Benny Dembitzer is an international development economist specializing in the economics and management of small-scale enterprises. He was taught by Amartya Sen, one of the outstanding economists of the present era, who identified access to enough food as the key issue in liberation of people from starvation. Read Benny's full biography here.
Benny (not alone in the world), has become more and more convinced that the poverty and hunger in most of sub-Saharan Africa, a part of the world in which he has worked, studied, and travelled over the last half a century, are due to physical changes, including global warming that is inevitably affecting the tropics more than the Northern parts of the world, decreasing availability of water, soil erosion, and deforestation.
But all attempts at overturning the rapidly diminishing food security across most of the continent is due to outside forces.
They include the misguided applications of inappropriate agricultural strategies pushed by the North, land grab by outside interests, including foreign countries that are investing to produce for re-export to their own countries, the need to repay huge debts to international banks, including the World Bank that forces African countries to export more and more of their own unprocessed commodities at the cost of local food production, and the marketing tactics of International chemical companies.The latter come from the North as well as China. Above all, there are too many donors which all cut across one another and do not reach those who really need the help, elderly women farmers. All the aid given to sub-Saharan Africa is being consumed in the process of delivery. We all should fight for food sovereignty in different countries and regions of the continent.
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He has worked for 51 years across 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and also in Pakistan and Indonesia. Most of his work has been for International agencies, including the UNDP, the World Bank, UNIDO, ILO, ITC and for international NGOs, including OXFAM, CARE International, War on Want, Skillshare Africa, VSO. He started GRASSROOTS AFRICA in 2010, and has been involved with small-scale agricultural projects in Malawi ever since.
Mr. Dembitzer was a Rockefeller fellow in 2019, is currently Hon Fellow of University College, London, and was a member of the team that was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. Please contact Benny here.
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