The Ease of Doing Hunger
On the Ease of Doing Business, the FAO's Hand-in-Hand Initiative, and debt
“Debt is neo-colonialism, in which colonizers have transformed themselves into ‘technical assistants’.” Thomas Sankara
In November 2024, Burkina Faso opened a tomato processing plant in Bobo-Dioulasso. The country is West Africa’s fourth-largest tomato producer, yet every year it had been shipping out more than eight million dollars to buy back the same product that it already grows, but in cans. The new facility — Société Burkinabè de Tomates, or SOBTO — was 80 percent capitalised by Burkinabè citizens and 20 percent by the state. Farmers who used to lose harvests for lack of a local buyer now have one. A second plant opened weeks later in Yako. A third is going up in Tenkodogo.
I’ve been working through some practical and theoretical ideas about debt recently, prompted by an invitation to write a paper for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) 38th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference (APRC - lots of acronyms in today’s post). Today, I’ll wax political-economic just because it’s always worth nailing down some numbers when looking at the horizon of possibility. The Burkinabè example is an instance of what investment in agrifood systems can look like when international creditors aren’t setting the agenda. Unfortunately, as Thomas Sankara — the revolutionary who was Upper Volta’s last head of state, and Burkina Faso’s first — the technocratic style reigns supreme in international development and, with it, new reasons to worry.
The civil society consultation to the APRC — the process through which peasants’ organisations, fisherfolk, and Indigenous movements in the region put their positions to member states before the conference itself — asked me to write a short piece on debt. Civil society organisations (CSOs) at the 37th APRC in Colombo in 2024 has asked the FAO to interrogate “the consequences of industrialization, neo-liberal policies and corporate consolidation” on regional food security, and to enable “direct access to financing” for farmers’ organisations. Member states did not take up those demands. Two years on, the conditions they diagnosed have worsened. The region’s governments are hemorrhaging capital.
Between 2022 and 2024, developing countries paid out $741 billion more in principal and interest on their external debts than they received in new financing. The World Bank’s 2025 International Debt Report records it as the largest debt-related outflow in fifty years. Interest payments alone hit a record $415 billion in 2024. In East Asia and the Pacific, net debt transfers in 2024 were negative by $156 billion. Across the 78 poorest International Debt Assistance-eligible countries, new private-creditor loans now carry an average interest rate of 7.45 percent, with maturities compressed to eight years — terms that structurally pre-empt fiscal space for anything resembling a food system, a clinic, or a school.
Against this, the FAO has identified a global financing gap of $93 billion a year, the figure required to hit Zero Hunger by 2030. But hunger isn’t the outcome of an aggregate shortage of money; it is the ongoing work of a system that moves multiples of the gap in the wrong direction.
The APRC’s headline agenda is “accelerating agrifood investment pathways,” anchored in the FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Initiative. My paper argues, in my best technocratic brogue, that an investment-pathway framing cannot resolve a problem whose structural driver is an investment-pathway framing.
What Hand-in-Hand does
Hand-in-Hand launched in 2019. By 2023 it had drawn in 72 member countries; it now showcases 114 “investment opportunities” advertising an average internal rate of return of 24.5 percent, chasing $16.59 billion in capital. The FAO describes its role as a “matchmaker,” facilitating a shift “from donations to investments”: what Director-General Qu Dongyu calls “a new business model” for development. Country briefs present rates of return to investors by commodity — Rwanda’s 2025 profile offers avocado at 19 percent, chili at 18 percent. Scorecards benchmark governments against Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets in red-yellow-green. Ministers gather annually in Rome to pitch.
When FAO officials address civil society organisations, Hand-in-Hand is instead described as a “technical tool” for “territorial diagnosis” that “does not promote any type of investment.” Both investor- and CSO-characterisations appear in FAO’s own documents, sometimes in the same month. They describe, plausibly, two different tools. What joins them is a specific institutional sleight of hand.
Readers of a certain vintage will recognise it. From 2003 to 2020, the World Bank published a numerical ranking called Ease of Doing Business. It too insisted it was merely diagnostic. It measured the regulatory environments countries presented to private capital; it did not, officially, tell anyone to do anything. Yet, as political scientist André Broome has shown, within a year of the rankings appearing, governments were not seeking advice on improving their regulation — they were seeking advice on improving their ranking in the Ease of Doing Business league table. Over seventy countries stood up reform committees geared to the indicators. Doshi, Kelley and Simmons called it the power of ranking. The instrument was discontinued in 2021, after an external investigation found that senior Bank staff had altered the scores of China and Saudi Arabia to please those governments.
This is a diagnostic that produces its object, data as the master’s tool, if you will. The Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum, on my reading, works the same way. Governments do not come to Rome to receive territorial analysis; they come to pitch their agricultural sectors to investors, and the reward is not a rank but a commitment letter. It does not require anyone at FAO to be cynical for this to reshape national agrifood priorities. Countries that cannot, or will not, translate their food systems into rates of return aren’t penalised - they’re just left without a match.
Consider Bangladesh. In October 2022, Dhaka was preparing to present a Hand-in-Hand package including $500 million from the World Bank and $43 million from IFAD, designed to transition “semi-subsistence oriented rural households” into an “advanced, commercialized” sector. None of it materialised. By August 2024 the Hasina government had been overthrown by a mass uprising driven in part by the very conditions the investment pathway was supposed to resolve: rising prices, a collapsing currency, non-performing loans at 24.1 percent of the banking sector — three times the South Asian average — and, by the interim government’s own estimate, an average of $16 billion a year in illicit financial outflows, more than double the combined value of net aid and FDI.
When Hand-in-Hand re-advertised Bangladesh in 2025, the framing was entirely different and made no reference to the original figures. The “groundbreaking” transformation project that eventually launched in April 2025 was funded not by the World Bank but by the Gates Foundation.
Through all of that, Bangladesh’s farmers kept producing. Rice yields rose from 4.70 to 4.82 tonnes per hectare. Total food-grain output went up. None of that owed anything to the investment pipeline. It owed everything to the smallholder systems the pipeline was designed to “transition” out of.
What already works
There are a few other things that already work.
In Andhra Pradesh, a state of 53 million people, the Community-managed Natural Farming programme has since 2016 enrolled more than a million smallholder farmers — most of them women — in an agroecological transition across half a million hectares. It is the largest such programme on earth. A True Cost Accounting study finds participating farms yield 11 percent more than chemically intensive systems, earn 49 percent higher net incomes, eat more diverse diets, and lose fewer days to illness. A foresight exercise co-run with FAO’s own scientists models a full state-wide agroecological transition by 2050 and finds it addresses food security, employment, inequality, and environmental sustainability at once. The public cost runs to about a dollar per farmer per month. No one at Hand-in-Hand will ever calculate an IRR on this, because there is no external investor to receive one: the savings flow to farmers, and, via reduced fertilizer imports, to the national balance of payments. The programme reduces debt. It also does not get to pitch.
In Isabela Province in the Philippines, the Payoga-Kapatagan Multipurpose Cooperative generates 99.9 percent of its revenues from its own members’ pooled savings. It disburses production loans — between $200 and $600 — as organic fertilizer that the cooperative itself makes from rice straw, animal manure, and carbonised rice hull. Interest on loans for organic inputs is one percent a month; on loans for chemical inputs, two and a half. The rate structure involves an ecological preference that no commercial lender has any reason to price. Of the cooperative’s 3,408 members, most of them women, 2,650 have shifted to organic.
And across Sri Lanka — which defaulted in 2022 and is now projected to spend close to half its recurrent expenditure on interest — peasant farmers and women’s collectives have been quietly repurposing death-donation societies, welfare associations, and mutual-aid groups as credit circles. Accumulated membership fees serve as shared reserves, interest rates are set through participatory decision-making and capital circulates rather than leaves. It’s about to come undone.
The Asian Development Bank extended Colombo a $200 million loan in 2023 whose conditionality requires the enactment of a Microfinance and Credit Regulatory Authority that would fold these mutual-aid arrangements into a compliance regime built for commercial moneylenders — a regime that, as it happens, exempts the very licensed institutions whose practices had, by 2021, been linked to the suicides of over 200 indebted women. Peasant organisations blocked the first draft in 2024. A revised draft was gazetted last November. Whether the 38th APRC defends community credit, or quietly acquiesces in its enclosure, is a test worth watching.
The arithmetic of infinite debt
I don’t think most people at the FAO wants what the chart above shows. I have met too many careful, good-faith staff there to think that. But the institutional design of Hand-in-Hand does not leave room for the question of debt to surface. An investment pathway cannot un-extract. A matchmaker cannot refuse a match that, viewed from the fields, is a bad one.
My recommendation is not no international cooperation. The recommendation is for debt relief as a precondition, rather than as a reward, for investment. Technical assistance for domestic capitalisation and public processing infrastructure — the Bobo-Dioulasso model — rather than for pitching those same assets to external capital.
Food sovereignty does not require that international institutions stop existing. It requires that they stop treating extraction as the condition of their help. The FAO has the capacity, the convening power, and the mandate to make the shift. The 37th APRC was asked, and declined. The 38th is an opportunity to answer a more honest question: what would it take for the countries of the Asia-Pacific to feed themselves, on their own terms, without going deeper into debt?
The answers already exist. The people living them are not asking to be matched. They are asking to be left the room to keep going, without debt prejudicing their sovereignty, and without the ‘technical assistants’ who Thomas Sankara so presciently observed were the agents of neo-colonialism.
The full CSO Consultation paper, “Beyond Investment Pathways: Debt, Dependency and Agrifood Systems in the Global South,” is available here.