Response by the authors

In their kind response to our paper (Seeley et al. 2010; Wouters et al. 2010) focus upon the point that our “research efforts showed that the predicted progressive and systematic decline did not seem to have materialized and come to the conclusion that HIV and AIDS have sometimes thrown households into disarray and poverty, but more often reduced development.” We very much welcome the opportunity to take this important discussion further and to explain our thinking with more clarity.

To be absolutely clear at the outset, as in our original paper, we do not in any way suggest that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in African rural communities has been anything other than a terrible cause of individual and community suffering. Neither do we suggest that HIV/AIDS is no longer a very serious world problem. Of course, Wouters et al. (2010) do not accuse us of this but some cursory readers may arrive at such a conclusion from this correspondence, not having read the original paper. We would encourage such readers to look at what we had to say there and also to read Beegle et al. (2008) in which many of the queries raised by Wouters et al. (2010) are dealt with in discussions of the modelling and the resulting quantitative analysis.

The points of mild disagreement between Wouters et al. (2010) and ourselves are twofold: (i) the empirical question of “the predictions made by ample HIV impact studies in the 1980s and 1990s which foresaw progressive and systematic declines in agricultural production with dire consequences for rural livelihoods”; (ii) the conceptual, theoretical and methodological question of how and whether it would be possible to track and measure such processes rigorously.

On the first question, Wouters et al. (2010) refer to “ample HIV impact studies in the 1980s and 1990s”. In our view, use of the word “ample” here is key. In fact, there have been relatively few studies which set out to test empirically the effects of HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality on rural production systems in Africa: in particular, whether there has been a “progressive and systematic decline”. Instead, there has been (i) a limited number of rigorous pieces of work, notably that of the World Bank (Wouters et al. 2010; World Bank, 1997) and more recently Jayne et al. (Lundberg et al. 2000; Yamano & Jayne 2004; Chapoto & Jayne 2008) – albeit of these studies, one uses data from Kenya and two use Zambian data; (ii) a number of simple surveys interpreting the past situation from a study of the present (often using participatory methods and/or qualitative methods and/or simple survey methods) (Barnett & Blaikie 1991; Kwaramba 1997; Mason et al., 2009); (iii) studies which used anecdote and sometimes unclear methods and which were often designed for advocacy purposes and which furthermore often took the results of Barnett and Blaikie (1991) as a truth rather than as a set of provisional findings to be examined scientifically; and (iv) a very few ethnographic studies, notably Rugalema’s (Larson et al. 2004); in which the processes of attrition related to HIV/AIDS are traced by an experienced researcher with very specialised local knowledge and linguistic skills. In other words, the studies are in no way “ample” and they did not show generalised and conclusive evidence of “progressive and systematic decline”, although we do not dispute that this may have occurred in some places. However, it was not a general process – in some cases assumed to be so general that as in the PNG case cited in our original paper, the conceptual model of the effect of HIV/AIDS on Ugandan smallholding households from Barnett and Blaikie (1991) was deemed directly transferable from Uganda in 1989–90 to Papua New Guinea’s oil palm industry in 2006. Readers should note here how as advocacy took over, so science flew out of the window.

On the second question – which occupies a substantial part of Wouters et al.’s critique – there is much to say and we can only summarise the main points of what would otherwise be a very long disquisition. We certainly agree that HIV/AIDS is not a “shock” in the simple sense often assumed by some modelling exercises. Indeed, one of us has written regularly on the “long wave” nature of an AIDS epidemic (Barnett 2006; Barnett & Blaikie 1991; Rugalema 1999; Barnett & Whiteside 2002, 2006). Similarly, none of us has argued that an AIDS epidemic can be conceptualised as distinct from other processes whether agricultural (Barnett 2006; Wouters et al. 2010) or contemporary, such as the developing provision of ART (van Asten et al. 2009; Seeley & Russell 2010) or the operation of the broader economy (Russell & Seeley 2010). Indeed that is precisely the point of our original paper: there have undoubtedly been effects from HIV/AIDS, but they are not apparent with the simple clarity once assumed because so much else is going on in any society. This means that clear conceptualisation, careful survey design, mixed methods, rigorous analysis are required. The difficulties of doing research which might arrive at some proper and more certain understanding of the causal processes between a pandemic event and the social and economic life of rural communities (let alone a whole nation) have been elegantly although not exhaustively explored by Beegle et al. (2008); Kathleen Beegle and De Weerdt (2008) and empirically in relation to the effect of HIV/AIDS on rural communities by Mason et al., (2009).

While there are of course nuances, our position is not markedly different to that of Wouters et al. (2010). We are, above all, concerned that the community of scholars learn from this experience so as to understand these complex processes with their great humanitarian consequences and to press forward this understanding in an environment, where advocacy and necessary urgency have sometimes clouded our understanding of what is happening on the ground.

This is particularly so in relation to long wave events where researchers try to show how a potentially disastrous or just costly long wave event may break so as to prevent it from happening. This is precisely the situation with another such event: climate change.