Kinnock Visits Rome Before Tour of Africa

ROME — Africa’s famine may best be solved by ending African cash-crop production and focusing all agricultural efforts on production of food for the internal market, Britain’s opposition leader Neil Kinnock said here Friday.

But officials at the International Fund for Agricultural Development met Kinnock’s proposal with skepticism, noting that “cash crops are still the backbone of the African economy,” providing much of the foreign currency needed to purchase imports and pay foreign debts.

Labor Party leader Kinnock, currently running 10% ahead of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in some English public opinion polls, gave a glimpse into the likely African policy of a Labor government during a brief stop in Rome en route to Africa, where he will meet with the heads of government in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.

The vagaries of the international commodities markets wreak havoc with African economies dependent on one or two “cash crops” such as tea in Kenya, Kinnock argued in a meeting with IFAD officials.

“The suspicion must be – especially in the case of Kenya – that it’s bad news,” Kinnock said of the current concentration of agricultural effort on cash crops. “The land used is bound to be the best and to attract the best technology – that seems to throw in the imbalance.”

It might be better for African countries to stop producing cash crops out of a process of “strategic decision-making,” using the land instead to produce food for consumption on the spot, Kinnock suggested.

“Is it not a time to consider going off the international market and grown for internal markets?” Kinnock said.

But IFAD officials, who are currently carrying on research to determine the economic impact of cash crop production, told Kinnock they though cash crops both help and harm African economies and that any categorical condemnation of cash-cropping would be excessive.

“That depends on the conditions,” IFAD Africa division head Bahman Mansuri said, noting that cash crops are “the backbone” of many African economies.

“To right that bias, countries have to make sure they follow price policies which give equal incentives to farmers for food crops as for export crops,” Brown said.

Kinnock visited IFAD headquarters to offer his support to the organization, which has generally been praised for its work in assisting development through low-interest loans, but which has been threatened with extinction due to a struggle between OPEN and western nations over how to fund the agency.

“I am most impressed by the work which IFAD does to promote food production in the poorest countries,” Kinnock said. “For that reason, it is extremely disturbing that not all IFAD donor countries have agreed on the amount of replenishment of IFAD funding.”

Kinnock noted that the response of the British people to the recent LIVE AID concert indicated that they support development aid.

“Now governments must act,” he said, suggesting that the refusal of the United States to back the IFAD funding was “playing poker” with IFAD’s resources.

Conditions attached by western governments to African aid also came under fire from Kinnock.

The hold-up of a livestock vaccination program in a number of African countries by the World Bank until an agreement is reached with the Fund for Agricultural Development (FAO) over the use of state agencies or private enterprises in running the project was particularly highlighted by the Labor Party leader, according to his press secretary Patricia Hewitt.

Kinnock disagreed with World Bank insistence that private enterprise play a role in the vaccination project, Hewitt said.

After meeting with IFAD and FAO officials, Kinnock huddled with Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who treated Kinnock “as if he were receiving Britain’s future prime minister,” Hewitt said.

The two men held “an unusually long meeting” and kept Craxi’s next appointment waiting until they were done, she said.

One issue discussed was increased development aid through the EEC to third world countries, she said.

Kinnock, a tall, red-haired 43-year-old Welshman who joined Britain’s Labor Party at the age of 15, is running hard to unseat Thatcher and become Britain’s next Prime Minister.

Kinnock’s ten-day Africa trip comes as British public opinion appears strongly supportive of African famine relief following the unprecedented success of the LIVE AID concert.

It also comes as a bitter dispute has cropped up at home, where the 160,000-member National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is facing a split.

A break-away group of miners has formed withing Nottinhamshire’s 26,000-member NUM branch, calling themselves “moderates” in opposition to NUM’s hardline leftist president Arthur Scargill. The break-away groun has called on Kinnock to declare his support for them.

Kinnock has said the break-away group should return to the union, and faces loss of bargaining power by being outside the “main organized body” in a dispute viewed by many in Britain as a “no-win” situation for Kinnock.

In Ethiopia, Kinnock will join a Hercules C-131 food airlift into the northern Tigray province.

He is scheduled to return to England July 13.

The International Courier
21 July 1985