Latest Developments, September 16

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analsis…

Broken promises
The UN says donors are not living up to their promises in Haiti and around the world.
“There is a troubling distance between what we have promised and what we are actually doing to support the global partnership for development. And that gap is expected to widen,” according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Missing plutonium
Wired’s Danger Room reports on the difficulties encountered by the US, which has sold 17.5 tons of fissile material to other countries over the last 60 years, as it seeks to “secure all vulnerable nuclear material” worldwide.
“And there’s just one other problem. Subtracting all the nuke material that’s been accounted for and secured still leaves 2,700 kg — nearly three tons — outstanding. And that’s enough material to make dozens of nuclear weapons.”

The drug hemisphere
The White House’s new list of major drug producing or transit countries names 22 states, of which 17 are in the Americas.
“Pursuant to section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228)(FRAA), I hereby identify the following countries as major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries: Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.”

Corporate transparency
In a piece carrying the headline “Licence to Loot,” the Economist looks into international efforts to end the secrecy surrounding beneficial ownership of companies.
“Campaigners and, increasingly, criminal-justice agencies want the rules tightened—and not only in faraway islands. The case for this is highlighted in “The Money Laundry”, a new book by Jason Sharman, an Australian academic. As a test, he tried creating companies in various places without using a real (verified) ID. Of the 47 providers of registration services he approached in OECD countries, no fewer than 35 agreed to form shell companies without requiring proper documents. Some also helped to open bank accounts. Classic tax havens were on the whole much more rigorous.”

Anti-bribery legislation
Global Financial Integrity’s Tom Cardamone writes about a new paper entitled “Busting Bribery: Sustaining the Global Momentum of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” authored by a pair of American law professors to counter the US Chamber of Commerce’s recent campaign against the anti-bribery legislation.
“To the idea that a company could be insulated from a charge of bribery if it had an anti-corruption program in place [Harvard’s David] Kennedy and [Northeastern’s Dan] Danielsen note that this would merely allow corporations to implement ‘fig leaf’ FCPA compliance programs in order to avoid criminal culpability.  Rather than leveling the playing field as the Chamber suggests, this provision could increase the incidents of bribery while reducing the likelihood of conviction.”

Democratizing the IMF
According to the findings of a Center for Global Development online survey, development workers in 81 countries overwhelmingly favour an end to Europe’s exclusive hold on the International Monetary Fund’s leadership.
“First, both European and non-European participants reject Europe’s traditional selection prerogative by large margins, with equally strong support for an open, transparent, competitive selection process. Agreement with an open process characterizes 92 percent of respondents from low-income countries, 90 percent from middle-income countries, and 84 percent from high-income countries.”

Bad food
Calling voluntary guidelines inadequate, a UN expert called on national governments to stand up to the food industry by imposing taxes and tougher regulations on unhealthy foods that kill about 3 million people per year worldwide.
“It is crucial for world leaders to counter food industry efforts to sell unbalanced processed products and ready-to-serve meals too rich in transfats and saturated fats, salt and sugars. Food advertising is proven to have a strong impact on children, and must be strictly regulated in order to avoid the development of bad eating habits early in life,” according to Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter.

Expensive food
Mother Jones food and agriculture blogger Tom Philpott rejects the Wall Street line that soaring demand and relatively stagnant supply, rather than rampant speculative trading, explain the record food prices that have pushed millions into poverty and hunger around the globe.
“One way that investors morally justify the price surge they have set off is by arguing that while it might boost hunger in the short term, higher prices draw additional investment into agriculture, which will help “feed the world” going forward. But this, too, is hype. Indeed, commodities aren’t the only ag-related bubble now in the process of puffing up—prices of farmland, too, have exploded as investors search for new ways to cash in on Wall Street’s food pitch. And as investors snatch up farmland in places like Africa and Latin America for export crops, the amount of land devoted to feeding low-income residents of those places dwindles, and food insecurity rises.”

NCD generics
Intellectual Property Watch reports on concerns that next week’s UN summit on non-communicable diseases will concentrate on prevention to the exclusion of a much-needed debate on treatment as NCDs become a bigger problem in poor countries.
“But public health advocates see a coming crisis in treatment and want measures now to address it. For instance, Health Action International issued a briefing paper this week showing medicine prices are often too high for those on low wages, and urging the summit to ‘refocus on the attainable goal of universal access to essential medicines as a core priority for the treatment of NCDs.’

Ideology promotion
London School of Economics PhD student Karl Muth argues Carnegie Mellon University is set to “sow the seeds of African neoliberalism” with its announcement of a planned new campus in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.
“However, liberal universities have a history of large influence in post-conflict zones, particularly in places recovering from internal conflict.  While the influence of the Chicago Boys after the 1973 Chilean coup is the most famous example, various neoliberal institutions have had more subtle effects, from encouraging the rapid evolution of economic policy in the Philippines to opposing minimum wage laws in post-handover Hong Kong.  The disorder of post-internal-conflict political reformation combined with the fact that incoming regimes are more likely to have military might than economic expertise allows foreign institutions to have disproportionately more influence.”

Latest Developments, September 15

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Child mortality
New UN statistics offer a mixed picture on global child mortality trends, with half of all under-five deaths occurring in five countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and China.
“In the past two decades the under-five mortality rate dropped by more than a third – from 88 deaths per every 1,000 live births to 57 deaths.
Yet that is well short of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG), agreed to by world leaders at a UN summit in 2000, for child mortality rates to fall by two thirds by 2015.”

Fighting pandemics
Duke University English professor Priscilla Wald calls for increased efforts to address the social and economic factors that make pandemics more likely and more deadly.
“The eradication of extreme hunger and poverty is the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Its report for 2010 maintains that the goal of cutting in half the number of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015 is reachable. That’s where the story needs to begin. Global poverty is the biggest humanitarian and economic disaster. Nothing will more effectively fuel ‘the coming plague.’
But global poverty is not inevitable. Maybe the best way to prepare for the disaster described in Contagion is to stop asking how we’ll survive the next pandemic and ask, instead, how we want to address the problems that fuel it.”

Intellectual Property and health
Ahead of next week’s UN conference on non-communicable diseases, Intellectual Property Watch writes about the significance of new World Health Organization data suggesting that despite the attention paid to infectious diseases in recent years, cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases and diabetes actually kill three out of five people worldwide.
“Beyond the health impact, the WHO also emphasizes the economic strain these diseases have, especially in low- and middle-income countries. WHO authorities are urging the international community to sharpen its focus on NCDs. Such attention could intensify concerns about access to treatment of these diseases in developing countries. And this could raise more questions about the role of intellectual property rights in relation to that access.”

Fear of innovation
A View from the Cave’s Tom Murphy draws attention to new research suggesting people have a hard-wired aversion to creative thinking.
“The results of both studies demonstrated a negative bias toward creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.”

Trade and agriculture
The UN News Centre reports three top UN officials are calling for trade and agriculture policies that will create inclusive growth and feed the hungry.
“A lot more needs to be done ‘towards designing a more coherent international agricultural trade policy framework,'[World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy] said, adding that domestic policies and their implications on natural resources management, property rights, energy, transportation, and distribution network credit systems are the key elements of a successful international agricultural trade policy.”

European immigration
An Al Jazeera report uses a visit to a Dutch immigration detention centre to illustrate the harsh conditions faced by illegal immigrants in Europe.
“For migrants without papers, life in Europe can become a real survival tour, with basic needs such as medical care and housing being hard to get. In many European countries you can be locked up, without a criminal record.”

Tax justice
ActionAid’s Anna Thomas writes that the international “tax justice” movement’s top priority is to increase tax revenues in poor countries.
“This is both to increase the money available to pay for nurses, teachers and roads, desperately needed when you’re trying to run, say, a health service on a few dollars per person per year – as is the case in many of the poorest countries. It is also to encourage and develop the social contract between state and citizen, improving accountability. And it is to afford poor countries autonomy over their own development.”

International justice
As member states prepare to elect a new International Criminal Court chief prosecutor in December, Human Rights Watch hopes Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s successor will bring a new approach to investigation and prosecution, while also taking on more cases.
“The ICC prosecutor’s tough choices face intense scrutiny, which makes it all the more important that they enhance the court’s independence and credibility,” according to Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program senior counsel Elizabeth Evenson. “By failing to project an effective and coherent strategy through his investigations, the prosecutor has too often come up short.”

Bribes and fines
The Wall Street Journal reports Japanese rubber manufacturer Bridgestone has agreed with US justice officials to plead guilty and pay a fine of $28 million for engaging in bid-rigging and bribery from 1999 to 2007.
“The Justice Department also charged that Bridgestone authorized and approved corrupt payments to foreign government officials employed at state-owned entities in Latin America. The company’s local sales agents agreed to pay the employees of state-owned customers a percentage of the total value of proposed sales.”

Mining profits
International accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a report that suggests now is a good time to be a mining CEO in Canada, the country that hosts about three quarter’s of the world’s mining companies.
“The average total cash compensation package (including annual base salary and cash bonus) was $826,000, similar to $840,000 reported in 2010 and well above the $670,000 figure seen in 2009.”

Latest Developments, September 14

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Moving beyond aid
In a speech entitled “Beyond Aid,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick argued wealthy countries have not yet adapted to a rapidly emerging multipolar world and continue to take a “do what I say, not what I do” approach to international relations.
“In a world Beyond Aid, sound G7 economic policies would be as important as aid as a percentage of GDP. In a world Beyond Aid, G-20 agreements on imbalances, on structural reforms, or on fossil fuel subsidies and food security, would be as important as aid as a percentage of GDP.”

Self-interested aid
Looking into the Canadian International Development Agency’s near future, the McLeod Group’s Stephen Brown and Ian Smillie see funding cuts and shifting priorities that have little to do with improving the lives of the poor in other countries.
“For instance, as Canada winds down its military involvement in Afghanistan, the Canadian International Development Agency will be “normalizing” aid to a level comparable to its 19 other “countries of focus.” This confirms a poorly-kept secret: aid to Afghanistan was always more about Canadians, candy and Kandahar than about sustainable long-term development.”

Resource curse
ECONorthwest’s Ann Hollingshead says the so-called resource curse is too often seen as a problem for the countries with said resources to resolve on their own.
“Above, I said the resource curse is “seemingly” an issue of national jurisdiction. That deserves some explanation. Governance itself is an issue of national jurisdiction, but the extractive industry that drives the supply of these resources is not. Most of these companies are, in fact, American and European and—therefore—are accountable to the governments of America and Europe. It is these companies, with their corrupt practices and lack of accountability, that facilitate the embezzlement and revenue misappropriation, which directly contribute to the resource curse.”

Population
The Overseas Development Institute’s Claire Melamed takes exception to arguments pinning poverty, hunger and climate change on population growth.
“Climate change is not a population problem.  It’s a consumption problem.  People in rich countries, where population is static or falling, consume many hundreds of times more carbon than people in the poor countries where population is still rising.  Let’s start with the problem we have now – consumption in rich countries – rather than worrying about some hypothetical future when everyone in Mali has a washing machine and two cars.”

Drones
University of Ottawa political scientist Roland Paris calls for the establishment of clear international rules regulating the use of drones before the technology becomes widespread.
“The U.S. seems to be taking the opposite course, extending its drone campaign to countries far removed from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan – including Yemen and Somalia – and using rules of engagement that are, at best, obscure and, at worst, illegal.
This is a dangerously short-sighted strategy. While execution by drone may appear to be a relatively low-cost and low-risk option for dealing with America’s enemies, it legitimizes methods that other countries may be expected to follow once they acquire similar capabilities.”

Mercenaries
The UN News Centre reports a UN panel has called for tighter regulation of private military and security companies “by both host and contributor countries” in order to reduce the risk of human rights violations and to ensure accountability when abuses occur.
“The panel…noted in its report on Iraq that incidents involving private military and security companies there had dropped since the killing of 17 civilians and wounding of 20 others in Nissour Square in Baghdad by employees of the United States security company Blackwater in 2007.
But it added that Iraq continues to grapple with the grant of legal immunity extended to private security contractors by US authorities after the 2003 invasion, preventing prosecutions in Iraqi courts while the case against the alleged perpetrators is still pending in US courts.”

AfriCom
The Hill reports the head of the US military’s three year-old Africa Command thinks looming Pentagon budget cuts are the biggest, though not the only, reason not to establish physical headquarters in Africa.
“Since AfriCom was formally established in October 2008, Pentagon officials and lawmakers have floated the idea of shifting its main hub from Stuttgart, Germany, to Africa or the United States.
But U.S. officials are hesitant to have a permanent and high-profile U.S. military presence on African soil due to indigenous skepticism about such an arrangement, which has left no clear candidates for its permanent home.”

Banking secrecy
The European Network on Debt and Development’s Alex Marriage says opposition to the so-called Rubik plan, whereby Swiss banks hand over tax money to national governments in exchange for maintaining their secrecy, could scupper a recent bilateral deal with Germany.
“The [Social Democratic Party]’s financial concept note published last Monday rejects the agreement with Switzerland. It is now quite likely that the deal will be rejected by the Upper Chamber, the Bundestat. North Rhine Westphalia’s Finance Minister Walter Borjans argued that effectively giving an amnesty to tax evaders was unconstitutional. Nicolotte Kressl and  SPD finance experts in the Bundestag said the deal should be halted as not to undermine EU efforts to secure automatic exchange of information with Switzerland.”

Corporate transparency
The Wall Street Journal reports the European Parliament has adopted a report that calls for laws to enforce transparency from oil, gas and mining companies.
“The report, which was first released July 25, contains a provision that calls for the EC to “establish legally binding requirements for extractive companies to publish their revenue payments for each project and country they invest in, following the example of the U.S. Dodd-Frank bill,” it said.”

Tobacco
The Guardian reports approximately 85 percent of the world’s tobacco is produced in the global south, often through the use of children as young as five working long hours under poor health conditions.
“The tobacco giants, who all have anti-child labour policies in place, insist they abide by the rules. British American Tobacco (BAT) says on its website that it does “not employ children in any of our operations worldwide”, but admits that using intermediaries to purchase tobacco makes it difficult to trace the country from which they buy the leaf and ensure all farm owners follow the rules.”

Latest Developments, September 13

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Moving beyond aid
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie writes about the significance of a new ActionAid report that suggests aid dependence is declining in poor countries.
“As bilateral aid gradually reduces in importance as a development issue, it feels a bit like stepping into the unknown. We all know that trade, climate change, tax evasion and a host of other issues are more important, but somehow aid is manageable, deliverable, known. We don’t really know what will happen on the bigger issues, with so many powerful interests at play. All the more reason for the NGOs to accelerate their shift away from being aid agencies and towards being true development agencies.”

Role reversal
The Globe and Mail’s Kevin Carmichael writes about the possibility that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will come up with a “modern-day Marshall Plan” to help fix Europe’s staggering economies.
“This is a noteworthy development, coming only days after finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven industrial nations failed to instill financial markets with confidence that the world’s established powers have things in hand. After spending much of the past year pointing fingers at the U.S. Federal Reserve and various G7 legislatures, the big emerging markets might finally have come to the conclusion that they have a more positive role to play in stabilizing the global economy.”

Food
A new World Development Movement report places much of the blame for record food prices on “broken” financial markets and calls on the UK government to support European efforts to rein in speculation.
“Financial players including banks like Goldman Sachs and Barclays have taken over food markets, says the World Development Movement’s report, with the total assets of financial speculators in these markets nearly doubling from $65 billion to $126 billion in the last five years. Not a single penny of this has been invested in agriculture.”

The Center for Global Development’s Charles Kenny argues eating local, organic food is bad for the world’s poor and says people in wealthy countries should strive to become “cosmovores” who consume food from around the world.
“So how should you eat as a responsible global citizen? Consume less meat and oppose Western farm-subsidy programs — especially if they focus on livestock. Campaign against U.S. biofuel programs, which divert corn into grossly inefficient energy production. Embrace further testing and analysis of GM crops. Encourage public funding of research and intellectual property laws that ensure that poor farmers are not priced out of the potential benefits of GM seeds. Spend only on organic food that is as energy- and land-efficient as conventional production. And be a smart consumer: Local produce grown out of season and meat raised on imported feed isn’t friendly to you, the environment, or the developing world.”

Mining
The Christian Science Monitor reports foreign mining companies are outraged by new Guinean legislation that aims to give the government greater access to resource-extraction profits.
“The new law would allow Guinea to purchase rights of up to 35 percent of all money made off their mines and to hike export taxes on mineral shipments. It was the keystone of President Alpha Condé’s campaign, last year, to become Guinea’s first democratically elected leader after five decades of misrule by dictators.”

Arms trade
Two US senators have introduced bipartisan legislation that would risk China’s ire by requiring the sale of at least 66 fighter jets to Taiwan.
“This sale is a win-win, in strengthening the national security of our friend Taiwan as well as our own, and supporting tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S.,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas

International justice
The International Criminal Court, which has only taken on cases involving Africa up to this point, is being asked to consider a complaint against the Vatican for its role in sexual abuse scandals.
“Human rights lawyers and victims of clergy sexual abuse filed a complaint on Tuesday urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate and prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and three top Vatican officials for crimes against humanity for what they described as abetting and covering up the rape and sexual assault of children by priests.”

Happiness
Princeton ethicist Peter Singer writes about his recent visit to Bhutan and what he learned about the country’s experiment with gross national happiness.
“We may agree that our goal ought to be promoting happiness, rather than income or gross domestic product, but, if we have no objective measure of happiness, does this make sense? John Maynard Keynes famously said: “I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” He pointed out that when ideas first come into the world, they are likely to be woolly, and in need of more work to define them sharply. That may be the case with the idea of happiness as the goal of national policy.”

Entertainment
An iPhone application playfully depicting the dark side of mobile technology briefly showed up on the Mac App Store before being removed.
“Developed by Molleindustria, the Phone Story game combines economics, politics and environmental awareness with play. The 8-bit inspired graphics trace the origins of our electronic devices from the coltan mines of the Congo to the labor conditions in Chinese factories. The tale ends in the West, where our desire for the latest gadgets drives a cycle of innovation, obsolescence and e-waste.”

Writing “This does not get old,” Africa is a Country’s Sean Jacobs posts the trailer for Machine Gun Preacher, a new film starring Gerard Butler as a violent criminal who finds God and decides to help the children of Sudan in his own inimitable way.
“ – I was thinking maybe I could go over there.
– Africa?
– I reckon they could do with all the help they can get.”

Latest Developments, September 12

Posted on by
Reply

Latest Developments is undergoing a change of format in order to free up more time for original Beyond Aid reporting. All constructive feedback is welcome.

In the latest news and analysis…

Corruption
The BBC’s Hugh Schofield places allegations former French president Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Dominique de Villepin accepted millions in cash from African heads of state within a historical context of often unsavoury relationship between France and its former colonies on the continent.
“Under the original arrangement, the African leaders guaranteed French access to mineral resources and arms contracts, and helped France maintain its standing on the continent. In return a French military presence more or less ensured their survival in power.”

Reuters reports US officials are looking into possible corruption involving the aerospace industry.
“According to a document obtained by Reuters, the FBI briefed other government agencies in June about a project focused on possible corruption associated with sales and maintenance contracts between aerospace companies and state-owned airlines.
While the aerospace industry has long been subject to such scrutiny, the new initiative focuses on sales and maintenance contracts on the commercial side, not in defense.”

Fiscal policy
Harvard economist Dani Rodrik argues European political leaders need to embrace fiscal unification if they want to save the eurozone.
“Yet this cannot mean that fiscal policy for, say, Greece or Italy would be run from Berlin. A common fiscal policy implies that the elected leaders of Greece and Italy would have some say over German fiscal policies, too. While the need for fiscal unification is increasingly recognized, it is not clear whether European leaders are willing to confront its ultimate political logic head-on. If Germans are unable to stomach the idea of sharing a political community with Greeks, they might as well accept that economic union is as good as dead.”

Megaconferences
The Institute of Development Studies’ Lawrence Haddad wonders whether the upcoming Busan and Rio+20 summits – on aid effectiveness and sustainable development, respectively – will actually lead to new thinking. He gets the ball rolling with a few suggestions of his own, including:
“Ditching the terms “developed” and “developing” countries and replacing them with new terms such as “sustainable developing countries” and “developing countries” to stress the work that the richer countries have to do. Germany might be in the former category and the USA and China in the latter (although strictly speaking no countries can be classified as sustainable developing countries if the collective action failure on emissions continues).” 

The Guardian reports a Rio+20 organizer believes it is necessary to “un-environmentalize” sustainability discourse in order to win over new converts.
“The effort to broaden the principles of the original 1992 Rio Earth summit are likely to prove controversial. Supporters say the world needs a new, more inclusive approach to sustainability that emphasises the benefits to humanity because current efforts to protect nature are failing. Critics warn the increased emphasis on technology and markets will simply greenwash destructive levels of consumption and development.”

Resource extraction
The Globe and Mail’s Barrie McKenna takes Canada, home to about three quarters of the world’s mining companies, to task for its reluctance to implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
“It wouldn’t be easy, of course…But a little more regulation and some federal-provincial stress could prove a lot more palatable than a reputation for spawning companies that run amok in the world.”

In an excerpt from his upcoming book on ethical investment, NAJ Taylor draws on the example of Australian miner Rio Tinto to suggest that investors are complicit in the misdeeds of the companies that earn them money.
“Behind the headlines of the global financial crisis is a deeper, more systemic fault line that rewards rampant capitalism. Too many invest in and operate mines such as Grasberg without any consideration of the ethics of so doing.”

La Paz-based freelancer Mattia Cabitza argues Peru’s new land law marks a radical departure from the region’s tendency to favour the interests of resource companies over those of indigenous populations.
“Against the wider backdrop of a struggle that pits the ancestral owners of untapped natural resources against greedy governments and corporations, Peru’s new law on the right of indigenous people to prior consultation may set a regional precedent in avoiding lengthy legal battles and, more importantly, in the prevention and reduction of social conflicts.”

Agriculture
The Guardian’s Mark Tran writes about some of the challenges that are likely to dominate this week’s G20 meeting on agricultural research and development.
“In their discussions on food security and self-reliance, ministers should be asking themselves what impact they will have on a woman farmer in Kenya with a few acres, who is struggling to grow crops on semi-arid soil to feed her family and generate income for school revenues.”

The Overseas Development Institute’s Steve Wiggins and Sharada Keats look at predictions for 2020 cereal prices that range from a significant increase to a gradual decline.
“The medium-term prospects for cereals prices depend much on policy. If too little is spent across much of the developing world on rural roads, health, education, water, and agricultural research and extension, then the outcomes could be as gloomy as those projected by Oxfam and Willenbockel. This applies all the more so if OECD countries do not support international public research for agriculture, and continue their beggar-my-neighbour polices of agricultural trade restrictions, and export and farm subsidies that distort world markets.”