floods which have damaged local crop production in "portions of Botswana, Lesotho Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa." Over 60% crop losses are reported in Lesotho while Mozambique and South Africa have declared a state of emergency.


The Ethiopian government has agreed to allow private Indian farmers to set up shop to crow pulses and edible oils to export back to India. The Indian government for its part is providing assistance with watershed development and other commercial agricultural investments. More on land grabbing.

Roving Bandit brings to our attention a call for papers on food market systems planning, with an emphasis on the planning. The call also includes plans made by NGOs and landscape architects, but the intro paragraph makes pretty clear their interest in meeting "the official who is in charge of ensuring bread supplies to London."Oh dear.

Big Bag of Africa

One of my better-visited posts dealt with Ethiopian monetary policy. The question is: what is the chance of another Birr devaluation? One vote for pretty good based on pretty simple trends. The currency stays relatively stable against the dollar for 5-6 months, then is devalued. The hope with the last one, though, was that it would be large enough to stave off another such episode for a longer period of time. Blattman ponders:

The under-qualified macroeconomist in me expected Ethiopia’s recent devaluation to actually spur rather than slow the manufacturing sector. In time that may be so. But in a place where inputs and machinery are imported, a devaluation is a mixed blessing. Existing firms must be adding real value to production to succeed. The agricultural export sector, where few foreign inputs are needed, seems to have a brighter future.

South Africa is starting its own development agency. "development assistance for the year 2006 is estimated between $363 – $475 million.  This is 0.18% of South Africa’s GDP from 2006 – which matches the figures for US development assistance as a share of the economy."

People seem to enjoy ranking Africa's leaders. Here is the latest (Hat tip: Africa is a Country)

The Economist does Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood).

How helpful is fairtrade chocolate? One journalist's opinion is here

World cocoa prices easily exceed the Fairtrade minimum. Kuapa has built schools and clinics but competition for beans is fierce and many other buyers offer farmers incentives, such as loans or machetes or insecticides.  Some farmers are loyal to Fairtrade but many have good reasons to sell their beans elsewhere.

Farmers are an important lobby in Ghana, which has seen two government changes in the last five elections, and hence

Ghana has fixed a minimum farm gate price of 3200 cedis, or $2165, roughly two thirds of the world market price.  It is unusual for farmers to be this well rewarded.  During the late 1970s, producers received just 10 per cent of the world market price.

This means fair trade matters less in Ghana than it used to now that the alternative is not as bad.  Here is another good article on the subject.

Speaking of chocolate exporters, there's a new article on Cote d'Ivoire which "traces the civil war to the politicization of citizenship and ethnicity during the democratization process."

More Praise for Corporations

A lot has been written lately on the role of business in development (a little more here). Mostly because this has been underused. Even the neoliberal synthesis of the last several decades focused efforts on reforming government (admittedly to improve the business environment) rather than on directly improving the opportunities for businesses in developing countries.

Multinationals are reducing gender discrimination in South Korea by hiring women who are paid less than their male counterparts. This lowers their costs relative to domestic firms, giving them a competitive advantage. The way to level the playing field? Stop domestic discrimination.

IBM is leading the way by training management for international work by organizing volunteer international service projects that are accountable to the firm for success. On the other hand, there's the difficulty of getting out of social businesses or separating the profit and not-for-profit parts.

Rojas argues that the reason contemporary classical music sounds so terrible is that it is funded by subsidy and mandate rather than as a business that has to appeal to its consumers. Fedako would like to claim that the reason India and many African countries have many cell phones and few toilets is that the former are produced by companies and the latter by government... but who says businesses can't provide toilets? or electricity? They can, they do, and it's by far not enough. Companies are better suited to providing some goods than others.

The Economist's Schumpeter addresses importance of companies doing what they do best (earn profits by providing better goods and services at lower prices, generating employment and economic growth in the process) rather than focusing on corporate social responsibility. Excerpt below the fold:

Big Bag of Oddities in Political Incentives

Insider Trading is Legal for Congressional Insiders, but if you work at a company and see the writing on the wall, boy you'd better watch out. Tabarrok notes that he "wrote about a study showing that the portfolios of US Senators 'outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998.'"

Efforts to stamp out corruption in South Africa mingled with worries about untouchable corruption at the top. Speaking of which, Africa News complains about the use of perceptions-based corruption measures that don't respond much to changes on the ground. People continue to rate developed countries highly even in the midst of scandal while African nations get little credit for their efforts.

From Newmark: The IRS is planning on a power-grabbing licensing change that will "likely harm over 87 million American taxpayers while benefiting a few politically-favored insiders." In Bethesda, one government agency is selling a 10 story building for which it has no use while other agents of the same agency are trying to find a 10 story building to rent. Minnesota built a large new airport only to have the main airline that was going to use it pull out. The kicker for me is when a government representative said they wished they had known about it before because they "might not" have done this otherwise. Might??

Bipartisanship by alternation in Britain vs. the US where "it’s hard to do anything but then once anything’s been put in place it’s almost impossible to scrap or alter it as long as any non-trivial constituency is willing to back it."

A different view of bipartisanship is that your party choice depends on ... concern about cleanliness or bad smells. That is, if you ask people about their political stances while standing near hand sanitizer or in the midst of a bad smell, they report more conservative beliefs than without those cues. They also express more moral indignation at any immoral or unethical choice. Any Republicans out there in favor of making sure there are hand sanitizer dispensers near every voting booth? Would that be voting manipulation? If so, how would you prove it?

2 unusual theories of democracy: high rainfall supports stable agriculture, which in turn supports institutions that help democracy. The Brain Drain may be helping strengthen democracy by 1) removing dissidents and 2) giving low and medium skilled residents more opportunities, possibly. At the same time, just drawing maps with thicker, darker border lines makes people more likely to feel safe and discount cross-border threats

lastly Yglesias discusses the problems of electing judges and reminds us that politics has always been just politics and attack ads haven't changed much in over 200 years, you "hatched-faced nutmeg dealer." (video below the fold):

Humongous Bag o Blog Links

An important effort to quantify economic misconceptions of intro students. What are the biases we are working to overcome? I hope you will consider contributing to the data base.

Speaking of economic misconceptions, South African authorities are shocked that the people their new minimum wage law is intended to help are rising up against it. Many realize what the loss of their job would mean and would rather accept a lower wage and keep working than risk going without. This suggests an interesting behavioral/labor economics research topic: how do people value the minimum wage/probability of unemployment trade off a) before they move to the city (Harris-Todaro); b) while employed below minimum wage; c) while unemployed in the city. Loss aversion in an important development context.

The importance of California's vote to dismantle gerrymandering by turning the drawing of election district lines over to a citizen commission. Currently the incumbents have the privilege. "The potential for abuse is so obvious that it is a kind of miracle that the system has survived as long as it has."

Massachusetts teachers against volunteer librarians. 

Yglesias on Pakistan's perverse aid incentives:

Our current policy, after all, is to give the Pakistani military a lot of aid that’s predicated on the existence of an Islamist militant threat. If the threat went away, the aid would probably dry up and even if it didn’t dry up it would be redirected away from military matters—we wouldn’t be interested in explicitly funding an arms race with India. When the Pakistanis give us a desultory effort it seems to me that we’re just getting what we paid for. 

The World Bank states in no uncertain terms that "we are not advocating an authoritarian development model" but can't be convinced to say that they are advocating for democracy or any other system. Zoellick's recent speech spoke of the democratization of research, but not politics. This picture of a search of the WB website for "democracy" may be telling.

Clemens continues to be deeply disappointed with the methodologies used to verify the successes of the Millennium Village Project. Before and After shots just don't cut it.

Pictures of how much food you can buy with $1. One answer to that link is "a lot less kimchi than you could a month ago."

In Cuba's fashion world, I consider this good news. Dr. Watson: wearing Cuban formal wear since 1994.

Vote on the greatest Nigerians of the last 50 years. Advert for it below the fold:

Big Bag o Latin American Links

The Millennium Challenge Corporation celebrated a completed contract with Honduras

“on-time, on-budget, and with all targets met” despite a political crisis and three different governments during the duration of the compact.  With numerous infrastructure projects completed and over 6000 farmers trained, the compact targeted development in rural areas and worked as a transformational tool to put in place systems that will continue to benefit the Honduran poor after the close of the compact.

 The application of the Coase theory to water management in Ecuador.Rights have been awarded the upstream water users with downstream users paying them to keep it clean and preserve forestry along the water's edge.

Growing tension in Haiti over land rights - tent dwellers have been in tents for quite some time now and the generous folks giving them the land for it are getting tired. They'd like people to move on so they can make sure their land stays theirs. But where do the displaced people then go? Higher education is similarly suffering a heavy burden from the earthquake, and it's pretty low on most donors' lists. And, by the by, here is a picture of the Haiti/DR border demonstrating (once again) the lack of trees. Most were cut down during the 1991-94 military dictatorship/embargo/inflation/everything else that could go wrong.

I have continued my tradition of picking up one of the works of the year's latest literature Nobel winner, which this time around is Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian politician and libertarian. The War of the End of the World sounds like it should be quite engaging - inequality and poverty, development, state vs. individual, and it opens with a mysterious religious man with fire in his eyes.

Big Bag o African Blog Links

So there's a plan for communities in Southern Sudan to arm their young men so they can fight off the LRA when it comes to town. Wronging Rights' poll on "what should I be yelling as I tear out my hair" is delicious.

The  Ask Your Government initiative asked governments where the development money goes. Researchers then measured how responsive governments were to the requests. Podcasts are available for the responses from Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and South Africa. The relative winners in SSA are Egypt, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. South Africa was as forthcoming as the US, England, France, and New Zealand or more so.

WalMart in Africa, a hopeful perspective.

Social entrepreneurs protecting Kenyan topsoil by encouraging the growth of micro-forestry:

After each harvest cycle, KOMAZA processes the lumber from farmers' trees into a variety of products including firewood, electricity poles, sawn lumber and even luxurious floorboards. The company then sells the products on markets that would normally be completely inaccessible to smallholder farmers. KOMAZA projects that each microfarm will return over $3,000 to each family at the final harvest, a huge sum for families accustomed to living on less than $300 a year.

Happy belated 50th birthday, Mali. Fun song.

Would Obamacare cover this traditional doctor's services? Everything from diabetes and TB to not being liked at work, bad luck, STDs, and court cases.

Kraft is encouraging Ghanian cocoa farmers to become fair trade certified.

A less than positive piece on Zimbabwe's land reform at machete point. Best quote from the Southern African Confederations of Agricultural Unions research report cited in the article: "tenure reform is more important than land reform in many countries." It applies this to Zimbabwe's and South Africa's very different land reform systems.

Hayek on Human Rights

 Take the conception of human rights.  I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd.
The United States discovered human rights two years ago or five years ago.  Suddenly it’s the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don’t think it’s in the least justified.  People in South Africa have to deal with their own problems, and the idea that you can use external pressure to change people, who after all have built up a civilization of a kind, seems to me morally a very doubtful belief.  But it’s a dominating belief in the United States now.

HT: Aid Watch. Videos and more here.

Blattman comments:

Human rights trouble me less than their blind acceptance. Not least because of the steadily creeping definition. ... Not long ago I discussed Michael Ignatieff’s take: human rights are merely useful, and that is good enough. I find this mostly persuasive. If I had to draw the veil of ignorance, not knowing what role or gender or nationality I would receive, I’d be much relieved by a world with human rights.

New financing options for SSA farmers

The proposed solution in South Africa: make more middlemen.

The bank gives loans to a contractor instead of directly to the farmer. The contractor then subcontracts the farmer to grow food or raise cattle. The contractor takes on the risks both of farming and of default.

"What we have essentially done is to remove the risk from the farmer and we carry the risk ourselves. We lease the land from the farmer and he is then contracted to us to grow crops according to our agreement and gets paid," he said. "They do not even worry about prices because we never enter into a scheme without hedging the prices as we are not in the business of speculating on prices."

Vintage Bigot

Oliver - World Cup 2010: Into Africa - The Amazing Racists

www.thedailyshow.com

The Daily Show's episode on race riots in South Africa is quite good. Best line: Oliver asks researcher Mapeete Mohale, from the not-radical South African Institute of Race Relations: “What should white people have to do to fully earn your hate?” Her answer: “I think they’ve done all that they can.”

Sadly, bigotry is seen in more subtle ways: international property theft from Africa. Both topics today from Africa is a Country.

Fiscal Stimulus in S. Africa

Tyler Cowen is asked:

Some of the skepticism comes from the projects not being "shovel ready" and taking too long to have a real stimulative impact. South Africa didn't have a banking crisis but we had a dramatic housing bubble ... and we did enter recession after the crisis hit. We also have massive investment in infrastructure because of the World Cup and those projects were only really getting going when the crisis hit. I'm sure there are technical reasons why this isn't relevant to the stimulus debate, but I've barely even seen it mentioned anywhere. Is it really that irrelevant?

Unemployment in South Africa had been 23.5 percent.  Yet, after the collapse and response, the unemployment rate is still rising and see also here for further information.  It's like trying to catch a falling knife, there is more information here. 

"Andrew" offers the following:

1. A large proportion (perhaps 50-80% depending on the type of project)of the billions spent is is 'heavy metal', that is technology such as turbines, boiler, cranes, train-sets etc, imported from abroad and therefore this spending has a much more limited impact on local demand and employment;
2. Most construction jobs are relatively low-skilled jobs and there is already evidence that people employed on flagship 2010 projects are again unemployed. Part of the problem is the insistence on using local labor on projects which limits the extent to which people trained on one project can be used elsewhere. The focus on local labor also raises the training and recruitment costs;
3. the main reason why there is such high unemployment is the relatively inflexible labor markets which overcompensate a relatively small labor aristocracy and mitigate against the employment of more people at lower costs. Even those taken on in 'unemployment relief' type projects get paid a significant premium over local wages which limits the scope of such projects;
4. the ruling alliance is dominated by the trade unions which are solidly entrenched in the public sector and major utilities which raises the costs of government and services. Basic services in health, policing and education also suffer because the unionized staff have no incentive to deliver because of their protection. Similarly the costs of electricity and other public services are inflated whilst the actual services are constrained by under-investment and poor maintenance;
5. the majority of the population are excluded from these benefits, suffer poor service delivery and unemployment, and like the disenchanted masses elsewhere in history seek scapegoats such as 'foreigners'. ....

No Lions Here

It's not often that National Geographic gets a gold star for its reporting on African society, but Africa is a Country caved and gave the upcoming article "Mandela's Children" some love for depicting ongoing racial tensions in a sophisticated way:

The feature–the pictures and the text as a unit–presents South Africa as a hybrid of modernity and tradition, rich and poor, violent and compassionate; in short, an entanglement of realities that while complicated, is certainly not unworthy of the world’s attention next month.
P.S. my sincerest gratitude goes to The Society for getting through an African feature without the single mention of a lion. Thank you.

The caption for the photo gallery reads: "South Africa is a vibrant, multiethnic democracy striving, with mixed success, to fulfill its promise." The photos range from ballet and bagpipes to strip searches, Scrabble, and shacks.

Food in Africa: Too Much and Too Little

The African Agriculture Blog warns us of two expected changes in the African food system. One is abundance and low food prices, the other is starvation and high food prices. Let's hear it for the importance of integrating African markets:

South African bumper harvest depresses Botswana cereal prices
"A three-million tonne surplus in maize from South Africa has resulted in a depression of prices" in Botswana. The prices the government uses to buy from farmers is expected to fall from P70 to P60 for a 50 kilo bag of maize, which is on the high end of what S. African farmers are receiving. Farmers who contracted with the government earlier, however, have already locked in higher prices.

Niger is on the brink of food shortages

Millions of people in Niger are at risk of running short of food, relief agencies have warned, as high prices and a lack of rain take their toll on one of the world's poorest countries. The landlocked west African nation lies at the centre of a food crisis spanning the Sahel, the arid region on the southern fringe of the Sahara.
The United Nations estimates that 7.8m people in Niger could be affected unless donors deploy some $130m (€102m, £88m) of emergency aid immediately. Parts of Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Nigeria and central Chad are also at risk. ...
Weekly admissions of malnourished children [in southern Niger] to MSF's [Doctors Without Borders'] main feeding station in Zinder doubled in the second half of April. ...
After poor rains last year, the cereal harvest was 31 per cent lower than in 2008, says the World Bank. ...
A government bulletin from mid-April found that prices for staples including millet, sorghum, maize and rice were "at an exceptionally high level", standing between 6 per cent and 17 per cent above the average of the past five years.
Compared with the same month in 2005 - when a plague of locusts contributed to food shortages - prices for millet, sorghum and maize were all higher this April, while the price of imported rice had increased by more than a third. ...
"There is enough food in the area but the prices are too high," says Johannes Schoors, Niger country director for Care, an aid agency.
During a visit to the region that included Zinder in late April, Sir John Holmes, the UN's senior emergency relief official, said that without structural changes, "it will become increasingly difficult to contain these recurrent crises, which do so much to undermine economic and social progress in the Sahel".
Sir John urged investment in irrigation and measures to prevent the encroachment of the Sahara. These steps would be more effective than periodic emergency appeals.

Governance problems are holding up aid and development flows while poor infrastructure and underdeveloped food markets and infrastructure hamper intra-regional trade in grains. (Note: the distance from Cape Town, S. Africa to Zinder, Niger is 3364 miles. That's a thousand more than from here in Ithaca, NY to my parents in Santa Barbara, CA or 100 less than the distance from here to London. It's not minor infrastructure improvements we're talking about, but it's still shorter than sending food from here to Zinder [5350 miles].)

Meanwhile, they also report that Zimbabwe's parastatal is giving 75-80% subsidies on fertilizer for winter wheat farmers. The amount farmers can buy depends on whether they sell to the parastatal marketing board or not and how large the farm is. The board is also encouraging farmers to do their banking with the board.