The series so far includes:

• Duncan Green from Oxfam, who contrasts progress in developing countries over the last year with the gloom of the ‘formerly rich’ countries of the G-8.
• Calestous Juma from Harvard, who identifies regional integration and better links with the diaspora as key drivers of Africa’s growth.
• Shanta Devarajan from the World Bank, who is cautiously optimistic, especially in the light  of increased demand by Africans for their governments to be accountable.
• Linda Raftree from Plan, who also emphasizes progress towards more inclusive and open societies.
• Kevin Watkins from Brookings and UNESCO, calling for “a properly financed global fund for education like those that have delivered such striking results in the health sector“.
• Jonathan Glennie from ODI and the Guardian, who is pessimistic about the prospects for international cooperation in the face of rising protectionism and nationalism as a result of poor economic prospects in the US and Europe.
• and my contribution, reproduced below, which gives a positive account of progress in many countries in Africa over the past year, and emphasizes the importance for developing countries of better global decision-making.

Economic growth has made the developing world less dependent on aid

A new generation of leaders, business friendly policies, technology, the spread of peace, and strong demand for natural resources have helped Africa to withstand the global downturn.

The Mercato, the commercial hub of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Ethiopia's economy grew by 7.5% in 2011.

I celebrated New Year’s Day 2011 in Ethiopia, where we lived for three years. Ethiopia is humming with the optimism and energy of a fast-growing country, creating more jobs, sending more children to school, expanding healthcare, and providing electricity, clean water, sanitation and roads.

Ethiopia’s economy grew by 7.5% this year, and it is not the only country in Africa to boast a high growth rate. Africa has been the fastest growing continent of the past decade. The emergence of a new generation of leaders, the end of the continent’s debt crisis, business-friendly policies, new technologies, the spread of peace, and strong demand for natural resources have helped Africa withstand the global downturn.

Steve Radelet, a former senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, has documented the emergence of 17 African countries in which total income is growing by more than 5% a year – increasing average incomes by 50% in 13 years. That growth is attracting businesses and investors from Africa and abroad, and the continent’s middle class is expanding. By 2015, about 100m African households will have incomes greater than £2,000 a year, roughly as many as India today.

And as they grow, developing countries are becoming less dependent on aid.

At the start of 2011, we did not expect a year in which so many people would be able to claim their rights and freedom. The Arab spring has moved many of us, but should not have surprised us. Better government has spread across Africa and the Middle East, defying outdated assumptions in the west. Thirteen African countries held national elections in 2011, four leading to a change of government; there will be 13 more in 2012. South Sudan gained its independence after a largely peaceful referendum.

When the year began, we did not know the rains in east Africa would fail. But in contrast to the 1980s, in today’s Ethiopia drought no longer means famine. Unlike its neighbour Somalia, there has been no repeat of the TV images of starving people in Ethiopia. That’s because, with the help of foreign donors, it has put in place early warning, food reserves and distribution systems, and a safety net that supports the poorest families in their own communities.

As developing countries have become more integrated into the world economy, and less dependent on aid, so their interests have changed. The most important international events for developing countries this year were the repeated failures of European leaders to put in place a credible plan to save the euro, the G20′s decision to put the world trade talks out of their misery, and modest progress at the Durban talks on climate change. These will all have more impact on developing countries than gatherings of the “development set” at World Bank meetings, the UN general assembly or the Busan forum on aid effectiveness.

But while progress has been good, it is not yet fast enough. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Horn of Africa will have spent Christmas in refugee camps, and about a billion people will go to bed hungry on New Year’s Eve.

In the years ahead, the Centre for Global Development in Europe will be working with policymakers, researchers and academics to find evidence-based, politically savvy ways for rich countries and powerful institutions to help developing countries lift themselves out of poverty. Our focus is on the world’s efforts to promote shared growth, protect our environment, reinvent our financial system, clamp down on international corruption, encourage and share innovation, reduce inequality and entrench peace.

For affluent and developing countries alike, these are the aspirations for 2012.

It is at times like this that we get a lot of half-baked commentary about famine. We are told that the problem is drought, or over-population, or global warming. Special interest groups call for more money to be spent on agriculture. Commentators complain that we’ve given aid for decades and nothing gets any better.

So here are two things to keep in mind.

First, famine is not caused by drought or overpopulation or insufficient food production. As Amartya Sen explained in Poverty and Famines, people go hungry when they cannot access food, because they are too poor or because markets and governments fail.  Drought is neither necessary nor sufficient for famine.

Ed Carr says that this insight holds in the current crisis:

The long and short of it is that food insecurity is rarely about absolute supplies of food – mostly it is about access and entitlements to existing food supplies.  The HoA [Horn of Africa] situation does actually invoke outright scarcity, but that scarcity can be traced not just to weather – it is also about access to local and regional markets (weak at best) and politics/the state (Somalia lacks a sovereign state, and the patchy, ad hoc governance provided by al Shabaab does little to ensure either access or entitlement to food and livelihoods for the population).  For those who doubt this, look at the FEWS NET maps I put in previous posts (here and here).  Famine stops at the Somali border.  I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have.  Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Map of the Horn of Africa by the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS-NET)

If you are interested in learning more, read Ed Carr’s book Delivering Development, and his blog. My colleague Charles Kenny makes a similar point in Foreign Policy.

Second, development aid works. Though there is considerable suffering, famine has been avoided in Ethiopia this time so far, and that is because of the safety net programme and disaster management system which has been set up by the Ethiopian government, with help from foreign aid. Remember 1984, and people leaving their land to make their way to feeding centres in Ethiopia?  Not happening this time. Why not?  Here’s what the BBC says:

BBC Africa analyst Martin Plaut says many people at the heart of the current disaster – in Ethiopia – have emerged relatively unscathed.  This is because the government in Addis Ababa has such an extensive safety net in place, he says.  Pre-positioned supplies mean the Ethiopian authorities could respond rapidly once the extent of the drought became clear.  The first food distributions began in February and have continued to the worst effected communities across a vast area. Communities are suffering, but the famine that has hit neighbouring Somalia has so far been avoided in Ethiopia and overall the disaster management system, built up since the 1980s, has worked.

Martin Plaut is no starry-eyed apologist for the aid system or the Ethiopian government.  But like me, he was in Ethiopia in 1984 so he knows what famine looks like; and he can see the difference in Ethiopia this time. As he points out, the investments that have been made over the past two decades have transformed Ethiopia’s ability to deal with bad rains. Ethiopia has suffered drought and famine about every ten years.  But now a determined government, backed by foreign aid, has put in place systems which have made Ethiopia more resilient and prevented a repetition this time of past tragedies.  If you are one of the Ethiopians who has put this in place, one of the hard-pressed development workers who has patiently assisted, or if you have contributed to aid, through taxes or donations, you should pat yourself on the back: bad as things are in the Horn of Africa today, the crisis would have been a lot worse without you.

Please spare a thought, and a few quid (or a few dollars) if you can afford it, for the 11 million people affected by hunger in East Africa today; and for the many aid agency staff working round the clock, often in difficult and dangerous conditions, to try to help them.

Update: Duck of Minerva thinks that Ed Carr and I are understating the role of physical factors.  Brian Kahn, on the other hand, agrees that “ The current famine in the Horn of Africa isn’t caused by drought. Rather, a complex mix of societal and political factors created a dangerous situation“.

Malini Mehra and Alex Evans discuss the big development challenges of the 21st Century in Development Drums 25

Alex Evans and I recently took part in a discussion of the big development issues with a committee of Members of Parliament in the British House of Commons. Alex kicked off that meeting with a magisterial and somewhat pessimistic presentation which set out ten key issues for development, and we took his presentation as our agenda for this discussion on Development Drums.

Malina and Alex are interesting and knowledgeable on a dauntingly wide range of issues, and the podcast covers a lot of ground: the changing distribution of global poverty; demographic change; the financial crisis; oil prices; food prices; feeding the 9 billion; climate change; trade; the changing face of conflict; the global governance deficit; and the implications for UK development policy. Each of these issues really needs an entire episode of Development Drums to be discussed properly, but I thought it was interesting to bring them all together to draw out common issues and ideas.

The following thoughts struck me from the discussion:

First – the importance of resilience which cropped up again and again in the discussion. I think this is possibly the Next Big Thing in development thinking (as if we need more Big Things). The idea is that we should be helping to develop the institutions and assets that ensures that people are resilient to shocks, of which there seem to be likely to be more.

Second – treating shocks as opportunities as well as risks.  As Alex points out in the podcast, there was a narrow window after the collapse of Lehman Brothers during which we could have remade the global financial system: but nobody had a plan ready to go. There are going to be more shocks: will the progressive development community be ready to seize the opportunities these represent?

Third – the almost complete failure of global governance. All the issues we discuss relate in some way to the failure to put in place effective global processes and institutions to solve collective action problems  such as on trade, climate change, or food supply. As Malini says, we are living in an era not of the G-8 but of G-0.  Alex provides an interesting analysis of the problems in the podcast: on the face of it, to my mind, the problems don’t sound insurmountable.

Fourth – the optimism and energy coming from emerging countries such as India and China. Malina both describes and embodies this.  But it’s also clear that on many issues – notably trade and climate change – the interests of these increasingly powerful countries are now diverging from those of the less developed countries, and we need to think hard about ensure the interests of the poorest countries are not left behind a grand bargain between the old and new rich countries.

Fifth – development policy isn’t mainly about aid.  In a discussion which surveys the big development challenges confronting us, aid hardly gets a mention. Yet most of the development agencies in the world spend most of their time thinking about aid.

How to listen to development drums

You can listen to Development Drums on your computer straight from the website (http://developmentdrums.org) or download any episode (from here) to your MP3 player or computer. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Development Drums on iTunes free of charge (search for “Development Drums” in the iTunes store).

As is the Development Drums custom, the podcast plays out with a slightly relevant song.  See if you can guess before you get to the end what it’s going to be (there’s a clue hidden in the title of the podcast, Episode 25: Global Development Challenges).

Other development podcasts

I find podcasts a convenient way to keep up to date, especially when I’ve got long plane flights or trips by road; and lots of people listen to them when running on the treadmill in the gym or during their commute.

If you enjoy Development Drums, you may also enjoy the Center for Global Development’s Global Prosperity Wonkcasts, which are a bit shorter than Development Drums.  As with Development Drums, you can listen online, subscribe to the feed or subscribe free on iTunes.

The Guardian has also recently started a monthly development podcast.  The most recent editions are about “securitisation of aid” (that is, greater focus of aid on fragile states) and on so-called “Land Grabs“.  Again, you can subscribe to the feed directly, or get it free on iTunes.

Here’s a complete list of development podcasts:

• Development Drums
• The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
• The Guardian Focus Podcast
• Think Before You Give
• BBC Africa Today
• Peterson Perspectives
• PRI: Global Health and Development
• The World Bank Podcasts
• Philanthropy This Week
• PRI: The Changing World

Other economics podcasts

Tim Harford (author, and FT leader writer) has just compiled a list of the best economics podcasts.

Would you spend it on stopping the slash-and-burn of forests?  Perhaps on switching to nuclear energy?   More energy-efficient buildings?  Building cleaner power stations?

According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, climate change experts at the Center for Global Development, the answer is (drum roll): you would do much, much better to spend your money on a combination of family planning and girls’ education in developing countries.

This table, based on data in their paper, shows how many tonnes of CO2 would be abated for your $1m:

The logic, of course, is that if there are fewer people on the planet, then we will generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions.  Population policies are important because there are many people in developing countries who want smaller families, but don’t have access to the family planning services they need to achieve this.  Education is important because educated girls want (and are more able to insist on) smaller families.  That’s why these interventions are important and cost effective, both individually and especially when done together.

Win – win

This approach is particularly attractive because, in addition to helping to slow global warming, there are other, very significant benefits for the citizens of developing countries of access to family planning and to education for girls.

The other day I reported here that if donors invested about $180 million a year to provide modern contraception to every Ethiopian woman who wants it, this could set off a virtuous circle of rising income per capita, lower desired family size, greater use of contraception, lower numbers of children, and so rising income per capita.  My back of an envelope calculation found that a decade of access to modern family planning would have roughly the same effect on incomes in Ethiopia as the entire international aid programme in Ethiopia does today.

As well as environmental and economic benefits, there are important social and health benefits for women and their families, which strengthen the case for these investments over and above the cost-effectiveness figures shown above.

Making choices

Of course in an ideal world we would do all of these things.  But although it is inconvenient to acknowledge it when you are busy trying to save the world, resources for averting climate change are limited. We should make informed choices to reduce carbon emissions in the most cost-effective and sustainable way we can with the resources available, to secure the biggest and broadest benefits.   These figures from the Center for Global Development imply that investment in family planning and girls’ education would be a far better investment than the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), which aims to spend $30 billion a year on incentives for developing countries to reduce deforestation and forest degradation.

We would get three or four times as much bang for our buck – in terms of climate change benefits – from population policies and girls’ education as we would from even the most cost-effective investments in forestry (stopping slash-and-burn), and in addition we’d get the broader economic and social benefits for the people of developing countries.

So why isn’t this, in fact, where we are spending the climate change money?  Something to do with the power of industry in the environmental lobby? (Update: See Eliot’s comment below)

(The figures in the table above are calculated from Table 2 and and Table 5 of The Economics of Population Policy for Carbon Emissions Reduction in Developing Countries, David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, Center for Global Development Working Paper 229)

Rich countries have many reasons for wanting to help poor countries. The main three British political parties speak in their manifestos of Britain’s obligations to the developing world (Lib Dems); moral duty, common interest and poverty emergency (Lab); and enlightened self interest and commitment (Cons).  The combination of motives – moral concern for others and self-interest – is a strength of the development cause, not a handicap.

These motives translate into two broad classes of objectives for development policy:

• One view is that development assistance should help to accelerate economic and institutional change in developing countries. The idea is that temporary support from outside can be a catalyst for permanent changes in developing countries. As economic growth takes off, developing countries will no longer need our help.  This view is attractive both to donors, who do not want to go on giving aid for ever, and for recipient countries who do not want to continue to be aid dependent.  For shorthand we will call this the transformation objective of development assistance.
• Another view is that development assistance can improve people’s lives today. This is most obvious in the case of humanitarian relief, for which the objective is to provide food and shelter; but more generally a lot of aid is used to send children to school or provide basic health care.  On this view, the development process is long and hard, and one role for outsiders is to enable people to live better lives while this process is happening in their country. Let’s call this the solidarity objective of development assistance.

It is entirely reasonable for countries, organizations and individuals to care deeply about both the transformation and the solidarity objective, and they can coherently pursue both objectives at the same time.

From time to time, people try to make connections between these objectives, positive and negative.

The claim of a positive connection is the idea that spending money on health and education is an investment in the human capital of a country, and that this will, in time, lead to faster economic growth.  Some point to significant investments in education in fast-growing Asian economies as evidence that education spending will promote growth.  Others say that improving health will lead to a demographic transition, in which falling infant mortality leads to smaller family sizes and greater investment in each child.  Both of these stories are appealing, though unfortunately neither is very well supported by the evidence.

The possibility of a negative connection is that the things that donors do to support people in developing countries as a matter of solidarity may actually slow down the political, social, institutional and economic changes that the country needs for transformation.  It may sustain unaccountable governments in power; undermine the social contract between citizen and state; hollow out fragile government institutions; cause appreciation of the real exchange rate and so choke off exports; or create a culture of dependency that dims demand for social change.  Again, the empirical evidence for these (quite plausible) ideas is pretty thin (pace the claims of Dambisa Moyo).

Are we using the right tools to pursue our two types of objective: tying to catalyze transformation, and at the same time to help people live better lives?   I think we are focusing too much on aid and not enough on development policies.

It is quite straightforward to see that aid can help meet solidarity objectives.  It is used to provide clean water and food, and to finance public services such as health and education.  There is quite good evidence that it is effective, though there is much more to learn about how to do it better.

It is much less clear that aid achieves our transformation objectives. The statistical evidence linking aid to economic growth is, at best, uncertain (see The Anarchy of Numbers by David Roodman).  This does not mean that there is no relationship – it is much harder to demonstrate a statistical connection when there are few countries to observe, and so many factors as well as aid that are likely to affect whether a country achieves economic lift-off.  We can think of aid being to growth what venture capital is to start-ups: many investments will fail, but the huge benefits from the few that succeed may make the losses worthwhile.

I personally have my doubts that aid makes much difference to the prospects for economic and social transformation.  Countries change from within, through long, slow, organic processes, and it is hard to see how money and advice from outside can make much of a difference to that.  Consider our own history, and the decades and centuries that it has taken us so far to construct our social and political institutions.

If we are serious about promoting transformation, we need to look beyond aid to how we can change the environment in which developing countries are struggling to change their economic, social and political institutions. Transformation is much likely to take root if we create conditions in which it is likely to succeed.

What are the development policies that might contribute to this?

1. Trade policy – As well as duty-free, quote-free access for all developing countries to our markets, we have to dismantle the complex rules – such as rules of origin and phyto-sanitary standards – which make exports complicated.
2. Agriculture policy – We have to stop dumping subsidized agricultural over production abroad, especially as our aid conditions prevent developing countries from competing with us. We also have to stop using food aid as a welfare system for European and American farmers.
3. Climate change – If anthropogenic global warming is a reality, as is the consensus among scientists, then the harm we are doing to developing countries through climate change will become one of the most important obstacles to development.  Probably the most important thing we can do to accelerate development is to stop our own carbon emissions.
4. Conflict – We make and sell the guns that are used in conflicts in developing countries.  We buy the oil and minerals over which groups are fighting.  We sustain the unaccountable leaders in pursuit of our geo-strategic interests.   If we were serious about development, we would by now have stopped the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda – it would be a simple matter for a well-resourced army.
5. Immigration – In the 18^th Century, a third of Europeans moved to America, to the benefit of both continents.  In the 20^th and 21^st century we have introduced historically unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people – notwithstanding our rhetoric about globalization. These restrictions may be the single most important factor which explains why poor countries have not been able to converge on rich countries.
6. Intellectual property – Another constraint on the ability of developing countries to close the gap is that there are historically unprecedented constraints on their ability to appropriate technologies. For centuries, new agricultural techniques such as crop rotation spread through word of mouth.  During the industrial revolution, America and Europe were able to use technologies from Britain.  When Henry Ford invented the assembly line, the idea was rapidly adopted everywhere.  But today’s technologies – from business software to pharmaceuticals and biotechnology – are protected by patents that make it impossible for other countries to adopt.
7. Corruption – We often think of corruption as a problem of developing countries, but this ignores the fact that the money for corruption comes from, and often returns to, industrialised countries.  Rich western companies pay bribes, in return for access to contracts or minerals.  To his eternal credit, President Jimmy Carter introduced the Foreign Corrupt Practises Act, which made it harder for American companies to pay bribes abroad. But there is much more we could do, if we were prepared to take on the vested interests of our own multinational companies, to reduce corruption in developing countries.
8. International governance – In our own nations, we have long ago dropped the property qualification for representation; but internationally we do not think that it is strange that representation in our main institutions is based on wealth and power.  This matters because again and again, the interests of developing nations are ignored, or treated only as a footnote.  From banking secrecy to internet peering arrangement, the rules of the game are set by the wealthy in their own interests. Changes to these practices which would be irrelevant to most of us, but could make a huge difference to the prospects for development, are resisted by powerful vested interests from industrialized countries.

It is entirely reasonable that industrialized countries want both to promote transformation in developing countries, and to help people there to live better lives while that process is taking place.  Aid has been proven to be an effective instrument for meeting our solidarity objective, but it is far less clear that it is a significant driver of transformative change.  Our political rhetoric focuses on the idea that development policies should promote transformation.  Yet it seems unlikely that aid is the most useful tool we have for achieving this.  If we are serious about transformation we should invest  more time and effort in creating the global environment in which economic and social change are more likely to succeed, by changing our policies and behaviours on issues like trade, agricultural policies and immigration.

Many people who work in development are directly or indirectly dependent on aid. Government development agencies gain their bureaucratic position from the size of their budget.  International NGOs get a lot of their money from aid budgets or from private charitable giving.  Partly as a result, the debate about development too often shifts to aid: whether it works, how much is given and by what means.  These are important questions, but primarily for the important goal of helping people in developing countries to live better lives while they are waiting for, and helping to build, a more prosperous and fair society.  If we are serious about accelerating the transformation, it is our development policies, not aid policy, that we should be discussing.

Bono made two very good points in the New York Times on Monday:

An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle)
In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now. One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. …

People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid
A lot of us have seen or lived the organizational chart of the last century, in which power and influence (whether possessed by church, state or corporation) are concentrated in the uppermost point of the pyramid and pressure is exerted downward. But in this new century, and especially in some parts of the developing world, the pyramid is being inverted. Much has been written about the profits to be made at the bottom of the pyramid; less has been said about the political power there. Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place. The world is taking notice of this change. On her most recent trip to Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bypassed officials and met instead with representatives of independent, nongovernmental groups, which are quickly becoming more organized and more interconnected. For example, Twaweza, a citizen’s organization, is spreading across East Africa, helping people hold local officials accountable for managing budgets and delivering services. (Twaweza is Swahili for “we can make it happen.”)

(Disclosure: I am a member of the board of Twaweza, so it is not surprising that I agree with Bono that their work is good.)

Update: You should also read Alex Evans’s excellent piece at Global Dashboard on the importance of Bono’s support for contract and converge.

Then last night, we woke up to torrential rain. I gather it was raining in Addis Ababa too.  It doesn’t normally rain at this time of year in Ethiopia.  If this continues for another day or two, the crop will be ruined.

The rain today is an unwelcome reminder of how precarious is the livelihoods of millions of people who are dependent on rain coming at the right time (and not at the wrong time).  It can turn a good harvest into a bad one, or into no harvest at all.  Affected families may be forced to sell their meagre assets, pushing not only them but their children into another generation of chronic poverty.

Our thoughts today are with the millions of farmers of Ethiopia and their families.

UPDATE: (2nd December) – It has been cloudy, but not raining, here in Addis. Fingers crossed.

we are all in this together.

This is a powerful message.

When 15 million people  face starvation in East Africa this Christmas, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When twenty thousand children die tomorrow from easily preventable and treatable diseases, purely because they don’t have enough money to buy drugs that cost cents to produce but for which we charge rich world prices, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the developing world demands proper compensation for their part of the atmosphere, which we have filled up with carbon emissions far beyond our share, resulting in the risk of destruction to entire nations, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the people of the Niger Delta demand a share of the wealth lying beneath their ground, and an end to the environmental destruction caused by our oil companies so that we can drive our cars and cool our houses, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When we complain about corruption in the developing world, forgetting that all the money that pays for those bribes comes from us, and then choose not to prosecute our own companies that pay the bribes, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When we continue to be one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of arms in the world, fuelling conflict all around the world, but are more concerned about a hundred jobs on the Isle of Wight, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When people are forced to leave their homes, their family and their country because they lack freedom or face persecution, or because they cannot find work that pays them enough to support their family, and they look for a new beginning in rich countries, and we decide how we will treat asylum seekers and immigrants, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the world’s poor demand fair payment for their coffee, cocoa, and minerals, and for their labour which provides us with the cheap clothes and electronics which we take for granted, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the world economy recovers, companies of the rich world begin to prosper, when bankers get their bonuses again and the rich start to become richer, and we decide how to share the proceeds of that growth within and between nations, let us say:

we are all in this together.

I have a personal interest in this because I travel a lot by air (boo!) but I have not eaten meat for 25 years, nor do I own a car.  I also live in a house that has neither any heating nor air conditioning; nor (unlike many ex pats in Addis Ababa) do we have a generator.  So if we are fixated only on air travel, my carbon footprint looks horrendous; but it looks a lot better if you take account of other aspects of my lifestyle. I am sure I should do more, probably much more, to reduce the damage that I do to the environment: but let’s look objectively at the overall impact of a person’s lifestyle, rather than focus on any single measure.

The fixation with air travel annoys me because I think that there is public good in air travel.  The world would, in my view, be a better place if more people were able to travel and meet people in other countries and learn about other cultures.  We would have a stronger sense of solidarity with other people around the world and a greater willingness to act collectively to solve global problems.  We would probably be more worked up about the need to tackle global warming if we saw first hand how it is already affecting communities affected by rising temperatures and rising sea levels.  Air transport also enables farmers in Africa to grow flowers and beans for sale in Europe, with an overall carbon cost that is much lower than if these products were grown in greenhouses in Europe, and that trade provides livelihoods for more than a million people who desperately need it so that they can trade their way out of poverty.

I do not see a similar “public good” argument for eating meat.  I did not become a vegetarian 25 years ago because of climate change, which hadn’t been invented then, but because I thought then and continue to believe that it is wrong to eat animals purely for pleasure.  As well as being bad for the animals themselves, and for the climate, the meat industry is destroying our health and our countryside.

Yesterday Tristram Stuart Hunt in The Guardian calculated how much we should reduce our meat consumption:

Based on the global food production figures published by the FAO, I did a few preliminary calculations. Global average consumption of meat and dairy products including milk was 152kg a person in 2003. Average EU and US consumption, by contrast, was over 400kg, while Uganda’s was 45kg. In order to reach the equitable fair share of global production, rich western countries would have to cut their consumption by 2.7 times – and this doesn’t include the fact that the butter will have to be spread even more thinly if the global population really does increase by another 2.3 billion by 2050.

However, still further reductions would be necessary because global meat production is already at unsustainable levels. The IPCC among other bodies, has called for an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since high levels of meat and dairy ­consumption are luxuries, it seems reasonable to expect livestock production to take its share of the hit. For rich ­western countries this would mean decreasing meat and dairy consumption to significantly less than one tenth of current levels, the sooner the better.

So let’s try to focus less on air travel – which has positive benefits for the world – and more on changing our diet, which we should be doing even if there were no impact from livestock on climate change.

I suspect that the environmental movement focuses on air travel partly because it appeals to an instinct for class war. The kind of people who fly several times a year on long-haul flights are the kind of people we love to hate.  This makes a campaign against air travel much more popular than criticising people for eating meat, which would mean taking on “ordinary” people.

Of course, as a vegetarian who flies a lot, I would say this, wouldn’t I?

Here are some key points:

• Donors promised to increase aid by 2010.  Half way to that target, if donors had been increasing aid at a constant rate to meet their commitments:
  - Global aid in 2007 would have been $18.4 billion higher
  - Over the last three years donors would have spent an additional $29.5 billion
  - This would have lifted approximately an extra 15 million people permanently out of poverty.
• The G7 also promised in 2005 to double aid to Africa. Half way to that target:
  - G7 aid to Africa has increased by only $3.3 billion, less than a sixth of the promised increase.
  - If aid had been increased at a constant rate towards the target, aid to Africa would have been more than $6 billion higher in 2007.
• It is becoming clear that Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece and France are not going to meet their promises
• The financial crisis is a potential “quadruple whammy” for developing countries. The value of the existing aid commitments has fallen (because they are expressed as a share of GDP), donors are increasingly unikely to meet those commitments, the financing needs of developing countries have been increased by the downturn, and there will be be substantial declines in non-aid flows to developing countries such as foreign direct investment, remittances, and equity investment.

In industrialised countries the fiscal “automatic stabilisers” tend to increase spending in recession, which both dampens the macroeconomic effects of the downturn and channels additional funding to services that face additional costs. By contrast the institutional arrangements for providing finance to developing countries tend to mean that finance is reduced just as needs are increasing, which amplifies the economic downturn, increases economic instability and jeopardises poverty reduction and service delivery.

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”

some recent research by Cranfield University – who compared the emissions from producing 12,000 rose stems in Kenya with those in Holland, including transporting them to Hampshire – and found that the emissions produced by Kenyan rose and flying them here can be less than a fifth of those grown in heated and lighted greenhouses in Holland. Why? Because Kenya is warm and sunny, and heating greenhouses in Holland uses enormous amounts of fossil fuels.

Furthermore, even if it were not better for the environment to buy African flowers rather than Dutch flowers, we should still consider buying flowers, fruit and vegetables from Africa:
people living in the vast majority of African countries are responsible for a tiny amount of carbon emissions. In Kenya, carbon emissions are 200 kg a head; here it is fifty times that. We should bear that in mind when making our choices.

This is social justice on a global scale. If we boycott their goods that are flown to the UK we deny our fellow human beings their chance to grow; their chance to reduce poverty. It’s like saying, we messed this planet up, but you can take the consequences.

So do the right thing on Valentines Day: buy flowers from Africa.