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Fish, hooks and shekels: explaining safety nets
03 April 2006
Social assistance, social protection and safety nets have become common terms in food security jargon in recent years. This is good news and shows that there is growing awareness of the role of these instruments to address hunger and vulnerability. But it is important that these terms do not remain in the realm of jargon, and that practitioners and policy-makers have a clear understanding what each entails. The aim of this Comment is to introduce safety nets to a wider audience and to explain how safety nets work.
Many people have heard the proverb often used to explain the need for development rather than relief - “give a man a fish and he will be hungry tomorrow, but give him a hook and he will feed himself”. While the moral behind the proverb is widely understood it isn’t quite correct. Indeed, proponents of food aid argue that if the man isn’t given a fish today he may not be able to utilise the hook tomorrow.
Apart from highlighting the relief versus development question, the proverb is also useful in explaining what safety nets are and how they work, especially if we extend the biblical image by introducing shekels into the equation.
Safety nets help people cope with vulnerability. They are intended for people in society who are unable to deal with sudden shocks to their livelihoods (such as illness, a fall in household food production or a rise in staple food prices). We can call them ‘transitorily vulnerable’. Safety nets are also for people whose livelihoods are more fundamentally unsustainable (for example, as a result of land degradation, climate change or unfavourable policy environments). We can call them ‘chronically vulnerable’.
Returning to the proverb, the traditional way of dealing with the plight of these vulnerable groups was to provide them with fish (that is, food aid). While giving them fish will certainly keep them alive (which is, after all, the primary function of humanitarian relief) this type of intervention can encourage reliance on the fish handouts and reduce the incentive to utilise the hooks. After all, fishing is a risky business and there is no certainty of a catch. If someone is going to be given a fish every time he is hungry, isn’t it rational for him not to go out and fish for himself?
Moreover, if every vulnerable person within the community is given fish, what would be the incentive for the rest of the community who go fishing, to try to catch more than they need for themselves and supply those that don’t have enough? Without the catching of surplus fish and the selling of this fish on the market, the vulnerable, will always have to rely on fish handouts.
This situation is clearly not very satisfactory : the non-vulnerable don’t have opportunities to improve their livelihoods and the vulnerable will be perpetually dependent on handouts.
So, is there an alternative? This is where shekels (or cash in a real safety net programme) come into play. Instead of giving the vulnerable fish, which might reduce trade and damage the livelihoods of other community members (even potentially making them dependent on handouts) the provision of shekels could give vulnerable groups the purchasing power to buy the fish they need on the market, promote trade, safeguard the livelihoods of the fishermen and enable the vulnerable to utilise their hooks and become fishermen themselves.
But, as with fish, there are limits to the use of shekels. For one thing, the dependency concern is also relevant to shekels. Indeed, some might argue that the dependency effect is stronger if you give out shekels rather than fish, since shekels can be more readily traded and are therefore more desirable. But others might argue that the dependency effect is less since the shekels, being more usable, can create more opportunities for enhancing livelihoods.
In some situations, providing shekels might exacerbate rather than improve the situation for the vulnerable: if fish catches were reduced (because of a structural problem such as over-fishing or because of a temporary problem such as a drop in the water level) and there were fewer surplus fish on the market, then the handing out of shekels rather than fish would do little or nothing to improve the supply of fish. Instead, prices would increase and fish would remain unaffordable to the already vulnerable and might also increase either numbers within the community.
Even the provision of hooks (or agricultural inputs), the third option in this imaginary safety net scenario, has its own limitation: some vulnerable people may not be able to utilise the hooks. They may be ill or disabled, they may be too far from the river or they may not have the time or the other assets to enable them to fish productively. So even providing hooks does not guarantee that the vulnerable members of the community will be able to feed themselves in future.
The morals of this modified (but as yet unwritten) proverb are: first, different types of safety nets (fish or food, shekels or cash, hooks or inputs) are suitable to different vulnerable groups in different situations. Second, the advantage of safety net programmes is that individual transfers, be they fish, shekels or hooks, can be used more selectively, not only as more effective substitutes but also in complementary combinations. Third, whatever the transfer, the impact of the safety net programme depends on effective targeting of the vulnerable, and the appropriate selection of transfer.
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