upton-on-line
5th August 2004
In this edition
An unaccustomedly brief summer holidays edition of upton-on-line on: French
explanations of what the recent 'deal' on export subsidies for
agricultural products really mean; the reasons why Turkey isn't
welcome in the EU despite what governments say; biological
invasions of Europe; and Tariana Turia breaks into Le
Monde.
Plus (for the minority of u-o-l readers who feel disoriented by the
idea of a short edition) the full text of a Letter from Kenya by Jeff
Sachs, Special Advisor to Kofi Annan on the the Millennium
Development Goals. If you're interested in development assistance,
this open letter to the rich world is a must read.
Reading between the lines
The recently concluded negotiations in Geneva represent a real break
through, don't they? After all, Europe is set to phase out export
subsidies, tariff barriers will fall and general sanity will break out
after years of foot dragging. Upton-on-line's theory is that radical
departures can be explained either by genuine revolutions or tactical
retreats behind which lie deeper defences. It would seem Europe's
conversion is of the latter kind.
As Europe's most recalcitrant defender of farm subsidies, French
reaction provides probably the most plausible guide to the future which
can only be described as strewn with obstacles. The tone of the French
Agriculture Minister, Hervé Gaymard, provided the first grounds
for sobriety. M Gaymard decided to present the deal as a major victory
for European diplomacy (for which, read a major victory for French
pressure on the European negotiating position). It was, above all, he
said about bringing the United States to heel. "The United States
have accepted constraints on their agricultural payments that they have
never before accepted. Once our efforts were placed on an equal footing
there remained no basis for our continued opposition."
But it was the next sentence that gave the real flavour of French
fervour to reform the agricultural products market: "the focus of
negotiations between this autumn and December 2005 will be the speed
with which the subsidies are removed. I think the rhythm of reform will
very likely have a horizon of 2015 or 2017 which will give us the time
to get ourselves organised." So there's no avalanche of activity
likely. Just the stately movement of the same old policy glacier perhaps
a little the worse for wear after a mild policy warming. It would also
explain the measured tone of a statement from the ministry responsible
for overseas trade which characterised the agreement as: "an
agreement along the way which constitutes an important step in the
negotiations opened in Doha ... There still remains much work to be done
to finalise the terms of the agreement and to reach an agreement that is
in accord with the interests of the European Union."
And to the extent that French reporters shine a light into the soul
of French officials (or more accurately, French officials shine
remarkably well-informed light through the pens of expert journalists),
reporting in Le Monde on the agreement provided a superb insight
into how this agreement is viewed officially. After a recitation of the
heroic reforms being undertaken to the CAP, Le Monde's well
sourced journalist recorded that: "It is being underlined, in
Paris, that there are other means available to provide protection from
competition that is too stiff (for example, competition from countries
with very low wage rates). The application of strict sanitary or labour
standards, labelling rules, requirements for the traceability of crops
or animals, the presence or otherwise of GMOs, the taxation of the large
wholesalers - all these can constitute protections every bit as
effective as tariffs, quotas or various types of direct
assistance." (Le Monde, 3 August).
So there you have it. A long, slow retreat so when the ice finally
melts there will be plenty of new barricades in place!
New Zealand interests will also be interested to know that Le
Monde (reflecting, one assumes, the official view) is firmly of the
view that Europe's gallant reforms of the last 10 years are ahead of
everyone elses. "The United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand haven't made the same effort" intones the self-righteous
mouthpiece for the Ministry. In New Zealand's case that is technically
correct. If you have no protection it's hard to make more progress. Do
Europeans think we should have started paying them through some novel
system of negative subsidies?
Talking Turkey
The recent visit to Paris by Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, provided yet another opportunity for Jacques Chirac
to reiterate his support for Turkey's admission to membership of the
European Union, albeit on a very slow time-track. In this, Chirac has
been courageous (although his caveat would place membership safely
beyond the life of any current senior politician). That caution hasn't
stemmed increasingly vocal opposition to the prospect. Le Figaro
published recently a call to arms against Ankara's candidacy by Alexandre
Del Valle. Del Valle is a ferocious islamophobe who believes
fervently in a clash of civilisations that pits the liberal, enlightened
West against its third totalitarian challenge (the first two were
communism and fascism). An academic, his most recent book is entitled Turkey
in Europe - an Islamic Trojan Horse? There is no question that the
views he expresses are widely shared across the political spectrum.
Leaving aside his particular views on Islam, Del Valle's recent
article skilfully marshalled the sorts of arguments Europe is likely to
hear much more about should its leaders commit to official adhesion
talks:
"Are our leaders aware that Turkey will
become the single biggest state in Europe; that from 2020, Ankara would
account for 100 Turkish deputies in the European Parliament asa against
72 for France and 98 for Germany; that it will be the premier military
and power and have the largest population (around 100 million
inhabitants and 850,000 soldiers)? The entry of Turkey into the EU will
open a Pandora's Box of enlargement. How could one in turn refuse the
200 million Turkish speaking people from the Caucasus and Central Asia
or the states of North Africa? The EU will inherit all the contentious
geo-political disputes (water, national boundaries, minorities etc) that
Turkey has with her neighbours. That's without including trafficking in
drugs, arms and illegal immigrants in respect of which Turkey is a hub.
The EU will have, as direct neighbours: the Iran of the Mullahs and
Syria, guardian of the Hezbollah; Iraq, home of Al Qaida's anti-Western
djihad; Azerbaijan and Georgia, conduits for Islamo-terrorists fighting
in the Chechen djihad..."
Uncompromising stuff. Upton-on-line is not aware of any significant
official campaign in Europe to counter this sort of analysis. The
governing elites seem to continue on their reasonable, fair-minded way
hoping that these voices will simply evaporate. That would seem to be a
dangerous gamble. Turkey is not the same as Lithuania or Hungary. It is
huge and of enormous geo-political significance. Without a popular
mandate for accession based on active, prolonged advocacy for turkey's
cause, Europe's political leaders could find themselves - or more likely
their successors - with a real popular backlash on their hands. That's
certainly what people like Alexandre Del Valle are counting on.
Biological Invasions of Europe
New Zealanders are acutely aware of the bio-security status of their
isolated islands. So it's interesting to read what a recent French
update has to say about the significance of biological invasions of
France over the last 11,000 years (the Holocene or post-Ice Age world).
Of the 585 species believed to have established themselves over that
time, around a quarter - 154 - appear to have invaded naturally from
outside. They embrace 68 birds, 38 mammals, 31 fish and 17 reptiles and
amphibians. Over the same period 51 species have disappeared,
principally species of birds and mammals. Needless to say, one species
(living in Europe long before the Holocene) has had a bigger impact on
the rate of arrivals than any other - humans. And the rate has risen
over time. From less than one invasion per century between 9000 years
ago and the C17th, the invasion rate is now running at over 130 species
per century. As a continent whose bio-diversity has been radically
simplified by Ice Ages, Europeans probably don't feel under much threat
but climatic change could change as the arrival of vectors for nasty
disease find it easier to gain a foot hold, proboscis hold or whatever
it is that insects have...
Godzone as the world now reports it
The sheer infrequency of articles on New Zealand tends to cause kiwis
abroad to pause when they see articles about 'home'. Le Monde
recently devoted a 1000 word article to Godzone under the stiff, formal
title: The Maori question divides New Zealand. It was a summary
of the fall-out from Don Brash's Orewa Speech and the general
state of race relations. The journalist set the stage with this
description of the background:
"New Zealand has long been presented, justly,
as a country in which the European settlers managed to live on good
terms with the population already installed prior to their own arrival.
This peaceful co-habitation contrasted squarely with neighbouring
Australia where the settlers set out to physically eliminate the
Aborigines before turning to assimilate them forcibly by tearing
children away from their parents and turning them over to religious
boarding schools. But the good relationship between Maori and Pakeha
(New Zealanders of European origin) seems now to be being called in
question. For decades, the Maori question has been a taboo subject in
the Land of the Long White Cloud. Politicians from the right and the
left have resisted using the race card to win votes. Then Don Brash arrived."
There follows an unvarnished account of the party political stand-off
which will be stale news to New Zealand readers but seems more than a
little squalid to kiwi Diasporans who have rather enjoyed New Zealand's
good reputation in these stakes. Brash is quoted as saying (with a
'wheedling smile') that "It was high time that someone tackled the
question [of special rights for Maori]. The resentment felt by a large
chunk of the population for several years now would only have grown if I
hadn't put the issue on the table." Helen Clark is quoted, in
response, as claiming that "the leadership of the National Party
was so low in the polls that they became desperate. And the right is
used to playing the race card to win votes."
The journalist then proceeds to an account of what the debate has
done to the opinion polls followed by a grim litany of statistics
charting the gap between Maori and Pakeha on a range of social and
economic indicators before returning to a verdict from Tariana Turia that
"this country is going through a critical period in its history.
Some young people have already asked me what I think about a possible
armed uprising against the Pakeha." With this almost casual
reference ringing in our minds the journalist concludes with the trite
verdict that "New Zealand has become a country like all the others,
with its share of racism and jealousies."
There's not a word about the foreshore debate which sparked the whole
thing off. That's scarcely surprising. That sort of arcane domestic
debate doesn't begin to penetrate consciousness here. The long and the
short of it is that paradise got misreported and Whale Rider -
which does get mentioned - exists in Hollywood, not the real world. It
was always risky to launch - and then market - a nation based on utopian
premises (and we've had more than our share: social laboratory of the
world, race relations nirvana, clean and green now running in its latest
incarnation as 100% Pure NZ). Sorting out the image problem may take
longer than many imagine - assuming Turiana's none too subtle commentary
doesn't get acted upon. Upton-on-line can see a bit of a branding
problem up ahead.
A Letter from Sauri, Kenya
For those who insist on substance rather than the preceding sound
bite length stories, upton-on-line leaves readers with the full text of
an open letter to the rich world by Jeffrey Sachs, Kofi Annan's
Special Advisor on the Millennium Development Goals and Director of the
Earth Institute at Columbia University. The UN system has a penchant for
appointing special advisors on all sort of problems that arise or (as in
this case) goals it has talked itself into but doesn't have a clue about
how to achieve. These are usually earnest men (and sometimes women)
known only to the grey world of multi-lateral diplomacy. In Sachs, the
Secretary-General chose a completely different sort of beast - an
internationally known and controversial economist implanted at a top
American university.
What the world leaders who trooped off to New York in 2000 to sign up
to some ambitious development goals thought they were doing we will
never know for certain. One has to fight against the cynical thought
that at least a percentage of them saw set another raft of words that
would never come back to haunt them simply because there were already so
many broken promises on development assistance that one more couldn't
cause much trouble. And looking at the way in which development
resources didn't exactly pour in in support of the Goals, it might have
looked as though any cynics among them picked it right. But they hadn't
reckoned with Sachs.
Despite major professional and academic commitments, Sachs has become
a crusader for the goals and a highly mobile and vocal conscience for
those who might have thought they'd be left to welch on their promises
in silence. The author of a major report for the WHO on the
macro-economic benefits from tackling the key diseases which blight the
world's least developed countries (AIDS, Malaria and TB), Sachs has
placed a lot of emphasis on the investment case for putting serious
money behind the goals. As an economist he knows how to marshal his case
to head off those who might be inclined to query the value for money of
such investments. Here is the full text of his appeal direct from East
Kenya and following hard on the heels of a high level meeting at the
OECD where he asked the donor countries just what they were going to do
about making good on their promises.
Some readers may challenge some of Sachs' premises but no-one can
doubt the sheer single-minded passion he has developed for his subject.
As a successful academic with the professional world at his feet, it is
not work he needs to guild his career. He does it because he believes in
it as is palpable to anyone who has listened to him. Time will tell
whether this man's crusade can unlock the necessary billions.
_________________________________________________________________________
Jeffrey D. Sachs
July 24, 2004
Letter from Sauri, Kenya
I am writing to you in my capacity as Special Advisor to UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals and
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I have been
visiting western Kenya, where I have seen harrowing things that I would
like you to know about.
Together with colleagues from the UN Millennium Project and the Earth
Institute I have spent several days this month in a group of 8 villages
known as the Sauri sublocation, in the Siaya district of Nyanza
Province, about 44 km from Kisumu. We have visited farms, clinics, a
sub-district and district hospital, and schools, in Sauri and the
environs. We have met with international organizations working in the
region, including ICRAF (the World Agroforestry Center), the UNDP, and
the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We have found a region beset by hunger, AIDS, and malaria. The
situation is far more grim than you will find described in official
documents. The situation is also salvageable, but the international
community requires a much better understanding of its severity,
dynamics, and solutions if the crisis in Sauri and the rest of rural
Africa is to be solved.
The situation is best understood through the voices of Sauri’s
struggling residents. In response to an invitation from our group, more
than 200 members of the community came to meet with us one afternoon,
pictured at left. Hungry, thin, and ill, they stayed for
three-and-one-half hours, speaking with dignity, eloquence, and clarity
about their predicament. They are impoverished, but they are capable and
resourceful. Though struggling to survive at present, they are not
dispirited but are determined to improve their situation. They know well
how they could get back to high ground.
The meeting took place on the grounds of a primary school, called the
Bar Sauri Primary School, under the auspices of a remarkable school
headmistress, Ms. Anne Marcelline Omolo, who shepherds hundreds of
hungry and impoverished school children, many of them orphans, through
primary education and the shoals of daily life. In the midst of disease,
orphan-hood, and hunger, all 33 of last year’s 8th grade class passed
the Kenyan national secondary school exams. This past Sunday, July 11,
we saw why. On their “day off” from school, this year’s class of
8th graders sat at their desks from 6:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. preparing
months in advance for this year’s national examinations coming in
November. Unfortunately, many who will pass the exams will be unable to
take up a position in a secondary school because of lack of funds for
tuition, uniforms, and supplies. Nonetheless, to boost the fortitude of
the 8th graders during the critical examination year, the community
provides them with a cooked mid-day meal, with the fuel wood and water
brought from home by the students (shown below). Alas, the community is
currently unable to provide mid-day meals for the younger children, who
must fend for themselves, with many going hungry the entire school day.
The village meeting got underway on Monday afternoon, July 12, with
the villagers arriving on foot from several kilometers away. I
introduced my colleagues and told the community of the Millennium
Project’s assignment from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to
understand the situation of communities like Sauri, and to work with
villagers to identify ways to help such communities to achieve the
world-wide Millennium Development Goals of reducing extreme poverty,
hunger, disease, and lack of access to safe water and sanitation. I also
announced that thanks to a remarkable grant from the Lenfest Foundation
in the United States, the Earth Institute at Columbia University would
be able to put some of the ideas to work in Sauri, and to help the
international community learn from the experience in Sauri for the
benefit of villages in other parts of Africa and beyond. Several hours
later, around 5:30 p.m., we all rose from a discussion that was
riveting, distressing, uplifting, and profoundly challenging – most of
all challenging for us in the rich world.
Whatever the official data may show about “stagnant” rural
incomes in places like Sauri, stagnation is a euphemism for decline and
early death. Food output per person is falling; malaria is pervasive and
increasing; AIDS stalks the community and the region, with adult
prevalence on the order of 30 percent, if not higher. Rudimentary water
springs for collecting water for household use are often dirty, as
pictured here, especially later in the day after extensive morning use.
There are a few protected water points installed a few years back with
the help of a UK NGO, but these are too few in number, far from many
homesteads, and heavily congested, sometimes yielding little more than a
trickle and therefore requiring several minutes to fill a jug. Rapid
population growth in the past has made farm sizes small. Fertility rates
are around 6 children per woman, and the villagers utterly lack access
to family planning and reproductive health services, and to modern
contraceptives.
I canvassed the group on the material conditions of the community,
and received enormously perceptive accounts of the grim situation. Only
two of the two hundred or so farmers at the meeting reported using
fertilizer at present. Around 25 percent are using improved fallows with
nitrogen-fixing trees, a scientific farming approach developed and
introduced into Sauri by ICRAF. The rest of the community is farming on
tiny plots, often no more than 0.1 hectares, with soils that are utterly
exhausted of nutrients, and therefore biologically unable to produce an
adequate crop. The soils are so depleted of nutrients and organic matter
that even if the rains are good the households still go hungry, getting
yields of around 1 ton of maize per hectare. If the rains fail, the
households face the risk of death from immuno-suppression due to severe
under-nutrition. Stunting, meaning low-height-for-age, is widespread, a
sign of pervasive and chronic under-nutrition of the children.
The real shocker came with my follow-up question. How many farmers
had used fertilizers in the past? Every hand in the room went up. Farmer
after farmer described how the price of fertilizer was now out of reach,
and how their current impoverishment left them unable to purchase what
they had used in the past. A 50 kg bag of diammonium phosphate (DAP)
fertilizer sells for around 2,000 Ksh ($US 25). That’s $500 a ton, at
least twice the world market price. A proper application might require 2
to 4 bags per hectare, or $50 to $100 per hectare, a cost vastly beyond
what the household can afford. Credits to buy fertilizer are neither
available nor prudent for these farmers: a single failed crop season, an
untimely episode of malaria, or some other calamity, can push a
household that has taken on debt into a spiral of unending indebtedness
and destitution.
As the afternoon discussion unfolded, the gravity of the
community’s predicament became more and more apparent. AIDS is
ravaging the community, and nobody has yet had access to antiretroviral
therapy. I asked how many households were home to one or more orphaned
children, children left behind by the pandemic. Virtually every hand in
the room shot up. I asked how many households were receiving remittances
from family members living in Nairobi and other cities. The devastating
response was that “the only things coming back from the cities are
coffins and orphans,” not remittances.
I asked how many households had somebody currently suffering from
malaria. Around three-fourths of the hands shot up. How many use
anti-malaria bed nets? Two out of two hundred hands went up. How many
know about bed nets? All hands. And how many would like to use bed nets?
All hands remained up. The problem, many of the women explained, is that
they cannot afford the bed nets, which sell for a few dollars per net,
and are too expensive even when partially subsidized (“socially
marketed”) by international donor agencies. How many in the community
are using medicine to treat a bout of malaria? A few hands went up, but
the vast majority remained down. A woman launched into an explanation
that the medicines sell at prices well beyond what the villagers can
afford.
A year or so ago, Sauri had a small clinic. The doctor has since left
and the clinic is now padlocked, as pictured below. The villagers
explained that they could not afford to pay the doctor and buy the
medicines, so the doctor departed. Now they fend for themselves without
health care or medicines. When malaria gets bad, and their children fall
into anemia-induced tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), gasping for breath in
small, ravaged bodies deprived of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, they rush
the child to the sub-district hospital in nearby Yala town. The mothers
may carry the children on their backs, or push them in a wheelbarrow for
several kilometers over dirt paths. Yet when we visited the Yala
Sub-district hospital on our way from the village, we found a hospital
without running water, without an in-house doctor (one visits only two
afternoons per week), with patients lying on cots in the halls, and
without even one complete surgical kit.
A few years back, Sauri’s residents cooked with locally collected
fuel wood, but the decline in the number of trees has left the
sub-location bereft of sufficient fuel wood. The quarter or so
households who are using the ICRAF system of improved fallows, based on
leguminous trees, have a dedicated supply of fuel wood. Other farmer
households do not. Villagers said that they now buy pieces of fuel wood
in Yala or Muhanda town (both a few kms away), a bundle of 7 sticks
costing around 25 shillings (30 cents). These 7 sticks are barely
sufficient for cooking one meal. In our meeting with the villagers, I
conveyed astonishment at the price, 30 cents per meal, for a community
that earns almost no money at all. A woman responded that many villagers
had in fact reverted to cooking with cow dung or to eating uncooked
meals.
As this village dies of hunger, AIDS, and malaria, its isolation is
stunning. There are no cars or trucks owned or even used within Sauri,
and only a handful of villagers said they had ridden in any kind of
motorized transport during the past year. Only 3 or 4 out of the 200 or
so said that they get to the regional city of Kisumu each month, and
about the same number said that they had been to Nairobi, Kenya’s
commercial and political capital 400 km away, once during the past year.
There are virtually no remittances reaching the village. Indeed, there
is virtually no cash income of any kind reaching the village. Given the
farmers’ meager production, farm output must be used almost entirely
for the household’s own consumption, rather than for sales in the
market. The community has no money for fertilizers, medicines, school
fees, or other basic needs that must be purchased from outside of the
villages. Around half of the individuals at the meeting said that they
had never made a phone call in their entire life. (Ironically, and
promisingly, our own mobile phones worked fine in the village, relying
on a cell tower in Yala town. Extending low-cost telephony to the
village, for example based on a mobile phone shared by the community,
would therefore pose no infrastructure problems.)
This year the rains are failing again, another disaster in an
increasingly erratic climate, quite possibly a climate showing the
increasing effects of long-term manmade climate change emanating from
the rich world. The two roof-water harvesting cisterns at the school are
now empty, and the farmers fear disaster in the harvest next month. The
Kenyan Government has already put out a worldwide appeal for emergency
aid to fight imminent starvation in several provinces, including Nyanza.
The remarkable point is that this village could be rescued, and
indeed achieve the Millennium Development Goals, but not by itself.
Survival depends on addressing a series of specific challenges: nutrient
depleted soils, erratic rainfall, holo-endemic malaria, pandemic
HIV/AIDS, lack of adequate education opportunities, lack of access to
safe drinking water and latrines, and the unmet need for basic
transport, electricity, cooking fuels, and communications. All of these
challenges can be met, with known, proven, reliable, and appropriate
technologies and interventions.
The crux of the matter for Sauri sublocation can be stated simply and
directly:
Sauri’s villages, and impoverished villages like them all over the
world can be saved, and set on a path of development, at a cost that is
tiny for the world but too high for the villages themselves and for the
Kenyan government on its own.
African safaris speak of “The Big Five” animals to watch for on
the savannah. The international development community should speak of
The Big Five development interventions that would spell the difference
between hunger, disease, and death, versus health and economic
development. Sauri’s Big Five, identified by the villagers as well as
by the UN Millennium Project (including the study “Ending Africa’s
Poverty Trap,” in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, which I
attach), are:
• Agricultural inputs. With fertilizers, improved fallows (with
ICRAF’s proven technologies), green manures and cover crops, water
harvesting and small-scale irrigation, and improved seeds, Sauri’s
farmers could triple the food yields per hectare, and quickly end
chronic hunger. In addition, improved storage facilities would allow
farmers to store their surplus and not have to sell it all immediately.
This would be of particular advantage for the women who do the lion’s
share of African farm and household work.
• Investments in basic health. A village clinic with one doctor and
nurse for the 5,000 residents would provide free anti-malaria bed nets,
effective anti-malarial medicines, treatments for HIV/AIDS opportunistic
infections (including highly effective and low-cost Bactrim),
anti-retroviral therapy for late-stage AIDS; and a range of other
essential health services, including acting as skilled birth attendants
and providing sexual and reproductive health services.
• Investments in education. School meals for all the children at
the primary school could improve the health of the school children, the
quality of education, and the attendance at school. Expanded vocational
training for the students could teach them the skills of modern farming
(e.g. using improved fallows and fertilizer), computer literacy, basic
infrastructure maintenance (electrical wiring, use and maintenance of a
diesel generator, water harvesting, bore well construction and
maintenance), carpentry, and the like. With a mere 1,000 households in
Sauri, village-wide classes once a month could train adults in hygiene,
HIV/AIDS, malaria control, computers and mobile phone use, and a myriad
of other technical and enormously pressing topics. Without doubt, the
village is ready and eager to be empowered by increased information and
technical knowledge. The school could provide a remarkable impetus for
an enormous infusion of village capacity.
• Power, transport, and communications services. Electricity could
be made available to the villages either via a power line (from Yala
town or Nyanminia village) or an off-grid diesel generator. The
electricity would power lights and perhaps a computer for the school;
pumps for safe well water; power for milling grain and other food
processing, refrigeration, carpentry; charges for household batteries
(which could be used for household illumination), and other needs. The
villagers emphasized that the students would like to study after sunset
but can not do so without electric lighting. A village truck could bring
in fertilizers, other farm inputs, modern cooking fuels (e.g. LPG), take
out harvests to the market, allow sale of perishable goods and milk in
Kisumu and increase opportunities for off-farm employment for youth. The
truck could rush women with childbirth complications and children with
acute complications of anemia to the hospital. Storage facilities would
allow the village to sell the grain over the course of months, rather
than all at once, thereby getting more favorable prices. Grain could be
protected in locally made storage bins using leaves from the improved
fallow species tephrosia, which has insecticide properties. One or more
shared mobile phones for the village could be used for emergencies,
market information, and generally to connect Sauri with the outside
world.
• Safe drinking water and sanitation, with enough water points and
latrines for the safety and convenience of the entire village,
especially for the women and children of the village who now toil hours
per day fetching water. The water can be provided through a combination
of protected springs, bore wells, rain-water harvesting, and other basic
technologies. There is even a possibility of establishing links with an
existing large-scale storage tank and pumping station a few kilometers
away.
The irony is that the costs of these services for Sauri’s 5,000
residents would be very low. Here are some quick guesses, to be refined
by the Earth Institute over the coming months:
Fertilizers and improved fallows for the 500 or so arable hectares
would be roughly $100 per hectare per year, or $50,000 per year for the
community.
A clinic, staffed by a doctor and nurse, providing free anti-malaria
prevention and care and other free basic services other than the anti-retrovirals,
would cost around $50,000 per year. (Anti-retrovirals would be provided
by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the U.S. Emergency
Plan, and other programs.). School meals could be paid for communally
out of just a small part of the incremental grain yields achieved
through the application of fertilizers.
A village truck would be an annual inclusive running cost of perhaps
$15,000 per year if amortized over several years (or leased from a
manufacturer). Modern cooking fuel for the primary and secondary school
students (numbering about 1000) in the entire sub-location would cost an
additional $5,000 per year. A few village cell phones and a grain
storage facility would add perhaps $5,000 per year, for a total of
$25,000 per year.
A combination of protected springs (with improved access), bore wells
(with pumps) and community taps connected to the large-scale storage
system would provide access to water at 10 convenient locations and cost
around $25,000 dollars.
Electricity could be provided to the school, the nearby clinic and
five water points by a dedicated off-grid generator, or by a power line
from Yala town or Nyanminia village for an initial cost of about
$35,000. For another $40,000 initial costs and recurring costs of
$10,000 every household could be provided with a battery/bulb assembly
to light a small bulb for a few hours every night with the battery
charging station connected to the village generator. The annualized
costs would be $25,000 per year.
Additional expenses would include scaling up educational activities,
various costs of local management, technical advice from agricultural
extension officers, and other related delivery services.
We estimate that the combined costs would be around $250,000 per
year, or roughly $50 per person per year in Sauri, for at least the next
few years.
The benefits would include decisive malaria control (with
transmission reduced by perhaps 90 percent judging from recent CDC bed
net trials in a neighboring area), a doubling or tripling of food yields
per hectare with a drastic reduction of chronic hunger and
under-nutrition, improved school attendance, a reduction of water-borne
disease, a rise in incomes through the sale of surplus grains and cash
crops, and a myriad of other benefits as well (e.g. the growth of cash
incomes via food processing, carpentry, small-scale clothing
manufacturing, horticulture, aquaculture, animal husbandry, and the
like). With anti-retrovirals added to the clinic’s services, the mass
deaths from AIDS, as well as the deluge of newly orphaned children,
could also be staunched.
Sooner rather than later, these investments would repay themselves
not only in lives saved, children educated, communities preserved, but
also in direct commercial returns. Consider the case of fertilizers,
which are currently utterly unused, since households lack access to
storage, transport, credit, and a financial cushion against the risk of
crop failures even if credit is made available. A fertilizer application
of $100 per hectare (e.g. 100kg of DAP), combined with or substituted by
improved fallows (as appropriate), could raise crop yields in a normal
season from 1 ton per hectare to 3 tons per hectare, with a marketable
value of the increment of roughly $200 to $400 dollars per hectare,
assuming that transport is available and there is a stable price for the
maize crop. In a drought year, fertilizer and/or improved fallows would
mean the difference of harvesting 1 ton with fertilizer/fallows versus a
failed crop without fertilizers/fallows (with attendant acute hunger, if
not starvation). In the first few years, fertilizers and improved
fallows should be given largely for free to the villagers, to boost
their own nutrition and health, and to build a small financial cushion.
Later on it will be possible to share the costs with the community, and
eventually, perhaps in a decade, to provide the fertilizer and improved
fallows on a full commercial basis.
The international donor community should be thinking round-the-clock
of one question:
How can the Big Five interventions be scaled up to rural areas
similar to Sauri?
With a population of some 33 million people, of whom two-thirds are
in rural areas, Kenya’s villages require annual investments on the
order of $1 billion per year, with the donors filling most of that
financing gap, since the national government is already stretched beyond
its means. Instead, donor support to Kenya is around $100 million, or a
mere one tenth of what is needed. Amazingly, Kenya’s debt servicing to
the rich world is around $600 million per year, much larger than the aid
inflows! Kenya’s budget is therefore still being drained by the
international community, not bolstered by it.
This is all the more remarkable since Kenya is a new and fragile
democracy that should be receiving considerable help from its
development partners. Kenya, ironically, is also a victim of global
terrorism, caught in a war not of its own making. U.S. and Israeli
targets on Kenyan soil have been hit in recent years, sending Kenya’s
tourist industry into a downward spiral, and causing hundreds of deaths
of Kenyans and massive property damage.
The UN Millennium Project is working with the Government of Kenya to
ensure that its poverty reduction efforts are bold enough to achieve the
Millennium Development Goals. This strategy will require much greater
development assistance and deeper debt cancellation from the rich world
to enable Kenya to invest in the Big Five – agriculture, health and
education, electricity, transport and communications, and safe drinking
water – not only in Sauri villages, but across impoverished rural
Kenya. Yet when the Kenyan Government recently raised the proposal of a
National Social Health Insurance Fund, the very thing needed to scale up
the access to basic health care, donors quickly objected rather than
jumping at the opportunity to examine how it could actually be
accomplished.
The issue of corruption overshadows the donor relations with the
Kenyan Government. Much of the corruption reflects the holdouts of
corrupt officials from the earlier regime of more than two decades, who
have not yet been weeded out. Part of the corruption is new and utterly
avoidable, but only if the donors help Kenya to improve the functioning
of the public administration, not by moralizing and finger pointing, but
by the installation of computer systems, published accounts, job
training and upgrading, higher pay for senior managers so that they
don’t have to live off of bribes and side payments, continued support
for the government’s already major efforts to improve the judicial
system, empowerment of local villages to oversee the provision of public
services, and some humility on the side of the donors. Most donor
governments have enough corruption to go around inside their own
governments, and even in the provision of foreign aid (which is often
linked to powerful political interests within the donor countries). The
affliction is widespread, and needs to be attacked systematically and
cleverly, but without useless and false moralizing.
The donors should sit down with the Government leadership and say the
following. “We’d like to help you scale up the Big Five in Kenya’s
Villages, to enable you to ensure that all of Kenya’s rural poor have
access to agricultural inputs, health, education, electricity,
communications and transport, and safe water and sanitation. Let’s
together design a budgetary and management system that will truly reach
the villages, and ensure a monitorable, governable, and scalable set of
interventions across the country. We’re prepared to pay if you are
prepared to ensure good governance on such an historic project.”
Private consulting firms with an international reputation can be brought
in to help design these systems, and to give confidence in their
performance.
With a little more forethought, the donors and Government could take
advantage of the crucial fact that villages like Sauri have a “group
monitoring and enforcement” mechanism automatically built into village
life that can help to ensure that aid at the village is well used. Just
as experience with group lending in microfinance has been highly
successful, projects which empower village-based community organizations
to oversee village services have also been highly successful. Recent
experiences with village governance in India, based on the panchayats,
are but one notable example. In Sauri, the villagers jumped with
eagerness at the invitation to form various committees (schooling,
clinics, transport and electricity, farming) to help prepare for the
actual investments and to ensure proper governance as they are put into
place. The headmistress, Ms. Omolo, who oversaw the formation of the
committees, also ensured that the village women, with their special
needs and burdens and even legal obstacles, would be well represented in
each of the committees.
If donor officials will join the UN Millennium Project and Government
of Kenya by going together to the villages, meeting with the villagers,
and brainstorming with government officials, I am utterly confident that
together we can come up with a hundred-and-one fruitful approaches to
ensure that aid actually reaches the villages. We need to be more
creative, in order to save the lives of millions of people now
struggling to survive – and often failing – in the impoverished
villages around the world. The donors and the Government of Kenya can
and should agree on a suitable and bold strategy before the end of 2004.
I firmly believe that Kenya’s new democracy, from the national
government down to the villages, is prepared to govern the use of
international help with transparency, efficiency, and equity, if we can
get the delivery mechanisms right and invest in the supporting
information and reporting technologies. The emergency is at hand.
Kenya’s poor and the country’s fragile democracy need to be saved
now. The rich world needs to wake from its slumber.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium
Development Goals
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
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