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.