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Indians Fighting Inflation with Technology

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Despite the global economic downturn, many countries of the South are seeing rapid economic growth. That can have a down side: inflation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation). Inflation can be caused by variety of factors – too much money chasing too few goods, deliberate government policies to increase demand for goods and services, environmental disasters creating scarcity, or poor investment in infrastructure straining against rapid economic growth. But when it gets out of control for life-essential goods like food, then people need solutions to survive.

In India – home to more poor people than all of sub-Saharan Africa – rising inflation has prompted the Reserve Bank of India to raise interest rates, which in turn leads to more expensive loans and credit, just when funds need to be borrowed to invest in infrastructure improvements for the country.

India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, has warned that the rising interest rates necessary to fight inflation will hurt India’s economic growth.

India has seen inflation jump from single digits in 2008 to double digits this year. Consumer price inflation for industrial and farm workers in India rose by 14 percent, government data show – up from 5.51 percent in January 2008 (It hit 16.22 percent in January 2010, according to the Indian Ministry of Labour).

And it is the poorest who suffer the most from inflation. Inflation in India has led to worker protests for wage increases and rising prices for essentials like food: a life-and-death issue for the poor.

Other countries across the South are also experiencing high inflation, the worst being Venezuela. India has the highest inflation after Venezuela’s 32 percent rate, according to Bloomberg data compiled from 82 countries.

The UN’s trade and development body, UNCTAD, has called for new measures to tackle inflation. “In the past few decades, monetary policies have been more and more gradually based on inflation targeting,” said Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary-general of UNCTAD. “I see there should be other instruments to contain inflation rather than monetary policies.”

Frustration with inflation has even been taken up by India’s vibrant entertainment industry, Bollywood (http://www.bollywoodworld.com).

The song “Mehangayi Daayan” (“The Inflation Witch”) in a film produced by acting star Aamir Khan has the lyrics, “my husband’s earnings are good but his second wife — inflation — is eating them up.”

Indian marketing consultant Suhasini Sakhare (http://www.suhasinisakhare.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=2&Itemid=12) from Nagpur has called for Indian consumers to be empowered, just as farmers are with the successful e-Choupal web portal.

E-Choupal (http://www.echoupal.com) has developed a reputation for both controlling prices and increasing incomes for poor farmers. Started in 2000 by the major Indian company ITC Limited (http://www.itcportal.com), it links farmers to the latest prices for products including soybeans, wheat, coffee and prawns.

E-Choupal works through computers set up in rural areas. It has built one of the largest internet initiatives in rural India, reaching 4 million farmers in 40,000 villages. It does this through 6,500 computer kiosks located in the homes of farmer-coordinators called Sanchalaks. The kiosks offer weather reports and the latest market prices, important scientific developments, risk management advice, and help with sales and marketing. The computer is in the Sanchalak’s house and connects to the internet by telephone. Each computer can serve around 600 farmers in the surrounding area.

Indian agriculture suffers from being very fragmented, with poor infrastructure and an army of middlemen looking to get the best price for themselves at the expense of farmers and consumers. Indian farmers are heavily in debt and plagued by a very high suicide rate as a result (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers’_suicides_in_India). This agricultural crisis has a direct impact on India’s ability to meet its development goals and lift many millions more out of poverty in the future.

E-Choupal sees itself as creating a “virtuous circle of higher productivity, higher incomes, enlarged capacity for farmer risk management, larger investments and higher quality and productivity.”

E-Choupal has increased yields for farmers, reduced transaction costs, and raised the quality of output leading to rising farmer incomes.

It is clear from experience in other countries that better access to price information helps control price inflation. E-Choupal has the advantage of providing both information and the means to access it: a big problem in rural India. Most poor Indian consumers do not have access to the internet and make food purchases from small vendors, whom they must trust to set the right price for products.

Online, there are plenty of price comparison websites for Indians (http://explore.oneindia.in/internet/portal/comparisonsites): computers, electronics and household goods (http://compareindia.in.com) for example. But this is of no use to poor Indians without access to the information.

Economic commentator Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told AFP of the political dangers: “There’s a huge amount of discontent and anger across the country and certainly among the poor. Speak to the person on the street and their biggest problem is inflation.”

Published: August 2010

Resources

  • Olam: A global food supply company in ‘agri-products’ that got its start in Nigeria. It shows how a Southern brand can grow and go global, and overcome the difficulties of cross-border trade. Website: www.olamonline.com
  • Model Village India: A pioneering initiative is reviving impoverished rural villages. Drawing on self-organizing methods used in India since 1200 BC, the Model Village India is based around India’s democratic system of Panchayats: a village assembly of people stemming back to pre-colonial times. Website: www.modelvillageindia.org.in
  • e-Choupal: Hope or Hype? By Neeraj Dangi and Harjit Singh, American Journal of Economics and Business Administration 2 (2): 179-184, 2010. Website: http://tinyurl.com/3682r3p
  • A book on the consequences of inflation when it gets out of control: When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation by Adam Fergusson. Website: http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Money-Dies-Nightmare-Hyper-Inflation/dp/1906964440
  • The American National Inflation Association: A website with educational videos and resources on inflation. Website: http://inflation.us

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Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-1/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-5/

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2023

Categories
Archive Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletters Southern Innovator magazine

Woman Wants African Farming to be Cool

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Can farming be cool? Especially on a continent where it has long been associated with hardship and poverty, can agriculture be attractive to a young generation looking for big opportunities? A young woman in Nigeria thinks so and is on a mission to show farming is a great way to get ahead in modern Africa. And she hopes more people attracted to farming will boost the continent’s food security and reduce costly imports.

Cynthia Mosunmola Umoru’s company, Honeysuckle PTL Ventures (http://www.tootoo.com/d-c3015227-Honeysuckles_Ptl_Ventures/), is based in Lagos , the business capital of Nigeria. The West African country has become dependent on food imports, despite many attempts to modernise its agricultural sector.

The country’s heavy dependence on oil exports for its income has led to poor investment in its domestic economy. Over 80 percent of Nigeria’s university graduates struggle to find work. And it is these two problems – food security and high unemployment among the country’s young, educated and ambitious – that Umoru wants to change.

Leading by example, Umoru has set up a successful and modern agribusiness focusing on high-quality food products using modern packaging and fast delivery. She produces meat products, from seafood like shrimps and prawns to snails, beef, chicken, and birds. Her niche is to deliver the product however the customer wishes: fresh, frozen or processed. Her business has its own farms and ponds but also has developed a sophisticated network with other farmers, providing them with standard contracts and benefits. This extra capacity means she can meet the demand and handle large volume orders.

She is proudly self-taught. “I didn’t have a mentor in farming! Though I have other mentors,” Umoru told the Guardian Life Magazine. “My knowledge of agribusiness has been largely from personal education and research. The Internet has served greatly as my resource bank.”

Umoru was initially on the path to study medicine, but had that dream upset by riots in the late 1990s. She then moved on to study zoology at Lagos State University. In her final year, she became interested in agribusiness. Her company was officially registered in 2004, but she had already begun at university providing meat products to fast-food outlets in Lagos.

“It took five years to gain relevance,” she said. “My involvement in the agribusiness sector is really impacting people, particularly young people like me, who I always hear say ‘If you are involved with farming then it is probably not as bad as it seems’. Farming, before now in Nigeria, was termed business of low-lives and with the barrier to entry being so high for young people to actively participate.”

“I have successfully, in my little way, impressed on my generation that farming could be glamorous and cool enough for us to trade places with the business executive in the large conglomerate and also the bank’s middle management cadre, which is the initial attraction for most young graduate(s) in Nigeria.”

She is not shy talking about how rough it was in the beginning: “As a young entrepreneur, in my very early days, I lost a lot of the seed capital I got from financial mentors to poor and bad business decisions I took because there was no one to talk to.”

Overall in sub-Saharan Africa, the long-term prospects for agriculture are good. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) found in a 2009 paper that “the sub-Saharan agricultural sector — 80 percent of which consists of smallholder farmers — grew more than 3.5 percent in 2008, well above the 2 percent rate of population growth.”

Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is predicted to grow from 770 million in 2005 to 1.5 to 2 billion in 2050 (FAO). Despite rapid migration from the countryside to cities and the growth in urban population, the absolute number of rural people is also likely to continue to increase.

Agriculture is the motor for rural development, poverty and hunger reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. The FAO paper said that agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be led by domestic and intra-African demand for food commodities due to urbanization and the growing population.

African farming has been able to benefit from rising global food prices and demand. The policy environment has also become more favourable, according to the FAO. The paper found “There is a particular need for programmes and policies to increase the capacity of smallholder farmers to enter dynamic sectors of national, regional and international markets.”

African farming can see serious productivity gains if it changes and it takes on new techniques. At the moment only 3 percent of the region’s food crops are produced using irrigation, compared to more than 20 percent globally.

The irony is that Nigeria has already hatched one of the world’s most successful food companies, Olam (www.olamonline.com). A global food supply company in ‘agri-products’ that got its start in Nigeria, it shows Umoru is on to something – a Southern brand can grow and go global, and overcome the difficulties of cross-border trade in Africa.

Olam currently supplies well-known global food brands including Cadbury (chocolate), Nestle, Lavazza (coffee), Mars (chocolate), Tchibo and Planters (peanuts).

With some 218 million people in Africa — around 30 percent of the total population — estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition, a thriving local food sector would bring many gains.

Turning to more sophisticated business models offers solutions to chronic problems. With 80 percent of Africa’s farms less than two hectares in size – and there are 33 million of them – cereal yields have grown little and are still around 1.2 tonnes per hectare in the region, compared to an average of some 3 tonnes per hectare in the developing world as a whole. Fertilizer consumption was only 13 kg per hectare in sub-Saharan Africa in 2002, compared to 73 kg in the Middle East and North Africa and 190 kg in East Asia and the Pacific. The FAO has estimated that the potential additional land area available for cultivation in sub-Saharan Africa amounts to more than 700 million hectares – a boon to the continent’s and the world’s food needs in coming years if handled well.

And the demand is there: Between 2001 and 2007, annual increases in the global consumption of agricultural commodities were larger than during the 1980s and 1990s. The quantity of agri-products harvested in the world is 5.2 billion metric tonnes a year.

“I have been able to reach out to so many people across the nation, preaching the agribusiness development and adoption gospel,” said Umoru. “I have also worked closely with other youth agencies to empower many more young people to aspire in Nigeria.”

One such agency is the Harambe Nigeria Endeavour. Harambe Nigeria (http://www.hendeavor.org/content/bgroups/nigeria.php) is a programme designed to stimulate growth in the agricultural sector and open up opportunities for youth to become leaders and entrepreneurs in this area. And this means future young entrepreneurs going into the agricultural sector will not feel as alone as Umoru once did.

As Obinna Ukwuani, creative director of Harambe Nigeria says: “We wish to rectify the tarnished image of agriculture in Nigeria, making it a viable investment for Nigerian youth from all walks of life.”

Published: May 2010

Resources

1) World Vegetable Center: The World Vegetable Center is the world’s leading international non-profit research and development institute committed to alleviating poverty and malnutrition in developing countries through vegetable research and development. Website: http://www.avrdc.org

2) Marketing African Leafy Vegetables: Challenges and Opportunities in the Kenyan Context by Kennedy M. Shiundu and Ruth. K. Oniang. Website: http://www.ajfand.net/Issue15/PDFs/8%20Shiundu-IPGR2_8.pdf

3) 2050: Africa’s Food Challenge: Prospects good, resources abundant, policy must improve: A discussion paper from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Website: http://www.fao.org/wsfs/forum2050/wsfs-background-documents/issues-briefs/en/

4) African Alliance for Capital Expansion: A management consultancy focused on private sector development and agribusiness in West Africa. Website: http://www.africanace.com/v3

5) Branding Strategy Insider: This blog provides advice and case studies on how to build trust for your brand. Website: www.brandingstrategyinsider.com

6) Growing Inclusive Markets, a web portal from UNDP packed with case studies, heat maps and strategies on how to use markets to help the poor. Website: www.growinginclusivemarkets.org

7) Starting a SME (small, medium enterprise): This website is packed with advice and tips for starting a small business and how to grow it with limited resources. Website: http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk

8) World Business Fair: The World Business Fair is an international trade platform for global entrepreneurs and professionals. Website: http://www.worldbusinessfair.com

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2023

Categories
Archive Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletters

India’s Modernizing Food Economy Unleashing New Opportunities

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Increasing prosperity in India is reshaping the country’s relationship to its food. A number of trends are coming together that point to significant improvements to India’s long-running problems with food supply and distribution. This matters because India, despite its two-decade economic boom – and increasing middle-class population – is still home to about 25 per cent of the world’s hungry poor, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

According to Indian government figures, around 43 per cent of children under five are malnourished and more than half of pregnant women between 15 and 49 suffer from anaemia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemia), a consequence of poor diets (WFP).

Many Indians go hungry despite the fact that the country grows enough food for its entire population. The problem isn’t lack of food but a wasteful system that fails to distribute affordable food efficiently and to make participating in the food system a viable income source. Farming employs as much as 70 per cent of Indians. But many work small plots of land, are heavily in debt and earn a meagre income.

However, a number of developments are improving the efficiency of India’s food system and modernizing the way it works.

There are signs that big changes lie ahead: New restaurants exploring foreign cuisines; modern supermarkets; online food shopping services; food academies teaching new skills; food gurus proselytising for new approaches; and a thriving publishing and media sector.

They are creating new jobs, increasing price competition and encouraging more modern delivery, marketing and distribution systems.

In 2011 the introduction of global supermarkets into the Indian marketplace became a hot debate. The Indian government announced it would open the marketplace to global competition and foreign direct investment (FDI), but put the move on hold in December after an outcry by political parties and protests by small- and medium-sized retailers fearful it would harm livelihoods. The Indian supermarket sector is a market estimated to be worth US $475 (The Guardian).

One retailer that is already bringing international methods to Indian retailing is the Best Price chain of wholesale stores. Best Price is a joint venture between U.S.-based Walmart and Bharti Enterprises, one of India’s largest business groups. In 2007, Walmart India made a deal with Bharti Enterprises to set up a cash and carry business called Best Price Modern Wholesale. The first store opened in 2009, and by 2012 there were 15 outlets.

By teaming up with Walmart, Bharti Enterprises gets to learn from one of the world’s leading retailers and a pioneer in efficiencies, logistics, supply chain management and sourcing.

The stores have all the hallmarks of modern food selling – warehouses, sophisticated inventory control, hygienic conditions and connection to new information technologies (http://www.indiaretailing.com/bharti-walmart-II.asp).

Best Price Modern Wholesale employs 3,710 people, and the stores sell more than 6,000 items, a mix of food and non-food products. It claims 90 per cent of the goods and services are sourced locally.

Food is a highly volatile and politicized issue in India. High food inflation – which reached 12.21 per cent in November 2011, according to India’s Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee – has led to political tensions. Inflation has driven up the price of staple foods, essential commodities and imported products.

At the same time, India’s commerce ministry has forecast that 10 million jobs will be created if foreign supermarkets are allowed to set up in India. Many of these jobs will be in logistics as more efficient, modern methods shake up India’s food industry. Poor logistics in the Indian food sector means that as much as 40 per cent of produced food does not reach consumers. This waste comes at a high cost in a country with 50 million malnourished children.

New jobs are already being created in the country’s restaurant industry.

While there have always been high-end restaurants in India’s cities, the gastronomic scene has received a recent boost from expatriate Indian restaurateurs returning from the competitive London, Tokyo and New York scenes, bringing skills and experience from some of the most demanding kitchens in the world.

One example is Megu, a restaurant in New Delhi’s Leela hotel(theleela.com/new-delhi-megu.html) that sells Japanese-influenced food.

Such cuisine is being called “elite Indian international gastronomy”, according to The Guardian newspaper.

“We are aiming at the affluent traveller or the ultra-rich local,” Aishwarya Nair, a senior executive at the Leela, told The Guardian. “The idea is to give people a taste of globalization. In our restaurant you don’t know you are in India. You could be in New York, Japan, anywhere.”

That appeals to many newly affluent Indians, food critic Vir Sanghvi told the newspaper.

“The food (at somewhere like Megu) doesn’t matter so much as the experience and the glamour,” Sanghvi said. “There is a lot of money outside the traditional elite now and these people are looking for ways to spend it on something that seems sophisticated.”

The new food fascination is also leading families who once would have employed a cook to watch 24-hour TV channels about food. This programming changes habits and encourages buying new foods and exploring new flavours.

Market analysts believe these trends are likely to continue. A middle class with spending power has been growing in India for almost two decades, and forecasts see the number of middle class Indians reaching 250 million by 2016.

“With bigger and better restaurants and international food brands coming in to the country, it’s only a matter of time before fine dining finds its place among a growing cosmopolitan population,” said Siddharth Mathur, manager of the independent Smoke House Room restaurant (facebook.com/SmokeHouseRoom).

Online food shopping in India is also thriving. Research by Juxt found that 65 million people use the web in India, four-fifths of whom shop online. Murali Krishnan, head of eBay India, told the BBC that the country could become one of the top 10 e-commerce hubs in the world by 2015.

Online grocery services include MyGrahak.com, which calls itself “India’s Largest Food Store” and offers home delivery of food, toiletries and pet supplies. Another is Greenytails.com, which brings together multiple food retailers into one online shopping website and is based in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

As an example of the spin-offs that can be created from rising interest in food culture, there is the story of Nita Mehta. Considered one of India’s most celebrated cookbook authors, Mehta (nitamehta.com) not only publishes recipes but also runs a chain of cooking academies.

As she tells it, her interest in cooking was always there and she started experimenting at home with new recipes for her friends and family. The response was encouraging and she started teaching people how to make ice cream in her home. Curious students flocked to her classes to learn how to make flavours like mint, chocolate chip and mocha.

Following on this success, she started teaching classes in baking, Chinese cooking and what she calls “multicuisine”.

The lessons soon turned into a cookbook, which she wrote after doing her household chores. But her battles had only begun: publishers were not interested so she self-published. She called her publishing company Snab Publishers and released her first book, “Vegetarian Wonders”. It was modestly successful but it was with her second book, “Paneer All the Way”, that things got cooking. Her publishing company has now produced 400 cook books and sold 5 million copies. She has won international awards, does TV cooking programmes, has established several cooking institutes in New Delhi and teaches classes in the U.S., Canada, Britain and other countries.

With successes like Nita Mehta, the Indian food revolution is well underway.

Published: March 2012

Resources 

1) India Retailing.com: Calling itself “a path-breaking retail information interface portal. Addressed and directed towards the retailing community across the world, the portal provides a wide-angle view and analysis of the business of retail in India”. Website: indiaretailing.com

2) Retailers Association of India (RAI): RAI is the unified voice of Indian retailers. RAI works with all the stakeholders for creating the right environment for the growth of the modern retail industry in India. Website: rai.net.in/

3) The Wal-Mart Effect: A book on how highly competitive retail supermarkets can drive down food prices and inflation. Website: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wal-Mart-Effect-Out—town-Superstore/dp/0141019794/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322570100&sr=1-1

4) More on India’s food situation from the World Food Programme. Website: http://www.wfp.org/countries/india

5) Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Urban India: A report from Networked Ideas. The Report reveals an alarming situation of a permanent food and nutrition emergency in urban India. Website: http://www.networkideas.org/focus/feb2012/fo28_M_S_Swaminathan.htm

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2023

Categories
Archive Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletters Southern Innovator magazine

Staple Foods Are Becoming More Secure in the South

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Finding ways to ensure food security in countries experiencing profound economic and social change and stress is critical to achievement of development goals.

Food security is crucial to ensuring economic development is sustainable, and it is vital to long-term human health. Just one bout of famine can damage a generation of youth, stunting brain development and leaving bodies smaller and weaker than they should be.

Thankfully, many innovators are working on this problem and are making significant progress. A report from the Asian Development Bank, The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains (http://www.adb.org/publications/quiet-revolution-staple-food-value-chains), found improvements to security of rice and potatoes – common staple foods in many countries. It said the so-called value chains – the various activities a company does to deliver a product or service to the marketplace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain) – for potatoes and rice have seen significant improvements in Bangladesh, China and India.

This is important because improvements in access to staple foods will mean better food security and less threat of extreme hunger events. This matters because it just takes one extreme hunger event and a generation is scarred for life.

The human brain is a heavy user of energy: it uses between 20 and 30 per cent of a person’s energy intake. Failure to consume enough calories means brain functioning begins to  be altered (brain-guide.org).

Hunger and starvation slow a person’s mental responsiveness. Low energy intake from minimal diets leads to apathy, sadness and depression. Fetuses and infants are especially sensitive to brain damage caused by malnutrition. A malnourished child can suffer life-long low intelligence and cognitive defects.

More than 70 per cent of the world’s 146 million underweight children aged five and under live in just 10 countries, with more than 50 per cent located in South Asia alone (UNICEF). A quarter of all children – roughly 146 million – in developing countries are underweight, and it is estimated that 684,000 child deaths worldwide could be prevented by increasing access to vitamin A and zinc (WFP).

Undernutrition contributes to 53 per cent of the 9.7 million deaths of children under five each year in developing countries (UNICEF).

Food insecurity also shows on the faces of people who experience it. This extreme stress scars people and harms their prospects in the labour market and their ability to improve their incomes.

Why is access to staple foods improving? It seems, according to the report, to result from innovations such as rapid modernization, with the increasing roll out of supermarkets, the use of cold storage facilities and large rice mills. It also cites the impact of small farmers taking on modern technologies, such as mechanized farming, and making the most of soil by using fertilizers and efficient techniques.

Supermarkets by their nature encourage highly sophisticated supply lines to ensure a steady stream of fresh produce coming in from farms to urban areas. Because of the variety and vast range of produce on offer, they require finely-tuned organizing models and information technologies. In short, they radically alter the way people buy their food, and what people will expect from food providers.

By negotiating deals with farmers, supermarkets create stability, as well as low and competitive prices. They allow for better traceability for food and give consumers more confidence in what they are purchasing. They use cold storage, which means food lasts longer and there is less waste than if food is left to spoil in a marketplace without refrigeration – a revolutionary change in hot countries.

The downside with supermarkets, as has been the case in some countries, is they can quickly dominate the marketplace and push out all other competitors with their economies of scale. When this happens, farmers can also find themselves with little bargaining power again and be hostage to the price the supermarket tells them to sell their product at.

Another critical improvement is the rapid spread of mobile phones. Armed with a mobile phone, small-scale farmers are able to access critical knowledge and information. This means they can make better decisions and quickly adjust what they are doing when mistakes are made.

The survey found that India is a country where the food-supply game has changed dramatically. In the past, traders would advance cash to farmers in the form of loans. But since the use of mobile phones has increased, the balance of power has shifted: farmers now have many other options to finance their operations than turning to middlemen and traders. This means they are no longer as easily manipulated by the traders and can negotiate better prices. Also, better roads, combined with greater competition to provide services to farmers, are improving farming of staple foods in general.

Among potato farmers in rural areas, 73 to 97 per cent have mobile phones and use them to organize deals with traders or receive market information. The take-up of mobile phones was also a recent development for the farmers: most had acquired a mobile phone in the last four years.

It is clear this quiet revolution in food security for staples is a result of greater use of innovative technology and taking on of new techniques.

Published: July 2013

Resources

1) How to start a supermarket in Lagos, Nigeria: A supermarket is one of the most lucrative businesses that can thrive anywhere in the world. Website: http://www.ackcity.net/supermarket-startup-in-lagos

2) Write a supermarket business plan: Templates for writing professional business plans. Website: http://planmagic.com/business_plan/supermarket_business_plan.html

3) How to get your product into a supermarket: Use this mindmap to remind you what you should be doing at every stage of the process. Website: http://www.smarta.com/advice/suppliers-and-trade/logistics-management/mindmap-how-to-get-your-product-into-a-supermarket/

4) The hidden tricks behind making a successful supermarket: Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-secrets-of-our-supermarkets-8228864.html

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

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