Last updated on August 29, 2011
I began my career in development policy with an internship at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to eradicating rural poverty. I had just finished my Masters in December, and I knew I was going to start my PhD the following September, so I was looking for short-term employment to keep me occupied during the spring and fall.
As luck would have it, Quebec’s Ministry of International Relations had organized a number of paid internships in international organizations for recent graduates. One of those internships was with IFAD, in Rome, working with the person in charge of multilateral and interagency affairs.
Back then, the administrator of the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) was Mark Malloch-Brown, a brilliant communicator who had previously worked for The Economist and whose skills as communicator I have admired ever since my time at IFAD, when I had to read a number of his speeches for my work.
Here is what Malloch-Brown writes on famine in an essay for Reuters:
“The best example of why government matters is in Somalia, where there is no central government to speak of and the famine is principally in the area controlled by the ruthless Al-Shabab Islamic militia. By contrast semi-independent, better governed Somaliland and Puntland have weathered the crisis much more effectively. Following the logic that safety from famine follows good leadership and management it may be time for its neighbors and the world to hear Somaliland’s call for international recognition and independence. Its parent is a failed state that might do better broken up.
Whether it is terraced farming in Ethiopia, which conserves dusty highland soils that previously were blown or rained off the hill sides, or the extraordinary success of Bangladesh in recent years of cutting lives lost from tens of thousands to almost zero in the annual monsoons that flood down it’s funnel-shaped center, the examples of successful cheap disaster mitigation and containment are remarkable in poor countries.
Yet as man has found throughout his history, good management can only get you so far in a contest with nature, and today the affected famine region is facing the worst drought in 60 years or more. Man-made defenses might seem not to be able to prevail against the combination of climate change and local environmental degradation that are making populations in this area ever more marginal. Like in Niger in West Africa there seems a risk that this part of East Africa could lapse into an endemic famine situation with almost yearly food crises.”