MALNUTRITION: Somalia: "It is a colossal outrage that the lessons of previous famines have been ignored," says Oxfam.

GENEVA, 27 July 2011 (IRIN)

Analysis: Horn of Africa aid must also build long-term resilience

 Photo: Dan Delorenzo/OCHA

The carcass of a camel that has succumbed to drought lies on a roadside in northern Kenya

The images of starving children bear grim witness to the extent of the crisis affecting millions of people in the Horn of Africa, but they also symbolize a failure to act in time, say aid experts.

"It is a colossal outrage that the warnings went unheeded, that the lessons of previous famines have been ignored," says Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam.
The crisis in the Horn of Africa, triggered by drought, conflict and high food prices, is affecting at least 11.6 million people, with two regions of southern Somalia suffering from famine. And the situation may well deteriorate.
But the crisis, experts say, could have been mitigated by mobilizing the necessary resources ahead of time. There is increasing evidence that helping people become more resilient to the naturally recurring cycles of drought is far more effective than responding after disaster has struck.
It is also sound use of donor money, they say. As such, helping farmers find alternative livelihood options, or teaching them to grow drought-resistant crops, is far more effective than providing food aid when the harvest has failed.
"We have hard evidence, including from Africa, that we need only five Swiss francs [US$6.20] per capita per annum to build up resilience,” said Mohammed Mukhier, who heads the Disaster Risk Reduction unit at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
“If you take the emergency response and emergency operations, you might need 200 francs [$250] per capita to deliver relief assistance for periods of just three or four months."
Humanitarian agencies and donors agreed at an emergency meeting in Rome on 25 July that the response to the crisis must address the immediate needs of the desperate population and help build resilience to avert similar crises in the future.

Risk reduction
Using donor money wisely is particularly urgent in view of the threats posed globally by natural disasters, including increasingly frequent storms, floods and droughts. Advocates of the risk reduction strategy argue that donors can no longer afford to provide funding for disasters primarily after the fact. The cost is rising and compromising regular development investment.

 Photo: OCHA

Intergrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) for eastern Africa

Yet, warnings of impending disaster in the Horn of Africa went largely unheeded.
"Measures that could have kept animals alive – and provided milk, and income to buy food – would have been much cheaper than feeding malnourished children, but the time for those passed with very little investment,” said Simon Levine, of the Overseas Development Institute. Now, "it is far too late to address anything but the worst symptoms", he wrote on the website of the independent British think-tank.
While massive funding often goes to post-disaster response, funds for preparedness and contingency planning are relatively scarce. Risk prevention is often hard to fund as it does not generate the same kind of media as a high-profile emergency response. Government donors answer to taxpayers and need to demonstrate impact – something that is difficult to do when disaster has been averted.
With donors mobilized - even if funds pledged still fall well short of the US$2 billion needed – the focus in the Horn of Africa is now on emergency as well as long-term assistance.
“Short-term relief must be linked to building long-term sustainability," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "This means an agricultural transformation that improves the resilience of rural livelihoods and minimizes the scale of any future crisis. It means climate-smart crop production, livestock rearing, fish farming and forest maintenance practices that enable all people to have year-round access to the nutrition they need."
Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), stressed that building resilience in farming and herding communities required a long-term commitment. "But time - as we can see from the devastating situation in the Horn of Africa - is running out,” he told delegates at the meeting in Rome.
The challenge of seeking to avoid future food insecurity crises in the Horn of Africa is daunting. Conflict has severely hampered development and relief efforts in Somalia, and affects the mobility of pastoralists and their livestock, which is key to food security in the region.
But disaster risk reduction is increasingly seen as a humanitarian imperative, crucial to battling poverty and achieving sustainable development.
“Building resilience of farming and herding communities in East Africa requires a long-term, sustained commitment on the part of the region’s governments and the international donor community,” said Kevin Cleaver, IFAD's associate vice-president.

"The rains will fail. But let us not fail, too."

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93337

POVERTY: SOMALIA: Cash transfers "a better aid option"

NAIROBI, 30 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: SCDO : Conflict, prolonged drought and a series of crop failures have precipitated a humanitarian crisis in Somalia (file photo)

 As the drought in Somalia intensifies, with an estimated 2.85 million needing aid, more and more relief agencies are looking at the option of cash transfers, saying the system helps beneficiaries by giving them freedom of choice.
"Cash transfer programming is a very simple concept: give people money so they can buy what they need," Sarah Bailey, a research officer with the Humanitarian Policy Group of the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), told IRIN.
Cash transfers also stimulate local markets and support local producers, according to officials and beneficiaries. For cash transfer programmes to work, Bailey said, markets need to be working, "but markets are often stronger than we think".
She said agencies therefore had to understand markets before deciding what assistance to provide, "and cash transfers are only appropriate when the market can absorb the cash injection and people can buy what they need".
She said agencies should always choose the most appropriate type of assistance for each context: in some cases this would be cash; in others, food aid.

Insecurity
Across much of Somalia, conflict, prolonged drought and a series of crop failures have precipitated a humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization's Somalia Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU), most of the 2.85 million Somalis needing aid are in the south-central region, representing 61 percent of the total population in crisis. But the area is largely under the control of Al-Shabab militias, and their perceived hostility to aid agencies means the delivery of food assistance is "extremely limited".
"The 1.75 million people in crisis in the south include rural, urban and IDPs [internally displaced persons], an increase from 1.4 million in January," FSNAU said in a statement on 28 June.
The spokesman for the UN Word Food Programme (WFP) in Nairobi, Peter Smerdon, told IRIN the agency's operations remained suspended in the south-central areas of the country under the control of the opposition Al-Shabab. Somalia's internationally-recognised transitional government's authority extends to only parts of the capital, Mogadishu.
 Photo: ReliefWeb : Humanitarian snapshot (See larger version of map http://www.irinnews.org/pdf/East_Africa_drought_June_2011.pdf)

"WFP is providing food assistance [not just general food distributions, but also supplementary feeding, food for education, food for assets, school meals] for now but is exploring the possibility of using cash transfers or vouchers," he said. "WFP is feeding one million Somalis, but under a new emergency operation starting on 1 July will aim to assist 2.65 million people."
With security considerations affecting aid distributions, cash transfers present a viable alternative. In Somalia cash transfers are mostly through money transfer companies and sometimes via mobile phones.
Kate Churchill-Smith, programme and communications officer for international NGO Horn Relief, said cash transfers in Somalia, apart from being a flexible and dignified aid tool, also had other benefits.
"Somalia's pastoralist population, for example, tends to carry a large debt burden," she said. "If the aid community provides vulnerable Somalis with food aid, we are ignoring both their considerable debt repayment needs as well as their water needs. As a result, they may sell their food aid in the market to meet their obligations."
However, Churchill-Smith said if cash were targeted at the most vulnerable households, "they will use a cash grant to meet their most basic and immediate needs - and this isn’t always just food".
Horn Relief's Sanag Emergency Response Project benefits more than 8,000 households (about 48,000 people), primarily in northeastern Sanag, Sool and Bari regions but also in the central region of Mudug. It also chairs the Cash-Based Response Working Group in Somalia and has, at the request of the Working Group and the Agriculture and Livelihoods Cluster for Somalia, developed guidelines on cash programming. The cluster has adopted the guidelines.

Advantages
Jawahir Hassan Ali, a mother of seven, told IRIN the food aid she used to receive from relief agencies had not been enough to feed her family and buy other essentials such as medicines and vegetables, much less send her children to school.
In February 2011, Ali's family was included in a cash transfer programme run by Horn Relief in her home town of Baran, Sanag region. Before she started receiving cash, she sometimes had to sell some of her food, even though it was not enough.
"I had no choice; I could not even afford a piece of meat or one tomato," Ali said. "Now with the cash I feel like a free woman. Sometimes I even buy shoes for my children, when I have saved enough."
The cash transfer had made decision-making easier, she said, adding: "I can now decide what is important for my family."

Inflation debate
Critics suggest injecting cash into an economy can generate inflation, although Churchill-Smith rejected the notion, saying the amount of cash handed out was small compared with the size of the local economy. "Evidence to date has consistently shown that cash transfers have no inflationary effect on local markets."
She said many poor households depended on credit to survive, and small businesses unable to repay loans could not order goods or were forced to close. "Traders are then unable to pay off their debts, which is how the chain of credit travels to urban centres. Cash grants act as local cash injections and have been shown to have an extremely positive effect on the local economy."
All aid assistance has the potential to affect markets. "Cash transfers can cause inflation and food aid can hurt producers by lowering prices," said the ODI’s Bailey.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93106

POVERTY: AID POLICY: Classifications questioned in protracted crises

MEDFORD, USA, 8 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Marion Doss/Flickr
More creativity needed in responding to crises

Classifying aid as "relief", "early recovery" or "development" does little to help countries that have been troubled for years.
This was the key message from the Second World Humanitarian Studies Conference this month during a discussion on food security response in protracted crises such as Somalia.
The UK's Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reckons there are at least 22 countries in protracted crises, by which it means countries where a large population is vulnerable to disease, death and disruption of livelihoods over a long period, with the state having limited capacity to help those affected.
"Food insecurity is the most common manifestation of protracted crises," according to Prabhu Pingali, deputy director of Agriculture Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Luca Alinovi, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative for Somalia. About 20 percent of the world's undernourished people (or more than a third of the global total if China and India are excluded) - 166 million - live in countries in protracted crises.
The problems of engagement in such countries are linked to the way "development" is perceived and how aid is used to respond, said Alinovi.
In the aid world, "development is viewed as a gradual improvement in the quality of life. Disasters or acute emergencies briefly interrupt this trend, but the expectation is that there will be a return to normality, hence the use of terms such as 'disaster', 'recovery' and 'sustainable development'," he said.
Aid responses even in protracted crises tend to be short term. "We cannot work with funding that is reviewed every year as at times there are breaks in funding, which does not help projects which have long-term development objectives," said Alinovi. "If we want to help the country emerge from the crisis we have to make a long-term commitment with no interruption in spending."

"Wrong" emphasis
Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations set out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) put too much emphasis on building state institutions, said Daniel Maxwell, a food security expert at Tufts University and one of the authors of a joint FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) report on food insecurity in protracted crises.
Most developed countries and major aid donors are among OECD's 34 members. The OECD should better focus on efforts to strengthen livelihoods and local institutions that support livelihoods, he said.
"We have to become more creative in how we seek to respond to a crisis - and not with the traditional humanitarian mindset," said Maxwell.
ODI researcher Sarah Bailey in a forthcoming paper on the Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in a protracted crisis, says: "Aid architecture is divided into humanitarian and development compartments. The choice to use aid mechanisms is a political decision related to how donor governments want to engage with the state, and there is a lack of programming strategies for shifting between shorter-term and longer-term assistance approaches.
"As addressing state fragility has become an important international concern, so too has the focus widened from linking relief and development to integrating aid and security.
"Many policies and interventions now seek to `stabilize' fragile and conflict-affected settings through assistance and security responses. 'Early recovery', meaning laying foundations for recovery at the earliest opportunities, has also emerged as a framework in recent years. "
But rather than coming up with frameworks such as "early recovery" intended to plug a theoretical distinction between relief and development, the aid community should try to understand the opportunities and limitations offered by existing approaches, she says.

Flexibility key
In perhaps the most protracted crisis of all, FAO and other agencies have had to be creative in trying to help communities in Somalia. Humanitarian agencies there engage with whichever local authority holds sway, and many dispatch funds through "hawala" money transfer systems, global networks of trusted brokers, with some success, says Alinovi.
Francois Daniel Grunewald, chair of Groupe URD, a research centre, said another reason why FAO had made inroads is "because it responds to a crisis in agro-ecological zones, so it can set up those relationships in a decentralized way - which is the way to respond for aid agencies and donors even in countries like Afghanistan - and not have to spend vital time engaging with an ineffective central government". Grunewald worked in Somalia for some years when he ran the agriculture rehabilitation unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
ODI's Bailey suggested that donors, rather than responding to the needs of a crisis from one year to the next, should consider aid money pledged over a period of time in totality and then decide how best to spend it.
Donors and the aid community perhaps needed to better understand the impact of their assistance in terms of helping communities back on their feet. Instead of asking the question, "How can humanitarian action support recovery?" Bailey suggested they ask: "What is the most appropriate assistance given the needs, context and capacities? How can it have the greatest impact?"
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=92928

POVERTY: One billion people forgotten in fight against povertyA new Unicef report reveals how an invisible generation of adolescents have been overlooked and marginalised in development strategies

 Posted by Annie Kelly  25 February 2011


Youths play football in Katine, Uganda. A new Unicef report reveals how the young are sidelined in development strategies. Photograph by Dan Chung for the Guardian



This year Unicef's annual flagship State of the World's Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world's 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015.
The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised.
Many of the world's teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation.
The fact that the world has achieved a 33% drop in infant mortality in 11 years in testament to the fact that progress can be made when matched by political will and national investment.
However, the report says this investment and support tails off when these same children enter the second decade of their lives, and that development programmes are not sufficiently making the link between an investment in early childhood and the need to consolidate these gains into early adulthood.
For example, although millions of children have been vaccinated against dangerous diseases, one-third of all new HIV cases in the world involve 15-24 year-olds. In Brazil, 26,000 children under the age of one were saved between 1998-2008, but in the same decade 81,000 Brazilian teenagers were murdered.
According to Unicef, adolescence is the most dangerous period of many children's lives. This is the time when young people, especially girls, are at the highest risk of dangers such as child marriage, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. But these dangers are yet to be reflected in child protection resources and assistance.
The report says that greater investment in adolescence is also crucial for further progress towards the MDGs. Adolescence is the pivotal decade where poverty and inequality pass on to the next generation, and is most apparent among poor adolescent girls who become mothers.
Those with low levels of education are at particular risk of perpetuating intergenerational cycles of poverty, discrimination and inequity. Almost half the world's adolescents do not attend secondary school or do not complete their studies. Despite the advances towards gender parity in primary education, girls are still far less likely to attend secondary education than boys. The development advantages of education, particularly for girls, have been proved time and time again. Educated adolescent girls are less likely to marry early, get pregnant and have a better knowledge of HIV/Aids and health issues.
Adolescence is also a time when other cultural forms of gender discrimination come into play and perhaps presents the best chance of confronting and challenging institutionalised attitudes and behaviours.
Country-by-country statistics at the back of the report reveal some interesting findings on adolescents' attitudes to violence against women.
The data shows a general tendency for girls to justify domestic violence more than boys. This phenomenon, however, is not universal, as in some countries, such as Azerbaijan, the opposite is true).
In Benin, for example, girls are almost four times as likely to justify domestic violence than boys the same age. Researchers also found that younger girls were as likely to excuse violence than older women. How likely is it that these pervasive attitudes towards violence get passed down to the new generation of daughters?
Unicef argues that in the current global economic climate, a stronger focus on adolescents is becoming increasingly crucial as children are now reaching adolescence as the world is gripped by social and political insecurity, spiralling food prices and rising unemployment.
The global economic crisis has compounded a situation where 81 million young people are unemployed and 15-24 year olds make up one-quarter of the world's working poor. This is likely to have a significant impact on future economic recovery and growth.
The latest International Labour Organisation report showed that youth unemployment is now a significant concern in almost every national economy. More than 20% of international companies consider inadequate education of the potential workforce to be a significant obstacle to higher investment and faster economic recovery.
Earlier this week, Alasdair McWilliam of the Overseas Development Institute, blogged on this site about the extent of youth unemployment in countries in the Middle East recently beset by political unrest and upheaval.
Despite the region being a "star performer" in terms of development indicators such as health and education, unemployment among 15-24 year olds stands at over 25%. With two-thirds of the region's population now below 24, young people are not being absorbed into the economy and employers are complaining of poor education and low skills.
McWilliam also argued that that– youth unemployment and a lack of political voice – two factors attributed to the growing unrest in the Arab world – are not included in prominent measures of development.
The Unicef report also suggests that the MDGs do not adequately address the challenges and dangers facing the world's youth. Although many of the MDGs are related to adolescence, the goals themselves focus more explicitly on the survival and health of under-5s, reflected in specific and clearly defined targets on infant mortality, infant immunisation and primary school enrolment. According to Unicef this has partly allowed an under-investment in programmes targeting teenagers and young people.
The conclusion of the report is stark. The global fight against poverty, inequality and discrimination will be compromised if this doesn't change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/feb/25/unicef-state-of-worlds-children-adolescents

POVERTY: Conditional and Unconditional Cash Transfers

2 August 2010 (IRIN) - A World Bank study that put money in the hands of girls and their parents in Malawi's poor southern region has caused ripples across the debate on cash transfers in academic and aid communities. "Cash transfers enhance access to education whether or not they are conditional, so the determining factor is the income effect, not the conditionality," said development economist Stephen Devereux. An average of US$10 per month was handed out to a group of girls participating in the study on condition that they attended school 80 percent of the time so to remain eligible for the stipend. It made no difference to the outcome when no conditions were imposed - the girls participating in the study attended school 80 percent of the time, and in both cases the school drop-out rate also fell by 40 percent. The debate on whether vulnerable people should be given cash as a social safety net without any conditions attached has run for decades, said Anna McCord of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a UK-based think-tank, and John Hoddinott of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), who have both studied cash transfer programmes at length. Nicholas Freeland, who heads the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme in Southern Africa, said attaching conditions made cash transfers more complex and expensive because they had to be monitored and enforced; there was also the moral issue of the donor or government deciding on how people should behave. Much of the enthusiasm for conditional cash transfers (CCT) has been built on the success of such programmes in Latin America, which is quite different to Africa, said Shiela Sisulu, deputy director of the World Food Programme (WFP). "A CCT in Latin America can ... [give money] to mothers on condition that she goes to the clinic, but many parts of Africa are not well-serviced - there may be no clinic or school for miles around." The stir Does the Malawi study in the poverty-stricken Zomba district add anything to the debate? ODI's McCord admitted that the findings were significant but did not think they resolved the question. "This is a strong and important finding, both because it challenges the rationale for conditional cash transfers, and because it comes from the World Bank, which has been the strongest advocate of conditional cash transfers in the international community," Devereux said. The Bank backs CCT programmes in 13 countries, and provided $2.4 billion to such initiatives during the global economic crisis in the 2009 financial year, according to a Bank statement. There was a "limited availability" of "rigorous evidence to measure the effects of 'conditions' separate from those of the cash transfer", noted Ariel Fizbein, the World Bank's leading authority on social protection and a global expert in the field, who maintained that the Bank did not have a policy on the issue and had supported both CCTs and unconditional cash transfers (UCTs). Freeland commented, "The point is that the Zomba experiment represents the only 'ideal' experiment to date to determine whether it is the cash or the condition that causes the impact." He quoted the World Bank's "Bible on CCTs" - Conditional Cash Transfers: reducing Present and Future Poverty - co-authored by Fizbein: "Ideally, to disentangle the effect of conditions from the income effect inherent in the transfer an experiment would be designed whereby a first group of households or villages receives a UCT, a second group receives a CCT, and a third group serves as a control group." The Malawi study did just this. The researchers selected three groups of girls, the first of which were given stipends on condition that they attended school 80 percent of the time; the second were given the same stipends unconditionally; the third received nothing and served as the comparison group for the study. The study was led by researchers Berk Özler, a senior economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group, Sarah Baird of the George Washington University, in Washington, and Craig McIntosh of the University of California, San Diego. The World Bank noted in a statement that the findings were "in contrast to the conditional cash transfer (CCT) experience in Latin America, where the condition to attend school has been key to the programme's success". Devereux agreed with Freeland, pointing out that "We do not have 'experiments' in Latin America, with control groups of conditional and unconditional cash transfer beneficiaries, so in that sense the Malawi case study is unique." Fizbein was cautious in his endorsement. "The Malawi study is ... a welcome addition to this literature. In my view ... it is problematic to seek a resolution to the complex issue of human capital conditions based on a narrow interpretation of the Malawi study. The effects of conditions may vary, depending on a range of factors (target group, level of payment among others)," he said. "My recommendation to Bank teams and their government counterparts remains the same: consider with care the objectives being pursued by the particular programme, the potential pros and cons of alternative designs (including political economy ones), and build a solid evaluation design to learn from what is being done." Why the fuss about conditions? Hoddinott suggested looking at the UCT versus CCT debate from a public as well as a private perspective, both of which provided "good rationales to impose conditions" on getting money from the state. The case for CCTs Governments may believe they know what is better for the poor "than do the poor themselves", and as a result impose conditions to bring about changes in their behaviour, Hoddinott said quoting from a paper he co-wrote with Alan de Brauw. "For example, governments may place greater weight on the intrinsic value of educating girls than their families do," and give the family cash, provided they sent their daughters to school. Governments could also use CCTs to create awareness or persuade people of the benefits of a course of action, such as being screened for a chronic disease. Politicians could also use conditional transfers as a "useful tool to help them stay in office", Hoddinott said. Politicians were "often evaluated by performance indicators, such as changes in school enrolment or health clinic use. "By conditioning transfers on behaviours that increase these indicators, politicians and policy-makers can provide useful evidence of accomplishments long before the indicators show more important evidence of poverty reduction (e.g. increased productivity or better adult health)." Within households CCTs could empower or "strengthen the bargaining position of individuals whose preferences are aligned with the government's preferences," Hoddinott commented. Making welfare payments conditional could also have the affect of legitimizing the transfer and overcoming any stigma. "Finally, recent work in behavioural economics emphasizes that when households are myopic (they make a decision today that they will regret in future), they are better off under constraints designed to reduce or limit their ability to trade future consumption for present consumption. Conditionality can be seen as such a constraint. The case against CCTs "Conditioning transfers can be perceived as being demeaning to the poor," Hoddinott noted. "Conditioning can be seen as implying that the poor simply do not know what is good for them." Imposing conditions increased administrative costs and made cash transfers more complex, he said, citing studies from Latin America. It would be pointless if imposing the conditions became costlier than the actual benefits. If the conditions imposed costs on the beneficiaries - such as getting to a school that was too far away - then it might also not be considered worthwhile. Some extremely poor households might find the conditions difficult to meet. "If the preferences of the poor do not align with the conditions placed on their behaviour by the government, the restrictions that conditionality imposes on the poor will reduce their total welfare gains, thus decreasing the net benefits of the CCT," Hoddinott said. Imposing conditions could also "create an opportunity for corruption, whereby individuals who are responsible for certifying that conditions have been met could demand payments for doing so." ODI's McCord said many African countries, such as South Africa, ran social protection programmes without imposing conditions, and "I think there needs to be more discussion" of the issue.

MALNUTRITION: AFRICA: Bullish about the agricultural future

LONDON, 23 July 2010 (IRIN) - Suddenly, after 20 years of relative neglect, African agriculture is a hot topic, with a substantial growth in production and a new interest among major donors in funding the sector. That is the message emerging from a series of seminars now taking place in London looking at the constraints and opportunities facing Africa's farmers.The figures being presented are impressive and - according to Steve Wiggins, who leads the agriculture programme at Britain's Overseas Development Institute - confound the pessimists who assume the situation to be much worse than it is."I often hear it said that Africa is running out of food per head," he told the seminar. "Now unless these statistics are complete and utter junk, that just simply isn't true. The index shows 16, 17, 18 percent more food being produced per capita compared to the early 1980s."In particular, he said, two regions - West Africa and North Africa - were surging ahead, although there were signs that production in East Africa too might now be beginning to accelerate."For those of us working on Africa," said Wiggins, "people use Asia as a stick to beat us with. Well, as far as I can see, there are two bits of Africa there which have done every bit as well as Asia has done over the last quarter of a century."Wiggins's fellow speaker at the opening session was Ousman Badiane, the Africa director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington. He put his finger on the mid nineties as the point when Africa really turned a corner.With no other overall change which could account for this recovery, Badiane attributed it to the structural adjustment programmes which so many countries had been persuaded to follow. "I believe it was the result of those strong and messy reform programmes of the 1980s. I remember the pain of it, but it completely changed the environment for agriculture."Challenges, opportunitiesBoth speakers were agreed that the food price spike in 2008 and the world economic crisis pose both challenges and opportunities for African farmers. They worried about a growing protectionism in Asia - a major potential market for African agricultural produce - and about the fact that the speed of Asian development may have closed a window of opportunity for African's own industrialization. Steve Wiggens made the point that "the single biggest stimulus to most farmers is a thriving local city."Above all they worried that the gains of the last 20 years might be reversed. Ousman Badiane referred to a new law passed in Kenya to restore price controls on agricultural produce. "That's where Kenya was 25 years ago," he said. "The danger is that the generation of leaders that went through the pains of those reforms are no longer active. So those leaders today can make the same mistakes as the leaders of 25 years ago."And he added: "It is just for me unimaginable that a farmer stands up every day, produces the food and someone claims that is a common good - "It's OUR rice, it's OUR maize." It's amazing. Nobody goes to the farm with them, but once they produce the product, everybody claims it as their own. That has to change. It's a private product; it belongs to the farmers. And they have to be able to sell it for the price that the market offers."CAADEPOusmane Badiane sees the African Union's CAADEP (Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme) project, in so far as it gives a voice to farmers, as an influence against this kind of reversal of policies. The first two seminars both sparked discussion of CAADEP, which obliges member governments to devote 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture and encourages them to produce a coherent plan to which donors can subscribe.But there was a considerable level of scepticism about CAADEP. One participant, currently working in Malawi, described the frantic rush to produce a programme to put before donors, and said he had seen no evidence of new money becoming available.This was echoed by Christie Peacock, chief executive officer of the NGO Farm Africa. "There's so little vision," she said. "I'm very sceptical about the CAADEP process. It's supposed to be African led, but it's often a very top-down process."She echoed the reservations expressed by several participants, that even if new money was now being offered for agricultural development, both through CAADEP and from the US government's Feed the Future programme, there was no well-thought-out plan about how it should be used. "I think we are visionless at the moment," Peacock said, "and after 20 years of lack of interest, we are in danger of reinventing the wheel all over again."But the keynote speaker at the second seminar, Professor Sir Gordon Conway, author of The Doubly Green Revolution, was more optimistic about funding: "I do think there will be money - about a billion dollars of USAID [US Agency for International Development] money this year, and a billion plus next. Not perhaps the 3.5 billion that has been talked about, but around 2.7 billion will be there.""Twenty years ago there was a view that African didn't need agricultural development, that the private sector would do it all, and among some donor agencies that view is still there. But as a result of the food price crisis we have things like the Feed the Future programme, which looks for countries' own plans. It recognizes that countries are different, asks what they intend to do, and acts accordingly, and I think that's quite a good approach."The African Seminar Series is organized by the Future Agricultures Consortium and the Overseas Development Institute. Further sessions on markets, land issues and agriculture-led development in an urbanizing world will take place between now and the beginning of September.