Latest Developments, August 8

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Australia’s so-called Malaysia Solution is on hold for now. The country’s high court has said the Australian government may not have the legal authority to carry out the terms of the deal, which would involve sending 800 boat people to Malaysia to have their refugee claims processed in exchange for 4,000 who have been approved for permanent resettlement. Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees.

UNESCO head Irina Bokova has condemned last month’s NATO attack on Libyan state television that left 3 dead and 21 injured. “Media outlets should not be targeted in military actions,” she said, pointing to a 2006 UN Security Council resolution on the safety of media workers in conflict zones. Following the bombing, NATO justified its choice of targets: “Striking specifically these critical satellite dishes will reduce the regime’s ability to oppress civilians while [preserving] television broadcast infrastructure that will be needed after the conflict.” But Bokova appeared to head off this argument by saying “the NATO strike is also contrary to the principles of the Geneva Conventions that establish the civilian status of journalists in times of war even when they engage in propaganda.”

The US is eager to get more involved in Mexico’s escalating drug war but faces laws forbidding foreign soldiers or police from operating on Mexican soil, according to the New York Times. The solution so far has been the deployment of CIA agents, with possible reinforcements to come from private security contractors. Meanwhile, there will soon be 5,500 private troops operating under State Department command in Iraq, but “no one outside State knows anything more, as the department has gone to war with its independent government watchdog to keep its plan a secret,” according to Wired’s Spencer Ackerman.

There is much uncertainty in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu after Islamist rebels withdrew from the city over the weekend, leaving observers to wonder whether the move represents a retreat or simply a shift to guerrilla tactics. There also appears to be lingering confusion among humanitarian organizations in Al Shabab-controlled areas over strict US rules that are ostensibly meant to ensure the rebels do not benefit from foreign assistance but are having a chilling effect on groups looking to provide emergency food aid. “USAID says they want to move, they do want to get us funding, and from their perspective it’s all sort of green light, ready to go,” an anonymous aid official told the Huffington Post. “Maybe they’re not really understanding that NGOs are quite nervous, especially the American ones — and the European ones are taking their cues from the Americans.” US aid to Somalia dropped from $230 million in 2008 to below $30 million last year. But the White House has just announced an additional $105 million in emergency aid for the Horn of Africa, bringing the total up to $565 million for the year so far.

South Africa’s maternal mortality rate has “more than quadrupled over the last decade,” according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. But in a piece on Africa’s high rates of economic growth, Witney Schneidman, president of Washington-based consulting firm Schneidman & Associates International says “Africa’s moment is at hand.”  He praises South Africa where “for the past 15 years, the government has pursued an economic policy that has brought greater financial discipline and macroeconomic stability.” Schneidman does, however, concede South Africa “has a first-world economy” but “faces developing-world challenges.”

The Guardian reports on the Nigerian fishing village of Goi destroyed by oil spills and one of its inhabitants suing Shell in The Hague for reparations. Another piece in the same paper suggests Gaza’s new, Spanish-run five-star hotel provides “hope” in a place “where there are no tourists and around 70% of the population lives below the poverty line.”

In the ongoing punditry frenzy over credit rating agency S&P’s decision to downgrade the US debt slightly, “chutzpah” and “overreach” are two frequently recurring terms. Paul Krugman, who wrote last year that such agencies “were a big part of that corruption” which triggered the financial crisis in the first place, now compares S&P to a “young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.” The author of a post on the Economist’s Democracy in America blog does not necessarily disagree but also sees plenty of chutzpah in those now blasting S&P: “So yeah, S&P failed to accurately identify the junk that made up those troublesome mortgage securities. But I can hardly fault them for trying not to repeat the mistake when evaluating the make-up of America’s political system, which is ultimately responsible for paying the country’s bills.” And the Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie, sounding a little annoyed at the Americentrism of it all, asks via Twitter: “why has s&p overreached itself just because it has downgraded us bonds? Are its analyses of other countries less important!?”

Fraud lawyer Monty Raphael shows little enthusiasm for the UK’s new bribery act, arguing that without proper enforcement, “it will change little or nothing.” And while the act only deals with offences occurring since it came into force, he wants to see a mechanism to deal with “all the accumulated corruption committed before July 1 this year.” He calls for an integrated anti-corruption agency, along the lines of those currently operating in Hong Kong, Singapore and New South Wales. Recognizing that governments are not eager to take on new spending these days, he suggests: “Resources presently available can be channelled into a single investigation and prosecution agency with a wide remit, and with penal, civil and administrative powers. It should include within its remit Parliament, the legal system and all public and private sectors.”

Former World Bank economist Dennis Whittle praises his former employer for its attempts at “democratizing” development, by which he seems to mean the increased use of focus groups. “If the World Bank can make progress in this area,” he argues, “the payoff for the entire aid field could be large, both in terms of finding effective policies as well as catalyzing more openness and accountability.”

Latest Developments, August 5

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

Standard &Poor’s has downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA-plus for the first time ever. Although a lower credit rating tends to mean higher interest rates, Planet Money’s Jacob Goldstein is not convinced this particular adjustment will have much practical impact, arguing most financial institutions don’t distinguish between the two ratings. Princeton economist Paul Krugman, for his part, is totally dismissive based largely on the agency’s recent track record: “In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.” But even if there is little domestic impact, a continuation of negligible growth and extremely low interest rates in the US could mean “emerging market economies—Brazil, other strong performers in Latin America, much of Southeast Asia, and even the better performers in sub-Saharan Africa—will continue to experience a flood of capital seeking higher returns, hot money with all the attendant risks of a bubble,” according to the Center for Global Development’s Liliana Rojas-Suarez. And the Guardian reports that bubble may already be about to burst.

Only a month after replacing the disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn, International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde has learned she will face a criminal inquiry over her roll in a questionable $600 million payment to a political ally. According to the IMF’s website, the “Fund’s approach to combating corruption emphasizes prevention, concentrating on measures to strengthen governance, and limiting the scope for corruption. The IMF also has strong measures in place to ensure the integrity of its own organization.” Nevertheless, the allegations Lagarde faces had been widely reported well before her appointment as the organization’s managing director despite resistance from a number of non-European countries who felt it was time to end that continent’s six-decade hold on the IMF’s top job.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper sets off this weekend for a four-country Latin American tour that will focus on trade, rights and security, according to Postmedia News. In a recent statement, Amnesty International said many of the hemisphere’s governments are not doing a satisfactory job of balancing these considerations at home: “Countries across the region – including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and Peru – have failed to consult Indigenous Peoples before passing laws that would threaten their livelihoods. They also carried out development projects in Indigenous Peoples’ ancestral lands without respecting their right to give free, prior and informed consent.”  And in terms of international relations, the Canadian parliament approved a free trade agreement with Peru  in June 2009, a few days after dozens died in protests over new Peruvian laws facilitating oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.

A couple of telecommunications companies have run up against the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Magyar Telekom, a Hungarian corporation controlled by German Deutsche Telekom, is currently in talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission over possible bribes paid in Macedonia and Montenegro. And a federal jury has convicted two former executives of Florida-based Terra Telecommunications Corp. for authorizing bribes paid in Haiti over a period of several years. Meanwhile, a pair of US lawmakers has proposed legislation absolving non-Americans living outside the US of having to report their bank deposits within the country to revenue authorities, according to a Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development blog posting by Ann Hollingshead. In her view, such a law would encourage people to hide dirty money in US bank accounts. She sums up: “[Gregory] Meeks and [Bill] Posey, two officials elected to represent the interests of U.S. citizens, have introduced a bill that represents the interests of foreign money launderers, tax evaders, terrorist financers, and, perhaps, big banks.” Writing on the same blog, Global Financial Integrity’s Ryan Isakow writes about a PR/framing coup for the global anti-corruption movement: “It’s interesting to note that connecting corruption to something which directly interests those in power—economic growth— has elicited a bigger response from government leaders than the abundance of stories written everyday on the impoverishing effects corruption has on their own countrymen.  After all, if exploiting the poor bothered them, they would have more reservations about robbing their country’s resources in the first place.”

The US Navy has held a celebration to mark the launch of the 2,000th Tomahawk missile. “It was a great feeling to have taken part in the 2,000th missile launch,” according to a sailor quoted in a Navy press release. “There were a lot of us that had never shot before, so to be able to fire off the 2,000th one was a great experience; it means a lot to us.” The US Navy has launched over 200 Tomahawks in the Libyan conflict so far at a cost of $607,000 each, according to Defense Tech.

In other technology matters, Tactical Technology Collective’s Tanya Notley says mobile phones and the Internet are among the tools that can help people impose a certain level of accountability on governments and development agencies but “there are many “invisible” layers that track what we do online.” And given that such bodies do not always like questioning and exposure, there are real (and sometimes fatal) risks attached to engaging in such behaviour. Consequently, “we should all be thinking about what kind of digital future we want and what risks we might be taking or asking others to take when we promote digital technologies as tools for transparent, fair and just development.”

Former US assistant defense secretary Joseph Nye regrets that Bush Administration “policy failures” led to the view among many that democracy promotion smacked of imperialism and hypocrisy: “Democracy is not an American imposition, and it can take many forms,” he writes. But he stresses the need to “stimulate emulation” by maximizing domestic democracy, rather than trying to impose values on others. But Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin sees little in the way of positive examples as he presents “the top eight foreign-policy items currently held up by the do-nothing 112th Congress.” Der Spiegel columnist Jakob Augstein is harsher still in writing of America’s “apparent political insanity” and arguing the “divided country has more in common with a failed state than a democracy.”

Latest Developments, August 4

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

After controversy and delay, the UN Environment Programme has released the results of a 14-month study of the oil industry’s impacts on Nigeria’s Ogoniland region. According to the report, “there are, in a significant number of locations, serious threats to human health from contaminated drinking water to concerns over the viability and productivity of ecosystems. In addition that pollution has perhaps gone further and penetrated deeper than many may have previously supposed.” It goes on to say clean up could take decades and cost billions. Shell Petroleum Development Company, a Nigerian subsidiary of the world’s second largest oil company, says it ceased oil production in Ogoniland in 1993 and blames the majority of spills on illegal bunkering by local inhabitants. But Nigerian NGO Environmental Rights Action wants Shell to apologize to the Nigerian people and pay for clean up and compensation. It is calling for a $100 billion remediation fund and environmental audits of other drilling areas in the Niger Delta.

French oil giant Total, its CEO and a number of French politicians are being charged for their roles in a scandal involving bribe paying and the UN’s oil-for-food program which operated in Iraq from 1996 to 2003. French law allows for corporations to be “declared a legal entity and be prosecuted,” according to Radio France International. The trial is expected to begin next year.

Although much of the blame for the severity of Somalia’s current humanitarian crisis has been heaped on the Islamist rebels who have banned many foreign agencies from operating in the country’s south, the Guardian’s Xan Rice reports “delays in procuring food aid and raising funds” are every bit as much of a problem. A problem that makes the international humanitarian community look bad, according to one aid worker, given that warnings of a looming food shortage started months ago. A Globe and Mail editorial calls the current situation a crisis of unpreparedness, anarchy and sloth.

The Economist says “developing” countries have surpassed their “developed” counterparts – a division it call “more than a tad arbitrary – on a number of economic indicators. While the former still only account for 38 percent of global GDP, that figure is twice what it was two decades ago and when adjusted for purchasing-power parity, it climbs to 54 percent. These same countries also accounted for more than half of foreign direct investment inflows, energy consumption and mobile-phone subscriptions. But in none of these categories does their share equal their proportion of the global population.

US President Barack Obama has issued a directive establishing a new “standing interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” in order to remedy the fact that “66 years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide.”

Oxfam’s Duncan Green points out some of the things World Food Programme head Josette Sheeran left out of her TED talk on ending hunger: “Globally, apart from an oblique reference to food subsidies, there is little mention of rich country policies on biofuels, or cutting aid to agriculture, or land grabs, or driving risks down the value chain to small farmers, or failing to do anything on climate change, which all contribute to the problem.”

Reuters’ Barry Malone writes about the predictable nature of the food crises he covers. He laments “that every few years we’re faced with an “emergency” that could have been prevented, that aid groups must frantically try to raise money to respond, that journalists need to find emaciated babies at death’s door and film and photograph and write about them before the world gives a damn.” And he is sceptical of foreign charities that “talk about long-term plans to help people become self-sufficient but they’ve been failing to achieve them for 20 years.” Saving perhaps his harshest criticism for his own profession, Malone quotes an Ethiopian girl who was moved to tears while watching foreign journalists interacting with a Somali woman in a refugee camp: “All she had left was her dignity,” the girl tells him. “And then they took that, too.”

With the EU currently looking into establishing rules on corporate transparency, Christian Aid’s Joseph Stead argues it should draw inspiration from US legislation requiring oil, gas and mining companies listed on American stock exchanges to divulge how much they pay to foreign governments, thereby making it easier for citizens of poor countries to hold their elected officials to account. But Stead believes the EU should go a step further by requiring European businesses to disclose their profits, sales and number of employees on a country-by-country basis. These requirements, unlike the US ones, would address the two main ways the inhabitants of poor countries miss out on the benefits of resource wealth: In addition to bringing to light government corruption, the information Stead suggests “would also help identify suspected corporate tax dodging. The latter is a problem that Christian Aid estimates costs poor countries $160bn a year – much more than they receive in aid.”

In a wide-ranging Q&A, City University of New York’s Talal Asad talks about the fear among many Western observers that the Arab Spring will eventually hand the reins of power to Islamist groups, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: “I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.”

Latest Developments, August 3

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

The UN has declared three additional famine zones in Somalia – including the refugee camps in the capital Mogadishu – on top of the two areas already considered as such since last month. The famine is expected to spread throughout southern Somalia and persist until December.

The Guardian’s Mark Tran goes through the factors hampering the delivery of emergency food aid in Somalia: lack of funds, hostile Islamist rebels, US anti-terror legislation and corruption. And ABC informs us we can add another item to the list: the Mogadishu offensive launched by African Union and government troops against Al Shabab.

There is also increasing concern about the Ogaden, a predominantly Somali part of southeastern Ethiopia where not even the International Committee for the Red Cross is allowed to set foot. According to the Royal African Society’s Richard Dowden, “ it has been fenced off and closed to outsiders for years because Ethiopia fears it might be infiltrated by anti-Ethiopian insurgents. Atrocities by Ethiopian troops are reported but cannot be verified. If the rest of the region is suffering, the closed Ogaden may be hiding an even larger disaster.” The area is not completely closed off, however, as Canada’s Africa Oil Corp. has just released an update on its exploration activities in East Africa, including the Ogaden where: “Preparations for drilling, including purchase of materials, execution of drilling related contracts, civil works, and environmental permits have commenced.” The Canadians are not alone, as Reuters reports “a surge in requests for exploration rights” in the Ogaden’s 18 oil and gas exploration blocks, which Ethiopia believes “may contain gas reserves of 4.7 trillion cubic feet of gas and major oil deposits” which could be ready for  production in six years.

A Colombian mining union leader has been shot dead by paramilitaries, according to the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions, which says his own union “had reported threats to its leaders that were believed to be tied to the contested takeover of Frontino by [Canadian mining companies] Modora[sic] and Gran Colombia, and the sacking of all miners.” And Ghana’s Chronicle reports a dispute between inhabitants of the town of Yayaso and Canadian Newmont Mining. The latter claims it is serious about social responsibility and spent nine months working out a compensation package for Yayaso’s inhabitants to relocate. But a number of the villagers refuse to leave and allege that the company has already destroyed several farms and plans to dump mine waste in revered burial sites. There are currently no Canadian laws in place requiring the investigation of domestic companies for alleged wrongdoing overseas. A bill that would have threatened to withdraw public support –  but not to impose fines or prison sentences – for Canadian companies found guilty of such offences was defeated by parliament last fall.

Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay compensation that could exceed $400 million for two oil spills in Nigeria, after a class action suit by a group of inhabitants of the Niger Delta. And victims’ families have won the right to sue Chiquita in the US for complicity in torture and killings of employees by Colombian paramilitary groups.

Jewelry giant Tiffany & Co.’s CEO Michael Kowalski writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: “There are places in our nation, belonging to all Americans, that are too special to mine, too special to develop for oil and gas and too special to forever sacrifice for short-term gain.”  It is for that reason, he says, that his company opposes the mining of California’s Bodie Hills as well as the legislation that “would eliminate protections and allow development on more than 43 million acres of America’s most fragile and important lands.” But as the New York Times reported last month, Tiffany & Co. has tried to have gold exempted from US legislation requiring companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals.

Kenneth Epps of disarmament advocacy group Project Ploughshares accuses Canada of having “reversed its previous low-key but constructive role at the United Nations [Arms Trade Treaty] preparatory meetings to become a potential treaty spoiler,” in particular by pushing for exemptions to sporting and hunting firearms. “To work,” Epps argues, “the ATT must adopt high universal standards that would require many states to improve their arms transfer controls to meet these higher standards. A lowest common denominator approach to the ATT, by locking in low global standards, would actually make matters worse.”

And Al Jazeera English tweets: “Now that #Mubarak is on trial, do his foreign supporters owe #Egypt an apology?”

Latest Developments, August 2

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

American senators Carl Levin and Chuck Grassley have brought forth legislation that aims to greatly reduce international financial secrecy and wrongdoing by requiring anyone setting up a company in the US to divulge the name of the beneficial owner. “Until this law is passed, foreign corrupt politicians, terrorists and drug traffickers can continue legally to hide their identities and their dubious assets behind the secrecy provided by American companies,” according to Global Witness’s Stefanie Ostfeld who hailed the bill’s introduction. As did Global Financial Integrity’s Heather Lowe who said, as things stand, it is “far too easy to gain access to financial services in the U.S. through anonymous U.S. corporations, while it is far too difficult for law enforcement groups to figure out who is really behind those corporations.

Plaintiffs in Papua New Guinea have obtained a temporary injunction “preventing a mine from dumping millions of tonnes of waste into the sea.” The news came less than a week after a national court judge had ruled the Chinese-Australian copper project’s proposed method of waste disposal “amounts to an abuse and depletion of Papua New Guinea’s natural resources and environment” but refused to impose a permanent ban. PNG’s Supreme Court will examine the case later this month.

A new Food and Agriculture Organization report suggests that, contrary to popular belief, growing demand for grain in China and India has little to do with increasing food prices.  In fact, the FAO says cereal imports to the two Asian giants actually declined between 2000 and 2007 and points to the rise of biofuels as the main driver of growth in demand. And a new report by the New Economics Foundation suggests EU fisherman have discarded more than 2 million tonnes of cod over the last half-century.

Somalia’s Islamist Al Shabab “has destroyed whatever legitimacy it had, by obstructing humanitarian organizations from entering the country to provide relief from the severe famine,” according to a Globe and Mail editorial. Meanwhile, the US has decided to ease up on some obstruction of its own by loosening restrictions on aid to Somalia that threatened to prosecute any organization deemed to have provided any financial or material support to Al Shabab. Food aid aside, the rebel group which controls much of Somalia, including the famine-stricken south, has reportedly gotten its hands on a large number of American-made weapons.

Arguing “we live in an era when political boundaries, not the lives of nomadic pastoralists, are sacrosanct,” Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs takes on the role of arbitrary colonial-era borders in the Horn of Africa’s food crisis. He points to the fact that many Somali people live in Kenya and Ethiopia as a prime reason for the ongoing instability of the border regions. Sachs also discusses “the overlap of dryland climates and conflict zones” and argues “the region urgently requires a development strategy, not a military approach.” Moreover, he says the “US and Europe are not only failing to respond to the African drought; they have probably contributed to it through their greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Former NATO secretary general Javier Solana and the University of the Basque Country’s Daniel Innerarity declare an end to foreign affairs, saying that globalized threats and opportunities give today’s world an “epidemic character” that renders national policies inadequate: “Truly effective global governance is the strategic horizon that humanity must pursue today with all its energy.” Failure, they claim will mean “the “end of history” – not as the placid apotheosis of liberal democracy’s global victory, but as the worst collective failure we can imagine.”

A Bloomberg editorial argues Brazil, India and South Africa “don’t seem to demonstrate the awareness that international leadership comes with responsibilities as well as privileges.” Exhibit A, according to the authors, is the three countries’ disappointing troop contribution to UN peacekeeping: only India is a “major contributor,” they say, and even it ranks behind its much smaller neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But according to June statistics on military and police contributions to UN peacekeeping, India  ranks third overall, behind only Pakistan and Bangladesh. Brazil and South Africa rank 13th and 14th, respectively. The UK is 46th and the US is 64th, with approximately a twentieth of Brazil’s or South Africa’s contributions. As for the editorialists’ notion that a greater contribution from India, Brazil and South Africa could “possibly free European troops for more difficult missions, such as Afghanistan,” there are currently only three European countries (Italy, France and Spain) ranked among the top 35 contributors with over 500 troops or police serving as blue helmets.

A Voice of America editorial celebrates the UN refugee convention’s 60th anniversary, saying the agreement remains essential today given the millions “who have been uprooted from their homes and forced to live in difficult and in many cases unacceptable conditions.” The US leads the way both in terms of permanently resettling refugees (71,400 in 2010) and creating them in the first place (4.7 million from Afghanistan and Iraq).

Reuters’s Rachelle Younglai and Ana da Costa point out the “overwhelming irony” that credit agencies, such as Standard & Poors and Moody’s, “are the same firms that many blame as prime instigators of the 2007-2008 credit crisis for freely giving out top ratings to ultimately worthless structured mortgage products” and yet, they now “sit in judgment of the countries that had to ruin their public balance sheets to prevent financial collapse by saving the banks shattered by those bad instruments once blessed by the agencies.”