VOLATILITY KILLS

A. Despite gun battles in the capital of Chad, rioting in Kenya, and Galloping inflation in Zimbabwe, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa are, as a whole, in better shape than they were a few years ago. The World Bank has reported recently that this part of the continent experienced a respectable growth rate of 5.6 percent in 2006 and a higher rate from 1995 to 2005 than in previous decades. The bank has given a cautions assessment that the region may have reached a turning point. An overriding question for developmental economists remains whether the upswing will continue so Africans can grow their way out of poverty that relegates some 40 percent of the nearly 744 million in that region to living on less than a dollar a day. The optimism, when inspected more closely, maybe short-lived because of the persistence of a devastating pattern of economic volatility that has lingered for decades.

B. “In reality, African countries grow as fast as Asian countries and other developing countries during the good times, but afterward they see growth collapses,” comments Jorge Arbache, a senior World Bank economist. “How to prevent collapses may be as important as promoting growth.” If these collapses had not occurred, he observes, the level of gross domestic product for each citizen of the 48 nations of sub -Saharan Africa would have been third higher.

C. the prerequisites to prevent the next crash are not in place, according to a World Bank study issued in January, Is Africa’s Recent Growth Robust? The growth period that began in 1995, driven by a commodities boom spurred in particular by demand from China, may not be sustainable, because the economic fundamentals- new investment and the ability to stave off inflation, among other factors-are absent. The region lacks the necessary infrastructure that would encourage investors to look to Africa to find the next Bengaluru (Bangalore) or Shenzhen, a November report from the bank concludes. For sub–Saharan countries rich in oil and other resources, a boom period may even undermine efforts to institute sound economic practices. From 1996 to 2005, with growth accelerating, measures of governance– factors such as political stability, rule of law, and control of corruption- actually worsened, especially for countries endowed with abundant mineral resources, the January report notes.

D. Perhaps the most incisive analysis of the volatility question comes from Paul Collier, a longtime specialist in African economics at the University of Oxford and author of the recent book The Bottom Billion. He advocates a range of options that the U.S. and other nations could adopt when formulating policy toward African countries. They include revamped trade measures, better-apportioned aid, and sustained military intervention in certain instances, to avert what he sees as a rapidly accelerating divergence of the world’s poorest, primarily in Africa, from the rest of the world, even other developing nations such India and China.

E. Collier finds that bad governance is the main reason countries fail to take advantage of the revenue bonanza that results from a boom. moreover, a democratic government, he adds, often makes the aftermath of a boom worse. “Instead of democracy disciplining governments to manage these resource booms well, what happens is that the resource revenues corrupt the normal functioning of democracy-unless you stop (them from) corrupting the normal function of democracy with sufficient checks and balances”, he said at a talk ion January at the Carnegie Council in New York City.

F. Collier advocates that African nations institute an array of standards and codes to bolster governments, one of which would substitute auctions for bribes in apportioning mineral rights and another of which would tax export revenues adequately. He cites the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which took in $200 million from mineral exports in 2006 yet collected only $86000 in royalties for its treasury. “If a nation gets these points right,” he argues, “It’s going to develop. I f it gets them wrong, it won’t.”

G. To encourage reform, Collier recommends that the G8 nations agree to accept these measures as voluntary guidelines for multinationals doing business in Africa- companies, for instance, would only enter new contracts through auctions monitored by an international verification group. Such an agreement would follow the examples of the so-called Kimberley Process, which has effectively undercut the trade in blood diamonds, and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, in which a government must report to its citizens the revenues it receives from sales of natural resources.

H. These measures, he says, are more important than elevating aid levels, an approach emphasized by economist Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University and celebrity activists such as Bono. Collier insists that first Angola receives tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue and whether it gets a few hundred million more or less in aid is really second-order.

THE SENSE OF FLAVOUR

Scientists now believe that human beings acquired the sense of taste as a way to avoid being poisoned. Edible plants generally taste sweet; deadly ones, bitter. Taste is supposed to help us differentiate food that’s good for us from food that’s not. The taste buds on our tongues can detect the presence of half a dozen or so basic tastes, including sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (a taste discovered by Japanese researchers, a rich and full sense of deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods such as shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and seaweed).

Taste buds offers a limited means of detection, however, compared with the human olfactory system, which can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas. Indeed, ‘flavor’ is primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you’ve just put in your mouth. The aroma of food can be responsible for as much as 90% of its flavor.

The act of drinking, sucking or chewing a substance releases its volatile gases. They flow out of the mouth and up the nostrils, or up the passageway at the back of the mouth, to a thin layer of nerve cells called the olfactory epithelium, located at the base of the nose, right between the eyes. The brain combines the complex smell signals from the epithelium with the simple taste signals from the tongue, assigns a flavor to what’s in your mouth, and decides if it’s something you want to eat.

Babies like sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; we know this because scientists have rubbed various flavors inside the mouths of infants and then recorded their facial reactions. A person’s food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending upon what the people around them eat. The human sense of smell is still not fully understood. It is greatly affected by psychological factors and expectations. The mind filters out the overwhelming majority of chemical aromas that surround us, focusing intently on some, ignoring others. People can grow accustomed to bad smells or good smells; they stop noticing what once seemed overpowering.

Aroma and memory are somehow inextricably linked. A smell can suddenly evoke a long- forgotten moment. The flavours of childhood foods seem to leave an indelible mark, and adults often return to them, without always knowing why. These ‘comfort foods’ become a source of pleasure and reassurance a fact that fast-food chains work hard to promote Childhood memories of Happy Meals can translate into frequent adult visits to McDonald’s’, like those of the chain’s ‘heavy users’, the customers who eat there four or five times a week.

The human craving for flavour has been a large unacknowledged and unexamined force in history. Royal empires have been built, unexplored lands have been traversed, great religions and philosophies have been forever changed by the spice trade. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail in order to try to find new seasonings and thus to make his fortune with this most desired commodity of that time. Today, the influence of flavour in the world marketplace is no less decisive. The rise and fall of corporate empires – soft-drink companies, snack-food companies, and fast-food chains – is frequently determined by how their products taste.

The flavor industry emerged in the mid-1800s, as processed foods began to be manufactured on a large scale. Recognizing the need for flavor additives, the early food processors turned to perfume companies that had years of experience working with essential oils and volatile aromas. The great perfume houses of England, France, and the Netherlands produced many of the first flavor compounds. In the early part of the 20th century, Germany’s powerful chemical industry assumed the lead in flavour production. Legend has it that a German scientist discovered methyl anthranilate, one of the first artificial flavours, by accident while mixing chemicals in his laboratory. Suddenly, the lab was filled with the sweet smell of grapes. Methyl anthranilate later became the chief flavoring compound of manufactured grape juice.

The quality that people seek most of all in a food, its flavour, is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured by any traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons. Today’s sophisticated spectrometers, gas chromatograph, and headspace vapor analyzers provide a detailed map of a food’s flavour components, detecting chemical aromas in amounts as low as one part per billion. The human nose, however, is still more sensitive than any machine yet invented. A nose can detect aromas present in quantities of a few parts per trillion. Complex aromas, such as those of coffee or roasted meat, may be composed of gases from nearly a thousand different chemicals. The chemical that provides the dominant flavour of bell pepper can be tasted in amounts as low as 0.02 parts per billion; one drop is sufficient to add flavour to the amount of water needed to fill five average-sized swimming pools