A newborn baby is held by her father outside a church in a small village outside Quelimane, Mozambique. The country has improved its primary completion rates since civil war ended. Photograph: Getty/Graeme Robertson
The World Bank has published its annual World Development Report and, as usual, it is a good read. This year its focus is on insecurity, conflict and fragility. It aims to build the evidence linking development, the bank's primary area of expertise, and insecurity, one of the biggest constraints on progress.
The first things you can expect from a report like this are some new era-defining stats. So we get this: "One-and-a-half billion people live in areas affected by fragility, conflict or large-scale, organised criminal violence, and no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single UN millennium development goal."
The first part of the report shares a lot of helpful evidence for something that should be obvious – conflict is one of the biggest enemies of development. Anyone Ivorian would be able to thoroughly back that assessment at the moment as they watch the development gains of recent years being put at risk by the present violence.
To pick from one of the many statistics: "Mozambique more than tripled its primary [school] completion rate in just eight years, from 14% in 1999 [seven years after the fighting ended] to 46% in 2007."
So far, so obvious. What does the World Bank think should be done? It has one clear and compelling answer: Make institutions more legitimate. Legitimate institutions are what the report cleverly describes as a country's "immune system" against conflict.
The report turns out to be one more example of how "institutions" have finally made it to the very top of the development hierarchy, trumping "good policy" as the latest key to development progress. The report is impressive in scope, seeking to reassess an international order built in the wake of two world wars and finding it wanting for the new reality of conflict today, with its complex, repeated and inter-related forms of violence.
Commendably, it mentions the big issues, like the drugs trade and international channels of corruption, that development experts often prefer to leave to others. It emphasises the importance of improved data collection to track stolen money. But on drugs it is weaker, mustering only the following recommendation: "Exploring the costs and benefits of different combinations of demand and supply-side measures would be a first step to underpinning more decisive demand-side actions." Hmmm.
Being the World Bank, there is not the slightest hint that western powers could be at fault for any of the violence and conflict in the world. It might have been nice to acknowledge that violence is not a developing world phenomenon, by adding a few examples of western problems.
The style of the report is humble, which is all the rage in development nowadays. It is an attitude taking some time to filter down to country managers, though, where anecdotal tales of arrogant westerners insisting on rapid change along Washington Consensus lines are still all too common. But at least there is change at the top.
One thing I particularly liked was the emphasis on job creation because it is unemployment that is the major driver behind young people joining rebel groups or criminal gangs (according to the surveys quoted). Again, it's common sense, but it's always useful to have it written down. Jobless growth is not good enough.
First prize for most glaring omission is shared between Colombo and Paris. The major story in internal armed conflict recently, the crushing of the Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka, gets not one mention in the whole report. I expect there are complicated politics behind this silence.
But there is no such excuse for the failure to mention the Paris agenda on aid effectiveness. Fundamental to the legitimacy of institutions is where their money comes from. So the report is right to focus on the donor-recipient relationship, which muddies the supposed accountability links between citizen and government. It is good that this link (a particular beef of mine) is being recognised in such an important report.
But to engage in a long list of (very welcome) suggestions for how international agencies should reform without mentioning the major international initiative seeking to achieve such reform is strange. While calling for donors to work better together, the World Bank is in danger of looking like it prefers to go it alone, setting up a new group of "WDR principles".
What about the future? The WDR recognises that climate change and increased competition for natural resources are likely to heighten the risk of conflict in the years to come. And there are some very useful pointers as to what makes for a potentially more peaceful future.
One that particularly hit me was this: "Some states have tried to maintain stability through coercion and patronage networks, but those with high levels of corruption and human rights abuses increase their risks of violence breaking out in the future." Or in layman's terms, you need to deal with the causes of the problem. The causes are usually linked to poverty and injustice, as a later graphic makes clear.
That is also one of the conclusions (obviously) of a separate initiative that is worth looking at. The Global Peace Index ranks countries according to how peaceful they are, and while the methodology behind it can be criticised (as any index can) it adds important evidence to the debate about which policies really do contribute to peace.
Geeta, a four-month-old Indian baby. Figures for child mortality, underweight children and other basic health indicators have showed no significant improvement in seven years. Photograph: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images
Head out of Delhi, across the fetid Yamuna river, with the tourist sites behind you and the northern Indian plains in front of you. Go past the new, luxury flats built for the Commonwealth Games, turn right and follow the lines of the new metro and then plunge left, avoiding the chaotic traffic and the occasional bullock cart and into the seething slums.
Millennium development goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
To halve between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people earning less than $1 a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. The goal also calls for the achievement of full and productive employment and decent work for all.
Consistent progress in reducing poverty has been made across Asia. China has halved its poverty rate. Poverty levels in India have remained stable, but the UN is confident the country will hit the target. Progress across Africa has been patchy. Ethiopia and Angola have halved poverty levels, but rates in Nigeria have increased. More than half of countries have made progress on reducing hunger, but levels have remained the same in 28 countries and increased in 24. Latin America has made strong progress in this area, as has south-east Asia, although India has not performed as well as expected.
The UN is confident poverty levels will be halved, but the recent food crisis has pushed the hunger target off track.
In a small, two-roomed flat off one of the packed streets of Kalyan Puri, one of the biggest slum neighbourhoods, you will find Anju Rao, a 50-year-old grandmother who spends her days looking after her two small grandchildren. Their parents are rickshaw pedallers and construction workers and only return home after dusk, if at all.
"It's not so bad. Everyone in the family has got used to it," Rao says, looking out through the lattice of illegal electricity wires at the drenching monsoon rain.
On every street corner of this district, at around noon, a woman with a big tin pot ladles out thick gruel to a stream of small children carrying tin bowls. Each one is meant to get exactly 320 grammes, but few are measuring what ends up in their bowls. Each of these feeding points, known as anganwadi, which means "courtyard shelter" in Hindi, looks after between 100 and 200 children and their mothers.
It is among the world's biggest organised feeding schemes for young children, which according to government estimates reaches 58 million children. It is one of many programmes introduced by successive Indian governments aimed at curbing malnutrition in adults and, especially, in children. Yet, despite the investment of billions each year and initiatives ranging from employment guarantee schemes to school meals, malnutrition in India is rife and the country is almost certain to miss the millennium development goal one – eradicating extreme poverty and hunger – by 2015 by a considerable margin. This is despite economic growth that has more than quadrupled India's per capita gross domestic product since 1992.
"Growth has seen the poor get poorer," says Dunu Roy, of Hazards Centre, an independent thinktank in Delhi. Calculating poverty in India, as elsewhere, is a fraught business. By the government's calculations, poverty has been dropping steadily in recent years. Whatever the trend, a recent study by researchers at Oxford University revealed how grave problems still are. Using innovative methodology, factoring a range of elements from cooking fuel used to simple food intake, researchers found that there were more poor in the eight poorest states of India – 410 million people – than in the 26 poorest nations of Africa. Levels of poverty in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, for example, were roughly comparable with those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
One reason for the persistence of malnutrition in India is that the myriad schemes set up to combat it are hugely inefficient. The largest involve the distribution of subsidised food to the needy. The subsidies are significant. Rampant food inflation over recent years now means that a kilo of wheat costs around 15 rupees (11p) and of rice, 25 rupees (18p).
But that means incentives for corruption are high. Corruption on the part of both food distributors and officials, combined with administrative incapacity and poor logistics all impede delivery. This summer, a row blew up in the Indian parliament amid claims that the entirely predictable monsoon rains destroyed around £8bn of food because of poor storage. "We estimate that around half the food actually gets distributed," says Roy.
In its last MDG interim report, the UN also identified the food crisis of 2007 and the financial chaods of the same year as contributory factors in India and other countries' continuing poor record in this area.
"Before the onset of the food and financial crises, a number of regions were well on their way to halving, by 2015, the proportion of their population that were undernourished. South-eastern Asia, which was already close to the target in 2005-2007 made additional progress, as did Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Asia. Progress in the latter region was largely due to reductions in hunger in China. The prevalence of hunger also declined in sub-Saharan Africa, although not at a pace that was suffi ciently fast to compensate for population growth and to put the region on track to meet the MDG target."
The world still has a long way to go to meeting MDG1; the prevalence of underweight children worldwide fell from 31% in 1990 to 26% in 2008, according to a Unicef report published this month. And the progress that is being made is not necessarily helping the worst-affected.
"In India… there was no meaningful improvement among children in the poorest households, while underweight prevalence in the richest 20% of households decreased by about a third between 1990 and 2008," the report said.
In Kalyan Puri, around half of the local distribution offices were shut and the officials paid to weigh children and monitor distribution absent. Many locals in the slum turn to Nurmila, a 31-year-old local NGO worker, who is employed under a separate Delhi state government scheme which aims to try to improve locals' access to services. "Very few of the families with ration cards actually get their rations. The shops are never open or they just don't hand over the right amount," says Nurmila. "Some families go for months without the food the government says they should get."
Those that do get the rations often complain that the better-quality wheat purchased by the government is often replaced with a poor substitute by the shop owners. As for the food doled out on the doorsteps by the anganwadi, many complain it is often inedible.
It is also, being largely rice, pulses or wheat porridge, unsuited for very young infants. The real problem in India, experts say, is undernourishment of the very young. Children of five and above receive – at least theoretically – their midday meal at school. In Kalyan Puri, new-borns and toddlers fall through a gap in provision. Yet these years are crucial for later mental and physical development.
According to the World Bank, 43% of Indian children are underweight – the highest level in the world and a figure that has remained constant for at least 20 years. In China, the figure is only
7%, in sub-saharan Africa it averages 28%. Poor nutrition among lactating and pregnant mothers means the effects of post-natal malnutrition for children are exacerbated.
The results are evident in the charity-run primary school run for street kids behind the police station. Here, teacher Amitha Joshi says many children do not eat from early in the morning when their parents leave home until late at night. "They cannot concentrate, cannot retain any facts, they have serious behavioural problems," she told the Guardian.
President Laurent Gbagbo is not the only African leader who refuses to fade away. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
There are many reasons for being angry with Laurent Gbagbo, whose belligerence has thrust Ivory Coast back into the eye of the storm and threatened to undo any democratic gains of the past decade. For a man who made ultimate political capital from opposing the strongman rule of Félix Houphouët Boigny, it is a chilling commentary on African politics that Gbagbo now seeks to cement his place as one, refusing to hand over power after losing November's presidential election.
Yet it may be easy to understand – without condoning – Gbagbo's stance. He must be wondering why the international community has singled him out for special attention when it hasn't acted with such aggression towards Robert Mugabe or Mwai Kibaki. The events of the past month certainly remind us of disconcerting truths about the brand of democracy in many African countries and elsewhere in the developing world, truths that the pressure for optimism often forces us to wish away.
Consider these cases: in Zimbabwe, the question, in April 2008, was not whether Mugabe had lost an election held in a climate of state-inspired brutality, but whether he would "agree" to leave power. He refused, and was forced by a crumbling economy into a power-sharing arrangement with Morgan Tsvangirai, of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). He is now rumoured to want to end what he sees as the indignity of sharing power. More elections are due, with Mugabe saying recently they would be free and fair "as they always are".
And then there is Kenya. Around 1,300 people died in the violence that followed the presidential election in 2007, in which Kibaki was declared the winner. He refused to relinquish power, before international pressure forced him to share a political bed with rival Raila Odinga. Another thorny union in which ethnically aligned rival supporters are reportedly already buying guns in preparation for the elections next year. While Kibaki will not contest, thanks to the two-term constitutional limit, ethnic polarisation – especially between the Kikuyu and Luo communities – means we can expect another highly charged electoral period.
One man who knows how to beat term limits is Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda for almost a quarter of a century. Museveni controversially abolished presidential term limits in 2005, and next month he will contest his fourth election. A topical question is already being asked, even by Ugandan voters: what would happen if, like Gbagbo, Museveni lost power? Some of his previous utterances provide a clue to the man's mind.
Two yeas ago, as Mugabe was declaring that "MDC will never rule this country", Museveni was quoted in the Ugandan media as saying he would not have handed over power if the opposition had won the elections in 1996 and 2001. Only last year, a former Museveni minister told a national newspaper that he had been at a meeting in which it was discussed that the army planned to seize power if Museveni lost the 2001 polls. Not that the question itself is new: in 2001, CNN's Catherine Bond asked Museveni if he would leave if he lost the election and Museveni's response was telling: "I will not lose the elections. So that is completely academic. But of course, [inaudible] why not?" Compare that with Gbagbo's campaign slogan in 2010, "we win or we win", and you realise that Africa's elections function on a different logic.
Ideally, elections are held to choose leaders, but in many cases in Africa, elections are either intended to launder regimes that fought their way to power, or otherwise dress up despots in democratic garb – so the idea of losing is academic. In these neopatrimonial states, the big man, like Mugabe or Museveni, believes only he has the capacity and the right to rule. Hence, Museveni sees "no one else with the vision" to lead Uganda, and Mugabe believes Tsvangirai cannot lead Zimbawe because he did not fight for independence.
With such logic, elections are routinely rigged - the Ugandan courts have found the previous two presidential polls were. And if the rigging falls short, there must be a mechanism in place to announce the big man as the winner.
In Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast, the pressure to end the chaos has come from abroad. Whether such pressure can be sustainable is questionable, but perhaps Ivory Coast represents a watershed for African democracy – the optimistic exceptions of countries such as Ghana and Botswana notwithstanding.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
leader, is prepared to place a formal application for UN membership before
the Security Council next month triggering a major confrontation with
Israel.
If it wins Security Council backing, the Palestinian leadership plans to
present its statehood bid to the UN General Assembly in September, when a
two year plan by Salam Fayyad to build the institutions necessary for a
functioning state reaches fruition.
Mr Obama categorically opposed the Palestinian bid and indicated that the
United States would wield its veto.
Palestinian officials said it would be hypocritical for the West to back the
Fayyad plan but to reject its "logical outcome", especially when
statehood was being conferred on much less developed territories.
"Isn't it shameful to have South Sudan as a state and not Palestine?"
said Mustafa Barghouti, a favourite to become the new Palestinian foreign
minister when a unity government is announced in the next few weeks.
Senior figures in Mr Abbas's secular Fatah party have given warning that the
Palestinian Authority would struggle to justify its policy of seeking
international legitimacy, a course it has struck for two decades, if the
statehood bid was rejected -- leaving non-violent resistance as the only
alternative.
"If the international community fails to pay its dues in September, it
will be extremely hard for any Palestinian administration to argue for
multilateralism in the future," said Husam Zomlot, a senior Fatah
official.
Rejection of the Palestinian bid would trigger a mass campaign of non-violent
resistance, inspired by the Arab Spring, that could severely strain Israel's
44-year occupation of the West Bank.
Earlier this month, Israel faced an unprecedented challenge when 10
Palestinian refugees were killed during protests along its border with
Lebanon and four more died when its defences along the occupied Golan
Heights from Syria were breached.
More protests have been called for Sunday, with refugees threatening to build
a tented protest camp along the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Surplus corn harvested in 2010 is piled outside a farmer's co-op storage silo in Colorado. About 40% of US corn goes to biofuels, driving up food prices. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
This year began with record-breaking food prices that experts warn could lead to another fully fledged global food crisis. Rising food prices contributed to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and sparked riots in several other countries. A food crisis three years ago also brought impoverished people on to the streets when they couldn't afford to buy staple foods such as rice, wheat and corn. Not surprising when poor people spend up to 80% of their income on food.
The World Bank estimates that between June and December 2010 an additional 44 million people fell below the poverty line due to rises in food prices. The bank's president, Robert Zoellick, called for the world to "put food first".
There are numerous causes to the recent price rises, but biofuels remain a significant piece of the puzzle. About 40% of US corn goes into biofuels. Today, 18% of biofuels now used in the UK are made from wheat and corn that are staple foods in the developing world. Yet just over a year ago, the UK hardly used either of these.
This demand can do nothing but drive food prices higher. And the demand is only set to grow. The EU alone is planning to more than double the amount of biofuels it uses in the next 10 years.
It's not just NGOs such as ActionAid that have raised the alarm. Recently, 10 international organisations – among them five UN agencies, the IMF, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – warned that biofuels will exert considerable upward pressure on food prices in the future. This is unacceptable when around 1 billion people go hungry every day.
What happens at the global level impacts heavily at national and local level. Take Kenya, which is a net importer of food. Its food import bill has risen, often meaning higher national and local prices – a disastrous situation when most rural and urban poor are net buyers of food.
But the drive for more biofuels to fuel vehicles and power stations in rich countries is having another, more localised effect. Companies are scouring the globe for land to meet biofuel targets. There is simply not enough land in the rich world to cater for the new demand; where better to look than in the developing world, particularly Africa where land is supposedly abundant and cheap.
So land vital for food crops in developing countries is being turned over to grow biofuels, invariably for export. Less food is planted as farmers go to work on biofuel plantations in anticipation of jobs and better incomes, which often do not materialise.
ActionAid with other local partners in Kenya has recently highlighted the potential impacts of a proposed 50,000 hectare jatropha plantation in the country's coastal region. This is just one of at least five massive biofuel plantations that ActionAid is aware of in this part of the country.
The plantation could displace around 20,000 people who have lived in the forest and the surrounding areas for generations. They grow food on small plots outside the forest to feed their families and sell at the local market. Gertrude Kadzo, 37, a farmer, said: "If we are evicted to make way for the plantation, my community will have no place to go. This is land where we grow cassava, corn and pineapples."
When global food prices fell in 2008 and food insecurity was no longer front-page news, political interest faltered. This time world leaders must act. They should take their lead from the warnings by the 10 international institutions about the consequences of biofuels on food prices. They called for biofuel targets and subsidies to be scrapped. This is what ActionAid has been demanding for many years.
• Tim Rice is a biofuels policy adviser at ActionAid
