Resilience is the development buzzword of the moment

Resilience is the development buzzword of the moment. It seems that we invoke it in an attempt to exorcise our apparent inability to avert the suffering caused by the repeated food crises that have plagued West Africa in 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2012. If small producers attain resilience, we think, the crisis will not be repeated.

This discourse becomes disturbingly hollow when we are not able to define which are the tools that produce resilience. What do we really need to avoid a situation where small producers do not produce enough food to cover the year and have to resort to food aid when the harvest has been worse than average? For decades, development cooperation has sought solutions tailored to small farmers in the Sahel. There is no single tool to be prescribed, and only some of those currently used are new (including index insurance to name one of the most remarkable). Some solutions are widely deemed necessary (grain marketing by producer organizations being one of them).

Cereal banks and warehouse receipt systems are among the most widespread forms of grain marketing. Cereal banks have a troubled history. Although they have been promoted since the seventies, very few have survived for long. They are very vulnerable to three types of problems: poor management, the climate risk and price risk.

Mismanagement can occur in any organization. Since the cereal bank is a solution that lies in the very people who suffer from hunger—as opposed to temporary solutions that come from the state in the form of emergency assistance or social protection—they are subject to the same collective action problems affecting any associative enterprise. Solutions, always partial and difficult, must be grounded in a careful promotion and external supervision that should be subsidized.

Climate risk has a double effect: small farmers who lose crops cannot pay debts and are forced to buy more food at a higher price. At the same time, cereal banks cannot afford the fixed costs due to low inventories and loss of capital due to defaults on loans. Several solutions have been developed, including indexed weather insurance. It is a solvable problem that requires an immense effort of extension and institutional capacity building in agricultural insurance, with the indispensable participation of the private sector.

Price risk is a major problem. Oxfam has been exploring the possibilities of price risk management in recent years. In January 2011, a convening was organized and its conclusions were far from optimistic. The application of a certain price in sub-Saharan Africa was seen as difficult due to the absence of commodity exchanges and widespread government intervention in markets. There is some scepticism about the feasibility of solutions tailored to small producers, especially for food staples.

There are no solutions for managing price risk that have been fully extended. The World Bank ITF projects started in the year 2000, but have not shown a huge success. In addition, solutions were focused on cash crops for export. Recently, the experience of Standard Bank and Rabobank, which work insuring the price of food staples linked to credit, is highly encouraging but still not very widespread.

State interventions in the grain market are one of the major barriers, though not the only cause.

Before emergencies or price increases that restrict access to food for millions, we face a dilemma, which at the same time is a paradox: to save producers (who have not been able to produce all year) from hunger, or to wreck their organizations, which should be able to sell their products better and thus turn them into net sellers.

States cannot afford not to take action against hunger when it arrives. What they can do in parallel is to develop mechanisms geared towards protecting the organizations affected by price falls caused by these interventions. These mechanisms would have the two-fold aim of a) increasing the incorporation of producers to associations that protect them from price risk, and b) avoiding excessively cautious State interventions (for fear of affecting the markets), which sometimes result in “too little-too late”.

The Oxfam research project on Food Security and Resilience in West Africa (SARAO) seeks to reflect on these issues. We know that there are no magic or simple solutions. Weather conditions will continue to worsen and crops that fail to adapt will be lost. Although the profile of price volatility has significantly dropped after the 2008 crisis, it remains an issue of concern.  With our interventions we hope to build resilience, but it is not realistic to believe that we can attain it to such a level that resistance to increasingly difficult external conditions is assured (particularly in complex contexts such as the Sahel). Ultimately, it is part of the responsibility of governments and international organizations to place the necessary means at the disposal of people to ensure that both their right to food and their livelihoods are guaranteed. It’s a difficult balance. 

Contact

Gabriel Pons Cortès
Responsable de Medios de Vida Sostenibles 
(Programme-Policy Advisor) Unidad de Desarrollo Temático y Metodológico (UDTM) Dto de Cooperación Internacional
Email: [email protected]