Latest Developments, July 29

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

As the Horn of Africa food shortage continues to intensify, most analysts agree that drought is an insufficient explanation for the extent of the crisis. Abdikarim Abdi Buh, writing for the Mogadishu-based news site Raxanreeb Online, blames both rebel group Al Shabab’s leadership and American foreign policy for how bad things have gotten. One the one hand, he believes Al Shabab’s refusal to allow food deliveries to starving people amounts to genocide, but on the other, he says the US government “has no long-term or comprehensive policy towards Somalia other than tactical policies which are geared towards hunting down few Al Qaida individuals.” He calls on “the international community to funnel food aid through the Al Shabab approved agencies to alleviate and mitigate the depth of the famine” while simultaneously trying to strengthen the disastrously week Transitional Federal Government (TFG). But the Rift Valley Institute’s Mark Bradbury argues it was “international support for the TFG that included the provision of weapons and training of its security forces, the assassination of al-Shabaab leadership and overt attempts to deploy aid in support of the TFG” that led to restrictions and violence against foreign aid workers in the first place.

Al Shabab leaders are said to fear foreign NGOs will provide intelligence necessary for further CIA drone strikes, which the US first admitted to carrying out in Somalia last month. But speaking at a security forum in Colorado, former US intelligence chief Dennis Blair “said the administration should curtail U.S.-led drone strikes on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia because the missiles fired from unmanned aircraft are fueling anti-American sentiment and undercutting reform efforts in those countries,” according to Politico. In Blair’s words: “I think we need to change — in those three countries — in a dramatic way.”

At the same time, UK director of Islamic Relief Jehangir Malik writes in the Guardian his organization has mostly been operating within 50 km of Mogadishu, but “on a recent assessment visit to central and southern Somalia we found it safe and practicable for us to scale up our existing operation and help many more families further afield.” And Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs is encouraged by the significant role nearby wealthy Gulf countries and the Islamic Development Bank have taken on to help in the current crisis.

Meanwhile, less than two weeks after the US and its allies recognized the rebel Transitional National Council as the “legitimate governing authority” in Libya, witnesses say those same rebels have killed their top military commander and two of his aides. At today’s funeral, the dead man’s son reportedly cried out “We want Moammar to come back! We want the green flag back!” – an outburst described by Associated Press reporters as “a startling and risky display in a city that was the first to shed Gadhafi’s rule nearly six months ago.”

Citing fears of a “race to the bottom,” civil society groups are calling on East African governments to stop offering tax breaks as a way to attract foreign investment, arguing such “incentives hinder the entry of revenue and have no empirical results to prove their efficacy and impact to investment,” according to Uganda’s Daily Monitor. As the Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence writes, poor countries are actually ahead of their wealthier counterparts in terms of understanding the balance of power in international business: “Developing countries, dealing with corporations whose revenue often exceeds their own GDPs, have long been aware of their own lack of power. They are familiar with the way world trade rules have been written to benefit corporations and limit what any one country can impose on them…For an affluent country like the UK, it has come as more of a shock.”

A new study by the Greenlining Institute reveals that 77 of America’s Fortune 100 companies have subsidiaries based in tax havens and the number of said subsidiaries has increased by 44 since 2008. On the flipside, “low-tax jurisdiction” Barbados is suffering from the ailing global economy and is stepping up efforts to attract investment from Canada, a country whose companies account for 31 percent of foreign subsidiaries in Barbados and 78 percent of the international banks. “As an island nation, we don’t have natural resources unless you count sea, sand and sun. We import most of what we consume here, so it’s very important we bring in foreign exchange,” Invest Barbados CEO Wayne Kirton told the Globe and Mail.

In a piece entitled “Offshoring the boat people,” the Economist reports on a new deal between Australia and Malaysia, under which “Australia will send the next 800 boat people who sail into its northern waters to Malaysia. There they will join about 90,000 other asylum-seekers who have been waiting, some of them for years, to have their claims assessed. In return, Malaysia will send 4,000 certified refugees to Australia and receive compensation for the programme’s costs.” In other immigration news, the US State Department has denied entry visas to Uganda’s youth baseball team, the first African squad ever to qualify for the Little League World Series. And Al Jazeera reports Vietnamese children as young as 13 are being trafficked to the UK to work as cannabis-growing labourers and are then treated as criminals when British police raid such operations.

Earlier this week, Global Witness released a report entitled “Pandering to the Loggers: Why the WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Network Isn’t Working” in which the authors claim “the scheme has never, in Global Witness’s opinion, been adequately evaluated in terms of its rules, 
operation, membership and, crucially, its impact on forests.” In the accompanying press release, Global Witness accuses the World Wildlife Federation of “allowing companies to reap the benefits of association with WWF and its iconic panda brand, while they continue to destroy forests and trade in illegally sourced timber.” WWF has responded with a statement from the criticized certification program’s head, George White, who believes the private sector “can be a significant positive force” in protecting endangered forests: “By mainstreaming responsible forestry practices among the forest-related sector, GFTN creates market conditions that help conserve the world’s forests, while providing social and economic benefits for the businesses and people that depend on them.”

The Trade Justice Movement’s Ruth Bergan slams rich countries for their unwillingness to make even minor concessions to poor countries in the decade-old Doha round of world trade talks, which ostensibly aimed to “improve the trading prospects of developing countries.” Lamenting the fact that, to date, the rich countries have not even honoured “their commitment to tackling their own damaging practices,” Bergan argues “that serious and democratic debate on the purpose and powers of the WTO is long overdue.”

Latest Developments, July 28

Posted on by
1

In the latest news and analysis…

It has been exactly a year since the adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution declaring access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation as human rights, rights that continue to elude 900 million and 2.6 billion people, respectively. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said it was “not acceptable that poor slum-dwellers pay five or even 10 times as much for their water as wealthy residents of the same areas of the same cities,” while making it clear he did not believe water should be free. But speaking at UN headquarters in New York, Bolivian President Evo Morales slammed water privatization: “Water is life. Water is humanity. How could it be part of the private business?” And Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians writes that Canada and Tonga are the only two countries who have not recognized the right to water and she reminds readers access to water is not universal, even in rich countries.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has released its review of American aid policies. The assessment was the result of the organization’s “peer review” process, meaning only members of the DAC – an even more exclusive group than the OECD which is  commonly described in newspaper shorthand as a “rich-country club” – can be “examiners.” In this instance, it was Denmark and the EU. The accompanying press release carried the headline “US, a generous donor, is committed to making aid more effective” and said the world’s biggest aid donor had “significantly enhanced its development strategies, policies, and programs” since the last review in 2006. The examiners do, however, note that the 0.21 percent of American GDP devoted to aid falls well below the DAC average and called on the US to “better incorporate and reflect the goals and strategies of developing countries.” They also point to “concerns about the role of the U.S. military in humanitarian assistance.”  The US Agency for International Development’s Donald Steinberg called the assessment “fair, objective and rigorous.”

Malawi’s government, reeling from the suspension of American and British aid over alleged human rights abuses and poor economic management, is trying to defend its actions, claiming those killed during last week’s demonstrations were not protestors but looters and blaming the lack of fuel and foreign exchange on IMF-imposed privatization. Under mounting pressure to devalue the national currency, President Bingu wa Mutharika has said: “I cannot devalue the kwacha because no one, including the IMF, is giving me convincing arguments on what will be done to deal with the rise of the cost of living that will follow the devaluation.” One bit of good news for Malawi’s embattled government is the country’s top ranking in the latest Hunger Reduction Commitment Index.

If Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab will not deal with foreign agencies, the international community should go through local NGOs, according to the Somali Relief and Development Forum umbrella group. “There are divisions within al-Shabaab and there are Somali NGOs that are able to work around al-Shabaab and bypass them, but there is hardly any international engagement with these local NGOs,” forum spokesman Mustakim Waid told the Guardian.

As the food crisis in the Horn of Africa continues to unfold, a growing chorus is calling not just for emergency relief but long-term assistance to allow the region to feed itself through future droughts. According to a Bloomberg report, World Food Program head Josette Sheeran thinks her organization’s Purchase for Progress initiative can help do exactly that by using “the agency’s buying power to integrate the world’s poorest farmers into the global food economy.” But a skeptical Frederick Kaufman, in a 2009 Harper’s Magazine piece, wonders how inculcating the profit motive in food producers will help the world’s poor: “Henceforth, the rural farmer could follow fluctuating prices with the technology of his mobile phone. The once indigent peasant could become a commodity trader and peg his sale to any time of the year. In this way, he could forecast, model, and leverage more financing. No matter that commodity speculation and grain hoarding had helped trigger the world food crisis.”

In a Transparency International blog post entitled “Saving the World? Prove it,” Krina Despota argues dodgy carbon offsets actually lead to more emissions since they are used as justification for polluting elsewhere. The biggest offset scheme is the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), through which major polluting countries can meet their Kyoto commitments by obtaining credits through investing in greening projects in other countries. But as of October 2008, “over 75% of all projects registered under the CDM had been completely constructed prior to being approved for carbon credits, suggesting that in some cases projects did not rely on financing from the CDM to be realized.” Despota also argues the CDM can actually provide incentives to pollute, as companies fiddle with emission levels in order to maximize the number of credits for which they are elligible.

A new Hollywood movie entitled “The Whistleblower” takes on the link between international peacekeeping and the sex trade as it played out in Bosnia during the 1990s. According to Ari Karpel of the New York Times, the film depicts graphic abuse and “implicates the United Nations, the State Department, private contractors and nongovernmental organizations in the sex trade.” Nevertheless, the star of the film, Rachel Weisz, tells the Times the true story has been toned down for public consumption: “In real life there were girls doing this as young as 8 years old.”

As reported yesterday, liquor giant Diageo agreed to a $16 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations of bribery in three Asian countries. But if the US Chamber of Commerce gets the changes it wants to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, companies will no longer have to pay fines for paying bribes abroad as long as subsidiaries do the dirty work, according to Global Financial Integrity’s Dan Hennessey. Moreover, companies “with anti-corruption programs would also be able to use the existence of those programs in order to defend themselves from legal action.”

Latest Developments, July 27

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

The UK has recognized the Libyan rebels as “the sole governmental authority in Libya” and unfrozen $150 million in oil revenues, measures the Gadhafi regime has termed “irresponsible” and “illegal.” On the other hand, the British and French seem to be opening the door for Gadhafi to stay in Libya as long as he gives up power, a position that is not popular with the International Criminal Court. Referring to the ICC’s insistence on Gadhafi’s arrest as “a monkey wrench into the diplomatic machinery,” James Dorsey says “it may well help to make the irony of the need for humanitarian help for Qaddafi-held areas of Libya that result from the international community’s own actions a reality.”

A power struggle appears to be underway between members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – a group of 34 rich countries that includes none of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) – and those on the outside over who gets to set global tax rules. The rich countries believe the OECD should retain that privilege, while their opponents want to see an increased role for the UN’s Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters. In a blog update, one of the authors of the Guardian piece wrote: “According to preliminary indications, things haven’t gone very well in Geneva this afternoon for developing countries – but we await further information.”

Greenpeace Argentina has released a report (in Spanish) accusing Canada’s Barrick Gold of destroying glaciers in Argentina and Chile and flouting national environmental laws in the process. Daniel Whalen of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs suggests such behaviour by Canadian mining companies is all too common. Given that Canada’s mining industry is the largest in the world, he argues “it is imperative that Ottawa hold its industries accountable to some approximation of environmental and human rights standards, both at home and abroad.”

Vedanta Resources, an Indian mining company which has its head office and is traded in London, faced protests at its annual general meeting over alleged human rights and environmental abuses, as well as its plans to set up an open-pit bauxite mine in an area considered sacred by local indigenous people. Among those protesting was asset manager Aviva Investors, “a small but vocal shareholder whose move to join the protest marks a more activist stance from institutional investors on social issues,” according to a Reuters report.

Diageo, the world’s biggest maker of spirits, has agreed to a settlement over American allegations it paid $2.7 million in bribes to officials in India, Thailand and South Korea to improve whiskey sales and get tax breaks. “Without admitting or denying the charges, Diageo agreed to desist from further violations and pay $11.3 million in disgorgement, $2.1 million in prejudgment interest and a $3 million penalty,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network has released a statement decrying proposed budget cuts to the US Agency for International Development and the State Department it claims would “roll back the huge progress that has been achieved in making U.S. foreign assistance more effective and accountable, impeding ongoing efforts to ensure that taxpayer dollars are getting into the hands of people who need our help.”  Meanwhile, New York University’s Richard Gowan warns that aid “retrenchment” is likely to become the norm in Europe over the next few years. “The question is whether this will be smart retrenchment – with governments, NGOs and international organizations actually working out how to introduce sensible reductions, evaluate what works, etc. – or a poorly-coordinated set of budget cuts justified by vague appeals to “the need for austerity”.”  Answering his own question, Gowan says all signs point to the latter.

Jonathan Glennie writes in the Guardian the English language has moved beyond “aid” – the preferred term is now “development cooperation” – but he is not convinced the shift represents more than semantics. “Rich countries (old and new) will still make decisions based on a mix of interest, ideology and altruism, just as they always have; it will take more than a progressive declaration to change the power mechanisms inherent in international relations.” Moreover, he points out that aid discourse over the last half decade has focused increasingly on efficiencies and cost cutting and he worries the new linguistic shift could mean it would no longer be only “aid concepts that are colonised and techno-fied, but the broader development agenda.”

Similarly, development experts Stephen Brown and John Sinclair point out the Canadian International Development Agency’s new open data initiative provides access to aid inputs but not to the outputs. So, for example, one can see how much money Canada gave to Haiti following last year’s earthquake, but not the actual impacts of those hundreds of millions of dollars. “If the government wants to show it is fully committed to aid transparency,” the authors argue, “it will join the International Aid Transparency Initiative. This would involve much more than quantitative information on some very selective inputs—it would also require more complete data on participating organizations, activities and budgets, as well as public access to actual documentation—all downloadable from the CIDA website.”

The Center for Global Development’s Charles Kenny walks his readers through the arbitrariness of World Bank country income classification and suggests an “attempt to make the income and [International Development Association] thresholds actually reflect something about the nature of countries independent of their relationship to the World Bank and its arcane concerns with civil works preference.”

As the Canadian government deliberates over setting appropriate immigration levels, the Embassy Magazine’s Jim Creskey supports the idea, put forth in a new book, “that Western governments should simply accept the inevitable and open their borders” and he argues for “putting the very important idea of people first before the abstract idea of national borders.”

Latest Developments, July 26

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

A UN mission has observed food and fuel shortages and a “strained medical system” in Gadhafi-held parts of Libya. “Although the mission observed aspects of normalcy in Tripoli, members identified pockets of vulnerability where people need urgent humanitarian assistance,” humanitarian coordinator Laurence Hart said. Despite NATO’s military intervention, the amount of territory controlled by the Gadhafi regime has grown by about 20 percent over the last five months.

Twelve Democratic members of the US Senate have joined their Republican colleagues in opposing the proposed Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) on the basis of a perceived threat to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “Ratification requires two-thirds of the Senate. So far 57 senators have said they would vote against the treaty, expected to be wrapped up next year,” according to a US News and World Report piece, which also quotes a Republican letter of opposition: “Our firearm freedoms are not negotiable.” The ATT, as currently being negotiated, would apply only to the international transfer of arms.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development has released its World Investment Report for 2011. The top story suggests a world moving towards greater equality, at least among states: “For the first time, developing and transition economies together attracted more than half of global FDI flows.” On the other hand, foreign direct investment is declining in some of the poorest regions, most notably in Africa which saw a nine percent drop in 2010. The report also addresses the current state of corporate social responsibility: “Voluntary CSR standards can complement government regulatory efforts; however, where they are promoted as a substitute for labour, social and environmental protection legislation, or where CSR standards are not based on national or international rules, then these voluntary standards can potentially undermine, substitute or distract from governmental regulatory efforts.”

Speaking in Hong Kong, US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton pushed for “true regional integration” in the Asia-Pacific as opposed to a “hodgepodge of inconsistent and partial bilateral agreements,” the pending US-South Korea trade deal notwithstanding. According to Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton’s message was consistent with American policy since the end of WWII but: “What is novel in Clinton’s approach is her insistence that developing countries—which have often been granted special treatment—can no longer be exempted from binding rules.”

The UN’s special envoy for the Middle East has told the Security Council: “The Palestinian Authority is ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood at any point in the near future.” But the US, one of five permanent members with veto power, has said it will oppose any attempt by the Palestinians to obtain state recognition from the UN in September.

Following last week’s deadly anti-government protests in Malawi, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US government agency, has put on hold a five-year $350 million deal signed with the East African country earlier this year. The US government agency says it will conduct a review before deciding how to proceed, but terminating the agreement is a possibility.

After trying for over a decade, the International Gay and Lesbian Association has gained the right to attend and speak at UN meetings. Support for the group’s consultative status came primarily from Europe and the Americas, as well as Japan, South Korea, India and Mongolia. Opposition came largely from African and Islamic countries, as well as Russia and China.

University of London economist Costas Lapavitsas looks at the lessons to be drawn from earlier debt crises in poor countries. He criticizes policies that protect lenders while pushing the burden of debt onto the public, suggesting a possible remedy whereby an “audit commission could examine public debt for its legality, legitimacy, odiousness and social sustainability, providing grounds for its cancellation.” He also calls for “international co-operation among borrowers” and says “engagement with multilateral organisations, principally the International Monetary Fund, is to be avoided.”

Foreign Policy columnist Charles “The Optimist” Kenny calls for the leaders of Somalia’s militant Islamist group, Al Shabab, to be charged by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity by method of mass starvation.” But at least some of the blame should go to the “modern world system” that has undermined the centuries-old, sustainable pastoralism that is uniquely adapted to producing food in one of the harshest climates on earth, according to Helen de Jode who has edited a book on the topic.

Esther Dyson, CEO of EDventure Holdings, says there are two types of investors: “Venture capitalists want to fund the next Facebook, while philanthropists want to use Facebook to support good causes.” And although she does not expect or want the former to start behaving like the latter, she suggests “they could focus a little more on training new employees rather than poaching them from the competition at inflated salaries.”

Latest Developments, July 25

Posted on by
Reply

In the latest news and analysis…

The UN will hold a donors conference in Nairobi on Wednesday to try to raise $1.6 billion for drought assistance in the Horn of Africa and is looking into allegations that some of its officials are demanding money in exchange for food in refugee camps there. Former US ambassador to neighbouring Ethiopia, David Shinn, lays out some of the obstacles to helping in Somalia, including Al Shabab’s dislike of foreign aid agencies and US policy that is fixated on not helping the Islamist group in any way. A pair of Chatham House experts hold a similar view: “Both parties bear responsibility for treating emergency aid as a political tool.”

The Guardian’s Simon Bowers reports the UK’s Serious Fraud Office is allotting more resources to investigating overseas bribery cases than to fraud schemes hatched in London’s financial offices, “raising concerns that tackling the very biggest UK fraud cases may be slipping as the agency’s top priority.”

Mike Koehler, aka the FCPA Professor, looks at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’s facilitating payments exception, arguing the provision, which allows small “grease payments” to foreign officials, is wrongly being ignored by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission: “If Congress wants to remove the facilitating payment exception from the FCPA, let Congress do that, not the enforcement agencies through its charging decisions.” Similarly, a Washington Post headline decries the fact that US companies don’t know “whom to bribe.”

Al Jazeera reports on Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining’s El Dorado mine in El Salvador which is reportedly shut down at present due to ongoing protests.“Recent murders and death threats against activists in the region have put the spotlight on the gold mining project there,” according to the report. Pacific Rim, for its part, insists it has done nothing wrong and is itself the victim of unscrupulous tactics: “Despite our consistently professional behavior throughout our time in El Salvador and investigations clearing us of any involvement, we are again being maliciously and falsely tied to a horrible act for the third time,” according to a statement posted on the company website.

Despite continued rumblings within South Africa’s African National Congress about nationalizing mines, Anglo American Platinum, the world’s biggest platinum producer says the government simply does not have the money to follow through.

Declaring “the future of the global economy lies in the hands of poor countries,” Harvard economist Dani Rodrik looks at the long-term growth prospects of these states to see whether we are headed toward a newly egalitarian economic world order. His conclusion: probably not. “Ultimately, greater convergence in the post-crisis global economy appears inevitable. But a large reversal in the fortunes of rich and poor countries seems neither economically likely, nor politically feasible.”

Colombian ambassador to London Mauricio Rodríguez argues no option should be left off the table in the search for a completely new approach to fighting the global drug trade. One key element, he says, is to follow the money: “Let’s be serious about where the big money is. If you look at the trail of cocaine, you’ll find that 5% of the profits remain in the producing countries; 95% is in the distribution networks and laundered. The big money is in the big banks in the big countries; the big money is in the US, Europe and Asia.”

Fox News’s Oliver North recounts his conversation with a young man who asks him what he intends to do “once ‘The Empire’ bans your shotguns,” in reference to negotiations on the UN-sponsored Arms Trade Treaty that would regulate the international transfer of conventional weapons without interfering with “the right of States to regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownership, exclusively within their territory.” The piece ends with the two men, anxious about their guns but filled with mutual admiration, parting ways: “When he got into his truck, I noticed his license plate: Massachusetts. Home of Paul Revere, John Adams, John Hancock. When an empire struck at Americans in 1775, they knew what to do. Let’s hope we still do.”

Howard Berman, a member of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, makes the case for his efforts to modernize American foreign assistance. He says the changes he will propose this fall include “reforms in the areas of conflict prevention and mitigation, human rights and democracy, security assistance, and trade and investment programs.”  Berman points out the current legislation is 50 years old and better suited to the Cold War than today’s world. “In this tight budget environment, one thing that can unite Democrats and Republicans is a commitment to make our foreign assistance programs more efficient and more effective.  We may have differing views on how much aid to provide and to which countries, but we should all agree to deliver aid in a way that reaches the intended beneficiaries and achieves its desired objectives.” But the University of Ottawa’s Stephen Brown has argued that, while most can agree on the desirability of making aid more effective, “the definition of what constitutes effectiveness and the choice of means to promote it are highly debatable.”

A Globe and Mail piece entitled “When business charity goes wrong,” uses the example of iwearyourshirt.com as a cautionary tale about the potentially disastrous consequences of acting on good intentions without doing one’s homework first.

Inter Press Service’s Thalif Deen looks at how much progress has been made since last July’s UN resolution making water and sanitation a human right. The answer, according to those he interviews, is not much.