Episode 4: Gender, Rural Change and Realizing Rights
Professor Haroon Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy at Trent University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics, as well as a member of the Advisory Board for the Woman's Rights program of the Open Society Foundations. He further provides extensive advisory services to various UN agencies, including UN Women and the United Nations Development Program. And recently he repackaged some of his university courses into a podcast entitled: "Peasants, Food and Agrarian Change". He joins us from Toronto, Canada.
We speak about:
the gender dimensions of rural political economy
failings of dominant development discourses
social movements and demanding rights
the different interests and agendas of development stakeholders
facing ethical issues in his consultancies & choosing not to work with some organizations
knowledge mobilization between academia and development agencies
the human rights based approach /model
the farmers protests in India
the impact of COVID-19 on development policies
Transcript
Intro: There is no doubt in my mind that development policy and practice is undergoing a fundamental transformation in a way in which we cannot see the endpoint because of COVID-19. Until the pandemic comes under control, all development policy and practice will be refracted through: what is the effect of the policy or practice, in light of the pandemic. It is affecting everything.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development podcast. My name is Safa, and I'm your host. Thank you for joining me as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all career stages and organizational affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different guests. Today, I am joined by Professor Haroon Akram-Lodhi. Professor Akram-Lodhi teaches agrarian political economy at Trent University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics, as well as a member of the Advisory Board for the Woman's Rights program of the Open Society Foundations in New York. He further provides extensive advisory services to various UN agencies, including UN Women and the United Nations Development Program. And recently he repackaged some of his university courses into a podcast entitled: "Peasants, Food and Agrarian Change". Thank you so much Professor Akram-Lodhi for joining me today, I really appreciate your time.
Haroon: You’re very welcome.
Safa: Wonderful. So could you maybe begin with sharing a bit with us about what motivated you to study agrarian political economy? What were some of the experiences that led you to make that decision?
Haroon: I actually started university quite late compared to the age that young people go to university today. I didn't start till my mid 20s. And before I went to university, I had another career, I worked in food service industries for the better part of 6 or 7 years. And in that time, what I would do is I would take the money that I was making, and I would save it up and I would go traveling for quite prolonged periods of time, 8 months, 12 months, 16 months at a time. And back in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, this was quite unusual. Now in the course of that traveling that I did, I went to many developing countries in North Africa, in South Asia. But I was also fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in some rural areas, areas where there weren't any foreigners floating about. And I was the only person and I spent a lot of time learning from the people that I was with. And as a result of all of this, when I decided I wanted to go to university, I knew I wanted to study development in some way, even though back then it was only a very young field of study. And I knew also that I thought I wanted to be a journalist in doing this. But as I studied and my questions grew, and I continued to study, I gradually found myself being drawn towards the life of an academic, rather than the life of a journalist. One of the things that particularly interested me when I was particularly in rural parts of Asia, was seeing the extent to which women were making huge contributions to their family's lives - and yet, very often, the men were totally dismissive of their women's contributions. And one thing that really struck me in South Asia, in the countryside, was when I would see a woman making a chapati and serving it up, and then the husband complaining that it wasn't hot enough, even though I had just come off the griddle. And I really saw this as a quite profound injustice. And so my interest in development and in the countryside, agrarian political economy grew from there, but particularly interest in the gender dimensions of agrarian political economy grew from there.
Safa: Yes, so a lot of your research has focused on agrarian class formation and gender relations in northern Pakistan. Could you share a bit with us about what that work has taught you in terms of thinking critically about dominant development paradigms and also the dynamics of resistance - resistance of the communities you are working with or researching in the face of loss of land or land grabbing?
Haroon: I suppose the starting point, if we think about development paradigms is what my work has shown me is the extent to which the people who do development policy and practice really do not have any understanding at all of the way in which lives are lived on the ground in the countryside. Far too often, they sit in offices in the capitol - very often they sit in offices in a foreign capital, and they come up with suggestions based on an evaluation of quantitative data, but they never really see the lived lives behind that data. And so I've seen this very clearly in my work in rural Vietnam, when outsiders thinking that they know what the development prescriptions ought to be, come up with a series of recommendations, which then don't seem to work. Whereas when I talk to Vietnamese, for example, they are quite complimentary on the extent to which I actually understand what is going on, because I engage with rural people and find out about their lives. So what it's really taught me is the the fallacies of so many development paradigms and the way in which we have to critically engage with those approaches to improving people's lives. I've also, of course, seen the way in which so many of the intended beneficiaries of the so called development business don't benefit at all. I've particularly seen this in the lives of women, when men are able to appropriate any benefits that may accrue for themselves at the expense of women in their community. That women remain quite marginalized in development processes. And their voices certainly remain far too often unheard. And there are other marginalized groups - most societies have indigenous groups, which are marginalized, and also in Vietnam I've seen how indigenous groups are marginalized in the process of development, not being listened to. I've also seen many times the extent to which development interventions are resisted by local populations, because they don't want outsiders coming in and basically telling them what to do or how they should act. They're the ones who know their own lived realities and have a better sense of what is appropriate for them. And in doing this, what I've seen is that the power of mobilization, of local people mobilizing, local people mobilizing can affect serious change within their communities for the better when they come together, collectively. But the other side of that which I have also seen is the extent to which dominant actors in the countryside in particular, will do what they can to retain their privileges, if necessary, through the use of force, and sometimes extraordinarily violent force in order to maintain the privilege that has accrued to them. So I would say that my research over the course of the many decades that I've done the work that I've done has shown to me the failings of dominant development discourses, it's shown to me the way in which there are many groups that continue to be marginalized in the process of development, small scale petty commodity producing peasant farmers in general, but in particular, women farmers within that group, and the way in which communities resist these processes very, very actively, sometimes with benefits for their members. But occasionally, with repression being rained down upon them.
Safa: Yes, so bringing our attention there in terms of social movements in relationship to or fighting against dominant development paradigms. Could you maybe share a bit with us about your thoughts between the role of development work bis-à-vis activism and social movement organizing when it comes to advancing or realizing meaningful social change? So really thinking about, are we making systemic, deep, long term changes?
Haroon: Well, I mean, I think very, very strongly that one of the things that development practitioners can do is facilitate the ability of people within communities to come together, in order that they may try and effect change within their communities in a direction that they want. And then the role of outsiders in facilitating this may be to show them a portfolio of options that may be available to them, it may be to show them the things to which they may aspire, the things which are simply not achievable, or accomplishable. It may be around showing the way in which community groups can develop tactics and strategies which allow them to better realize their end goal. One group that I was particularly struck by in 2017 was in western Tanzania. I came across a woman's group - the Amani woman's group in the far west of the country. And this was a group of women, 14 women, and what they had done is they had collectively organized and written to the government of Tanzania. Their request in that letter was that they would be allocated some land which they could then work themselves independent of their husbands. And for reasons unknown to me, the government deemed that request was acceptable, and so they were allocated land. Their husbands knew they had land, they didn't know where it was. This land gave these women an independent source of farmed products, but also an independent source of income. And this income changed how their homes operated, and it changed the lives of them and their families. The women used the incomes that they were able to generate from the land that they were operating to pay for their children's education, with the result that in this group of 14 women, 4 of the of the daughters in this group had gone to college, 1 had gone to university, incredibly improving the educational opportunities for their own families. But also in terms of intra household relations, it was extraordinarily interesting when I asked these women about their relationship with their husbands, that because these women had their own independent source of income, none of their husbands attacked them. They were not subjected to any forms of gender based violence, men, their husbands were much more likely to share the earnings that were generated from their holdings with their wives. And in an area that was very heavily polygamous, none of the husbands of these women had more than one wife. So these women's struggles to try and increase their economic autonomy from their husbands had resulted in not only improved life chances for their children, but also improved relations within their home with their husbands. It was quite an extraordinary story. And it demonstrated to me in a very concrete way, the way in which resistance to domination can result from mobilization into far more equitable outcomes, if people are supported.
Safa: In thinking about economic empowerment, economic autonomy, thinking of the context of neoliberalism, capitalism globally, and also thinking about the politicization of funding, and donors, and governments and all that. So could you speak to us about how that political economy analysis has been so key in your work and how using that analysis has helped you in terms of your understandings and your work?
Haroon: Well, I think the first thing about a political economy analysis of any development policy, practice or intervention, is to recognize that there is no homogenous interest. That it's very rare for the interests of the development agency, or the development practitioner and a community to be aligned, because communities themselves are not homogenous. Communities have differential interests within them, because communities are places where hierarchies exist, and where privilege can be expressed over others within the community. So political economy allows us to understand that we're dealing with diverse sets of actors and divergent sets of interests. And then, in terms of thinking about who we act with, we want to look at those that we want to work with. So within the communities in which I work, the people that I'm interested in learning from, working with them, but not in any stretch of the imagination saying anything at all really about what they should in theory or practice do. What I want to do is learn from those who are most marginalized in those communities -the poor, the women, fisherfolk, indigenous populations, and in terms of development institutions, I think it's really important to recognize that within development institutions, there are again, these diverse sets of interests. One of the things that's really quite striking is that despite the extent to which we see a dominant neoliberal development paradigm being continually reproduced around the world, particularly in relationships between global development institutions, national governments and development interventions, despite this, what we see in many development institutions are many, many people who want to make the world a better place by improving the lives and livelihoods of those that they think they are trying to serve. In national governments that I've worked with in Sub Saharan Africa or in Vietnam, one of the things that's always struck me is the extent to which you come across civil servants who are profoundly dedicated to improving the lives of their fellow citizens. And part of that is by recognizing injustice where it is there and trying to work to ameliorate injustice, if not, in fact, eliminate it. And within United Nations organizations, what I'm really struck by is the extent to which yes, there are bureaucrats, there are pen pushers, there are people - we have seen the documentary evidence, there are people that abuse their position for their own gain. But there are so many people that work long, hard days, in very harsh environments, with the objective of improving the lives of others. I remember a time in western Tanzania, I was driving to a village. And we were carrying along with us to workers from UN Women, again, posted to this part in the west of the country, you know, far away from the capitol. And, you know, at one point in the drive, there was several vehicles, these two women got out of the car and got into another set of vehicles, and they were driving off, and they were driving off because they were going to a refugee camp. And they were responsible for principle food distribution to more than 60,000 people. Two people delivering food to 60,000 people who were food insecure. I mean, it really is quite remarkable what you can see in terms of the heroism of the everyday lives of people that try and make the world a better place for those who just simply do not have enough in a world which is, of course, as profoundly wealthy as ours. It's quite empowering to see the extent to which people try and make the lives of others better.
Safa: In bringing the conversation more to your own personal experience, in your work, in your research, what have been your experiences with navigating ethical issues in terms of your research work, or your engagement or your positionality, when you are working in a community, doing your work?
Haroon: Some of them have been extraordinarily challenging. I've worked in communities where violence against others is socially acceptable behavior, and that violence can be interpersonal violence, can very often result in death. And yet, it's socially acceptable. And if you stand up to that violence, you yourself can be the subject of violence, because you are violating local social norms. It is a tremendous ethical challenge that one faces, and I don't think I have a good way of saying how one can navigate it, you certainly can't resolve it. One ethical response would be not to engage in those communities. But then you're talking about populations of hundreds of thousands of people that you basically say, you know, that the development sector shouldn't be engaged with, which I think is wrong. So I've seen those sorts of situations. I've been in many settings, both in Asia and in Sub Saharan Africa, where women, either privately or in groups of other women have spoken to me about the violence that has been inflicted upon them by their men. And that is, again, an ethical burden that one faces when you do work, particularly on gender and rural change, because rural areas are areas where there is huge amounts of intimate partner violence. And the fact of the matter is that as one individual, you cannot solve that intimate partner violence and to intervene, again, can very often put you in a harmful situation. So again, a terrible ethical dilemma to face. Another ethical dilemma that one faces is situations where young teenage girls are married. And I've seen many situations where girls of 14 have young children, and of course, that their entire lives have been shaped for them. And very often these young girls are married to much older men, again, a huge ethical dilemma. What one can only try and do when working in these sorts of communities is try to undertake practices which, you know, it's trite to say, but it's true, which do no harm, which don't place anybody in that community in any kind of danger whatsoever. That very often means not challenging existing social norms. But it is possible in many settings to work in communities where there are social norms, which are especially malignant. Working in those communities in ways which don't challenge them explicitly, but which do implicitly undermine those norms. And the only way one can do that is by coming to understand the community that you work in, working with the grain of their social customs, and working with that grain trying to find ways in which social change in a positive way can be initiated by members of communities. And the thing is that within communities that are subject to these sorts of issues, it's not as if people don't recognize that there are not problems there. It's just very often they're atomized. And so you can find and locate individuals that you can work with, again, with the grain of those communities to try and engender changes in a positive kind of way. But you know, ethical issues are something that when you do field work, whether it's research or whether it's practice, and I do field work in both areas, ethical issues is something you confront pretty well every day. And it's very easy to see in those situations how abuses occur, it really is. But I should also say that, especially as a researcher, these ethical questions that we face, they're not addressed by the ethics questionnaires that a university makes you fill out before you go and do research, because these are ethical questions which those questioners can't even envisage. The ethics questionnaires that one has to fill out, are designed to minimize the exposure of the institution to any legal liability. They're not designed to improve research practice. I wish there was a way of resolving ethical dilemmas. But in many instances that I work, it's not a question of resolving them, it's a question of figuring out how to work with them in ways that perhaps reduce the possibility of those challenges coming to the fore. And you can spend an awful lot of time being tremendously angry at people you have to engage with, to be blunt.
Safa: Yes, yes. And so you mentioned that you kind of wear two hats, one as Professor, academic, educator, and the other as more a consultant and advisor. In your experiences of the exchanges between academic institutions and UN entities or other development agencies, what do you think about the dynamic interchange between the two, they play different roles, but they also collaborate on some levels?
Haroon: Well, in my experience, when academics are brought on board by international organizations to act as advisors, usually what they want is that the international organization is looking for very specific advice on something. They do not want academic research to be undertaken. They want something which gives them a clear output, with a clear reason for that output being recommended. Now, some academics can navigate that world very, very easily. I face greater challenges in doing so because one of the ethical questions that I face is the fact that I don't want to be involved in development interventions that I consider to be unethical. And so I'm stringent in the selection of the kind of activities that I will engage in. And therefore I'm stringent with the kind of people that I will also engage with. So for example, as a point of my own personal practice, I will not do advisory work with the World Bank, because I just think that the World Bank does, in many settings, more harm than good. I would similarly not do advisory work with many of the regional development bank's who also take on many, many advisors. And within the UN, there are some organizations that I work with. But within those organizations, there are individual branches of it that I will work with, and then there's other branches that I will not work with. So I'm very picky about the kinds of situations that I'm prepared to work in. And in that sense, I'm quite fortunate because I am an academic first and foremost, which means I have security to turn things down when they come my way. Very often, a lot of the work that academics do is not acted upon by international organizations. But one of the things I would really want to really highlight is the extent to which the interchange between academic researchers and development institutions is in many ways, much more limited than one would think would be the case. Here in Canada, it is very, very limited. It's limited because historically, the international development agency that's been responsible for Canada's development cooperation programs, has not worked very often with Canadian academics. They've worked with some, but not worked very much with them because the two domains of activities are just too far removed. In Northern Europe, you do see a greater interface between government agencies and academics who do development research. This is in Sweden or in the Netherlands or in the United Kingdom. But again, that's as a result of deliberate decision making by government to engage with development academics and to learn from them. Many governments and many international institutions are unwilling to engage with academics, because academics can be very critical of these governments or institutions. And they don't want to take that on board. And so finding a common language can be a huge, a huge challenge. But I have to say that at the same time, I've been very fortunate over the years to have relationships with international organizations within the UN system over multiple years, which have been extraordinarily productive both for the organization and for myself, and which I think have done tremendous benefit for communities. So it is possible to create these sorts of academic development institution win-win scenarios. But I do think in many instances, what appeared to be those possible scenarios are in fact, not there.
Safa: And earlier, you mentioned, you know, you have a list of organizations you might not want to work with. And it's kind of more black and white, which you do and which you don't. But sometimes the situation is maybe not so black and white, or maybe you are already in a partnership or in a consultancy, and something comes up and you're critical about it. Have you felt, you know, free to express those feelings? Or have you ever felt pushback from maybe you're - in that case, I guess, employer or the person or the organization and team that you're with - that maybe they say, oh, that's not the, you know, line of analysis that we're looking for? Or how has it been in terms of the more kind of messy parts where you're just different human beings from different sides speaking about your opinions and resolving it in some way?
Haroon: Interestingly enough, this is also an ethical question. What I have to say, and this is actually I can think of a very recent experience that I've had, when I was asked to do some advisory work for an organization that I won't name. It was about a gender analysis that they had undertaken. I reviewed their materials, and was, as I frequently am, appalled by the lack of gender analysis in something that was supposed to be gender responsive. So I wrote extensive commentaries for the organization about what was required to transform what was essentially a gender biased piece of work into something that will be gender responsive, how that could be transformed - and also pointed out the way in which gender was being used in a descriptive and instrumental way that had potentially negative consequences. And then what I did was I presented these these findings. I don't normally get pushback about this. And the reason I don't get pushback is I think I've got enough of a professional reputation that when organizations are working with me, particularly for the first time, they do not feel that they're in a position to challenge my credentials, or question what it is I'm saying, because of my experience. In this particular situation, I said, this is what needs to be done, I can do this for you, or I can withdraw from this assignment, and you can decide how you want to proceed. And they wanted me to withdraw from the assignment, and so I withdrew from it, because what they were doing was was really wrong. And that's not the first time I've encountered these situations, where organizations do things which are really quite wrong. And you say how they can start to make things right, and give them the option of sticking with you or going another way. In other words, giving them an out if they want. And very often they will take the out. I should say that I've also faced this in doctoral examinations, where work has been put forward for examination, which I found wholly inadequate. And again, I point out where that work is inadequate. And I give then the people who have - usually it's a School of Graduate Studies that I'm dealing with, the option to stick with me or go in another direction because there can be institutional inertias which one is best not to challenge because one cannot overcome them. And in those situations, it's better to withdraw and move on to fight the next fight.
Safa: Choosing your fights wisely. Definitely.
Haroon: Yes.
Safa: So in your research, in your career, you've written a lot on food justice issues and food sovereignty and World Food Systems and also the financial models related to World Food Systems. And in the past month, we've seen globally the former's protests in India, and I wanted to maybe get your take on the situation or some of your thoughts about the protests, the social movement, the response from government, and just the implications you think this has in terms of some of the most pressing development issues of our time.
Haroon: You know, the extent to which the former protests in India have garnered international attention is really in and of itself quite interesting. And I think a lot of the reason it's attracted the attention of the international press in a way that I think probably the Indian government did not foresee, is simply because of the size of the diaspora that exists, and the extent to which many in that diaspora can trace familial roots back to the areas from which the protesting farmers originate. And so they have raised protests in the communities in which they reside. And that's been picked up by local news organizations. I think one has to situate these protests very, very clearly. And the way in which one situates these protests is to recognize that, by and large, India has been undergoing an agrarian crisis for more than two decades. What do I mean by an agrarian crisis? What I mean is that, for many small scale farmers, the challenge that they face in constructing a livelihood has been getting harder and harder. The inputs that they need to farm are becoming more expensive. The prices that they get for their crops are getting lower. The debts that they are carrying to try and manage are ballooning. And very often, these debts are not to public sector agencies, but to private sector actors who have advanced them loans. And this crisis has led to a unprecedented number of farmer suicides across India over the course of the past two decades. So the recent farmer protests that have converged on Delhi are an expression of this agrarian crisis. The farmers that are protesting have for decades had a system in which they sell their crops to a government agency, which guarantees them a certain price for their crops. And that gives them a degree of certainty in their decision making processes. On the face of it, the reforms are, you know, in some ways, on the face of it, not particularly contentious. The government would say, the government of India would say that all these reforms do is allow farmers to sell their crops to private sector actors rather than to government agencies. Farmers are protesting this because they see this as the beginning of a process whereby the system under which they have lived, which does offer a degree of certainty to them, will start to be dismantled, and that the dismantling of this will throw up much more chaotic variability in their lives, disempowering many, and resulting in marginalization. And they do not want this to happen. And so they have protested to the government, particularly because the government rushed the new legislation to Parliament, without an adequate period of consultation. In some ways, what the farmer protests represent is the culmination of decades of organizing by farmer movements in North India, in order to ensure that governments undertook policies of benefits to the rural community, the Bharatiya Janata Party in North India does not by and large have much of a rural base. And because of this, has felt less beholden to rural interests. And as a result is now witnessing what the power of organized farmer movements have the potential to be in India. I'm not sure how I see this being resolved, because the government has withdrawn the legislation. But what the farmers want now is a guarantee that this legislation will not be reintroduced. They're facing a government which is used to getting its way and which, in its last budget of just last month, did commit to a new round of privatizations, which would suggest that efforts to throw farmers into private sector markets would certainly come back, even if they've temporarily halted this at this time. But one really does have to recognize that the sources of this lie in this systemic agrarian crisis that exists in India and the extent to which farmers have been marginalized in India since the opening of the country to neoliberal reforms back in 1991.
Safa: Yes, thank you for that breakdown. And as you say, you know, the importance of looking at the historical processes that led to this moment. And also this connects with the role of government and, you know, their role as duty bearers in terms of fulfilling the rights of their citizens. How do you see, you know, the role of international development organizations within this moment or in this movement - it is more, right now at least, a dynamic between the government and the social movement, but what lessons maybe do you see for those on the development sector side?
Haroon: Starting from what I said earlier, that one shouldn't see UN organizations as homogenous, but really recognize the huge divergences within the UN system. Having said that, UN system organizations are committed to a rights based development agenda. And this actually provides a certain leverage over the way in which these organizations operate that you do not see in some of the other multilateral development organizations ,such as, for example, the World Bank, or the regional development banks. Because if a rights based development agenda is to be introduced and adhered to on a large scale, these rights go beyond individualistic political rights, and go beyond individualistic civil rights. And these political and civil rights are tremendously important, don't get me wrong. But they extend into collective rights, social rights and cultural rights. And collective rights really do have the power to transform the way in which we think about how economies operate- in ways which really do fundamentally challenge I would suggest the status quo in international development. For example, when a government under a fiscal austerity program decides to cut its health care expenditure, this may result in a violation of the collective right to health. And because governments are signatories to international human rights conventions, in theory, citizens can hold them accountable to these commitments that they have made. When governments do things like expose farmers livelihoods to the potentially negative consequences of private market processes, in threatening their livelihoods threatens some of their economic rights as laid down in UN conventions. So human rights frameworks can allow a very powerful narrative basis by which to challenge the prevailing practices of international development organizations and governments. Here in Canada, for example, the fact that so many indigenous Canadians do not have a right to clean water is a violation of UN Human Rights Principles, going back to 1948. And this is something which indigenous activists have brought to UN fora, in order to raise this. the fact that there is no consultation over much of the land which indigenous communities claim for their own, again, is a violation of UN conventions. And this also allows challenges to be made to government and to international, public and private sector institutions. So it is possible to use human rights frameworks to really quite fundamentally challenge some of the basic tenants of the development process. And I do think that it offers a language which can be very, very inclusive, because many of the social movements want to claim rights, and many of them - those rights that they want to claim their governments have already signed up to, but simply do not enforce. And when governments do not enforce rights that they have signed up to, this offers possibilities of leverage by social movements to realize the rights to which their governments have already agreed, but do not enforce. So the possibilities of constructing an alternative future, I think, lie in part within a development agenda which focuses upon realizing rights, because far too many rights, which governments have agreed citizens should be able to claim, citizens cannot claim because of the very policies those governments carry out.
Safa: Right, yes. And so in thinking about the human rights based model or approach, and as you mentioned, the right to health for example, we can extend that now to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic globally. Where now we're kind of in a stage where some countries at least are purchasing and rolling out vaccines but we see this disparity in terms of the purchasing power of some countries versus others and the hoarding that's happening and all of that. So could you also share your thoughts a bit with us about how you see the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the way that the development sector operates or some of the issues that it's brought up, You know, we've seen the gendered impact, the class impact.
Haroon: Well, the first thing to really stress is that the COVID 19 pandemic is a manifestation of human inequality on a world scale. That wherever the virus originated, the terms and conditions by which it jumped the species barrier and started to infect humans was a result of the way in which marginalized communities have to try and construct viable livelihoods under conditions of their ongoing marginalization. And this then forces those communities into adopting livelihood strategies which facilitate the spread of zoonotic diseases. If we looked at, as you have mentioned, the global distribution of vaccine rollouts, what we see is that many developing countries are relying upon the World Health Organization led COVAX initiative, which has been implemented by GAVI, which is again another global organization in the health sector. COVACS has been able to secure 2 billion doses, that's enough to vaccinate 1 billion people, so not enough doses. But more fundamentally, COVACS won't start really receiving significant numbers of doses, probably until the middle of 2022, possibly even later. And there'll be many parts of the world in which access to a vaccine probably will not become available until 2024. Whereas here in Canada, the government has secured vaccinations through contracts equivalent to 11 times the Canadian population. So if you chart a map of vaccine availability, what you see is a map in which the developed countries of Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, all have access to vaccinations for their populations many times over, and then Sub Saharan Africa, the Andean region, the upland regions of the Himalayas, these areas are not going to be able to get access to vaccines for a long time. And what this inequality does is has the effect of potentially prolonging but also worsening and possibly compromising the end of the pandemic. Because what we have seen attention drawn to now in the past month, is the way in which the virus mutates. Well, zoonotic diseases, mutate, they always mutate, that's part and parcel of how they work, its part of their biological makeup to try and survive. And as they mutate, the efficacy of vaccination becomes something that becomes a an unknown. A known unknown, to maliciously quote Dick Cheney. In the sense that the companies creating the vaccines know that they have to retest to see whether or not the vaccine is still effective given mutations. The mutations that we are most familiar with right now would be the so called Kent variant from England, B 117. The South African variant, and the variant from Brazil, from Manaus in Brazil, the P1 variant. We've seen a lot of Kent variants here in Canada, we've seen a few cases of the South African variant, the vaccines are effective against the Kent variant. What we have also seen though, is AstraZeneca says that the efficacy of its vaccine against the South African variant is far far less. Meaning that they'll have to be new rounds of research to come up with a booster or a new formula for the vaccine, which will make it work against the South African variant. Now, why am I talking about this in the context of human inequality on a world scale? While areas in Sub Saharan Africa, the Andean region, the uplands region of the Himalayas, and other places are not being vaccinated, these become population pools within which new variants can emerge. And if these new variants emerge, they have the potential to render vaccines totally useless. And we have seen the extent to which individuals can have remarkable impacts on the spreading of COVID-19. I saw a remarkable report yesterday of an epidemiological study of the New Orleans Mardi Gras last year, Mardi Gras is on again this year in New Orleans, in which one case of COVID-19 generated 50,000 more cases. One person resulting in an infection of 50,000. Now, if we leave pools of possible variants in Sub Saharan Africa or the Andean region, or uplands region of the Himalayas, or other places that are going to be vaccinated much later, we are opening up the possibility that a variant will emerge against which the vaccine has no efficacy. And we will reset back to where we were on the last day of December of 2019. And we will be at the beginning again, and the new variant might be more lethal. So it is in the interest of global public health, that everyone get vaccinated as quickly as possible. And the inequality that we see in the response to vaccine distribution is preventing this from happening, therefore laying the preconditions for a new crisis to emerge.
Safa: Yes, those numbers are staggering. And definitely, if there's one thing that this pandemic has shown us is how interconnected we are on so many levels globally, and also the importance of international solidarity. Do you have any final thoughts in terms of rethinking development, rethinking approaches to development or anything else you'd like to add, based on what we've spoken about today?
Haroon: There is no doubt in my mind that development policy and practice is undergoing a fundamental transformation in a way in which we cannot see the endpoint because of COVID-19. Until the pandemic comes under control, all development policy and practice will be refracted through what is the effect of the policy or practice, in light of the pandemic? It is affecting everything. It is a global seismic event well beyond the impact of say, for example, 911, it's much more similar, I would suggest to say, the end of the second World War in which the entire world changed as a result of the cessation of that conflict. How development works, going forward in the wake of COVID-19, I don't know. But COVID-19 will shape how it goes forward. The second thing I would also like to really stress is the absolute centrality of the climate crisis. We have, you know, so many UN reports sitting on shelves, gathering dust, which tell us that if we cannot get climate change under control by the end of this decade, we may have locked in processes which will result in a execrable shift to a higher temperature, well beyond two degrees centigrade. We have very limited time to do it. And yet, governments are not acting upon this. And the place in which climate change impacts first is in the developing countries, these are the ones most severely impacted by climate change. And so those who are least able to cope with the consequences of climate change are the ones who are most likely to be affected by it. Not withstanding storms in Texas or snow in Greece. And so all development practice has to refract through the interplay between the development process and climate change going forward. Climate change, COVID-19 and development. These are three sides of a triangle which cannot be undone anymore. We have to view them as a whole going forward.
Safa: So powerfully and well said - food for thought as we wrap up the conversation here. Thank you so much, Professor Akram- Lodhi. It's been great to hear from you and learn from you. Thank you for your time and your reflections. I really appreciate it.
Haroon: You're very welcome.
Safa: Thank you so much. Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and supporting the podcast. I invite you to join in on the conversation by going to our website, hitting the send us a voice message button and sharing some of your thoughts with us. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your preferred podcast player, rate and review past episodes and share our conversations with your friends. You can also keep up to date with our latest episodes and offerings by signing up for our newsletter on our website and following us on social media. On our website, you can also find a donation link where you can choose either a one time donation or reoccurring monthly donation option to help us cover our production costs. Thank you again for tuning in. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next time. Until then take care.
