Conferences

vital role in counteracting this de- velopment .

The entire workshop programme was smoothly executed thanks to the excellent work of ILCA’s Training Department and the organizing com- mittee, while the variety of topics ensured that all delegates participated in the discussions. Criticisms about the usefulness and practical aspects of the application of the FAO Framework for Land Evaluation were voiced in a friendly but business-like atmosphere which contributed greatly to this

Workshop, which may be regarded as the first step to an integrated approach in land evaluation for extensive graz- ing. A total of 28 papers were pre- sented, which together with the re- ports on the working group sessions and the recommendations and conclu- sions will be published as proceedings of this workshop in the ILRI publica- tion series.

W. Siderius ITC, Enschede

the Netherlands

Polarization of views on food aid Second Food Aid Seminar, organized by the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK, !5-16 December 1983

The Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex held its Second Food Aid Seminar from 5 to 16 December 1983, directed by Ed- ward Clay and Hans Singer, reviewing the current state of food aid, the debate on a wide range of food aid policy issues, and the state of the art in assessment of project food aid.’ With- in these broader themes greater atten- tion was given on the one hand to the overall context of food aid within the whole development structure and re- lated policies, bringing out the grow- ing need for cross linkages between policy and reality, and between food aid and other forms of aid, and on the other hand to the changing require- ments of food aid over time and responses to these changes.

Some 35 participants attended the seminar from food aid departments of bilateral and international agencies, recipient countries, governments and universities. Between the first and the second IDS seminars, there had been considerable international discussion of food aid, such as the Hague Semi- nar in October 1983 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the World Food Programme taking a positive but qual- ified view of food aid,2 and the pub- lication and ensuing controversy sur- rounding Tony Jackson’s onslaught on project food aid.3 This polarization, together with the wide mix of the participants meeting in an academic setting, gave rise to stimulating pre- sentations and discussions from which

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a number of important issues emerged.

The presentation made by partici- pants from the donor and internation- al agencies gave added depth to this background. Although wide ranging coordination and exchange of in- formation has been achieved in sever- al instances at the field level, eg Bangladesh, Mali and Somalia, often under the chairmanship of WFP, it did not seem that this has yet been put into practice at headquarters level. In fact, the pooling of information on the methods and procedures of the many institutions involved in food aid was most enlightening to the participants, and one of their most often voiced wishes was to continue to be able to benefit from this kind of exchange and to keep abreast of changing views and circumstances. These views were strengthened by the evident paucity of donor knowledge about each other’s detailed operations which were based on widely differing policy approaches to food aid and ensuing differing criteria for allocations by country, commodity and type of aid.

Vital role

There was consensus on the vital consolidating and stabilizing role of the Food Aid Convention and its various extensions since 1972. It had been instrumental in converting what began as variable ad hoc commodity disposal arrangements into a mechan-

ism providing a statutory minimum input of cereals to developing coun- tries over a period of years, on the basis of defined humanitarian and developmental criteria. Most felt that the quantities could be progressively increased and hoped this framework could be expanded to cover other commodities and other inputs.

Discussions on these topics showed, furthermore, the need for topic- specific workshops, and for more in- formation to communities and insti- tutes in developing countries about assistance possibilities open to them. The IMF’s Compensatory Financing possibilities, for instance, were found to have been underutilized.

The differing views and the wide ranging discussions on policies and practical problems arising from agency programme implementation, and in agency interactions with the priorities and absorptive capacities of the reci- pient countries, showed that there was, despite much common ground, still a considerable need for further research in areas such as the allocation criteria for food aid: the balance of bilateral and multilateral channelling, the means by which each donor selects beneficiary countries, and the type and duration of allocation, project aid or programme assistance. Some saw project aid as superior, since it enables targetting to specific groups together with data feedback to satisfy the sup- porters of food aid in their respective countries. Others, concerned about the overheads involved in detailed administration of project operations and the practical difficulties of target- ting, saw programme aid, under which governments used the food to gener- ate counterpart funds for their own priority projects as a more cost effec- tive resource transfer.

The relationship between nutrition and food aid also requires further research. It seems to have been ax- iomatic in the case of the multilateral food aid that all food aid must be shown to have or have had a nutrition- al impact. The discussions indicated that a growing body of opinion that the insistance on nutritional rather than economic goals (even in targetted programmes) was in fact counterpro- ductive, as in the case of many food-

FOOD POLICY May 1984

for-work projects, or food distribution projects that primarily act as family income supplementation.

Evaluation and impact assessment, particularly of project aid, were sub- jects for the second week. Detailed methodologies of evaluation were pre- sented; the methodologies were simi- lar but there was a considerable differ- ence in perception of the evaluator and his objective. Some recent pro- gramme evaluations, such as that of the EEC ‘Community Action’ pro- gramme, and of Canadian food assist- ance, by their own evaluation service have involved what is termed ‘corpor- ate evaluation’, that is of the whole system of food aid. Another interest- ing theme was the developing linkage between evaluation and project re- design, in, for example WFP and on US Title II Assistance. These newer styles of evaluation are a sharp con- trast to the ‘classical’ concept of evaluation and impact assessment, which is almost always ex post and independent from programme man- agement.

All participants found the oppor- tunity for an informal debate, ex- change of views and information by administrators and academics most worthwhile. IDS plans for the series to continue with another seminar, prob- ably in late 1984, on food aid and emergencies.

John Wood Visiting Fellow

IDS, Brighton, UK

‘For reports on the First IDS Food Aid Seminar see Food Policy, Vol 7, No 4, November 1982, p 348-48, and more fully E.J. Clay and J. Pryer, Food Aid: hues and Policies, IDS Discussion Paper 183, Institute of Development Studies, Universi- ty of Sussex, Brighton, 1982. ‘World Food Programme/Government of the Netherlands Seminar: information Paper by the Executive Director (WFP/ CFA 16/INF/6), October 1983. 3T. Jackson with D. Eade, Against the Grain, OXFAM, Oxford, 1982. %. Maxwell, ed, ‘An Evaluation of the EEC Food Aid Programme’, A Report prepared for the Evaluation Service of the Commis- sion of the EEC by the Institute of Develop- ment Studies and Africa Bureau, Cologne, Commissioned Study No 4, The Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, November 1983.

FOOD POLICY May 1984

Book reviews The CAP and the food industry THE FOOD AND FARM POLICIES OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY

by Simon Harris, Alan Swinbank and Guy Wilkinson

John Wiley, Chichester, UK, 1983, 354 pp, f 1250

This book offers a comprehensive coverage of the more important aspects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and, as its title indicates, carries the exposition beyond the farm gate, reflecting the authors’ interest and experience in the food industry. Indeed, a main theme of the book is that the food industry is responsible for operating the major part of the CAP mechanism.

The early chapters outline the his- tory of the CAP, the Brussels bureaucracy and the basic method of price support. For seasoned CAP watchers reading this material there will be a feeling of dkj;jci vu, although for the student or newcomer to the scene it forms a vital prerequisite for what follows. Chapters 4 to 7 deal with the CAP on a broad commodity basis and illustrate the (sometimes seeming- ly absurd) complexity of some of the support arrangements. Major areas of current concern raised in this section of the book include the infamous commodity ‘surpluses’, the issue of cheap imports of cereal substitutes, the bias within the CAP that favours the larger, richer farmers of the North, and the various proposals for reform.

Elementary economic analysis is employed throughout, with the use of the now usual ‘lean-to shed’ diagrams, to illustrate the effect of the CAP on product markets. However, attention to economic theory is on occasion lax. For example, in referring to beef consumption in the Community in the late 197Os, the authors comment that ‘market prices were raised to levels which consumers were not prepared to pay’ (p 108). Did consumption really

fall to zero? Similarly, the assertion that, ‘The stability that the CAP has brought to European food prices is, no doubt, prized by consumers’ (p 330), is more open to economic analysis than the authors imply. Some very useful data are presented throughout the text, although the omission of the word ‘million’ from Table 4.2 will hopefully not fool any reader into believing that the cost of the cereals sector in 1982 was a mere f1200. But for a subject area where data abound, the authors have done well to avoid swamping the reader with a plethora of numbers.

Chapter 9 examines an aspect of the CAP which often receives much lip service but little action or money, that of structural policy. Although atten- tion is drawn quite rightly to the Community’s hollow commitment in this area, it is difficult to concur with the authors’ view that the costs of the (now ended) non-marketing of milk and beef conversion schemes were ‘substantial’. When set against the cost of price support in the dairy sector the figure they cite of around f300 mil- lion, spread over eight years, pales into insignificance. This chapter also deals with the contentious issue of national aids to agriculture.

The importance of the CAP to the food industry is made explicit in Chap- ter 10. Food processors and manufac- turers have repeatedly called for lower CAP prices, so as to reduce their own raw material costs. However the other side of the coin is that to maximize their production capacity, butter manufacturers and sugar refiners, for example, are heavily reliant on a continuing high level of output from EC agriculture. Farmers, it would appear, are not the only group to gain from surpluses.

In dealing with the Community budget and the cost of the CAP the authors rightly identify as major prob- lems the shortage of finance and the UK’s grievance concerning the coun- try by country net balance. Although

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