The last weeks meant a step change in the dairy project. During discussions with Victor, TechnoServe Honduras’ director that has worked in the dairy sector until a few years ago and knows a whole lot of it, the data points have transformed themselves into meaningful stories. It all starts making sense, conclusions are about to be written. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) data already showed in the first weeks of the project that the high prices for the milk producers were an important fact, but a lot of that data was not very accurate. I did already ask myself how FAO could have such complete data of countries from all over the world, when data is all but available in Central-America – well, it turns out they actually didn’t … Instead of blindly following FAO-data, Victor told me to contact people in the neighboring countries to get reliable data.
Luckily the conclusions didn’t change big time, Honduras was losing competitiveness by the year. Its prices for a liter of fresh milk were high compared to neighboring diary-strong countries as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. This of course reflects itself in growing imports from those countries of finished products like milk powder and cheeses. Something that had to be changed.
It can seem weird for an NGO to try to do something about high prices for producers. After all, TechnoServe’s goal is to decrease poverty in rural communities. But these high prices are a bubble slowly bursting, local milk processors are already imposing more production quota during the high season and quality fines in order to lower the real price of milk. It is TechnoServe’s job to help the milk producers to be more efficient. That way the producers, while swallowing future price cuts, could still end up with higher profits.
Two weeks ago, I’ve been interviewing the director of the farmers association and we will still get together with the Chairmen of the 2 leading milk processing companies. TechnoServe is taking this seriously, and I’m happy to comply! You can really feel this strategy will not end up in a drawer. It will change the lives of thousands of people living from dairy production.
I thought that meeting captains of industry would be the most amazing encounters during my stay here in Honduras, but it got even better. In January, I met the newly elected president of Honduras, Perfirio “Pepe” Lobo, about whom I’ve already written in some earlier blog posts. If you won’t believe me, proof is shown - myself, Pepe and Melissa (my new fellow volunteer in Honduras). While at the local bank, trying to pay my mobile phone bill, he just came walking down the stairs with a few security guards. I would have been expecting half an army to protect him, but Hondurans told me that president elects (he was only officially inaugurated January 27th) are easily accessible. That changes though after they are inaugurated, then streets are closed, traffic is stopped and helicopters are spying when he’s in town.
I found myself lucky to be able to present myself, laugh about his comment that he needed a chair to compensate for the difference in height and have a picture taken. Only a few minutes later – when he got into a huge black SUV and, escorted by pick-up trucks filled with machine gun armed soldiers, left the parking lot – I realized what an incredible encounter it was. Almost every newspaper around the world has mentioned his name; he will be the one hopefully ending the political crisis, deciding on what to do with Mel Zelaya and so on. And he was shaking my hand just some moments ago? I was genuinely impressed.
I was way less impressed with one of Belgium’s largest fundraising events, Music For Life. For those non-Belgians: the basic idea is to put some famous radio personalities in a transparent house for one week, have them broadcast non-stop radio, while surviving only on juices and fundraise about 3.6 million EUR for a good cause. Although it is great radio and amazingly well marketed, the ones that chose the good cause got it all wrong…
The idea is to stop malaria in Africa with one of the most effective malaria-prevention methods: impregnated mosquito nets. As such this of course is a worthwhile cause. More than 1 million people die of malaria each year. What shocked me is that Music For Life will buy those mosquito nets and distribute them to the African communities. If you have read some of the earlier blogposts, a bell should be ringing. This is destined to fail big time! It seems as if they haven’t learned anything from the last 50 years of worthless developmental aid.
Let me try to describe what I think that will happen with those nets. It is quite probable that the people on the receiving end will find them a lot more useful as fishing nets or as suspended bags protecting food from wild animals (in the large scheme of things two causes that are probably higher on their need list). And if they would use them properly, these nets don’t have an infinite lifetime. What will the local population do with broken nets? Send them back to Europe for after-sales service?
It is of course easy to critique this initiative. What I would propose doing with the money? Well, keeping in mind the lessons learned from my experience at TechnoServe and books like The Aid Trap, a local mosquito net economy should be pushed. If there are already local companies producing those nets, it should be assessed why they don’t get to the local communities. Are the nets too expensive – and should the company be made more efficient or subsidies be implemented? Or don’t the nets get to the communities – and should the market access strategy be revised? Or do the people don’t believe in the effectiveness of those nets – and should local health workers be trained and dispersed around the country?
It should be thought off like food security, with its 3 axes: food should be affordable, accessible and effective (nutritious). And please, not as an exercise in neo-colonialism with the rich world handing out mosquito nets to the poor Africans…
This job/adventure is slowly changing my view on the world of today. A truly enriching experience!
I couldnt agree more!
ReplyDelete