A LETTER FROM BENNY DEMBITZER

It's autumn and universities across much of the First World are harvesting a crop of new students that they will nurture into graduates for the aid industry to take in a few years' time. My message today addresses problems in the way these institutions work and the impact this has on their students -- and ultimately on how effective interventions by rich countries are in solving the problems of extreme poverty and death by starvation in poor countries.

The primatologist Jane Goodall, who died recently, did not have a degree when she first went to observe the behaviour of chimpanzees in East Africa. It was two years later that she registered as a university student -- and managed to skip undergraduate and masters classes to work directly on her doctorate, which was good enough to win the approval of her peers. To me this approach could also be the way to become a good economist, and especially a development economist. Don't start from some theory which has absolutely no basis in reality but start from reality and make sense of it in your own terms before you try to make sense of academic books.

I unfortunately didn't come to this realisation until late in my career as a development economist. I had studied economics several decades earlier at Cambridge under one of the most brilliant economists of our generation, professor Amartya Sen. He got the Nobel prize in Economics in 1998 for his studies of famines as a tool of power. Fortunately, his teachings were solidly founded in reality. I taught for a short while at Cambridge and a variety of other universities until I eventually retired at the end of 2023 as visiting professor of economics at the China Centre at University College London. By then I had become increasingly unhappy about the teaching of economics as it had evolved over the previous three or four decades. Economics is the primary social science: whatever we do to survive on this earth, whether we grow our own food, steal it, buy it or exchange it, it is an economic act. But some textbooks describe a world in which everyone is assumed not only to buy their food, but also to do this at a price set by crossed lines on a graph of supply and demand. To be of any use, economics should remain very deeply anchored in reality, in what happens to real people on a daily basis.

In parallel to my academic career I have had the privilege of working in development across many parts of the world, primarily across sub-Sahara Africa, but also in Indonesia and more recently in Latin America. Society determines economics, only occasionally does economics shape society. We know that in a Muslim country, for example, there is no official market for alcohol. But in reality there could be an underground market: I understand that they do flourish in various places, including Iran. Similarly, the idea of universal economics doesn't work if we consider the market for hand guns, for example. In many countries (eg, those across most of Europe) there is no market for them. Yet in other countries, most notably the USA, there is an open market for even the most sophisticated types.

Consider a poor country, one which is rural, with the vast majority of its people living on and off the land. It's likely to have a growing population and increasingly frequent climatic events that decrease the productivity of the land. As a result, the essential quantities of food needed are becoming more and more difficult to obtain. The people have no food security. Food security can be provided, however, if there is a government structure that allows for it. That could be in the form of reserves sufficient to prevent famines, it could be food subsidies to those who particularly need them, or, the most obvious of all, it could be a way of enabling people to produce more food. This is the main theme of my most recent book, THE GLOBAL FAMINE GAME.

My book concentrates particularly on the fact that the global system of economics, dictated by the World Bank, the international Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, is simply strangling poor countries. If we want to help, we should not be dishing out small amounts of money or small amounts of food. We should change our policies to enable poor countries to develop as they require, not as we think they require. That means above all food security at local, national, and possibly at regional levels. To achieve an increase in productivity, farmers need to be better educated about the potential to make improvements at little cost.

If you have an economic system in which no one has any resources -- ie, no one can buy essential inputs such as fertilisers or better seeds -- then in reality there is no viable economic system. There is only a system of indebting the poorest people. This is exactly what is happening in the poorest countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa.

I would urge all students and teachers of economics, from A-level to university courses, to become aware of this increasing problem.

We know that at least 30,000 people per day die of starvation. This number was calculated before Covid; today's number will be much higher. What are the rich countries doing about it? Well, the amount of aid from governments (what is generally referred to as official development assistance or ODA) is decreasing, especially from major donors such as the USA (with the abrogation of USAID) and the UK (where the government has virtually eliminated all official aid).

To make matters worse, other forms of aid are now also under pressure -- such as that from individuals in rich countries who have for generations made a point of giving a bit of money to the poorest people in the world. This pressure results from increases in the prices of most daily commodities -- partly because of the war between Russia and Ukraine and partly because of the negative impact on crop yields of climatic changes everywhere.

Obviously, I would like to sell more copies of my book; if you are a student, please ask your library to buy a copy. But more importantly, I would like you to contribute to the conversations we're having on our website, fightglobalpoverty.com, about how we can fix the problems of international aid.

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THE GLOBAL FAMINE GAME explores the complex, systemic issues keeping sub-Saharan Africa trapped in cycles of food scarcity and poverty, while offering ways forward that focus on the needs of farmers themselves.

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