Why Do Resources ≠ Riches on the African Farm? Pt. II

So why have Africa's resources not been turned to riches?

There are many compounding factors, and I won’t go into them all here, but near the core is lack of stable property rights, which in turn translates to people finding little gain from investment, and in the end few companies find an incentive to be there to buy the raw materials of people like James.

Without enforced property rights, two key things can happen, which have interrelated effects:

1. A strong-armed government, such as Angola or Zimbabwe, can capture export rents and fail to spend it on the public, alienating business and not supporting public infrastructure and social goods. Botswana’s equitable partnership with De Beers, the diamond company, is one reason for the country’s success.
2. The mindset of people like James becomes consume now, save later. As higher demand chases a constrained amount of goods, inflation ensues, and the central bank raises interest rates to combat it. This high cost of capital, a key symptom of weak property rights I’ll hit upon next, compounded by corruption, lack of infrastructure, and other factors, isn’t the most inviting scenario for investors, foreign or domestic.

When at a USAID conference in Mozambique, I remember the Standard Bank official tell the delegates, point blank, something to the extent of, “There’s no way we can give your farmers lower rates than 16% or reduce the 40-60% equity requirement. It’s just not possible.” At the root of what he was talking about was property rights: in Mozambique, the government owns all property, so private individuals have no equity in their property with which to take out loans.

As a result of these factors, the cost of capital in Sub-Saharan Africa is enormous. The average commercial lending rate for all SSA countries with data available is 17% (CIA Factbook, 2010), and you can imagine that countries without data likely have higher rates.

Business investment is sorely needed, for both agricultural innovation (higher yields for farmers) and to serve as an outlet to which farmers can sell. When I was in the village for those few weeks, I almost ran out of money from people trying to sell me things – pineapple, pumpkin, fish. I was like the United States of village trade – heavy on the imports.

It’s also no coincidence that while doing my work with TechnoServe in Ghana, I heard villagers singing the same song, telling me they loved having a “ready buyer” in Guinness Brewery, even though the price was slightly lower.

The villagers need agricultural business to start up, and it’s starting to happen in Liberia. Attracting large commercial investors can be a powerful way to grow an economy and help people like James, but if property rights and cultural traditions aren’t respected when business comes, as this NY Times article points out, it can lead to foreign companies and dictators running away with the loot. In a few posts I’ll talk about people in the village who are looking to serve the business need from the ground up on a much smaller scale.

Why Do Resources ≠ Riches on the African Farm? Pt. I

I split time between working with Togbah, and James and Goma (pictured with our dinner), a wonderful couple who graciously opened their home to me (they had a couple homes, and I stayed in their Boi Town home). By the time I visited James’ primary home in Jaimue, I had already learned how to make and sell charcoal, source homemade alcohol, and watch as Togbah instantly closed my cut with the juice of some random blade of grass he found in the brush. Our meals come from the rice of the fields, and the bitter ball in the garden. I bathed either in a small stream under the expansive stars or just went outside and stripped down when the thunderous rains poured at night. It’s amazing to me how much the land has to offer. Unfortunately it also offers dirty drinking water, which led to a short speed bump in me getting giardia and a complimentary sleepless night/painful day.

I want to digress briefly and explain the generosity of Goma, who in addition to offering her home, ran errands into town for me and routinely brought me dinner, even despite the 45 minute roundtrip walk (not fun after a hard day’s work in the field, I can attest). She first met James during the civil war while they were hiding out in the bush from 1990 – 2003. For 14 years they were on the run, moving occasionally, pounding rice in the swamp so as not to be heard.

Goma and her young son had been abandoned by her husband, and James stepped in. Their two children, Naywa (pictured) and Matu, grew up on the run. In the community, James has been somewhat of a leader, doing things like building a public bridge across a river to many farm plots, and also spearheading construction of a public palm oil “factory”.

Which brings me back to the resources of the land. One staple of West African diet and agriculture I haven’t mentioned is palm oil. ­The first day I visited James and Goma in Jaimue, a village about a 20 minute walk away from Boi Town, we went hunting for fresh fruit bunches of palm kernel.

When I was in Ghana with TechnoServe, I was looking at palm oil from the NGO’s side, doing an oil palm market analysis. Now I’m sweating in the bush with the farmer they are trying to connect with. Full circle, indeed.

It started by James finding a “wreath” in the woods, which was essentially natural ladder. He rigged this 25-foot ladder with a sickle-like hook on the top, and pointed it up in the oil palm tree over one of the branches. Once up among the branches, he’d knock the fresh fruit bunch down, and I would gather it up. Tree after tree we did this, and I’m not ashamed to say that I never volunteered to climb.

From there, back at the farm house, I chopped the bunches apart and manually processed them with Goma to create a sweet oil, a sample of which I was able to take back home. The meal of plain rice and oil is probably the Liberian equivalent of spaghetti and sauce in the States. A guy’s go-to.

I’ve often explained to people the potential for African agriculture. After working on the farm for just a few weeks, that only becomes clearer. It is true that Africa has a more difficult agricultural environment than places like Latin America and infrastructure such as roads is lacking. But it’s also true that there are opportunities in terms of increasing yields and increasing the amount of land that those yields are on. Right now 60% of the world’s uncultivated land is in Africa, and average yields stand at only 1/3 of those of South Asia, according to the World Bank. There’s room to improve, and in the next post I’ll attempt to explain where past failures have come from in as simplified and entertaining manner as possible.

Solving the Conundrum of Poorly Planted Fields

"A visitor is a guest for two days. On the third day give him or her a hoe."

-Swahili proverb

For a long time I’d been trying to solve what I termed to myself the “Conundrum of Poorly Planted Fields.” When in Mozambique working with CLUSA, I wondered why nearly all soybean fields had been planted by farmers just scattering the seed, leading to poorer yields. Economically speaking, the poorer you are, the more willing you’ll be to trade time for money. Thus, wouldn’t these farmers, who have much more time than money, make every effort to plant correctly to maximize yields? Seeing the poorly planted fields, the only logical answer was, they’re lazy. But I didn’t believe them to be lazy. Hence the conundrum.

The simple answer is that there’s a certain point where the amount/difficulty of work outweighs the additional financial benefit. Though I thought this to possibly be the case, I never really believed it until I did the work on the farm myself. I suppose I was holding them to a higher standard than myself. This became evident when I got to try my hand at their work:

• Checking and setting traps: on a couple of mornings we went around checking both water and ground traps for any catches. This required us to trek through the woods and wade through the swamps to find Togbah’s hidden traps. A few crabs were all we came up with during the two weeks, which we ate shells and all.

• Weeding the bitter ball crop: this was absolutely back-breaking labor. What I initially thought would take me a half day ended up requiring two days. I had the help of a few of village kids, about whom I inquired why they were not in school. No real reason. (Bitter ball is a tiny eggplant with a self-explanatory taste.)

• Building a rice kitchen: when families harvest, they have to store it to eat it later – most people don’t commercialize, since the quantities usually aren’t that enormous and trying to fetch a good price when the markets are flooded is pointless. So, a stilted structure made entirely from wood, vines, and palms is constructed to protect the rice from rain. This required Togbah and me to collect and form together a wood structure entirely with without nails. Huge market opportunity for nails here, I’m thinking.

• Brushing: to brush means, essentially, to clear brush. On the face of it, chopping away at grass is no problem, until you realize that there are thorny vines and sawgrass that rip away at your hands (or my hands…theirs were hard as rocks). By the end of it, gripping a cutlass with hands covered in razor thin cuts was less than enjoyable.

But by far, the most intensive – primarily since we didn’t finish the rice kitchen – was making the charcoal. During the building process, the rain started to pour, and the rest of family retreated inside. What took us an entire day to build, the charcoal pit – a pile of wood, dirt, grass, and palm – was lit to slowly burn over the course of two days.

Once the burning started, our work wasn’t over. You have to closely monitor it all times so that it “doesn’t spoil”, in Togbah’s words. This meant that he, Game, and I had to sleep in the kitchen – an all-thatch structure about 7 feet x 5 feet – to check the coal every few hours and watch for “rogues” (Liberian English) trying to steal the rice, which I’ll talk about later. The bugs living in the thatch bed combined with the rain dripping through the ceiling cracks didn’t make for a pleasant sleep.

It wasn’t until that night, in the middle of my dinner of dry rice, that I found out it was Liberia’s Thanksgiving Day. The contrast to the American Thanksgiving experience and even the urban Liberian’s Thanksgiving experience is striking. As I settled into bed, we could actually hear blasting African pop music from the nearby city. Togbah said to me, “And you see how they are enjoying?”…”Do you think, if I was having money, I would be sleeping like this?”

Ironically, on a day that should be for acknowledging what you have, the poor are reminded of what they are without. It doesn’t seem, for most of them, it’s for lack of effort.

Development Choking Points

Let me first clarify the initial post “Living Their Life” and preface subsequent posts. In reference to the villagers, by saying I was “living their life”, I was being quite presumptuous – certainly for journalistic reasons and not to mislead. A dominating characteristic of their experience, one which I would NEVER be able to comprehend regardless of the time spent immersed, is a feeling of perpetuity. For most villagers, things will never change; there is no escape in sight. For me, I know in X number of weeks I escape to a better place. This is one reason why I’ve come to accept that I will never fully understand poverty – I can only get close. Having said that, in two weeks in a village, you can pick up a lot, and that’s what I hope to share with you.

So getting on with it.

I want to continue where I left off, with what happened next with Togbah. The next morning circa 7:00 am, after a night of powerful rain that shook the house, we went to the farm to tap the palm wine. The wine was extracted from the base of the overturned palm and handed to me in a never-washed cup complete with dirt, bark, and all manner of insects floating in it (pics 1 and 2). I went back for seconds, but not because I liked it. From there we went to a bar in the next village for “7 cent gin” (the name I gave it), and then purchased a bottle of fiery home brew moonshine to split back at the farm. When I went for my lunch, which was just oranges, he questioned why I wasn’t soaking it in alcohol. So my lunch was a gin-soaked orange, and by around 11 am I was a bit tipsy.

It didn’t take long to confirm that yes, I had somehow been paired up with the village drunk, for lack of a better descriptor. Many people claimed there was something wrong with his head – a claim I initially thought to be an exaggeration or slight, but became increasingly convinced that that might actually be the case.

This alcohol problem, combined with his personal mindset, did two things. First, he killed any opportunity for himself in terms of work and impressing me, someone who could probably really help him. He spent more time drinking and talking than working which, at least to me, doesn't seem like the best course of action when it’s harvest time and you have free labor on hand. Second, he killed opportunity for his family and those around him. Which leads me to Esther.

Esther is 18 years old. She’s in 5^th grade and has three classmates. This isn’t unusual for Liberians, especially rural Liberians, who have had schools disrupted for years. She’s the daughter of Gamay, but not of Togbah, so he tells me often (“she not born to me”, he says). As such, he really doesn’t care at all for her.

Still, she’s studious and hardworking. To fund her education, every Saturday she heads to market to sell cassava leaf. I noticed that she was always carrying around this tattered World Book – the “T” section from sometime during the Clinton administration. Since it was the only book she had, and I understood there was another she wanted, I offered to buy her the new one once she could find out the price.

This was a problem with Togbah. He warned me, “And you don’t give her money [for the book]. Don’t ever try. Don’t ever try, I tell you…Whatever I tell you to do, do; whatever I tell you don’t do, don’t do.” Admittedly, I should have checked with him first. Yet, this was a consistent pattern throughout my stay: any money I wanted to spend had to go through him, and he always had to benefit first. He essentially wanted to use me as his personal pocketbook. Needless to say, this created an interesting dynamic throughout my stay.

The problem with this is not primarily that he is difficult to help get out of poverty, but that he serves as a choking point for impacting others – his entire family. In thinking about how to impact a community, people like Togbah create very difficult situations. In Bangladesh, I met many female entrepreneurs whose husbands had been supportive of their home business. Would Gamay ever be able to start a business? Would I ever be able to mail something like books to Esther? It’s not impossible, but when need is great and resources are scarce, you go for the low-hanging fruit.

(I did, by the way, buy her the book before I left, and proposed to Gamay that if she made it to college I would fund it. To my knowledge, Togbah still doesn’t know.)

Overview of the Villages

Before I go any further in documenting my time in the rural hinterlands of Liberia, I thought it would be helpful to give a quick tour of the villages, Boi Town (pronounced "Boy") and Kpellemue (pronounced "Belly-moo"), which are nearest to Gbanga city in Bong County. I did this walkthrough at the end of my stay, and planned it so that it was midday when people would be working and I wouldn't be ransacked by each and every villager eager to say hi.

From village to village it's about a 15 minute walk, but I've condensed it (and added music) for your sanity. Along the way I point out a few key people and places, some of which I'll refer to in subsequent posts. You'll also notice me repeating the same several phrases - I had the greetings down pretty well, as well as commonly used items for me like "cutlass" and "country axe", but beyond that I pathetically defected to English. Needless to say it led to some interesting, if frustrating, conversations.

Living Their Life: Entering 2 Weeks of Immersion and Uncertainty

I was probably scared, early on in my trip. Since I set off I’d wanted to live in a village, but I've balked. I’ve lived in South African slums for several days, had a few nights’ stay in Bangladeshi villages, and trampled around countless times for hours on end through ghettos and rural communities in the world’s poorest countries. But I wasn’t living their life. I was observing, interviewing, walking around, going to social events – and my Western preoccupations were never really checked at the door. I was always planning, producing, multi-tasking.

Finally in Liberia everything came together: a harvesting season (where labor is needed and I could be used), an English speaking country, and a connection to a villager. So, a friend of a friend of a friend said sure, his father would put me to work. Not knowing any of these people, as usual, I just took their word and snagged a free ride one Saturday morning, heading several hours over crumbling roads into the war-ravaged interior of the country.

Arriving in the small town of Gbarnga, I met my friend of a friend, Johnny, at his Carter Center office. An impressive individual, Johnny served as my contact in case anything went wrong. He introduced me to Cooper, the son of the old man I’d be working for. I hopped in the back of truck with Cooper and his friend, and we drove through a light rain shower off to the village. I was nervous. Two weeks, alone in the bush, as an outsider to a bunch of people with whom I have nothing in common. What would we talk about? How awkward would it be living with the old man? What if I got sick? (I brought no medicines, no water purification, nothing) And perhaps my biggest concern: what if I was just bored all the time?

When we arrived, some half hour later (not far, but far enough to see no trace of modern civilization), we were in solid bush. The village was Boi Town. I hopped out of the back, and met Togbah, a short, scruffy old man with graying hair, a strained face, and condemning eyes that were initially hidden behind a big grin and welcoming attitude (pictured in orange shirt). He insisted I call him his Papa (pronounced “Pap – A”), as he was known in the village as the Papa. My things were dropped off at his house, which was quite impressive, and then we walked to his farmhouse, five minutes away. His daughters were pounding rice and his wife was busy at the fire. From his farmhouse we made stops at every home and person, introducing me. Finally we came to the village “restaurant” that serves breakfast and lunch, run by the wife, Framadah, of Togbah’s younger brother Amos.

“Do you want to bath?”, asked Amos. “What?” I asked, bewildered. In hindsight, it was really dumb for me to assume I’d bath at the house, since the village has no running water. Next thing I knew, I found myself stripping down by a murky puddle next to an old guy I’d met 30 minutes prior so that we could cup water from the puddle and splash ourselves clean. So much for small talk.

That night dinner was delivered to me and Togbah at his house. Everyone else claimed they had eaten, so his wife Gamay (pronounced “Ga – may”), his 18-year-old daughter Esther, Ma-Mary the 2-year-old toddler, and others including James (in red hat) and Goma (pronounced “Go – ma”, pictured in orange shirt helping to find a creative way to hang my mosquito net) who were somehow related to Togbah, sat around watching Togbah and I eat this large portion of rice, greens, and fish. It was very awkward – almost like the white man and alpha male got all the food and everyone got what was left over. Had they really eaten?, I wondered. After dinner we sat around, in the dark, passing a bottle of hard liquor between Togbah, James and me while everyone watched. Two sips later I was already feeling the buzz. Looking back, that first bottle was a warning sign of things to come from Togbah.

Punk'd: Liberia Style

What works for development? One of the main problems with development is that in many cases, we simply don’t know. Failed approaches get tried over and over again by different organizations or even the same ones – in Ghana, an organization with which I worked was planning a community grain storage scheme in the same manner that had previously failed. When I got assigned to the task, I started asking questions, doing interviews, and digging deep for data – at least in the handful of organizations with which I worked, there wasn’t any organized manner for looking at past results (partly due to digitization only since the late ‘90s). And there certainly isn’t any database between organizations to document past experiences. So, most of the records are either buried deep in the archives, found in some long chain of emails, or recalled only from the memories of development workers who may or may not still be with the organization.

Compounding this problem is that even when you do find the records, it’s almost always a self-evaluation. What a breeze Vanderbilt would’ve been had I been able to grade myself! I was actually brought on with TechnoServe in Mozambique to gauge the impact of its poultry project. I tried to be objective as possible, but when the organization that you’re evaluating is paying your bills and giving you all the contacts, there will be some bias. And there’s pressure to paint a positive picture, because that improves your chances of getting a gig at another project, as it did for me in Ghana. Most NGOs are guilty of this.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is trying to change this. Based out of Yale, the NGO and its sister organization J-PAL at MIT are conducting randomized controlled experiments to test and improve the effectiveness of poverty alleviation interventions. So, they will generally go to an NGO that has or will have a program soon starting, take a baseline survey of random villages both included and excluded from the intervention, and after the intervention administer the same survey to the same villages.

IPA interested me because of its unique role as an NGO that supplies the implementing NGOs with the information they need (though IPA has recently started doing implementation itself). To get to know the organization better, I volunteered just for a week and a half helping design a very small part of a survey that was to determine whether peace education was worthwhile (peace education is big in post-war Liberia). The UN and Liberian government had implemented a huge program to train communities in conflict resolution.

For my part, the setup was that after the team had finished administering the survey to the entire village and right before they were to leave, several enumerators were to get into a staged fight in the presence of the village chief. How would the chief respond? Had the training improved his “conflict resolution”? I was tasked with designing the skit and training the enumerators to act it out. Not the budding Shakespeare everyone believes me to be, I asked for the help of some locals in writing it. Training them was hilarious – when they practiced it out in the church (above), several unknowing pedestrians came by to try to mediate the fake fight. Liberians (and I tend to believe Africans in general) are amazing performers, at least when it comes to getting in fights – I think because they often do get in real fights themselves.

It really got fun when we went to local villages to practice on unsuspecting village leaders. We first asked permission to act it out, but this didn’t work since they knew what was coming. I did a quick 180 and in the next village we did a fake mini survey as a pretext for being there. I excused myself to go to the bathroom so that I – as the survey team leader – could not be assumed by the chief to take action when the fight broke out. I took a video, which was previously posted but had to be taken down in response to IPA's human subjects liabilities. The chief comes out saying, “We don’t fight here! I will fine you!”, and the village chair soon after runs out too. From there we go to the palava hut, and evenutually reveal the skit as a fake. There’s a moment of disbelief and then everyone just starts laughing hysterically. Invariably this was the response of the villagers. Everyone was a good sport, and the chiefs were especially interested to know how they performed.

(Ivory Coast Update: On Thursday the election results were announced with opposition candidate Ouattara winning in a 54% to 45% margin. On Thursday night, incumbent president Gbagbo's ally in the Constitutional Council called the results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission null and void. Gbagbo has instituted a curfew, closed borders, and threatened to kick out the UN envoy. Gbagbo's henchmen are patrolling the streets of Abidjan, and on Thursday night they opened fire at point blank range, killing 8, at the opposition party headquarters in Youpougon, the exact compound I spent time interviewing opposition supporters. Riots have broken out across the country. As I write this, both candidates are being sworn in as president, and the country is on the brink of civil war. International community supports Ouattara, and the African Union is holding an emergency summit to decide a course of action. The news is coming out by the hour. For a good article and stunning pictures, go here.)