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The E. F. Schumacher Society •
BUDDHIST ECONOMICS
by E. F. Schumacher
“Right Livelihood” is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.
Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflict between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies.” 1 Or: “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” 2 Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.” 3
All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider “labour” or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a “disutility”; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.
The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal Read the rest of this entry »
Food and Fuel: Biofuels Could Benefit World’s Undernourished
Published on Worldwatch Institute (http://www.worldwatch.org)
By Worldwatch Institute
Created Aug 15 2007 – 1:59pm
Nations that develop domestic biofuels industries will be able to purchase fuel from their own farmers rather than spending scarce foreign exchange on imported oil.
The increase in world agriculture prices caused by the global boom in biofuels could benefit many of the world’s rural poor—one of many conclusions of a landmark new 450-page book, Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Energy and Agriculture, authored by Worldwatch and published by Earthscan.
“Decades of declining agricultural prices have been reversed thanks to the growing use of biofuels,” says Christopher Flavin, president of the Institute. “Farmers in some of the poorest nations have been decimated by U.S. and European subsidies to crops such as corn, cotton, and sugar. Today’s higher prices may allow them to sell their crops at a decent price, but major agriculture reforms and infrastructure development will be needed to ensure that the increased benefits go to the world’s 800 million undernourished people, most of whom live in rural areas.”
Biofuels for Transport, undertaken with support from the German Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection, assesses the range of “sustainability” issues the biofuels industry will present in the years ahead, ranging from implications for the global climate and water resources to biological diversity and the world’s poor. The book finds that rising food prices are a hardship for some urban poor, who will need increased assistance from the World Food Programme and other relief efforts. However, it notes that the central cause of food scarcity is poverty, and seeking food security by driving agricultural prices ever lower will hurt more people than it helps.
Growth in biofuels production may have unexpected economic benefits, according to the experts who contributed to the report. Of the 47 poorest countries, 38 are net importers of oil and 25 import all of their oil; for these nations, the tripling in oil prices has been an economic disaster. But nations that develop domestic biofuels industries will be able to purchase fuel from their own farmers rather than spending scarce foreign exchange on imported oil.
World biofuels production rose 28 percent to 44 billion liters in 2006, according to the figures compiled since research on Biofuels for Transport was completed; fuel ethanol was up 22 percent and biodiesel rose 80 percent. Although biofuels comprise less than 1 percent of the global liquid fuel supply, the surge in production of biofuels in 2006 met 17 percent of the increase in supply of all liquid fuels worldwide last year.
“Farming practices need to be reexamined if agriculture is to provide energy as well as food for a rapidly growing global population that is hungry for both.”
This rapid growth is having unintended impacts. Large-scale biofuels production can threaten biodiversity, as seen recently with palm oil plantations in Indonesia that are encroaching on forests and edging out the endangered orangutan population, worrying European consumers who have begun importing palm oil from Southeast Asia. In Brazil, the Cerrado, a vast landscape of biologically rich forests, brush, and pasture just south of the Amazon, is coming under pressure as sugar cane cultivation expands.
“It is critical to the stability of the climate that we prevent biofuels from expanding at the expense of rainforests and other valuable ecosystems that store carbon and provide other ecological services,” says Suzanne Hunt, who directed the team of 15 researchers from four countries.“Energy crops should instead be established on the millions of hectares of degraded land that can be found around the world.”
“Current biofuels production methods place a heavy burden on land and water resources, due in part to the fossil fuel- and chemical-intensive corn that is used to produce over half the world’s ethanol,” says Hunt. “Farming practices need to be reexamined if agriculture is to provide energy as well as food for a rapidly growing global population that is hungry for both.”
The book concludes that the long-term potential of biofuels is in the use of non-food feedstock, including agricultural and forestry wastes, as well as fast-growing, cellulose-rich energy crops such as perennial grasses and trees. Following the model of Brazil’s sugar cane-based biofuels industry, cellulosic ethanol could dramatically reduce the carbon dioxide and nitrogen pollution that results from today’s biofuel crops.
“The question is not whether biofuels will play a major part in the global transportation fuel market, but when and at what price,” says Flavin. “The first priority should be to ensure that the industry develops sustainably—so that the problems of an oil-based economy are not replaced by another socially and ecologically bankrupt industry.”
The book recommends policies that protect natural resources and support a speedy transition to improved biofuels technologies. Freer trade in biofuels should be coupled with social and environmental certification and a credible system to certify compliance.
“Biofuels alone will not solve the world’s transportation-related energy problems,” the authors conclude. “Development of these fuels must occur within the context of a transition to a more efficient, less polluting and more diversified global transport sector. They must be part of a portfolio of options that includes dramatic improvements in vehicle fuel economy, investment in public transportation, and better urban planning.”
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http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5302
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Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys
Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, the situation is both dire and all too real.
Chip Ward
July 30 , 2007
Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You’re going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. “Resilience thinking,” the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace “efficiency” as the organizing principle of our economy.
Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That’s what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one “best” way of doing something—usually “best” means most profitable over the short run—and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible—things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We’re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.
Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one “best” way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.
In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.
Surprise Happens
Too often we understand the natural systems we manipulate incompletely. We treat living systems as if they were simple, static, linear, and predictable when, in reality they are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable. When building our manmade world on top of those natural systems, we regularly fail to account for inevitable natural disturbances and changes. So when the “unexpected inevitable” occurs, we are shocked. Worse, we often find that we have “all our eggs in one basket,” and that the redundancy we eliminated in the name of efficiency limits our options for recovery. This applies to manmade systems, too.
Our efficient energy and food systems are perfect examples of how monolithic and brittle our infrastructure can become. Political turmoil in the Middle East, storms ravaging offshore oil wells, refinery fires, terrorism, and any number of other easily imaginable, even inevitable disruptions send gas prices soaring and suddenly our oil-dependent economy is pitched into a crisis. Because there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of life—no resilience—our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially vulnerable to crisis. Our food system is likewise vulnerable, since it is so dependent on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and relies on cheap and consistent supplies of gas for farm machinery and shipping.
Redundancy—alternative energy sources, for example—would have left us options to fall back on in a time of such crisis. We did not develop those options, however, because they weren’t considered “competitive.” That is, if one energy source is cheaper to produce than others—ignoring, of course, all the associated and unacknowledged environmental and health costs—then that is the predominant energy source we will use to the exclusion of all others. Decades ago, oil and coal were cheap and so we constructed an entire energy infrastructure around those resources alone. (Nuclear squeaked through the door only because it was so heavily subsidized by government.) Solar and wind couldn’t compete according to the rigid market criteria we applied, so those sources hardly exist today. We are still told that we will get them only when they become more competitive.
Our focus on efficiency in building manmade systems has been short-sighted because it fails to anticipate change over the long run. Resiliency is eliminated at each turn by owners, managers, and planners steeped in the cult of efficiency and trained to cut out profit-reducing redundancy whenever it appears. In organizations, this usually works well—at least for a while. But our attempt to maximize the use of natural systems has, in this regard, been an unmitigated disaster.
Most of the technological means we use to overcome nature’s inefficiencies seem clever and beneficial until the long-term drawbacks dawn on us. In the Northwest, for instance, dams seemed like a great way to produce electricity and make rivers navigable until, that is, the salmon began to die and an entire Northwest ecosystem that depended on salmon began to unravel. Until they broke under the power of Hurricane Katrina, the levees in New Orleans seemed to be a neat alternative to those messy coastal wetlands and inconvenient barrier islands we had wiped out for keeping storm surges in check.
Bees Drop Dead
The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service—pollination—to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.
Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways—birds do it, bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have wrung out what resiliency there was.
Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as well.
Nobody knows for sure why bee colonies are collapsing. German researchers recently speculated that the rapid growth in cell-phone use might be a cause, that some kind of tipping point had been crossed where bees could no longer navigate and communicate in an electro-magnetic environment saturated with cell-phone signals. This speculation is based upon experiments in which forager bees abandoned hives next to which cell phones had been placed. But bee populations are collapsing across the nation, including in areas with less cell phone ubiquity.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
The suddenness of the collapse is puzzling, but one possibility would be the emergence of some new killer parasite or bee mite—a development that could result in such a precipitous decline. After all, bee pollination is big business. Bees are transported and mixed today in ways never before possible, giving the tiny parasitic critters that bees carry in their guts all sorts of opportunities to find new hosts. But whatever the specific cause of bee colony collapse, the context of this pollinator catastrophe is an old story.
Once upon a time we had lots of small, local farms. Farmers relied on dispersed bee populations to pollinate their crops, enhanced and encouraged by the work of local beekeepers. When monoculture was but a glint in the agricultural eye, when cows, chickens, pigs, and more than one crop was still part of the farming dynamic, a farmer might also keep a hive or two. Before we replaced meadows and prairies with sprawling subdivisions, there was enough habitat for local bee populations to thrive and meet agricultural demands. Not anymore.
Today, when farms are massive and almost invariably dedicated to single crops, there just aren’t enough local bees to do the work required. In addition, the crops we grow need to be pollinated at different times. So, for example, vast crops of almonds in California need to be pollinated in February when there aren’t enough local bees around, so the growers import bees to do the job.
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums
In fact, we ship billions of bees from here to there and back again in tractor-trailer trucks to pollinate our food crops. Like so many other aspects of modern agriculture, bee pollination has become a business that matches the scale of our food-production system. So, out with the inefficient, inflexible, insufficient local bees and in with diesel-driven colonies of commercial bees that arrive in sufficient numbers where and when we want them. The top beekeeping corporation in America can put 70,000 hives on the road at one time.
What happens to bees in such circumstances is probably similar to what happens to all creatures living in crowded and overpopulated environments—illness can spread quickly. A dairy farmer in Vermont told me that, when you have a hundred cows in the milking barn, you can use antibiotics sparingly. But put a thousand cows together and you’re applying antibiotics all the time. Whatever happens in one cow’s blood stream tends to go through the whole herd quickly—and the more cows that are crowded together, the more viruses, parasites, and infections are in play.
The same thing happens to chickens and pigs in factory farms, which is why they get antibiotics routinely. Why would bees be an exception to the vulnerability to illness that comes with agriculture conducted on such a massive scale? You can’t, however, apply antibiotics to bees the way you can to cows because bees are more likely to trade mites than infections, so new miticides are being developed.
Logically enough, bee vulnerability is increased if the immune responses of the bees are low. A friend of mine drove tractor-trailer trucks filled with bees as a summer job in college. He drove by night when the bees were in their hives and quiet. The goal was to get to his destination before dawn and unload the bees onto the targeted crop before they became busy, uncooperative, and agitated. When the trip was rough, when there were breakdowns or bad weather en route, he said, thousands of bees died. If stress kills bees, it is not unreasonable to assume it lowers immune response.
Bees have to be fed between trips. High fructose corn syrup is hauled to them in tanker trucks, which probably isn’t any better for their health than it is for ours. Bees, of course, encounter and incorporate pesticides and herbicides in the fields they pollinate, as well as all the other background pollutants we have put into the environment. Toxic chemicals also lower immune thresholds. Who knows what those genetically modified plants they encounter do to them? Add it all up and you get overcrowded, malnourished, stressed-out, poisoned, possibly cell-phone radiated, disturbed bees. Any—or all—of this could contribute to the present colony collapse, or it could be due to some as yet unknown factor or development. When it comes to resiliency, however, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the missing redundancy in the system.
Flower Power
This sort of colony collapse has happened before. The occasional collapse of bee populations has been recorded over the past couple of centuries, though not in the present widespread form. Obviously, bee populations eventually recovered. Is it reasonable then to expect that they will recover again? Yes, but not right away. Habitat destruction —all those sprawling burbs where bee-flowers once bloomed — mean less room for bees to recover and fewer colonies of dispersed local bees to replenish diminished populations. Lots of viable habitat is also an important aspect of resilience. In other words, natural pollinators are no longer resilient—they cannot quickly recover from a disturbance like an epidemic. If we expect to continue to rely on fossil-fueled bees, packed like Third World slum-dwellers onto trucks, then we can expect future die-offs as well, whatever the cause of this one.
If we understood and appreciated the need for resilience, we would not just rebuild commercial bee colonies as we certainly plan to do, but would also find ways to encourage local beekeepers to grow healthy colonies of dispersed bees. That way we wouldn’t have all our bees in one basket. (The scientific term for such a precaution is modularity.). We would conserve or restore bee habitat. We would move away from agricultural models that require pollination on a scale that local bees cannot hope to satisfy and on schedules that are out of sync with what bees can do naturally and locally.
We could focus more on what makes bees healthy than on what makes them convenient and profitable. We might even realize that industrializing bees is not as efficient as we imagined. In the long run, such arrangements only make growers vulnerable to bee-colony collapse. And we would not be so quick to replace an ecological service (a process nature provides for free) that is resilient with an artificial version of the same with next to no resilience.
A World of Impotent Turkeys
When biodiversity is sacrificed to improve efficiency, we lose options and become vulnerable. American farmers, for example, once grew a wide variety of indigenous breeds of turkeys. Today, 99% of all the turkeys raised commercially belong to a single engineered breed. It has a very meaty breast and so is exceptionally efficient in terms of getting the most white-meat bang for the buck, but it must be intensively managed with high protein feed, medication, and climate-controlled housing. That’s expensive to do, so just three corporate breeders supply just about the entire world’s turkey market.
Sadly, those super-chested turkeys are incapable of reproducing on their own. Without artificial insemination, they would disappear in a single generation. Their genetic base is exceedingly narrow as well, making them highly vulnerable to disturbances. A catastrophic die-off of turkeys is likely sometime in the future. What would make this component of the food system more resilient? You fill in the blanks here—be sure you use the words “local,” “dispersed,” and “diverse.”
We have likewise lost diversity and resiliency in the plants we eat. The diversity of the genetic base of the world’s wheat and rice supplies is so diminished by commercial manipulation that these crucial crops are vulnerable to a catastrophic blight if scientists in agro-business labs don’t remain one slight step ahead of evolving plant diseases. If, at any point, they falter in that race, widespread starvation and the political and social chaos that accompanies famine will only underscore, in the grimmest way possible, the dangers of imposing artificial notions of efficiency on a dynamic natural process. Untrammeled efficiency turns out to be as risky as it is arrogant.
Crossing Thresholds
Ultimately, the loss of resilience can result in profound and unanticipated changes that happen when thresholds are crossed and ecosystems shift suddenly into new patterns of behavior with no way back. I live in an arid western desert that was once a vast grassland. Pioneers reported that the grass was as tall as the shoulders of their horses. Hundreds of thousands of cows were driven in to graze on the abundant food. Settlers expected that, like the pastures they knew in the east or the Midwestern prairies, the grass would be an annual affair, that it would always return. Not so.
Once it was over-grazed, the grass died out and pinion and juniper trees moved in. Massive erosion followed and today the barbed-wire fences of those original ranches dangle twenty feet above the arroyos that were washed out under them. That, too, is an old story.
How many thresholds were crossed as the ancient forests of the Middle East were turned into parched wasteland by the manmade disturbances of clear-cutting and overgrazing? How many thresholds are we approaching today that we do not see coming? Already, major ocean fisheries have been so depleted that they will likely never recover but will shift instead into new, unrecognizable ecological regimes.
Restoring resilience to manmade systems will require an eye for options, an appreciation for redundancy, and a tolerance for chaos. Messy organizations may also be creative. But, hard as it may be, we will always find it easier to anticipate disturbance and build choices into our manmade systems than to understand how to conserve resilience in the natural systems that support us. To do that, we must grasp the deep underlying relationships between such “slow variables” as weather, soil composition, and plant succession that we often miss. We will have to learn to see how connectivity and feedback loops operate in nature and how futile it is, in the long run, to impose narrow notions of efficiency on natural systems that are profoundly dynamic and inherently unpredictable.
How resilient are we? Crisis is also an opportunity for change. As the bees die, we are getting an unmistakable warning. Without pollination, life as we know it is not possible. Think “tiny canaries in the coal mine.” Then think “resilience.”
Chip Ward is a former public library administrator and grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. His book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, is an account of his campaigns to make polluters accountable and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land explores the cutting edge of America’s conservation movement. He writes from Torrey, Utah.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
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Al Jazeera English
WEDNESDAY, MAY 02, 2007
11:56 MECCA TIME, 8:56 GMT
Growing underclass in ‘Lion City’
By Hamish MacDonald, Singapore
Long regarded as an economic miracle, Singapore faces a growing gap between rich and poor
The city-state of Singapore is Asia’s second-richest country after Japan – a high-tech global hub for banking, transport and business.Modern Singapore has never really had a problem with poverty, but globalisation and an ageing population are changing that.
A growing number of Singaporeans are now struggling to make ends meet – forcing radical changes to social and fiscal policy in a country where welfare remains a dirty word.
Tan Ching Hoo is 62 years old. He used to work as a waiter, but now he collects cardboard for a living.
For every kilogram, he earns the equivalent of 65 cents. “Whether I like or not, I have no choice,” he says. “I have to earn money.”
His son pays the rent of $50 a month for a one room apartment.
‘Dirty word’
Tan Ching Hoo lives in a crowded
single room apartment
But Tan is not alone. Eight per cent of Singapore’s population is said to live in poverty and increasing numbers are joining that new class of urban poor.
Sinapan Samydorai of the Think Centre, an independent political research group, says for years Singapore was built around a concept of affluence, and was simply not prepared for the idea of poverty.
“Welfare was a dirty word in Singapore, even now. They don’t encourage welfare.”
Globalisation created Singapore’s economic miracle, reinforcing the self-styled image of the ‘lion city’.
Singapore’s wealth gap
GDP $28,077 per person in 2006
Economy forecast to grow 7 per cent in 2007
Between 2000 and 2005:
- Monthly income of Singapore’s poorest workers fell 4.3 per cent to $774 a month.
- Monthly income of Singapore’s richest workers grew 2.8 per cent to nearly 11,000 dollars a month
Source: UN, Singapore government
But it also brought cheaper migrant labour, and that has made it hard for an ageing population to compete.
While most countries have their disadvantaged, what makes Singapore different is that a country now known as one of the most affluent in Asia is developing what is being described as an underclass.
Singapore’s government has now acknowledged there is a problem and in this year’s budget it introduced what it calls “bold” new welfare payments.
Sylvia Lim, a member of parliament for the opposition Workers Party, says this represents something of a sea change in Singapore’s policy towards welfare.
“This is quite radical for Singapore,” she says.
“We have always lived under this system where you have to earn every cent that you get basically and now the government recognises that there are some people who just can’t earn enough now.”
‘Marginalised’
An ageing population is adding to the
numbers living in poverty
Singapore’s emerging underclass may be relatively small now, but its growth could threaten the political dynamic in what is effectively a one-party state.
Chua Hak Bin, a Singapore-based economist with Citigroup, says this is the first time the government has acknowledged the issue.
“There will be some social pressures, there will be a group that will be marginalised,” he says.
“I guess what is important though is that it is being recognised and the government is trying to do something to help those people.”
Back at his small one room flat Mr Tan has yet to sign up for any of the government’s new assistance programs.
The paperwork he says is just too complicated.
Even in pragmatic Singapore old habits die hard, and welfare, both giving and receiving, might take some getting used to.
Source: Al Jazeera
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IRIN Africa | Continent needs 2.4 million new jobs every year, says ILO
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
ADDIS ABABA, 23 April 2007 (IRIN) – Africa needed to create 2.4 million jobs per year to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015, the International Labour Office (ILO) said.
Regina Amadi-Njoku, ILO regional director for Africa, told journalists the continent needed 11 million jobs every year to meet the MDGs; however, only 8.6 million jobs were available. There are 368 million workers in Africa, which accounts for 11.9 percent of the total world labour force.
According to the ILO report, “The Decent Work Agenda in Africa: 2007-2015″, the annual increase in Africa’s labour force is nine million and is expected to increase by 10 million per year in the period under review.
“Despite the pick-up in growth over the last three years, employment is only expanding by around 8.6 million a year, with a consequent increase in the numbers of jobless persons,” the report stated.
Amadi-Njoku said unemployment was one of the issues that would be raised at the 11th African Regional Meeting of the ILO, to be held over three days from 24 April in Addis Ababa. The meeting is held once every four years.
Sustainable enterprises, job creation, youth employment, child labour, labour migration, social protection, HIV/AIDS and female entrepreneurship are some of the issues that will be addressed.
The 2006 overall unemployment rate in Africa was estimated at 10.3 percent, comprising 9.8 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 12.7 percent in North Africa. The continent also accounts for the largest number of working poor compared with the total employment of any region.
”Growth without employment does not address poverty”
“It is estimated that around 55 percent of all people employed in sub-Saharan Africa do not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$1 a day poverty line and about 80 percent are subsisting on less than $2 per day,” the report elaborated.
African countries are not only lagging behind in achieving a sustainable employment rate; economic growth is also way behind what is necessary to meet the MDGs.
The report explained that if it is planned to halve poverty in 2015, as set out in the MDGs, a minimum 7 percent average growth rate is needed every year. However, statistics showed that the African region grew by 5.4 percent in 2005 and 2006 and is projected to grow by 5.9 percent in 2007.
“Growth without employment does not address poverty,” the regional director said. “We have a mixed-bag situation. Africa is at a crossroads.”
Three hundred participants are expected at the 11th African Regional Meeting of the ILO, including the Director-General, Juan Somavia, and several African presidents.
Report can be found online at:
http://www.irnnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71756
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
Copyright © IRIN 2007
The material contained on www.IRINnews.org comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies.
All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the IRIN copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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AFRICA: Working poor to increase by 20 percent
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
AFRICA: Working poor to increase by 20 percent
Subsistence farming: Most of the work in Africa is of a near-subsistence nature
ADDIS ABABA , 24 April 2007 (IRIN) – The number of people working in extreme poverty in Africa would increase by 20 percent by 2015, Juan Somavia, Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), said at the opening of the 11th regional meeting in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
“Most of the work in Africa is of a near-subsistence nature, with more than eight out of 10 workers in the informal economy [operating] with low pay, low productivity and low protection,” said Somavia.
Somavia said every day 10,000 African women and men join those workers who are already living with their families on less than US$1 a day.
ILO’s recent report, “The Decent Work Agenda in Africa: 2007-2015”, stated that Africa had the largest working poor in total employment of any region. In sub-Saharan Africa, 55 percent live on less than $1 a day and 80 percent on less than $2 a day.
The Director-General explained that four out of five of the 368 million workers in Africa could not earn enough to lift their families above $2 a day.
Somavia agreed with the Tanzanian President, Jakaya Kikwete, that the predominance of the informal sector accounted for Africans earning less. It also failed to meet the requirement of decent work. Kikwete said it was a challenge for everyone to address the decent work deficits, which were obvious in the informal economy.
”Every day 10,000 African women and men join those workers who are already living with their families on less than US$1 a day”
“We know that child labour is predominant in the informal economy. And we know that workers in the informal economy lack protection, rights and representation,” said the Tanzanian President. “As a result, they remain vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment and trapped in perpetual poverty.”
Somavia added that the policy advice given to African countries over the past 25 years had brought few jobs; thus he recommended African solutions for African challenges.
Report can be found online at:
http://www.irnnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71775
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
Copyright © IRIN 2007
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Biofuels Pushing Up Food Aid Prices
Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON, Jul 27 (IPS) – A dramatic increase in the production of biofuels has led to rising food prices with serious implications for developing countries reliant on food aid to combat famine.
Perceived by many in Washington as a clean, renewable energy source capable of insulating the U.S. from rising oil prices and instability in the Middle East, as well as revitalising the lagging agricultural industry in the Midwestern United States, policy makers have advocated agro-fuels as an alternative to imported oil.
The increasing rate of ethanol production has predictably led to increases in the cost of corn — nearly doubling in the past year — and policymakers have warned that U.S. demand for biofuels will likely spread to South American and South East Asian sugar- and palm oil-producing regions which are capable of producing ethanol more efficiently than with the U.S. corn-based methods.
According to World Bank price indexes, worldwide basic food commodities now cost 21 percent more than in 2005 and important commodities such as grain and oil have gone up in price more than 30 percent.
United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Josette Sheeran pointed to the role of biofuels in driving up food prices during an interview with the Financial Times last week.
She acknowledged that rising food prices were “already having an impact on WFP operations.” “There is a realisation we are facing a new level of challenges,” she added.
Food prices have surged for other reasons over the past year, including increased demand from China and bad weather. However, the growing global demand for biofuels in the U.S. and a proposal by the European Commission stipulating that all petrol and diesel in the European Union must contain 10 percent biofuels could spell serious environmental and economic consequences.
“In the case of the developing countries where sugar cane and palm oil are efficient sources of biodiesel that means we’re going to see enormous growth in the tropics and subtropics in both ethanol and biodiesel,” Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown told IPS. “What this is going to lead to is very rapid deforestation if no one intervenes. It is leading to a lot of land clearing in the Amazon, Indonesia and Malaysia.”
Brazil has already announced that it will ban new sugarcane fields in the Amazon region and in the vast Pantanal wetland, but the full economic and environmental impact felt by equatorial regions in their rush to produce biofuels is still of concern to analysts.
In countries such as Brazil, farm sizes are much larger than in the United States and Europe, meaning that a smaller portion of the population will benefit from price increases in food products while the majority of the people will only experience the price increases when they buy food.
“We used to have a food economy and an energy economy but now the two are merging. You can’t draw a line between the two anymore,” said Brown. “The world price of grain has moved up towards it oil price equivalent value.”
With the price of oil and food no longer separated, economic and political turmoil will have a greater effect on the price of food products worldwide.
The U.N. World Food Programme hasn’t needed to reduce any of their operations yet, but has warned that the current trend in food prices will eventually force them to cut back some of their projects if donor countries do not contribute additional funds.
“(Biofuel) is a dangerous alternative because of the effect of food prices and political instability. It could generate a degree of political instability that could disrupt global economic progress,” said Brown. “If you want to know what will happen to the price of food, look at the price of oil.”
With developing countries being both the largest recipients of food aid and increasingly the most important source of biofuels, it is likely that the greatest impacts of the biofuel industry and its resulting economic and environmental effects will be experienced in these already impoverished regions.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.<
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Message in a Bottle
Read the whole story at: FastCompany.com
“If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.”
“24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi.”
“We pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year–in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic.”
“Worldwide, 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water; 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water.”
“Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.) Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water “varieties” from around the globe, not one of which we actually need.”
Plastic Bottles: A Boon or a Bane?
Published on Worldwatch Institute (http://www.worldwatch.org)
By Alana Herro
Created Jul 23 2007 – 5:00am
In Bintaro, South Jakarta, people are reusing plastic bottles to make clean water and save money, according to the Inter Press Service [1] (IPS). Instead of sterilizing groundwater by boiling it over expensive kerosene-fueled flames, many residents now simply refill used water bottles and set them in the sun for several hours, a process that can kill bacteria that cause diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. “We don’t have to spend money anymore to have clean drinking water,” said Dewi, a 29 year-old mother of three, who has been using the practice for two months.
The non-governmental Emmanuel Foundation [2] introduced the solar water disinfection process to many residents of the region, and distributes comic books with information on the method to school children. “We believe that children can influence their parents to treat water through solar disinfection,” said Mita Sirait, public health promoter of the Foundation.
To sterilize water, residents simply clean out transparent plastic water bottles, fill the containers to the brim with water, tighten the caps, and sit them in the sun for six hours. Placing bottles on a black cloth will help the water absorb heat faster. When it is not sunny, such as during Indonesia’s rainy season from November to March, water bottles must be left out for two days.
The wait time and unreliability of the weather are a deterrent to the method, as is the scarcity of used bottles in the region, reports the IPS. Since Bintaro residents are able to sell their used bottles as a valuable commodity, most families keep only what they absolutely need. Dewi, for example, uses just three plastic bottles, even though her family consumes four a day. “If we get really thirsty, we just drink groundwater directly,” she told IPS.
By using solar disinfection, Dewi has cut the costs of buying kerosene by more than half every month. And she is avoiding the air pollution caused by boiling water indoors, one of the leading causes of respiratory ailments in the developing world. “The smoke from burning kerosene or firewood causes eye irritation and lung problems,” said Zainal Nampira, head of the sub-division water sanitation directorate of Indonesia’s health ministry.
While bottled water has brought benefits to Bintaro and other poor communities, there is rising concern globally about the environmental and health effects of using the plastic containers. In many countries, the issue is not scarcity, but overabundance, creating a solid waste challenge. In the United States, some 2 million tons of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a plastic used to make water and soda bottles, wind up in landfills every year [2]. A mere 23.1 percent of PET was recycled nationwide in 2005.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health [3] also warn that heating certain plastic containers (though not necessarily PET bottles) could have adverse health effects. Some plastics contain phthalates [4], or chemical compounds added to the plastic to make it more flexible, and heating the containers could increase the leaching of these substances into water and food.
The researchers note, however, that the risk from chemicals in plastic bottles is generally much lower than the risk from dehydration or exposure to microbial contaminants from unclean water. In developing countries like Indonesia, where nearly 80 percent [5] of the population uses water sources that are likely to be contaminated with bacteria, access to clean drinking water remains a serious concern.
This story was produced by Eye on Earth [5], a joint project of the Worldwatch Institute [5] and the blue moon fund [6]. View the complete archive [6] of Eye on Earth stories, or contact Staff Writer Alana Herro at aherro [AT] worldwatch [DOT] org with your questions, comments, and story ideas.
Note: This article was updated on July 27, 2007.
Source URL:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5200
Links:
[1] http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=38509
[2] http://yayasan-emmanuel.creation-website.com/
[3] http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/articles/halden_dioxins.html
[4] http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NEWSCIENCE/oncompounds/phthalates/phthalates.htm
[5] http://www.waspola.org/web/content/view/97/37/
[6] http://www.bluemoonfund.org/
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Published on Worldwatch Institute (http://www.worldwatch.org)
By Brian Halweil
Created Jul 23 2007 – 12:44pm
At a potluck dinner last night, in the midst of local skirt steak, Montauk scallops, a frittata made with the year’s first potatoes, and a salad made with the year’s first tomatoes, the conversation naturally turned to the origin of our foods. The guests included a farmer, two winemakers, and a fisherman, as well as a nurse, several writers, and others who don’t directly make their living from food, but were happy to speak about it.
More than ever, it seems, people are talking about where their food comes from. It must have something to do with the recent news about contaminated food imported from China and other nations whose food safety laws seem equally porous. Food scares always push people toward farmers markets and more home-cooked fare made with fresh ingredients.
In North Carolina, concerned citizens recently issued a grassroots call [1] for food labeling. Finally, there may be enough political will to fight opposition from international food makers and pass country-of-origin-labeling laws that, in the words of a recent New York Times [1] op-ed, let Americans consumers “know where their food comes from before popping it into their mouths.”
But as my dining companions made clear, knowing where your food was grown is only the beginning. At a time when our food travels farther than ever before, eating local is not just about geography—it’s about the end of “anonymous food.” It’s about asking how our food was raised, who raised it, and what impact it had on the landscape. Remember, food is still our most intimate connection to the soil and water around us.
Consider two recent—and creative—“eat local” campaigns. The first was launched by the Center for a New American Dream as part of their six-month Carbon Conscious Consumer (C3) [2] campaign. “Big changes start with small steps” is the campaign’s tagline, and this month’s goal is to buy one pound of locally grown food each week. Future months will encourage people to cold wash their clothes and dishes, reduce their junk mail, and carve out one car-free day a week.
And now, Bon Appetit restaurant company has built on its successful Eat Local Challenge to introduce a low-carbon diet [3] at its 400 cafes at universities and corporate campuses in 28 U.S. states. The chain plans to reduce its use of beef by 25 percent, to source all meat and poultry and nearly all fruits and vegetables from North America, to use seasonal local produce as a first preference and tropical fruits only as “special occasion” ingredients, and to serve only domestic bottled water and reduce waste from the plastic containers.
Perhaps the best evidence of this growing curiosity about how much energy it takes to move our food around is the fact that eating local has even invited a backlash in form of disparaging “don’t buy local” stories [3] from the New York Times and studies [4] from concerned New Zealand shepherds illustrating that, despite the long-distance haul, New Zealand lamb requires less energy to produce than American or European lamb because of the island’s balmy climate and extensive pastures.
According to Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, “It’s entirely possible that under certain systems or certain constraints the local is going to be less efficient than the national or even global food system in terms of energy and greenhouse gas use.” Pirog pioneered much of the thinking on food miles [5] a few years ago, showing that the mode of conveyance makes a huge difference (potatoes shipped by rail from Idaho to New York might be less polluting than Maine potatoes delivered via 18-wheeler truck). “Food miles are a great indicator of localness, but they aren’t necessarily the best indicator of energy use,” he concludes.
But localness has other advantages even when it isn’t the most energy efficient. Eating local keeps money in the local economy, helps preserve farmland, and usually means tastier food. In the midst of food safety crises, eating local also brings a certain peace of mind because the shopper can get much more information about what they are actually buying.
For those shoppers who are most concerned about energy use, though, here are some simple rules of thumb:
* Shop nearby if you can—driving long-distance to a farmers market isn’t doing anyone any favors. Even better, try to get your local supermarket to host a farmers market in its parking lot.
* Eat whole, unprocessed foods. The energy use and greenhouse gas emissions skyrocket for canning, freezing, and other processing, and processed foods require more energy to ship.
* Eat seasonally. Your local tomato grower might have to drive love apples to market in August, but at least you won’t be getting them flown in from Holland in December.
* And, finally, ask questions. Because the more we ask, the better our food seems to get.
Source URL:
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5202
Links:
[1] http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/643477.html
[2] http://c3.newdream.org/
[3] http://www.bamco.com/PressRoom/press-pre-041707.htm
[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/03/nrgreen03.xml
[5] http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/files/food_travel072103.pdf
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IPS Inter Press Service
Inter Press Service News Agency
Saturday, July 28, 2007 02:05 GMT
SRI LANKA:
Not All Tsunami Reconstruction Is Equal
Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 26 (IPS) – It has been 30 months since the waves struck the coasts of Sri Lanka in the morning hours of Dec. 26, 2004. Since then, in a pattern that has become symbolic of the divided nature of the South Asian island, parts of the country have motored ahead with the reconstruction effort, while others have lagged woefully behind.
And it is the worst-hit areas that have suffered the lowest recovery success rates. In the north-east of the country, beset by the resurgence of sectarian violence in the last 19 months, government authorities and aid agencies have been sometimes unable to reach programme locations while others have been suspended outright.
Overall, the reconstruction rate looks satisfactory. More than 80 percent of the 118,000 permanent housing needs will be completed by year’s end, according to officials at the Reconstruction and Development Agency (RADA), the main government authority overseeing the rebuilding effort.
“We are confident that we can reach the mark. Things have moved on quite well,” Ramesh Selliah, RADA’s director of housing, told IPS.
But construction has not even started on 7,000 houses, mostly in the north-east.
“The situation is particularly dramatic in the conflict-affected north and east of the country, where housing reconstruction has been slower than in the south,” the international anti-poverty group ActionAid said in a recent report titled “Voices from the Field”. “Not even 12 percent of fully damaged houses in the north have been completed and only around 26 percent in the east, while the figure is 86 percent for the south.”
The needs assessment figures released by the government and its donor partners soon after the disaster said that 60 percent of the need was in the north-east.
“It has been very difficult to access the areas in the north-east because of the fighting. We are now in the process of assessing the situation, but we cannot predict anything,” Selliah said.
Violence between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, popularly known as the Tamil Tigers, erupted in earnest in December 2005 and has continued since, claiming the lives of 4,500 people, including 1,500 civilians. Recent fighting has forced some 300,000 people from their homes, in addition to the 60,000 displaced by the tsunami, who are still living in temporary shelters in the north-east.
“Access to some construction sites is restricted and transportation of materials difficult or impossible, with delegate and staff movements severely hampered — all factors which lead to delays in reaching construction targets. Projects located in frontline areas have been frozen,” said the two-year assessment report of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), which has undertaken to construct 26,000 housing units.
The upsurge in fighting and ensuing humanitarian crisis have also put pressure on resources and personnel that relief agencies could otherwise dedicate to the reconstruction effort.
“Since mid 2006, the conflict in Sri Lanka has shifted the attention of the humanitarian community in general away from tsunami recovery, with many of them re-orientating programmes in the north and east to focus on the emerging internally displaced people crisis,” IFRC said.
Recent violence may have created a very real practical problem for reconstruction crews, but from the onset, aid delivery to the north-east showed signs of lag.
According to RADA, the eastern district of Ampara, which sustained 24 percent of the overall tsunami housing damage, had only received 14 percent or 58 million U.S. dollars of total pledges. The southern Hambantota, on the other hand, received almost five times its requirement of 11.4 million dollars, with commitments reaching 45 million dollars.
The recent detection of cargo trucks rigged with explosives on their way to the south of the island has also had an impact on supplies, especially to the northern areas. All lorries, except those owned by the World Food Programme, have to now unload at a new checkpoint half-way through the journey and reload after security clearance, adding costs and time.
There are also restrictions placed on the transportation of fuel and construction material to areas under the control of the Tigers, further slowing reconstruction.
The northern Jaffna Peninsula appears to be getting hit hardest, cut off by land after the government closed the only road, the A9 highway, in August 2006 following attacks by the Tigers. The Peninsula’s more than 500,000 citizens are relying on government supplies delivered by sea and the few UN chartered flights.
The recent International Labour Organisation assessment report found that, as in the housing sector, the livelihoods recovery programme also showed glaring disparities between the south and the north-east of the country.
“The resumption of the conflict in the north and east has taken its toll, however, on whatever recovery had taken place, especially in the Jaffna District. The expansion of high security zones and the closure of supply routes have affected livelihoods,” said the ILO.
The Geneva-based organisation found that 73 percent of the tsunami-affected families in Jaffna were earning less than 20 dollars per month (SL Rs 2000) and 45 percent were relying on non-work related income for survival. On a national level it said that members from 90 percent of the affected families had returned to work, though income levels remained lower than pre-tsunami capacities.
“The government has made lots of promises and still the people are expecting the government to fulfil those expectations created more than two years ago. What it is clear to all of us is that tsunami survivors don’t want any more broken promises,” Sugali Kumari of ActionAid said.
Unfortunately, the government’s involvement in the reconstruction effort is more likely to lessen than increase by the time the third anniversary of the tragedy draws near. RADA officials said that it was scaling down operations and most of the departments would be closed by the end of the year.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
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IPS Inter Press Service
Saturday, July 28, 2007 01:52 GMTReaders
World’s Poor Abandon Rural Past for Big Cities
Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 27 (IPS) – A dramatic population explosion in the world’s urban centres will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) says in a new report released Wednesday.
As the world begins to leave its traditional rural past behind, more than half the global population, projected at 3.3 billion, is expected to be living in towns and cities by 2008.
“The battle to reach the Millennium Development Goals, halving extreme poverty by 2015, will be waged in the world’s slums,” predicts UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid.
The fastest growth will be in poorer urban areas. The slum population of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, more than doubled in a decade, from 1.5 million in 1996 to 3.4 million in 2006.
While much attention has so far been paid to “mega-cities”, most future growth is expected to take place in smaller cities of half a million people, or fewer.
By 2030, Asia’s urban population will increase from 1.36 billion people to 2.64 billion, Africa’s from 294 million to 742 million, and that of Latin America and the Caribbean from 394 million to 609 million.
As a result of these demographic shifts, developing countries will have 80 percent of the world’s urban population in 2030. By then, Africa and Asia are expected to include almost seven out of every 10 urban inhabitants in the world.
Still, the UNFPA study, “State of World Population 2007″, expresses optimism because “no country in the industrial age has ever achieved significant economic growth without urbanisation.”
“Our optimism is derived from our belief that urbanisation can potentially help solve some of the world’s most serious challenges in the 21st century,” Obaid told IPS.
She pointed out that urbanisation is essential for economic growth, for reduction of poverty, and for long-term sustainability. But fulfilling this potential will require a different mindset, a proactive approach and better governance, she warned.
“We are convinced that much of the misery and degradation that we encounter in cities today could have been prevented,” Obaid said.
Therefore, if the proper policies are put in place, she argued, “we should, in the future, be able to make cities more effective in helping to reduce poverty, improve people’s lives and reduce the negative environmental impacts of city growth.”
Lawrence Smith, Jr., president of the Washington-based Population Institute, told IPS that urbanisation has stabilised in Europe and the Americas with about 75 percent of the population living in urban areas.
By comparison, only 35 percent of Africa and Asia’s current population is urban. But the developing world is projected to absorb 95 percent of the world’s urban growth over the next 20 years, he added.
Consequently, by 2030 the population of Asia and Africa is estimated to be 50 percent urban, Smith pointed out.
“If you could imagine the five largest cities in the United States — Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston — as a single country, it would be the fourth largest economy in the world.”
A similar trend is emerging in developing countries, noted Smith. For example, Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, and Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, each account for about 10 percent of their respective country’s population, but more than 40 percent of the gross domestic product.
Obaid said: “We are very much aware of the enormous increase in urban population during the near future. We are also aware of policymakers’ current aversion to urban growth in developing countries.”
This is what will have to change first. Such an aversion is based on a series of misconceptions, she added.
Hence, improved evidence-based arguments, such as those presented in the new report, are a necessary starting point for change.
“This will help generate advocacy for better policies, an area in which the media will have a critical role. With a more proactive approach and good policies, urbanisation can definitely help reduce poverty and improve sustainability,” Obaid told IPS.
Smith said that urban life offers the promise of a multitude of economic and social advantages, including employment availability, whether in the formal or informal sector; better health care; a wide range of social services, as well as educational opportunities.
“But urbanisation also portends a multitude of problems: traffic congestion, air pollution, epidemics of disease, violence and crime.”
The overriding concern regarding the urbanisation of developing countries, he said, is the proliferation of poverty. Among the more than three billion people currently living in cities, one billion live in slums and squatter settlements.
Smith said that World Bank estimates indicate that rural areas are home to the majority of the world’s poor, but that by 2035 cities will become the predominant sites of poverty.
A vital determinant of whether developing world cities will thrive or collapse under the weight of rapid urbanisation will be governance, Smith continued.
“If developing world city government leaders learn from past urban experience elsewhere, urbanisation could mean a brighter future not only for cities but for entire nations.”
According to Obaid, a major issue is land. Providing minimally serviced land for the poor will help meet present and future needs.
With secure tenure, street access, water, sanitation, waste disposal and power, poor people will do their own building.
“An address can be the first step out of poverty,” she added.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
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IPS Inter Press Service
Wednesday, June 27, 2007 19:45 GMT
G8: Much Talk, Too Few Results
Julio Godoy
… G8 leaders only paid lip services to its own commitments, and who isolated themselves from demonstrators — and the world — with costs for security alone estimated at more than 135 million dollars.
HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, Jun 8 (IPS) – This year’s summit of the G8 heads of government will likely be remembered as a “how not to” organise such an event, for the contrast between the expectations it raised and its negligible accomplishments, and for its enormous security costs.
The three-day Group of Eight summit, held in this Baltic seaside resort, ended with two vague, non-binding promises — more aid for Africa, and negotiations towards a post-Kyoto Protocol international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — and failures in numerous other items on the agenda.
This G8 failure in Heiligendamm to pass its self-imposed test of credibility will certainly mark the future of its summits.
The leaders of the G8 countries (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States) said their farewells without an agreement on international trade negotiations, or on eliminating subsidies for agriculture in the industrialised world, a move that would give development a boost in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
No agreement was reached either on a new regulation of the highly speculative, and therefore risky, hedge funds, nor on the political status of the Serbian province of Kosovo.
At the same time, the only accords the G8 leaders reached in Heiligendamm — on a medium-term reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and new aid for Africa — are considered as weak compromises, tailored only to avoid the impression that the summit was a total failure.
On Friday, the G8 leaders agreed to allocate 60 billion U.S. dollars “over the coming years” to finance the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and a further 500 million dollars for the “Education for All” programme in Africa.
But development and aid experts consider this new pledge as a step backwards, compared to the promises made by the G8 at the 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, to double development assistance by 2010. The Gleneagles deal would mean an annual increase of aid levels by 50 billion dollars starting in 2006.
“The whole declaration (on aid for Africa) is just cosmetic”, Ulrich Post, development expert at the German non-governmental organisation Welthungerhilfe (World Hunger Aid), one of the country’s largest aid campaigners.
Post regretted that the G8 declaration on Africa “only mentions agriculture (in Africa) with one single phrase. In the face of more than 200 million people suffering from chronic malnutrition, of which 80 percent live on rural areas, this behaviour is scandalous,” Post added.
According to the development watchdog Oxfam, the new G8 aid promise for Africa means at best “just three billion U.S. dollars extra in aid by 2010.”
Previous to the Heiligendamm summit, Oxfam had shown that the G8 countries would miss their 2010 target on aid for Africa by 30 billion dollars. “Today’s announcement may only close that gap to 27 billion dollars,” the organisation said Friday.
Other activists criticise the ambiguity of the G8 statement, which does not set a clear timetable for the allocation of the new promised assistance, nor does it define how much of the sum would truly be fresh aid.
The Irish rock musician and anti-poverty campaigner Bono described this ambiguity as “a deliberate language of obfuscation. It is deliberately misleading. I am exasperated,” the U2 frontman said.
In addition, the new pledge for targeting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria does not fulfil the target estimated by the United Nations for the G8 countries, and which foresees a spending of 15 billion dollars per year through to 2010 on the HIV/AIDS fight alone.
Instead, the new aid promised at Heiligendamm commits the G8 countries to earmark about 12 billion dollars per year for all three diseases.
The G8 deal on cutting climate-changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is also seen as a lip service to international environmental policy.
The group’s joint statement on reducing GHG takes note of and expresses concern for “the recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports (which) concluded both, that global temperatures are rising, that this is caused largely by human activities and, in addition, that for increases in global average temperature, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity and ecosystems, e.g. water and food supply.”
But U.S. President George W. Bush and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin agreed only to “seriously consider the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050,” according to the statement. “We commit to achieving these goals,” the paper says.
For Christoph Bals, director of the environmental organisation Germanwatch, the agreement opens the door for an international negotiation towards a new GHG reduction regime, under the framework of the UN, and with the participation of the U.S. government. (The United States is not part of the Kyoto Protocol.)
But the statement is not binding, and further negotiations, starting at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali, Indonesia, scheduled for December, will be a first test of the U.S commitment, and that of the Asian giants — China and India — to join the post-Kyoto process.
The G8 leaders also failed to re-launch the negotiations on international trade in the stalled Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation, and did not advance towards eliminating its member countries farm subsidies, which constitute one of the main obstacles for development in Africa and other developing regions.
These disappointments round out the image of an expensive, futile event, where G8 leaders only paid lip services to its own commitments, and who isolated themselves from demonstrators — and the world — with costs for security alone estimated at more than 135 million dollars.
Japan is slated to host the G8 summit in 2008. (FIN/2007)
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
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<a href=”http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14474&printsafe=1″>CorpWatch : Brazilian farmers struggle to survive </a>
Edinaldo Mateus Bezerra, a 46-year-old coffee farmer near Rio Claros in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, was 10 when Starbucks was founded. The company’s global success helped fuel the boom in high-price, specialty coffee cafes that have changed the drinking habits and spending patterns of hundreds of thousands of Western consumers. But the boom hasn’t reached his six hectare farm.
As he lays his coffee beans on the ground to dry, he says he has vaguely heard of Starbucks, but doesn’t know the price it charges for a cup of coffee in one of its high street shops. He would be amazed.
So would many of the 25 million producers around the world who find a living cropping coffee. About 70 per cent of coffee comes from small farmers in the developing world who own less than 10 hectares of land. The price of a cappuccino in the U.S., Europe or Asia is likely to have risen at least 100 times since the beans left the farms.
Bezerra tells me of his struggle to survive, how his small farm is unlikely to be sustainable for long. He will carry on, as his parents did. It is the only way he knows to make a living. But he says none of his seven sons will follow: the life is too hard and prospects too poor.
It’s not just the low prices. The banks, he says, give scant help to small farmers in the form of loans or mortgages: they claim the risks are too high. The cooperatives buy his coffee but often keep it in stock until they can get a better price, a practice that can leave farmers without payment for weeks.
“Besides,” he says, “banks in Brazil are worse than loan sharks. They make a lot of money on our backs. You have to be very careful doing business with them. Before you know it, you’re knee-deep in debt. That would be the end.”
Local roasters have a monopoly because farmers like Bezerra live far from market centers and lack the marketing skills and information needed for trading. The coops organize workshops and seminars, but he says he didn’t learn much from them and no longer bothers to attend.
His pessimism brightens only when discussing the prospects offered by Fairtrade coffee. It offers benefits, including higher, assured prices; the availability of money for credit; and long-term relationships that allows farmers to plan ahead and not be forced to sell at the lowest prices.
Coffee was the first product to carry the Fairtrade label and there are now Fairtrade labelling initiatives for coffee in 27 countries, representing consistent growth since the first scheme in 1989. Fairtrade coffee has helped improve the lives of thousands of farmers, but it still represents only 20 per cent of the world’s roasted and ground coffee.
There’s a long way to go before farmers such as Bezerra can be confident about their children’s future as coffee-growers.
“Coffee is part of our culture”, says Ato Getachew Mengistie, director general of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office and the driving force behind the trademarking and licensing initiative. He is not exaggerating: coffee probably originated in Ethiopia (though Yemen claims it, too) and the traditional coffee ceremony is a respected ritual steeped in symbolism.
By Noam Chomsky
The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.
In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.
In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.
In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.
In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.
The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture that collapses quickly on examination.
It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.
The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.
The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.
Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.
The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.
Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.
It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.
The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.
Increasingly, bio fuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world, according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are cleared and burned for oil palms destined for bio fuel, and there are threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.
The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever the human cost.
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From School Teacher to Sexworker
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
NEWS
21 May 2007
Posted to the web 21 May 2007
Harare
Surviving the world’s highest inflation rate is resulting in people ditching their professions and embarking on work, which they had never previously considered.
Mavis, a qualified nursery teacher, has swapped her life as an educator for that of a sexworker and now cruises for clients in the upmarket hotels of the capital Harare.
“I am a professionally trained infant teacher, but last year I decided to quit the profession as the money that I was earning was not adequate to sustain myself,” she told IRIN. “The odd tourist is always good for business because they pay in foreign currency and they are always very generous with their money.”
Although foreign tourism has dropped off considerably in the last few years because of the country’s political and economic woes, Mavis said there was still a class of people in Zimbabwe who were able to afford her services and the best place to proposition them remained the hotels.
“If I was still working as a school teacher, I would be earning just over Z$300,000 (US$7.5 at the parallel exchange rate of Z$40,000 to US$1) a month, but now, I can charge as much as Z$500,000 (US$12.5) per night regardless of whether the client wants my services for a short while or for the whole night.”
Mavis said that the majority of her clients were married men, who had to get home to their wives. “When clients cannot be with me for a long time, I can double my earnings in a single night,” she said.
There are some clients who demand to have unsafe sex and even offer to pay more but I insist on the use of condoms
Her new work carries with it the risk of AIDS, as one in five Zimbabweans aged between 15 and 49 are infected with HIV. “I would not do anything as reckless as unprotected sex. I am an educated person and I know the hazards. There are some clients who demand to have unsafe sex and even offer to pay more but I insist on the use of condoms or cancel the transaction,” Mavis said.
More than 5,000 teachers failed to report for duty when schools opened for the new term two weeks ago.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions estimates in its latest economic review that hyperinflation had reduced wages and salaries to renumeration received in 1965. An average public servant earns about Z$300,000 (US$7.5) a month, while the cost of living for a family of six for the most basic requirements, such as rent, food and school fees, is estimated at about Z$2 million (US$50) a month.
Independent economists contend that the official annual inflation rate of 3,713 percent is less than half of the real rate of inflation. In a recent weekly newspaper column, economist, Eric Bloch said “With inflation having soared, based on the Consumer Price Index (it’s) in practice exceeding 8,000 percent.” The Consumer Price Index is a measure of price rises affecting a specific basket of goods.
“The hyperinflation is so pronounced that an estimated 85 percent or more of the population is striving to survive with insignificant incomes, far below the Poverty Datum Line and more than half of Zimbabwe’s people are suffering at levels below the Food Datum Line, being the minimum resources needed to avoid malnutrition,” Bloch said.
Domestic duties
Sarudzai works as a domestic helper for three young female journalists, doing their laundry at the weekends and general house-cleaning one day a week. The journalist were initially perplexed by their maid, as she seemed “too intelligent” for such menial work, and became a good source for news story, particularly regarding the police.
The conundrum of their maid’s life was exposed when the three journalists were stopped at a police roadblock and among their number was a police officer who looked vaguely familiar: then it dawned on them the policewomen was their domestic helper.
After some initial embarrassment and a mumbled apology from the policewoman, the coincidence was to change Sarudzai’s life. She resigned from the police force five months ago, after her unmasking had led to options for better-paid work.
“When I came out in the open with the journalists, they introduced me to a lot of their friends who I now do part time work for. I am very grateful for the break which they gave me because while I would have been earning Z$400,000 (US$10) as a sergeant in the police, I now make Z$3 million (US$75) a month from doing laundry and cleaning for young professionals in Harare,” she told IRIN.
The government has said 15,000 public servants have resigned in the past 12 months and half of all government posts were vacant.
Entrepreneur
Robert Chimedza was at one time a manager at a Harare hotel, but because of the dwindling number of foreign tourists visiting Zimbabwe, his employers told him and his colleagues that their salaries would be reduced in line with the slump in tourism.
Instead of accepting the lower wages, Chimedza resigned, took his six-month redundancy cheque and cashed in his pension. “I pooled my pension and requested the salaries in advance and raided the foreign currency black market and bought as much foreign exchange as I could,” he told IRIN and then he left for neighbouring South Africa.
“I had done my research and established that a lot of companies and government departments did not have foreign currency to buy supplies in South Africa. I made arrangements with pharmacies to import basic medical supplies,” he said.
“After selling my products at the prevailing black market rate, I raid the illegal foreign currency market, go and buy some goods in South Africa and supply local companies because the manufacturing sector has all but collapsed and is now dependent on people like ourselves to import basic products,” Chimedza said.
He has no regrets about his decision to resign from his hotel job and said his entrepreneurial talents had rewarded him handsomely, as he now owns a house in one of the township suburbs and drives a car imported from Japan.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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뉴스게릴라들의 뉴스연대 – 오마이뉴스
The World Bank: Whose World?
Let it prove its relevance to the 21st century or undergo a slow death
Ranjit Goswami (ranjit)
“What’s in a name?” “Romeo and Juliet,” (II, ii, 1-2), William Shakespeare
The first few words of the World Bank Web site are: “The World Bank: IBRD & IDA: Working for a world free of poverty.”
Sloganeering apart, some self-evident questions about any organization claiming to work tirelessly toward such a great goal would be: (1) from whence are its key personnel drawn (ideally, they would represent all nations equitably); (2) where should its headquarters be located; (3) what material rewards are its workers entitled to and (4) who shall decide its functions, if not the World Bank itself?
Granted the primary need to apportion resources efficiently to the poverty-stricken areas of the world in a constructive fashion, it is open to question how much longer the developed world will be able to do this through the awarding of credit, based on the rationale of its claimed capability and expertise.
Business, by focusing much more on its customers, has shown a resourcefulness in reforming and redesigning itself to remain competitive that could be very instructive for other multinational, albeit nonprofit, institutions. Since its inception in 1945, whatever credit is due the World Bank in achieving an overall reduction in world poverty is open to debate, given the world-wide prevalence of chronic poverty today.
It might be useful to identify the recipients of World Bank largesse, in terms of its declared objective, as (1) the poor people of the world, their societies and countries; (2) the donor nations, who largely fund the World Bank in its noble mission and (3) the world at large, regardless of the distribution of poverty. There may be a few more, possibly overlapping, categories.
Enough has been made in the global media of the pay-and-promotion scandal, which broke last week, involving Shaha Ali Riza, girlfriend of the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz. Going beyond this coverage, I studied many comments posted by us commoners on news sites, and my limited sampling showed that at least 90 percent of respondents were unanimous in their opinion that Wolfowitz must go. The majority felt that the issue could considerably undermine the Bank, and many also pointed out that the biggest damage, if a weakened Wolfowitz stays, would be to the long-overdue reforms and zero tolerance of graft and corruption in the institution and its beneficiaries, a process that Wolfowitz himself had been spearheading.
It is also remarkable that a majority of these opinions originated within the U.S. and the U.K.
The White House proposal that Wolfowitz head the Bank was supported by No. 10 Downing Street, illustrating the cozy relationship that has many wondering whether we still need five permanent U.N. Security Council members or if one could be eliminated, as the closeness of the Bush-Blair relationship has generally meant one voice on critical issues instead of two, and has put public opinion in both nations at variance with their leaders.
That 90 percent or more of respondents agree on an issue isn’t something often seen or heard in the global media, but it would be foolhardy for Wolfowitz and his backers, as well as the World Bank, to gloss over these grassroots comments.
On the contrary, the latest reports suggest that Wolfowitz is now preparing to fight back, with the help of Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer who gained prominence by defending President Bill Clinton against accusations of sexual misconduct during the Monica Lewinsky affair. Both cases appear to have a lot in common. And the Bush Administration also has yet to give its all-important critical support to Wolfowitz’s removal.
It only signals that the 90-plus percent of opinions of people like me and you really don’t matter, for whatever reason, whatever the cost-benefit analysis might be if Wolfowitz stays.
A management maxim is that even the worst situation can be viewed as a budding opportunity, depending on one’s perspective, with the worst of the situation being what kicks us into taking action and moving forward in a new direction. As a citizen, naive as to the complexities of issues regarding multilnational institutions like the World Bank, I feel that focusing only on the wrongful, unethical actions of a Wolfowitz is to be concerned with only the tip of the iceberg of current global iniquity.
Therefore, I view this round of crises in the World Bank as an opportunity to examine the whole of the iceberg. If not taken as an opportunity, deeper agonies are bound to be the destiny of the Bank, and the latest media reports indicate such an unfortunate trend, as Wolfowitz apparently insists on staying.
Wolfowitz himself and his well-wishers at the Bank, to honor their goal of creating a world free of poverty, must ensure that this opportunity is used properly, which could well mean the renewal of the World Bank, and not be lost in political squabbling. He must be replaced by someone with zero tolerance for corruption and a zeal for reform equal to the challenge and should be only too happy to see his ostensible mission being realized.
But this can happen only if one takes the measure of the entire iceberg and not just the Wolfowitz issue in isolation. To begin with, the Bush Administration should learn from its actions and recommend someone with genuine credibility, free of bad associations with the likes of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. But that would still be only partially engaging the crisis as a temporary fix in another short-sighted approach, not head-on.
To realize this crisis as an opportunity, the Bank, with U.S. support, should change its charter and look to Asia for his replacement. All over the world the cry is that the 21st century is to be the century of Asia. With 60 percent of the world’s population (3.8 billion) and with 2 billion of these living for under US$2 per day and with nearly a billion Asians still surviving under conditions of extreme poverty (more than 70 percent of the world figure), one would expect that the president of World Bank and its key officials would devote more than half their time to Asia, if they mean business.
That can be done only by relocating its headquarters to Asia, by having more representatives from Asian nations and by having, preferably, an Asian president. By adopting these changes, the Bank would only be emulating what the business world has been doing to deliver the results — getting closer to the customer in a true sense and having a team that understands the customers’ languages, needs and difficulties better.
It’s indeed unfortunate that Asia, in spite of its current difficulties, does not host even a single headquarters of any global organization of repute. The World Bank could blaze the trail for many to follow in the future.
Unless this comes about, it will never be clear why, if remuneration is to be based on performance, World Bank executives should be paid more than their corresponding corporate cousins. In paying a tax-free salary of $193,590 to Shaha Ali Riza, despite her not working for it over the last two years, the Bank wasted more than a thousand persons earning one-dollar-a-day for a year.
If that is not paying back in “black” part of the aid that the World Bank receives from the U.S. government, what else can it be?
After making a significant contribution to world development during the twentieth century, the U.S. is struggling to define its rightful place in the twenty-first, on the basis of the flawed policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration. It accordingly behoves truly global bodies more than ever to start distancing themselves from the historically exorbitant influence of the U.S. These bodies, mostly created after World War II, often fail to understand that the world of 2007 has changed drastically since their inception.
To convey that hypocrisy, I quote from sections of “Wolfowitz Scandal Takes Bank Hypocrisy to New Heights”:
“Wolfowitz giving his girlfriend a more exorbitant salary than she had previously enjoyed is only the tip of the iceberg as far as World Bank governance is concerned. By convention, World Bank presidents are selected by the U.S. administration of the day. They are always U.S. citizens and are always sympathetic to U.S. interests. Among Wolfowitz’s predecessors is Robert McNamara, another architect of another failed U.S. war, namely that of Vietnam. The convention of giving the World Bank presidency to a man (they are always men) chosen by the president of the United States is one indication of a stark reality: when it comes the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. vote is the only one that really counts. When questioned on issues of accountability in a panel discussion, one senior IMF staff member reportedly answered ‘Of course I consult. I consult with U.S. Treasury all the time.’”
One can be reasonably certain that the World Bank isn’t much different in this respect from the IMF, any more than that its policies to date have been directed by the grandiose statement: “Working for a world free of poverty.” If it hadn’t been for the priority of U.S. interests this statement would have been much less of a punch line.
With global asymmetries and emerging economies holding close to US$4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, an amount that’s ballooning fast (China’s alone growing by $1 million a minute), emerging nations by themselves could use these reserves for poverty reduction, which would threaten the ability of the U.S. economy to attract foreign investment. At that rate, China alone could grow its foreign exchange reserves by US$500 billion or more a year, and with reserves of $200 billion or more held by other emerging nations, millions of aid dollars from these bodies could have a significant impact in terms of poverty elimination. Therefore, we see an increasing trend, in which, starting with the U.S., the U.N., the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the IMF are all struggling to find their respective roles in the new global order.
The double standard is getting exposed more and more, revealing its ugly outlines from beneath whatever camouflage it enjoyed in palmier days, thanks again in large part to the democratizing platform of the Internet.
The role of these institutions should then shift from that of moneylender for the Great Goal to framing right policies to help these emerging nations with expertise, and money, if need be. Money can no longer be the governing factor. Employees of the Bank should descend from the stratosphere to get their hands dirty by working with grass-roots organizations to aid the poor directly rather than organizing conferences in splendid isolation in five-star resorts.
Otherwise its fate will resemble that of the United Nations, whose Security Council members have generally held it hostage since its foundation to their vested interests, whenever it came to addressing critical challenges like climate change, global terrorism or economic imbalances, and where, globally, we would rejoice to see a united front for a change. Or that of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which works more like a World Tariff Organization rather than a promoter of as much free, ethical trade as possible.
The fine words always required too great a leap of faith for anyone tempted to become dedicated to these institutions and were usually belied by their actions, which is how it began in 1945 and continues to this day. The following excerpt is from a declaration issued at the birth of one such institution, murdered unilaterally in 1971 by the Nixon Administration, which broke its promises to the world, without a word of criticism or any action from a multinational agency:
“This Conference at Bretton Woods, representing nearly all the peoples of the world, has considered matters of international money and finance which are important for peace and prosperity. The Conference has agreed on the problems needing attention, the measures which should be taken, and the forms of international cooperation or organization which are required. The agreements reached on these large and complex matters are without precedent in the history of international economic relations.”
In the 1970s these multilateral institutions aided the U.S. not only in covering up the trade deficits crisis but helped the U.S. to withstand the crisis. No objections were made to these international gestures of goodwill at the time, but not even a fraction of that generosity was displayed during the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The rest of the world does not want to be fooled again and again.
One can see early signs of this brewing in Latin America now, as Ecuador, following the Venezuelan model, severed its ties with the IMF. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa recently stated that a World Bank official had tried to blackmail him when he was economics minister in 2005 with a loan of 100 million dollars. “We will expel the World Bank representative from the country because we are not going to take a bribe from anyone,” Correa reportedly said, without naming the official. Now there’s zero-tolerance!
The handwriting is clearly on the wall for these nominally world institutions, which have so seldom taken action befitting their namesakes. History is rife with examples of the rise and fall of nations, empires and regional civilizations, although we don’t have a sufficiently long-term history for global institutions.
The latest Wolfowitz crisis is therefore a golden opportunity, provided the Bank takes advantage of it by looking inward and seeing that the its fate need not be linked with the fate of any single nation, administration or empire in the 21st century. If the World Bank is to have a meaningful role in global affairs as long as human civilizations exist, and in order to make poverty history in the shorter term, all concerned should ensure that the big-bang start with the removal of Wolfowitz as soon as possible.
And if that does not happen, the World Bank, regardless of its name and stature, would remain as just another U.S. policy making tool, which the rest of the world can abandon, after the Ecuadoran model. As a world citizen, I want to escape the ignominy of Wolfowitz heading the World Bank any longer than necessary.
Unless, of course, we accept that the name’s been a misnomer all along.
2007/04/25 오전 12:57
© 2007 Ohmynews
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An excerpt from “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?”,
a new book by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney
Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”
Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!
You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?
I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.
My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.
Who Are These Guys, Anyway?
Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them—or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.
And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That’s an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not just a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.
Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?
The Test of a Leader
I’ve never been Commander in Chief, but I’ve been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I’ve figured out nine points—not ten (I don’t want people accusing me of thinking I’m Moses). I call them the “Nine Cs of Leadership.” They’re not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can learn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let’s be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It’s up to us to choose wisely.
So, here’s my C list:
A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the “Yes, sir” crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. “I just scan the headlines,” he says. Am I hearing this right? He’s the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he’s ready to go.
If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn’t put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he’s right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don’t care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn’t listen to the polls. Yeah, that’s what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a “thumping” on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn’t listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.
A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There’s a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President—the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. “The President was serene,” Joe recalled. “He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. ‘Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘how can you be so sure when you don’t yet know all the facts?’” Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe’s shoulder. “My instincts,” he said. “My instincts.” Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush, “Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough.” Joe Biden sure didn’t think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn’t.
Leadership is all about managing change—whether you’re leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.
A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I’m not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I’m talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don’t know if it’s denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while. Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it’s painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn’t cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we’ve stopped listening to him.
A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths—for what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he’s tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.
A leader must have COURAGE. I’m talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn’t courage. Tough talk isn’t courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.
If you’re a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can’t even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.
To be a leader you’ve got to have CONVICTION—a fire in your belly. You’ve got to have passion. You’ve got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President—four hundred and counting. He’d rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.
It’s no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That’s eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that’s not leadership.
A leader should have CHARISMA. I’m not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It’s the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That’s my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn’t look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don’t go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.
A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? You’ve got to know what you’re doing. More important than that, you’ve got to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let’s see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we’ve got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we’ve run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that’s just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.
You can’t be a leader if you don’t have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham’s rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford’s zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, “Remember, Lee, the only thing you’ve got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don’t know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you’ll never make it.” George Bush doesn’t have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know—Mr.they’ll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-
heck-of-a-job-Brownie-mission-accomplished Bush.
Former President Bill Clinton once said, “I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world—and I like it here.”
I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.
The Biggest C is Crisis
Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It’s easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else’s kids off to war when you’ve never seen a battlefield yourself. It’s another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.
On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It’s all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn’t safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day—and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.
That was George Bush’s moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he’d regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq—a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn’t listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, I don’t know what will.
A Hell of a Mess
So here’s where we stand. We’re immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We’re running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We’re losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.
But when you look around, you’ve got to ask: “Where have all the leaders gone?” Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.
Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We’ve spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.
Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone’s hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn’t happen again. Now, that’s just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you’re going to do the next time.
Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when “the Big Three” referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen—and more important, what are we going to do about it?
Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.
I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn’t elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don’t you guys show some spine for a change?
Had Enough?
Hey, I’m not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I’m trying to light a fire. I’m speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I’ve had the privilege of living through some of America’s greatest moments. I’ve also experienced some of our worst crises—the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: You don’t get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it’s building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That’s the challenge I’m raising in this book. It’s a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It’s not too late, but it’s getting pretty close. So let’s shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let’s tell ‘em all we’ve had enough.
Excerpted from Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Copyright © 2007 by Lee Iacocca. All rights reserved.
Four Asian nations hit by 1997-98 financial crisis face vulnerability
International Herald Tribune
The Associated Press
Thursday, April 19, 2007
BANGKOK: Four Asian nations hit hard by the 1997-98 financial crisis face renewed vulnerability to sudden capital outflows that could cause a currency crisis, the United Nations said in a report.
Despite the rapid economic growth of the region, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines have recently showed some cracks in their economies that should be closely monitored, according to the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
In particular, the report released Wednesday said that managing exchange rates would pose a challenge to Asian countries this year, given that many currencies appreciated significantly against the U.S. dollar last year and are expected to gain strength this year despite intervention from central banks.
The 1997 collapse hit Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea hardest, setting off an avalanche of bankruptcies, wiping out thousands of jobs and shaking the foundations of the region’s economies.
While the region has since bounced back strongly, the report warned that “crisis-affected countries, except for Malaysia, are displaying renewed vulnerability in 2006.”
The report highlighted the appreciation of their exchange rates driven by short-term capital inflows – and the risk of a sudden reversal of capital flows, with greater inflationary pressures caused by higher oil prices.
“Although growth is expected to remain quite robust, there are some downside risks for the region,” the UN agency’s principle officer, Raj Kumar, told a press conference in Bangkok. Those risks include “a potential oil price shock, a disorderly unwinding of global imbalances and economic overheating in China.”
The UN predicted that economies across Asia would continue to grow rapidly, though slow slightly this year to 7.4 percent from 7.9 percent last year, partly due to a slowdown in the U.S. economy, a major market for Asian exports.
To assess a country’s vulnerability to a currency crisis, the UN agency devised an index that looks at the level of foreign-exchange reserves to cover short-term debts, private domestic credit levels and exchange rate appreciation.
In the years leading up to the July 1997 crisis, which was triggered by a plunge in the Thai baht, the index steadily declined.
After a period of relative stability from 2000 to 2004, the index has started to deteriorate again in 2006 in crisis-affected countries except for Malaysia, the report showed.
Thailand now faces greater risks due to a decline in the ratio of foreign reserves to short-term debt and an increase in short-term capital inflows.
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Scotsman.com
Wealthy pour oil on Angola’s troubled waters
JAD MOUAWAD in VIENNA
ANGOLA, which shared the stage with the world’s most powerful oil-producing nations at its first Opec meeting earlier this month, is an unlikely candidate to be the darling of the global oil industry.
An underdeveloped, war-scarred country that has foundered for decades because of corrupt leadership, Angola is one of the poorest lands on earth. But ask any energy executive these days and another picture emerges: a place of immense riches, solicitous of foreign investors, and among the three fastest-growing oil exporters in the world.
In the capital, Luanda, hotel rooms cost more than $200 a night and are booked two months in advance by the oil companies; three times a week, nonstop charter flights known as the Houston Express ferry workers to and from Texas; offshore, dozens of oilfields have been discovered and given names such as Cola and Canela.
Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and others have poured billions into Angola in the past decade to unlock petroleum resources in the country’s deep waters, where the vast majority of the oil is, and the payoffs are finally coming in.
In recent years, Angola has become the fastest-growing source of exports to the United States and, along with Nigeria and smaller West African countries, it is about to become an important component of American energy security.
Within three years, oil-producing nations in western Africa will account for one of every three new barrels pumped worldwide. By 2015, the US is projected to import a quarter of its oil from Africa, up from 15% today.
Angola’s promise stems from a string of big discoveries some 100 miles offshore, which have increased the country’s oil production tenfold since the mid-1970s, to 1.5 million barrels a day in 2006. Next year, Angola is expected to reach two million barrels and by 2011, 2.6 million barrels, the equivalent of Kuwait’s output.
But Angola has become the latest stage in a global rivalry playing out among Western, Russian and Chinese oil companies. This year, it joined the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has been paring global supplies to keep prices from falling below $50 a barrel.
China has identified this country as a promising source in its rush for energy resources, providing billions in loans and development aid in return for favourable treatment of its oil interests. Last year, Angola overtook Saudi Arabia as the largest oil supplier to the Chinese. It is the sixth biggest exporter to the US.
But in their eagerness to do business, oil companies are very coy about Angola’s lack of transparency or the history of corruption among its leaders.
Angola suffered through a devastating civil war for 27 years and became a focus of cold war proxy battles between Western and Soviet allies in Africa. When the fighting ended in 2002, an estimated 500,000 people had died and much of the country was in ruins. The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has imposed a brand of African-tinged Marxism, something the government has since abandoned.
These days, Angola still has a terrible record on corruption and ranks on the lowest rungs of nearly all development indicators. Elections have been postponed several times and are currently scheduled in 2009.
The nation’s contradictions are glaring. Angola earned more than $30bn last year from its petroleum exports. But according to a recent World Bank report, 70% of the population lives on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, the majority lack access to basic health care, and about one in four children die before their fifth birthday.
President José Eduardo dos Santos has shown little interest in improving transparency of oil accounts. Last month, his government arrested a prominent British transparency campaigner, Sarah Wykes of Global Witness, who was visiting the northern oil region of Cabinda. Wykes, from North Yorkshire, had lobbied producers to publish their oil accounts but was jailed for three days and accused of being a spy. (She returned to Britain last week after the authorities allowed her to leave the country.)
What the government in Luanda does with its oil wealth and where the money goes has long been a frustrating matter for human rights groups. In 2001, for instance, Angola chastised BP for disclosing a $111m fee without the government’s approval.
After that, officials clashed with the International Monetary Fund over opening the books to scrutiny. From 1997 to 2002, $4.2bn was unaccounted for, according to an estimate by Human Rights Watch.
Angola ranks 142nd among 163 countries in Transparency International’s annual corruption perception index.
This article: http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=461922007
Last updated: 25-Mar-07 02:41 BST
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