Out of Africa

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Done. In a few days I'll be leaving Tanzania, hoping to return to run the project we have proposed and which the Ministry with which I've been working appears to be very eager to implement. If they - and particularly the normally snail paced World Bank decision process - move quickly enough then in six months I could be back for several years. Would be fun.

Development Terms of Reference

Excuse the rant, but I have a couple of points to make about TOR writing and expectations of donors, land reform in particular - one of my principal areas of expertise.

One. Land reform that aims to help the public in general and give the poor access to capital in particular, relies on only one key component. Secure tenure. All the rest is fluff.

Two. Secure tenure can be achieved within the confines of two key structures. The first is title registration (I exclude clearly successful deed recording as in South Africa or the United States) and second, effective enforcement mechanisms through the courts or other institutions.

Three. Title registration - the love of donors and particularly the World Bank - is not rocket science.

Four. Surveyors can be the enemy of rapid registration of title, especially in poorer countries where land is worth nothing but the surveyors insist on five to ten centimeter accuracy - in rural areas. Taste reality. People on the ground know where their boundary runs. Don't interfere. I have been in too many countries where no boundary disputes existed before the surveyors landed in their mother ship.

Five. Donors need fewer agricultural economists and surveyors driving secure tenure because the vast majority (except for a few, really, really smart practitioners) don't have the slightest regard of the foundations of the policy of secure land tenure. Valuable land is located in urban areas. That's why everyone is moving there and creating, as in Africa, slums at the rate of five percent a year. Give these people tenure first. The wilderness can come next.

Finally. Donors should not permit the release of a TOR that ignores the edges. In other words, don't target one area for reform without looking at the other sectors that directly or indirectly feed into that one area. That is not negligent. Or lazy.

It is stupid and a waste of money.

End of Rant. Thank you and my apologies to agricultural economists and arm-chair reformers.

Obama in Ghana

Since I am on my way to Ghana again I've been following the progress of President Obama to that West African country.

At the G-8, agricultural growth in Africa was one of the primary targets of the participants and resulted in a commitment to allocate $20 billion to Africa. Leaving aside whether these funds will ever make it through the bureaucratic systems in individual countries of the G-8, this type of aid needs to be re-directed. The G-8 appear to have recognized that the policies of aid supply to African agriculture have not produced the expected results over the past 20 years, and have actually harmed local farmers. It is about time that agricultural aid is recognizing that the focus should be on helping farmers help themselves rather than attempting to impose non-indigenous concepts. So far, so good.

Yet, as President Obama correctly emphasised that each country must, in effect, help themselves, nothing in agricultural aid will produce the results necessary without a significant reduction in farm subsidies in the US and, more importantly, Europe. Given European agricultural policy, such a reduction is politically impossible.

The other aspect of agricultural reform in Africa is the slow rate of land tenure security. Agricultural reform will not be successful unless farmers have clear tenure over their land. This is a major problem in Ghana, for example, as the growth of cities is exponential - and is not due to population increases but rather an exodus from the rural areas into cities. Local chiefs, the true power in Ghana, are in some areas literally giving away land to get people to stay. But the legal system established to secure tenure is inefficient, expensive and corrupt. Although huge sums have been and will be spent in Ghana by the World Bank and USAID to improve tenure security and improve agricultural policies and practices, they have so far been unsuccessful.

There are many reasons for the slow rate of success in land tenure security, including a highly bureaucratic system and central government/chief rivalry, but until significant movement toward secure tenure is achieved, agricultural growth will remain slow and intermittent.

Third Time a Charm in Moldova?

Yesterday, the Moldovan parliament failed to appoint a president for the second time. By one vote. The immediate result of these failures to approve acting Prime Minister Zinaida Greceanii of the Communist Party as president will be a new election 45 days after the compulsory dissolution of parliament.

The last election was immediately followed by opposition protests that quickly turned violent despite OSCE monitors' reports that the election was free and fair. Although the outgoing president Voronin has accused Romania of supporting and funding the opposition and the protests, no proof has been profered.

Russia is keenly interested in the outcome of the power struggle in Moldova as it has a firm hold on what is essentially a criminal regime in the breakaway region of Transdniestria. Transdniester is on the left bank of the Dniester. It proclaimed its status as a republic in September 1990 and declared its independence in August 1991, at the same time as Moldova. It is supported by the present Russian government much as Russia supports South Ossetia and Abkhazia - although unlike the latter two regions, Russia has never recognized the independence of Transdniestria. That may be next.

Russian foreign policy in Europe is to prevent any further rollback of its influence and to extend that influence where possible. If Romania succeeds in pulling Moldova out of Russia's sphere of influence, then Transdniestria becomes untenable; but it is unlikely that it will ever rejoin Moldova and will continue as transit center for illegal arms, human trafficking and drugs.

Despite vast sums of money spent by the EU, World Bank, the Swiss and USAID, Moldova remains outside Europe. As the Czech Ambassador Pyotr Kupr said recently, he is doing his best to bring Moldova closer to Europe. He has been only modestly successful. "People are interested in foreigners when it comes to making a profit. They do not think like Europeans. There is no civil society, no independent mass media... There is only so much one can do on the micro level."

The fact that there is has been little to no success in developing civil society or an independent media in Moldova after so many years and so much money expended by international organizations is evidence that the development community is either doing something terribly wrong or the Moldovan people don't care. Or both. So why are the aid agencies continuing with the very same programs they have funded over the past 15 years?

A new election may end the control of the only democratically elected Communist government in Europe and begin to turn wheels of change. How much capital will Romania and Russia be willing to expend to either fulfill this result or oppose it?

Ghana's land reform struggle - losing the battle?

In 1997 I first came to Ghana on a short mission for the World Bank together with two experts in urban planning and title registration respectively, to try and find out where the land reform program had jumped the track. Ghana had been the shining star of West Africa for the Bank, but the failure to rapidly provide secure tenure to ordinary Ghanaians, and especially the poor, via a much vaunted new title registration system was disturbing, to say the least. There are few things more important to economic growth and reduction of poverty than land reform.

We interviewed all the usual suspects: government representatives, bank official (accesss to credit which land ownership provides), urban planners and lawyers. We wrote a report. Apparently, no one listened because when I arrived here at the end of January this year I was presented with virtually the exact set of problems we had identified more than a decade earlier. Incidentally, the land market reform program intitiated by the Bank was known as Urban I. Urban V - or VI (I need to check on this) is the latest iteration.

Ghana has received more than $750 million in aid from the Bank alone in the past 20 years. A significant portion of that was sunk into resolving land tenure issues. The poor have no cash. But they have assets. It's the frozen capital described by Hernando de Soto in "The Mystery of Capital". Give the poor tenure and unfreeze the capital so that the poor can escape the informal sector. That's the theory and I happen to agree. So what has gone wrong in the past twelve years that has in many ways witnessed rather large sums of money have rather minimal effect? Why are slums growing on average of 3.5% a year in Africa? This is an accelerating train wreck and the solutions will only be more painful as time passes without a better approach. To be continued...