Story of a people’s movement, 1974-84

‘They can’t eat your words’. That was the admonition with which the World Food Conference’s independent daily newspaper, PAN, greeted delegates on its first front page of 5 November 1974. Intended as a gritty note of warning from the development lobby of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that they’d better get on with the job and skip the rhetoric, the participants were urged to work out ‘concrete solutions to the food crisis’.

Well, it sounded right. Govern- ments had got us into the crisis, so they’d better get us out of it. And in the meantime they deserved a bit of stick. But what exactly was the NGO food lobby looking for? And 10 years on, are the official experts and the independents any closer?

One thing that stands out, rereading the eleven issues of PAN, is that few of the 100 or more NGOs present (only one of which was identifiably from the South) had made any sub- stantial analysis of their own of food policy issues. Their experience was in running micro-projects and in explain- ing the symptoms of poverty to their home constituencies, mostly in the context of fund-raising campaigns. They saw their grassroots programmes as ‘filling in the gaps’ left by multi- and bi-lateral aid; the big problems were for the big boys.

The consequence of this logic, not unreasonably, was that the NGOs should rally around whatever appeared to be the most convincing assessment of needs being put about in the international arena. In Rome, the most obvious shopping list was the one drawn up by the Conference secretar- iat, calling for $5 billion a year of investment in developing country food production, 10 million tons of food aid, an international system of food stockpiling, a fertilizer fund, etc.

In pressing for these commitments by the governments of the rich North, the NGOs were simply endorsing the proposals for action drawn up by an FAO preparatory team; they hardly questioned the process of analysis on which this action plan was based. For

FOOD POLICY November 1984

the rest, the non-government lobby broke up into small interest groups, pressing delegations to adopt resolu- tions on population control or women’s role in food production.

There were exceptions. The Trans- national Institute produced a tren- chant critique of official aid program- mes; some NGO leaders called for a five-year moratorium on all Third World debt; and maybe I could claim a place in the ranks for a PAN editorial which asked why so many were deluding themselves with the idea that solutions lay in large infu- sions of aid.

Generally speaking, the voluntary agencies knew enough to be sceptical of the fine words and noble intentions trotted out by government spokesmen at meetings of this kind. But they themselves were at different stages of development and therefore quite un- able to discuss, let alone agree on, any coherent strategy of their own.

Assessing the NGOs role after the conference, Leslie Kirkley, chairman of the International Council of Volun- tary Agencies, concluded cautiously that they had had an opportunity to exert pressure on individual delega- tions but that the most important task would be the follow-through and ‘building up the political will to trans- late the pious resolutions of the con- ference into positive actions’.

Three years later, most of those hopes had come to nothing. The WFC’s investment and food aid targets remained unfulfilled, and negotiations for grain stockpiling were firmly on the rocks. In the same period, however, there were three new developments. One was the formation of a Food Policy Study Group within the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), a loose network of some 50 researchers whose analysis of the underlying causes of hunger and poverty was fundamental- ly at odds with that of the internation- al agencies. Then came a string of reports which turned many conven- tional assumptions about development on their heads: the seminal ‘What

Now?’ (1975) from the Dag Hammars- kjold Foundation, Food First by Joseph Collins and Frances Moore LappC and How The Other Half Dies by Susan George (both 1977). And third, the idea was gaining ground in a number of voluntary agencies that political innocence was no longer a mark of virtue. They saw that the benefits of their community-level pro- jects could be wiped out by the con- flicting aims of their own govern- ments’ aid and trade policies, and that they therefore needed to understand better the development process.

Doers and thinkers

By the end of the decade, the ideas, the analysis and-the direct experience of many like-minded people looking for viable development alternatives was beginning to coalesce. Though there was still a communications gap between the ‘doers’ of the NGO com- munity and the more radical ‘think- ers’, many of them by now were moving in the same direction. At the World Conference on Agrarian Re- form and Rural Development in Rome in July 1979, the main differ- ence between them was that the NGOs still considered it worthwhile to make their presence felt in the official forum, whereas the IPRA-coordi- nated Rome declaration Group (RDG) stayed at arm’s length.

The NGOs, including this time a number of Third World representa- tives, had a very different message from the one they proclaimed in 1974. They no longer believed that ‘the conventional model of rural economic growth’ could be made to work. National and international strategies had not merely been inadequate, they said - in most cases they had been the wrong strategies, with negative effects on the poor. What’s more, without a radical reorientation, the scale of rural poverty and deprivation could be ex- pected to worsen drastically.

In their Declaration on Agrarian Conflict, the RDG put similar argu- ments more starkly in terms of false premises and promises. So although there were signs of convergence, re- searchers and activists .did not see the

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importance of working together. As a result, after 1979 the energy of

both groups tended to dissipate. The voluntary agencies talked of develop- ing an information network among themselves, but without any clear sense of purpose the exchanges soon fizzled out. IPRA’s Food Group kept going, but the members found they were talking largely to themselves.

Two important trends have emerged in the past four or five years to make a bridging operation possible: the rapid evolution of food policy analysis within many NGOs in the North, and the increasing strength and confidence of non-government groups of all kinds in the South. Indeed, people’s organizations from both hemispheres have produced some of the most thorough documentation showing how conventional develop- ment schemes have reinforced dispari- ties of wealth, leaving the poor worse off than before and with less control over their own lives. The message from all sides is that the massive development schemes favoured by governments and multilateral agencies are almost inherently counter- productive in human terms and unsus- tainable in terms of resource use. It could be a landmark.

At the same time, the independent development community has begun to gain a clearer perception of what can work for people and what is sustain- able. After a decade of struggle, a strong sense of identity and common purpose is emerging among a wide spectrum of people and groups work- ing on issues of food and rural policy. This month in Rome, about 100 repre- sentatives will meet at the World Food Assembly with the aim of giving shape and substance to this new coalition.

Double-bind syndrome

On more than a few occasions in recent years, international develop- ment experts have been heard lament- ing that the problems - whether of food and agriculture or other sectors - have become so complex that (a) none but the most brilliant polymath can fully understand them any more, and (b) there is no strategy which does not

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risk creating ten new problems for each one it solves. Granted the irony that we need an Ivan Illich to tell us to deprofessionalize, it seems to escape these experts that the double-bind they describe may be due to some- thing more than a better understand- ing of the inter-relatedness of things.

Along with the pressures of profes- sional exclusivism goes a seemingly irresistible tendency to aggregation and aggrandisement. The more we can inflate the problems confided to us, the more important we shall be! Why otherwise should so many clever peo- ple think it purposeful to spend their time fiddling with the abstract global arithmetic of hunger, aid and food production. Is it 500, 700 or 1000 people who haven’t enough to eat? Statistics at this level of aggregation produce a momentary shock, quickly followed by an overwhelming numb- ness. As for helping to find answers, they are about as useful as knowing the combined bodyweight of all the development economists in the world.

So the experts confessing their im- potence are right: multimillion dollar sledgehammer strategies can only make things worse. Don’t take it from me - listen to Kenya’s delegate at the World Food Council last year: ‘We have tended to throw money, or more usually bags of wheat and powdered milk, at the food problem without fully appreciating its causes . . . and now there is a proliferation of new and expensive remedies which look suspi- ciously like the old ones that have already been applied without signifi- cant long-lasting effect’. Or the Minis- ter from Lesotho: ‘Projects have been tailored on input-output models that have left us wondering where all the money went. Usually, when such pro- jects ended, there has neither been food to eat nor any money left. . . .’

To be fair, some governments and multilateral agencies have gone as far as their constitutions or organizational structures allow to break this syn- drome. (Fill in the names of your favourites here.) The remainder, still up to their necks in it, are showing signs of panic. A coded confession from the WFC in the serene language of bureauspeak gives the game away:

‘International development agencies are concerned with a reappraisal of their development strategies in the light of past failures’.

Grasping at straws, these agencies are currently bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves with the fair damsels they call NGOs. They may make a few conquests, but they will soon turn to kiss other hands when they realize that they can’t make any sense of what the NGOs are trying to tell them.

Ten years after the World Food Conference, then, what we have is an ever-widening gap between two diametrically-opposed schools of thought on how to tackle develop- ment. But it is no longer a case (if it ever really was) of market liberals v radical lefties. The people’s move- ments of today increasingly recognize that, while right-wing regimes and exploitative capitalism are frequently the grossest violators of human rights, the political complexion of govern- ments is less a determinant of adequ- ate conditions for development than the structure of the system itself. If socialist hierarchies are frequently as repressive and incompetent as their capitalist counterparts, what it comes down to is the question of scale. The fundamental precept, therefore, is that at each level of social organiza- tion - community, district, nation or region - economic or other rela- tionships should only be entertained where there is a roughly equal balance of strength. Should this imply, as indeed it does, a selective disengage- ment of the South from the global economy controlled by the North, the nettle is there to be grasped.

The other school of thought is that of the entrenched official system de- scribed above, which continues to flourish in the World Bank, the FAO and many other marbled palaces. Here are the sophisticated pragmatists ready to prove that if the best tool for knocking in a nail is a two-pound hammer, a thousand nails will require a one-ton piledriver. Our landscape, as a result, is tragically littered with bent nails and discarded piledrivers.

Robin Sharp

FOOD POLICY November 1984