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Development Point: Sleeping With the Enemy AAAHHHH CHHHUUUU! I wildly awoke myself from my deep slumber with a giant sneeze. I pondered for a second on why it was so dry in the air around me. It only took a second to shake off my sleepy haze to remember that it was the 1600 - 25kg bags of mealie meal that I was sharing this little house with. Mealie meal is the flour like ground up maize powder used in making Zambia’s staple food, Nsima. The reason there were 1600 bags of mealie meal in my house wasn’t because I was well versed in Zambian economics and I had purchased a decades supply of it knowing that the looming drought will cause the food prices to skyrocket in a couple months. That would only be something some overzealous goat cheese making village crazy man would think of (cough, Paul). It is however, very related.
See, I’m currently staying with one of those extremely generous human beings of whom you always seem to randomly meet when you are lost in a developing world town with no place to stay. Robbie, this friend, also just so happens to be
Failed Maize
Again a photo borrowed because I lost all mine. Thank you to: www.bbc.co.uk/news/ 020927_famineafrica.shtmlworking for a well known Zambian health support and food relief agency working in Livingstone. When Robbie invited me to stay at his place, he apologized because the small bed the two of us would be sharing together, would also be sharing a room with a huge shipment of emergency food relief supplies.
Drought was once again thrusting its dagger deep into the heart of Zambia. What were supposed to be vast fields of robust green stalks of maize were now scattered patches of limp brown weeds. And as each day passed, the desperately needed moisture disappeared, droplet after droplet under the evaporative grasp of the sun’s thieving hand. Each one, desperately screaming out a call for help, help to feed this starving nation.
So allegedly rising to the call of these screams, the rumbling gears of the well-oiled emergency food relief machine started to churn. The United Nations Food Program, along with other international relief organisations, were preparing to deliver shipments of food aid to the surrounding communities, where the effects of the drought were starting to take hold. The 1600 bags of mealie meal in my house, accompanied with an equivalent amount of beans and cooking
This is what Maize looks like when its sad =^(
Again, thank you to http://news.bbc.co.uk/
olmedia/1465000/images/
_1467972_drought300.jpg oil, was one of the first shipments ready to go out, the predicted departure date only a few months away.
But I woke up this morning excited to do my type of work. Working alongside farmers, helping them to grow crops that would allow them to beat this spawning drought. Using conservation farming techniques and small-scale irrigation equipment, these farmers would be able to grow crops all year round, rain or no rain. These crops would be able to beat the drought, not only easily allowing farmers to feed their own families, but also providing them with excess produce that they could sell and reinvest the profits in their own livelihoods.
Today, I was heading out in the field, working with a farmers group who were growing Paprika under a contracted out-growers scheme. This scheme gave the farmers a guaranteed market and price for their crops, as long as an earlier agreed upon quantity and quality of paprika was produced. For small-scale farmers, having access to a guaranteed market is one of the greatest aids in providing them with a reliable consistent income. However, finding and keeping these guaranteed markets is also one of the greatest challenges that they face. The small-scale farmers must be able to meet the conditions of the commercial buyers in order to gain their confidence so that the contracts can be renewed in the future. Along with my coworkers over the past week, we had been visiting a couple of these Paprika farmers and noticed that they had been improperly managing their crops. If this mismanagement was not dealt with immediately, the crops could spoil and the contract would be lost. We decided to call a meeting of the farmers group to bring them all together and educate them about how to deal with the problem. In the past, these group meetings had always been quite successful at mobilizing the majority of the farmers in the area together, brining in between 30-40 of them. At these meetings, we would help educate them on better farming methods and also work with them to share best practices with each other to learn from their own success’s and failures.
The meeting time had come and gone and so far our group consisted of but 4 farmers. We waited another 30 minutes and were only able to round up 3 more passers by. Not understanding where everyone was, we decided to carry on the meeting for those who did come. But this meeting wasn’t like most of the other meetings we had held. Early on, some of the farmers grew very impatient with the teaching and interrupted us with aggressive questions like “Ahh, but why do we need to know this. It is just extra work. I don’t think I want to do this extra work” or “Can’t your NGO just give us money so we can survive, we are poor farmers who can’t afford to eat”. We were quite shocked and taken back by their comments. From what I had been told, these farmers were some of the better farmers that IDE had been working with. Perseveringly through the heckling, we carried on the rest of the meeting and by the end we were able to get the farmers to see the importance of what was needed to be done to save the contract. Unfortunately, we needed the farmers who weren’t there to understand this as well so for the time being we left the farmers who were in attendance to share the information they had learned.
One of the more receptive farmers in the meeting asked us to give him a lift home after the meeting. Along the way, we started questioning this farmer about why he thought there was a lack of attendance. To our surprise, he said that the day before the meeting, it was announced that one of these food relief organisations was coming out early to the area to start handing out food aid and also assessing who else would be in need of it in the future.
In delivering food aid, this food relief organisation tries to assess who the most vulnerable people are in an area to deliver the food aid to first. A vulnerable person could mean someone who is HIV Positive, suffering from Tuberculosis or having a physical disability. They usually provide not only enough food for that vulnerable person, but also for their entire household. This makes sense because you obviously can’t just give one person in a house enough food to survive and leave the rest of them to starve. Households always buy and share the food equally so in order to help that vulnerable person have enough food to eat, you need to provide enough food for their household.
However there is a problem with this strategy in a country with an average HIV/AIDS rate close to 20%!,(MISSING) one of the highest TB rates in the world, and an average household of 7 members. It’s not hard to crunch a few numbers and figure out that by using this strategy, the large majority of households, especially in the rural areas, are going to qualify for food aid. The people in these communities realize this and all want free food for the year. Therefore, it is quite a competition to convince the food relief organisations that your household is one of the ones most in need.
So today, most of the farmers that were supposed to be at our meeting, decided that instead of working, that they would show up for the food relief organisations meeting to convince them how much they are suffering so they would qualify for this years food aid. Then, if they were successful, these farmers would practically stop working because they know that they are taken care of for the year. I had heard over a dozen times already since being here from other development workers about how farmers were getting lazier and more dependent on the outside world through food aid. But this was the first time I had experienced it first hand.
I returned home that day from the field quite perturbed. How could the food aid that was supposed to be helping to relieve the suffering of so many people, at the same time cause future suffering by removing peoples motivation to work? It was hard to accept that providing food relief was directly countering the long-term development work that, if successful, would stop the need for this food relief altogether.
Funny thing is that when I was walking in the front door of the house all bitter and angry from the day and ready to kick the crap out of one of the bags of mealie meal, I never sneezed. I looked up and was shocked to see that I had nothing left to curse. I talked to Robbie and very ironically it turns out that the very same food aid being delivered to the farmers who skipped out of our meeting, was the exact same food that I was sleeping with next the night before.
Talk about sleeping with the enemy.! Now, I definitely don’t want to bastardize these food relief organisations with this story, which is one reason why I’ve chosen to leave it unnamed. I talked to a lot of them and they agree that what they do creates dependency. But they have a very good argument in saying they just aren’t going to sit around and let people starve. They even try to deal with the dependency they create by targeting only really vulnerable people who aren’t capable of helping themselves. But with the limited time and resources that all of our organisations have to deal with, they can’t spend all the time really necessary to do the proper research in figuring out who these vulnerable households are and making sure they are less vulnerable in the following year.
One other aspect of their work that I feel is really important to note. Is that in terms of job satisfaction or donor satisfaction, the work of these food relief organisations is pretty damn personally appealing. Think about it, who wouldn’t want to be the person who donates the money for, or better off, actually gets to drive up to a village of people who are all cheering and thanking you profusely for saving their lives? As you arrive, the men are all hollering, the women dancing, the children singing, everybody applauding you, their hero, for saving their lives. Man, I would completely feel that I had done a remarkable thing being apart of the organisation that could do such a charitable and wonderful thing for these people. I can’t say that I blame the many donors and workers for these food relief organisations for wanting this system to remain the way it is.
Contrast this with the job of someone in my organisation. Alongside farmers, you work with them figuring ways they can help themselves. Many times, instead of being praised you get scolded for being a rich NGO worker who doesn’t understand what being poor is really like (which is the case some of the time). Even after years of day in day out work with them, where they actually end up becoming self sufficient, there really isn’t any party with the same glory or fame. Now, I personally feel that what there is with empowerment driven development work is a much deeper sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. This comes, not only with the outcomes of the work, but with the slow process of seeing people understand some of their problems, make their own smarter decisions, and ultimately increase their own confidence. It is even more satisfying to see these people then turn around and help someone else who was in their past position. This is why I choose to do this work and why I’m dedicated to staying with it.
I understand this is a controversial topic and there is a big debate going on now about what should be done about food aid with good arguments from many different sides. I encourage people to read more about it from much more articulate people then me.
One article that is quite critical of food aid is:
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/FoodDumping/Intro.asp
A different article saying that food aid still has a net benefit for the poor is:
http://www.nber.org/digest/mar05/w11048.html
I'm interested to hear what you all think!
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anonymous
non-member comment
I always knew your were a slut! :) No it really comes down to "teach a man to fish..... Such wisedom in that statement Aaron - Aaron