We see it in almost every relief response: those life-saving NFI kits, food parcels (I don’t know why we insist on calling them “food baskets”), tarpaulins, jerry-cans, shoes, or whatever else… that we’d gone to a lot of trouble to distribute directly to refugees or survivors end up for sale in local markets.
We usually just take this for granted as one of those things that always seems to happen. In some cases (Tsunamiland and Haiti come to mind) we used the appearance of relief materiel in local markets as a crude proxy to tell us, “okay, we’ve distributed enough of _______.” But other than this and sometimes post-distribution monitoring (which typically looks at the absorption/resale on one specific thing, as opposed to the overall issue of resale), as far as I know, the phenomenon of beneficiaries monetizing (selling) relief goods/food has never been looked at in any kind of systematic way.
Both Fiona Terry (Condemned to Repeat) and Linda Polman (Crisis Caravan) discuss the issue of relief supplies ending up in local markets generally as a bad thing. And fair enough, I suppose, given that they’re talking primarily about situations where those relief items including food are either diverted before ever being distributed or confiscated from beneficiaries soon after distribution. While on one hand a certain amount of relief stuff ending up in the host economy is probably inevitable, and I have yet to meet a relief op of any size that had zero per cent inventory slippage. However, on the other it is our responsibility as humanitarians to do all we can to ensure that the stuff we give out is, first, the right stuff, and second, that it ends up in the hands of those for whom it is intended.
Plumpy’nut for sale in a relief zone near you (photo by J.)
Even so I’d see this as rather different from the phenomenon of beneficiaries who receive distribution and then under no apparent duress sell it. What does it mean when we see this happening? Obviously there are many variables to consider, but here is part of what I think we need to be thinking:
More than anything else, we have to get past the simplistic explanations. Monetization of relief goods by beneficiaries isn’t necessarily a negative, but we need to watch it specifically, watch for it, and understand what it means in each context. We have to dig deeper than just, “well, there’s obviously something they want more…” We have to look more closely at the actual behavior, at what they’re selling, and what they’re buying with the proceeds. We need to systematically monitor and track and analyse monetization of relief goods. For starters, we need to look at/for two primary patterns (there are probably more):
1) Selling to buy something similar. They’re selling clothes to buy different clothes, food to buy different food. If we see this it means that we’re basically on the right path in assessing real beneficiary needs, but we probably need to look carefully at what’s driving us to distribute what we’re distributing rather than what they’re trading for. If we distribute wheat flour which they immediately sell in order to buy pasta, for example, then we need to ask ourselves the obvious question: why not just distribute pasta? (And if the answer to that is something about institutional needs or donor priorities, then we should probably be asking ourselves some deeper questions about why we’re there in the first place…)
2) Selling to buy something totally different. They’re selling the Plumpy’nut and buying SIM cards, or they’re selling the medium sized pot from the family kit and buying bednets. This is actually the larger, deeper problem. It is a signal that something is seriously flawed in either the logic of our selected intervention(s) or in the quality of our delivery. If we see this it means that at best we’re running a high cost, low impact cash-transfer program (more or less what distribution of TOMS shoes seems to have become in Haiti).
While monetization of relief goods doesn’t have to be a bad thing in every context, we should not let it become the norm. If we find it becoming our operative assumption that beneficiaries will sell what we distribute, then we need to be asking ourselves some hard questions about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We need to be reviewing the quality of our assessments, rechecking the validity of our analyses, checking the logic of our intervention. We also looking carefully at livelihoods options, cash transfer or voucher distribution and justifying our decisions to keep distributing.
Michael Keizer
/ June 21, 2012I think anyone who would want to discuss these issues should start here: Reed, Barbara A, and Jean-Pierre Habicht. “Sales of Food Aid as Sign of Distress, Not Excess.” The Lancet 351, no. 9096 (January 1998): 128–130.
(Also a good example of how bad we are in using acedemic knowledge. But I guess I have ridden that hobby horse often enough.)
Breanna R
/ June 25, 2012This is one of the major arguments for including a cash component in relief distributions (either stand alone or in combination with goods). Especially in a large emergency, there is no way we can meet everyone’s specific needs with standardized in-kind distributions. When relief goods in large quantities are being re-sold on the market (usually for below market-value prices since everyone knows they were free), it could be a sign that something is seriously wrong with our HEA / market analysis / needs assessment and taken seriously – not just assumed to mean that “we’ve distributed enough”. It could mean “we’ve distributed the wrong thing entirely”.
Fredrick
/ June 26, 2012Cash transfers are in theory preferable if conditions are right for them to work. If that is not the case and one choose to supply relief goods one should bear the following in mind. Beneficiaries are different and have different needs. Getting targeting so precise that this is perfectly captured by relief baskets is simply utopian. Someone gets too much of one thing and too little of another and if they decide to trade it is an unequivocally good thing. Indeed, if trading is lively at barter prices that make sense, it is a sign that one is supplying things that some people actually want.
Jet
/ September 30, 2012I hope this isn’t a naive answer from a young development worker, but this post sounded too much about “us” looking at “them” and providing the answers. Shouldn’t part of the data gathering be asking recipients these questions?
We might say that analysis may come up with a “better” answer for what disaster need than what they can say themselves, but they’ll end up using these things and valuing them the way they themselves see them anyway.