Tackling rural poverty, together

Dr. Christoph Kohlmeyer

Co-Chair, Global Donor Platform for Rural Development
Head of Division, Rural Development and Food Security, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Bonn

Co-Chairman Kohlmeyer: What really counts is aid effectiveness

Christoph Kohlmeyer, Ph.D., says agricultural policies must make sense. His speeches pointing out the many ways they don’t are met sometimes with a barrage of eggs and tomatoes from angry farmers in his native Germany. But 25 years spent in rural development, from grass-roots work in Africa and Asia to ministerial headquarters at home, have earned the agricultural economist a reputation for imperturbable diplomacy on behalf of donor cooperation. Dr. Kohlmeyer spoke with Timothy Nater in Bonn.

Nater: Is the world finally starting to get the rural agenda right?

Kohlmeyer: Most of our rural policies are anything but right. They’re just not working, whether for our small farmers or for the rural populations of developing countries, where about 70% of all the world’s poor still live.

I’m a great believer in coherence. There is no coherence in agricultural policy today, either in rich or in poor countries.

Or in trade, by the look of things.
Farm subsidies in rich countries have two negative consequences for trade. The first is that rich countries have to keep trade barriers against food imports high in order to maintain their own high internal market prices.

But my biggest objection is that subsidies are also spent on exporting food on the world market. That gives our produce a 20% price advantage. Many developing countries can’t compete. They find it cheaper to buy our farm products on world markets than to invest in producing the same goods themselves. Their farmers are disconnected from their own domestic markets. Farmers don’t farm, roads aren’t built, rural areas remain impoverished, the vicious cycle continues. For the last 20 years or so, developing-country governments have preferred to tax agriculture rather than invest in it, and we donors have bowed to their priorities.

But spending on food aid is increasing.
It’s truly perverse: global donors today are handing out more money on food aid and hunger relief than on promoting agriculture itself. The impact on local farm prices is ruinous. And this state of affairs will worsen until we start putting money back into agriculture again. If we go on with business as usual, we’ll never reach Millennium Development Goal I, namely halving the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. We have to get a whole lot better at our business if we still want to win this race against time.