Comments

Hi Joel -- thank you for your comment. Those figures really are quite staggering aren't they? I agree, this is absolutely something where momentum has to be stopped here in Australia. The challenges the US is facing in reforming food aid show that once these types of policies gain traction they are very hard to reverse.

A comment from PNG to bring to your attention that there is another difference between the West and the East that is related to aid. Western aid does not come with an assault on the ability of Pngians to enter the low levels of our business sector. Small and large stores, container tuckerboxes and fast foods are blanketed by Asians. Laissez faire economics does not work well for the benefit of the PNG people. They need assistance to enter the S.M.E.business economy; positive discrimination is needed to assist them to catch up with people who have had so much more exposure to the pressures and benefits of developed economies. Tony Flynn

Ashlee, I cannot thank you enough for your terrific critique of SWEDOW aid. The requirement for the Australian aid program to buy and ship millions of tonnes of Australian grain over 40+ years (up to 2007) was hugely costly and distortionary - both for the program and for development. AusAID made the best of a bad job by channelling increasing proportions of this commitment through WFP, but assistance in the form of food sourced from Australia was rarely the best option in humanitarian situations (because of the distance, time and cost involved), and it was always costly and distorted local markets and incentives when delivered as development assistance - even in food-for-work or school feeding programs. Alas, AusAID has had to ward off many hare-brained cases of SWEDOW, often pushed by MPs and not just confined to food. Your critique is timely. Peter

Maree Thanks for this great tribute to Helen. She was a force of nature and a passionate development advocate, both qualities you have captured well. I worked as an editor in her early days at NCDS and I well remember her reaction to a concern I raised about an article for publication that described a particular country's situation as hopeless. She said we won't publish, we don't shy away from robust analysis and criticism but we will always be constructive. Her tendency to over-statement in her later years sometimes seemed to go against this precept, but she also loved a good argument so I'm sure she enjoyed many of the public stoushes she provoked. Vale Helen Hughes.

Yes, I've done the same I entirely concur - AVI was a much better provider.

I think Chris has made a very salient point about the ongoing relevance of ‘top-down’ pressure to broad-based service delivery (thanks Chris for the excellent link). In 2013 it’s no longer a secret that the Waigani-centric approach of the last generation has failed more than it has succeeded. And doing more of the same would seem most likely to amplify the current status quo of service delivery, rather than altering the current trajectory. There’s a widespread consensus, from ordinary citizens to MPs to Ministers and donors, that we need to change course if we want service delivery to get better. The current political executive at the national level in PNG <a href="http://www.thenational.com.pg/?q=node/51487" rel="nofollow">appears to be pinning</a> most of its service delivery aspirations to by-passing Waigani and its public servants. But what are the feasible alternatives? ‘Bottom-up’ models of service delivery in PNG, without ‘top-down’ pressure, seem acutely susceptible to capture by the ‘local grain’. This would work well when the local grain of politics exhibits small-scale characteristics of the developmental state – but is this the norm, or the exception? Where the local grain is profoundly anti-development then we shouldn’t expect any gains. And making judgements about resource allocation based on assessments of the local grain may be bureaucratically problematic, and essentially an intensely political act. Back & Hadenius <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007.00383.x/full" rel="nofollow">considered this issue in a paper</a> written in 2008 “Democracy and State Capacity: Exploring a J-Shaped Relationship”. They find that high levels of state capacity (a proxy for service delivery) come from a combination of top-down (centralised legitimate authority) and bottom-up (citizen auditors) pressure, e.g. Denmark. But good levels of service delivery can be found in authoritarian states that have a lot of the top-down pressure and very little of the bottom-up kind, e.g. Saudi Arabia, Cuba. States that have neither have low state capacity, e.g. PNG, Haiti. A clear vision is starting to emerge of what PNG would look like if it were able to deliver broad-based services to its citizenry. A centralised state apparatus with high levels of accountability, combined with a nation of citizen auditors, with both constantly reinforcing inclusive institutions, fuelling a virtuous circle of human development. The hard part is ‘how do we get there?’ I would hope and expect that in coming years much greater resources will be deployed in pursuit of this challenge, rather than continuing with the forlorn hope that service delivery will grow out of granting Waigani and its 'rentiers' an unaccountable monopoly over public resources.

Hi Paul, Thanks for the comment and thank you for the suggestion. My wife has just mentioned to me it was a great movie too apparently. Terence

Thanks for this post Andrea - it does a great job of setting out very clearly some of the key issues and challenges and I particularly appreciate the reference to some really important lessons learned through the Kula and ECF experiences. As with most things, it's really important that donors and others working in this space have a detailed understanding of what the private sector environment is in each country. As this work (and other related activities go forward) I would hope to see 2 things emerge. One is, as you flag in the title of this blog, a coordinated approach between ADB, IFC, AusAID (and others?) based on information sharing, environmental enabling and a commitment to reducing everyone's transaction costs (not just those of donors) and the other is appropriate recognition given to the place, needs and realities faced by those who populate the private sector(s) of the region rather than an overemphasis being placed on external 'big' businesses who have the attraction of (possibly) being able to operate 'to scale'.

This rise in obesity in developing countries is certainly worthy of closer examination. I think it is fair criticism to say that this is not just the middle class and rich in those countries. I suspect that part of the rise may have a correlation to urbanisation and in particular to the growth in urban slums. As you mention, it is these people who lack access to nutritious food and often rely on cheap food of low quality. It may be that we need to do more with the private sector to make available low cost nutritious food in these environments rather than promoting their highly refined, high calorie, low nutrient products.

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This looks like an op-ed piece for a major newspaper. Highly entertaining and astute.

Food is very important for human being, but it doesn't mean any type of food, mostly you will see in the middle class of below poverty line that people don't have food for the last two or three days totally depends on water. Most of the people die not because of food, but lack of nutrition.