Fishing about and about fishing

QUO VADIS FAO?

 

A fully independent external evaluation (IEE) of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), first-ever in its sixty-year history, says that FAO’s performance has been inadequate for at least two decades, and if the agency doesn’t change its ways soon, it is going to slide down the slipway in a fish basket, or in the words of the report into a "terminal decline",  The recently posted highly critical IEE report was funded by FAO member states and authored by an international team of consultants. (www.fao.org/unfao/bodies/IEE-Working-Draft-Report/K0489E.pdf).

 

FAO’s governance – say the reviewers – is weak, and is failing both the agency itself and the world’s people it’s supposed to serve. Notwithstanding, the IEE asks: “Does the world need FAO?” and its answer is “Yes, without doubt; If FAO were to disappear tomorrow, it would need to be re-invented”. Nonetheless, FAO needs urgently to change, “before it fades into insignificance," The IEE questions whether FAO can “cost-effectively support humanity in facing the challenges of this 21st century”, in particular “the scourges of hunger and poverty and the challenges to environment”, and whether its Management, Administration and Organization, and its organizational culture and structure can fill the bill. 

 

Once upon the time, FAO had abounded with highly qualified and knowledgeable specialists, and both, as a “recipient” and as a staff member I had admired FAO’s quality of knowledge, wisdom of advice, and professional integrity. The IEE put the finger on one root problem as it wrote that “former Director-General Saouma took autocracy in FAO to exceptionally high levels”. Since, politicization has been affecting the choice of FAO’s staff. 

 

While professional integrity has been its most important quality, for with professional integrity FAO stands, without it - it falls; where FAO’s projects did fail they failed in integrity and the wisdom of its advice. With increasing politicization FAO started failing on the integrity and the quality of advice both in the field and at its headquarters. In due time, it has started preferring specialists from developing countries because they could be paid lower fees and wages.

 

Politics.  This process of qualitative deterioration took place not only at administrative and representative but also at professional levels, which meant that some technical officers were appointed not because of their qualifications and experience, but according to their nationality and the resulting political play and pressures. FAO’s qualities as an institution have always been the product of personal values and qualifications of its functionaries, and it didn’t help if FAO jobs were distributed among its member nations in exchange for electoral favours, political support to FAO’s leadership’s policies and maneuvers, such as bending the rules to let its Director General to stay in office for many years more than the original rules stipulated, etc. 

 

Since this process couldn’t be soaped over, the international and national donors’ support started shriveling, although FAO’s leadership kept surviving very well, thank you. Donor countries and some agencies, as for example the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), have gradually reduced their support to FAO executed projects, and redirected their resources to bilateral activities or to other agencies. Then, UNDP displaced FAO by implementing its own and other agencies’ projects that formerly had been obviously falling in the domain of FAO’s doings. 

 

Eventually, FAO’s field work had shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be, and the agency became top-heavy and professionally lighter, and, according to IEE it “ was plagued by management uncertainties and significant bureaucratic delays." Also: “the financial situation of FAO has become dire and it lacks transparency and accountability”.

 

Assistance to developing fisheries.  FAO’s Fisheries, however, came out of this quite disturbing review somewhat better than the agency as a whole. Firstly, it has played a leading role even among developed fisheries by providing principles and guidance in fisheries management, organizing regional fisheries management bodies, assisting in promoting international trade in fishery products, and in the worldwide struggle against pirate fishing. Secondly, FAO’s fisheries field work remains in a high demand among developing countries, “particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, although the field is becoming crowded with bilateral agencies, private consultants, NGOs, and various institutes, all increasing their activities in fisheries”. Also: …”fisheries field work was better …   … than many other technical areas in FAO”, some of it “appropriate and effective”. The FAO TCP (short-term, limited purpose projects) in fisheries got significantly above average scores for relevance, impacts and follow-up. IEE is quoting, however “some international specialists” saying that “the quality of FAO’s technical work in the field is highly variable”, an opinion with which I fully agree. 

 

No doubt FAO has been a major player in the fisheries of developing countries, its role having been widely recognized and its assistance frequently called for, although sometimes misdirected and, unavoidably, criticized.  Throughout its history, the agency provided Third-World fisheries with short and long-term consultants, instructors and advisers, single and in teams, to deal with fishery resources assessments, on one hand, and in the development of fishing communities and of fish production, on the other. Moreover, IEE  pointed out that FAO fisheries specialists have been active in helping fisherfolk to recover from disasters, lesser and major, caused by hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis, and hostilities.

 

EEI recommendations. I am not sure that the administrative reshuffling of FAO’s bureaucracy, as proposed by the EEI, however necessary and important, would heal its main maladies. EEI took for granted the whole FAO Country Representatives (FAOR) system – the weird product of Mr. Saouma’s politicking and a mother of many counter-productive practices, a system, which was soaking up funds that could be better spent otherwise. Thus, EEI evidently didn’t look for other organizational options and didn’t consider its abolishment, for example by putting FAO’s field operations back under the UNDP country offices umbrella. On the other hand, the spirit of EEI’s recommendations, never mind the wordage, that experts and consultants should only be selected by their personal merits and remunerated accordingly are just on the target.