Plus ca change

I have a book on my bookshelf entitled "Realizing the promise and potential of African agriculture". It was published in June 2004 by the Inter Academy Council, following intensive research and consultation in 2002-2003. I found it very useful when I began to develop the investment strategy for African Agricultural Capital in 2005. Well-researched, well-written and well-intentioned, it sets out a shopping list of recommendations that, taken together, will achieve the goal expressed so concisely in the title of the book itself.

Some eight years later, I wonder how many of the recommendations have been acted upon and how much change has taken place for "the man [and woman] with the hoe", which remains the best description of the average African farmer. Certainly, some progress has been made. For example, more African farmers have access to certified seed. Information and communication technologies are infinitely more accessible than they were, as a result of the rapid spread of wireless communication. Rural infrastructure has, in general, got slightly better. Import statistics, at least in East Africa, suggest that the use of fertiliser and crop protection inputs has increased.

Otherwise, however, I suspect that very few elements of the plan have been implemented. Indeed, at the risk of being cynical, I'd hazard a guess that you could repackage and republish the recommendations without anyone noticing that they were first issued eight years ago, and, perish the thought, that you could probably do the same again in 2020....... Worse still, it's already happened, more or less, in the form of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (fondly known as CAADP to its friends).

Why is it that the very well-qualified people that populate the corridors of academia and administrations around the world persist in believing that plans translate into action, when there is so much evidence to the contrary? In his provocative book, The White Man's Burden, the rogue World Banker Bill Easterly argues very strongly that "Planners", at least with regard to foreign development aid, have failed, and that the real agents of change are what he describes as the "Searchers", the people who experiment, who learn from experience what works and what doesn't. He might have described them as "Doers". Easterly is by no means alone in his critique, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain satirized planners and do-gooders more than a hundred years ago. Graham Hancock exposed the hypocrisy and waste in the aid industry in his modern classic The Lords of Poverty. Dambisa Moyo added her voice a few years ago in Dead Aid. And Michael Maren provides anger, emotion and powerful anecdotes of development failure in his well-names The Road to Hell [is paved with good intentions].

Different planners have different justifications for their continuing existence. But, apart from the honest few, who admit to doing a well-rewarded job for money, not love, their justifications are variations on the common themes of self-delusion and faux-humility: we're learning, they say ,we're learning from the past about what works and doesn't work; we're different........ A more plausible justification would be that, in some way, planning fulfils the atavistic human need of security, a belief that the future can be controlled and a desire to perpetuate this comfortable illusion from which bureaucracies derive their power and authority.

Zanzibar Queen

Freddie Mercury would have been 65 earlier this year. It's hard to imagine the most flamboyant of glam-rockers as a pensioner. He died 20 years ago from an AIDS-related illness, but his extraordinary musical talent endures. For the legion of Queen fans, YouTube provides heaven-sent music and video alike. Radio Gaga (with its video montage taken from Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis), I Want to Break Free, Under Pressure and the beautiful Love of my Life, the list goes on and on.

Like all those who are taken from us before their time - one thinks of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Princess Diana, among others - Freddie's image is frozen in time. Inez in Huis Clos says "One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly underneath it, ready for the summing-up. You are your life, and nothing else." Well, Freddie certainly packed a lot into his 45 years.

Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946 into an Indian Parsee family, he left Zanzibar at the time of the 1964 revolution (which overthrew the Sultan and his Arab/Asian government, and led to the union with Tanganyika and founding of Tanzania) and settled in the UK. His musical talent was evident from a young age as a pianist, guitarist and vocalist and, after a few flirtations with unsuccessful bands, he formed Queen in 1970 with Brian May and Roger Taylor. Queen's glory decade began with the phenomenal success of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 and reached a climax with their show-stopping performance at Live Aid in 1984. Freddie's ambition was for Queen to be "the Cecil B DeMille of rock n'roll" and David Mallet's Queen videos, with their use of film from the 1920s and 30s, pay homage to the glory days of cinema spectacle.

Sadly, his prodigious talent goes almost unknown in Zanzibar, apart from a sleazily-pleasant bar called Mercury's in Zanzibar town. In 2006, the Zanzibari government sanctioned a celebration of Freddie's 60th birthday, but subsequently withdrew its support of the event after an Islamic pressure group complained on the grounds that Freddie was not a true Zanzibari , that he was gay, which is not permitted under sharia law, and that"associating Mercury with Zanzibar degrades our island as a place of Islam". Freddie would have loathed this intolerance, which speaks volumes about the prevalent attitude in most African countries, regardless of the dominant religion, towards homosexuality.

The great Christian writer, CS Lewis, at the end of the chapter entitled Sexual Morality in his finest book, Mere Christianity, writes as follows: "...If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, then he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasures of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising .... and backbiting; the pleasures of power, and hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the Human self I must try to become. They are the Animal self and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But of course, it is better to be neither."

In Uganda, anti-homosexual rhetoric is particularly virulent, to the extent that parliamentarians have called for the death penalty for practicing homosexuals, and elements of the popular press have published the names and photographs of homosexual Ugandans who dare to make their status public, and have incited violence against them. Early this year, this despicable conduct almost certainly led to the shocking murder of gay rights activist David Kato in Mukono.

Maybe, in time, a more liberal and tolerant attitude towards the ways in which adults choose to indulge their sexual pleasures will develop across the African continent. And maybe Freddie Mercury's matchless talent will be honoured by more than a tourist-targeting cocktail bar in the country of his birth.

Christmas tree

In most of East Africa, December marks the beginning of summer. By mid-December, the short rains are over, the humidity falls and the mercury rises. For anyone who's grown up above the tropic of Cancer, it feels distinctly un-Christmassy, though the occasional appearance of a sweaty-looking Santa Claus and some half-hearted piped Christmas carols in Nakumatt, Shoprite and Game serve as an unwelcome reminder of the commercial excess in most of Europe and North America.

Excess aside, however, Christmas, along with the long evenings of the Wimbledon fortnight in late June and early July, is the time of year when I feel most nostalgic for home. Prototypical bright frosty mornings, Christmas lights strung along the high street and, best of all, the annual task of decorating and admiring the Christmas tree.

The bizarre tradition of chopping down a conifer, bringing inside the house and decorating it hasn't really taken root in most African countries, though a few Harare vendors did a roaring trade in thinnings from the pine plantations in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands. Before that, when I was based in Tanzania's southern highlands, I was lucky enough to live and work on a large wattle and pine plantation, where one of the unwritten benefits of employment was the December visit to the forest to fell a Patula Pine (pictured) and bear it home in triumph.

In Kampala, however, apart from the hideous plastic efforts available in Game, there don't seem to be any Christmas trees on sale. Surely there must be a good business proposition here. Buy up a few acres of mountainside land in Eastern Uganda otherwise unsuitable for farming. Plant the land on a 2-3 year rotation with Patula Pine (or another vaguely Christmassy conifer suitable for the Ugandan environment). Chop them down when they are 2-3 years old and bring them to Kampala for sale at Garden City, Lugogo, Kabalagala and other expatriate hang-outs. Or, better still, make home deliveries on special order. Sell them at $50 each to homesick expatriates and pocket a healthy seasonal profit.......

Come to think of it, the Christmas tree is just the tip of an iceberg. A good quality turkey is very hard to find.

Conservation agriculture

In his French A-Z, included in the fascinating non-fiction miscellany that makes up Bamboo, William Boyd writes about Xavier Rolland, his neighbour in SW France. Rolland has a small farm, which he works himself and, according to Boyd is "possibly the hardest working person I have ever encountered". For those of us who occasionally witness the daily grind of rural life, this comes as little surprise.

Boyd is usually very incisive and accurate in his observations, but in the following passage about Xavier Rolland, he falls prey to a very common misconception about farmers: namely that they enjoy a loving relationship with mother nature. "He ploughs his fields to the very edge of roads. He obliterates hedgerows..... and cuts down trees..... to gain a few extra square metres..... He is close to the land, but his relationship with nature seems more like that of a tenant with a rapacious and demanding landlord. There seems no love of the countryside..." No indeed: in many ways, conventional agriculture is little more than a ceaseless battle against the forces of nature.

Last Sunday evening, I travelled to Northern Tanzania and stayed the night in a small hotel in the town of Boma N'gombe, close to Kilimanjaro. The following morning, I flew about 100km to the south in a tiny single-engine Cessna. It was a bright clear morning. For once, Kilimanjaro was fully visible, resplendent in the sunshine, with a fresh coating of snow and frost. We flew over the semi-arid scrub that makes up such a large proportion of Tanzanian and Kenyan Maasailand. There was little or no sign of agriculture, at least on any scale: indeed, the only signs of human activity were red-clad Maasai herdsmen, their flocks and their manyattas, overnight homesteads for family and flock alike. From the air, the landscape is dotted with trees, except for a few large expanses of grassland. It is a fragile environment: the sandy red soil is prone to rapid erosion, especially if the trees are cleared for cultivation. Rainfall is low and unpredictable. The large expanses of grassland are usually evidence of areas of black cotton soil, where the heavy clay content of the soil prevents drainage, making the land prone to waterlogging and, in turn, unsuitable for most trees.

African farmers have traditionally avoided farming black cotton soil. It is heavy and hard to work using hand tools. But, in comparison to the red soils which are preferred, it is nutrient-rich. In some parts of the world (Queensland and Southern Brazil, for example), commercial farmers using conservation agriculture techniques have managed to unlock the potential of these soils to great effect.

Conservation agriculture is yet to be widely adopted in Africa, perhaps because so little of the continent is commercially farmed. Often called zero-tillage farming, it has three fundamental principles: to minimise soil disturbance, thereby preventing erosion, water loss and the oxidisation of organic material; to increase organic matter in the soil, creating a living rather than an inert soil environment; and regular crop rotation, reducing the build-up of pests and pathogens in the soil.

Later that same day, I returned to Sanya Juu, a small town on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. We invested in the development of a Hass avocado plantation there about four years ago. The young trees are already laden with fruit (as shown in the picture above). The environment there is very different. Annual rainfall is higher. Soils are fertile and deep. The altitude is higher and the ambient temperature cooler. European farmers (like Xavier Rolland) feel at home in this more temperate environment, where conventional farming methods yield excellent results.

But across Tanzania, (and elsewhere in East Africa), these areas are already farmed very intensively. To unlock Tanzania's agricultural potential, farmers will need to venture further into lower altitudes and semi-arid conditions, and will need to adopt new farming methods suitable for different soil types, in the forefront of which is conservation agriculture.

Cordylobia anthropophaga

The description "Man-eater" is most often used of lions and tigers, but that's what the scientific name for this small and apparently inoffensive fly means. Anthropophagus, derived from the Greek words for eating human flesh. The culprit is not the adult fly, but its larva, which burrows into its host and feasts on its flesh before emerging from the skin to enter its pupa phase.

Variously called the Putsi fly, Tumbu fly, or Mango fly, cordylobia anthropophaga is a thoroughly nasty little creature, as attested by the rebarbative set of images that an internet search on "putsi fly" produces. And now, after almost 20 years of residency in sub-Saharan Africa, I can also personally attest to the discomfort caused by this mini-man-eater. Called Mango fly because of its affinity with mango trees, it lays its eggs on damp surfaces, including laundry hanging out to dry. A thorough ironing kills the eggs, but if, as I did, you impatiently grab an article of clothing from the washing line, you do so at your own peril. Never again!

Movember

What do you first notice in this famous photo-portrait of Salvador Dali? My sample of 10 was unanimous: "the moustache", they crowed. The chicken barely registered a mention.

Every now and again I am reminded of how disconnected I have become from the zeitgeist of my culture. Earlier this month, during a short visit to the Netherlands, I met a representative of one of our investors sporting an impressive moustache. I was surprised: since the days of the silver screen, of Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and the great Charlie Chaplin, the popularity of the moustache seems to have been on a fairly continuous decline, punctuated only by Tom Selleck's luxuriant growth in the TV series Magnum PI. But the decline has been arrested especially in the month of November, courtesy of the Movember movement.

Movember originated in the United States a few years ago as a means of raising money for and awareness of men's health issues, in particular for prostate cancer-related charitable causes. Movember is now spreading the globe: a reminder of how potent the internet is in disseminating information. Having only heard about myself earlier this month, I assumed that at least to date it had passed Africa by. But I was wrong. Almost immediately on my return to Kampala, I saw a Movember stand in the South African retailer Game store at the Lugogo shopping mall.

For me, the month of November will always be sombre. Dark, cold, the beginning of winter, without the bright lights of Christmas or the hope that the New Year brings. Also, I associate November with Remembrance Day. My mother was a poppy lady every November, collecting door-to-door on late autumn evenings for the military charity the British Legion, and, while my schoolboy head was instead full of plans and excitement for the fireworks and bonfires of Guy Fawkes night on 5th November, I would sometimes be persuaded to accompany her on her door-to-door beat through the quiet residential areas of northern Fleet. Both my parents were veterans of the second World War and my father's family connections with the military, through his decorated uncle (Tom Adlam, awarded the Victoria Cross in the first World War), were strong.

My father suffered from prostate cancer - fortunately the slow-burning variety. His PSA levels were checked regularly to ensure that the rate of increase in cancerous cells remained slow. He passed away almost six years ago from heart failure at the ripe old age of 86. I don't know what he would have made of Movember - he wasn't given to the support of causes - but he preserved his own moustache until his demise, and I think if nothing else he would have like to have seen even a temporary increase in facial hair. Hearing about Movember has also reminded me, as I approach my own 50th birthday next May, to regularly check my PSA levels for any evidence of this most stealthy of cancers.

Tinga Tinga

During a recent visit to Dar es Salaam, I stayed in a hotel in Msasani within easy range of the Tinga Tinga Co-operative's base close to the Morogoro shops. I took advantage of my proximity to pay a visit to the artists' studios, and happily browsed for about half an hour.

I love Tinga Tinga painting. I love its use of enamel paint, its bright colours and cartoon style. A vibrant riot of colour, celebrating the heat, humidity and exuberance of the tropical coast. Sadly, most of the art on offer was mediocre tourist fare: lurid depictions of the "big five" animals alongside the more traditional birds and marine life, but every now and again, one stumbles on something interesting, or beautiful, or, very occasionally, both.

Over the past twenty years, Tinga Tinga painting has evolved to include humorous, sometimes satirical, representations of daily life in Tanzania. Until recently, the painting pictured above adorned the wall of my office. I don't know how much artistic merit it has, but I think the joie de vivre of its cross section of the Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam firmly places it in the "interesting" category.

The absence of perspective in most Tinga Tinga paintings gives the style a naive and childlike quality. As I looked through the artwork on display. I was reminded of the 1960s film "The Rebel", probably the English comedian Tony Hancock's most memorable film, which satirises art snobbery everywhere. Hancock plays a middle-aged middle-class Englishman who abandons his surburban life to become an artist in Paris. Initially, his flatmate's (beautiful) paintings are mistaken for his own, and he becomes the toast of Paris. As the story develops, Hancock's own paintings (immortally described as "infantile" by George Sanders' superbly urbane art critic) are revealed first to acclaim but then, quickly, to ridicule.

I wonder how the cognoscenti react to Tinga Tinga.

Life is sweet

"..solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was the great 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes' bleak assessment of the human condition without political community.

Hobbes might have been a little more cheerful had the sweetness of sugar been widely available, but in his day, the European sweet tooth was only satisfied by honey and ripe fruits. Sugar was yet to make its appearance. The discovery of the New World changed all that. Suddenly, vast tracts of cultivable land became available to Europe. Once indigenous populations had been subjugated (or, more often than not, decimated by disease and genocide), the hideous triangular trade began. Cheap trinkets from Europe to Africa in exchange for boatloads of African slaves to the New World in exchange for cargos of sugar and tobacco back to Europe. Hobbes' words would also have made an accurate description of the life of slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. One only has to read extracts from the loathsome Thomas Thistlewood's diary, quoted extensively in Adam Hochschild's book Bury The Chains, to appreciate the horrors of sugar plantation life in Jamaica and elsewhere.

The sugar industry in Kenya was my first significant exposure to agro-industry in Africa. I worked on a consulting assignment for Coopers & Lybrand in 1996, in partnership with Barclays Merchant Finance, to provide advisory services to the Kenyan Government on the privatisation of Chemelil Sugar. Like many of the sugar companies in Kenya, Chemelil was under-performing: cane costs to the factory were high, sugar yields were low, and the market suffered from periodic distortion due to low cost imports. I became very interested in the dynamics of the sugar industry - and, after reading the excellent book Seeds of Change" by Henry Hobhouse, in its history. Recently, Elizabeth Abbott published a well-written and more complete history of the sugar industry entitled Sugar: a Bitterweet History, which should be compulsory reading for sweet-eaters everywhere.

As the resident sugar industry expert in Coopers Kenya, I subsequently led a team on a management consulting assignment at the giant Sudanese sugar company, Kenana Sugar. Kenana dwarfs the Kenyan sugar companies. Carved out of the desert a little south of Kosti on the White Nile, its huge area, massive factory and large-scale irrigation facilities drawing water directly from the Nile (pictured above) is remarkable. With production figures exceeding 350,000 MT per year, it is one of the largest sugar businesses in the world, supplying most of Sudan's needs and exporting to the Middle East and Europe.

So, let's start with some facts. Sugar is produced from sugar cane (in tropical and sub-tropical climates) and from sugar beet in colder climates. Sugar cane, like the banana, was first domesticated as a crop in New Guinea about 2,500 years ago. Sugar cane is one of the most efficient converters of solar energy into biomass (and potential chemical energy). It is perennial - though after several ratoons it begins to lose its vigour and needs replanting. Almost all countries around the world produce sugar. As far as I can see, only Norway and some of the other smaller European states have zero production. Indeed, many countries have autarkic policies for national sugar industries (for example China and India) and of total global production estimated at 150 million MT, only about 20-25% is traded internationally. This means that the price of sugar on the global market can fluctuate dramatically if the supply side is affected by factors leading to significant under- or over-production by large exporters like Brazil or Australia.

Or, indeed, Mauritius, which is where I have the pleasure of being at the moment. Coming to this lovely island in the midst of the Indian Ocean is one of the privileges of my job. Alas, there is little if any time to sample the delights of the beach, but just to be beside the waterfront in Port Louis is compensation enough. While Mauritius has developed world-class tourism and offshore financial services industries, the cultivation of sugar cane and the processing and production of sugar was until recently the bedrock of the island's economy - and remains a very important contributor. As such, Mauritius has invested heavily in supporting the industry through world-class research and development of improved cane varieties, to ensure that it can produce high-quality sugar at a competitive cost of production.

The manufacturing process of sugar from cane is simple. Freshly cut sugar cane is crushed, the juice extracted and the fibre broken up. The fibre (called bagasse in the industry) is used as biofuel to power the mills. In Mauritius - and increasingly elsewhere - surplus power from bagasse is sold to local electricity distributors. After impurities are removed from the juice, the pure juice is reduced by evaporation until the liquid is sufficiently concentrated to allow sucrose crystallisation. The viscous black liquid that remains - molasses - is used for bioethanol production and for animal feeds. In effect, nothing goes to waste.

Until 2006, Mauritius benefited from very favourable tariffs that allowed it, under the Lome Convention, to export the majority of its sugar production to the European Union at preferential prices. Despite the removal of these tariffs, the Mauritian industry has remained profitable, due to industry rationalisation and value addition.

Yet, just as in the Caribbean, the Mauritian sugar industry was also founded on slavery and indentured labour. It seems extraordinary that such an inessential, indeed damaging, commodity should have caused so much human suffering and death. Sugar has no nutritional value. It contributes to tooth decay, diabetes and obesity. But by some biological quirk, some evil trick of mother nature, it delights human tastebuds to the extent that we cannot live without it.
Perhaps it's just that sugar helps us believe that life is sweet, and not, as Thomas Hobbes asserts "nasty, brutish, and short".

Footing beside the Nieuwe Meer

I've recently returned from a short business visit to Holland. I arrived before dawn after a cramped, uncomfortable and sleepless overnight flight from Entebbe (via Nairobi), but was fortunate enough to be able to get an early check in to my hotel. After the obligatory shower following a long journey, I decided against sleep in favour of taking a walk and getting some fresh autumnal air into my lungs.

Is there anything more therapeutic than "footing", to give walking its Kampala slang name? I don't know if it's a function of simply breathing outdoor air, or the joy of being closer to nature, or, as Ian McEwan describes it in his aptly-named novel, Amsterdam, the "gentle release of endorphins" brought on by vigorous footing, or indeed a function of all three. Whatever it is, for me it is one of the most primal and precious of pleasures. Even in the flat lands - the nether lands - of the landscape around Schipol airport.

I footed along the quiet banks of the Nieuwe Meer for a good hour or so in watery sunlight, revelling in late autumn colour and the birdlife of my childhood. I counted a remarkable 21 different bird species, including chaffinches, jackdaws, magpies, coots, mallard ducks, pied wagtails, and a few winter visitors like greylag geese. Best of all was the sight of a pair of whooping swans in flight, presumably on their journey from the breeding grounds of the far north of Europe to their winter home further south.

One of the bizarre aspects of footing in richer countries is how few fellow-walkers one meets. In my 90 minutes along the Nieuwe Meer, I only encountered about ten other walkers, four of whom were with their dogs. The absence of pedestrians was even more pronounced during my recent visit to Canada, where - astonishingly - on the 20 minute mid-morning walk from the hotel to visit my sons, through a fairly densely-packed residential area of Burlington, Ontario, I did not see a single fellow-pedestrian. In most of Africa, of course, pedestrians abound and I have become so accustomed to crowded pavements that the emptiness of rich and densely-populated countries always comes as a surprise.

The positive power of capital

"The positive power of capital" is the slogan of the giant emerging markets private equity firm Actis. For all the justifiable criticism of unfettered global capitalism, private sector investment remains the most effective means of driving economic growth.

Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to have two wonderfully professional and hard-working volunteers, Paul Fletcher and Swarupa Pathakji, join us through a programme managed by the excellent Edinburgh-based organisation Challenges Worldwide. Paul's principal assignment was to study five original AAC investees from the date of investment, with a view to assessing their prospective financial returns and the impact that each investee has had on its stakeholders to date, and publish the findings.

The publication is available through the Pearl Capital website www.pearlcapital.net/new_impact_investment.html and is well worth a read, especially by anyone who doubts the positive power of capital to create wealth and opportunity.

Tabasco sauce

During last week's ANDE conference, I asked our waiter for some chilli sauce to spice up my dinner, but met with a blank look. I had forgotten that in the USA you don't ask for chilli sauce, you ask for Tabasco. What greater success is there for a brand, when its name replaces the name of the commodity itself?

To my surprise and delight, my neighbour at dinner told me that the manufacturer of Tabasco sauce was still an independent family-owned business. And, so it is. This is the 5th generation of the McIlhenny family business from Avery Island, Louisiana. Sometimes, it seems as if the whole world is controlled by faceless transnational corporations, but in fact family-owned businesses still employ many more people around the world than public companies and governments combined. And long may it continue!

Africa, in particular, has a disproportionate number of micro- small and medium-sized enterprises, generally individual or family-owned. The plethora of small local brands makes it quite difficult for internationally -recognised brands, like Tabasco, to gain a foothold on the continent. By way of illustration, I have long had my own favourite brands of hot sauce across East & Southern Africa. For a long time, my absolute favourite was the fiercely hot Nali, from Malawi, and whenever I am fortunate enough to be able to visit the "warm heart of Africa" I make sure to return with two or three bottles of Nali. Since taking up residence in Uganda, however, Nali has been supplanted in my affections by the consistent excellence of Pearl's Garlic and Chilli sauce, manufactured in Kasese by Reco Industries (though the Little Ritz - the diner across the road from our Kampala offices - offers a ferociously-hot unbranded chilli oil, said to originate from Rwanda, and well worth sampling in extreme moderation).

For chilli devotees, there is even an index - the Scoville Index - which officially measures the relative hotness of chilli varieties (as defined by their detectability to the human palate in parts per million). According to Wikipedia, the current accolade for the world's hottest chilli cultivar goes to the well-named Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pepper, though as far as I am aware, chilli sauce manufacturers are not yet obliged to provide an indication of their Scoville scores on their labels.

For my palate, however, no commercial preparation matches the flavour and aroma of my own very simple harissa, a simple blend of African birds eye chillis, garlic, mint and olive oil. Magnificent! Maybe it's time to start branding and bottling it.

Still No Exit

KADS next production will be No Exit, to be staged at the shortly-to-be-opened reincarnation of the Latino Club in Kampala in early November.

I really hope that we get good audiences for this quite astonishingly brilliant and disturbing play. While its depiction of hell may be far less physically terrifying that the punishments meted out in Dante's nine circles of hell, the three traitors ruthlessly expose each other during the course of the play and at its end we are in no doubt that they are eternally frozen - not in Dante's ice - but in the timlessness of their claustrophobic room.

It's not for the faint-hearted, and all the better for that!

Empire of Illusion

I've been reading a fascinating book by Chris Hedges entitled The Empire of Illusion. Well-written, acute and scrupulous in quoting sources, it is an excellent addition to critical analysis of the modern United States of America. Its chapters include a rather-too-detailed description of modern pornography, which might suggest a degree of prurient interest if Hedges' revulsion was not so apparent, under the title the Illusion of Love, and a profoundly depressing analysis of the assault on education, in particular the liberal arts, entitled the Illusion of Knowledge, before culminating in the concluding chapter, the Illusion of America.

Heaven forbid, he even dares quote from the famously-impenetrable Adorno in his analysis of the role of popular culture , though I think Marx goes unmentioned - presumably Hedges' publishers drew the line at mentioning that particular spectre of the past. When Marx, and his magnificent historic insights, was still taken seriously, Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School in the 1960s tried to reinterpret Marx's theories in the context of the modern world. Adorno's interests were in the impact of mass media on consciousness and individualism. Just as in Huxley's futuristic fantasy Brave New World, Adorno argued that popular culture was designed to turn people into passive consumers, content even in the most miserable of economic circumstances, and that advanced capitalism had in effect subverted the possibility of rebeliion and revolution as foreseen by Marx.

The book finishes with a splendid analysis of the moral and political bankruptcy that ultimately destroys empires from within. In a paragraph eerily reminiscent of the collapse of the Libyan regime earlier this year, Hedges writes that empires fall because "they all were taken over by a corrupt elite. These elites, squandering resources and pillaging the state, are no longer able to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness, and their empires died morally. Their leaders, in the final period of decay, had to rely on armed mercenaries because citizens would no longer serve the military. They descended into orgies of self-indulgence, surrendered their civic and emotional lives to glitter, excitement and spectacle of the arena, became politically apathetic, and collapsed."

In fact, the book doesn't quite end there. Even Hedges (or perhaps his publishers) cannot quite manage to resist the compulsory happy ending. Instead, he talks of the enduring power of love to transcend the forces of the establishment. A couple of years ago, I went to see the remarkable special-effects film Avatar, which was utterly spoilt by its ending, in which the noble savage, living in harmony with nature, triumphs over those who use technology to plunder her resources. A likely story: certainly not one that aboriginal communities in the Americas or Australasia would recognise. The truth is that when empires collapse from within, it takes generations for them to emerge from the chaos and dark ages that follow. So why can't film-makers and writers tell the truth? At least Hedges' book tells us why, even if it fails to remain true to itself.

Seed Tribe

Earlier this week, I attended a workshop to discuss the future financing of Africa's seed industry, convened by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and held at one of Nairobi's swankiest hotels, Tribe, located next to the Village Market in Gigiri. While Tribe is an extremely stylish venue, no question, it fails the gestalt test in that its constituent parts make up much more than its whole. Everything is beautiful - yet together it somehow lacks a coherent theme. The venue aside, the workshop itself was outstanding.

Some six years ago, nobody was interested in investing in Africa's seed sector, so the presence of at least six representatives from actual or potential investors was very encouraging. Increasing populations, increasing food prices and long term investment in the breeding of crop varieties specifically suited to a range of different topographies have created an environment which may break the low input/low output cycle in African agriculture.

But attractive industry fundamentals don't automatically result in attractive investment opportunities. Managing a seed business is difficult and fraught with risk. It involves the maintenance of "breeder seed" - the parental material from which hybrid seed is itself produced. It involves uninsurable agricultural risks (drought, disease, pests, etc), regardless of whether it is produced by outgrowers or on owned farm land. Especially for hybrid seed, maintaining appropriate isolation during crop flowering to avoid genetic contamination is a challenge. Once the seed crop is harvested, it needs to be transported for sorting, drying, processing and storage, with attendant logistics and processing risks. Because agriculture is seasonal, all this has to be done some 5-8 months before the seeds are actually sold to farmers, which in turn leads to a cash flow challenge during the holding period. And then, seed companies face the universal business challenge of managing their large number of small agro-dealer debtors.......


Growth, too, brings its own business challenges. An owner-manager can generally manage a small business without too much managerial support, but as his/her business grows, s/he must invest in recruiting new managers, the development of business administration systems, internal controls and the delegation of authority.

Given all these risks, it often amazes me that there are people out there who want to take up this challenge and deliver improved seed to Africa's farmers. But there are, and they are a remarkable group of astonishingly determined and unsung heroes. During the conference, Aline O'Connor Funk, consultant to AGRA and a former seed business owner-manager in the United States, shared with us the tag-line of the American Seed Association. "First, the seed". It would take a brave person to disagree.

My memory of 9/11

It's hard to believe that it's the tenth anniversary of the assault on New York and the World Trade Centre. People of my parents' generation used to say that they could always remember what they were doing on the day of JFK's assassination in 1963. I suspect 9/11 will have the same impact for my generation.

I was at home in Harare, at number 25 Brentford Road, close to Ballantyne Park. In August 2001, after a particularly gruelling travel schedule, shuttling between the UK, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, I came down with a very painful and debilitating attack of shingles. Because I was struggling to recover, the CDC medical adviser, the redoubtable Dr Paul Clarke, advised me to have specialist medical review in the UK.

As chance would have it, my UK flight was scheduled for about 9 pm on the evening of 9/11, when the news broke at about 4 pm Southern African time. I was busy packing my bags for the flight. The BBC website bore the extraordinary and unthinkable breaking news that first one and then a second aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Centre. I remember switching on the TV and seeing the first footage before setting off for Harare's airport in a taxi.

The mood on arrival at the airport and in the BA departure lounge was sombre. Together with the other passengers, I watched events unfolding on CNN and Sky TV. A lot of alcohol was being consumed in silence. Later, as we boarded the BA flight to London (one of the last flights before many airlines grounded their planes), I found myself sitting next to an Algerian-born female journalist. We chatted for a while, anxiously, both slightly drunk, before lapsing into silence as the cabin lights were dimmed and the plane thundered down the runway. Oddly - perhaps because of the alcohol or because of my illness - I had the best night's sleep on a plane that I have ever had.

Real Impact

Back in the innocent days, "malnutrition" was used as another word for famine. I still remember the shock of Michael Buerk's reports from Ethiopia in 1984, when pictures of malnourished children horrified the British public and inspired Bob Geldof's extraordinary Live Aid campaign. Today, famine has returned to East Africa, threatening the survival of up to one million Somalis (maybe more) and, indirectly, the stability of the region as a whole.

Since then, the aid industry has become, for want of a better word, professionalised. There are hundreds of new organsations working alongside the UN, the International Red Cross, Oxfam, Save The Children, Care et al, all of whom have communications and PR departments vying with each other for press coverage and donor recognition for their work. Yet, despite the proliferation and professionalisation, thr four horsemen of the apocalypse still have their powers undimmed, and the survival of millions is at severe risk. To be fair, Somalia presents a unique set of challenges to the distributors of emergency food supplies. The state of anarchy that has prevailed since the late 1980s and a complete lack of basic physical and social infrastructure creates an extremely dangerous vacuum for the aid agencies to operate in.

But malnutrition is not just about the quantity of food available, but also its nutritional content. The FAO estimates that up to 80% of malnoursihed children live in countries with food surpluses. Countless people across East Africa (and elsewhere, of course) suffer from an impoverished diet, excessive in carbohydrates and frequently lacking in essential vitamins and minerals. The poor quality of diet manifests itself in numerous chronic health conditions, in particular in the high and increasing rates of diabetes in the region.

There are two general solutions to poor nutrition: one, do nothing about the diet itself, but fortify its constituents with synthetically-produced vitamins and minerals. I call this the sticking-plaster approach, doing nothing about the fundamental cause of the problem, nor addressing some of the long term adverse health consequences of poor diet. However, it seems to be the preferred solution by health ministries in the region - in Kenya, for example, it is becoming common for maize flour and even sugar manufacturers to add Vitamin A and other nutritional supplements to their products. This is a good thing, in that it does at least ensure that children (in particular) have sufficient nutrition to grow properly, but it needs to be balanced with a second solution, which addresses the root cause of the problem and provide people with the education, knowledge and practical guidance to improve their diets. To be more specific, with regard to Vitamin A deficiency, the Kenyan consumer can purchase vitamin A-fortified bags of sugar, but s/he should also eat more pumpkins and carrots.

About five years ago, l made an investment, through African Agricultural Capital, in an early stage integrated pest management (IPM) business operating in Thika, central Kenya, called Real IPM. The business began by supplying phytoseiulus persimilis (a mite which preys on rose growers' most damaging pest, the red spider mite) to the Kenyan floricultural industry, thereby enabling rose growers to use fewer synthetic pesticides with both cost and environmental benefits. Since then, Real IPM has grown into a successful biopesticides and IPM business, developing its product range, its customer base and its geographical scope.

Not content with its success alone, its founders, Louise Labuschagne and Henry Wainwright, have established a not-for-profit organisation called Real Impact (http://www.realimpact.or.ke/) which is pioneering the improvement of nutrition in and around the Thika area of central Kenya, working with a range of organisations (schools, hospitals, community organisations, etc) to establish "nutrition gardens" - essentially equipping these organisations with the skills and know-how to improve the diets of their beneficiaries through the cultivation of kitchen gardens with a range of vegetables, legumes and staples designed to improve the nutritional profile of a Kenyan institutional diet.

Nutrition gardens may not be a solution for Somalia, but they do offer a much more sustainable solution to malnutrition than the sticking-plaster of food additives. Knowing the tenacity and determination that has propelled the growth of Real IPM, I am sure that Real Impact will live up to its name, and, in time, transform dietary behaviour in its chosen region and beyond.

Goat racing

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Kampala's leading social event of the year, the Royal Ascot Goat Races at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, as a member of a syndicate with a goat in each race. In keeping with tradition, goats are named by their owners, their names being derived from (fictitious) sires and dams. One of our goats was the superbly named Hugh Grant - by California Freeway out of Devine - but alas, he failed to rise to the occasion.

The racing itself is entirely incidental to the day out. Goats aren't like greyhounds - they don't run for fun - and they are of course too small to have jockeys to urge them along. So the racecourse consists of a grassy oval, fenced inside and out, and the goats are pushed around the course by a kind of manual snowplough. Every now and again, one breaks into a trot, and, as they approach the finishing line, that is what decides the winner. Our syndicate managed one winner and one third place, which was almost enough to cover the costs of purchasing the animals. The real benefit of ownership, though, is that it confers VIP status on syndicate members, with entry to the owners' marquee with unlimited food and beer and wine on tap.

This is a Kampala society day out, to come, to see and to be seen, to drink copiously, to admire the ladies dressed up to the nines, and to forget..... And, brash though it is, it does raise a great deal of money for local charities, and in that regard at least, it probably delivers more social value than its infinitely more famous eponymous parent in the third week of June in England.

No Exit

Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society's next production will be the great French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, usually translated in English to No Exit. It will be staged on the first two weekends in November as a dinner theatre production, and offers Kampala audiences something very different to KADS's usual fare.

The plot is simple: three condemned souls are incarcerated in a room in which the essentials of any sort of civilised life are absent - no bathroom, no privacy, no books, no mirrors. Their punishment is to torture each other by picking over each other's lives in an eternal present from which there is no escape. The play's most famous quote is "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) but my own favourite is Garcin's observation that [the three lost souls] "are chasing after each other, round and round, in a vicious circle, like horses on a merry-go-round."

A friend observed yesterday that Sartre's hell is very close to his own idea of hell: a place in which God/Jesus is absent. It's hard to disagree: there is no God and no love in the room - and the natural world is completely closed off - but it also makes me think of the hell of the Big Brother house, where repulsive contestants voluntarily subject themselves to a complete lack of privacy in exchange for the possibility of winning a large cash prize, and, ghouls that we are, we revel in their torments for the vicarious pleasure of not being there with them.

No Exit certainly promises to provide some food for thought (please excuse the pun) for its dining audience in November. It will make challenging and thought-provoking theatre, itself all too absent in KADS' normal round of frothy comedies, feelgood musicals and traditional pantomime.

Cassava Disease

About this time last year, the Economist featured an article about the spread of new varieties of stem rust, a fungal disease which can cause significant crop losses in wheat. The variety of stem rust causing most anxiety among agricultural scientists is rather unimaginatively called UG99, having been first observed by Ugandan researcher William Wagoire in 1999.

Stem rust (pictured) is not a new disease: the late great Norman Borlaug's work initially focused on breeding stem rust-resistant wheat varieties, when he made the serendipitous discovery of the gene Sr31 that not only increased tolerance to stem rust, but also substantially increased yields (and was one of the most important contributors to the Green Revolution in the 1960s).

It's not clear yet how widespread Ug99 will become, or how it can be controlled, and so it presents a considerable threat to the world's most important food crop (alongside rice).

Given the importance of agriculture, it used to surprise me how seldom news stories like this appear. On reflection, though, perhaps it isn't really so surprising. I recently read, for the first time, Amartya Sen's long essay Poverty and Famine, in which the renowned economist argued that famine was caused not by the non-availability of food, but rather by inefficient food distribution mechanisms and a lack of money. Experience bears this out - when was the last time anyone heard of a serious food shortage in a wealthy country with decent roads and other infrastructure? As a result of this - and the separation of modern urban life from the soil - the overwhelming majority have no experience or understanding of agriculture. A constant food supply is taken for granted, so why on earth would agriculture be in any way newsworthy?

This week, however, I was surprised to hear a similar story on BBC World Sevice on another critical staple crop, cassava. As many as a billion people depend on cassava's starchy roots as a staple food, and yet it is hardly known outside the tropics (except in the long-deceased tapioca pudding of my youth). It is particularly important in West Africa, and also in parts of East & Central Africa.

Cassava is an excellent food security crop, as it can survive in drought conditions. In areas of Uganda, it is treated as a "food bank" - when supplies of fresh matooke bananas or other staples run low, cassava roots provide a reserve source of carbohydrates. In other parts of the world, cassava is also used for industrial starch production, for animal feeds and, more recently, as a feeder crop for ethanol production.

TheBBC report highlighted a report just published by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The report warns of the dangers presented by cassava's four most damaging pests and diseases: cassava mosaic disease (pictured), green mite, brown streak disease and whitefly. The report urges the establishment of early warning systems for disease outbreaks, so that they can be contained quickly and effectively before spreading to other regions. Cassava, like bananas and potatoes, is propagated using plant cuttings rather than conventional seed. This means that infected plants can move rapidly from region to region, increasing the risk of disease transmission.

It's not the exciting political news that keeps us glued to CNN and Al-Jazeera newsfeeds. But, for the billions that make up the so-called bottom of the pyramid, it's a lot more important.

Malawi shandy

A Malawi shandy is simple and delicious: a mixture of soda water, lemonade, ginger beer and angostura bitters, served with plenty of ice cubes in the largest available glass to hand. Nothing better on a hot Southern African day (except possibly a cold beer). Sadly, I missed out on a Malawi shandy during my most recent visit, but apart from that, my visit to the "warm heart of Africa" did not disappoint.

It was good to see considerable progress at both of our Malawi investee seed companies, Seed Tech and Funwe Farm. Production volumes on the increase and belief in and commitment to the future. As with all East & Southern African countries, agriculture is the modus vivendi for the majority. The Malawi government introduced a highly successful Agricutural Inputs Susbidy Programme about four years ago: a well-managed subsidy scheme that has led to considerable growth in the distribution of quality certified seeds and fertiliser throughout the country, created an opportunity for seed companies to develop and, if reports are accurate, led to an increase in farm yields of between 50% and 100%.

And yet the future of this successful programme may be in jeopardy, because Malawi is running out of money. An undignified spat with the British government earlier this year led to the mutual expulsion of high commissioners, followed by a suspension by the British of budgetary support to the Malawi government, in turn followed by the reduction and suspension of other bilateral aid programmes to the country. Malawi is heavily dependent on aid inflows, among other things because of its considerable trade imbalance, and the suspension of aid has resulted in a shortage of foreign exchange - most clearly visible in queues at petrol stations and the informal rationing of fuel. Under these circumstances, will Malawi be able to cntinue to afford its agricultural subsidy programme? Let's hope so: it would be a tragedy if the gains in productivity over the past five years were lost in a political squabble.

As a fringe benefit, my visit to Malawi also enabled me to spend three nights at the Norman Carr Cottage in Monkey Bay. The London Review of Breakfasts blog post on the Norman Carr Cottage in 2006, together with its two comments, speak volumes for this most idyllic lodging, which serves to demonstrate that hotel facilities are unimportant in comparison to hospitality, location and simple good food. My advice is simple: go there if you possibly can, relax in a hammock under the giant sycamore fig tree beside the lake, order a Malawi shandy, and thank God you are alive.

Uganda's burning

It's been a pretty awful month so far. It started with an appalling fire at Owino market (Kampala's largest and busiest) in the early hours of the morning, and ever since then, the newspapers have been full of gloomy news.



Among other things, East Africa has now been identified as a major drug transit point, for both international and local distribution. This comes as little surprise to any of us who see large amounts of conspicuous consumption by young people wth no apparent profession, (legitimate) business or family wealth. It certainly doesn't look like hard-earned money. What did, however, come as a surprise to me was the assertion in the newspapers that the maximum penalty for offenders who pleads guilty to the possession or trafficking of narcotics is a fine of one million Ugandan shillings (about $350 at current exchange rates).



The economy continues to struggle. Despite reasonable rates of economic growth, the effects of increasing fuel prices and a 20% fall in the exchange rate since the beginning of the year has resulted in high inflation rates without (as yet) any benefits from economic growth trickling down to the "man in the Kampala taxi". Poor harvests in the first half of 2011 combined with food shortages within the East African region as a whole have also pushed food prices much higher.

Teachers are demanding significant salary increases and threatening strike action. On the one hand, it's hard not to feel sympathy for teachers. How families can survive on income of less than 1 million Ugandan shillings (remember - the maximum fine for narcotics possession) per month I do not know, but at the same time Uganda's tax base is so low that it's impossible to see how the Government can afford an increase in teachers' salaries, not to mention the knock-on effect on other public sector workers of a salary increase to teachers. And, as a separate issue, while the quantity of education service delivery in Uganda has increased dramatically in recent years under the Universal Primary Education (UPE) initiative, the quality of education provided through UPE is generally acknowledged to be very poor. Makerere University lecturers are also threatening strike action for similar (and even less justified) reasons.

And now the "giveaway" of Mabira Forest, which seemed to have been shelved following public discontent in 2007, is back on the agenda, apparently in order to increase the amount of sugar cane under cultivation. It seems desperately sad tha,t in a country where so much land with arable potental lies idle, one of its few remaining natural forests is under threat of being cleared for sugar cane cultivation.

Even at a domestic level, this has been a particularly bad month. While Owino was burning, our refrigerator caught fire on Sunday morning. We awoke to the acrid smell of smoke, and the terrifying experience of flames and smoke in one's own home. Fortunately, I managed to remember most of the things one is supposed to do in a fire (apart, that is, from calling Kampala's underfunded fire brigade) - evacuate the house, switch off the elecricity, smother the flames, and so on, though I did forget to cover my nose and mouth and as a result inhaled an unpleasant amount of smoke. It goes without saying that we now have a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket and two smoke alarms installed.






I feel for the market traders at Owino, though. It's hard to make an honest living in Kampala at the best of times. And it's certainly not the best of times in Uganda.

The birth of a country

Yesterday, South Sudan became an independent country. After some 50 years of struggle, the South has finally gained independence from the North, and the hastily-drawn colonial boundaries of the 1950s have at last been re-drawn. The historic woes of South Sudan go much further back: through the bad days of the Ottoman empire and the Anglo-Egytian condominium, slave-traders brought up countless slave caravans from the South to Khartoum and onwards to the Middle East.

The new country is both full of hopes and burdened by expectations that its political leaders may struggle to fulfil. The transition from the politics of liberation to the politics of leadership and development is difficult in any environment, let alone one where the vast majority have grown up in a state of civil war and uncertainty, and where education, in particular, has been absent for all but a fortunate few.

Dimly, in my Sunday morning torpor, I listened to a thoughtful analysis on BBC World Service's excellent programme The Forum, in which the chief topic of discussion was the likelihood of "success" for a newly-created country. One expert panellist (Anatoli Lieven) set out the three factors which - in his historical analysis - seemed to be the key drivers for successful secession. First, the existence of strong administrative and physical infrastructure. Second, a sense of national unity that binds people together at a cultural and even an emotional level. Third, a tradition of solving disputes and disagreements through negotiation rather than the use of force. Based on this analysis, at least, the prospects for South Sudan are not good as, with the possible exception of the second, it fails Lieven's criteria.

There is, however, still room for optimism. There is no doubt that the world understands the challenges of nation-building much better in the light of recent history. The new country also enjoys enormous international goodwill and will as a result benefit from very considerable bilateral and multilateral development aid. And South Sudan is blessed (some might say cursed) with massive unexploited natural resources, the wise use of which offers the potential for the rapid development of much-needed infrastructure.

So, just as with any new birth, let us pray that South Sudan grows and flourishes, and confounds the gloomy biblical prophecy that some of the pentecostal Christian churches that themselves infest the fertile spiritual ground of South Sudan purvey: "How horrible it will be for the land of whirring wings which lies beyond the rivers of Sudan" Isaiah 18.1. Better, by far, to acknowledge how horrible it has been, and look with hope and determination to the new future.

A price to pay

This time last year I was on holiday in Southern Ontario, marvelling at the orderliness of large scale Canadian agriculture. This year, I was closer to my childhood home, deep in the Hampshire countryside. In his wonderful book, The Ages of Gaia, James Lovelock deplores the destruction of the English countryside - its meadows and hedgerows teeming with biodiversity - and its replacement with mechanised monoculture. And yet, while it may no longer be the thing of beauty celebrated in words by Housman and Hardy, in music by Vaughan Williams, and in painting by Constable, to my eyes at least, in the long, still, sunlit June evenings, it retains a tranquility and gentleness which is hard to find elsewhere.

In recent weeks, the international media has been reporting a new food emergency in the Horn of Africa, affecting Somalia, northern Kenya and south east Ethiopia. The rains have once again failed in this most marginal area for agriculture and many communities are at risk from the loss of meagre livelihoods, displacement and, possibly, famine. Coming at a time when regional food prices are already running at all-time highs, food aid is urgently required. Among other reasons, the media is once again trotting out comments from aid organisations attributing Africa's agricultural woes to, among other things, farming subsidies in the West. The hypothesis as generally expressed as follows: "agricultural subsidies are damaging to developing countries because they undermine the viability of local farmers". The argument follows that subsidies create over-production, over-production results in lower prices on the international market, and farmers in developing countries have no incentive to invest in agriculture because of the low price of competing imports.

But (with apologies to William Wordsworth), as I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills on the downs between Winchester and Petersfield, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the policy makers had probably got it about right. After all, farmers need to make a profit. Enough of a profit to encourage investment, but not so much of a profit that every tree is uprooted and every square inch of land ploughed up for agriculture. Indeed, farmers are also be rewarded for reforestation, for hedgerow conservation, and for the adoption of other environmentally friendly activities. If farming is unprofitable, what happens? Farmers no longer have any incentive to farm and the countryside - and the rural economy - suffers. There is risk to the wider economy: the risk of greater exposure to short term commodity price fluctuations; and the political risk (with unthinkable consequences) to any government of a failure in the food supply chain. Preservation of the countryside, too, is a public good

So my simplistic analysis suggests to me that African governments would do much better to erect and enforce import tariff barriers on food supplies, thereby creating an environment which encourages investment in agricultural productivity so that farmers can make profits and reduce their exposure to short term price fluctuations, rather than muttering about the injustice of agricultural subsidies elsewhere in the world. Tanzania does this with its rice industry, charging a 75% tariff on imported rice and it is no coincidence that investors are eying large scale rice production with considerable interest. The sugar industry in the region also has some protection from low cost imports. True, import barriers create opportunities for smuggling, tax evasion and corruption, but the risk of malfeasance should not drive sensible economic policy.

Budget Breakfast

East Africa is just coming to the end of its annual budget frenzy. A number of years ago, someone cooked up the idea that all member states of the East African Community should present their annual budgets on the same day. This year, of course, the stakes are high: East Africa as a whole has been experiencing rapid inflation (driven by price rises in basic needs - in particular food and energy prices), currency depreciation, and the resulting political instability elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.

According to the East African, the Finance Ministers didn't do a great job this year: I quote: "they sacrificed free market policies in the political horse-trading that has largely restored the numerous import exemption schemes blamed for slowing intra-regional trade.... [leading] to a slow return of entrenched nationalism that will slowly undermine the remaining stages of the region's integration process - the Monetary Union and Political Federation." A fairly disappointing analysis in the context of the real economic risks that present themselves.

Many moons ago, when I worked in Coopers & Lybrand Kenya's management consultancy practice, I co-ordinated the production of pre- and post-budget newspaper articles by partners and senior managers as part of Coopers' marketing programme in the region. Since then, the stakes have risen. The big 4 accounting firms and local accounting institutes splash out on budget breakfasts, lunches and cocktails - if you are able to get on two or three invitation lists, you can spend a full day criss-crossing the city in search of the next freebie in the opulence of Kampala's leading hotels.

The truth is that the budgets are usually a damp squib, full of self-congratulations and airy promises based on dubious assumptions and murky public sector accounts. Quite why public sector governance is so weak, when calls for ever-stronger private sector governance from public sector regilators continue to be so loud, seems strange. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal's 2,000 year-old question remains as relevant as ever.

Winterthorn

Every now and again, I find something really interesting in Business Daily. Yesterday's copy contained an article on the so-called Fertiliser tree, Faidherbia Albida, commonly known as Winterthorn in Southern Africa. Here's the link: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/-/539444/1171952/-/122lfrcz/-/index.html

Among its many positive attributes, Winterthorn is leguminous. That is to say, it fixes nitrogen in the soil, and researchers have apparently found that the yields of maize and other staple crops improve when planted alongside mature trees. I have always found it difficult to get a straight answer on the real impact of nitrogen-fixing plants on the nitrogen content of soil, but given that Winterthorn needs fairly generous spacing, it seems safe to assume that only a small proportion of nitrogen consumed by the inter-crop will be put back by the tree.

However, there are numerous other benefits to Winterthorn. It forms a useful windbreak for maize and sorghum. It sheds its leaves in the rainy season, which means that high levels of sunlight reach inter-crops during their peak growing season after the rains have finished. By forming a mulch, its leaves reduce soil water transpiration. Unusually, it flowers at the end of the rainy season and therefore provides a valuable forage source for bees at a time of scarcity. Its seed pods are good fodder for cattle and goats, and its timber has a very high calorific content when used for charcoal or firewood.

Indeed, the only drawback to planting Winterthorn in suitable semi-arid eco-zones would appear to be that its leaves are particularly attractive to African elephants. And it goes without saying that elephants and farmers are not the best of friends!

Motokas, cows and wives

Having only recently finished Twelfth Night, I had promised myself that I would take a 12-month break from matters theatrical..... But, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I find myself in another play starting next week at Uganda's National Theatre in Kampala. We will be doing four performances of the comedy The Cow Needs A Wife, written by Angie Emurwon and a prize winner in last year's BBC World Service African playwriting competition.

Without giving away too much of the story, the plot of this hilarious play revolves around the efforts of a poor young man (Mamboleo) to pay the bride price for his chosen woman, assisted by his over-bearing uncle (Motoka) and the cunning jack-of-all-trades (Kuyiya). I will be playing the role of Motoka, so named as the first owner of a motor car (motoka in Luganda) in his village.

The central themes of the play are bride price and fund-raising, both of which have considerable significance in Ugandan life. The logic of bride price is simple: it represents compensation paid to a family for the loss of a daughter. In an environment lacking an external welfare state, the extended family is the only approximation to a social safety net for the disadvantaged. But in recent years, some non-governmental organisations in Uganda have campaigned against bride price, on the grounds that it encourages society to regard women as chattels that can be bought and sold. It is hard to know to what extent this campaign has attracted popular support, either among women or men, in a society where the Kwanjula (betrothal ceremony) is deeply rooted in traditional culture. My own theory is that, as Uganda becomes wealthier and more urbanised, the Kwanjula - where the bride price is paid in the form of gifts of livestock and other commodities - will become increasingly celebratory and ceremonial, and that the transactional element will wither away.

One consequence of bride price is the need for would-be grooms to fund-raise among their families and friends in order to raise the necessary cash to meet the huge costs of betrothal and marriage. Next week, when we stage The Cow Needs A Wife, I know that in the tranquil lawns surrounding the theatre, there will be at least three or four tables each evening where meetings of wedding committees will be held, to organise functions and raise money to finance the event. Complicated budgets are drawn up and pledges from friends and family carefully recorded. Very few men in Uganda can afford to meet the costs from their own resources, especially in a country where extended families are large and where it is not unusual for weddings to have more than 500 guests.

And this is the cultural backdrop to this excellent comedy. If you are able to come and see it next week, don't miss it!

Nazareth

I went to Nazareth last week. Not the Nazareth in the Holy Land where Jesus served his apprenticeship as a carpenter, but the Nazareth that lies about 100 km south of Addis Ababa in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, its name a reminder of Christianity's long history in highland Ethiopia. (Or so I thought, until my host pointed out that the city's Oromo name is Adama, and that it had only been renamed by the last Emperor Haile Selassie some years ago.)

It was four years since I had last visited Addis. As with so many African cities, the pace of economic growth (at least if construction work is any sort of proxy) is rapid: yet the country remains in visible poverty. My journey took me south, to the Southern Nations and People's region. Shortly after the town of Butajira, we branched off the main road and continued along an excellent all-weather road en route to a farm in the Hlaba district. There were hardly any motorised vehicles on the way: most people travel on foot or, for a lucky few, on donkey carts. I saw very few shops on the way: the exchange of goods appeared to be reliant on weekly open-air markets in village centres. The rains had recently started and farmers were busy using ox-ploughs to prepare their fields for planting. In such a region, households are dependent on wood and farming waste for their energy source, yet there were almost no trees visible standing more than about head-high.

After reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse last year, this visit was a timely reminder to me of the vulnerability of rural communities like this to any adverse shock - for example, failure in rainfall. No rainfall, no crops. No crops, no food. No safety net, and no incentive to traders to transport food into the district, because there would be no money to pay for it. The same could be said of the long term impact of annual farming on soil fertility: diminishing farm yields feeding an ever-increasing population. It is a sobering thought.

On the way back into Addis, I saw a sign for Bobmarley Square (sic), a reminder of the strong connection between the Rastafarian movement and its spiritual home in Ethiopia. Tafari was, in fact, Emperor Haile Selassie's real name: according to Rastafarian beliefs, the embodiment of God on earth and the opponent of western Babylon. It is almost exactly 30 years to the day since Bob Marley's untimely death from cancer, and 36 years since Haile Selassie was executed by Mengistu's Derg, but the Rastafarian movement lives on.

Panacea

For all the hype that surrounds microfinance, one can be excused for believing that it will save the world. There is an initiative by the Ugandan government called "Bonna bagaggawale" which, loosely translated from Luganda means "Prosperity for all". Few appear to take it as a serious policy statement, but as a long term vision it is laudable. Bonna Bagaggawale could, however, be the manifesto for the microfinance movement, the latest cure-all in a long sequence for the world's woes.

I've recently finished reading the provocatively titled book "Why Microfinance doesn't work" by Milford Bateman, which should be compulsory, if uncomfortable, reading for microfinance believers everywhere. Bateman poses the question of why countries that have achieved microfinance saturation over the last decade (for example Peru, Bosnia and Cambodia) do not demonstrate obvious and substantive poverty reduction and "bottom-up" development gains. While the book deals less with African countries (where the microfinance movement is younger and, presumably, reliable statistics are harder to come by), Bateman supports his arguments with impressive statistics and qualititative observations. His conclusion is simple: that most independent evaluations are unable to show concrete evidence that microfinance has had a significant impact on poverty alleviation.

Indeed, Bateman goes further. He asserts that, contrary to the major premise of the microfinance movement: that it promotes poverty reduction by enabling the poor to borrow and invest in income-generating activities (and create a kind of virtuous spiral of wealth creation by micro-entrepreneurs), that in fact the vast majority of microfinance loans are taken out for short term expenses like school fees, health care, funeral expenses or other consumption requirements. So, far from creating wealth, microfinance adds a new item to many household monthly budgets: repayments to the microfinance institution (MFI).

No doubt microfinance supporters can (and will) produce powerful statistics of their own in support of the developmental thesis rubbished by Bateman. So far, at least in my experience, their rebuttals have been feeble. Recently, on quoting from Bateman's book, a MFI Chief Executive responded to me that "poor people also have a right to credit". Well, I can't remember seeing that particular right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A few years ago, at the onset of the credit crunch, my brother remarked to me, after having lived for a year or so in Nairobi, that while there wasn't a great deal of money around, at least personal indebtedness was very low. After the consequences of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, this seemed to him to be an entirely positive aspect of African economic life. What he didn't appreciate was the colossal demand for short term debt to meet essential consumption requirements. Now, better by far to have this demand met by properly regulated MFIs than by the Tallyman with extortionate interest rates and brutal enforcement methods (hence the classic movie poster above), but to represent this as poverty alleviation? To me, that's a bit like saying that credit cards and other unsecured lending are the solution to the world's economic problems. I don't think so.

The trouble with walking to work......

.....is, of course, that you have to walk home again.



Or at least, under normal circumstances, it is difficult to think of any other possible objection against this carbon-friendly and healthy alternative to Kampala morning traffic jams. But in Uganda, the "walk to work" campaign has taken on a whole new significance. Led by a loose alliance among the leaders of opposition parties, this apparently innocuous campaign, ostensibly against high food and fuel prices, has provoked a powerful, many say disproportionate, reaction by the Ugandan government. Here's a little piece of visual evidence from the Monitor newspaper. It's certainly a deterrent to leaving the car keys at home.

But leaving aside the muscular response, what's driving the underlying problem of increasing food prices? Global commodity prices, especially oil, are one factor. Increasing regional demand, in particular from South Sudan, is also cited. But the fundamental law of supply and demand is the real driver. Quite simply, there is a supply-side problem, fanned by the increasing demand of a growing population. There's not enough production and, in Uganda at least, there certainly isn't enough storage capacity. I've written before about the remarkable informality of Uganda's food distribution systems and the reliance on fresh products for food - and the lack of buffer stocks of maize and rice in particular - mean that there are no smoothing mechanisms in times of plenty or scarcity

And prices are rocketing upwards, across the board. Matooke, potatoes, maize and beans have all seen increases of between 20-40% in recent months. Not surprisingly, increases in staple foods are also driving up the cost of dairy products, poultry and pork. Fish prices have doubled in the last two years or so, as a result of the depletion resulting from over-fishing in Lake Victoria and Uganda's other major lakes. It's at the bottom of the pyramid, where food costs make up the major part of the household budget, where the impact of inflation is felt the most. When the Ugandan President said, a few weeks ago, that increasing food prices were good for the farmer, he was right, up to a point. Commercial farmers may well make some hay while the sun shines, but the truth is that most small-scale farmers are net consumers, not suppliers, of agricultural products.





"It's the economy, stupid" was Bill Clinton's slogan in his successful campaign against George Bush in the 1992 presidential elections. It's a phrase that could apply to a number of the popular uprisings that have sent shivers down the spines of many longtime autocratic leaders across Africa and the Middle East.

The best response for the nation to the "walk to work" campaign is investment in the agriculture sector. Big fists will only make things worse.

A green and yellow melancholy

It's always a wrench, coming to the end of a play. This will be my last post about Twelfth Night, by some distance my most successful production so far. And while I couldn't have asked for a better cast, the real star was the English language, in Shakespeare's incomparable hands. Here are just a few of my favourites quotes from the play:-

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.

You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard.

You are all idle, shallow things. I am not of your element.

Let us draw the curtain and show you the picture.

Madam, I will.

A very dishonest paltry boy.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenge.

Get him to say his prayers Sir Toby, get him to pray.

She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.

Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil ... are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the Devil

And it is with a green and yellow melancholy that I say goodbye to the characters and the words. Plays are labours of love: maybe one day I'll be brave enough to choose the wonderfully-named Love's Labour's Lost.