Chris Blattman

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Want to avoid the food crisis? Ignore western experts

So writes G. Pascal Zachary in this Foreign Policy article:

Farming has suddenly become fashionable again. Once a largely ignored corner of the development business, agriculture is now a hot field among experts more versed in structural adjustments than crop rotations. Record prices for cereal crops such as wheat, corn, and rice have many of them viewing farmers as a key component of economic growth in poor countries and as a supply-side solution to the political instability those high prices have caused everywhere from West Africa to Bangladesh. Researchers should be careful, however, to learn the right lessons from the countries that are already harvesting success.

Consider the case of Uganda. The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade. Rice production is expected to reach an astonishing 180,000 metric tons this year, up from 135,000 in 2006 and 102,000 in 2005. Consumption of imported rice, meanwhile, fell by half from 2004 to 2005 alone, and by half again from 2005 to 2007.

Uganda’s importers, seeing the shift, have invested in new mills in the country, expanding employment and creating competition for farmer output, thereby improving prices. New mills, meanwhile, lowered the cost of bringing domestic rice to market. While people in developing countries across the globe are clamoring about the sharp rise in food prices, Ugandans are still paying about the same for rice as they always have. And Uganda is poised to start exporting rice within East Africa—and beyond.

The secret of Uganda’s homegrown success? Ignoring decades of bad Western advice.

Zachary goes on to argue that protectionist policies at home helped Ugandans foster their rice industry–against Western advice.

I for one am very open to light protection to nurse young industries to life. The trouble is that protection is like herpes: once you’ve got it, it never goes away. So a system that protects in the short term, but manages to expire in the medium term, might be a better piece of advice.

Also, it’s easy to forget that decades of Western advice is one of the leading reasons Uganda is doing so well. When Museveni took power in 1986, he was bent on a quasi-socialist model of the economy. He inherited a bankrupt state, however, and so had to listen to the World Bank and IMF.

Museveni and his team arealso incredibly smart, and caught on to more liberal ideas fairly quickly. The important thing is that they did not listen blindly, but adapted some of that Western advice to their own situation. But a good amount–probably most–of the advice they received–sell off failing public enterprises, liberalize agriculture production–made a lot of sense. Six percent economic growth for nearly a decade is Uganda’s reward for following a relatively liberal path.

5 Responses

  1. Regardng the current uncertainties with food prices and the role of ever increasing demand from China and India. There is a greater need for us to conserve and be increasingly frugal about food consumption at home.

    Simple food saving tips are things we need to get used to and practice more regularly. Most of these are common sense and can be quite creative. You can find a list of free food saving tips at sites such as http://www.foodcrisis.co.uk amongst other similar sites as well.

    We all need to contribute to a fairer and a more foodwise program for ourselves.

  2. Concerning Malawi, there is a lot more to the story than fertilizer subsidies. These kinds of subsidies has been on-and-off all since the drought of 91-92, and there are generally two reasons for that:
    1. They do not always succeed in raising yields.
    2. They are nowhere near fiscally sustainable, costing around 3% og GDP.

    Dani Rodrik has an excellent blogpost and following debate here: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/12/ending-famine-b.html

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