In this review of the book, ‘The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it’, by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press, 2008), Reinert identifies Collier’s core argument: four ‘traps’ lock Africa into poverty, namely the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbours, and the trap of bad governance in a small country. Collier’s analysis, Reinert argues, represents a departure from traditional development economics to ‘development aid strategy’, and comes at a time when the world has long been dominated by Washington Consensus policies pushing for market liberalisation. Compared to the first decades after the Second World War, the growth record of this neo-liberal period has been dismal, he notes, especially in Africa. However, the reviewer expresses some concern that the book appears to defend the past policies of the World Bank, with the most salient misinterpretation of history being Collier’s presentation of the successes of China and India as a result of the policies of the Washington Institutions, when in fact their success was the result of actually not following the policies and rather opening their markets gradually. Collier tends to reverse the directions of the arrows of causality and even to disregard co-evolution of economic structure and institutions. As a former employee of the Washington Institutions responsible for enforcing neo-liberalism, the reviewer concludes that he attempts to cover up the past rather than present new constructive insights, and the book contains more descriptions of symptoms of poverty than of its root causes.
Poverty and health
According to this report, the agriculture sector is underperforming in many developing countries, in part because women do not have equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. The gender gap imposes real costs on society in terms of lost agricultural output, food security and economic growth, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) argues. Promoting gender equality is not only good for women – it is also good for agricultural development. Women make essential contributions to the rural economy of all developing country regions as farmers, labourers and entrepreneurs. Their roles are diverse and changing rapidly, so generalisations should be made carefully, the FAO warns. Yet one finding is strikingly consistent across countries and contexts: women have less access than men to agricultural assets, inputs and services and to rural employment opportunities.
The transnational influence in South Africa's economy is argued in this paper to be linked with ecological and economic problems that reflect in increasing hunger and health problems, higher food prices and polluting agro-processing. The Democratic Left Front proposes an Anti-Hunger and Food Sovereignty Campaign to challenge the current reality and politicise the food question in a people-centred way. They propose a campaign that is advanced from the grassroots through participatory processes, to mobilise mass forces against hunger and the way the current agro-processing industry shifts the value away from producers and raises costs for poor communities. They propose an alternative food economy as part of a wider socio-economic change, guided by the principles of solidarity, collective ownership, self-management, democratic control of capital, an eco-centric emphasis, direct community benefit and participatory democracy.
Using panel data from Mozambique collected in 2007 and 2008, the authors explore the impact of the food crisis on welfare of households with people living with HIV and AIDS. The analysis finds that there has been a real deterioration of welfare in terms of income, food consumption, and nutritional status in Mozambique between 2007 and 2008, among both sets of households. Households with people living with HIV have not suffered more from the crisis than others. Results on the evolution of labour-force participation suggests that initiation of treatment and better services in health facilities have counterbalanced the effect of the crisis by improving the health of patients and their labour-force participation. The authors look at the effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits to health facilities and on treatment outcomes. Both variables can proxy for adherence to treatment. This is a particularly crucial issue as it affects both the health of the patient and public health because sub-optimal adherence leads to the development of resistant forms of the virus. The authors find no effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits, but they do find that people who experienced a negative income shock also experienced a reduction or a slower progress in treatment outcomes.
The authors have two main policy messages from this study for food security and trade for low and middle income countries. First, as evidence shows that poverty and hunger materialise at household and individual levels, the special and differential treatment for developing countries in trade negotiations at the national and/or crop levels may not be sufficient to reach the households and individuals at risk. Secondly, they argue for a balance between protections that help small producers with protections for poor consumers. They propose increased investments in physical capital and human development, land tenure, water access, technology, infrastructure and general services (such as health and education), especially focusing on poor and female headed households. They call for state support to non-agricultural rural enterprises and also well-designed safety nets, including conditional cash transfers (CCT), school lunches, women and infant nutrition and food-for-work. They propose strengthening of organisations of small farmers and women and supporting their participation in policy and political processes. This is argued to demand financial, human and institutional capacity support.
This study uses updated global poverty estimates to infer that nearly half a billion people escaped extreme poverty in the five years from 2005 to 2010. However the gains have not been equally distributed, globally. Between 2005 and 2015, Asia’s share of global poverty is expected to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa’s share will more than double from 28% to 60%. Although sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate had by 2010 fallen to below 50% for the first time and is projected to fall below 40% by 2015, at global level the authors argue that the share of the world’s poor people living in fragile states is rising sharply and will exceed 50% by 2014.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have signed an agreement to work together to reduce child stunting in Eastern and Southern Africa in an effort to reach the UN Millennium Development Goals by 2015. UNICEF and WFP acknowledged the progress that had been made to address the nutritional factors hampering children’s health. UNICEF said that the prevalence of stunting in the developing world declined from 40% to 29% between 1990 and 2008. Stunting in Africa only fell from 38% to 34% in the same period. Of the 24 countries that make up 80% of the world’s stunting burden, at least seven are in Eastern and Southern Africa. UNICEF argues that investing in child nutrition pays high dividends for a country’s social and national development. National nutrition strategies need to tackle not only the root causes of stunting, but also to target the most vulnerable children and their families, including those in remote areas, or from the poorest and most marginalised communities. Only 11 African countries are on track to reaching the Millennium Development Goals to halve hunger by 2015, four of which are from the eastern and southern African (ESA) region: Mozambique, Botswana, Swaziland and Angola.
The 2010 edition of the European Report on Development (ERD) deals with the issues of poverty, inequality and social protection, notably in sub-Saharan Africa. It examines the external shocks that African countries experiencing chronic poverty are undergoing, such as climate change, food and fuel price volatility, or the recent financial crisis. These shocks are undermining progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, and the report highlights increasing demand for new and more substantive social protection programmes in many African countries. It focuses on the role of formal and informal mechanisms of social protection as a means to enhance the resilience of sub-Saharan countries when faced with shocks (short-term) and structural vulnerabilities such as poverty traps (long-term). Specific interventions targeting the most vulnerable sectors of the population should go hand in hand with more traditional pro-growth policies, the report argues, especially when dealing with emerging unstable global socio-economic scenarios.
In this article, International Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) offers five strategies to reduce the psychological trauma experienced by African AIDS orphans. In Africa, most orphans remain with their extended families, being cared for by either the remaining parent, or by grandparents or other relatives, and this approach has been shown to minimise trauma for the children. Institutional care should only be a temporary solution or last resort, the article argues. Also, keeping brothers and sisters together also enhances their emotional wellbeing. Other strategies include meeting the basic needs of orphans, for example by instituting school feeding schemes and providing social grants, as well as providing psycho-social care in the form of grief counseling and peer support groups. Governments should also ensure that orphans remain at school. So far, free primary education has gone some way to improving overall school attendance, but other factors, such as living with a non-relative, appear to continue to hamper orphans' education. Finally, the article agues for more support for the carers of orphans, especially custodial grandparents. It recommends that health workers and home-based caregivers be trained to support orphans' caregivers.
If wheat and maize production do not rise substantially in 2011, global food security could be uncertain for the next two years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned in its latest Food Outlook report. Wheat and maize prices have passed their 2009 highs, with FAO adding that international food import bills could surpass one trillion US dollars in 2010. Food imports last topped the trillion dollar mark during the 2007/2008 food price crisis. The FAO anticipates that world cereals stocks will shrink by 7%, with barley declining by 35%, maize by 12% and wheat by 10%. Six percent more maize will have to be produced in 2011 than in 2010, while wheat stocks need to rise by more 3.5% to ensure the world has enough reserves to tide it over 2011. The FAO has cautioned that its calculations have not taken into account the possibility of unfavourable weather conditions in 2011.