Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper 36

Governance and Food Securityin an Age of Globalization

Robert L. Paarlberg

International Food Policy Research Institute2033 K Street, NW

Washington, DC 20006–1002 USAFebruary 2002

Copyright © 2002 International Food Policy Research Institute

All rights reserved. Sections of this report may be reproducedwithout the express permission of but with acknowledgment tothe International Food Policy Research Institute.

ISBN 0-89629-642-3

Contents

Tables iv

Foreword v

Acknowledgments vi

1. Introduction 1

2. Dominance of National Governments Despite Globalization 3

3. Public Goods Provision by Government 12

4. Performance of Global Governance Institutions 15

5. Africa’s National Governance Crisis and Food Security 27

6. Strategies to Correct National Public Goods Deficits 38

7. The Role of NGOs in Supplying Missing Public Goods 47

8. Conclusion—Assigning Responsibilities 50

References 52

iii

Tables

1. Institutional alternatives for governance of food and agriculture,by level and sector 4

2. FAO estimates of the incidence and prevalence of chronicmalnutrition in developing countries and countries in transition,1996–98 8

3. Prevalence of child malnutrition in developing countries, byregion, 1975–95 9

4. Incidence of child malnutrition in developing countries, by region,1975–95 9

5. Net private capital flows and foreign direct investment intoselected low- and middle-income regions, 1990 and 1998 10

6. Poor country (GNP per capita less than $1,000) grain importdependence by region, 1973 and 1993 15

7. Consumption of all cereals—wheat, maize, rice, other coursegrains—by IFPRI IMPACT regions, 1971 and 1974 18

8. Global food aid deliveries, cereals in grain equivalent, 1990–99 22

9. Food aid deliveries to Sub-Saharan Africa, cereals in grainequivalent, 1990–99 22

10. Global distribution of good governance 31

iv

Whose responsibility is it to assure food security in an age of globalization? Is improvedgovernance at the international level our greatest need, or are governance deficits mostsevere at the national level? When national governments lag in assuring food security for theirown citizens, can outsiders help make up the resulting governance deficit? What role canbilateral donors and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, play?Is it possible for NGOs to step in to do the job?

These and related pressing questions are addressed in this discussion paper by RobertPaarlberg. He argues that the problems of hunger and food insecurity urgently requirea national, not global focus. Many national governments in developing countries still donot provide essential public goods, such as civil peace, rule of law, transport infrastructure,clean water, electrical power, and public research to generate new agricultural productivity—essential ingredients in the effort to boost incomes. For tackling hunger, the weak per-formance of nation-states remains most critical—and in most critical need of improvement.According to Paarlberg, the governance challenge as far as food security is concernedis to persuade sovereign governments to provide the necessary public goods that wouldensure access to adequate food.

This paper was commissioned for IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative conference, “SustainableFood Security for All by 2020,” held on September 4–6, 2001, in Bonn, Germany. A sum-mary version was presented at the session on “Whose Responsibility Is It To End Hunger?”The presentation sparked a long overdue discussion on who are the key actors in the effortto eliminate hunger, how their role has changed over time, and what their responsibilities arelikely to be in the future. I hope that this paper contributes to continuing this much neededdebate, so that we can work more effectively to assure a food-secure world.

Per Pinstrup-AndersenDirector General, IFPRI

Foreword

v

The views expressed in this discussion paper are entirely my own, yet a number of colleaguesprovided supportive and corrective assistance along the way. Dana G. Dalrymple, DavidOrden, and Nora Ng gave useful reactions to early drafts of the paper. Per Pinstrup-Andersenread a draft and provided extensive comments as well. Raymond Hopkins and MichaelLipton, two formal reviewers suggested by me, offered sometimes sharp but always construc-tive comments and criticisms. I also thank my third formal reviewer from IFPRI, who remainsanonymous to me. Uday Mohan at IFPRI did a prompt and professional job managing theediting and production process. My most important supporter in this effort has been IFPRI’sRajul Pandya-Lorch, who commissioned the paper in the first place, then gave me wise andhelpful substantive reactions all along the way. Working with IFPRI, and especially with Rajul,is always rewarding.

Acknowledgments

vi

Globalization is said to be the “key governancechallenge” for the twenty-first century (Reinicke andDeng 2000, vii). The forces of globalization, whichinclude the spread of international markets forgoods, services, capital, and labor and the emer-gence of new institutions and network organiza-tions that operate easily across borders, are said todiminish the capacity of sovereign nation-states togovern their own affairs. According to a reportcommissioned for heads of government prior to the2000 U.N. Millennium Assembly, “One of the chiefcharacteristics of these globalizing dynamics is thatthey overwhelm the attempts of states to manageglobalization alone or control its effects” (Smith andNaim 2000, 11).

A conclusion sometimes drawn is that gover-nance activities must now be shifted to a level abovethe nation-state, into the jurisdiction of more cosmo-politan or global governance institutions (Held1996). Others argue for a shift in the opposite direc-tion, moving governance downward in the hope that“localization” of politics and policy will keep institu-tions accountable to communities (Hines 2000).

The need to globalize institutions of governancehas become obvious in some policy areas, such asinternational money and finance, climate change,and even public health. Is the same true in the areaof hunger and food security? This discussion paperargues that the greatest governance deficits in thefood security area are still at the national level, notthe global level.

Significant hunger persists in some regionslargely because of governance deficits and failuresat the national, not the global level. Too manynational governments in the developing world failto provide the essential domestic public goods—such as peace, rule of law, public research, andrural transport infrastructure—needed for sustained

growth of farm productivity and rural incomes.Global governance institutions have at times tried tostep in and fill these national governance deficits inthe developing world. But most such attempts haveended in frustration since the traditional norm ofstate sovereignty continues to stand in the way. Thegovernance challenge for food security is not somuch to deliver more public goods at the globallevel, but instead to persuade existing sovereigngovernments to deliver the minimal public goodsneeded at the national level.

This argument for the continued centrality ofnational government goes somewhat against thegrain of recent opinion. Czech President VaclavHavel has forecast that in this new century moststates will evolve into “far simpler, less powerfuladministrative units,” while power will move“upward to regional, transnational and globalorganizations.” Former U.S. Deputy Secretary ofState Strobe Talbott sees the same trend: “All coun-tries are basically social arrangements. [T]hey areall artificial and temporary. Within the next hundredyears nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; allstates will recognize a single global authority.”Leaders of intergovernmental institutions often wel-come and encourage this supposed trend.Speaking to the General Assembly in 2000,Secretary-General Kofi Annan asserted that theinstitutions of the United Nations ought to be viewedas having a direct mandate from the peoples of theearth, rather than a mandate derived from U.N.member governments (Thiessen 2001, 64).

Such hopes and expectations of globalizedgovernance are certainly appropriate and accuratein some policy areas (for example, trade regulation,the battle against HIV/AIDS, open-ocean fisheriesprotection). Yet in the area of hunger and food secu-rity it is the performance of separate sovereign

1. Introduction

1

nation-states that remains most critical—and in mostcritical need of improvement.

This paper emphasizes the continuing centralityof governance at the nation-state level in severalsteps. First, it reviews the dominant role that nationalgovernments still play in most food production,trade, and consumption activities around the world.Global markets and interstate institutions may bespreading and proliferating overall, but in the poor-est countries where large numbers of people are stillhungry, and particularly in the rural regions of thosecountries, international food markets and globalinstitutions still tend to have weak influence relativeto local or national food markets and local ornational food governance institutions.

Second, it offers a concept of adequate gover-nance for food security based on public goods pro-vision and asks which institutions are currentlydoing the job well and which are doing it poorly. Atthe global level a range of international institutionshave now evolved to provide a substantial numberof essential food and agricultural public goods.Public goods delivery at the national level in somedeveloping-country regions has been far less ade-quate, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is notprimarily a global governance deficit that leavesAfrica struggling to improve its food-security per-

formance. Within Africa too many national govern-ments still fail to provide their citizens with essentialnational or local public goods such as civil peace,rule of law, rural roads, clean water, electricalpower, and public research to generate new agri-cultural productivity. Improved governance is need-ed at every level, but these governance failures atthe national level now substantially outweigh gov-ernance failures at the international level.

A final section of this paper looks at some cur-rent options for improving the performance of nation-al governments in countries where hunger remains agrowing problem—again primarily in Africa. Itreviews a number of supporting or gap-filling rolesthat governments from the industrial world or inter-national governance institutions might attempt toplay, and it reviews a range of options available tonongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Yet theconclusion reached is that in regions where hungeris still a serious problem, national governments onthe scene must take the largest responsibility for solv-ing the problem. Our fascination with the rapid paceof globalization and with the rapid evolution of glo-bal governance institutions in other policy areasshould not distract us from the heavy responsibilitiesthat traditional national governments continue tobear in the struggle to end hunger.

2

Traditional nation-state institutions continue to domi-nate in the area of food supply and food security,particularly in poor countries where hunger prob-lems are most acute. This dominance of nation-statesis somewhat surprising, given the proliferation of somany powerful and influential public and privateinstitutions both above and below the national level.

In the public sector, the second half of the twen-tieth century saw a dramatic increase in the num-bers of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)operating above the level of the nation-state. Someof these IGOs are regional (for example, the inter-governmental institutions of the European Union).But a number are genuinely global institutions (forexample, the universal membership institutions ofthe U.N. system). In the private sector, two addi-tional kinds of institutions have proliferated abovethe level of the nation-state: private multinationalcorporations (MNCs) and not-for-profit private inter-national nongovernmental organizations (INGOs).

This emergence of multiple institutions abovethe nation-state dates in the modern era from thelate nineteenth century. It became pronounced afterWorld War II, and grew into a virtual explosion inthe last two decades of the twentieth century. Thenumber of intergovernmental institutions recognizedby the Union of International Associations (UIA) inBrussels nearly tripled during this period, from1,039 in 1981 to 3,019 by 2001 (Yearbook of Inter-national Organizations 1981 and 2000/2001).MNCs have proliferated as well. The number ofmultinational business firms in the world’s 14 richestcountries more than tripled, from 7,000 in 1969 to24,000 in 1994. By 1992 the sales of each of thetop-10 MNCs was more than the gross domesticproduct (GDP) of at least 100 nation-states.

Measured in global terms, in the 1960s and1970s foreign direct investment (FDI) by MNCsincreased at roughly the same rate as world outputand trade, but then between 1985 and 1995, FDIincreased eight times faster than output and morethan twice as fast as trade (Reinicke 1997). In con-sequence, the stock of FDI around the worldincreased over six times, to reach $3.2 trillion. Anumber of developing countries shared in thisgrowth. In the single decade between 1985 and1995 annual inflows of FDI into the developingworld increased from $18 billion to $99.7 billion(Vernon 1998). Private international financial flowsgrew even more rapidly than direct investments.Cross-border equity flows initiated by private firmsincreased by 300 percent in the last five years ofthe twentieth century, growing from $268 billion in1995 to an estimated $1.1 trillion by 2000(Persaud 2001).

INGOs also increased dramatically in number,activity, and visibility as the twentieth centuryended. According to one count, the number ofINGOs worldwide grew from fewer than 10,000 in1978 to more than 40,000 by 1997 (Cusimano2000). Growth in number and activity of INGOswas especially strong in the area of internationaldevelopment. During the 1980s, development assis-tance transferred through INGOs grew twice as fastas official development assistance (ODA) trans-ferred government to government. By the end of the1980s, some 4,000 development NGOs estab-lished in the wealthier countries of the Organisationfor Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) were disbursing billions of dollars a yearfor development, working with 10,000 to 20,000“southern” NGOs in the developing world, thereby

2. Dominance of National GovernmentsDespite Globalization

3

providing assistance to an estimated 100–250 mil-lion individuals (UNDP 1993; Clark 1991).

This late twentieth century increase in the visi-bility and activity of IGOs, MNCs, and INGOs isonly part of the story. Even as these internationalpublic- and private-sector institutions proliferated,other new challenges to nation-state authority aroseas well. Private markets expanded, sometimes atthe expense of state-owned enterprise. Under acombination of political and market pressures,including pressure from IGOs such as the WorldBank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF),state institutions yielded more economic controlwithin their borders to private markets and local pri-vate corporations. Not-for-profit institutions at thenational level also grew stronger and more numer-ous in developing countries. Within a short space oftime, 10,000 national and community-level NGOswere established in Bangladesh, 21,000 in thePhilippines, and 27,000 in Chile. Observers havecalled this a “global associational revolution” whichcould prove “as significant to the late twentieth cen-tury as the rise of the nation-state was to the latenineteenth” (Salamon 1994, 109). At the mostlocal level as well, the traditional institutions of thenation-state seemed increasingly under challenge.Local government authorities have demandedgreater control over public revenue and greaterdecentralization of government regulation. Thesenewly invigorated and diverse local institutionshave proven harder for central state institutions toregulate, and a profusion of grassroots organiza-

tions, including community-based development orsocial service organizations have taken their owninitiatives to balance or correct the perceived fail-ings of the nation-state.

Table 1 maps this expanded institutional ter-rain, locating traditional nation-state institutions atthe center of what is now a wide range of alterna-tive institutions capable of challenging the nation-state for dominance.

This proliferation of institutional alternatives tothe nation-state has visibly weakened the control ofnational authorities in many areas of contemporarypolitical and economic life. Nation-states are findingit harder to act alone when they seek to govern inter-national investment and finance, global environ-mental issues such as climate change, global com-mons issues such as ocean fisheries, and even publichealth issues like HIV/AIDS. Trade, international com-munications, and hard-to-contain cultural industriessuch as entertainment also elude the nation-state’sgrip. Yet traditional nation-state institutions continue todominate in the less globalized policy areas of farm-ing and food security. National political dominanceover farming is conspicuous in the industrial world,where so many producers work under inducementsprovided by lavish national farm subsidy programs.In poor states as well, the food and farm sector tendsto remain under considerable national political con-trol. Even in “weak” developing-world states wherenational governance institutions lack key resources,they still tend to be stronger than any alternative insti-tutions within the food and farm sectors.

4

Table 1—Institutional alternatives for governance of food and agriculture, by leveland sector

For-profit Not-for-profitLevel private sector Public sector private sector

International Multinational corporations Intergovernmental International (MNCs) organizations (IGOs) nongovernmental

organizations (INGOs)

National National corporations National government National nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

Local Local private tradespersons Local authorities Grassroots organizations

Source: Devised by author. For similar classification scheme, see Nye and Donahue 2000.

Industrial Countries

In the affluent industrial world, transnational andsupranational globalization forces are strong, buttraditional national authorities continue to dominatefood and agricultural policy. Food production pat-terns and practices continue to be shaped by na-tional agricultural trade restrictions or by nationalfarm price support and income subsidy policies. Inthe case of the European Union, these traditionalfarm subsidy and protection policies have beenaggregated into a regional policy. Nonetheless, thegovernance institutions of the Common AgriculturalPolicy (CAP) remain dominated by a council ofnational ministers of agriculture, and ultimately deci-sions are made through bargaining among theheads of separate national governments. IGOssuch as the World Trade Organization (WTO), theOECD, and the forum for Asia Pacific EconomicCooperation (APEC) have repeatedly attempted toimpose restraints on farm subsidy and price supportpolicies in industrial states, but politically organizedassociations of farmers within those states haveexercised enough influence to keep the lucrativesubsidy systems in place.

Consider the relatively weak authority of theWTO in industrial country agricultural policy. Theindustrial country governments that have dominatedmultilateral trade negotiations in the WTO have notyet been willing to subject their national farm sup-port policies to any significant international disci-pline. The obligations to reduce farm supports andlimit direct export subsidies that emerged from the1986–93 Uruguay Round of multilateral tradenegotiations were so weak that they forced neitherthe United States nor the European Union to under-take any reforms beyond those already being con-sidered for other reasons (such as budget con-straints). The 1993 Agreement on Agriculture didrequire industrial countries to convert nontariff agri-cultural border protections to tariffs. But even for thistechnical change some important exemptions weremade (Japan and South Korea were permitted forthe moment to avoid tariffication obligations forrice). Moreover, the new tariff bindings were set sohigh that in some cases they implied an increase,not a reduction, in permitted border protection (this

practice came to be called “dirty tariffication”). Atthe insistence of the European Union, nations unwill-ing to allow additional imports were permitted tobundle together sensitive with less sensitive productswhen calculating their compliance with the marketaccess provisions of the Agreement. The most im-portant cash income support payments to farmers inuse at the time in both the United States and theEuropean Union were exempted altogether fromdiscipline, by placing them in a so-called “bluebox.” A number of other subsidy instruments werealso excluded from discipline, because they weresaid to have either minimal market-distorting conse-quences, such as payments decoupled from marketprices and planting decisions, or a public goodsdimension, such as public research programs andpayments supposedly linked to environmental pro-tection (Orden, Paarlberg, and Roe 1999).

The financial resources of national governmentsin rich countries continue to dominate agriculturaldevelopment assistance policy as well, despite thedramatic increase in IGOs, INGOs, and NGOsworking in this area. NGOs emerged into the fieldof international development assistance in the1980s not so much as challengers to donor stategovernments, but as adjuncts. In Norway, forexample, 22 out of 70 INGOs engaged in devel-opment work obtained more than 80 percent oftheir budget from the state, and 39 more were state-dependent for at least 60 percent of their budget(Tvedt 1998). Nation-state tax revenues, not privatevoluntary contributions, are the major source ofINGO funding in many donor countries includingSweden (85 percent), Belgium (80 percent), Italy(77 percent), Canada (70 percent), and the UnitedStates (66 percent) (Smillie and Helmich 1993;Riddell, Bebbington, and Davis 1995). The recentNGO revolution in the area of international devel-opment is therefore not so much a challenge to tra-ditional nation-state dominance as it is an informalinstitutional extension of that dominance.

Developing Countries

Turning to poor countries, here as well food andfarm production systems and development policiestend to be shaped by national government authori-

5

ties. In many cases this large role played by stateinstitutions is a legacy of colonial rule. The public-sector export crop production and trade systems setup by colonizing powers in much of Africa andAsia did not disappear following independence.These national commodity production and market-ing systems, dominated by state-owned corpora-tions and state monopoly marketing boards, in mostinstances, were simply taken over by the newlyindependent national government and run for thepurpose of generating state revenue. At times thesedeveloping-country governments taxed the farm sec-tor so heavily as to impair agricultural productivity.Maurice Schiff and Alberto Valdes calculate thatbetween 1960 and 1984 the net effect of directand indirect state policy interventions in 18 devel-oping countries was an enormous income transferout of the sector, averaging 46 percent of agricul-tural GDP per year (Schiff and Valdes 1992). Thenewly independent governments of the developingworld may indeed have been weak in somerespects, but not in their ability to extract resourcesfrom their own farmers.

The biggest contrast between rich and poorcountries can usually be seen not in the relativestrength of national food and farm policies, butrather in the pro-farmer versus antifarmer bias ofthose policies. In wealthy industrial countries nation-al policy has long tended to subsidize farming thusgenerating surplus production, whereas in poorcountries governments have more often imposedexplicit or implicit taxes on farming, causing a slow-down in productivity growth. It is a perverse ironythat governments in rich industrial countries, wherefarmers are few in number and already productive,tend to support investments in farming more thangovernments in poor agricultural countries wherehunger persists and productivity is lagging.

Scholars studying this different policy bias inrich versus poor countries have been able to link itstatistically to the process of industrial developmentitself. When the comparative advantage of the agri-

cultural sector tends to weaken relative to industry,the “national political marketplace” tends to shiftfrom supporting an urban-biased policy of taxingfarmers and subsidizing consumers toward a rural-biased posture of subsidizing farmers at theexpense of consumers and taxpayers. Where theindustrial sector has become most highly advan-taged relative to agriculture, as in Japan or Europe,nominal rates of agricultural protection (measuredas the internal-to-border price ratio) tends to be veryhigh. Where the farming sector has not lost so muchcomparative advantage (as in Australia or NewZealand) nominal rates of farm protection still tendto be positive in the industrial world, but may actu-ally be quite low.1

These differing biases in national agriculturalpolicy tend to determine not only commodity marketoutcomes (surpluses in rich countries versus laggingproduction in poor countries) but also rural environ-mental outcomes. The threat that agriculture pres-ents to the rural environment can depend onwhether the sector is being taxed or subsidized bythe state. In industrial regions where farmers arewell-organized politically and where national gov-ernments tend to subsidize farming, the resultinginducement to boost crop yields often encouragesexcessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.This is one reason why so many farmers in Europe,North America, and Japan overuse chemicalinputs. The environmental outcome is chemical pol-lution of surface water and groundwater down-stream from farms.

Meanwhile in nonindustrial regions wherenational policies impose heavy taxes on farming, adifferent kind of environmental damage occurs.Rather than applying too much chemicals inresponse to subsidy incentives, heavily taxed farm-ers in most poor countries do not use enough inputsand end up mining soil nutrients, so soil fertilitydeclines. They may also underinvest in drainageand irrigation systems, leading to problems ofwaterlogging and soil salinity. When yields then

6

1 Those who study this industrial transformation model of policy outcomes have used quantified measures of industrial comparativeadvantage within countries to predict 60 to 70 percent of all variation in nominal rates of farm-sector protection across countries(Honma and Hayami 1986).

start to lag the only way to boost production to feeda growing population is to expand irrigated orcropped area. This often leads farmers to plow andirrigate fragile grazing lands, to move onto poorlysuited sloped lands, or to invade forest margins.The results are accelerating desertification, soil andforest destruction, and a rapidly shrinking habitatfor native species (Paarlberg 1994).

Developing-country governments have beenunder pressure to reduce their interventions in thefood and farm sector. Poor countries that borrowfrom international financial institutions such as theIMF and the World Bank have been told to liftnational controls on internal commodity and inputsupply markets, relax restrictions on foreign currencyexchange, privatize state-owned enterprises, andreduce wasteful employment in state bureaucracies(including food and agricultural ministries). Thesepowerful international pressures to weaken the roleof the state over the food and farm sector have beenexercised in part through “structural adjustment”lending programs and policy reform assistanceprojects. Yet many national governments in thedeveloping world have shown a remarkable abilityto resist such pressures.

In 1994 the World Bank completed a compre-hensive study of 29 Sub-Saharan African countriesthat had undergone structural adjustment. The studyrevealed that 17 of the countries did reduce theoverall tax burden on farming. But some—becauseof persistently overvalued exchange rates—actuallyincreased that burden, and only four of the29 countries had eliminated parastatal marketingboards for major export crops. Pressures on gov-ernments to reform macroeconomic policies pro-duced somewhat better results, but this study drewthe telling conclusion that “no country [in Africa]has good macroeconomic policies and good agri-cultural policies” (World Bank 1994, 1–2; 76–88).This finding of incomplete reform was reinforced bythe conclusion of an October 2000 IFPRI FoodPolicy Report on agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa:

The pace and extent of reforms have varied widelyacross countries and crop subsectors. For the mostpart, reforms were not fully implemented. Forexample, many governments liberalized internal

trade but maintained a state monopoly over exter-nal trade. In other instances, although fixed priceswere eliminated, price bands for food crops wereimposed to limit market price fluctuations and pro-tect consumers and producers from the allegedly“exploitative” behavior of private traders. State-owned enterprises remain active in several com-modity subsectors, notably cotton in West Africaand maize in Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.Many countries reversed reforms as a result ofexternal shocks or changing economic conditions(Kherallah et al. 2000, 9).

From the vantage point of the rural poor, the tra-ditional powers of the nation-state remain surpris-ingly dominant in most developing countries. Statepowers continue to be exercised through a broadrange of public-sector institutions: national or paras-tatal marketing boards that monopolize the pur-chase of commodities, national or parastatal seedand fertilizer companies that monopolize the supplyof key inputs, nationally controlled co-ops andnationally managed agricultural credit institutions,national research and extension services, nationalcommodity import or export authorities, nationalirrigation or land-titling agencies, national forestdepartments, centralized service delivery agenciesin areas such as health and education, and nation-ally organized public works projects such as foodfor work and public relief. State power is alsoexercised in rural areas by local representa-tives of national ruling party organizations, bynational taxation and revenue authorities, andof course, by national police and military forces.Even in supposedly weak states, such nationalgovernance institutions tend to dominate in thecountryside. It is often where such national gover-nance institutions most dominate that hunger prob-lems are most severe.

Hunger and NationalDominance

Poorly fed people are found in all regions of theworld. But the greatest concentrations of hungrypeople today are in South Asia and Sub-SaharanAfrica. Not coincidentally, traditional state institu-tions continue to be strong in the food and farm sec-tors of these two regions, particularly relative toglobal institutions.

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South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa stand outas the only two developing-country regions whereboth the incidence and prevalence of human mal-nutrition remain high and where trends towardhunger alleviation remain weak. Table 2 presentsregion-by-region estimates of levels of chronic mal-nutrition in the developing world by the Food andAgriculture Organization of the United Nations(FAO). The figures are based on highly aggregateddata so they conceal some important internal andlocal differences. Yet only in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa do we still find more than 175 mil-lion hungry people, combined with a regionalprevalence of malnutrition above 20 percent.

Table 2 reveals a large number of people stillundernourished in East Asia, as might be expectedgiven the region’s large population and its stillrecent movement away from deep poverty. Yet theclear trend in East Asia is now dramatically awayfrom hunger. Between 1980 and 1997 the per-centage of East Asians experiencing undernourish-ment declined from 29 percent to just 12 percent.The prevalence of hunger also declined in SouthAsia (from 38 percent to 23 percent) and in Sub-Saharan Africa (from 38 percent to 34 percent). Buteven with these declines the prevalence of hungerremains high in both South Asia and Sub-SaharanAfrica (FAO 2000). Moreover, high rates of popu-lation growth in these two regions meant that thetotal number of hungry inhabitants did not decreaseat all between 1980 and 1997.

Persistent hunger in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is again visible in parallel estimates(using different data sources) of child malnutritionby region in the developing world. As of 1995, theprevalence of child malnutrition was higher than30 percent only in South Asia and Sub-SaharanAfrica (Table 3). There was some decline in SouthAsia from an extremely high earlier level, but therewas no decline at all in prevalence of hungeramong children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

When considering the actual incidence of childmalnutrition, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africastand out even more as the two developing-countryregions farthest from solving their hunger problems.Table 4 shows that South Asia has more than twicethe number of malnourished children as East Asia.Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer malnourished becauseless people reside in the region, but in Sub-SaharanAfrica the absolute number of malnourished childrenhas recently been rising rather than falling.

This prevalence of hunger and chronic malnutri-tion in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa cannotbe explained through reference to rapid globaliza-tion or international governance failures because themost powerful forces of contemporary globalizationhave had only modest impacts on the food and farm-ing systems of these two regions. Most South Asianand Sub-Saharan African states have opted to shieldtheir food and farm sectors from the forces of glob-alization. Both are postcolonial regions where gov-ernments remain strongly nationalistic and eager to

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Table 2—FAO estimates of the incidence and prevalence of chronic malnutrition indeveloping countries and countries in transition, 1996–98

Undernourished

Region Number of persons Share of population

(millions) (percent)

South Asia 294 23Sub-Saharan Africa 186 34East Asia 155 12Near East and North Africa 36 10Countries in transition (former USSR, Baltics, East Europe) 26 6Latin America and Caribbean 55 11Total 792 18

Source: FAO (2000, Table 1).

keep external market influences at bay. Nationalinstitutions in these two regions have remainedstrong enough, despite globalization, to resist manyIMF and World Bank demands for market-orientedpolicy reforms. It is not because the forces of global-ization have remained ungoverned in South Asiaand Africa that hunger has persisted; strong nation-al governments in these regions have substantiallyresisted the forces of globalization.

We already noted the power of national gov-ernments in Africa to resist most IMF demands fordurable liberal market reforms. The consequence ofthis resistance has been, for Sub-Saharan Africa, agrowing disconnection from many internationalmarkets, including commodity markets. During thecolonial period African agriculture was deeply inte-grated into the global commodity markets of thatday, but more recently this deep integration hasweakened. Africa’s volume of exported coffee,groundnuts, palm oil, and sugar has actually beenshrinking. It was smaller in 1997 than in 1970.

As with trade, so with international investment.National policy controls over investment in Africa

are so strict that they help keep most private multi-national corporate investors away. After gainingtheir independence in the 1960s, most Africanstates embraced tax, regulatory, and trade policiesthat proved highly discouraging to new private-sector FDI. New foreign investment was also dis-couraged by the failure of some African states topreserve internal peace, enforce private contracts,or invest adequately in power, transport, and com-munications infrastructure. Thus at a time whenMNCs were assuming a larger role in the econ-omies of developing countries in East Asia and LatinAmerica, their role in Africa scarcely grew at all.By 1991–94, when average annual FDI inflowsinto the developing world as a whole had reached$62 billion, total inflows into all of Sub-SaharanAfrica (including South Africa) were still just $447 mil-lion, which was then less than 1 percent of thedeveloping-country total (Cantwell 1997). All ofSub-Saharan Africa was taking in just $447 millionin FDI annually at a time when China—nominallystill a communist country—was taking in $125 mil-lion in FDI every day. Also, the scant MNC invest-ments that did go into Africa almost never went intothe farming sectors of the poorest countries in theregion. Nigeria alone got 44 percent of Africa’s theFDI total in 1991–94, mostly in its energy sector.

In South Asia as well, national governmentalinstitutions and policies have tended to keep theforces of globalization at a distance. In post-independence India, it was national policy forroughly four decades to pursue development essen-tially without foreign MNCs. A labyrinth of nationalpolicies barred foreign investors from some industriesentirely, restricted them elsewhere to minority owner-ship, required extensive reviews and official

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Table 3—Prevalence of child malnutrition in developing countries, by region, 1975–95(percent)

Region 1975 1985 1995

South Asia 67.7 61.1 49.3Sub-Saharan Africa 31.4 29.9 31.1East Asia 33.3 26.5 22.9Near East and North Africa 19.8 15.1 14.6Latin America and the Caribbean 17.0 10.6 9.5

Source: Smith and Haddad (2000).

Table 4—Incidence of child malnutrition indeveloping countries, by region,1975–95 (millions)

Region 1975 1985 1995

South Asia 90.6 100.1 86.0Sub-Saharan Africa 18.5 24.1 31.4East Asia 45.1 42.8 38.2Near East and North Africa 5.2 5.0 6.3Latin America and the Caribbean 8.2 5.7 5.2

Source: Smith and Haddad (2000).

approvals, placed tight controls on their currencytransactions and distribution practices, and restricteduse of foreign brand names. In consequence, aslate as 1988 the total stock of FDI across all sectorsin India was worth only $1.2 billion. Not until 1991,when the government of Prime Minister NarasimhaRao began a number of sweeping investment pol-icy reforms, did India’s national regulatory grip onMNC activities at last begin to weaken.

South Asia’s negligible use of international foodmarkets is another indicator of its weak connectionto the modern forces of globalization. The poorcountries of South Asia are home to 21 percent ofthe world’s population and an even larger share ofthose who are still hungry in the developing world(roughly 38 percent in 1997, according to FAO).Yet these South Asian countries together take in only2 percent of the world’s grain imports. The region’sreluctance to use commercial international grainmarkets reflects a conscious policy choice by nation-al governments to promote “self sufficiency” in foodgrains rather than depend on international trade.

India is again a case in point. India has recent-ly accounted for roughly 10 percent of total worldagricultural production, but less than 1 percent ofworld commodity trade. Some 2.7 million childrendie in India every year, 60 percent of them from dis-eases linked to malnutrition (Sharma 1999), yetnational authorities tightly restrict the movement of

foreign grain into the economy. India does occa-sionally import small quantities of corn, but it strictlycontrols these imports with a tariff rate quota thatplaces a 60 percent duty on above-quota imports.The Government of India recently imposed an80 percent duty on rice to curb the influx of what itcalled “cheap grain.” For wheat, India allowsimports only rarely, to offset specific internal trans-port cost problems (for example, to allow lessexpensive imported wheat to reach coastal flourmills in the southern part of the country). The coun-try also exports very little wheat, despite its occa-sionally large internal surplus stocks.2

Table 5 provides additional evidence of global-ization’s weak impact in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. While net private capital flows intolow- and middle-income nations in Europe, CentralAsia, and Latin America were increasing sevenfold totenfold from an already substantial level during the1990s, and while net flows into East Asia (despite the1997 financial crisis) were more than tripling from analready high level, private flows into Sub-SaharanAfrica and South Asia increased very little from a lowbase. FDI in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa alsoincreased only slightly from very low levels, while pri-vate FDI in Latin America, East Asia, Europe, andCentral Asia was exploding upward.

To summarize, globalization’s impact has beenrelatively weak in the two regions of the world where

10

2 In 2000, when India’s excess wheat stocks reached 27 million tons, efforts were finally made to clear the stocks through export.These were frustrated in part by the presence of a wheat crop disease—”Karnal Bunt” fungus—in some parts of India, which hasput India’s wheat on the import ban list of some 30 countries (APBN 2000).

Table 5—Net private capital flows and foreign direct investment into selected low- andmiddle-income regions, 1990 and 1998 (millions of dollars)

Region Net Private Capital Flows Foreign Direct Investment

1990 1998 1990 1998

Sub-Saharan Africa 1,283 3,452 834 4,364South Asia 2,174 7,581 464 3,659Middle East and North Africa 369 9,223 2,458 5,054Europe and Central Asia 7,649 53,342 1,051 24,350East Asia and Pacific 18,720 67,249 11,135 64,162Latin America and Caribbean 12,412 126,854 8,188 69,323

Source: World Bank (2000, Table 21, 315).

food-security problems remain most conspicuous.Traditional nation-state institutions remain strong inthese regions, particularly relative to global-age insti-tutions such as international markets, MNCs, IGOs,and INGOs. People remain hungry in these regionsnot because the traditional power of sovereign stateshas been undercut by global markets, but more oftenbecause the powers of traditional nation-states havenot yet been properly used.

How should the powers of the nation-state beemployed? Here disagreements abound, but for-

tunately the most important function of government isalso the least controversial: to provide basic publicgoods such as national defense, social peace, ruleof law, macroeconomic stability, public education,public health, a public infrastructure for power, trans-portation, and communication, and research. Theseare all goods that societies need to prosper, andthey are goods that the private sector is ill equippedto provide. Where hunger is worsening today, it isusually because these basic public goods are not be-ing provided by still-dominant nation-state institutions.

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The quality of governance institutions can be ratedin many ways. Here we stress a minimal compo-nent of good governance that enjoys wide accept-ance. We assume that government’s first task isto provide the public goods needed by societiesto remain peaceful and prosperous, goods thatare unlikely to be produced in sufficient quan-tity by private markets alone or by nongovern-mental institutions.

Defining Public GoodsEconomists define public goods as goods with ben-efits that are available to all (they are “nonexclud-able”) and which are not diminished in their avail-ability even when consumed (they are “nonrival” or“nonsubtractable”). World peace is an example of apure public good. It is nonexcludable in the sensethat all can enjoy the consumption of world peaceonce it is achieved; and it is nonsubtractable in thatone person’s enjoyment does not reduce the totalamount remaining for others to enjoy. Another ex-ample of a pure public good is a traffic light. Thesafety that traffic lights offer to drivers and pedestri-ans is available to all who drive or walk on publicstreets and sidewalks, so it is nonexcludable. It isnonsubtractable because the safety offered to oneperson does not diminish that provided to otherscrossing the same street or to drivers at the intersec-tion in question (Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern 1999).

The provision of public goods such as these canbe understood as the first task of government. At thenational level, important public goods would includeadequate national defense, a public infrastructure ofroads, power, and communications, adequate pub-lic schools and public health services, a monetarysystem supplying a common currency of stable value,and a court system able to enforce laws and con-

tracts and protect life and property. Some of thesegoods may be partly price-excludable or partly rival-rous (for example, public schools that charge fees orpublic health services with a limited budget), yet allmust be provided primarily by government.

The nature of these goods is such that they areunlikely to be provided by business firms or privatevoluntary associations. Profit-seeking firms lack theincentive to invest scarce resources in the productionof goods that are nonexcludable, since they cannotearn profits from goods available to nonpaying cus-tomers. While private business firms are generallynot suppliers of public goods, they are nonethelessamong the most demanding consumers of suchgoods. Private companies usually hesitate to locatenew investments in nations where governments failto provide peace, rule of law, or an adequate infra-structure for power, communications, and transport.

Voluntary agencies that do not work for profit(including NGOs) are often motivated to producesome nonexcludable public goods. But seldom willthey have sufficient resources or authority to do soon their own. NGOs do many good things, but theydo not build national power grids and trunk roads,create criminal justice systems (police, courts, pris-ons) to protect life and property, or establish the lab-oratories needed to carry out basic scientific andmedical research. Public governmental institutionshave traditionally held the role of provider of thesemore expensive public goods. Governmental insti-tutions are more likely to have the financial meansto provide such goods within their jurisdictionsbecause of their exclusive sovereign right to raiserevenues through taxation. Governments will alsohave an incentive to spend public revenues for pub-lic goods, because only through the increasingprosperity of their domestic societies (made possiblethrough public goods provision) will their tax base

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3. Public Goods Provision by Government

and hence their own revenue grow in the long run.Theorists of political economy argue that even non-democratic governments thus have an incentive touse revenues to provide public goods, in order tomaximize tax revenues for the state over the longterm (Olson 2000).

Additional Components ofGood GovernanceProvision of essential public goods is, admittedly,only the first task of good government. A moreambitious vision based on an expanded view ofeconomic or social justice would have to includeprovision of some nonpublic (subtractable or exclud-able) goods as well. In the area of food security,one such good might be a supply of cheap foodmade available to the poor through a public food-distribution system. In other cases the pursuit of foodsecurity might even require that private goods (suchas land) be taken from a traditionally privileged cat-egory of citizens, with or without compensation, forredistribution to disadvantaged citizens. In still othercases food security might require governmentaction to reduce racial prejudice or gender inequity.These are important tasks in some cases, and amore complete review of governance would haveto address them. Yet public goods delivery is anessential task in all cases.

The public goods definition used here stopsshort of requiring governments to provide essentialpublic goods through one particular kind of gov-ernmental system, for example, a democratic ratherthan an authoritarian system. There is evidence thatdemocracies are more likely than authoritarian sys-tems to provide essential public goods related tofood security due to their institutionalization ofsocial accountability through regularly scheduledcompetitive elections under the scrutiny of a freepress (Sen 1985). Yet the statistical link betweendemocratization and hunger reduction is simply notstrong enough to focus on this characteristic of gov-ernance alone. Of the several independent vari-ables offered and examined by Smith and Haddadin a multiple linear regression to explain reducedchild malnutrition in developing countries be-tween1970 and 1995, democracy had the weak-

est correlation to hunger reduction. Other underly-ing determinants, such as women’s education, percapita food availability, women’s status relative tomen, improvements in the public health environment(such as access to safe water), and per capitanational income, all emerged as more powerfulexplainers (Smith and Haddad 2000).

We will argue later that promoting the democ-ratization of some political systems in the develop-ing world (in countries with minimal internal ethnicconflict or at a more advanced stage of urbaniza-tion) is both a worthy and realistic objective forfood-security purposes, because a democratic ruleof law is likely to be better for the poor than nonac-countable rule by the strong or corrupt. Nonethe-less, there is little evidence to suggest that democ-ratization by itself can bring economic prosperityto poor countries. According to a 1995 review of20 separate empirical studies, half of the studieshad found no significant relationship betweendemocracy and economic growth. Three did find apositive relationship, and five found a conditionalpositive relationship, but two actually found a neg-ative relationship (Brunetti and Weder 1995). Asubsequent review of 12 additional studies uncov-ered a slightly stronger link between democracyand growth, but only slightly stronger. Of these12 more recent studies, only one found a negativecorrelation between democracy and growth, whileseven found a positive relationship and the remain-ing four showed results that were either inconclusiveor mixed (Goldsmith 2001). In Africa specifically,no studies have found the few emerging democra-cies in the region since the 1990s to be any moreprone than their predecessors to adopt economicreform programs or do better than authoritarianregimes in the region in terms of economic growth,stable prices, or balanced budgets. African democ-racies in the 1990s on the whole did neither betternor worse than nondemocracies (Goldsmith 2001).

The important case of China suggests that it isentirely possible to increase food security withoutmoving all the way to democracy. Beginning in1978 a nondemocratic Chinese regime led by DengXiaoping introduced new market incentives andindividual household land contracts into the nation’sfarming sector, thus giving farm families more secure

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control over their land and labor. At the same time,it made substantial public investments in agriculturalresearch and rural infrastructure, particularly roads.Over the next two decades China’s total grain out-put increased 65 percent, from 305 million tons toannual levels averaging 500 million tons by 1999.The Chinese farmers who participated in this impres-sive feat saw their incomes rise markedly as well.Annual per capita net income for rural people inChina increased from a destitute level of only 134yuan in 1978 to 2,210 yuan ($276) by 1999. Asa result, the absolute number of Chinese people liv-ing in poverty—unable to feed, clothe, or housethemselves adequately—fell from 250 million in1978 to only 34 million by 1999 (Chen 2000). Thissharp decline in absolute numbers of poor peoplewas all the more impressive given China’s continuedoverall population growth. Never before in humanhistory have so many people escaped deep povertyand food insecurity so quickly. China’s leaders werenot providing their citizens with a competitive elec-toral democracy, but they were providing essentialpublic goods such as road and power infrastructuresin rural areas, property security (including householdcontrol over land), access to a system of market-based exchange, and public investment in research.

National Public Goods versusGlobal Public Goods

In many sectors in today’s age of globalization, thegreatest public goods deficits are no longer at thenational level, but rather, at the regional or globallevel (Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern 1999). In finance,trade, communications, transport, public health, mon-etary policy, and environmental protection globaliza-tion has increased the need for common interna-tional regulatory frameworks and mutual assistanceschemes. The struggle has been to design andempower global institutions capable of deliveringthese global public goods. Yet in food supply andfood security, today’s most conspicuous public goodsdeficits are not found at the global level. While thedemand for such public goods at the regional orglobal level has certainly increased in recentdecades, fortunately the supply of these goods hasalso increased. It is at the national level that publicgoods deficits remain most pronounced. In order tomake this point with adequate precision, we must firstexamine at some length the relatively strong per-formance of international institutions in delivering theglobal public goods most important to food securityand hunger reduction in poor countries.

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Global governance institutions for food security andhunger reduction are poorly funded and far from per-fect. Nonetheless, they work well enough to providean impressive range of tangible hunger-reducingglobal benefits. Function by function, the governanceinstitutions currently in place at the international levelhave done a relatively good job of delivering theessential public goods they were designed to pro-vide. Consider three global food-security functions inparticular: the regulation of international commoditymarkets, the international delivery of food aid (includ-ing the provision of famine early warning and faminerelief), and the supply of internationally usable agri-cultural research.

Regulation of InternationalFood and CommodityMarketsToday’s problems of malnutrition and food insecurityin Africa, and elsewhere in the developing world,are not strongly linked to the governance of globalfood markets. International food markets are not anespecially important factor one way or the other.Local commodity markets are far more importantthan international markets in determining the nutri-tional circumstances of the poor. It is generallywealthy countries, not poor countries, that dominateinternational markets for food and animal feed, bothas importers and as exporters. Genuinely poor coun-tries tend to be less prominent exporters into theseinternational markets, and only a few are heavilyreliant as importers. International food marketsdo tend to be heavily used by some upper-middle-income developing countries in the oil-producing regions of the Middle East and by rapidly

industrializing countries in East Asia. Yet these coun-tries are not genuinely poor and their hunger prob-lems are far less severe than those of Sub-SaharanAfrica, South Asia, or even Central America.

If we consider only those developing countriesthat are genuinely poor (defined as those with agross national product (GNP) per capita of $1,000or less in constant 1987 dollars) and measure im-port dependence on world food markets as the ratioof annual cereal imports to annual national produc-tion, Table 6 shows average poor-county regionalimport dependence for 1973 and 1993. These datareveal that dependence on international cereal mar-kets is quite low for most genuinely poor countries. Ithas been extremely low and declining for the gen-uinely poor nations of East and South Asia (thisincludes China, Indonesia, India, and Bangladeshunder the definition of poverty used here).

This poor-country pattern of not relying heavilyon world markets for grain imports goes againstsome of the expectations popularized by respected

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4. Performance of Global Governance Institutions

Table 6—Poor country (GNP per capitaless than $1,000) grain importdependence by region, 1973and 1993 (percent)

Import Dependence

Region 1973 1993

Sub-Saharan Africa 10.0 13.6South Asia 5.5 2.0East Asia and Pacific 5.3 3.8Latin America and Caribbean 17.6 36.5Middle East and North Africa 22.5 8.3All poor countries 6.4 5.2

Source: FAO (1973, 1975, 1985, 1993, and 1995).

analysts several decades ago. In 1977, IFPRI pro-jected that India’s food import dependence wouldincrease rather than decline, and would reach10–12 percent by 1990. IFPRI expected that by1990 Bangladesh’s food import dependencewould be as high as 30–35 percent (IFPRI 1977).We can see in retrospect that these projections wereoff by several orders of magnitude. In the case ofIndia and Bangladesh, analysts two decades agobadly overestimated the willingness of poor-countrygovernments in South Asia to depend on the worldmarket for imports. Nations in this region do haveunsatisfied food needs, yet their restrictive foodimporting policies have kept reliance on world mar-kets to a minimum.

Perhaps restricting imports is an excusable pol-icy in countries where the prevalence of hunger isdeclining, as in South Asia. But it is difficult tounderstand how it could be acceptable in Sub-Saharan Africa. Table 6 shows that among theincreasingly hungry countries of Sub-SaharanAfrica, dependence on the world market for importsremains minimal. Sub-Saharan Africa imports atotal quantity of cereals (combining both commer-cial purchases and food aid) equal to less than15 percent of annual domestic production. Byfocusing only on grains, Table 6 actually overstatesthe import dependency of poor countries in Africa.Taking into account foods other than cereals (suchas tubers and root crops, for example) Africa’sdependence on imports from the world market islower than 15 percent. The World Bank estimatesthat while more than 10 percent of Africa’s totalgrain consumption may have been imported in1988–92, only 6.5 percent of total calorie con-sumption in Africa came from imported grains(Ingco, Mitchell, and McCalla 1996).

Such averaged or aggregated estimates con-ceal significant variations within the region ofcourse. If data from regional grain exporters suchas South Africa and Zimbabwe are excluded, theimport dependence of the rest of Sub-SaharanAfrica is somewhat higher in most years. Yet evenso past expectations regarding Africa’s food importdependence have simply not come to pass. IFPRI in1977 projected much higher import dependencyratios for all of Sub-Saharan Africa, including a

44–46 percent import dependency ratio by 1990for the Sahelian countries in particular.

Only in Latin America and the Caribbean dowe find a grouping of genuinely poor countrieswhere import dependence on international cerealmarkets has been relatively high, and climbing. Thegenuinely poor countries in this region—Bolivia,Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala,Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru—imported 4.6 million tons of cereals in 1993, whileproducing only 8.0 million tons at home, givingthem an import dependence ratio of 36.5 percent,well above the 17.6 percent ratio seen in 1973.These poor western hemisphere nations, rather thanthe poor nations of Africa, appear to have thelargest interest in good governance of internationalgrain markets, yet these are all relatively smallnations with relatively small populations currentlyexperiencing food deprivation. Together, these poorwestern hemisphere countries contain only 1.3 per-cent of the world’s citizens, and they take only 2 per-cent of world cereal imports. So even if their importneeds were suddenly to double or triple, the worldmarket would be able to accommodate the increase.

Apart from the limited dependence of poorcountries on global food markets, we must ask howwell managed those markets are. Advocates ofimproved global governance might argue thatdependence on world markets for imports is lowamong poor countries today precisely because ofthose markets’ substandard performance. Perhaps ifworld food markets were better managed and moredependable, poor countries would be willing todepend more upon them. While there is certainlyroom for improvement, from the vantage point ofimporters international food and commodity marketshave in fact performed quite well, often much betterthan internal food markets in most poor countries.

One way to judge the performance of inter-national food markets from the vantage point of poor-country importers is to look at the changingpurchase price of basic staple grains in those mar-kets. Over the long term, these prices have fallensignificantly. Adjusted for inflation, the price ofwheat and corn available for export from theUnited States fell by 63 percent between 1910 and1988. The price of wheat available for export fell

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by 67 percent over this same period (Johnson1991). Because ocean transport costs declined aswell over these decades, the final import price forpoor countries fell even more in real terms.

Economic models suggest that the import priceof cereals on the world market will remain low evenif some large developing countries should abandontheir current practice of avoiding use of those mar-kets. For example, if personal incomes in India wereto grow rapidly, causing meat consumption there todouble by 2020 over the currently projected level,and if India, in consequence, began importingmuch more meat and 26 million tons of cereals by2020 (for livestock feed) rather than the currentlyprojected 6 million tons, the impact on world cere-al prices would still be quite small. World maizeprices might increase by 5 percent rather thandecline by 1 percent, and wheat prices mightdecline by 3 percent rather than decline by 8 per-cent (Rosegrant et al. 2001).

It could be argued that the low price of cerealson the world market is partly a consequence of sub-sidized food production in rich countries and thatit indirectly weakens food security by allowinggovernments in poor countries to skimp on agricul-tural investments and instead rely on imports fromabroad. This would be a stronger argument if thepoor countries in South Asia and Africa—those withthe most acute food-security problems today—hadin fact allowed themselves to become significantlyreliant on food imports. But as noted above, mostof these very poor countries have decided not torely on imports, in hopes of being able to claim“national self-sufficiency” in basic food supplies.

The price of food on the world market has beenlow and declining overall, yet importers do sufferfrom occasional price spikes. One example was therelatively sudden increase in international wheatprices between 1994 and 1996, from an average$157 per ton in the 1994/95 season to a momen-tary high of $271 per ton in early May 1996.These price spikes have sometimes been caused bymalfunctions from well beyond the food and farmsector, such as inflationary or deflationary macro-economic policies or adverse trends in internationalfinancial confidence. Yet sometimes world marketprice spikes do reflect the poor governance of inter-

national food markets. One reason for the priceincrease between 1994 and 1996 was a destabi-lizing policy switch within the European Union awayfrom subsidizing exports toward imposing dutieson exports as international markets tightened. Asnoted, the disciplines of the WTO have yet beeninsufficient to block all such market-destabilizing richcountry policies. Such flaws not-withstanding, inter-national markets provide important and mostly de-pendable options to importers, and when prices goup suddenly it usually does not take long for an off-setting global production response to follow. The1996 price spike in international wheat markets trig-gered so much added global production that by1998 the export price of wheat on the world markethad fallen back down to below the 1994/95 level.

There are reasons to believe that price stabilityin world food markets will in any case improve inthe years ahead, as the volume of food traded onthose markets continues to grow (international cerealmarkets today are already 50 percent larger thanthey were in the 1970s) and as the agricultural poli-cies of the nations that dominate those marketscontinue to move gradually away from the use ofdestabilizing illiberal practices. The industrial coun-tries in Europe, North America, and the Far Eastthat have long been the shapers of world food mar-kets continue to subsidize their own farmers heavily.Yet they have now taken at least some steps torestrict the use of highly trade-destabilizing policyinstruments, such as nontariff import restrictions andexport subsidies. The international Agreement onAgriculture that emerged from the Uruguay Roundnegotiations is designed to add further stability tointernational prices by converting nontariff barriersto tariffs, and also by reducing permitted export sub-sidy use. Under the Agreement, permitted budgetexpenditures for export subsidies were reduced by36 percent and the permitted volume of subsidizedexports was reduced by 21 percent over a 10-yearperiod (Dixit 1996). These disciplines are relativelyweak, as noted earlier, but they do move thegovernance of international food markets in theright direction.

International grain market price fluctuationsreceive considerable attention, and they are an im-portant issue for the heaviest users of international

17

grain markets (mostly the nonpoor). But these pricefluctuations have never been the main source of foodinsecurity among genuinely poor developing coun-tries. This can be said even for the so-called “worldfood crisis” period of the 1970s, when worldmarket conditions were badly disrupted and thenwidely blamed for a perceived increase in hunger.At that time when the price of internationally tradedfood rose sharply, it was simply assumed that hungerin poor countries probably would increase. Yet therewas never much evidence to support this conclusion,and in most cases it was an erroneous inference todraw. Most genuinely poor countries relied so littleon the international market, or their internal marketswere so segmented by policy from the world market,that their own domestic food prices moved up muchless than the world market prices. Also, while inter-national food prices did rise on this occasion, theprincipal reason was not a global food productionfailure. High-income growth around the world, dueto easy credit and inflationary macroeconomic poli-cies, had driven the price increases, and these weremacroeconomic circumstances under which mostpeople actually found themselves better fed.

Between 1971 and 1974 the real export priceof U.S. wheat increased by 103 percent and thereal export price of U.S. maize by 58 percent.World food reserves simultaneously declined from71 days worth of grain consumption to just 33 days(Johnson 1991; Hopkins and Puchala 1978, 7).Many analysts assumed that under these tightenedworld market conditions only the rich would be ableto sustain their accustomed consumption levels. Infact, it was the rich who cut back most during thiscrisis, by reducing their per capita meat consump-tion. Per capita food consumption in most genuine-ly poor countries did not decline. FAO estimates of1971–74 per capita grain consumption levels bycountry and region (Table 7) show no overall pat-tern of decline. While per capita consumption diddecline slightly in some nations or regions, else-where in the developing world per capita cerealconsumption either remained steady or actuallyrose while the “food crisis” was at its worst.

Consumption adjustments were small in poorcountries in part because the world market workedwell enough to trigger large adjustments in rich

countries. In 1973–74 when grain prices rose, thefeeding of grain to livestock declined in the UnitedStates by 37 million tons, or approximately 25 per-cent. Canada and Australia also cut feed use inresponse to high prices. Use of feed grains declinedso much in key exporting states in 1973–75 that itwas possible at the height of this so-called worldfood crisis for the rest of the world to continueincreasing grain consumption, not only by peoplebut also by animals (Johnson 1991). Reduced feeduse of grains in wealthy exporting countries did notresult in food insecurity among the wealthy, ofcourse; it led to higher meat prices and reducedconsumption of red meat, which was on balance anutritional benefit.

The later increase in world cereal export pricesin 1995–96 also failed to produce any noticeabledecline in per capita consumption in genuinelypoor countries. Between 1994/95 and 1995/96U.S. wheat export prices increased from $157 perton to $216 per ton, and world cereal stocks

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Table 7—Consumption of all cereals—wheat,maize, rice, other coarse grains—by IFPRI IMPACT regions, 1971 and1974 (kilograms per capita)

Region/Country 1971 1974

Latin America Mexico 167 168Brazil 96 102Argentina 131 127Colombia 76 81Other Latin America 108 107

Africa Nigeria 64 61Central and West Africa 66 65Southern Africa 115 117East Africa 70 78Egypt 165 174

Asia West Asia/North Africa 155 167India 130 126Pakistan 115 125Other South Asia 96 99Indonesia 125 135Malaysia 157 160The Philippines 114 119Myanmar 176 175Other Southeast Asia 161 168

Source: FAO (2001) compiled into regions used for IFPRI'sIMPACT model.

as a percentage of world consumption fell from17.8 percent to just 14.1 percent, generating talkof another world food crisis. Yet the imports of mostdeveloping countries were sustained and averageper capita food use of cereals in developing coun-tries overall continued to increase. Average annualper capita cereal consumption in the developingworld as a whole actually increased from 170 kilo-grams in 1994/95 to 171 kilograms in 1995/96,and then to 172 kilograms in 1996/97, despitemuch higher world grain prices (FAO 1998).

In many poor countries food consumption cir-cumstances were actually better in the mid-1970sand then again in the mid-1990s when grainexport prices were high, than in the mid-1980swhen grain export prices were low. Over the “foodcrisis” decade of the 1970s, the share of the popu-lation that was chronically malnourished signifi-cantly dropped in Latin America from 19 to 13 per-cent, in the Near East from 22 to 12 percent, andin Sub-Saharan Africa it remained steady (at rough-ly one-third) despite exceptionally rapid populationgrowth in that region (USDA 1995, 46).

During the 1980s, in contrast, when worldgrain markets were slack, export prices low, andworld stocks abundant, food consumption circum-stances in many poor countries actually worsened.In Africa overall, rates of dietary improvement fellby two-thirds during the 1980s compared to the1970s, and FAO estimated that the number ofchronically undernourished people in Latin Americaand the Caribbean grew from 46 million around1980 to over 60 million by the early 1990s, reach-ing roughly 14 percent of the population(Alexandratos 1995; FAO 1991). The 1980s weremarked by low international grain prices (describedas a world food glut at the time). Yet this decadewas one of severe food crisis within both Africa andLatin America due to the onset of a world recession.High interest rates after 1980 and lower worlddemand brought reduced income and export earn-ings to these developing regions, unserviceableexternal debts, and almost no income growth. ForLatin America and the Caribbean, real GDP growthrates fell from a 1970s annual average of 5.7 per-cent to just 1.2 percent in the 1980s. For Sub-Saharan Africa, real GDP growth fell from a 1970s

annual average of 3.4 percent to a 1980s annualaverage of just 1.8 percent (Grindle 1996, 20).Under these circumstances hunger increased,despite the abundance of grain on the world mar-ket (Paarlberg 2000).

Fluctuating world food market conditions aretherefore not by themselves a reliable indicator offood insecurity or hunger in most poor countries.Internationalists have repeatedly sought to improveworld food security by imposing tighter regulationson price movements in international markets or bycreating grain reserves and compensatory financemechanisms to assist importers. But the evidencesuggests that little would be gained by adding suchsupplementary governance features to world foodmarkets. International markets for other kinds ofgoods, such as currency exchange and finance, areclearly in need of improved global governance. Thefree international flow of capital promoted in the1990s by institutions like the IMF has at timesimposed needlessly harsh adjustment burdens onthe poor, leading in East Asia after 1997 to a tem-porary increase in hunger. Yet by comparison, inter-national food and commodity markets have operat-ed remarkably well. The poor countries in thedeveloping world that have been willing to usethese markets, rather than impose arbitrary anti-trade restrictions in the name of self-sufficiency,have found them to be an affordable and mostlyreliable supplementary source of food supplies.

Yet developing countries with food-security prob-lems require more than well-functioning internationalmarkets for the import of food. They also need effec-tive international markets for their own farm com-modity exports, and here the international marketdoes less well in providing for the needs of poorcountries. Especially for developing countries able toexport value-added products in competition withindustrial country farmers, the international market-place remains marred by serious protection. Indus-trial countries have at times been able, despite WTOrules, to impose restrictions on commodity imports,reducing export earnings for the developing worldand harming the income prospects of poor farmers.

For example, in 1998 the European Unionestablished a new regulation limiting the amount ofaflatoxins in imported food. This new regulation set

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an aflatoxin standard tighter than that suggested byseveral international food safety governance bod-ies, including the Codex Alimentarius Commissionin Rome, FAO, and the World Health Organization.Moreover, the health benefits that E.U. citizens cangain from this higher standard are likely to be triv-ial. The World Bank estimates that the differencebetween the new E.U. standard and the Codexstandard may help Europe to avoid only 1.4 deathsper year for every one billion consumers. Yet itcould reduce cereal, dried fruit, and nut exports toEurope from nine African countries (Chad, Egypt,Gambia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa,Sudan, and Zimbabwe) by 64 percent, costingthese exporters $700 million each year (Otsuki,Wilson, and Sewadeh 2000).

Such restrictive measures by importers are seri-ous market malfunctions. Still, evidence suggeststhey are not the chief reason why most commodityproducers in Africa have lost export sales. Africa’sagricultural exports have dwindled not so muchbecause of import protection by rich countries asdue to prejudicial sectoral and macroeconomicpolicies imposed by African governments at home.Between 1962–64 and 1991–93, Sub-SaharanAfrica’s share of various agricultural commodityexports (such as vegetable oils, palm oil, palm nutsand kernels, and groundnuts) dropped 47–80 per-centage points below earlier levels. Between 1955and 1990 Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of globalexports of all products fell from 3.1 percent to just1.2 percent, implying substantial annual trade loss-es. Yet the World Bank determined that this disap-pointing export performance could not beexplained by industrialized country import policies.African exporters have tended to face lower aver-age tariffs than other exporters. Nontariff protectionagainst African exports is also generally less restric-tive than that facing other developing countries. Theoverall external environment for exports facingAfrica today (tariff and nontariff) is actually morefavorable than that which today’s more wealthyEast Asian economies previously faced and over-came (Yeats, Amjadi, and Reincke 1996).

Africa’s damaging marginalization in worldcommodity trade more nearly reflects impedimentswithin the region itself to efficient commodity pro-

duction and export. Africa’s shrinking share ofworld trade is most accurately described by JeffreySachs as a “self-imposed economic exile” (Sachs1996). Most African states have not actively pur-sued a trade-linked growth strategy. Trade policiesin most other regions have moved slowly towardgreater liberalization within the WTO, but duringthe recent Uruguay Round of trade negotiationsthe African continent mostly sought exemptionsfrom trade-liberalizing obligations (Hertel, Masters,and Elbehri 1998).

Governance deficits at the international levelare thus not the principal reason why some poorcountries are failing to make gains from inter-national commodity markets. These markets offerimporters, in particular, an abundant supply of foodcommodities at prices low and stable enough tomake the risks associated with dependence on com-mercial imports acceptable. Some poor and food-insecure countries remain reluctant to engage incommercial imports but the markets are nonethelessavailable as a valuable global public good forthose that opt to use them.

International Food Aid

The availability of sufficient international food assis-tance might be viewed as a second important inter-national public good. Arranging adequate foodimports on commercial terms can be difficult for poorcountries with large external debts and lagging for-eign exchange earnings. The poor citizens of suchcountries, particularly those living in urban areas,may require a well functioning global concessionalfood assistance system to supplement commercialfood markets. Concessional food aid since the late1980s has in fact provided more than 40 percent oftotal cereal imports for over 40 recipient countries,mostly in Africa (FAO 1996). Fortunately, food aidis another area where existing global governanceinstitutions have generally performed well.

The international food assistance system is stilldominated by national governmental institutions atboth the donor and the recipient end. Virtually allinternational food assistance is financed by indus-trial world governments. NGOs do play a visiblerole in channeling food aid, but 97 percent of the

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food they deliver is financed either by the UnitedStates, the European Commission, or by other indi-vidual national governments in Europe, Canada, orJapan. Only 3 percent of food aid delivered byINGOs is actually financed by the INGOs them-selves (WFP 2001a). Governmental donors coordi-nate their efforts through a variety of internationalgovernance institutions, particularly the internationalFood Aid Convention (also called the LondonConvention). This Convention is a legal internationalagreement that lays down minimum annual foodaid commitments, donor by donor, either in terms oftotal tonnage or market value. The 1999 version ofthe Food Aid Convention set an aggregate mini-mum annual commitment from donors of 4.895 mil-lion tons of food assistance, plus a total value com-mitment of €130 million. Commodities consideredeligible for these commitments include grain, pulses,edible oil, root crops, skimmed milk powder, sugar,and seed for eligible commodities. The UnitedStates and the European Union dominate as foodaid donors. Since 1995 these two have coordinat-ed their actions separately under a food-securitycoordination program, as part of the U.S.–E.U. Transatlantic Agenda consultation process(Christensen 1999).

Food assistance is delivered through a widevariety of channels, but again national govern-mental institutions tend to dominate. More than half(55 percent) of all global food aid moves directlyfrom donor institutions to recipient governments.Another 29 percent moves through multilateralpublic-sector channels (almost entirely through theWorld Food Programme), and 16 percent is chan-neled through INGOs. Some food aid channeledinternationally via multilateral public-sector agen-cies such as the World Food Programme is sub-sequently distributed by INGOs or NGOs withinrecipient nations.

Food assistance is delivered to recipient nationsin three general forms: as emergency relief, as proj-ect assistance designed to improve nutrition andsupport development (project aid), or through acontinuing government-to-government commoditytransfer program (program food aid). In 1999,32 percent of all global food aid deliveries were foremergency relief (almost half of that went to Asia,

in particular North Korea), 17 percent were projectfood aid deliveries (40 percent of which went toSub-Saharan Africa), and 51 percent were pro-gram food aid deliveries, where Russia was themain recipient.

The adequacy of this global food aid deliverysystem was twice briefly called into question in themid-1990s: following completion of the 1994Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture in theWTO and following the 1996 enactment of newagricultural legislation in the United States. The1994 Uruguay Round Agreement raised concernamong some developing-country officials thatreduced domestic support to farmers in exportingcountries could result in lower surplus stocks,increased international price variability, andreduced incentives on the part of exporters to pro-vide food aid (Ballenger and Mabbs-Zeno 1992).These anxieties were aggravated when the U.S.Congress in 1996 enacted a new farm lawdesigned to support agriculture with cash paymentsto grain farmers—payments substantially decou-pled from traditional production incentives (Orden,Paarlberg, and Roe 1999). Roughly half of all inter-national cereal food aid traditionally came from theUnited States, so this policy move away from strongdirect production incentives to farmers suggestedthat a traditional foundation of food aid—surplusproduction in wealthy countries—might be eroding.

From today’s vantage point, these concernsappear to have been exaggerated. The UruguayRound Agreement on Agriculture actually took greatcare to protect the functioning of international foodaid systems. First it restated donor countries’ obli-gations to set their commitment levels to the FoodAid Convention high enough to meet the reason-able needs of developing countries during the tradeliberalization process. Second, it exempted foodaid shipments from the tightened restrictions onexport subsidies imposed by the Agreement. Evenprogram food aid shipments arranged throughlong-term credit agreements, such as the substantialU.S. grain exports funded under Title I of Public Law480, were exempt from any new restriction underthe Agreement (Christensen 1999). In the case ofthe new 1996 U.S. farm law, while it did promiseto contain the size of publicly held food stocks, in

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some other respects the new law was actually goodfor international food abundance because itincreased commercial production potential in theUnited States by eliminating the authority of the U.S.Department of Agriculture to impose annualacreage reduction requirements (called ARPs) onfarmers receiving income support payments.

Since the mid-1990s food aid shipments havein fact been sustained above World FoodProgramme minimums, despite the new WTOagreement and despite the new U.S. farm bill.World Food Programme data show that interna-tional food aid deliveries did dip briefly in1996–97, at a time when momentarily higherworld grain prices discouraged large donor contri-butions. But total donor contributions never fellbelow the annual minimum of 5.4 million tons ofcereals then prevailing under the Food Aid Con-vention. By 1998–99, as world grain prices fell,donor contributions climbed once again. Table 8shows the total tonnage of global food aid deliv-ered over 1990–99.

Recent trends in Sub-Saharan Africa specificallyprovide additional reassurance that the international

food aid system can continue to provide adequateconcessional flows. Program food aid to Africangovernments has generally declined over the pastdecade, but project food aid for nutrition and devel-opment purposes has substantially increased, andemergency relief has been able to increase whennecessary, as it did following the severe southernAfrican drought of 1991–92. Table 9 shows recenttrends in food aid deliveries to Sub-Saharan Africa.

The availability of international food aid foremergency relief has played a significant role incontaining some kinds of hunger, particularly inAfrica. Emergency food aid is not always able tocontain famine in Africa, but when failures occurthe international governance of food aid is usuallynot the problem. Ethiopia’s difficult experiencehelps put such issues in perspective. Food aidarrived too late in Ethiopia to prevent famine in1984. Most PL-480 shipments from the UnitedStates arrived in 1985 and 1986, and by then theworst of the famine had passed and a recovery oflocal production was already under way (Barrett2001). Yet in this case the tardy arrival of the foodaid could be blamed mostly on reluctance by the

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Table 8—Global food aid deliveries, cereals in grain equivalent, 1990–99 (million tons)

Contribution 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Relief 2.0 3.4 5.0 4.2 4.5 3.5 2.7 3.3 3.0 4.7Program 8.4 6.9 7.7 10.6 5.7 4.3 2.9 1.8 2.7 7.4Project 2.7 2.5 2.6 2.5 2.7 2.3 1.7 2.3 2.6 2.4Total 13.1 12.8 15.3 17.3 12.9 10.1 7.3 7.4 8.3 14.5

Source: WFP (2000).Note: 1999 data are provisional.

Table 9—Food aid deliveries to Sub-Saharan Africa, cereals in grain equivalent, 1990–99(million tons)

Contribution 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Relief 1.5 2.4 3.7 3.0 3.0 2.0 1.6 1.3 1.6 1.6Program 0.9 1.0 1.9 1.2 0.8 0.7 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.3Project 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.4 0.6 0.7 1.0Total 2.9 4.0 6.2 4.9 4.5 3.3 2.5 2.4 2.9 2.9

Source: WFP (2000). Note: 1999 data are provisional.

Ethiopian government, earlier in 1984, to allowany international reporting of the severity of itsgrowing internal food crisis. In 1999–2000, inter-national food aid shipments again arrived too latein Ethiopia to prevent famine deaths amid a dam-aging drought. Significant international humanitar-ian intervention began only in April 2000, bywhich time more than 70,000 people had alreadydied. Yet World Food Programme officials point outthat while some lives were lost before April, manymore lives were subsequently saved by food aid.The World Food Programme eventually providedfood to 2.5 million people in Ethiopia’s Somaliregion. Had there not been civil unrest in thisregion, even more could have been reached.

When recipient governments are prepared tocooperate and when there is no violent internalconflict underway to obstruct an international reliefeffort, the international food aid system is usuallyable to provide timely assistance. One recentlydeveloped international governance instrument thathas helped speed food aid relief has been the WorldFood Programme’s $20 million Immediate ResponseAccount (IRA) system. Since 1993, this fundingmechanism has given program officials working indeveloping countries the option to launch food aidoperations immediately, on their own initiative, atfunding levels up to $200,000 each. In 2000, coun-try directors used this authority 11 times in countriessuch as Nicaragua, Zambia, Mozambique, andViet Nam. IRA funds were also used to initiatelarger emergency food assistance operations inEritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya (WFP 2001b).

Improved international famine early warningsystems have become another important featurestrengthening international food aid governance.These systems use a combination of market-priceand meteorological data monitoring, plus increas-ingly sophisticated remote sensing satellite informa-tion, to plan and mobilize responses to food emer-gencies before they become acute. To illustrate thepotential of these systems, consider the effective inter-national response when widespread drought hitsouthern Africa in 1991–92. The drought cut aggre-gate cereal production in the region by more than50 percent on average; and in Malawi, Namibia,Swaziland, and Zimbabwe cereal production actu-

ally fell by 60–70 percent. Because of alreadydepleted maize stocks in the region, the drought put17–20 million people at risk of starvation. Yetfamine deaths were reported only in Mozambique,where relief was politically and logistically impossi-ble because a civil war was still under way.Starvation was avoided in the rest of the regionbecause per capita food aid increased quickly anddramatically, from an average of less than 10 kilo-grams per person in the 1980s to a peak of morethan 25 kilograms per person in 1992 (Pinstrup-Andersen, Pandya-Lorch, and Babu 1997).

Improved international early warning systemsplayed a key role in facilitating timely delivery of thisassistance. In December 1991, famine early warn-ing systems supported by FAO picked up the devel-oping drought, and by the end of February 1992the systems confirmed the situation was critical. InMarch and April, FAO and the World FoodProgramme sent joint crop and food-supply assess-ment missions to the region, to judge food importand food aid needs for the coming year and to com-plete a comprehensive logistics assessment, includ-ing a review of port capacities in South Africa.FAO/World Food Programme coordination withnational governments was accomplished through aregional institution, the Southern African Develop-ment Community (SADC). To ensure adequate finan-cial and commodity support from the internationaldonor community, FAO’s Global Information andEarly Warning System (GIEWS) issued a specialalert in April 1992, which was followed up by ajoint U.N.–SADC consolidated appeal for assis-tance. Donor response to this appeal was gratifying,as pledges received covered 82 percent of all tar-geted food aid requests and 89 percent of all pro-gramme food aid requests.

To move the assistance, SADC formed six differ-ent “corridor groups” to handle port, rail, and roadtransport through the region. Contributions to trans-port and logistics were roughly twice the amountrequested by SADC and came from a wide variety ofdonors including numerous NGOs and other con-cerned institutions that participated actively and effec-tively in the various relief activities (FAO 1996,Volume 3, 42–45). Donors then worked through theWorld Food Programme to create a logistic advisory

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center to collect and share information related topotential port and transport bottlenecks. Both FAO’sGIEWS and the U.S. bilateral Famine Early WarningSystem Network (FEWS-Net) developed and madeuse of extensive networks of on-the-ground informantsto gather and then disseminate information. The inter-national response in southern Africa was a remark-able achievement in providing the global publicgood of famine early warning and prevention.3

International food assistance efforts have beenfar less successful in cases where recipient govern-ments either deny information (as did Ethiopia in1984) or block international access (as with theNorth Korean famine after 1995) or where violentinternal conflicts prevent relief from reaching theindividuals in need. Violent conflicts are not only aleading cause of short-term food emergencies inmuch of the developing world, they are also a lead-ing barrier to effective international relief. The tem-porary interruption of World Food Programme over-land relief to vulnerable populations in Afghanistanfollowing the onset of a U.S. bombing campaign inOctober 2001 is the most recent case in point, buta number of African examples are also illustrative:

• Widespread drought in eastern and westernSub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1980s led tofailed harvests for three consecutive years in anumber of countries, threatening the survival ofvulnerable populations. More than 35 millionpeople were directly affected, and some 10 mil-lion eventually left their homes in search of foodand water. Yet in the affected countries wherepeaceful conditions prevailed, internationalfood relief was provided with gratifying success(Deng and Minear 1992). As Jean Dreze laterobserved, “Though drought threatened a largenumber of African countries at that time, onlysome of them—notably war-torn ones—actuallyexperienced large-scale famine” (Dreze 1995).

• When northern Sudan faced a severe droughtin the mid-1980s, it managed to avoid wide-spread starvation thanks in part to the accept-ance and distribution of $1 billion in externalassistance. Yet when violent civil conflict laterescalated in southern Sudan, relief could not bedelivered to areas still being affected bydrought so hundreds of thousands starvedbetween 1986 and 1988. By 1988 roughlyhalf of the population in southern Sudan hadbeen displaced by fighting, and famine deathsin that year alone reached 250,000. A newinternational relief effort (Operation LifelineSudan) was mounted in response to this conflict-linked emergency. But it was far less successfulthan the earlier international drought reliefeffort in the north, due in part to armed attackson food shipments by the warring parties (Dengand Minear 1992).

• Somalia, Ethiopia, and northern Kenya were alldevastated by the same widespread droughtbeginning in late 1991. Yet in the latter twocountries there were few deaths because inter-national relief efforts were able to get food tothose at risk. In Somalia, however, food reliefshipments were blocked by armed subclan mili-tia groups engaged in a struggle for politicalcontrol, leading to significant starvation.Minimum food security was temporarily restoredin Somalia only after U.S. military interventionlate in 1992 afforded protection to internationalfood relief shipments (Natsios 1996).International food assistance can thus be

viewed as an area where coordination and gover-nance mechanisms at the international level arequite advanced. The global governance achieved iscertainly far from perfect. Food aid availability isstill too closely tied to donor country agricultural sur-pluses, implying that too much is sometimes given

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3 Africa’s food problems are sometimes blamed on the region’s weak capacity for regional cooperation. Yet for food aid, compe-tent regional governance institutions are already in place. In the eastern part of Africa and in the horn of Africa, food aid can nowbe coordinated either through a fifteen-country regional institution—the Greater Horn of Africa Initiative (GHAI)—managed byUSAID, or through the seven-state regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), consisting of Djibouti, Eritrea,Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda (Christensen 1999).

when it is least needed, depressing incomes offarmers in recipient countries. Donors should pur-chase more of their food aid supplies from farmersin the developing world (“triangular” food aid),thereby giving income to the producers in greatestneed. Nonetheless, these flaws have not preventedthe current international food aid system from offer-ing substantial benefits to poor countries, particu-larly in times of famine emergency. The current foodaid system works surprisingly well, as long as localgovernance problems within individual recipientcountries do not get in the way.

International AgriculturalResearch

Agricultural research is another area in which thegovernance deficits of concern to poor countriesare less pronounced at the international level thanat the national level. At the international level, anexpanded and highly capable Consultative Groupon International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)has been operating for several decades now to pro-vide the global public good of research avail-able for use by farmers in poor countries. Unfor-tunately the national agricultural research systems(NARS) of many poor countries are simultaneouslydeteriorating in terms of budget resources anduseful research outputs.

The emergence of the CGIAR is further testimonyto the capacity of international public institutions toprovide some important global public goods. Whenthe CGIAR was officially formed in 1971, it broughttogether under World Bank leadership four interna-tional agricultural research centers that had originallybeen established by the Ford and Rockefeller foun-dations. Today it has evolved into a 16-center systemthat carries out technical and policy research relatingprimarily to production of the major food commodi-ties consumed by the world’s poor people, but nowwith an eye toward protecting rural natural resourcesand biological diversity as well. International coordi-nation for these 16 centers is provided through theWorld Bank by the CGIAR Secretariat, a chairper-son, and the FAO-staffed Technical Advisory Commit-tee (TAC). This coordination system is loosely knit anddecentralized. The CGIAR as a whole has no consti-

tution and no by-laws and it reaches decisions byconsensus. Individual centers are autonomous organ-izations with independent legal status and finances.Their research programs are separately directed byeach center’s board and management (Andersonand Dalrymple 1999).

The research mission of the CGIAR is preciselyand explicitly to create global public goods. Thecenters focus on problems that cut across nationalborders or which lend themselves to internationalsolutions. Of the 16 international centers, 13 arelocated in the developing world, yet they are con-stituted explicitly as international centers with man-dates and programs intended to be independentfrom purely national or regional influences. Thecenters’ germplasm resources are internationallymobile and research results are made accessible toall interested parties.

The CGIAR has an annual budget of roughly$340 million, financed through voluntary contribu-tions from 55 separate donor governments andfoundations plus the World Bank, FAO, the UnitedNations Development Programme (UNDP), and theUnited Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).Some 35–40 percent of all CGIAR expenditures gotoward research in improved crop, livestock, forest,and fish productivity, with other CGIAR researchinvestments going to environmental protection,improved policies, biodiversity protection, andassistance to NARS. Despite its relatively small totalbudget, the system has been able to generate astream of internationally useful research results.Since the goal is to generate results that are usablein more than one country, the CGIAR has tradition-ally focused either on food crops that are widelygrown or those grown in different places under rel-atively uniform conditions, such as wheat, maize,and irrigated rice. Here the centers have enjoyedearly and continuing success. By the 1980s, germ-plasm improved by the CGIAR was found in morethan 80 percent of all spring bread wheat grown inthe tropics, 72 percent of all rice varieties, andmore than 75 percent of maize varieties. By 1997,CGIAR-improved varieties of wheat and maizewere generating, respectively, an extra $1.8 billionand $1.0 billion worth of production every year(Anderson and Dalrymple 1999, 54). By one esti-

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mate, some 80 percent of the calories and proteinrequired in tropical countries now derives from com-modities whose productivity has been enhanced byCGIAR-generated agricultural technologies.4

The demonstrated ability of the CGIAR system toprovide internationally usable public research goodsis a significant achievement for global governance.Yet it runs against two serious limitations, both ofwhich derive from the underperformance of individ-ual national governments. Some key governmentsamong the donor community have recently failed theCGIAR by cutting back on their financial contribu-tions; and many governments in the developingworld have fallen short by not making parallel invest-ments in their own agricultural research programs.

Weak donor support has recently put theCGIAR at risk. In its early years, the CGIAR coulddepend on bilateral assistance from leading donorcountries, particularly the United States. As recentlyas 1987, about two-thirds of all core funding for thesystem came from bilateral foreign assistance, with25 percent (about $47 million a year) coming fromUSAID alone. But during the 1990s, USAID’s con-tributions fell sharply, to a low of just $22.5 millionin 1996 before leveling off at about $26 millionannually by 2001. This fall in U.S. contributionswas not compensated by other major donors, soduring the mid-1990s the system faced a wrenchingfinancial crisis, one that was solved in part by atemporary increase in contributions from anotherinternational organization, the World Bank (whichcontributed $10 million extra in both 1994 and1995). This recent weakness in donor-country sup-port for the CGIAR is part of a much larger pattern

of declining international assistance to agriculture.Annual foreign aid by governments to all forms ofagriculture in poor countries fell by 57 percent be-tween 1988 and 1996, from $9.24 billion to just$4.0 billion. The World Bank officially bemoanedthis decline, yet annual World Bank lending foragriculture and rural development also fell sharply,from $6 billion in 1986 to $3.2 billion in 1998.

It is hard to justify this evaporation of donorassistance to agriculture in poor countries given thehigh rates of return on past investments, particu-larly in re-search. More than 60 percent of all inter-nationally assisted agricultural research programsin Asia have yielded annual rates of return above50 percent. Even in Africa and Latin America morethan 40 percent of such programs have had ratesof return above 50 percent (Anderson, Herdt, andScobie 1988, 88–97).

Overall, we can still argue that in internationalcommodity markets, international food aid, andinternational agricultural research, the provision ofessential international public goods has been sub-stantial. Failures by international institutions to pro-vide global public goods have not been the princi-pal cause of persistent hunger today in regions suchas South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. More seriousgovernance failures can usually be found at thenational level. The discussion that follows examinesthis problem of national public goods provision inSub-Saharan Africa. It shows that an underprovi-sion of key public goods by national governmentsin Africa has significantly retarded agricultural pro-ductivity in the region, contributing significantly tothe region’s deep and worsening food crisis.

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4 Letter from Lewis T. Preston, President of the World Bank; Jacques Diouf, Director General of FAO; and James Gustave Speth,Administrator of UNDP, to Brian J. Atwood, Administrator of USAID, April 21, 1994.

Food consumption deficits in Sub-Saharan Africa arelarge and have recently been growing, as shownearlier in Tables 2–4. Most expect these adversetrends to continue, at least into the immediate future.FAO’s 1996 World Food Summit projected the num-ber of malnourished citizens in this region to in-crease to 264 million by 2010 (FAO 1996). IFPRI’sIMPACT model also projects an increasing incidenceof malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa. IFPRI forecaststhe incidence of child malnutrition to decline in everyother region of the developing world, but it is ex-pected to increase in Sub-Saharan Africa, reaching40 million by 2020, an increase of roughly 30 per-cent from the 1995 level (Pinstrup-Andersen, Pandya-Lorch, and Rosegrant 1999).

What is the source of this severe and worseningAfrican food crisis? It largely reflects a failure of gov-ernance within Africa itself, specifically a failure byindividual sovereign governments in the region toprovide essential public goods at the national levelsuch as internal peace, rule of law, and adequatepublic investment in rural infrastructure and agricul-ture research. These goods are all essential to farmproductivity growth, and lagging rural income linkedto lagging farm productivity has been the most con-spicuous element of Africa’s hunger crisis.

Africa's Hunger as a FarmProductivity Problem

Recent production trends indicate a serious farminglag in Africa. In the developing countries as awhole between 1970 and 2000 per capita foodproduction increased by 51 percent. In Asia’sdeveloping countries in particular per capita food

production increased by 73 percent. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa per capita food productiondecreased by 9 percent (FAO 2001). So Africastands alone not only because hunger is still onthe rise, but also because food production perperson is actually falling.

When explaining hunger and food insecurity,some analysts don’t like to start with agriculturalproduction data. Particularly in some NGO circlesit is fashionable to argue that “production is not theproblem.” Poverty, they say, is the real problem,because it weakens the capacity of the poor to pur-chase food even when production is adequate andprices are reasonable. Others prefer to view theproblem as one of “distribution,” again suggestingthat more production alone will be inadequate.These are strong and valid arguments in many partsof the developing world. In some parts of India, forexample, producing still more grain on good irri-gated land may do little to relieve the widespreadhunger found among rural communities elsewherein the country, where the means to purchase ade-quate food is lacking even when there are large sur-pluses in the commercial marketplace. Likewise inLatin America, producing still more soybeans onlarge commercial farms in southern Brazil will do lit-tle to help feed the landless or nearly landless poorfarmers who are struggling to produce tropical orsubsistence crops in the dry northeast. In Brazil, re-solving distribution problems (including inequitableland distribution) may be more important than over-all farm productivity for the purpose of ending hunger.

Yet Africa is different. Landlessness is a lesssevere problem in most of Africa, compared withLatin America. Many Africans with access to landremain hungry because the productivity of their

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5. Africa’s National Governance Crisis and Food Security

labor on that land remains low. Viewing Africa’shunger problem as a poverty problem is correct, butit is usually the low productivity of farm labor inAfrica that leaves people poor—and hence hungry.

Africa’s poverty is undeniable. In 1995, theaverage per capita income in Sub-Saharan Africa(excluding South Africa) was only $280 per per-son, less than a dollar a day, while average per-sonal incomes in East Asia were three times higher(Pinstrup-Andersen Pandya-Lorch, and Rosegrant1999). But in Africa, poverty cannot be separatedfrom low farm productivity. Two-thirds of all Africansstill live in the countryside and remain heavilydependent upon farming, grazing, and other agri-culturally linked activities for their employment andcash income. These Africans are still poor (andhence hungry) because their efforts at agriculturalproduction have so far failed to generate significantproductivity gains. Farm production has increasedsomewhat in Africa, but mostly as a function ofpopulation growth (that is, as a consequence ofmore labor input, not more productivity per unit oflabor). So the per capita income growth benefitshave been negligible.

Comparisons to East and Southeast Asia arerevealing. Agriculture is a dominant activity amongthe poor in East and Southeast Asia, just as it is inAfrica. But in these Asian regions higher produc-tivity growth in farming has helped hundreds ofmillions escape poverty and hunger. In East Asia inthe 1970s and 1980s, the successful introduction ofGreen Revolution farming technologies increasedlabor productivity, creating important opportunitiesfor income growth for most who worked the land.Between 1980 and 1997 in China, the produc-tivity of an average farm worker increased from$161 to $307 in real terms. In Thailand produc-tivity increased from $634 to $932. But in Sub-Saharan Africa during the same period, averageagricultural value added per farm worker actuallydeclined, from $418 to $379 (World Bank 2000,Table 8, 288–289).

Productivity growth in farming usually helps tostimulate economic growth overall, by creatingmore income, savings, and investment. But itimproves the welfare of the rural poor even whenthe rest of the economy is not growing rapidly. India

made significant gains against poverty in the 1970sand 1980s because agricultural productivitygrowth was high even while overall economicgrowth remained relatively low. By the same token,India’s more rapid overall economic growth in the1990s has been slow to reduce poverty becauseagricultural productivity growth (especially yieldgrowth in food staples) had slowed (Lipton 1999).

Africa’s lagging agricultural productivity in partreflects the region’s failure to find and adopt moreproductive farming technologies. New technologieshelped farmers in Asia and Latin America achievesignificant yield gains accompanied by incomeimprovements during the Green Revolution of the1960s and 1970s. But most farmers in Africa didnot participate in this important technologyupgrade. Between 1970 and 1983, new high-yielding rice varieties spread to about half of Asia’svast rice lands but only to about 15 percent of riceland in Sub-Saharan Africa. Improved wheat vari-eties spread to more than 90 percent of wheatlands in Asia and Latin America but only to 59 per-cent in Sub-Saharan Africa. By 1998 the overallrate of adoption of new varieties (of all crops, asa percentage of area) was 80 percent in Asia and52 percent in Latin America, but only 26 percent inSub-Saharan Africa (Tuskegee University 2001).This is the main reason why today’s average cerealyields in Africa remain less than half those in Asiaand Latin America. The inability of African farmersto access more productive technology has led themto use other, more destructive methods to boost pro-duction in pace with population growth. One exam-ple is shortening fallows, a practice that mines soilnutrients and can eventually lead to an actualdecline in crop yield per hectare.

How can we explain this African failure toincrease agricultural productivity and hence pro-vide the higher incomes needed by most rural com-munities as a path to improved nutrition? Naturalconstraints on farming in Africa are certainly part ofthe problem. The continent’s farmers face soil andclimate constraints that are noticeably more severethan those found in most other developing regions.This has created a burden for African agriculturethat even the best national governance institutionsmight have trouble removing.

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Natural Soil and ClimateConstraints to Farm Productionin Africa

It is no accident that only 6 percent of the Africancontinent is currently being used to plant arablecrops. Soils in Africa tend to be poor, even by thestandards of tropical countries, as they are highlyweathered, acidic, and generally low in fertility. Rain-fall tends to be either scarce, unreliable, or exces-sive. An estimated two-thirds of the continent is sub-ject to high risk of drought. Some 46 percent has lessthan 75 days of rain a year, too little to grow evenmillet. Tree planting, normally an option for soil con-servation, is problematic in the large parts of Africathat receive less than 1,000 millimeters of rainfalleach year. Compared with other tropical regions, amuch smaller part of Africa’s land mass is moder-ated by proximity to oceans. Most of Africa lacks themonsoon effects that provide more abundant rainfallin much of Asia (Sachs and Bloom 1998). Wherewater is uncertain, farmers tend to concentrate onreducing risks rather than boosting yields. Waterand weather risks diminish the attraction of pur-chased inputs such as fertilizers that might be usedto increase yield. Fertilizer use in Africa, at 12 kilo-grams per hectare, is only one-quarter the level inIndia and just one-thirty-sixth the level of Japan.

Temperature and topography also complicateAfrica’s farm productivity challenge. High tempera-tures cause excessive evaporation in semi-aridzones and depletion of soil organic matter in defor-ested humid zones. Africa’s farming regions areseldom variable enough in altitude (except in partsof East Africa) to provide relief from the sea-levelheat and sustain a wide mix of crops. Local topog-raphy also tends to be highly irregular, complicat-ing the engineering of irrigation systems whileboosting road construction and other rural infra-structure costs. Irrigation costs in Africa are roughlydouble those of other continents. This is one reason

why irrigation covers only 4 percent of cultivatedarea in Sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 26 per-cent in India and 44 percent in China.5

The many pests and diseases in Africa thatattack crops, livestock, and farmers are another nat-ural impediment to higher productivity. As one ex-ample, stem borers are a major pest problem forKenyan maize farmers, causing estimated lossesof 15–45 percent of each maize crop, reducingKenya’s annual farm earnings by an average of6.3 billion shillings (Obure 2000). In West Africa,cowpeas grown by women farmers on small plotsare a major source of protein and cash income for200 million people. Yet insect damage from podborers and weevils can affect up to 95 percent of thecrop, depending on the location and year (Murdock1999). Farm size tends to be small in Africa partlybecause of the difficulty of keeping fields free fromthe invasive weeds that grow rampant. Parasiticweeds such as striga attack cereals and foodlegumes in the arid savanna zones, while perennialgrasses force farmers to abandon prime lands in themoist savanna (Akobundu 1991). As much as athird of tropical Africa remains underexploitedbecause of the presence of trypanosomiasis, a par-asitic disease that affects both people and livestock.

Because of these difficult natural conditions, it isperhaps inevitable for farm productivity growth inAfrica to lag. Green Revolution crop varieties weresuccessful in Asia partly because of the greaterabundance of water, soil nutrients, and favorablecropping terrain. Efforts to introduce improved vari-eties in Africa, even for crops that are alreadygrown in the region such as sorghum, millet, andrice, have often met failure (Dommen 1988).

Given such natural disadvantages, it might seemunfair to attribute any of Africa’s lagging farm pro-ductivity to poor local governance. Yet the con-straints mentioned do not have to block all improve-ments in Africa. As the frontier of science moves out-ward and the ability of institutions to engineer

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5 Most of Africa’s potential for added irrigation is also distributed unevenly, in just four large countries (Angola, Democratic Republic ofthe Congo, Mozambique, and Zambia). Yet these are countries with relatively abundant rainfed land, where irrigation tends to be lessneeded. The countries of the Sahel, which desperately need more watered farming land, have scant additional irrigation potential.

responses to natural constraints expands, climate nolonger has to be destiny. Africa could be doingmuch better in working against these natural con-straints if governments in the region were willing toinvest more in essential public goods such agricul-tural research and rural infrastructure. We have seenthat public research and development expenditurescan raise productivity in almost any environment(Masters and Wiebe 2000). Economic returns toagricultural research tend to be high; even in Africarates of return above 50 percent are not unusual. Yetmost governments in the region have long skimpedon public spending for agricultural science (Alston,Pardey, and Roseboom 1998). Investments in ruralinfrastructure can also increase farm productivity(Antle 1983), but once again Africa’s governmentshave tended to put priorities elsewhere.

Africa does not have to wait for dramaticresearch breakthroughs. There is today consider-able potential on much of the continent to increasefarm productivity simply by increased use of con-ventional inputs, such as fertilizer. This could beachieved with improved delivery of essential publicgoods such as rural roads, education, agriculturalresearch, and conflict reduction (Wiebe, Soule, andSchimmelpfennig 1998). It is the undersupply ofpublic goods such as these, rather than any inher-ent soil or climate constraint, that has most con-strained farm productivity in Africa, thus compro-mising the food security of the rural poor.

National GovernanceDeficits in Africa

Despite serious soil and climate constraints, low farmproductivity and the persistence of hunger and foodinsecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa must, at some point,be understood as a failure of governance at thenational level. Many governments in the region fail

to provide essential public goods such as civil peace,rule of law, and investments in public infrastructure,services, and research.6 So long as these essentialpublic goods remain underprovided by national gov-ernments in Africa, remedial efforts by others—including governments of countries outside of Africa,NGOs, MNCs, and IGOs—will have limited impact.

When measuring good governance, surprisinglyfew analysts focus directly on public goods provi-sion. Some focus on larger values such as thedegree of freedom guaranteed to society, indicatedby the adoption of basic democratic practices (forexample, as surveyed by Freedom House in its“Freedom in the World” ratings). Others focus morenarrowly on degrees of political risk to privateinvestors (as in the country risk reviews preparedquarterly by Standard and Poor’s DRI) or on thelevel of perceived governmental corruption (meas-ured by the Corruption Perceptions Index preparedby Transparency International). Some of these meas-ures derive not from objective indicators of actualgovernmental performance but instead from subjec-tive responses to expert or citizen survey question-naires, and such reputational measures always riskbeing influenced by a respondent’s prior knowl-edge of what others believe, or by prior knowledgeof good or bad economic and political outcomes.States with good reputations or good economic out-comes often get high subjective ratings for gover-nance whether they deserve them or not.

Whatever the measure being used, the scoresfor good governance that emerge in Africa tend tobe extremely low. This is one finding from anAggregated Governance Indicator technique devel-oped by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton(1999), which uses a variety of survey sources toconstruct aggregate indicators of bureaucratic qual-ity, rule of law, and graft, for a large sample of160 countries. When African governments were

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6 Some of the public goods needed for food security in Africa today go well beyond the traditional and cannot be covered ade-quately here. Public health services fall into this category, given the magnitude of Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis. FAO estimates that inthe 25 African nations most affected by HIV/AIDS, 7 million agricultural workers have already died from AIDS-related complica-tions since 1985. Those countries could lose an additional 16 million farm workers to AIDS by 2020. At current rates of infection,nearly a quarter of Africa’s agricultural workers could be sick or die from AIDS or related complications within the next 20 years(Future Harvest 2001).

measured in 1997–98 alongside other govern-ments using this method, they compared unfavor-ably. African countries constituted 26 percent of allstates sampled, yet they made up 43 percent of thestates that fell into the lowest quintile in terms of gov-ernance, and they constituted only 3 percent ofthose that fell into the highest quintile.

Good governance in Africa may be scarce rel-ative to other regions, but by some measures it is atleast increasing. The number of Sub-SaharanAfrican countries rated as “free” by Freedom Houseincreased between 1990 and 2000 from only 2 to8, and the number of “partly free” countriesincreased from 15 to 24. Meanwhile, the numberof “nonfree” countries in the region declined from26 to 13 (Wolgin 2001). Peaceful transfers ofpower took place over the past decade in a num-ber of African countries, including Senegal, Ghana,South Africa, and Zambia. If constitutional gover-nance continues to spread to more states in Africa,public policies could become more accountable tothe rural poor and more public goods essential torural income growth might be provided.

In addition to democracy and constitutionalism,another measure recently offered as an indicator ofgood governance is decentralization. To be respon-sive to the needs of local communities, particularlythose that are rural and remote, government offi-cials may have to deliver social services from morethan just a single, central location in the capital city.

Despite the rural and highly dispersed nature ofmost communities in Africa, national governmentsthere are among the most centralized in the world.Local government employees in Africa constitute just10 percent of all government employees, only halfthe typical ratio in Latin America or Asia (UNDP1993). In terms of service delivery, governments inAfrica also tend to be highly urbanized. In onestudy of 19 developing countries, including sixcountries from Sub-Saharan Africa, four of the fivemost urbanized countries in terms of service deliv-ery were African (Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, BurkinaFaso, and Senegal), while the seven most decen-tralized service-delivery countries were all non-African (Tuskegee University 2001).

Indirect measures of good governance such asthese can be useful, but to advance our present argu-ment we must return to the issue of public goodsprovision. Consider four public goods of particularimportance to agricultural productivity growth andrural poverty reduction: internal peace, rule of law,rural infrastructure, and agricultural research. Na-tional governments in Africa have too often falteredin their efforts to provide these basic public goods.

Internal peace

Poverty reduction through agricultural productivitygrowth is difficult in Africa partly due to the failureof so many governments in the region to preserve

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Table 10—Global distribution of good governance

Governance quintiles

Share of 2nd 2ndRegion/Country sample Lowest Lowest Middle Highest Highest

(percent) (percent of quintile)

OECD countries 14.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 5.7 65.7Non-OECD countries

East Asia 3.4 0.0 2.9 2.9 2.9 8.6Sub-Saharan Africa 25.9 42.9 32.4 38.2 14.3 2.9Middle East and North Africa 10.9 14.3 5.9 11.8 25.7 0.0South and Southeast Asia 10.9 14.3 17.6 8.8 14.3 0.0Europe and Central Asia 19.5 22.9 20.6 14.7 17.1 14.3Latin America and the Caribbean 14.9 5.7 20.6 23.5 20.0 8.6

Source: Data from Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton (1999) as presented in Wolgin (2001, Part 6, 17).

internal peace. Violent conflict reduces agriculturalproductivity and compromises secure access tofood in multiple obvious ways. In rural farming com-munities, the recruitment of able-bodied young meninto armies and militias first takes labor away fromfood production thereby reducing rural incomes. Inareas of conflict, predatory activities by both mili-tias and regular armies then diminish food avail-ability and access directly. These armed groupstend to subsist by eating whatever they can takefrom the unarmed rural population, and they arefrequently motivated to destroy any food they can-not use immediately in contested areas, so as todeny it to their adversaries. Fearing theft anddestruction of this kind, rural dwellers naturallychose to invest less energy in farming. They mayleave their land entirely and begin moving as inter-nally displaced people toward cities or emergencyfeeding centers set up by relief agencies.

For all these reasons, countries experiencingconflict in Africa also tend to experience a signifi-cant drop in food production. They produce onaverage 12.4 percent less food per capita in waryears than in peacetime. A comparison of actualhistorical food production in Africa after 1980 to a“peace adjusted trend” shows that peace wouldhave added 2–5 percent to the continent’s totalfood production per year (Messer, Cohen, andd’Costa 1998).

Violent internal conflicts have been common inmany African states since independence from colo-nial rule four decades ago. Over the past threedecades, 13 of the world’s 20 worst violent militaryconflicts were in African states (Easterly and Levine1994). Between 1975 and 1995, 12 countries inSub-Saharan Africa representing a quarter of theregion’s population were war-torn, usually for pro-longed periods (Freeman and Lindauer 1999). Atone point in 1993, a 17-year civil war was still underway in Angola; a three-sided military conflict was

being fought in Liberia; a tenuous peace that fol-lowed a 16-year civil war was only beginning to takehold in Mozambique; a long-standing violent conflictbetween Hutu and Tutsi was again raging in Rwanda(soon to produce a tragic genocide in 1994); morethan 230,000 refugees were fleeing fighting in Togo;rebels in the mostly Christian and animist south ofSudan were fighting the Muslim-dominated govern-ment; and U.S. forces had just entered Somalia toprotect food relief shipments from violent attack inthat country’s civil war. The level of violence has mod-erated only slightly in the years since. As of 2001,serious military conflicts were still ongoing in Angola,the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone,Sudan, and Uganda.

Because of military conflict, many Africans areforced to cross national borders and becomerefugees, living in camps and depending for theirsurvival on international food aid. For those whoare internally displaced, food security can be evenmore tenuous, since these people are often cut offfrom access to international assistance. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 10 percent of theworld’s population, yet it recently harbored 46 per-cent of the world’s refugees and persons internallydisplaced by war (Haughton 1997).7

What explains such widespread internal vio-lence in Africa? One enduring source of conflict hasbeen the mismatch between nation-state boundariesand the distribution of contending ethnic groups.State borders in Africa south of the Sahara weredrawn up by European colonial powers (in Berlin in1885) mostly for the purpose of keeping peaceamong Europeans, not among Africans. When thecolonizers finally departed in the 1960s, thediverse African ethnic groups contained withinthese poorly drawn national boundaries naturallybegan to struggle to control what the Europeans leftbehind, not only the valuable natural resources,such as diamonds, copper, gold, and petroleum,

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7 In Angola, more than 20 percent of the population was recently internally displaced. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo,more than 450,000 are internally displaced. In Sierra Leone, rebel activity has prevented the return of about 500,000 refugeesfrom Guinea and Liberia and has blocked relief shipments to roughly 500,000 internally displaced people. Sudan continues to haveby far the largest number of internally displaced people due to violent conflict—an estimated 4 million as of 1999 (NIC 1999).

but also the potentially valuable political institu-tions of the state itself. In Africa, where the privateeconomy is weak, most wealth and power contin-ues to flow through or be generated by the publicsector, through institutions such as the army, thepolice, state-owned companies, job-creating statebureaucracies, or state agencies empowered to taxor regulate imports and exports. Resources nowalso flow into African states through the finan-cial, developmental, and diplomatic ministries thatreceive foreign assistance from donors or loansfrom international financial institutions. Strugglesbetween contending ethnic groups to gain controlover these wealth-monopolizing institutions oftenevolve into violent internal conflict. It is said thatbecause state institutions control so much in Africa,“the stakes of politics are too high” (Diamond1993, 218).

The great diversity of ethnic groups in Africawould have made the problem of nation-state for-mation and pacification difficult even if Africansthemselves had drawn their national boundaries.Fourteen of the fifteen most ethnically diverse soci-eties in the world are located in Africa.8 By onecount, Sub-Saharan Africa has 74 different ethnicminorities, compared to only 43 in all of Asia,where the population is much larger overall (Gurr1993). In Sub-Saharan Africa, minorities comprise42 percent of the population, versus the globalaverage of 17 percent. Ethnopolitical groups inAfrica also tend to have a stronger sense of groupidentity than comparable groups elsewhere. Fifty-seven percent of the African minorities on whichdata are available are strong identity groups, ver-sus the global mean of 37 percent. Much of thisstrength in group identity is actually recent in origin,having emerged under colonial influence or duringanticolonial and postcolonial struggles.

Under these fractious circumstances, askinggovernments to provide the public good of internalpeace is certainly asking a great deal. Yet it is

sometimes unlawful behavior by government itselfthat triggers the violence. In such cases the publicgood of internal peace is linked to a second impor-tant internal public good: rule of law.

Rule of law

Societies, including rural agricultural societies, needprotection against more than just violent conflict.They also need safeguards against loss of propertyand breeches of contract. Well-functioning nationalgovernments provide such safeguards by operatingcapable and noncorrupt civil and criminal justicesystems. Ill-functioning governments may either failto provide these safeguards, or in extreme cases,they themselves may break the law and prey ontheir own citizens.

Governments in Africa have often fallen short ofproviding secure rule of law to all of their citizens.Sometimes this is due to governmental breakdown,as in Somalia which has been without a function-ing central government since 1991. In other cases,rule of law may be compromised when a govern-ment loses control over significant portions of itsterritory. For example, in the Democratic Republicof the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia the cen-tral government is capable of maintaining order inonly relatively small portions of the country. Armedopposition groups or intervening foreign armiesdominate elsewhere. Rule of law can also be com-promised by unconstitutional political interventionsby military leaders. Or a government may driftaway from constitutional rule under the leader-ship of a corrupt entrenched party organization, ora single dominating leader (often the foundingpresident). “Rule by the party” or “rule by theleader” often degenerates into predatory gover-nance, where the power of the state is employednarrowly and unconstitutionally to enrich theleader’s family, friends, and ethnic compatriots, orto keep political rivals at bay. Public resources then

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8 Easterly and Levine (1994, 12) use a measure of ethnic diversity based on the probability that two randomly selected individualsin a society will belong to different ethnolinguistic groups. The only non-African society on this list is India.

become, in Richard Joseph’s words, “a nationalcake to be divided and subdivided among office-holders” (Joseph 1996: 195).9

The tendency in Africa toward rule-by-the-leaderrather than rule of law has been difficult to over-come, even in cases where elections are initiated.Between 1989 and 1999, 18 African countriesseemed to be moving toward democratization in thesense that they moved up at least one category inthe rating system used by Freedom House. Yetdespite elections, a disturbing number of entrenchedAfrican chief executives held on to their office andcontrol of the state. As of 1996, there were still onlytwo African countries (Botswana and Mauritius) withenough free electoral history to be classified as fullydemocratic (Derbyshire and Derbyshire 1996).

Another indicator of weak rule of law in Africais government corruption. Since 1995 the privateorganization Transparency International has rankedcountries according to the degree of corruption thatis perceived to exist among public officials andpoliticians. The ranking uses surveys that capturethe perceptions of business people, the general pub-lic, and country analysts. Countries get a score from0 to 10, where a score of 0 means highly corruptand a score of 10 means highly clean.10 Transpar-ency International’s rankings confirm African gov-ernments’ reputation for being less likely to enforcerule of law than governments in other developing-country regions. The average index score of the18 African countries ranked by TransparencyInternational in 2000 was 3.0. By comparison, the11 Latin American countries ranked had the higher

average score of 3.9 and the 10 non–OECD Asiancountries ranked had the even higher averagescore of 4.3.11

Another indirect measure of how well Africangovernments provide rule of law can be found inthe Index of Economic Freedom compiled yearly bythe Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal.One dimension this index measures is the protectionof property rights, defined as security from govern-ment expropriation, the presence of an efficientcourt system to enforce contracts, and a justice sys-tem that punishes those who unlawfully confiscateprivate property. Using information gathered by theEconomist Intelligence Unit, the U.S. Department ofCommerce, and the U.S. Department of State, thisindex ranks 155 countries according to the degreeof protection they offer to property rights. Scoresrange from 1 (strongest protection) to 5 (weakestprotection). Of the 36 Sub-Saharan African coun-tries ranked in 2001, none had a score of 1, fivehad a score of 2, 13 had a score of 3, and theremaining 18 had scores of 4 or higher, resulting ina regional average of 3.5. This high average scorewould have been far worse if coverage had beengiven to those countries in Africa that were ex-periencing full internal breakdown and violent con-flict. Six such countries were not even ranked in2001 (Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of theCongo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan) be-cause of “the unreliability of available data causedby political instability, outright civil war, or lack ofcentral government” (O’Driscoll, Holmes, andKirkpatrick 2001, 4).

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10 Transparency International uses a composite index to rank countries and it builds this index only for countries on which it hasdata from a minimum of three recent independent surveys. The 2000 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks 90 countries basedon surveys conducted in 1998–2000. See <http://www.glogalcorruptionreport.org/>11 Some individual Latin American and Asian governments (for example, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, thePhilippines, and India) had lower corruption index scores than the African average, and the transitional states of the former SovietUnion had the lowest average index scores. Yet the index of perceived corruption provides more evidence that African states havedifficulty supplying rule of law as a national public good.

9 Wolgin (2001, 17) describes this pattern as follows:African states became characterized by the identification of the leader and his party with the nation-state itself,ethnic tension, lack of a coherent national vision, the use of the state to dispense political favors, the expansionof the state’s role beyond its administrative capacity, and the erosion of the professionalism of the civil service.Without a tradition of strong institutions of accountability, it became commonplace in many countries for bothpoliticians and bureaucrats to use the power they controlled to enrich themselves.

Weak property protection in Africa is particu-larly important as a key to understanding the per-sistence of slow economic growth in the region.Economic growth in Africa would be higher if thelevel of investment were higher. But the incentive toinvest is weak because essential public goods suchas peace, property protection, and contractenforcement are so often missing. One of the fewAfrican countries to provide strong guarantees ofproperty protection to foreign investors, Botswana,has attracted one of the highest rates of FDI percapita on the continent. This is no accident.Botswana has the lowest “political risk” of anynation in Sub-Saharan Africa, including SouthAfrica, as revealed in surveys of risk analysts, riskinsurance brokers, and bank credit officers(Coolidge and Rose-Ackerman 2001).

It is significant that Africans as well as non-Africans have been reluctant to invest in the region.A study by Collier and Gunning (1997) comparesthe portfolio choices of wealth holders across allregions, using data on capital flight and domesticcapital stocks. They find that wealth owners in Africarelocated 37 percent of their wealth outside the con-tinent. This compares to a 17 percent capital flightrate in Latin America and only 3 percent in EastAsia. It leads Collier and Gunning to conclude thatif Africa reduced its own total capital flight to thelevel of Asia, its capital stock might increase by half.

When war, government corruption, and weakproperty protection discourage new investment,gains will be limited even if government perform-ance improves in other areas. African governmentshave improved their performance in some policyareas recently, including macroeconomic policy andpublic education. With regard to macroeconomicpolicy, partly because of better public spending dis-ciplines, inflation in the region has fallen from anaverage 13.6 percent in 1980 to 8.4 percent in1997. Reduced inflation is an important publicgood, especially for the poor who tend to hold theirassets in cash (Wolgin 2001). In recent decades,African governments have also made substantialinvestments in primary and secondary public edu-cation. Between 1970 and 1992 the primary schoolenrollment rate in Africa increased from 50 to72 percent, and the secondary school enrollment

rate increased from 7 to 24 percent (Freeman andLindauer 1999). Yet economic growth has remaineddisappointing, and per capita income in manyAfrican countries has continued to decline. In 1995,83 percent of Africans lived in countries with aper capita income below the level that prevailed15 years earlier, in 1980. As population has grown,the total number of the poor (and hence hungry) inAfrica has grown as well. Between 1990 and 1998the number of people living in poverty in Africaincreased from 242 million to 291 million.

Why hasn’t Africa experienced the economicgrowth that so many other developing regions haveexperienced? Freeman and Lindauer argue thatthere is a natural ordering to the determinants ofeconomic growth, and political stability and prop-erty rights protections come first.

Without this base, investments in education, open-ness, and levels of income equality have little effecton growth. The reason returns to schooling are lowin Africa, that capital flight is high, and that the shifttoward free trade has not created growth miraclesis that schooling, investment, and trade operate suc-cessfully only in a peaceful, stable, environment foreconomic activity (Freeman and Lindauer 1999, 20).

Rural infrastructure

Throughout the developing world, the deep povertyof rural areas tends to be associated with a lack ofinfrastructure to ensure access to markets and fun-damental public services including water and sani-tation, education, and public health. Data from onesurvey covering 55,500 households in 15 differentcountries (African and non-African) reveal the mag-nitude of several important rural-urban infrastructuregaps. Compared with urban households, fewerrural households had electricity (46 versus 89 per-cent), in-house water taps (12 versus 59 percent),sewer connections (7 versus 61 percent), and tele-phones (8 versus 38 percent). Given this pervasivelack of rural infrastructure, it is unsurprising thatwhen the sample of households in this survey wasbroken down by wealth, more than 91 percent ofthose in the poorest quintile were living in rural set-tings. Among these lowest quintile rural dwellers,infrastructure coverage was even weaker than theoverall rural average. Almost none of these poorestrural households had in-house water (2 percent),

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sewers (1 percent), or telephones (2 percent). Evenfor the less impoverished rural households—thosewith incomes up to $2,400 per year—coverage ofthese basic public services remained under 10 per-cent (Komives, Whittington, and Wu 2001).

In Africa, one rural infrastructure deficit es-pecially prejudicial to agricultural productivityand rural income growth is the shortage of well-maintained or paved rural roads. Total road cover-age in Africa is sparse, with only 0.06 kilometers ofroads per square kilometer, compared with a den-sity three times higher in Latin America and six timeshigher in Asia (Wolgin 2001). Of this scant roadcoverage in Africa, very little is paved to ensurepassability during the rainy season. Paved roadscomprise only 7 percent of total road coverage inUganda, and in the Democratic Republic of theCongo the paved share is just 2 percent. The pavedand unpaved roads that do exist in Africa alsotend to be poorly maintained. At a given time,50–90 percent of Africa’s rural roads are in needof repair (Calvo 1998). Partly because Africa’srural transport infrastructure includes so few pavedroads suitable for vehicles (or even bicycles), 87 per-cent of all household travel is still by foot.

A farm productivity revolution will be difficult tolaunch in Africa as long as transport costs remainhigh due to the underdeveloped rural transportinfrastructure. High costs of transport impede farm-ers from getting needed inputs (such as fertilizer) atan affordable price. Fertilizer costs 2–6 times moreat the farm gate in Africa than in Asia, Europe, orNorth America. High transport costs also reduce theability of farmers to sell their produce for higherprices in cities. Marketing costs for agriculturalproducts are higher in Africa than anywhere else inthe world, and this hurts the rural poor both as sell-ers and buyers of food. Many poor households areactually net purchasers of food, using the smallincomes they gain from cash-crop production orremittances. High rural transport costs also tend toconstrain rural credit availability and severelyreduce the growth of nonfarm employment as a sup-plementary income option in the countryside.

Africa’s poorly developed rural transport infra-structure is particularly damaging to the interests ofrural women, since it is they who traditionally bear

the larger share of transport burdens. ThroughoutSub-Saharan Africa, women contribute at least65 percent of the household time spent on traveland transport and well over 65 percent of the effort.African women learn from an early age how tohead-carry heavy loads (sometimes exceeding theirbody weight) over remarkable distances. Surveysconducted in rural Zambia, Uganda, and BurkinaFaso indicate that the carrying burden (measured inton-kilometers per person per year) taken on bywomen in rural Africa tends to be almost four timesgreater than the burden taken on by men (WorldBank 1997). The physical burden on these womencould be eased and rural transport efficiency dra-matically improved through larger public invest-ments in a rural transport infrastructure, especiallyfeeder roads capable of taking vehicles and bicy-cles into remote rural communities.

Adequate public investments in rural transportinfrastructure have been critical to farm productivitygrowth in other developing-country regions, mostnotably in China and Taiwan. Rural roads not onlyopen new areas for production, they also increaselabor efficiency (Craig, Pardey, and Roseboom1997). Investments in rural roads are nonethelessmeager in much of Africa, in part because the phys-ical dispersion of the population often renders roadprojects nonviable once economic rate of return cri-teria are calculated. Such traditional economic cri-teria can, unfortunately, be blind to parallel con-cerns such as social and gender equity andabsolute poverty reduction, which are also key tothe reduction of rural hunger. If more criteria high-lighting social benefits to the poor were taken intoaccount, rural infrastructure investments mightemerge as cost-effective even in some of Africa’smost sparsely populated areas. The rural poor inAfrica also can benefit from the process of roadconstruction and maintenance through the creationof local wage employment (Liu and Gannon 1999).

Agricultural research and extension

Governments in Africa have also fallen short in pro-viding adequate public investments in agriculturalresearch. We earlier discussed the role of theCGIAR in providing global public goods in the

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research area, but the CGIAR cannot do the jobalone. Without competent teams of agricultural sci-entists at the national level able to adapt CGIARcrop varieties and innovations for local use andrespond to local needs, the breakthroughs made atthe international centers are likely to sit unused.Research contributions from national scientists mayactually be more important in the African settingthan in other developing-country regions, givenAfrica’s distinctly difficult agroclimatic environmentplus the lower involvement of private-sector researchenterprises in Africa (Johnson and Evenson 2000).

During the Green Revolution in Asia, strongnational agricultural research programs within theadopting countries were critical to move improvedtraits into local germplasm and to move the newseeds out to farms. Yet since the 1980s, manyproven national programs have struggled due to alack of public funds. IFPRI’s 2020 Vision initiative,since 1995, has advised low-income developingcountries to set an immediate minimum target forspending on agricultural research equal to 1 per-cent of the value of total agricultural output, with alonger term (5–10 year) target level of 2 percent(IFPRI 1995, 29). Unfortunately, most governmentsin low-income developing countries have spent onlyabout 0.5 percent of their agricultural GDP on agri-cultural research. A few middle-income developingcountries, such as Malaysia and Thailand, havespent 0.6–0.7 percent, with other less wealthycountries, such as Pakistan and the Philippines,spending only about 0.2 percent.

Governments in Africa have also skimped infunding agricultural development more broadly.Most have invested less than 5 percent of theirannual budget in any kind of agricultural devel-opment, even though up to 75 percent of theircitizens—and an even larger share of their poorestcitizens—still depend on farming. These small agri-cultural development budgets leave little room for

research. Since the 1980s, research spending inAfrica increased at only a sluggish 0.8 percentannual rate, well below the 2.5 percent annualincrease registered in the 1970s when agriculturestill received high priority from a number of gov-ernments (Alston, Pardey, and Roseboom 1998).Between 1971 and 1991, in 44 Sub-SaharanAfrican countries public expenditures on researchand development for agriculture increased by only35 percent, versus a 166 percent average increasein all 131 developing countries together (Pardey etal. 1999 cited in Tuskegee University 2001). Thiswas at a time when Africa’s population was roughlydoubling and food production per capita was stag-nating. It is thus unsurprising that Africa has only42 agricultural researchers per million persons eco-nomically active in agriculture, compared with2,458 in industrial countries.

Of course the donor community is in part toblame for this underinvestment in research. Agri-cultural research in Africa has long been heavilydependent on donor funds—traditionally 61 per-cent is donor funded in francophone countries and36 percent in anglophone countries outside ofSouth Africa. When donor funding declines, as itdid in the 1990s, national governments find it hardto make up the difference. Yet the donor com-munity cannot be expected to carry the burdenon its own. Since 1981 the World Bank has lent$3.8 billion for agricultural research purposes indeveloping countries, either through specializedagricultural research loans or broader loans with anagricultural research component. Over the sameperiod, the World Bank also provided roughly$3 billion in direct support for agricultural exten-sion in the developing world. Yet these globalinvestments in agricultural knowledge creation andpublic dissemination have not been matched bysufficient public investments by governments in thepoor countries themselves.

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When governments fail to deliver the minimumpublic goods needed to provide food security fortheir own citizens, what can be done to correct theresulting governance deficit? To what extent cannational governments in rich countries, or IGOs, orperhaps national or international NGOs step into provide the public goods and services thatlocal national governments fail to supply? Thissection provides some illustrative answers, onceagain focusing primarily on the difficult case of Sub-Saharan Africa. We specifically ask how gover-nance deficits might be corrected in such areasas internal peace, rule of law, and investment inresearch and rural infrastructure. Where opportuni-ties exist for outsiders to provide more help, theirobligation to do so rises accordingly.

Can Outsiders Restore andPreserve Internal Peace?

International norms and laws of state sovereigntyhave traditionally restricted the freedom of outsidersto intervene in the internal affairs of foreign states,even when those states fail to provide their own cit-izens with internal peace. This norm of noninter-vention has been useful for protecting weak statesfrom domination or conquest by the strong, so it hastraditionally been defended most vociferously bythe leaders of weak states, and it has been writteninto the charters of many state membership IGOs,including the United Nations and various regionalorganizations. In Africa, when the Organization ofAfrican Unity (OAU) was founded in 1963, the con-

tinent’s new leaders agreed before all else on theimpermissibility of outside intervention into the“internal affairs” of member states.12

The traditional norm against intervention hasrecently weakened a bit, with the colonial erareceding into history and then with the end of theCold War. As national independence has becomemore secure over time and as the danger of com-petitive Cold War superpower interventions less-ened, new political space has opened to permitmore frequent peacekeeping and internationalhumanitarian interventions. Beginning in the1980s, the U.N. Security Council became moreactive in authorizing interventions into the internalaffairs of states, as it was no longer paralyzed by aveto-casting competition between the United Statesand Russia. The Security Council has increasinglyauthorized interventions in at least three importantcircumstances: when a state engages in systematichuman rights violations, when a state is incapableof protecting human rights due to a breakdown instate authority, and when a government in power isunlawfully constituted. When these conditions arepresent, the Security Council has become more will-ing to consider the situation a threat to peace, andit has exercised its legal powers to authorize inter-national enforcement measures under Chapter VIIof the U.N. Charter.

This weakening of the state sovereignty norm hasunfortunately not yet been accompanied by any sig-nificant strengthening of the institutional or militarycapacity of legitimate international institutions (suchas the Security Council) to carry out enforcement

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6. Strategies to Correct National Public Goods Deficits

12 In 2001 the OAU changed its name to the African Union (AU).

actions to preserve or restore internal peace. For thepurpose of peace preservation, it remains extremelydifficult for the Security Council or the secretary-general to authorize an intervention prior to anactual outbreak of violence. A former special repre-sentative of the United Nations in Somalia,Mohamed Sahnoun, has described at length his frus-tration in seeing several opportune moments for pre-ventive diplomatic intervention pass in that countrybetween 1988 and 1991, leaving the country tospiral into anarchy, clan violence, and finally a wide-spread famine. Sahnoun largely faults the weakinstitutional structure and capacity of the U.N. systemitself (Sahnoun 1994).

On other occasions the weak capacity of theUnited Nations to operate independent of the pref-erences of great powers has blocked timely peace-preserving interventions. A mission from the U.N.Department of Peacekeeping Operations recom-mended that an international peacekeeping forceof 8,000 troops be stationed in Rwanda in 1993.But this recommendation was blocked by the U.S.delegation, which had become fearful of partici-pating in U.N. peacekeeping operations since thedeaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a belated effort torestore peace by intervention in Somalia.Consequently the Security Council sent only a small2,500-troop force to Rwanda in 1993, a force withno budget, no intelligence capacity, only one func-tioning armored personnel carrier, and rules ofengagement that were strictly reactive. When sub-sequently attacked by contending forces inRwanda’s internal political war in the spring of1994, this token force simply withdrew, clearing theway for resumption of an internal war that wasmarked by genocidal violence, massive populationdislocations, and again famine (Jones 1999).

As currently constructed, IGOs such as theUnited Nations are also poorly equipped to restorepeace after internal fighting breaks out. Once hos-tilities are under way, the international communityhas usually intervened only for the purpose ofextracting foreign nationals from physical danger ordelivering emergency relief. International assistanceagencies and NGOs often attempt humanitarianinterventions to deliver food and medical relief tothe victims of war, but while fighting persists these

interventions, too, are prone to failure. In Somaliaafter violence broke out early in 1992, up to 80 per-cent of the food aid delivered to the country wasroutinely stolen by armed militias.

Discussions continue within the internationalcommunity over the legal and institutional innova-tions that might be required to empower the UnitedNations to conduct successful peace preservationand restoration missions within sovereign states, inAfrica or elsewhere. Several proposals could beacted on quickly, if the secretary-general were totake the lead with support from the permanent mem-bers of the Security Council. Without having toamend the Charter or alter the power or compo-sition of the Security Council, the United Nationsmight be able to provide more effective interna-tional preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping iffive conditions were met:

• If the secretary-general were to exercise moreoften his authority under Article 99 to “bring tothe attention of the Security Council any matterwhich in his opinion may threaten the mainte-nance of international peace and security.”

• If the General Assembly were to exercise moreoften its right to address problems that theSecurity Council is avoiding.

• If larger national contributions were made tothe Fund for Preventive Action (established byNorway in 1996), which provides the secretary-general with resources to train, support, and ex-pand a roster of people to serve as envoys andspecial representatives in real or suspected crises.

• If contributing member governments gave thesecretary-general and Security Council morecapacity to react quickly to imminent con-flicts, in the form of rapid-reaction and standbymilitary forces on call for U.N. duty. Memberstates—particularly nonsuperpowers—coulddesignate forces from their own military ser-vices as dedicated to the support of such rapid-reaction missions.

• If the secretary-general and Security Councilhad authority over a small standing police forcefor internal conflict prevention purposes.Conflict prevention policing actions are oftenbest carried out with trained police rather thanregular army troops. Yet police personnel are

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seldom in ready surplus among member coun-tries. A standing force under U.N. control couldbe necessary to ensure timely action (Smith andNaim 2000).It will strike some as potentially dangerous to

give the admittedly nondemocratic and frequentlynonaccountable institutions of the United Nationsany increased capacity to violate traditional normsof sovereignty in the name of preventive diplomacyor internal peace preservation. Yet the only alter-native, until now, has been to leave this task bydefault to disproportionately powerful individualstates (sometimes states with hegemonic or neo-colonial ambitions) or to ad hoc alliances of suchstates, sometimes with Security Council endorse-ment and sometimes without. This evolving adhoc intervention system has not prevented internalwars or mischievous foreign interventions (in Africa,witness the multiple international military interven-tions recently in the Democratic Republic of theCongo). Institutionalizing a stronger interventioncapacity within the U.N. system might thus bethe only way to preempt even less desirable inter-ventions. Moreover, an increased likelihood thatthe Security Council will act might deter some ofthe worst internal excesses in the first place. AsSecretary-General Kofi Annan re-marked in his1999 annual report on the work of the UnitedNations, “Even the most repressive leaders watch tosee what they can get away with…. The more theinternational community succeeds in altering theirdestructive calculus, the more lives can be saved”(cited in Smith and Naim 2000).

Some institutional innovations within Africaitself might increase prospects for internal peace.Governments in the region could experiment withinstitutional arrangements that depart from the uni-fied territorial nation-state model left to them by theEuropean colonizers. In some cases, the diversity ofAfrica’s many contending ethnolinguistic minoritygroups might better be accommodated—andpeace better preserved—through national gover-nance institutions designed to grant explicit regionalautonomy, shared powers, or conditional rights ofsecession to some regions or groups. Such innova-tive constitutional redesigns may be difficult toundertake, with international legitimacy now con-

ferred so exclusively on individual leaders of tradi-tional unified states, via diplomatic recognition, IGOmembership, and access to public-sector interna-tional borrowing privileges or financial support.Because of such international benefits, someAfrican politicians may find it more advantageousto rule a unified state torn by war than to innovatean internal division or sharing of power in the inter-ests of peace (Herbst 2001).

We may ask if promoting democracy is a wayto build internal peace in Africa. Promoting democ-racy may be good for advancing the rule of lawonce states are free of violent conflict, as we shallargue below. But movement toward highly central-ized majoritarian democratic systems in ethnolin-guistically divided countries can be dangerous ifpeace has not yet been secured. As Timothy Siskargues, “Simple majoritarian democracy containsspecial problems for ethnically divided societies.Minority ethnic groups expect to be permanentlyexcluded from power through the ballot box andfear electoral contests when the principle of simplemajority rule is operative” (1996, ix). Particularly insocieties that have recently experienced internal vio-lence, competitive winner-take-all elections contest-ed along ethnic or regional divisions may be anunlikely path to peace and national unity.

Can Outsiders PromoteRule of Law?

The norm of state sovereignty can also block out-siders from promoting rule of law. Yet the poor andthe hungry would seem entitled to some externalhelp, particularly where a government has becomepredatory against its own people. How can out-siders work against the tendency of regimes in somany states to impose arbitrary taxes, steal statefunds, appropriate private property, and fail to pun-ish crimes or enforce contracts? In societies not toobadly divided by ethnic conflict, international effortsto promote democracy can play a positive role.Genuinely competitive elections carrying a signifi-cant threat of electoral removal can be a strong pro-tection against entrenched and corrupt regimes.Democratic competition is one reason forBotswana’s relative success in maintaining a rule-of-

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law approach toward public affairs (Coolidge andRose-Ackerman 2001).

Outsiders concerned with rule of law in Africasometimes hesitate to call for the full democratizationof political systems in the region, knowing that sucha stance might compromise their various diplomaticor economic relationships with nondemocraticregime leaders. In deference to the norm of statesovereignty, international financial institutions suchas the World Bank are actually proscribed from con-ditioning their loans on the adoption of any one spe-cific form of government. Until now most interna-tional institutions have been willing only to seekgreater discipline over the most extreme outcomes ofnondemocratic rule, such as human rights abuses orstate corruption. For example, efforts are now beingmade by outsiders to reduce bribe-taking by officialsin the developing world. These efforts have beenpursued most energetically by NGOs such as Trans-parency International and the International Chamberof Commerce, now supported by IGOs like theOrganization of American States and the Common-wealth Heads of Government. The conditioned lend-ing activities of key international financial institutionssuch as the World Bank and IMF have also playeda role (Commonwealth Secretariat 2000).

External efforts to reduce bribe-taking in poorcountries are no doubt useful to the international pri-vate sector, yet agricultural productivity and foodsecurity in Africa is more often compromised byother rule-of-law deficits, such as a general failure toenforce private contracts, or the outright appropria-tion by the state (often by rulers, their family or theirsupporters) of private lands or wealth. External inter-ventions to prevent this sort of governance failureare routinely avoided by the international commu-nity, partly because they are hard to justify undercurrent international law.

It is an irony that Africa’s one-man rule regimesare protected from international interventions for

good governance purposes, given the frequency ofinternational interventions over the years to prop upsuch regimes. Some of these interventions wereCold War motivated, as in the case of U.S. supportfor the anticommunist but disastrous Mobutu regimein Zaire. In some cases the external intrusions revealpostcolonial motivations as one-man regimes inAfrica have often been given foreign economic andmilitary aid by former metropolitan governments forthe dubious purpose of preserving diplomatic influ-ence or exclusive commercial access. External inter-ventions that sustain one-man rule in Africa alsocome inadvertently from international financial insti-tutions such as the IMF and World Bank. WhenIGOs such as these extend loans to strugglingAfrican governments, they breathe political life intothe failed nondemocratic leaders of such regimes.Without the legitimacy gained through internationaldiplomatic recognition and representation, andwithout the intergovernmental lending and assis-tance automatically enjoyed as a result, some failedgovernments in Africa might be easier to replace(Clapham 1996).

Some of this international support for one-manrule in Africa weakened when the Cold Warended, and more political space is now open forappropriate international scrutiny and criticism. Forexample, when the U.S. Secretary of State visitedAfrica in May 2001, he directly asked the presidentof Zimbabwe (who had headed the country aseither president or prime minister for more than twodecades) and the president of Kenya (who hadruled the country as a one-party state for nearly aslong) to step aside and allow new presidents to beelected. In the case of Zimbabwe, outsiders havealso frozen most economic assistance pendingimproved governance.13

A mix of outside pressure and assistance mighthelp move more of Africa (or states in equally non-democratic regions, such as the Middle East)

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13 While regime leaders naturally resist such external pressure, ordinary Africans do not seem to be offended. In Zimbabwe, wheretwo decades of one-man rule finally brought the nation a shrinking economy, 60 percent unemployment, and state violence againstthe organized democratic opposition, one opinion survey conducted by the Helen Suzman Foundation found that only 2 percent ofall citizens thought whites were most to blame for Zimbabwe’s problems, while 41 percent blamed the president’s government and28 percent blamed the president himself (Johnson 2001).

toward political systems grounded in rule of law orcompetitive elections. Explicit bilateral pressure byinfluential states can produce results over time.Consider the dramatic shift toward democracy thattook place in Latin America between 1974 and1990, in part because of bilateral pressuresimposed from the United States. In 1974, when theUnited States shifted the focus of its diplomacy inLatin America (mostly at congressional insistence) inthe direction of advocating democracy, eight out ofthe ten states in South America had nondemocraticgovernments. Sixteen years later, in 1990, nine ofthese same ten states had governments that weredemocratically chosen (Huntington 1991).

This transformation was partly the result of con-sistently strong diplomatic pressures applied in theregion by United States, most obviously during thepresidency of Jimmy Carter (1977–80). These pres-sures included official statements endorsing democ-ratization, the publication of annual ratings ofhuman rights protection in individual countries bythe U.S. Department of State, direct advocacythrough the U.S. Information Agency, economicpressures and sanctions (for example, congression-al limitations on assistance, trade, and investment),material support for democratic forces, and evenmilitary actions. In 1978 the Carter administrationdeployed American warships off the DominicanRepublic to ensure a fair election count, and in1980, 1983, and 1984 the United States inter-vened to prevent planned military coups in ElSalvador, Honduras, and Bolivia. In 1989 U.S.diplomacy prevented a military coup in Peru, andthe United States staged a military invasion ofPanama to reverse a coup against free electoralprocesses. External pressures were only part of thestory, to be sure. Longer term demographic trends,such as the growth of a larger and better informedurban middle class, plus some key nonstate influ-ences such as radical Catholic priests promoting anew “liberation theology,” also helped to banishtraditional authoritarian regimes from the region.

The spread of democracy in Latin America inthe 1970s and 1980s helped to inspire parallelchanges elsewhere, including in Central Europe,East and Southeast Asia, and even the formerSoviet Union. Sensing the power of this trend, anumber of industrial democratic states in the 1980sbegan to incorporate formal democracy promotionprograms into their traditional assistance policies.At first these programs concentrated narrowly onelectoral assistance, such as funding electionadministration projects or sending internationalobservers to monitor the conduct of elections in tran-sitional states. Also playing a role in these effortswere IGOs, including the United Nations (under asomewhat expanded definition of peacekeeping)and regional institutions like the Organization ofAmerican States and the Organization for Securityand Cooperation in Europe. When it became clearthat merely holding elections might not be enough,these external efforts broadened to include astrengthening and reforming major state institutionssuch as legislatures and judiciaries, and the cre-ation of stronger “civil society” institutions to assistin holding state institutions to account. Considerableresources have now gone into such internationaldemocracy promotion assistance programs. In2000 the U.S. Government devoted more than$500 million to democracy promotion abroad,principally through USAID but also through a num-ber of publicly funded NGOs such as the NationalEndowment for Democracy, the Asia Foundation,and the Eurasia Foundation (Carothers andOttaway 2000, 5).

In Africa, international pressures and rewardsfor democratization have so far produced mixedresults. In some cases where elections were alreadyscheduled, such as Zambia, international assis-tance helped bring an end to an entrenched regimewithout any coercion.14 Yet in other cases, such asKenya, success has been elusive. In Kenya coercivediplomatic pressure from the donor community,including threats to suspend assistance, were

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14 Zambia held multiparty elections in 1991 for the first time since 1968. Western donors strongly supported the elections, and toensure their credibility they provided international observers and promoted domestic monitoring efforts. President Kenneth Kaunda,who had ruled the country since independence, was defeated (Ottaway 2000, 82).

required simply to persuade the regime to hold elec-tions, first in 1992 and then once more in 1997.These elections did not end entrenched rule, how-ever, as partisan divisions among the politicalopposition enabled the incumbent party to win.

In contrast to Latin America, where U.S. diplo-matic leadership was an external contributor to thedemocratization process, in Africa European lead-ership will be more critical. European governmentsenjoy stronger political and cultural ties to the re-gion. They have a larger diplomatic presence, andthey are also usually more engaged in terms of cor-porate investments and bilateral assistance. WithinAfrica itself, the government of South Africa has acrucial leadership role to play. Having recentlysecured its own transition to democratic rule, SouthAfrica has a chance to project greater expectationsof democratic governance onto neighboring statesin the region.

Even with such external pressures and rewards,Africa’s transition to democratic rule is likely to beslow and hesitant at best. While awaiting the com-pletion of that transition, outsiders should help com-pensate for other public goods deficits in the region,such as public investment in rural infrastructure andagricultural research.

Can Outsiders IncreaseInvestments in RuralInfrastructure andAgricultural Research?

Intervening from the outside to help bring aboutinternal peace and rule of law is sensitive and diffi-cult. But offering help to compensate for deficits inrural infrastructure and research investment shouldbe much easier, since this task only requires ade-quately funded and properly targeted externalassistance. The straightforward challenge is tomobilize sufficient external resources to make theadditional investments in rural infrastructure andagricultural research that are needed.

Public assistance is needed because the privatesector is unlikely to get involved. International com-panies have vast financial and technologicalresources, but they are uninterested in investing

those resources in Africa for the creation of publicgoods such as rural roads or for research onimproved varieties of subsistence crops for whichthere is no commercial seed market. This would betrue even if Africa were peaceful and democratic.Neither Africans nor outsiders should wait for theprivate sector to make these needed investments inpublic goods. The international public sector offersan attractive alternative.

Public-sector assistance to Africa has been sub-stantial over the years. According to data compiledby the OECD Development Assistance Committee(DAC), in 1998–99 Sub-Saharan Africa received ayearly average of $11.3 billion in net ODA throughbilateral and multilateral channels (OECD 2001,Table 32). For 1993–97, net ODA receipts inAfrica had totaled $86.5 billion, which was rough-ly nine times the total net foreign direct investmentof private companies in the region during the sameperiod (Goldsmith 2001). Africa receives moreODA than any other developing region in absoluteterms, in per capita terms, and also as a shareof GNP and gross domestic investment. Govern-ments in Africa have also benefited from repeatedrounds of debt forgiveness. From 1989 to 1997 the41 Highly Indebted Poor Countries (not all in Africa)received roughly $33 billion in debt forgiveness(Easterly 2001).

Yet much of this public-sector lending, assis-tance, and foreign debt forgiveness has recentlybeen linked not to local public goods investments,but instead to an elusive goal of “policy reform.”During the world debt crisis of the 1980s, whenmany developing-country governments ran out ofmoney and were forced to turn to the IMF and theWorld Bank for emergency loans, the policy advicethey got along with the loans was to embrace a setof “structural adjustment” policy reforms. Theseincluded not only monetary policy discipline, tradeliberalization, market deregulation, and privatiza-tion of state-owned enterprises, but also fiscal poli-cy discipline in the form of reduced public-sectorspending. The World Bank thus began lending notto expand state investments in poor countries, butinstead to shrink state spending in the name of mar-ket efficiency and fiscal discipline. During the1980s, the share of World Bank lending worldwide

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that was invested in agricultural and rural develop-ment projects fell nearly by half, while the share oftotal World Bank lending for the purpose of induc-ing policy change increased from almost nothing tomore than 20 percent (Lipton and Paarlberg 1990).The goal was to shrink wasteful public-sector spend-ing on unneeded consumer and producer subsidies,inefficient state enterprises, and large state bureau-cracies. But one unintended side-effect of the struc-tural adjustment lending strategy was a collateralshrinkage of spending on much-needed publicgoods investments in areas such as rural health,education, infrastructure, and agricultural research.

The World Bank’s policy reform lending strate-gy produced different results in different borrowingcountries. In some countries it fell short becausevery little durable policy reform was achieveddespite the large loans that were made. In othercountries it fell short because good policy changesundertaken in some areas were counterbalancedby damaging cutbacks in important state invest-ments and public services. In Africa, the most con-spicuous setbacks for policy reform lending were ofthe first kind, where borrowing governments tookthe money but then failed to undertake the pre-scribed reforms. As noted above, a 1994 WorldBank review of 29 Sub-Saharan African countriesfound significant backsliding on promised reformsin the areas of monetary policy and agriculturalmarket deregulation (World Bank 1994). This samepattern was revealed in a 2000 IFPRI study whichfound that “for the most part, reforms were not fullyimplemented… Many countries reversed reforms asa result of external shocks or changing economicconditions” (Kherallah et al. 2000, 9). A 2001World Bank study of policy-conditioned foreign aid

conveys the same message. This study looks at bilat-eral and multilateral assistance to 10 African coun-tries (Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mali, Tanzania,Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, Democratic Republicof the Congo, Nigeria). In the end it could classi-fy only the first two—Ghana and Uganda—as“successful reformers.”15 Another study, whichlooks at Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, andZimbabwe, concludes that in these states afteryears of structural adjustment “the policy environ-ment is not clearly more hospitable toward pri-vate investment than it was before the liberaliza-tion process began.”16

The reluctance of African governments to persistwith liberal reforms prescribed by the World Bankand other lenders or donors partly reflects a region-al and historical culture of mistrust toward privatemarkets. It mirrors the public sector’s desire to con-tinue managing food and farm commodity marketsand input-supply industries for narrow politicalpatronage (often bribe-seeking) purposes. Yet thereis also genuine concern that policy reforms request-ed by the World Bank will—in the short run atleast—cause problems for the poor. Some basis forthis concern is seen in the difficult experiences of thefew African states that have worked hardest toadhere to the World Bank’s structural adjustmentformulas. These countries often regained the soundmacroeconomic foundation needed to revive over-all growth, but at a high price in terms of with-drawing other kinds of public goods. Reformingstates are often under powerful pressure to continuepublic investments and state services for favoredurban constituencies, so they are sometimesinclined when cutting spending to disinvest in pro-grams for the less visible, less powerful rural poor.

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15 The study found that in Côte d’Ivoire and Ethiopia significant policy reforms were recently undertaken, but it is too soon to judgetheir sustainability. In the other six countries, according to the study, “policies changed little or even got worse” (Devarajan, Dollar,and Holmgren 2001, 1). The study remarks on the substantial quantities of foreign assistance spending that were made availablein Africa to “buy” policy reform ($3 billion went to Kenya alone for this purpose during 1970–96) with little actual policy changeto show in the end.16 Jayne et al. (2001, 2) shows that Zimbabwe reimposed price controls in 1998, the government of Zambia got back into fertil-izer distribution in 1997, Ethiopia curtailed marketing board operations but then permitted creation of regional holding compa-nies, Kenya continued to intervene in its maize sector, and Malawi allowed its state-owned marketing board to continue operatingas the nation’s dominant maize buyer.

In Ghana, the government began implementingstructural adjustment in cooperation with the IMFand World Bank under an economic recoveryprogram in April 1983. Ghana took the adjustmentprocess seriously, and its subsequent macro-economic performance emerged as a point of pridefor advocates of policy-based lending. Inflationcame under control and currency exchange rateswere successfully realigned, triggering a revivalof economic growth and exports, including cash-crop farm exports. But at the same time Ghanareduced important state investments in agriculture.The real purchasing value of its total state expendi-tures on agriculture declined from an index valueof 100 in 1981 to a low of 35.8 in 1984. Someof the state outlays cut were wasteful subsidies forinefficient state farming projects, but the index valueof real development expenditures on agriculture—mainly capital investment outlays—also droppedsignificantly, from 100 in 1981 to 60.7 in 1984.Under the economic recovery program Ghanadid initiate a public investment program, whichincluded a number of infrastructure investments. Butthe selection of projects for investment was basedon straight economic rates of return rather thanon numbers of people brought out of poverty orhunger, so too much of this investment ended upgoing to urban areas. Public investments in agr-iculture under the program were only 13.6 per-cent of the total, and public investments in educa-tion and health together received only 6 percent(Sarris and Shams 1991).

Sometimes nations undergoing structural adjust-ment have fallen short in both policy reform andpublic investment. Kenya, as noted, was prone torepeated backsliding from its policy reform promis-es in the 1980s, and its public-sector investments inrural infrastructure slid at the same time. Between1982 and 1988, Kenya’s spending on rural roadsdeclined by more than 40 percent. This was a timeof extreme budget stringency for the countrybecause of low coffee prices, but spending onroads fell even as a percentage of governmentexpenditures, from 10.8 percent in 1980 to 3.0percent by 1989 (Grindle 1996).

Responding to such frustrations in the late1990s, the World Bank began moving toward a

semiofficial “new Washington consensus” thatlooked beyond market-distorting policies to deeperproblems such as weak public goods provision(Goldsmith 2001). The World Bank has been some-what restricted from direct pursuit of better gover-nance through conditioned lending, because asnoted earlier its mandate precludes it taking standsfor or against any particular type of politicalregime. If the World Bank continues to encounterfrustration in Africa when lending for good policy,and if it is indeed constrained from lending explicit-ly for good government, then it might consider acompromise option of returning to its earlier tradi-tion of lending for good investments in some of themore “policy proof” public goods areas that suf-fered during the structural adjustment era, such asrural infrastructure and agricultural research. Areturn to this kind of investment-based lendingwould help the World Bank again become a part ofthe solution in Africa, rather than either seemingirrelevant or (in some cases) as part of the problem.

The agricultural sector is one area in which theWorld Bank could resume larger investment lend-ing. Between 1986 and 1993, total annual WorldBank lending for agriculture and rural developmentfell from nearly $6 billion to only $4 billion (in con-stant 1996 dollars). This decline then continuedthrough 1996, falling to just $2.7 billion (Paarlberg1999). The World Bank went into the 1990s with23 rural development projects in Sub-SaharanAfrica valued at $1.0 billion. By 1999 it was oper-ating only eight such projects valued at just $224million (Wolgin 2001).

If the goal is to offset underinvestment byAfrican governments in rural public goods such astransport, water, power, and agricultural research,a move toward more investment lending by theWorld Bank would seem to be in order. Using loansto buy tangible public goods such as roads andpower can do more good for the rural poor than try-ing to buy (or rent) some kinds or policy reform.Such traditional public goods investments can alsoreach indirectly into other areas of priority concern,such as gender equity. In rural Africa it will bewomen as farmers and as family caregivers whobenefit first from improved feeder roads, strongermarketing infrastructure, better access to health

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services, clean water and electricity, and newbreakthroughs in publicly funded agriculturalresearch. Supplemented by programs specificallytargeted at women—including child and maternalhealth clinics, women’s microcredit lending pro-

grams, greater support for women’s participation inresearch and extension, and membership in ruralcooperatives—basic investments in rural publicgoods in Africa may be one of the best ways to pur-sue greater gender equity (FAO 1997).

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When national governments fail to deliver the pub-lic goods essential for domestic food security, canNGOs or INGOs step in to fill the gap? Naturallymany have tried to do so. Scholars debate whetherthis has been a spontaneous civil society responseto government failures in the developing world(Brown and Korten 1991) or a phenomenon guidedand sponsored by governments within the donorcommunity (Tvedt 1998). Consistent with the sec-ond view, NGOs can offer donor governments aconvenient alternative channel for providing somekinds of assistance, plus valuable political supportto the aid bureaucracies of donor governments,once the NGOs become dependent on public fi-nancing. NGO activities are convenient to nationalgovernments in the developing world too, as gov-ernments under budget pressure welcome an alter-native means for delivering some of the social serv-ices that the state no longer can supply.

The private organizations that seem to workbest in developing countries in filling gaps in socialservice delivery are local grassroots people’s asso-ciations, those that live as well as work among therural poor. While such organizations are widelyappreciated in the abstract by donors and largerNGOs, they nonetheless tend to be overlooked forfunding and often remain disconnected from largernational and international NGO networks. This ispartly because so many are rural rather than urban(and hence hard to reach). It also reflects their lackof the administrative capabilities that most donorbureaucracies demand, such as professional leader-ship, a formal mission statement, and the ability toproduce—often in English or some other Europeanlanguage—a regular stream of accounting reports,project information, and grant proposals.

Even without donor funding, these local ruralgroups have often been capable of stepping in tofill at least some of the gaps left by public-sectorgovernance failures. They usually do best wherelocal collective self-help activities can substitute forthe delivery of government services. For example,they may play a valuable role in local infrastruc-ture maintenance and protection of natural re-sources, helping to maintain walking paths or water-harvesting tanks, or protecting trees, grazing lands,ponds, and riverbanks. Traditional village-levelorganizations often do a better job than the modernstate in managing such local common-propertyresource systems (Jodha 1991). Irrigation manage-ment is another function that is often better per-formed by local associations than by the centralizedorgans of the state (Uphoff 1996).

There is a limit, however, to what local grass-roots organizations can provide. While they canmanage natural resources or maintain and managesome infrastructure systems already in place, theyusually lack the financial clout or the wide reachneeded to create new and broadly connected ruralinfrastructure systems. Local groups can managewater-sharing and field channel maintenance oncean irrigation scheme is created, but they do notordinarily have the resources to construct such ascheme from scratch. While they can help managethe maintenance and repair of local rural road sys-tems, they do not ordinarily have the resources tobuild modern paved all-weather roads. Or at bestthey can provide the labor needed to build somekinds of rural roads, but not the wages needed topay the laborers.

National NGOs tend to have a wider reachand more abundant resources than their local grass-

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7. The Role of NGOs in Supplying Missing Public Goods

roots counterparts. They typically work from a cen-tral office in the capital city, enjoy access to key min-istries, stay connected nationally and internation-ally using modern communications capabilities,and often have their own small fleet of vehicles suit-able for trips upcountry. These assets give themcredibility in the eyes of international donors andthe INGO community, often their most importantsources of funding. National NGOs might thusseem better positioned to make up for national gov-ernance deficits, such as providing investments orservices that governments fail to supply. In fact,national NGOs can play this role in a wide rangeof areas—certainly including delivery of child andmaternal health services, family planning services,emergency relief, school-based feeding programs,child inoculation and oral rehydration programs,and microcredit schemes. Microcredit lending proj-ects, moreover, can contribute directly to food secu-rity, since 60 percent of such funds typically goes tothe rural poor (often women) to support agriculture.NGOs have these significant capabilities, and insome emergency cases where the authority of acentral government has collapsed entirely due toethnopolitical conflict (for example, in southernSudan), virtually all public services have had to beturned over to them.

Yet even in these extreme cases, the goods thatNGOs deliver are usually private services to indi-viduals rather than genuine public goods invest-ments. NGOs are good at reaching individual com-munities with valuable services, but they are not asgood at, for example, creating regional water,power, or rural road systems or sustaining agricul-tural research programs. Also, many NGOs as cur-rently constituted fall prey to some of the same limi-tations found within developing-country govern-ments. Just as national governments in many poordeveloping countries tend to be urban-biased, over-ly centralized, and not directly accountable to ruralcommunities, so too do many NGOs. When head-quartered in the capital city, NGOs may be just asprone to domination by urban-dwelling elites. Interms of organizational structure, many nationalNGOs are just as centralized and top-down as gov-ernments, having adopted this organizational stylepartly to carry out the standardized reporting and

financial accounting demanded by donors. As aconsequence, some NGOs working on rural devel-opment projects in Africa have begun to slip intothe same trap of excessive centralization and expa-triate management that previously characterizedpublic-sector projects in rural areas (Cleaver 1997).NGOs usually want to be accountable to local com-munities and work in genuine partnership with localgrassroots organizations. But they must also beaccountable to the foreign donors that provide themwith funds and to the national governments thatgrant them political space to operate. Suddenbudget constraints imposed by donors or suddenshifts in policy by national governments can forceNGOs to unilaterally abandon projects in localcommunities (Tvedt 1998).

NGOs also face limits in democracy promo-tion. Donors like to assist local NGO “societyorganizations” that engage in prodemocracyactions such as voter education and election moni-toring, advocacy for government transparency, orsupport of political and civil rights more broadly.The attraction of such prodemocracy NGOs is thefact that they are not political parties engaged inexplicit competition for political office, so donorscan support them without being accused of workingfor or against any one particular local partisan fac-tion. Yet the disadvantage of these NGOs is, onceagain, their tendency to operate somewhat apartfrom civil society. They are seldom closely linkedwith local grassroots organizations or with the mostimportant local social movements or voluntary asso-ciations such as religious associations, social net-works, and sports clubs. They tend to be urban-based and urban-biased and depend so heavilyon donor support that they risk appearing foreign-sponsored and hence inauthentic (Ottaway 2000).

In food security and agriculture, NGOs workbest when they are partnering with governmentsrather than trying to replace or challenge them. Ifgovernments want to pursue rural infrastructureinvestments, NGOs can help to mobilize the es-sential local participation in both planning andconstruction of, say, rural road, water, and powerprojects. Local participation is usually the key toensuring affordable maintenance and successfulmanagement via a greater sense of local ownership.

48

NGO participation can also help governments tar-get public infrastructure investments effectively towardthe poor. But the resources themselves usually haveto come through the public sector.

In agricultural research, NGOs are valuableonce again for bringing a participatory dimensioninto the development of new farming technologies,and they often play a key role in the transfer of newtechnologies from research institutes into farmer’sfields. But NGOs in poor countries will seldom beequipped to provide the laboratory, greenhouse,and field station work so often necessary to devel-op effective farming technologies. In some coun-tries, where funding within national research sys-tems has declined, NGOs have sought to hire thescientists leaving the public sector, but once theyare separated from their laboratory facilities, thesescientists are often reduced to much less produc-tive kinds of research. To solve this problem, there

can be no substitute for improved funding throughthe public sector.

In sum, asking NGOs to provide essential pub-lic goods where national governments have failedto do so is usually asking too much. NGOs aregood at many things, but they have not yet demon-strated an ability to keep or restore the peace individed societies, and they are unable to push gov-ernments to embrace democracy or to make theresearch and infrastructure investments needed tosupply the rural poor with better transport, power,water, or technology options. NGOs can help withall of these tasks if governments are doing their job.But when national governments fail or abdicate,NGOs can compensate only to a limited degree.Recall that in the most successful East Asian devel-oping countries, where hunger has been reducedmost rapidly, the essential public goods have almostalways been provided by governments, not NGOs.

49

We began by asking how the challenge of provid-ing improved nutrition and food security for all hasbeen altered by globalization. We end with a con-clusion that the forces of globalization have not nec-essarily shifted responsibility for ending hungeraway from traditional governance institutions suchas nation-states. National governments in manyregions of the developing world (particularly Eastand Southeast Asia) have managed, despite glob-alization, to act effectively to reduce the hunger andmalnutrition problems facing so many of their citi-zens. They did this by establishing and maintaininginternal peace, by providing rule of law, and bymaking the public investments in rural infrastruc-ture and agricultural research needed to sup-port farm productivity growth and facilitate ruralpoverty reduction. Providing such public goodsis easier in some regions than in others, due todifferent colonial and demographic histories plusdiffering agroclimatic endowments. Yet in stateswhere these minimal public goods are not yet pro-vided by government—particularly in Sub-SaharanAfrica—violent conflicts and property insecurityhave undermined investment and growth, and lag-ging farm productivity has deepened rural povertyand worsened hunger.

These divergent food security outcomes in dif-ferent developing-country regions remind us that theworld’s food system is not really a single global sys-tem after all. The most important forces producingpersistent hunger today tend to be local or nationalrather than global, and they are still governed bestat the local or national level rather than at the glob-al level. Where national governments haveresponded well to this challenge, hunger has comeunder better control. Where national governmentshave not yet responded appropriately, hunger haspersisted or even worsened.

Hunger persists in nations and regions sufferingfrom inadequate national governance despite therecent emergence in some areas of more effective“global governance” for food-security. In areas suchas international food trade, international food aid,famine early warning and relief, and internationalagricultural research, an impressive set of inter-national governance institutions capable of provid-ing significant global public goods has alreadybeen created and continues to evolve. These institu-tions should be improved and certainly be betterfunded by national governments, but governancedeficits at the global level are neither the first nor themost obvious cause of persistent hunger in someregions of the developing world. It is an underpro-vision of public goods at the national level, not theglobal level, that remains our central food-securitygovernance problem.

Improving the public goods delivery perform-ance of governments within the developing world isa difficult job for outsiders to assume, given the pow-erful norms of nation-state sovereignty and noninter-vention. Still, those genuinely interested in improvinggovernance in developing regions such as Africahave a number of practical options to follow.

First, they can do a better job of helping withinternal peace preservation and peace restoration,by strengthening the capacity of legitimate inter-governmental institutions (such as the U.N. SecurityCouncil and secretary-general) to intervene in con-flicts or in preconflict situations with timely diplo-matic initiatives or sufficient military force.

Second, they can do a better job from the out-side of promoting rule of law and democratic gov-ernance through a disciplined use of the politicaland diplomatic influence at their disposal so as toisolate leaders unwilling to hold competitive elec-tions or govern in an accountable fashion.

8. Conclusion—Assigning Responsibilities

50

Third, and perhaps most important, they can befar more generous in the way they provide interna-tional economic and financial assistance. Instead ofcutting back on international assistance to agricul-ture at a time when hunger is a growing problem insome regions, they can increase that assistance.The political credibility of all other external effortsand criticisms will be undercut if the funding thatdonors provide continues to decline.

Finally, instead of linking so much aid and lend-ing to the abstract pursuit of “policy reform,” thedonor community should rediscover the value offinancing tangible investments in rural infrastructureand research.

Outsiders concerned about hunger have littleroom to complain about the weak performance ofnational governments in the developing world as

long as they fail to shoulder these important respon-sibilities. Among those who accept these responsi-bilities, however, there should be no reason torefrain from criticizing governance failures within thedeveloping world. In too many international devel-opment settings a code of silence prevails regardinggovernance failures in poor countries. This culture ofnoncriticism is useful to support the harmonious con-duct of international meetings, but it does little toadvance the interests of the poor and hungry. If thedonor community, out of a misplaced sense of polite-ness, fails to critique the substandard performanceof developing-country leaders in policy areas suchas public goods provision, the poor are not be-ing helped. Outsiders are obligated to speak andact when national governments persistently fail toadvance the interests of their own people.

51

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Robert L. Paarlberg is a professor of political science at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts,U.S.A., and an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. His mostrecent books include The Politics of Precaution: Genetically Modified Crops in Developing Countries (JohnsHopkins University Press, 2001) and, with David Orden and Terry Roe, Policy Reform in AmericanAgriculture: Analysis and Prognosis (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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