 And I will open it up for the discussion, I think we should take free or so questions at a time and then yes and you have there and up there yes and yes please please identify yourself and thanks. Hi my name is Nicole Bidsworth, I'm here from Wider. Thank you for the excellent presentations, I really enjoyed all three. I wanted to speak to Professor Pinstrup Anderson to begin with, I had some comments and reactions to your paper, I really enjoyed it. I was really, I found it really refreshing that you're looking at this kind of political economy analysis of food prices and I was wondering if you track changes in food prices or food policy along electoral cycles because in a place like Zambia this is absolutely critical how food subsidies at electoral periods are increased and prices are depressed and then after elections when the government has more leeway they would sort of set a bit of a release on the food prices. My second question was you had a finding that foreign agencies had very little influence on food policy and I wonder if that might not be time specific because what we had particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last 15 years was the so-called Africa rising period, the boom period and what we're seeing now in many economies including Zambia is a sort of bust period and we're seeing the increased intervention of the IMF in the World Bank who are pushing for the reduction of these subsidies so it might be worth thinking about whether or not that is context and time specific. I had a reaction to Professor San's presentation as well and I was thinking that really I really like that you were talking about displacement and food crises because this is absolutely critical because in some ways it's a double crisis. Many of the people who are displaced were embedded in local economies, there are food producers in their home place, when they're removed to a new place they're no longer producing in their initial home base, they're not producing in displacement camps and often what happens is when food aid comes in this is disruptive to local economies in the new place as well so this interaction between displacement and food crises is absolutely critical so it occurs to me that the best way to deal with nutritional problems in these cases is an end to the conflict and returning people to where they came from and their re-embededness in local economies but when that's not possible how would you suggest you go about affecting positive changes in these kinds of cases. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, we have a hand over there. Okay, good afternoon, I'm Mikko Perkio from the University of Tampere Finland. I come from the research group that is research studying child growth, healthiness of living environment based on the data from Malawi and thank you for your excellent presentations. The question goes mostly to the Dr. Kilima and I'm asking on child growth. So the question links to the argument on the so-called environmental entropathy, a disorder due to frequent intestinal infection for viruses, bacteria or parasites. So it seems that Tanzanian results so that only the uppest quintile benefits in terms of child healthy growth. So I do simplify now, could it be that only the rich or the uppest quintile are able to live in such a safe and clean environment and they are able to avoid frequent intestinal infections and which makes body unable to benefit nutrients and lastly the other four quintiles are living not so clean and safe environment. So if it were about poverty and nutrition maybe it shouldn't it be other way around that poorest quintile we can see dramatic growth failures or at least it would go quintile and quintile, quintile by quintile. So the question is about would the growth puzzle be about how clean and safe environment we are living in. Thank you. Thank you. Was there one hand more? Then I think we should turn to the panel and you can come back again from the audience. Thank you very much. When I was presenting the context of Tanzania I thought it was very important for me to share first how does the population look like and yes one thing I should have also said we have about 80% of our population in the rural areas so which goes correctly into pointing out like yes so most of the people who are in the wealthiest quintile they will also have better services and they will also have access to different utilities including clean water while in the rural areas they would like that. So the four quintiles that we're not doing very well is the reflection of that. So thank you very much for pointing that out. It has everything to do with what governments want to happen next. In Thailand prior to an election, prior to a vote, the government increased the rice price above the world market price, about the export price. Thailand is a major rice exporter. So the government said we'll pay you this much more for rice and of course the government ended up with a lot of rice because farmers responded and the market wouldn't pay that price and at one point Thailand had the equivalent of half a year of international rice trade in their warehouses. They actually did have warehouses. India only had warehouses for about half of what they ended up with. The other half was outside and it was rotted and it rotted very quickly. The rats had a good time. In Sambia something very similar happened. Before an election, the Sambian government increased the maize price. And the Sambian government ended up with a lot of maize. And again, a lot of it was rotted before they could use it. So absolutely, India plays this game from time to time. So you're absolutely correct. And it comes back to the political economy question. That you really need to understand what's driving those decision makers. If you want to be able to predict anything about what they may do in response to something that's going to happen in the future. And frequently we policy analysts are in the dark because we have already made our recommendations and if they don't follow them they're not very bright so we go on to another study. And I'm as guilty as the next guy. We got to take this work one step further and I'm repeating myself. On the foreign agency's interest, yes, I believe it is context and time specific. I think it relates a bit, David, to your point, namely the visibility part. Is any development bank or multilateral or bilateral donor going to say to a government you cannot compensate the losers of food price increase? Now they're not going to do that. So they're going to go along with the government particularly because it doesn't really have much impact on the extent to which those governments can pay back their loans. And I think one of the reasons why the structural adjustment debate was so heavily directed by the international community was that there was a lot of money hanging out there. And if the governments didn't do what the money lenders were telling them, chances were that they would never pay back the loans, that wasn't the case here. This was much less risky for the development banks. And I want to repeat what I said before, but the World Bank really made a very special effort to try to deal with the food price crisis, much more so than I think many of the bilateral state, although some of the bilateral, DFID and others were very, very into that as well. David? And for you. Right. So I'll start by saying I really don't have an answer to your question except that it's the right one. As I was saying, earlier problems of famine and food crises, especially when you were, even if you had displaced, firstly, most cases people were not displaced. And if they were displaced, they were primarily displaced internally within a set of borders of a state that at least had presumably some interest in over time, over in their well-being. Now, obviously, in the current context where so many of the displaced people are in externally displaced and in somebody else's country, it's such a formidable problem that I really don't even, I can't even think about what the easy answers are. I mean, I think you've hit all the problems. You know, you're basically destroying the economy of where they came from because there's nobody working or attending the farm or keeping up the infrastructure or markets become dysfunctional in these failed states or failed regions of countries. And then where they go, there is no opportunity because governments who are hosting them have generally no interest in them being successful there. And how do you reconcile, I mean, they really, it's worse than being in no man's land. It strikes me as being in, I would use a stronger word for it, but might not be a polite one. So I don't know, I mean, it's really a very distressing situation, but I'd be interested if you have any ideas. So my initial suggestion would be maybe what you do is you get the new host government to encourage the development of agricultural production in the face of where these people live, but by citizens. But the trouble is that the sort of medium to long term goal rather than a crisis solution. Right. No, I think, you know, obviously the cooperation, but, you know, the little bit I do know about this suggests that host governments have been extremely resistant of this place for persons being integrated into their economy at all, whether I mean just they don't want them. They just view it as a threat to and I don't think this is unfortunately any different in Europe or the U.S. than it is in Jordan or Turkey, but a threat to people's local people's livelihood, their wages, their jobs, the man's in terms of the fiscal cost of caring for these people. So and it strikes me as with few exceptions, maybe the prime minister of Canada, anybody has tried to espouse a more progressive and I think more correct view of the potential benefits of trying to at the margin integrate some of these refugee problems doesn't fare very well in their political arenas. So it's just stressful. Yes, thank you. More questions? Fin, Todd? Thank you very much for three excellent presentations and, of course, they, how can you say, they motivate additional thinking and so on. David, one thing I was kind of pondering about whether is that, I mean, I'd like to kind of give you a possibility to elaborate a bit on how such an analytical approach might actually look. I mean, you sort of indicated that that would be good and that something is needed, but I was just sort of wondering what are the elements that one might try to put together. And to peer, I mean, I, you know that I completely agree with you in the sort of identifying that we need to try to understand the political economy of these decision makers. I'm kind of pondering about whether you would maybe try to elaborate on, well, how do we then in turn get better heard by these policy makers? I mean, how, what can one say about that interplay between researchers and policy makers and so on? Because I guess that, I mean, you were sort of thinking, well, we need to find out and predict how they're going to react next time. But there is also that dimension which is about how do we then try to be better heard? How do we influence them? There's a lot of discussion about policy impact. And I mean, of course the sort of phrase evidence-based policy making is all over the place. How does that sort of relate in here? Is this all just kind of something you would call words? Do they have any real serious meaning? Of course, one can have one's worries when one sort of sees the evidence that then is actually available and then compares that with the type of decisions that are taken. But I was just sort of wondering whether you could elaborate based on these off-the-cuff kind of thoughts. Thank you. Yes. Hi, I'm Neil Ferguson from the International Security and Development Centre in Berlin. I was going to ask almost exactly the same question to David that was just asked behind about how the analytics should look. But I'd like to go one step further with that and ask, how do you incentivize people to provide these analytics? If I put my humanitarian hat on, I think it's a great idea to try and do evaluations with whatever data is available and produce the best possible results. If I put my researcher hat on, then I begin to worry about where that's going to lead and so forth. And I just wonder, therefore, how you perceive the role of implementing organizations, how you perceive the role of international organizations, and how you perceive the role of researchers in delivering reasonably meaningful evaluations of programs when RCTs aren't available, when quasi-experiments aren't available, when maybe even as you say here, baseline data isn't available. I mean, I know from my own experience working with certain agencies that, you know, they have very small amounts of program data that they are determined to use and they can use it to do something that they can take to donors and say, yeah, look, we're having an impact here. And I think this is what you're hinting at here. But at the same time, for researchers, it's something that's going to be time-consuming. It takes just as long, if not longer, to do this analysis in any other sort of analysis. But it doesn't lead to the typical research outputs. And I just wonder how you think it actually looks to get people, or how you would incentivize people to do these sorts of analyses rather than trying to chase something that would be in RCT in less emergency situations. Yes, I will give a word to first of David and Pierre, but I will first also take the opportunity to ask Blondina what do you feel about the question before about increasing agricultural production? That would be interesting to hear your point of view also from your case study from Tanzania, yes. But first, David, I think was a question to you and then to Pierre. Yeah, again, I'm not going to pretend to have good answers to your questions. I haven't thought long about, I mean, I'm asking the same question. So, I mean, that's what my thinking about the motivation for this meeting led me in many respects to those same questions. I guess I would respond in a few different ways though. One is, you know, if you think back 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, I think NGOs were very reluctant to have, like, nosy economists and evaluators poke around in their programs for fear of kind of discovering ugly truths about either their lack of effectiveness or their lack of efficiency and so forth. And I think over time that has, that whole relationship has shifted that institutions and that also applies to governments. They have learned to see the research community in many respects as their allies or their best source of support because they both can substantiate impact but also help them improve their programming. My guess is that that same kind of trepidation probably applies to many of the institutions view, institutions of all emergency programming in terms of their relationship with the research community. So I think there is a process of building trust and relationships that needs to go on. And I think I'm sure that that has begun at some level. I just don't see a lot of it in the published literature and I don't know a lot of people doing it. That doesn't mean it's not being done to some extent but clearly a lot more can be done. And I think part of it is the research community has to step up to the plate in a constructive and positive way in terms of fostering greater dialogue and discussions. So I think the incentive has to be in terms of we can help you do a better job and we can help you garner more resources. And I have no doubt that the people who are spending their lives working, whether it's with displaced people or with refugee populations are very motivated to do a good job. And I think we need to push that discussion forward. But that being said, it also goes back in both addressing your question and Finn's question to the best extent I can. As I said, these emergency situations are not really for the most part emergencies in the sense that I thought of them back when I was watching television as a child or when I was first working in Sub-Saharan Africa and we'd see these emergencies in Ethiopia or even my early work in India in the 1970s where there were these real emergencies in the sense that they were acute, short-lived. And so I think we need to recognize that these emergencies have turned into largely chronic sustained problems so that I'm really not sure that we can't design research studies. If it's a year, two years, that's what it is. We can still learn a lot. And I think there's a lot of different questions about what works and what doesn't work. And those can be very relatively pedestrian in terms of should we invest in, you know, encouraging people to use latrines or provide soap and clean water. Two more complicated questions that may have to do with how we incentivize, you know, integration into the local communities. And that may involve doing that not only in the context of the camps or the affected populations, the immediately affected populations, but it may be incentivizing, you know, the indigenous populations through, you know, some sort of cash transfer program that says, you know, hire a refugee for the day and see, you know, we'll pay for it. You know, I'm kind of being somewhat pejorative in that sense. But I think there are ways of doing this. You know, who would have thought, and I think there are creative ways of thinking about a research agenda, knowing that these acute situations have a duration of time. And we haven't applied the creative type. But if you think about, when I think about some of the things that people are doing RCTs and experiments about or collecting data on panel surveys, I would have never dreamed up this stuff 20 years ago. And people are doing incredibly creative work now in the field of micro-development, basically. And whether it be, you know, across all dimensions, particularly in health and nutrition, and I think we can do the same thing in these other contexts. We just haven't put our minds to it. And I think, again, back to your earlier point, I think we have to go beyond just the affected populations but think about the broader geographical context in which displaced people are living and try to incentivize various types of research programs in those contexts. Again, knowing that, you know, we're not going to come up with an answer in six weeks or eight weeks, but they'll still be there in six months or six years, unfortunately, in many cases. Six years is a bit long for somebody at my age, so could we do it a little faster? We agree on that one. And Finn, that, of course, is the critical next question. How do we implement such wonderful ideas as to try to use political economy approaches to get some real action of the kind that we'd like to have? My hypothesis is that there are quite a few win-wins out there, meaning that if we were to interact with policy advisors and hopefully policy makers as well as we do our analyses, we could arrive at mutually satisfactory solutions to the problems that the policy maker is particularly interested in and the problems that those of us who are fighting for better health and nutrition are interested in. This may involve a little bit of things you may not like if you are very pure. For example, let's suppose that we could target a transfer program very tightly to low-income families with children at high risk of malnutrition. And let's suppose that it really is so well targeted that no politician cares about it because these poor people have no political power and therefore it is not going to last very long. Maybe as long as an international donor will provide the money, the government will keep it alive. Now, suppose that 30% of the benefits from that program is actually designed to the decision-makers in government. Sure, it's corruption, it's bribing, of course it is. It's terrible, we don't want it. But suppose that's the best we can do. 70% of that transfer is still arriving where it is supposed to arrive. And my point is sometimes we let the best stand in the way of the good. Particularly those of us in food policy analysis, we deliver the first best solution for the problem we have identified to a policymaker, say the Minister of Finance, who has a million other priorities that are a lot more important than trying to improve nutrition of little Johnny out there in a community that doesn't vote for him or her anyway. We got to be a little more pragmatic than that. And that's really all I'm saying. No econometrics may not help us a whole lot. Fair enough, we'll do econometrics on something else. But we really need to get a handle on working together and finding out where are the mutually acceptable solutions to their problems and, quote, our problems, the problems of low-income people. I'm working right now on how to change the food system for improved health. And that, of course, includes improved nutrition. And I think the only way that we can make some headway on improving the food systems for better health and nutrition is to provide the incentives to the decision makers all the way up the value chain. And that includes the farmers, the traders, the consumers, and yes, the policy makers and the news media and the researchers, those who can have an impact. We got to understand how each of these decision makers, how they take, what goals are they pursuing? Can we, by modifying their goals and our goals, arrive at something that would work for everybody? Is that polyanic? Is that kind of wishful thinking? Maybe. But I think it's worth a try. So that's the kind of thing I'm going for. We need to design the policies and the programs so that we don't simply say to the policy maker or the CEO at a big agribusiness corporation, you're stupid because you're not doing what we tell you to do. That's not the way to proceed. Give you another example and then I'll be quiet. The agribusiness corporations that are into food processing are delivering to us packaged food that is very high in energy, calories, and very low in nutrients. It is full of sugar and sweetener and fat and it has very little in terms of micronutrients. That is exactly what we don't need. Now, I'm not talking about we in this room. I'm talking about low-income people in developing countries. They are now bombarded with this junk. They don't call it junk food because it's sold in the grocery store in beautiful packages with multicolor. Everything is wonderful except they don't get very many micronutrients from this. They are iron deficient and they probably become obese if they are not already. And that can happen when the child is five or six years old or even earlier. Now, do we just say, well, sorry, we can't do anything about that? No, we don't. We try to find out what is it going to take to change the consumer behavior and the behavior of the processing industry. We have a guy at Cornell by the name of Brian Wansing who's written a couple of books about this. He's got all kinds of innovative ideas about how to change the behavior both of the consumer and the processing industry. So there are things we can do. It's very messy. Maybe we don't really want to get into that. We'd rather run another econometric model that's cleaner. But if we really want to have an impact, we've got to get right in there and see how we can change the behavior of these various decision makers. And I think there are tremendous possibilities that have not been pursued yet. Let me make one other point since I have the floor and you haven't showed to one minute then. One of the things I didn't get to in my list because I stopped when the chairman said, time to stop when his alarm clock went off is we need to work with those people who can influence the World Trade Organization to change the behavior of food exporters. We have so many regulations for food importers, how they should behave. We have virtually nothing for food exporters. So when India and Cambodia and a few other countries could suddenly stop exporting rice from one day to the next, that is not orderly trade and WTO stands for orderly trade. So that was one of the points I didn't get to talk about. But it's very much on my mind. I don't know how to do it, but there must be somebody who can make that happen. Thank you. And I will give the Glendina the chance to have the final word and you can comment also on these vital issues or you can comment on... Okay, thank you very much. And whatever you didn't have time to say, now is the time. I'll talk a bit about the issue you asked me to talk about. The increase in agricultural productivity and the impact that we see or not see. So the one thing that for sure that we've been seeing in Tanzania is with the increase in productivity, the first thing is we've been having more choices. It was very common when you're in Daa, let's say, you will only get mangoes in December, once it's January full stop you won't see anything. But then now with more innovative ways of producing we're able to get not only one type of mangoes but then different varieties. But then again with also increasing productivity then you have even farmers using less time, less land and perhaps less water. But then the discussion on irrigation, I won't touch on that because that is something I know we're working on it very much. But then to touch a little bit on the point that Pia just mentioned, so we've seen the increase in productivity, meaning there is a lot of increased in production but we're also seeing a lot of increase in losses in the post-havoc, the post-havoc losses. So that's the other area that we have really to work on. In addition to that, as I said, now we have our second year five year development plan focusing on industrialization. It's good that we're encouraging to have that but then like Pia just said earlier, the industries that will be processing the foods, will they make sure they return or preserve the nutrients that are required or are they just going to be just producing things out there. So it will be very important to have partnerships not only between the government but also the technocrats, all those who know the nutrients that are required but also the ones who will be setting up all these different small or big scale industries that will be used. Now the last point that I would like to say is when we talk about the increase in production on the household side, on the household side, this is really good because then it means if they were using a bigger portion of their money to buy food, now they have more money to do something else because now they can spend less and less. For the industry, even better. Even when the workers come to argue, they'll be like, yeah, we know the price of food has also been going down so it's easy for them to argue why we're going to pay you for less. So I think it's a win-win but also it's an area that will still have some challenges as we move on. Yeah. And then the last bits around that, there have been tendencies if we speak about, say, agriculture, we'll only want to concentrate on one actor and that one actor is simply a farmer, caring a little bit maybe less about the input providers and the later on, even the buyers and what have you. For us, I think when we look into the entire production, it's for the country or outside the country. The standards need to be within Tanzania for all the different actors who are in the chain, not only the input providers but also for the farmers and also the feedback also from the consumers themselves because at the end of the day, if we continually continue to punish the farmer and just pay them, let's say, whatever remains, we don't want them to stop producing because we still want to eat and not just eat but eat well food with all the required nutrients. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now we have come to a close and we have had three very heavy and excellent papers and I wouldn't summarize anything but I would just say that one thing that strikes me after this seminar is that you have presented all of you some basic challenges for future research. I think that has really come out of this. So thank you very much and let's give them a hand.