Andy Stirling, co-director of STEPS, will be a speaker at the conference Mission-Oriented Finance for Innovation on 22-24 July in London, which examines the important role of public sector agencies in tackling societal challenges through innovation. The conference is organised by Prof Mariana Mazzucato of SPRU with Prof L. Randall Wray (UMKC & Levy Institute, USA).
Prof Stirling is part of a panel on 'Mission-oriented finance for smart and inclusive growth' on the third day of the conference, with a contribution entitled 'From top-down missions to bottom-up causes'.
A limited number of tickets are available to the general public free of charge through the conference registration page.
Background
From the website:
"The role of the state in modern capitalism has gone beyond fixing 'market failures'. Those regions and countries that have succeeded in achieving 'smart' innovation-led growth have benefited from long-term visionary 'mission-oriented' policies — from putting a man on the moon to tackling societal challenges such as climate change and the well-being of an ageing population. In addressing these missions, public sector agencies have led the way, investing along the entire innovation chain and courageously defining new high-risk directions. Traditional cost-benefit analysis and market failure justifications would have halted these investments from the start. No internet, no biotech, no nanotech. And today no clean-tech.
To fulfill this mission-oriented function, state agencies — from DARPA in the US to the China Development Bank — have been willing to welcome failure and tackle extreme uncertainty. How do they do it? What are the challenges ahead? Should government step back, or step up? And how can we socialize both risks and rewards so that economic growth is not only 'smart' but also 'inclusive'?
Such investments would not lead to commercialization without a private sector able and willing to engage along the innovation chain. Is financialization putting such engagement under threat? If so, how can innovation policy also promote de-financialization?"
Speakers
Keynote speakers at the conference include Vince Cable (UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills), Luciano Coutinho (BNDES), Giovanni Dosi (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna), Andy Haldane (Chief Economist at the Bank of England), Mariana Mazzucato, Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor of London for Business and Enterprise), Paul Mason (Channel 4 News), Carlota Perez (LSE), Johan Schot (SPRU director), Adair Turner (INET) and L. Randall Wray.
Friday, 11 July 2014
7 July: China and Brazil in African agriculture - news roundup
This news roundup has been collected on behalf of the China and Brazil in African Agriculture (CBAA) project. For regular updates from the project, sign up to the CBAA newsletter
Zimbabwe to Follow Brazilian model of ethanol fuel blending
Zimbabwe’s Agriculture and Rural Development Authority board chairman Mr Basil Nyabadza has said that his country would move from the use of an E15 ethanol blend to an E85 ethanol blend in their cars, to cut down on imported fossil fuels (the number refers to the percentage of ethanol versus petrol). The chairman accepted that some car manufactures will have to readjust, but affirmed that “Zimbabwe has the same opportunity as Brazil to develop a dynamic biofuel industry to serve not only its own fuel needs but the region as well.”
(Manica Post)
Zimbabwe’s Alliance of Anhui-based investors growsThe Alliance of Anhui-Based Investors was established last year and has since then facilitated 37 Anhui companies’ engagement in Zimbabwean markets, with investment contracts worth $17m. These contracts have been signed with business and government leaders, and agriculture is listed as one of the areas of cooperation.
(Anhui News)
Zimbabwe’s tobacco sales exceed expectations
“The sales of tobacco in Zimbabwe reached 190 million kg, which has surpassed this year’s target of 180 million kg, as the country’s 2014 tobacco auction marketing season will end soon, the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) announced Thursday.” This was sold for $604.7m and compares with 166m kg sold in 2013 for $616m. The article cites China as Zimbabwe’s biggest buyer of tobacco.
(Coastweek.com)
Brazil seeks greater agro-business ties with Angola
The Brazilian ambassador to Angola recently stressed the need for stronger ties between the two countries, during which she stressed the potential role of agro-business. She also spoke of a biofuel project in Angola that is currently being supported by Brazil.
(AllAfrica)
‘China’s hunger for foreign food groups soars’
17% of China’s outbound mergers and acquisitions (M&As) this year have been in the food and beverage industries, almost matching M&As in the energy sector which has traditionally been China’s biggest. The targets are a mixture of winemakers, consumer goods and agricultural raw materials. The main buyers are both national state owned enterprises such as COFCO, and local governments such as Shanghai municipal government, but private companies are beginning to increase their activities too.
(Financial Times)
Comparing Chinese and Japanese Power Tillers in Tanzania
This paper by PhD student Andrew Agyei-Holmes looks at Chinese and Japanese power tillers in Tanzania and argues that despite the Chinese tillers being of lower quality, they are more accessible in terms of cost and maintenance, which has led to their much greater success with Tanzanian famers.
(Globelics Academy (pdf))
5 Challenges for Chinese agricultural policy
China’s Minister of Agriculture, Han Changfu, has outlined 5 key challenges for Chinese agriculture that should not be underestimated. They include: 1) increased droughts and floods, 2) downward pressure on agriculture prices, 3) difficulty raising rural incomes, 4) the complexity of rural reforms, 5) food safety and animal disease. This blog argues that Han’s simultaneous call for increased large-scale production in China is bound to make it even harder to meet these targets.
(Dim Sums blog)
Why China wants African students to learn Mandarin
Kenneth King has written a piece on the importance of promoting Chinese language and culture as part of its engagements with Africa. The article lists several key statistics regarding China’s education engagements with Africa reflecting the scale of these interactions.
(The Week)
Why we should care about developing a Green Economy in the global South
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| 101214 Algeria unveils renewable energy strategy by Magharebia on Flickr (cc-by-2.0) |
The importance of developing a green economy – mostly referred to as “an economy where economic prosperity can go hand-in-hand with the ecological sustainability” (PDF) – in the global South cannot be overstated. Studies indicate that with the basic economic system in place, using less carbon intensive technologies, less developed countries (LDCs) are better placed to go green than developed countries, which have to retire the old fossil fuels dependent facilities/technologies.
The transition to a green economy is, however, not an easy task. The constraints include lack of capital, technologies, policies, and legal and institutional frameworks that would enable and regulate private sector investments in the green economy. Yet the wealthiest Northerners, sometimes in collusion with local elites, are seizing opportunities associated with green economies – in many cases with negative impacts for surrounding communities and vulnerable groups in the global South.
Early studies into biofuels developments, for example, indicate that rural communities especially find limits placed on their access to, ownership and control over resources.
Understanding how these initiatives work, and their consequences, has motivated scholars from all over the world to attend the Green Economy in the South conference, which starts tomorrow in Tanzania. With a wide range of questions and cases covered, the conference will steer a lively debate in search for answers, recommendations and cruxes on how these issues can be dealt with.
The conference themes, including eco-tourism, biofuels, ecosystem payments, large-scale farming and the spread of GMOs in Africa, are topical and controversial both among academics and practitioners. One of the aims of the event is to bring together field-based research with theoretical ideas about framing and context.
As the organizers of this conference, my colleagues and I are hopeful that the course taken in the past, such as structural adjustment programmes – mostly implemented without critical academic debates – will not be repeated in the establishment and advocacy of the green economy in the South.
Why the green economy now?
The notable drivers of the green economy are the impacts of climate change and the limit of growth with the current economic system. Indeed, this has been a major force behind the large-scale land acquisitions in Africa – labelled land grabs in mid 2000s and energized by the food and financial crisis of 2007/2008.
Other drivers include pressure by environmentalists and general public on politicians to address climate change and the readiness of the business community to embrace emerging opportunities. Worldwide, politicians are including environmental issues in their agendas/priorities, though how far they are implemented remains debatable. Business communities are also becoming aware that climate change poses risks to their business, and that engaging in the green economy is itself an opportunity worth pursuing.
Available information supports the fact that developing the green economy has positive impacts to local economies, compared to the status quo. UNEP estimates that the green economy could create between 15m and 60m new jobs.
Combined with all these insights we hope that next week’s conference will provide new statistics, status updates, challenges and visions of these new green economy initiatives/projects.
Challenges ahead
While actions for green economy initiatives are crucial, politics ultimately determines what policies are adopted. It would be interesting, therefore, to see how leaders in the global South react to the academic debate in Dodoma. Could this conference shift the policy paradigm, and shape political, social and economic debates in the global South? All these would be interesting to watch during the conference and in the few couple of years afterwards.
Ways forward
If well implemented, transition to green economy to green economy provide several pathways to the reduction of green house gas emission, creates more jobs while reducing poverty in the global south.
To achieve this, academic debates like the forthcoming Dodoma Conference and awareness-raising campaign strategies are essential to the development of the green economy in any country. Such a campaign needs to be grounded on available information and success stories, such as experience with energy efficient buildings and renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, among others.
This post first appeared on the Green Economy in the South conference blog.
Monday, 7 July 2014
Comparing communal areas and new resettlements in Zimbabwe I: An introduction to a short blog series
One of the things people have asked us about our research on land reform in Zimbabwe is: are people better off in the new resettlements, compared to the communal areas? We made the case in the book by comparing our results with published data from nearby communal and resettlement areas, and argued that indeed the new settlers were better off: producing more, accumulating more assets, and investing.
But to probe this question in more depth, in 2012 Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene and I decided to undertake a survey in some nearby communal areas in parallel with the resurvey of the land reform sites. Exactly the same questions were asked of 120 households evenly spread over four sites, each of which were near the A1 sites we had been studying since 2000-01. With one exception, these were sites we had done surveys in during 2006, as part of a study of livestock production in the province, and we used the same sample. This was drawn to represent a range of households, with cattle ownership used as the main indicator. A 'success group' ranking confirmed an even spread of households in each of the 3 'success groups'. Although necessarily a small sample (due to budget and logistics), we believe it is broadly representative of the communal area settings.
The sites were in Serima (near our Gutu sites, in fact adjacent to Lonely A farm), Gutu South (close to our Masvingo district sites in Wondedzo), in Ngundu south (along the road from our Chiredzi sites at Uswaushava) and in Chikombedzi area (near our Mwenezi sites in Edenvale). The Ngundu site in southern Chivi is probably the least comparable to its paired resettlement site, as it benefits from a particular micro-environment, and regularly has better crops than the more dryland site along the Chiredzi road. But overall, the sites have many similarities in terms of basic agroecology, proximity to markets and so on.
The question was whether, a decade after people had moved – often from these very places – to the new resettlements whether they were doing better, worse or much the same. This is an important question for a number of reasons. Clearly critics of land reform argue that new, backward, hopeless communal area settings are being recreated in the new resettlements and that things are no better, perhaps worse. Some instead argue that the communal areas are not so bad after all, and investments should have been focused there, leaving the new land for more commercial, larger-scale endeavours – or indeed keeping the status quo. Others argue that there is a new dynamic emerging in the new resettlements, especially the A1 areas where access to land has provided the opportunity for people to move beyond 'subsistence' and move towards 'market-oriented' growth. Some thought that land reform offered the chance to 'decongest' the communal areas, and allowing those left behind further opportunities, moving the communal areas from 'reserves' to productive areas as land became available. Still others argue that we need to understand the relationships between communal areas and old and new resettlements, both A1 and A2 in an area if the real economic benefits of land reform are to be realised.
All of these debates are relevant as discussions unfold about how to support agriculture and rural development after land reform. For example, major investments by donors – including for example the UK's Department for International Development in partnership with FAO and others – have premised their programme's design on assumptions about agrarian structure, patterns of accumulation, and the opportunities for investment and growth between different types of farmers and different areas. So solid data on what is going on where and what the potentials are really does matter.
In the 1990s, Bill Kinsey and colleagues did systematic studies between the now 'old resettlements' and communal areas, and found that those given resettlement lands fared significantly better on most criteria, although there were some interesting contrasts too.
So, what is the story for the 2000s resettlements in Masvingo province? As ever, the story is complex.
There are clear limitations with our survey (sample size, comparability, lack of counterfactual of no exits to resettlements and so on), but we believe there is some interesting evidence that emerges. In our analysis we concentrated on the comparison between the communal area sites and the A1 villagised/'informal' sites in our larger sample. These seemed to be the most relevant groups to compare, as 62% of new settlers in our sample in these sites came from nearby communal areas. This was less in the A2 and A1 self-contained sites which had 12% and 39% respectively.
In the next few weeks on this blog, I will present some of the headline results under some different headings: people and places, focusing on demography, household composition and movements; land and cropping, focusing on land sizes and crop production; asset accumulation, focusing on asset ownership and investment, including of livestock; and off-farm income and diversification, focusing on the range of other income activities people are engaged in, including reliance on remittances.
We are writing this up more formally as a journal article, but in the meantime we thought blog readers would like a taste of the results. So please do check in each Monday for the next month for an update.
This post was written by Ian Scoones and originally appeared on Zimbabweland
The on-going Masvingo study research is conducted by Ian Scoones, Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene.
But to probe this question in more depth, in 2012 Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene and I decided to undertake a survey in some nearby communal areas in parallel with the resurvey of the land reform sites. Exactly the same questions were asked of 120 households evenly spread over four sites, each of which were near the A1 sites we had been studying since 2000-01. With one exception, these were sites we had done surveys in during 2006, as part of a study of livestock production in the province, and we used the same sample. This was drawn to represent a range of households, with cattle ownership used as the main indicator. A 'success group' ranking confirmed an even spread of households in each of the 3 'success groups'. Although necessarily a small sample (due to budget and logistics), we believe it is broadly representative of the communal area settings.
The sites were in Serima (near our Gutu sites, in fact adjacent to Lonely A farm), Gutu South (close to our Masvingo district sites in Wondedzo), in Ngundu south (along the road from our Chiredzi sites at Uswaushava) and in Chikombedzi area (near our Mwenezi sites in Edenvale). The Ngundu site in southern Chivi is probably the least comparable to its paired resettlement site, as it benefits from a particular micro-environment, and regularly has better crops than the more dryland site along the Chiredzi road. But overall, the sites have many similarities in terms of basic agroecology, proximity to markets and so on.
The question was whether, a decade after people had moved – often from these very places – to the new resettlements whether they were doing better, worse or much the same. This is an important question for a number of reasons. Clearly critics of land reform argue that new, backward, hopeless communal area settings are being recreated in the new resettlements and that things are no better, perhaps worse. Some instead argue that the communal areas are not so bad after all, and investments should have been focused there, leaving the new land for more commercial, larger-scale endeavours – or indeed keeping the status quo. Others argue that there is a new dynamic emerging in the new resettlements, especially the A1 areas where access to land has provided the opportunity for people to move beyond 'subsistence' and move towards 'market-oriented' growth. Some thought that land reform offered the chance to 'decongest' the communal areas, and allowing those left behind further opportunities, moving the communal areas from 'reserves' to productive areas as land became available. Still others argue that we need to understand the relationships between communal areas and old and new resettlements, both A1 and A2 in an area if the real economic benefits of land reform are to be realised.
All of these debates are relevant as discussions unfold about how to support agriculture and rural development after land reform. For example, major investments by donors – including for example the UK's Department for International Development in partnership with FAO and others – have premised their programme's design on assumptions about agrarian structure, patterns of accumulation, and the opportunities for investment and growth between different types of farmers and different areas. So solid data on what is going on where and what the potentials are really does matter.
In the 1990s, Bill Kinsey and colleagues did systematic studies between the now 'old resettlements' and communal areas, and found that those given resettlement lands fared significantly better on most criteria, although there were some interesting contrasts too.
So, what is the story for the 2000s resettlements in Masvingo province? As ever, the story is complex.
There are clear limitations with our survey (sample size, comparability, lack of counterfactual of no exits to resettlements and so on), but we believe there is some interesting evidence that emerges. In our analysis we concentrated on the comparison between the communal area sites and the A1 villagised/'informal' sites in our larger sample. These seemed to be the most relevant groups to compare, as 62% of new settlers in our sample in these sites came from nearby communal areas. This was less in the A2 and A1 self-contained sites which had 12% and 39% respectively.
In the next few weeks on this blog, I will present some of the headline results under some different headings: people and places, focusing on demography, household composition and movements; land and cropping, focusing on land sizes and crop production; asset accumulation, focusing on asset ownership and investment, including of livestock; and off-farm income and diversification, focusing on the range of other income activities people are engaged in, including reliance on remittances.
We are writing this up more formally as a journal article, but in the meantime we thought blog readers would like a taste of the results. So please do check in each Monday for the next month for an update.
This post was written by Ian Scoones and originally appeared on Zimbabweland
The on-going Masvingo study research is conducted by Ian Scoones, Blasio Mavedzenge, Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene.
Thursday, 3 July 2014
Antibiotics: avoiding a return to the dark ages of medicine
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| Sean Warren, iStockphoto |
This doomsday scenario is one where routine infections which we have come to think of as treatable nuisances, are once again life threatening; where modern medical procedures such as cancer treatment and surgery, threaten patient’s lives by leaving them vulnerable to untreatable infections instead of extending and improving lives. This is scary stuff. And scarier still is the fact that most agree it is not scaremongering. Indeed, it is already happening. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control looked at five well known antibiotic resistant bacteria and estimated that they alone caused 25,000 deaths a year in Europe.
Today Mr Cameron announced an independent review into how to tackle the global resistance problem; as penicillin was a British invention, it was fitting, he said, that Britain should now provide leadership. He defined the challenge as consisting of three elements: evolving resistance, the lack of development of new antibiotics and the over use of existing antibiotics.
The first is an unavoidable process, due to natural selection, which can be influenced but not stopped. On this, the focus on drugs should not detract from the importance of sanitation and infection control; one way to influence the development of resistance is to influence the rate of infection. Worryingly, there are currently huge gaps in what we know about the levels of resistance around the world.
The second element is tricky too. The golden age of drug production is long gone and getting effective drugs to market is expensive and uncertain. Pharmaceutical companies argue that they face limited returns on their investment as not only are antibiotics poor money-spinners (being short-course and low cost treatments), but it is likely that sales of new drugs will be restricted as governments try to regulate their use more strictly. Still, new business models for research and development are plausible and already being negotiated.
The third element, drug use, is potentially the most complex and challenging of all. Inappropriate drug use is a problem the world over and key will be finding ways to regulate the consumption of medicine. Any British leadership on this issue must consider that, in contrast to the highly regulated NHS or European health system models, people in many Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) access healthcare through disorganised and unregulated markets, with the poor in particular relying on informal providers.
In these markets the use of antibiotics is rife, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) reporting they account for 40- 50% of prescriptions. Stopping ‘irrational’ and ‘inappropriate’ use of antibiotics is a common refrain. Yet these labels detract from the many risks and uncertainties which people and healthcare providers weigh up when deciding on treatment, often in the absence of diagnostics. Faced with high and dangerous disease burdens, and with limited access to good quality health services and products, using these medicines presumptively is understandable, and at times beneficial. Indeed it was not long ago that the WHO was recommending presumptive treatment of malaria in endemic regions.
The crux of the issue is the access/excess balance. How can you regulate in a way which ensures essential medicines are available when needed, but are not overused so that they become ineffective? This also involves a trade off between individual and societal needs. The availability of cheap generic drugs to hard to reach populations through informal channels has undoubtedly reduced morbidity. It has been suggested that the impressive reductions in child and maternal mortality in Bangladesh can be attributed to increased access to antibiotics to fight infections. Top down responses such as tightly restricting the availability of antibiotics, to only formal providers for instance (if that was even possible), may adversely affect the poor and vulnerable who face barriers accessing such services. As such they may also work against key development goals like reducing maternal mortality or achieving universal health coverage.
Work by colleagues in the STEPS Centre has highlighted the ways in which regulation must be appropriate for local realities. The informal sector is both problematic and potentially a life line. Attempts to ensure access and also limit antibiotic resistance must take the significant role they play in health systems into account. At the Institute of Development Studies we are partnering with organisations in LMICs who have longstanding relationships with these informal health providers in order to understand the local contexts of drug use more fully.
By Annie Wilkinson, post doctorate researcher, IDS
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