Latest Developments, November 16

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

A little relief
The Paris Club of creditor nations has announced a debt relief agreement with Cote d’Ivoire that will reschedule and forgive a portion of the conflict-ravaged country’s debt, while leaving about 95 percent of it on the books.
“Participating creditors welcomed that these measures are expected to reduce the debt service (including the arrears) due by the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire to Paris Club creditors between 1st July 2011 and 30 June 2014 by more than 78% which corresponds to 1 822 million USD, of which 397 million USD cancelled.
…
The stock of debt owed to Paris Club creditors by the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire as of 1st July 2011 was estimated to be more than USD 7,185 million in nominal terms.”

Vulture proofing
The Guardian reports on efforts to prevent vulture funds from buying sovereign debt from some of the world’s poorest countries and litigating to collect payment with interest.
“The [UK’s Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act 2010] law, a world first, requires commercial creditors to comply with the terms of international debt cancellation schemes, which specify a single discount rate for creditors to ensure equal treatment. The law applies to the UK courts and ensures that public money given towards debt cancellation is not diverted to private investors.
However, debt campaigners point out that UK legislation applies only to the 40 [heavily indebted poor] countries and applies to cases before 2004.”

World turned upside down
The UN News Centre reports that the organization’s top food expert is calling on the World Trade Organization to prioritize the right to food in its Doha Development Round of negotiations.
“Some measures that have been cited as helpful in rehabilitating local food production capacity in developing countries are higher tariffs, temporary import restrictions, state purchase from small-holders, and targeted farm subsidies.
But WTO rules leave little space for developing countries to put these measures in place, said [Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier] De Schutter.
‘Even if certain policies are not disallowed, they are certainly discouraged by the complexity of the rules and the threat of legal action,’ he stated. ‘Current efforts to build humanitarian food reserves in Africa must tip-toe around the WTO rulebook. This is the world turned upside down’.”

Oil justice
The American Lawyer’s Michael Goldhaber predicts that American oil giant Chevron will come out on top in the decades-long battle over up to $18 billion in compensation for environmental damage in Ecuador.
“The moment that the arbitrators order Ecuador to make Chevron whole for $18 billion, all of the case dynamics are turned upside down. Suddenly Ecuador’s interests are no longer aligned with the plaintiffs. Suddenly, it is Ecuador and Chevron who share a common interest. And that interest is in dismissing the case, or vastly reducing the verdict.”

Ghanaian oil concerns
Pipe(line) Dreams’ Christiane Badgley writes about a mysterious oil slick that first appeared in the vicinity of a foreign-owned oil operation off the coast of Ghana before making its way to shore, as concerns over the country’s new oil industry grow.
“I’ve been trying to get more information on this spill, which according to someone at EPA, came from a tanker. There’s no way to know with any certainty that this is the case. All the information I have been able to get so far is unofficial. To date there has not been any official statement on the spill — either its source or the amount of oil spilled.”

The real Occupy debate
University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues the Occupy movement is not so much opposed to capitalism, which has taken many different forms across time and space, as to current forms that lack regulation and distribute benefits so unevenly.
“By labelling the Occupy movement “anti-capitalist”, those who do not want reforms have been able to avoid the real debate. This has to stop. It is time we use the Occupy movement as the catalyst for a serious debate on alternative institutional arrangements that will make British (or for that matter, any other) capitalism better for the majority of people.”

Right to know
The Associated Press reports the results of tests it conducted on right-to-know legislation by submitting questions about terrorism arrests and convictions in the more than100 countries where such laws exist.
“Newer democracies were in general more responsive than some developed ones. Guatemala sent all documents in 10 days, and Turkey in seven. By comparison, Canada asked for a 200-day extension, and the FBI in the United States responded six months late with a single sheet with four dates, two words and a large blanked section.”

Democratizing Europe
The Associated Press also reports the EU could be moving towards addressing one aspect of its democratic deficit after German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested the European Commission presidency should become a popularly elected position, though scepticism remains .
“Nigel Farage, a staunchly anti-EU British member of the European Parliament, was dismissive of the very notion that the EU could be democratic. ‘If the EU ever had any intention to democratize itself it would have done so in the Constitutional Treaty,’ Farage said.
‘As is perfectly evident, they rejected the idea of making it accountable to voters and so I believe this is just words to try to calm an angry populace who are speaking more and more of rejecting their political project.’”

Latest Developments, November 15

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Vulture funds
The Guardian reports there are growing calls for the UK to close a legal loophole that allows so-called vulture funds to use Jersey courts to collect money from poor countries.
“Vulture funds legally buy up worthless debt when countries are at war or suffering from a natural disaster and defaulting on their sovereign debt. Once the country has begun to stabilise, vulture funds cash in their cheap debt deeds, at massively inflated cost to the countries.
In the case before the Jersey court, to be decided next month, FG Hemisphere, run by vulture financier Peter Grossman, is trying to collect $100m from the DRC on a debt that appeared to start out at just $3.3m. The original debt was owed to the former Yugoslav government to build power lines.”

Gibraltar tax ruling
Agence France Presse reports Europe’s highest court has ruled against a tax reform proposed by the UK for its territory of Gibraltar, on the grounds that it would constitute state aid to offshore corporations.
“The system was ‘specifically designed’ so that companies with no real physical presence could avoid taxation because it would be based on the number of employees and the size of business premises occupied in Gibraltar, the court said.
The assessment to levy the tax ‘excludes from the outset any taxation of offshore companies, since they have no employees and also do not occupy business property,’ the court said.”

Growing inequality
Euromonitor has released a new report that suggests global inequality is on the rise – “high net worth individuals” increased their wealth by nearly 10 percent in 2010 – and is likely to continue growing in the years ahead.
“It is possible for governments to help narrow the gap between rich and poor by introducing various redistribution mechanisms, such as social welfare programs, minimum wage legislation, higher taxes for the rich and better educational opportunities for the poor,” according to Euromonitor’s Gina Westbrook. “However, many governments are trying to tackle their growing debt troubles, leaving very little financial room for investing in efforts to ease the plight of the poor.”

Toxic dumping trial
Netherlands-based oil and metals trader Trafigura is back in a Dutch court appealing a million-euro fine for illegally exporting toxic waste that was subsequently dumped in Cote d’Ivoire, while the prosecution is seeking a penalty twice that large, as well as the overturn of acquittals for the city of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Port Services.
“On July 2, 2006, toxic residues on board the Probo Koala were prevented from being offloaded for treatment in Amsterdam’s port and redirected to Abidjan, where they were dumped on city waste tips.
Trafigura, which denies any link between the waste and subsequent deaths and has an independent experts’ report backing its stance, reached out of court settlements for 33 million euros and 152 million euros in Britain and Ivory Coast that exempted it from legal proceedings.
But a United Nations report published in September 2009, found ‘strong’ evidence blaming the waste for at least 15 deaths and several hospitalisations.
The dumping caused 17 deaths and thousands of cases of poisoning, Ivorian judges said.”

Resource extraction harm reduction
The UN News Centre reports on a new book on exploitation of natural resources in post-conflict settings, which includes advice for the international community whence most extractive industry companies originate.
“The publication stresses four areas where international support can be helpful which include providing help to post-conflict countries so they secure better contracts with companies extracting natural resources, increasing transparency in payments and decision-making, supporting the monitoring of companies extracting natural resources, and encouraging strategic planning using revenues to provide immediate gains to the population.”

Reviving cluster munitions
Human Rights Watch’s Steve Goose says the US is leading the fight against the elimination of cluster munitions in negotiations, currently underway in Geneva, to establish a new draft law that would permit the “continued use, production, trade, and stockpiling” of weapons 111 countries have already agreed to ban outright.
“The [Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons] proposal would also establish a terrible precedent in international humanitarian law, adopting for the first time an instrument with weaker standards after one with stronger standards has already been embraced by most nations. The trend has been for the law to grow progressively stronger, with ever greater protections for civilians.”

Free trade opposition
Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane blogs about the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference in Hawaii, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership and protesters not sold on the benefits of international free trade.
“The bottom line for these protesters is that they feel the expanding global economy means their culture is being replaced, their resources exploited and their natural wealth taken. It is true that tourism here means much of the money made goes back to the giant hotel chains. There are jobs, but is it better to be paid to clean up after tourists, or to work in a field? That isn’t really the question I’m learning. They don’t all necessarily want to go back to what they had, but they want a bigger share of what is here now.”

Arab Spring media spin
The University of Michigan’s Juan Cole contends the Western media’s coverage of the Arab Spring as a purely political protest was tactically motivated.
“If the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were merely about individualistic political rights – about the holding of elections and the guarantee of due process – then they could be depicted as largely irrelevant to politics in the US and Europe, where such norms already prevailed.
If, however, they centred on economic rights (as they certainly did), then clearly the discontents of North African youth when it came to plutocracy, corruption, the curbing of workers’ rights, and persistent unemployment deeply resembled those of their American counterparts.
The global protests of 2011 have been cast in the American media largely as an “Arab Spring” challenging local dictatorships – as though Spain, Chile and Israel do not exist. The constant speculation by pundits and television news anchors in the US about whether “Islam” would benefit from the Arab Spring functioned as an Orientalist way of marking events in North Africa as alien and vaguely menacing, but also as not germane to the day to day concerns of working Americans. The inhabitants of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan clearly feel differently.”

Latest Developments, November 14

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Aid Transparency Index
Publish What You Fund has released its first Aid Transparency Index, in which the list of donor countries that performed ‘poorly’ includes the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and Norway.
“In the course of the research, a number of countries provided worrying examples of how poor reporting can distort perceptions of whether aid is well spent:
• Almost the only information available about one of France’s biggest aid beneficiaries, Cote d’Ivoire, related to a project commemorating 20 years of research into chimpanzees
• Greece provided no information about its current aid activities, but an annual report from 2009 included pictures of a half-built block of flats in Serbia as evidence of an ‘implemented project’
• Austria is the fourth biggest recipient of Austrian Development Agency aid according to the government’s database of ‘agreed contracts’”

Mining and inequality
Yao Graham of Third World Network-Africa argues booming profits for mining companies are not translating into comparable increases in revenues for the African countries in which they operate.
“The case of Zambia, for which copper makes up about 80 per cent of export earnings, is a good illustration of the asymmetry of power and benefits between mining companies on the one hand and African states on the other. Zambia levies a derisory 0.6 per cent royalty on copper in some cases.
In 2004, with copper prices averaging $2,868 US per tonne, it earned $8 million US in budget revenue from 400,000 tonnes of copper exported by foreign mining companies. This is a mere fraction of the $200 million US it earned in 1992, before privatization, from the same volume and similar price of copper. In the meantime, with the quadrupling of copper prices between 2002 and 2008, firms operating in Zambia such as the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals, have seen sharp jumps.”

Derailing Doha
The Fairtrade Foundation’s Aurelie Walker presents 10 pieces of evidence to support her contention that the World Trade Organization’s so-called Doha Development Round of negotiations has seen the marginalization of the very countries it was supposed to help.
“The WTO has failed to live up to its promises over the past decade, which reveals a wider systemic problem in the global community. True and lasting solutions to global economic problems can only come when the model of global competitiveness between countries becomes one of genuine cooperation.”

Planetary patriotism
California State University, Sacramento’s Angus Wright discusses the obstacles and necessary conditions to addressing global environmental challenges.
“The secret we seek is what inspires humans to act positively and creatively in the face of huge challenges. As humanity faces the environmental crisis, this is its greatest challenge: How do we elicit the kind of collective and individual action and creativity that will be needed?
I think previous experience implies that it cannot be fear alone, nor opportunity alone, nor persuasion alone, nor organisation alone, but a blend of these elements, with much else. We have been able to lump these things together successfully in the past in something called patriotism – a powerful force for good and ill – and now we need something like a planetary patriotism. But no planetary patriotism can be built without acknowledging and dealing with the major things that divide us as well as the challenge that must unite us. Putting on a happy face won’t cut it.”

Sustainable Development Goals
The Overseas Development Institute’s Claire Melamed argues that truly sustainable development will require more than simply coming up with eco-focused counterparts to the Millennium Development Goals.
“If economic growth is to be truly green, developing countries will need to leapfrog over much of our recent history of technological development and have immediate access to the kind of shiny new technologies that are still prohibitively expensive in much of the rich world.
This is possible – with dramatic changes to intellectual property laws, and with the kind of subsidies that until now have been reserved exclusively for the wealthiest farmers.  Neither are particularly likely, and this is just a taster of the huge changes in policy in almost every country if ‘sustainable development’ is to become a reality. We might even have to broach the subject of how more growth in one country might mean less in another.”

Seeming green
The Copenhagen Consensus Center’s Bjørn Lomborg argues political rhetoric about greening economies does not correspond to what is currently feasible in the real world.
“Danish politicians – like politicians elsewhere – claim that a green economy will cost nothing, or may even be a source of new growth. Unfortunately, this is not true. Globally, there is a clear correlation between higher growth rates and higher CO2 emissions. Furthermore, nearly every green energy source is still more expensive than fossil fuels, even when calculating pollution costs.”

Drones and literature
Reuters’ Myra MacDonald argues a recent short story about drone strikes in Pakistan is illustrative of a narrative she considers both problematic and increasingly important.
“We will return to the short story later, but first step back a bit and consider that the narrative gaining traction, at least in urban Punjab, is that the people of the tribal areas have been radicalised by American drone attacks.  Pakistan’s rising political star, Imran Khan, attracted tens of thousands to a rally in Lahore last month with a version of this narrative. Stop the drones, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, can be engaged in peace talks to end a wave of bombings across Pakistan.”

Philanthropy and facts
In his overview of current trends in philanthropy, Oxfam’s Duncan Green suggests the Arab Spring and networks are hot, while the State and analysis are not at the ongoing Bellagio Initiative Summit.
“I don’t attend many discussions where I find myself wishing for fewer stories, and more analysis, but this was one of them – more NGO than the NGOs when it comes to substituting heart-warming anecdotes for academic rigour.”

Latest Developments, November 10

Posted on by
Reply

In today’s latest news and analysis…

Beyond aid
The Overseas Development Institute’s Alison Evans reviews UK Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell’s speech on taking a multi-faceted approach to promoting development and she suggests the country “has a lot more to do on its beyond-aid agenda.”
“Mitchell noted the positive ranking of UK funding and policy on climate change in the latest Commitment to Development Index 2011. The same could be said on development-friendly investment and, of course, aid.  What he didn’t mention, however, is that in the very same index, the UK continues to be ranked amongst the bottom four (out of 22 OECD countries) on security (largely reflecting the continued export of military hardware to poor and undemocratic regimes); on technology (mainly regarding spending on research and development and intellectual property rights issues); and, worst of all, on migration (which reflects how easy – or not – it is for people from poor countries to immigrate, access education or find work, send money home, and even return home with new skills and capital). This is the dark side of UK policy on development and it is not heading in the right direction.
As Mitchell celebrates the powerful alchemy of public, private and voluntary sector commitment to development in the UK, he needs also to focus his energy on making UK policy as a whole development-friendly.”

Mining politics
Bloomberg reports the decision by South Africa’s ruling Africa National Congress to suspend Julius Malema is being welcomed by mining executives who had been made nervous by the Youth League leader’s push for nationalizing the country’s mines.
“In April 2010, Citigroup Inc. valued the country’s mineral resources at $2.5 trillion, the most of any nation.
Malema has lobbied the ANC to adopt a policy of nationalization, saying South Africa’s black majority hasn’t benefited adequately from those riches in the 17 years since the end of white-minority rule. Last month, he led thousands of young supporters on a 62-kilometer (39-mile) march between Johannesburg and Pretoria, calling for nationalization and jobs. A quarter of South Africa’s workforce is unemployed.”

Roma deportations
Al Jazeera reports that a European rights watchdog has declared that France’s expulsion of over 1,000 Roma immigrants last year constituted an “aggravated violation of human rights.”
“A Council of Europe committee has now condemned the move as a violation of its social charter – a document that sets out ‘social rights’, such as the right to fair working conditions and to housing. France is a signatory.
France claimed the expulsions were ‘voluntary’ repatriations only.
The committee dismissed the argument, saying ‘the so-called voluntary returns were in fact disguised forced repatriations in the form of collective expulsions’.”

Cleaning bill
Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development  have called on Shell to pay $1 billion as a “first step” toward cleaning up Nigeria’s Niger Delta.
“In 2008, two consecutive spills, caused by faults in a pipeline, resulted in thousands of barrels of oil polluting the land and creek surrounding Bodo, a town of some 69,000 people. Both spills continued for weeks before they were stopped. No proper clean up has ever taken place.
‘The situation in Bodo is symptomatic of the wider situation in the Niger Delta oil industry. The authorities simply do not control the oil companies. Shell and other oil companies have the freedom to act – or fail to act – without fear of sanction. An independent, robust and well-resourced regulator is long overdue, otherwise even more people will continue to suffer at the hands of the oil companies,’ said Patrick Naagbanton, CEHRD’s Coordiantor.
Shell, which recently reported profits of US$ 7.2bn for July-September, initially offered the Bodo community just 50 bags of rice, beans, sugar and tomatoes as relief for the disaster.”

G20 food inaction
The Inter Press Service reports that the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, believes the lack of substantive progress on global food policies at last week’s G20 summit was the result of lobbying from commercial interests, especially in biofuel-producing countries.
“Back in 2008, a note released by the World Bank’s development prospects group spotlighted how biofuels were responsible for a full 75 percent of the then skyrocketing food prices.
But in spite of strong evidence that biofuels and agrofuels are ‘one of the major drivers of speculation on the commodities markets and one of the major reasons why we have such high pressure on land in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,’ according to De Schutter, the G20 completely bypassed the issue.”

Legal empowerment
Namati’s Vivek Maru calls on the international community to establish a global fund for “legal empowerment” in order to ensure laws and policies apply as much in practice as in theory.
“Legal empowerment is a public good: it renders governments more accountable, and makes development more equitable. But unlike public health, for example, states have a natural disincentive to support legal empowerment, because it constrains state power – which is all the more reason for a multilateral financing mechanism.
Social movements in India, the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere are demanding institutions that promote greater citizen participation and oversight. The challenge of responding to those movements does not belong exclusively to a handful of governments. It belongs to all of us.”

Sector equality
The European Network on Debt and Development’s Alex Marriage argues the European Commission’s recently proposed corporate transparency rules need to target more than just mining, oil and gas, and logging companies.
“Evidence presented in [an upcoming] report finds that extractive commodities are only a small part of the problem and accounted for just 5% of the trade mispricing activity taking place between the EU and third countries in 2007. This clearly suggests country-by-country reporting is needed in all sectors.”

Latest Developments, November 9

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Cluster munition comeback
The Independent reports the UK is backing a US-led proposal that would legalize virtually all cluster munitions and be “a nail in the coffin” of a two-year-old ban on the controversial weapons.
“In recent years, the UK has played a leading role in trying to rid the world of cluster bombs. It is one of 111 countries that have signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, is on target to destroy its own stockpile, and has ordered the US military to remove any submunitions it holds on British soil.
But The Independent has learnt that the UK Government is supporting a Washington-led proposal that would permit the use of cluster bombs as long as they were manufactured after 1980 and had a failure rate of less than one per cent. Arms campaigners say the 1980 cut-off point is arbitrary, and that many modern cluster bombs have far higher failure rates on the field of battle than manufacturers claim.”

Corporate liability
Alliance Sud reports more than 50 organizations are calling on Switzerland to draw up laws that will require Swiss-based companies – “on a per capita basis the country has the highest number of internationally active firms” – to respect human rights and the environment while operating abroad.
“In response to pressure from public campaigns in recent years many companies have indeed adopted regulations for socially and environmentally responsible behaviour or have signed international guidelines like the Global Compact. Yet that is not enough to prevent human rights abuses and environmental destruction. These initiatives are often only about acquiring a social or a green image. Implementation depends on the goodwill of companies. Control and sanction mechanisms are either absent or very weakly formulated.”

Corporate Democracy
Harrington Investments’ Jack Ucciferri who caused a stir last month by calling the UN’s framework for business and human rights a “patently worthless document” has announced plans to launch the Corporate Democracy Initiative [DOC] and to develop “metrics to assess the ‘democracy quotient’ of publicly traded corporations.”
“The simple fact is that corporations and economic elites have too much power over governance and governments.  Power is never relinquished voluntarily.  Power must be met with power. I am not suggesting violence, but I am suggesting coercion.  Laws are coercive, binding bylaw resolutions are coercive, civil disobedience can be coercive, democratic elections are coercive.
…
Frameworks are not coercive, but they do take an awful lot of scarce non-profit and public sector resources to negotiate.  Now that we’re done with drafting the framework, let’s re-channel all of that energy and smarts toward more empowered forms of engagement.”

The rise of unelected officials
The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders writes about the rise of unelected officials in the context of Europe’s current crisis, as illustrated by the forceful speech International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde delivered today in China.
“This starkly political message was being delivered by an unelected official. It joined messages delivered by European Union president Herman Van Rompuy, by European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, by European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi – as it appears that elected leaders still do not fully agree on a path forward.
With the fate of millions of hard-pressed voters being left to unelected officials, some of them on the other side of the world, it shouldn’t be surprising that many Europeans are taking to the streets.”

World finance’s black hole
The Res Publica Foundation’s Jean-Michel Quatrepoint looks at world trade figures from the last five years to buttress his argument that international trade imbalances – and a “black hole” – lie at the heart of the current financial crisis.
“First observation: the numbers don’t add up. Logically, the total of the account balances (balance of goods and services, financial revenues and capital movements) should cancel each other out. Far from it. Each year, the discrepancy is greater. It’s the black hole of world finance. Even taking into account the margins of error and the different accounting systems, there is still a gigantic gap that no one can, or wants to, explain. No doubt because that would involve taking a close look at the reality of Chinese statistics, the accounting of big corporations, the role of tax havens, the revenues of drug trafficking and organized crime. But the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the central banks do not want to deal with any of that. There’s an omerta over this black hole.” (Translated from the French.)

Dysfunctional disarmament
Simon Fraser University’s Paul Meyer argues multilateral disarmament efforts are in the depths of a decade-long “crisis of non-performance.”
“The designated forum for negotiation of arms control and disarmament agreements, the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, has not concluded any agreement since the 1996 Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty. Operating under an extreme version of the consensus rule, whereby nothing can be decided unless all 65 members are in agreement, the conference has not even been able to adopt a functioning work program since 1998.
As a result, major multilateral files such as the negotiation of a ban on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and the prevention of an arms race in outer space go unaddressed. States shed copious tears over this lamentable situation, but take no effective measures to fix it.”

New imperialism
The Daily Maverick writes that former South African president Thabo Mbeki is concerned NATO’s Libyan intervention was the beginning of a new imperialism that threatens to recolonize Africa.
“He points out that Nato far exceeded its UN mandate in Libya, which allowed for the protection of civilians, not regime change. And he argues that the intervention was never motivated by anything other than a fig leaf to legitimise the involvement of foreign powers. ‘It is clear that the beginning of the peaceful demonstrations in Libya served as a signal to various Western countries to intervene to effect “regime change”. These countries then used the Security Council to authorise their intervention under the guise of the so-called “right-to-protect”.’”