1. FOOD SECURITY
Concepts, 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 function at 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 reproduce misgovernance, 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 REAL democracy
which 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
Industries N-I
Status Quo Invest
Status Quo 200 1800 220 3500
Industry I
Invest 150 1900 400 3600
Limitation: Multiple Equilibria_Require Visible Hand
13. Managing Public Space -
(2) Cooperation
The Possibility of Gains from Cooperation
Agents N-I
Evade Taxes/Skirt Laws Pay Taxes/Obey Laws
Evade Taxes/Skirt Laws 100 2000 230 3500
Agent I
200 4000
Pay Taxes/Obey Laws 70 2020
Σ=4200
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.
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.
