164 Poverty and Hunger
14 Daily Nation, 21 March 2003, http://www.nationmedia.com. This may have subsumed the
earlier US$20,000 pledged by the National Irrigation Board.
15 This is not to justify the gross inequalities of landholdings in Zimbabwe. The government, how-
ever, chose not to take up aided programmes of settlement of the sort that had been so successful
in Kenya. There were numerous reports of how farm labourers suffered and lost when land was
seized.
16 In October 2003, Concorde had its historic last flight. The Mahaweli project is still alive, extensive
and, to the best of my knowledge, well.
17 A contributory factor reflecting continuity of relationships may have been that the Tanzanian
President was a Finnophile. The only place in Tanzania with a sauna bath was, and to the best of
my knowledge remains, Mtwara. Though its construction provoked a divisive ideological debate
among Finnish expatriates, it could hardly have been a political liability when it was patronized,
as it was, by the president.
18 Statistics for DFID aid to Uganda compiled by Lister and Nyamagusira (2003) from http://www.DFID.
gov.uk/sid for 1999/2001 and 2000/2001, respectively, give project aid dropping from UK£41.467
million to UK£17.686 million, and programme aid rising from UK£17 million to UK£45 mil-
lion. The possibility must be recognized that part of this dramatic contrast may have been the
result of a change in accounting.
19 To be wilfully unaware is to decide not to know or not to take steps to know, when it is apparent
that there is something discordant to understand. Most people do this from time to time. I cer-
tainly do.
20 Hanging in and patience can bridge gaps until fashions come back in again. My grandmother’s
long skirts were for long a legacy of the past, but became avant garde fashion when hemlines
dropped again, and casual observation suggests that, in 2003, for some young women at least,
flared trousers have come back. Those aided projects that survive may in due course find them-
selves part of a wave of the future.
21 USAID’s lack of long-term commitment and tendency to lurch from one priority and language
to another is a commonplace development experience, has done much hidden damage and
deserves a special study. An example is its policies towards family planning. In Jordan, for exam-
ple, support to a project was withheld after field preparations had begun. ‘In such situations, with
expectations raised at the local level, organizational credibility is diminished, and time and energy
must be spent to regain the trust of partners in the field’ (bint Talal, 2003, p190).
22 I owe the word friendship to Norman Uphoff, who frequently stresses it in Gal Oya (Uphoff,
1992), and to Elmer Ferrer at the Community-based Coastal Resources Management Festival,
held at Subic Bay in the Philippines in June 2003, who eloquently stressed how friendship had
been fostered by people from different backgrounds and organizations staying together for a long
time, working with a common cause.
23 Rosalind Eyben (pers. comm.) has pointed out that: ‘Interestingly, the FCO [Foreign and Com-
monwealth Office of the UK government] now has “anchors”, so although someone is only posted
for three to four years at any time to a particular country, they do go back again later on and pos-
sibly for a third time, as well, during their career. Diplomats appreciate the importance of local
knowledge much more than do aid staff.’
24 While courting my wife Jenny, I was in Bihar when she had an excellent job offer that would have
put us in different continents for two years. Forced to communicate by cable with few words, I
pleaded with her to ‘minimize irreversibility commitment’. To my great good fortune, though not
necessarily hers, it worked.
25 I write this with passion, anguish and guilt. One of the biggest, most selfish errors of my life was
to spend many of the Sundays during three and a half years living in New Delhi rock-climbing on
endangered rocks at Damdama and Dhauj, instead of devoting my time to saving them and their
environments for future generations. The finest rocks are still, but precariously, intact at the time
of writing (2004); but at Dhauj outlying rocks have been mindlessly quarried and destroyed for-