Marketing Jomo

Marketing Jomo*

In the sixties WFP provided the hungry with the surplus food of western countries. This was a convenient way of getting rid of the food we didn’t need anyway. When western countries stopped producing surpluses, the economic rationale behind WFP ceased to exist. However, the mission didn’t stop, the organisation continued, on more humanitarian grounds this time. At the end of the last century the idea arose of buying food locally, instead of shipping everything into the developing world. This would reduce transport costs and by the same time boost local economy. The flipside of the coin is that WFP, due to its weight, can easily disrupt local markets. For example, when WFP decides to buy big quantities of rice in some village in Ghana, the price of the rice would go up, making it impossible for local people to buy rice for their families. WFP now tries to buy locally without disrupting the market. Their policy is to buy big quantities of food for the lowest available price. Now, almost all food is being bought from big suppliers. Although WFP now helps the local economy, the money they spend locally ends up in the pockets of the owners of big companies. Recently, WFP became more aware of the positive impact they could possible have on structural development of a country by empowering small farmers.
Although small farmers form 80% of Zambia’s maize production (main product here), they have no power of their own. The problem with these farmers is that they produce only minimal surplus, they sell their food whenever they need the money (not when the price on the market is the highest), and they have an extremely weak negotiation position towards the big traders. For example, Jomo and his wife Adama have a small farm in the north of Zambia, with seven children and one on the way. Jomo and Adama* produce maize, providing them with only two bags of maize every year. When Jomo comes in the trader’s office with only two bags of maize, the trader can pay him every amount that he likes (20 dollar instead of the market value of 50 dollar), Jomo is happy as long as he walks out of the office with some money to buy food for his family that day. This makes he does not have enough money to buy seed for the coming year, and again he produces almost no surplus, keeping Jomo and his family locked into this circle of poverty.
Purchase for Progress (P4P) is a new project of WFP through which they try to empower small farmers to market their products and sell them to WFP. This groundbreaking initiative takes WFP’s mission of ‘feeding the hungry’ to a whole other dimension. In this way WFP assists farmers without access to the market and at the same time they help the people without access to food by providing them with the food bought from local farmers. This project is challenging as it is much easier to deal with professional commercial companies than with local farmers directly. As I write, there are pilots starting in twenty different countries. Zambia is one of them. In these pilots they want to see if P4P is a viable undertaking for WFP. Mister and misses Gates are sponsoring this undertaking. My first day in office I immediately showed interest in this new initiative, because to me it addresses one of the root causes of poverty instead of just ‘feeding mouths’. The country director of Zambia gave his approval that I will be helping Felix, who is in charge of this project in Zambia. I am really excited to jump on this plane and see where it lands.

*The name Jomo means farmer
*The name Adama means beautiful child, queenly