The Life of Food
July 2009
Banner photo: Oxheart tomatoes [© Creativ Studio Heinemann]
Personal Reflections from Darfur
Margie Buchanan-Smith, a consultant and policy researcher on humanitarian assistance, reflects on what her experience in Darfur, Sudan, has taught her about the long-term challenges of creating food security in conflict areas.
Displaced women selling grain, including food aid, in Kass market, Darfur [Margie Buchanan-Smith]
I first flew into El Fasher, then capital of Darfur, on April 1, 1987. After leaving Khartoum and the Nile, we had flown for three hours over an apparently endless terrain of parched red desert. As the plane started to descend, I got my first glimpse of the place that was to become home for the next two years, and where I have continued to work for much longer.
From a height, El Fasher looked like a toy town--a scattering of houses around a small central lake, with tracks drawn across the sand like veins connecting the nearby villages. My first thought was to wonder at how people survived in such harsh, dry conditions. Learning about their livelihoods--how well-adapted and fine-tuned they are to that environment--has been at the heart of much of my work in Sudan since. My second thought was to marvel at the sense of space.
I had arrived to join a small team that was working with Darfur Regional Government. Funded by the British government, our job was to help build local government's capacity to plan and direct large flows of international aid in the wake of the devastating famine of the mid-1980s. That famine explained a large part of my motivation for working in Sudan. I wanted to be part of the recovery effort.
Finding ways of preventing such terrible famines in the future seemed to me to be one of the biggest challenges the world faced. I was fortunate to find myself working on a well-conceived and sound project (not always the case in the aid world!), with excellent colleagues--both within local government and within the aid-funded team.
In the two years I lived in Darfur, drought revisited the region. Relief food had to be distributed once again, but on nothing like the same scale as during the "Famine that Kills" (as it was known locally) of the mid-1980s. Our overall aim was to find ways of strengthening people's access to food--their "food security"--in the long term. During that time in Darfur Regional Government we set up an early-warning system, we bought up food stocks in a year of good harvest to act as a strategic reserve for future years, and we drafted a long-term food security strategy for Darfur. Unfortunately the project came to an abrupt and premature end. A coup in 1989 ended Sudan's experiment with democracy. The new government supported Iraq in the first Gulf War; soon after, British government development aid was suspended.
A Darfur village [Margie Buchanan-Smith]
The 1990s was a difficult decade in Sudan. Relations between the Sudanese government and Western governments were hostile and aid flows were limited for all but emergency interventions. During this period, I stayed connected with Darfur in a minimal way, but when the current conflict erupted in 2003, I was strongly drawn to reengage. The impact of the violence was devastating as the fabric of Darfur's society was rapidly torn apart. I wanted to find a way of contributing to the huge international humanitarian effort that was unfolding in response, to make use of my longer-term perspective on Darfur, and above all to find ways of working with and supporting Darfuri friends and colleagues.
As a freelance consultant and policy researcher, I have been able to work with a number of international NGOs and UN agencies in the last four years, for example helping Oxfam draw up a strategy to support livelihoods in Darfur during the conflict (i.e., to go beyond immediate life-saving interventions), and carrying out a study for the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) to investigate the wider impact of the world's largest humanitarian food aid operation on livelihoods, markets and agricultural production. In all of these assignments I have been privileged to work closely with long-term Darfuri colleagues.
Beyond the Crisis
Amidst the many stories of atrocities and failure in Darfur, WFP's work was an unsung success story. Against great odds and with very poor road infrastructure, WFP has maintained a life-saving food relief operation since 2003. Our study revealed how significant this has been as a form of income transfer as well as a source of food to those who have been displaced and to those still living in their villages but struggling to survive. Some people told us that food aid that they sold brought in up to 40 percent of their income. This has had a positive knock-on effect on the grain market.
Just as flows of locally produced cereals were drying up as local production all but collapsed, traders could switch to buying and selling food aid cereals instead. This has kept many of them in business at a time when there has been a high rate of bankruptcies amongst other traders in the marketplace. Maintaining this basic market infrastructure is extremely important for Darfur's eventual recovery.
Food aid has kept markets and traders functioning during the conflict. [Margie Buchanan-Smith]
So how could Darfur's story have been different and this conflict avoided? It is easy to see Darfur as an impoverished, underdeveloped territory, torn apart by war. In many ways this is an accurate perception, but it is not the whole picture. This is a multi-ethnic region with a long history of different groups living together harmoniously, with interdependent livelihoods (for example, farmers and pastoralists), and tried and tested means of resolving differences.
Darfur is also an area rich in agricultural and livestock production, renowned for the entrepreneurialism of its traders. (Darfur's sheep, for example, produce the most sought-after mutton in the Middle East.) With the right kind of commitment, strategic vision and investment, Darfur's development could have been secured and its story very different.
Holding that sense of potential is essential in the current crisis, and it requires a long-term perspective. But that is not a perspective that comes easily to the international aid community, driven by short-term planning horizons and agendas that are often far removed from the realities on the ground. For example, international efforts to forge a peace agreement in 2005 to end Darfur's conflict appeared to be driven more by the political urgency of "delivering" in Washington and London than by the slow and painstaking process that was needed to ensure all key parties were involved and that an agreement was negotiated that had a chance of working.
This is not the only war that Darfur has experienced, but it is the first that has been brought to the world's attention, triggering the world's largest international food aid operation. That is one of the benefits of a more globalized world.
But it has also become a more complex world. One of the unfortunate consequences of having to navigate such complex structures has been a tendency to simplify the message, whether that message is an analysis of Darfur's conflict, or what can be done about it.
Voices on the Ground
Servicing such a complex structure is extremely demanding, and that can act as a disincentive to engage locally, in Darfur, with those directly affected. Instead, meeting the political needs of those at higher international levels, whether in the capital cities of Europe, North America or the Middle East, can easily dominate.
The challenge we are yet to master is how to hold a localized analysis, that is true to and gives voice to the reality on the ground, while at the same time influencing the processes and structures within the wider international community.
Margie, front right, with members of her team
These reflections on the Darfur crisis have resonance for food security planning more generally. Development is a long-term process requiring long-term perspectives. Short-term and immediate responses must always be balanced by more considered and more strategic longer-term plans, vision and commitment. A more sophisticated and interconnected international system must still value and depend upon local-level analyses, and give space for local voices in the powerful international forums that now play such a dominant role in our world.
Margie Buchanan-Smith has worked as coordinator of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the U.K.'s Overseas Development Institute and as head of the Emergencies Unit at ActionAid.
