Developmental Dog Food

Dinner

So I'm sitting around at my place waiting for the latest batch in what I think is giardia to "pass" and listening to and reading world news. What do I stumble upon? Dog Food for Kenya amongst the many other interesting stories of the day. But this one just strikes me, because the other day I was listening to a BBC correspondent grill a Kenyan MP about why he wasn't interested in receiving this wonderful offer of aid. Her questions were implying, if not exactly stating, things like "how can't you take this wonderful offer of aid when your people are starving?" And he was often reduced to spluttering "but it is DOG FOOD". I mean, I've eaten some Alpo on a dare before, but come on, feeding a country with the stuff? More importantly, as this MP pointed out, it isn't that Kenya doesn't have the food, it is that it needs help buying it from one group of farmers and shipping it to another group who hasn't had good harvests this year for various reasons, including drought. From my experience here and elsewhere I've come to realize how intense the pressure of foreign agencies (developmental and otherwise) like the World Health Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the World Food Programme can be, often pushing and pulling in different directions, and backing random individuals, many of whom act a lot more qualified than they are. These organizations put a ton of pressure for their own little projects, to save their own little people, on these governments and usually it is for the right reasons. But since there isn't really any overarching organization it just makes for a schizophrenic mess often enough. Maybe the Millennium Development Goals are changing this, but it is happening slowly, and on the ground not a lot of money is being put into recurrent expenses, often the thing that is hardest for local governments to deal with. Especially when a lot of money is going towards single purchases that then need support to continue but don't necessarily immediately raise government profits from taxes, etc. This is just a guess with Kenya, but I'm betting that they've been strongly encouraged to adopt free market reforms, including removing subsidies to farmers (subsidies the rich world does have). That Kenyan MP was just saying that all that is needed are subsidies to buy and move the food. Yet at the same time Kenya is being blamed for corruption, etc. - well it is corrupt, but that doesn't mean that the corruption is really the problem. Many governments are corrupt and actually work, many are clean and don't work, you can't isolate corruption as the root cause of all. But if it is the case that Kenya has been encouraged to remove protections and subsidies for farmers, then you can say that in some way world development organizations have been involved in creating a situation that they need to support. If they're really serious
about creating a viable free market in Kenya, then it does make more sense to support it by buying up local stocks, which is often what the best organizations, like Oxfam, actually do. But it doesn't make sense to send a dog food derivative, and maybe not any other food, because the food is most likely there already and shipping it in just undermines local markets. A fact about famine that is usually the case, and often overlooked.

One other anecdote about development that I've noticed a lot since coming here. I've been doing a lot of work fulfilling donor agency requirements for reporting education statistics, this being a large use of Information Technology. What I've noticed is how often my work laying down the systems needed to fulfill one donor's requirement has been hurt by another donor coming in and requiring some other piece of information. Since all of these donors are "important" (e.g. they've got money that is needed) there is a tendency to allow them to take priority, even when they shouldn't have priority. I just ran into a quote from a World Bank President, Jim Wolfensohn, in "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs. Jim Wolfensohn says:

"I think that we are now in a situation where everybody recognizes that to have countries burdened with innumerable visits from good-hearted people like us and all the bilateral donors, and innumerable reports that they have to complete quarterly and little coordination in terms of some of the mechanics of the implementation, that there is a large pick-up to be had in just coordinating and better implementing what the development community are doing already."

While I've seen many instances of corruption since coming here, I wouldn't say that it has been any larger a headache to me and the people I work with than these constant interruptions. In fact, I'm one of these interruptions, but that is a slightly different topic. My point is, that offers of dog food aren't the best way to go, but when you have to file a quarterly report on whether or not the dog food was received by each child then it stops being stupid, and can start being down right destructive.