FOOD SECURITY C oncepts, Basic Facts, and Measurement Issues

1. FOOD SECURITYConcepts, Basic Facts,and Measurement Issues June 26 to July 7, 2006 Dhaka, Bangladesh

2. Rao 3e:Issues and Institutions in Governance Learning: Trainees learn to identify the main aspects of the system governing FS: the different types of community, state and non-government organizations, and reasons for governance failures along with the importance of coordination and cooperation.

3. Brief Contents • the political and institutional environment • goals vs instruments; wills vs abilities • lack of influence of the poor: cause or result of governance failures • cooperation and coordination as concepts in governance • the role of non-state organizations: food sector organizations, local and community organizations, non-government organizations

4. The Political-Institutional Environment • Markets do not operate in a vacuum. • Defining Rules They require rules, chiefly laws, that define rights & responsibilities. E.g., when land rights or access to common resources are ill-defined, market transactions in those resources will be problematic. • Enforcing Rules Yet, merely defining rules is insufficient if those rules are not adequately enforceable. E.g., if creditor rights in case of default are not enforceable, loan transactions may simply not take place. • Thus, non-market institutions are fundamental both when markets function (whether poorly or well) and when they fail to functionat all.

5. The Problem of Governance • But defining or enforcing rules is easier said than done! • WHO will define the rules? • WHAT will be the ends/purposes of those rules? • HOW will the rules be enforced? • A system of governance is defined by the answers it provides to these three questions. • When rules are defined by a narrow interest group, when their purposes are hidden, or when their enforcement is partial, the result is misgovernance. • Misgovernance results from minority control of rule-making, misrepresentation or lack of transparency, and deliberate omissions and commissions in enforcement. • Conversely, good governance, is a matter of democratic control, transparency and impartial enforcement.

6. Goal vs. Implementation……Ability vs. Will • Goals vs. Instruments: Any public policy goal confronts fiscal, administrative and informational constraints [`constraints in implementation’] • But these `constraints in implementation' (not resource constraints) are themselves policy choices and so not independent of the goals. This is why the notion of “lack of political will” is a contradiction in terms! • If there is a coherent public policy goal, then, this already implies a coherent mode of implementing it.

7. Lack of Influence of Poor: Cause or Result of Governance System? • In the present context, national `governance’ refers to role governments play in enabling/disabling the poor to help themselves in economic/political spheres: it is thus a question of who owns government? • The key words are empowerment, participation and accountability. • Poor suffer not only low incomes but lack of freedom of choice and action • Lack of influence is not just result of poverty but also cause of poverty

8. Lack of Influence of Poor ... (contd) • Problem "Governance system”, defined as, political & legal institutions regulating political power, does not tell us who actually governs. • If development failure is due (partly) to governance failure, then, we must answer this question. • But our understanding in this crucial area remains severely limited. We can all agree that good governance enables favourable social outcomes. But this, the easy part, seems true by definition. The hard part is: what defines "good"? and who defines them?

9. Lack of Influence of Poor ... (contd) • Example Cooperation is a key public goods including good governance itself. It seems to be more effective among people who are relatively equal. Does this allow the generalization that greater equality is always good for cooperation or that inequality necessarily limits cooperation? • Example Though there is a significant world-wide trend toward decentralized governance, this has not produced any clear trend of superior governance and its impact on development performance is even less clear.

10. The Misuse of “Governance” • Governance has become a buzzword for purely technocratic solutions to misgovernance. Such use results from: • Failure to ask: WHO owns the State/Society? • Evasion of: WHAT will be the ends of development • Faith in: technical fixes for the HOW of impartial enforcement • The technocratic approach evades/avoids the political by focusing on corruption, carrots (incentives) and sticks (penalties) in administrative systems, and, in the final analysis, privatization of parts of the public domain. • But corruption is symptom of misgoverance, not cause; incentives will follow the answer to the “Who?” question, not decide it; and privatization of the public domain will only reproducemisgovernance, not overcome it.

11. Good Governance(Properly Understood) Key “technical” issues in the public sphere are COORDINATION and COOPERATION. And there are no technical fixes to these.** WILL, COMMITMENT and TRUST of the people are the key elements. These are anything but technocratic and so have no place in what has become the buzzword of “governance” But they are also the keys to REALdemocracywhich is another phrase for GOOD governance ** This proposition is centrally important and is illustrated in the following two slides.

12. Managing Public Space –(1) Coordination Profits with and without Investment Coordination Limitation: MultipleEquilibria_RequireVisible Hand

13. Managing Public Space -(2) Cooperation The Possibility of Gains from Cooperation Limitation: Need for Enlightened Self-Interest

14. Role of Cooperation People may also cooperate in activities either to benefit collectively, or because these activities are seen to have cultural or moral value • e.g., collective management of CPR (common property resources), communal building of dams in China, and more informally, in Africa • e.g., Government interventions may be themselves examples: WWII rationing of all basic foods in UK was to ensure equal access of all • e.g., Cuba's population were subject to a food rationing system during the 1970s and 1980s and until the late 1970s, the rice ration was universal in Sri Lanka

15. The "Moral Economy" • Describes customary rights and obligations linking individuals or classes together, and especially important under food stress situations. e.g. northern Namibian women & children had right to go to kraal of the chief during times of famine, and he the obligation to feed his dependent subjects • For the most vulnerable, non-market institutions may be critical in FS & survival. They can neutralize a harsh market. • BUT markets erode non-market institutions as communal rights are erased. • These considerations apply not just to a small village community but also to the world community itself.

16. Moral Economy in Bengal

17. Food Sector Organisations • The private commercial sector Major role in the food chain (production, transport, retailing, etc.). Liberalization further enhances this role. But their size and forms vary enormously from the tiny female-dominated local-level marketing or processing to gigantic operations of transnationals. • Co-operatives have scale economies as their economic rationale (e.g., in transport, output marketing, input purchases, etc.). They can be very attractive where markets are under-developed and isolated. Co-operatives often fail as much for lack of techno-managerial resources as for co-option and corruption by the political system. Success depends on literacy & education, and well-developed political support. • Parastatals In recent decades, their numbers have dwindled e.g., in marketing, etc. They gave government control over political sensitive food market and prices, and also fiscal resources. Scale economies in marketing were a major justification. Their accounting losses were taken to be proof of social inefficiency. Many have been privatized or abolished.

18. Local and community organisations • Local and community organisations These can be important in ensuring social security including food security. This can occur at various levels from spontaneous actions of neighbourhood support if a family or a member of the community suffers destitution up to different forms of community based social security institutions. • Their main advantage is their close relation to the members. The community has better knowledge of destitution amidst it and better means to respond to it. These capacities can be used in implementing targeted policy interventions for FS in: • Identification of the people in need for food assistance • Determination of the type and volume of assistance needed

19. Local and community organisations (contd) • Distribution to the beneficiaries (e.g. through community fair price shops, community kitchens, schools, health centres). • Communities can be very effective in managing local irrigation, digging of shallow wells and management of village seed banks and also credit schemes

20. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) • NGOs offer a potential vehicle for supporting or complementing public sector • Can be important in places with weak infrastructure and low administrative capacities • Their decentralized structures makes them suitable for targeted assistance

21. NGO Strengths and Limitations Some of their strengths include: • Ability to reach poor and remote communities with few basic resources or infrastructure and where government services are limited; • Lobbying function for the poor and underprivileged; • Ability to promote local participation in design and implementation • Building self-confidence and self-organzation among low-income groups • Low cost of operation from low cost-technologies, streamlined services, etc. and innovativeness and adaptability.

22. NGO Strengths and Limitations Some of their limitations include: • Limited replicability of small, localized activities. Scaling up tends to make NGOs top-down, non-participatory and dependent on external support. • NGO activities are often not self-sustainable as they are often relief-oriented rather than developmental • Limited managerial and technical capacities of many NGOs • Lack of broad programming strategy for a region or a sector and poor co-ordination of NGOs at different levels • Controversial political or religious orientation of some NGOs.