Latest Developments, July 22

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Beyond Aid

In the latest news and analysis…

A new Médecins Sans Frontières report suggests a number of major pharmaceutical companies will no longer provide antiretrovirals at discounted prices to middle-income countries, including ones with large numbers of people living with HIV, such India, Brazil and Thailand. And while Health Global Access Project’s Brook Baker praises Gilead Sciences for recently becoming the first drug-maker to join the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) that aims to improve access to affordable HIV/AIDS treatments in poor countries, he argues the move may not have been as philanthropic as it might seem. The agreement excludes many “middle-income countries with a high HIV-burden” and “of the 111 countries included in the geographical scope of the tenofovir MPP license, Gilead has patent applications pending or granted in only 2 of the licensed countries, India and Indonesia.”

In other patent news, World Intellectual Property Organization delegates have wrapped up a week of meetings without completing drafts of treaties to protect genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore. A representative of indigenous peoples expressed concern that their voices were not being sufficiently heard.

Britain’s Macmillan Publishers has agreed to a hefty fine for bribes its education division paid in Africa in the hopes of securing contracts. And a confidential government memo dating from 2008 has revealed Canada’s asbestos industry, which critics say endangers the health and lives of people in the handful of poor countries which still import the substance, may be on its last legs due to dwindling reserves.

Somalia’s Al-Shabab militants, who control much of the country, are still blocking a number of aid agencies despite a recent announcement to the contrary and have called the UN’s declaration of famine “pure propaganda” even though the international organization has laid out the specific criteria it uses to make such assessments. The UN secretary general has written a plea for the world community to help the Somali famine’s victims, “the vast majority of them women and children.” Indeed, the photo accompanying the LA Times piece notwithstanding, more than 80 percent of those fleeing Somalia are women and children. This fact has prompted Al Jazeera to ask where the men are, with some suggesting they are being forced to fight in the country’s civil war. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s John Vidal blames the famine, in part, on what he calls an “insidious war” against pastoralists who “produce more and better quality meat and generate more cash per hectare than “modern” Australian and US ranches” but are being squeezed out “by large-scale farming, the expansion of national parks, and game reserves and conservation.”

Al Jazeera also asks if this week’s UN Security Council statement on the threat to global security posed by climate change is “a real opportunity to achieve significant results or an attempt to divert attention from the root causes of the problem and away from the countries that cause global warming and distribute the burden evenly on world nations.”

Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass proposes a so-called “restoration” doctrine, by which he means “a U.S. foreign policy based on restoring this country’s strength and replenishing its resources—economic, human and physical.” He says the idea is very different from isolationism in that it involves carrying out an “active foreign policy.” But restoration would mean engaging in “fewer wars of choice” abroad, such as those fought in Vietnam, Iraq and Libya, and making smart cuts to discretionary spending at home. Haass sees restoration as a short-term objective that could lay the groundwork for what he believes should be America’s real foreign policy goal: “integration, which aims to develop rules and institutions to govern international relations and persuade other major powers to see that these rules are followed.”

Reflecting on a new report entitled “Resource Scarcity, Fair Shares and Development,” Oxfam’s Duncan Green argues that both the left and the right argue away the idea of resource limits in their own way. He also says there is an important distinction between the “new scarcity” of planetary capacity and the largely local and socially determined ‘old scarcity’ that has always left poor people on the outside looking in. In his view, most of the scarcities are primarily local and, as a result, “we should be careful about lumping them all together or going too global, especially when it comes to solutions.”

Latest Developments, July 21

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Beyond Aid

In the latest news and analysis…

The World Bank has released a report on the challenge posed by the theft of public assets from poor countries, which it describes as “an immense problem with a staggering development impact.” The report’s authors estimate that about $5 billion in assets have been recovered over the last 15 years, which amounts to 1/1,500^th of the World Bank’s lowest estimate of the total stolen over that time. But the Tax Justice Network argues the real proportion of repatriated assets may be more like 1/3,800^thof illicit financial flows out of the Global South.

Four Kenyans claiming to have been tortured by British soldiers during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s have taken a major step towards obtaining reparations, as a British judge has ruled the plaintiffs have sufficient grounds to pursue a lawsuit. “This is not about money,” their lawyer said. “It is about restoring people’s dignity.” The UK’s Foreign Office argues it is not responsible for any wrongdoing during the colonial period and Kenya’s government should take care of compensating victims, an argument the judge termed “dishonourable.”

The UN has “strongly welcomed” new data providing further evidence that male circumcision is an effective way of preventing HIV in men. “Scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision services rapidly to young men in high HIV prevalence settings will help reach the 2015 goal of reducing sexual transmission of HIV by 50 per cent,” according to UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé. One of the leaders in this trend is Tanzania which “plans to circumcise at least 2.8 million men and boys between the ages of 10 and 34 over a five-year period.” Meanwhile, in San Francisco where HIV/AIDS was the fourth leading cause of death among men aged 25-54 in 2007, the battle is heating up over a proposed measure that would ban the circumcision of boys under the age of 18. The so-called Male Genital Mutilation Bill will be put to the California city’s voters in November.

Global Financial Integrity’s Tom Cardamone has announced the imminent launch of an international petition to fight perceived efforts by the US Chamber of Commerce and Wisconsin congressman Tom Sensenbrenner to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the 34 year-old piece of legislation aimed at punishing individuals and corporations who pay bribes overseas.

The Economist appears to have coined a new acronym, MIFF, to describe the “the emergence of a group of middle-income but failed or fragile states” that, despite moderate prosperity at the national level, account for 17 percent of the world’s people living on less than $1 a day. That figure has skyrocketed from one percent in 2005. “Anybody concerned with alleviating world poverty must reckon with the MIFFs,” the author argues.

Peru’s ambassador to the UN Gonzalo Gutiérrez makes a similar point in arguing “the cold figure of GDP per capita does not reflect the actual state of development in a particular country.” He is calling on the donor community to change the criteria it uses when devising aid policy and to recognize that most of the world’s poor live in so-called middle-income countries. “It is illogical to leave 70 percent of those who suffer most in the world, simply because a general index says that they are already in the medium-income countries,” he said.

And in a Project Syndicate piece entitle “Debt and Delusion,” Yale University economist Robert Shiller warns of the dangers of obsessing over economic indicators, such as debt-to-GDP ratios. Fear of “some magic threshold” beyond which a country will become insolvent is causing a stampede towards austerity measures which are likely to do more harm than good. “We should worry less about debt ratios and thresholds, and more about our inability to see these indicators for the artificial – and often irrelevant – constructs that they are.”

The Royal United Services Institute’s Knox Chitiyo says the relationship between Europe and Africa has moved beyond “handouts and hoopla” and the “scramble for Africa.” In fact, he believes we are now seeing the beginning of “Africa’s scramble for the world.” Now that Africa can boast some of the world’s fastest growing economies, Chitiyo says Europe needs its southern neighbour in order to dig out of its recession.

Washington-based economist Thomas Palley makes the case for a global minimum wage to counteract “globalization’s undermining of the income generation process.” Palley does not suggest introducing a rich-country level of wage floor to poor countries, but rather “establishing a global set of rules for setting country minimum wages.” Rather than calculating specific wage levels that would then rise with inflation, he proposes agreeing on a fixed percentage of median wages that would vary according to national and regional economic conditions. “Just as globalization demands global trade rules for goods and services and global financial rules for financial markets, so too labor markets need global rules,” Palley argues.

Recapping the events of last week’s Arms Trade Treaty negotiations, Transparency International’s representatives at the meetings say they are “delighted” by the apparent broad support – from investors, industry and governments – for including anti-corruption language in the agreement. And Oxfam’s Scott Stedjan refutes US gun lobby objections to the proposed treaty, saying an ATT would have “no impact on the Second Amendment freedoms.”

Latest Developments, July 20

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Beyond Aid

In the latest news and analysis…

As expected, the UN has officially declared a famine in southern Somalia. French agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire writes in Le Monde that hunger in this day and age is a “scandal,” and a Globe and Mail editorial decries the slow international response to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: “When an alarm of impending famine is sounded, the whole world should be galvanized into action.” But even though USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network predicted the food crisis nearly a year ago and Islamist insurgents controlling much of Somalia recently lifted their ban on foreign aid, there are still legal obstacles to large-scale US assistance.

Earlier this year, the World Food Programme also launched an emergency operation in North Korea and an EU mission recently reported “widespread consumption of grass.” As of last week, the UN had received less than a quarter of the funds it was seeking for North Korean food assistance. The Brookings Institution’s Roberta Cohen says politics have prevented South Korea and the US from helping so far. “But taking no decision is really a decision, which gives the impression that there may be no urgent or extensive food crisis in North Korea requiring immediate action.”

But Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs says responding to food shortages, such as the one currently unfolding in the Horn of Africa, is not the way to go. The focus should instead be on lifting people out of poverty permanently, dealing with climate change and reining in population growth.

A Guardian editorial says the British public’s lack of enthusiasm for the government’s pledge to increase aid to 0.7 percent of GDP is understandable, given the frustratingly predictable cycle of development policies. “Fashions in giving have come and gone, interspersed with bursts of retrospective analysis purporting to show both why previous programmes have failed and how to reshape them so that they really will work and really will add to the sum of peace and prosperity in the world.” Nevertheless, the authors encourage the Cameron government to stick to its aid promise before concluding: “If we get it right this time, the public might eventually come round.”

A major problem with foreign aid, according to Bottom Up Thinking, is an accountability deficit resulting from the fact that its “‘customers’ are not the same people as those who pay the bills and that leads to massively misaligned incentives.” But the main reason why people have such little faith in aid’s usefulness is, paradoxically, the high expectations set up by an industry obsessed with sending out positive messages: “The problem, as I see it, is that we are very rarely upfront about the risks of failure. Far too much of the conservation and development industry is extremely reluctant to admit to failure (or even just disappointing results); glossy brochures proclaim an unending procession of success stories.”

The Center for Global Development’s Wren Elhai warns that a six-word amendment to proposed US legislation would make all American assistance to Pakistan conditional on the South Asian country’s demonstration that it is committed to preventing the Taliban and other perceived undesirables from operating within its borders: “The notion that a relatively small amount of civilian aid will change the strategic calculus of the Pakistani military is simply ludicrous. Meanwhile, attempting to use civilian aid as security leverage would upset the fragile two-track strategy that has guided U.S. strategy in Pakistan for the past several years.”

In a blog post entitled “Yes, South Sudan Can,” World Bank economist Shantayanan Devarajan lays out the three keys for South Sudanese success: stimulating sustained economic growth, implementing “home-grown solutions,” and embracing information and communications technology. Drawing on Africa’s recent history for inspiration, Devarajan points to “a number of countries, such as Mozambique and Uganda, which emerged from civil conflict and sustained above-7-percent GDP growth for over a decade.” In the UN’s latest Human Development Index ranking, Mozambique sat 168^th out of 172 countries and Uganda scored better than only two non-African countries: Afghanistan and Haiti.

After discussing a recent study that suggests resource extraction is more often a blessing than a curse, Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations turns to the specific possibility of a Liberian oil industry, reminding us the authors’ “analysis is statistical: while it might say that on average there isn’t a resource curse, that should be little reassurance for any particular country that’s diving into extraction.” Nor does the analysis, which focuses on political freedom, take socio-economic or environmental indicators into account. Of the 12 sub-Saharan countries whose daily crude production currently exceeds 50,000 barrels per day, only Gabon, South Africa and Congo do not rank in the bottom quintile in either the UN’s Human Development Index or Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index.

Reuters correspondent Peter Apps asks if Britain is more corrupt than it thinks. According to one expert quoted in the article: “If you look at the way we talk about and measure corruption in the West, it’s either Africa or Asia which comes out worse. But we are using a distorted prism.” Apps’s question is inspired by the UK’s ongoing phone hacking scandal, but there are also new developments concerning British companies behaving badly overseas. A parliamentary committee slammed military contractor BAE Systems for misusing funds in Tanzania and not paying the penalty imposed after a plea bargain. And miner Monterrico Metals has settled out of court on charges of collusion in the detention and torture of protesters in Peru.

The European Network on Debt and Development’s Alex Marriage sees an “apparent conflict of interest” in the fact that the European Commission assigned PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international accounting firm which boasts 415 of the Fortune Global 500 among its clients, to prepare a report on how poor countries can minimize financial losses due to corporate transfer pricing. The practice allows large multinational corporations to reduce their tax bill by creatively billing themselves for transactions between subsidiaries so as to maximize declared expenses and minimize declared profits. “Transfer pricing is the single biggest source of illicit financial flows in the world costing developing countries hundreds of billions of dollars every year,” according to Marriage. PwC claims its own 2011 report on global transfer pricing – a separate document from the EU-commissioned one – “offers practical advice on a subject where the right amount of effort can produce huge dividends in the form of a low and stable tax charge, coupled with the ability to defend a company against tax auditor attack.”

Oxfam’s Duncan Green asks why development experts pay so little attention to “how poor people ‘do’ development.” And the Center on International Cooperation’s Alex Evans points out that poor people will not get a fair share of the world’s limited resources unless “developed countries and the “global middle class” dramatically reduce their consumption levels.”

Latest Developments, July 19

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Beyond Aid

In the latest news and analysis…

With the food crisis in the Horn of Africa intensifying and the United Nations expected to declare the food shortage in southern Somalia a famine as early as tomorrow, Kenya has agreed to accept imports of genetically modified maize. The decision, which came in the face of anti-GMO protests, was a first for the country. The government insists the maize will be turned into flour at the point of importation so as to prevent the seeds from getting into the market, but it is unclear at this point what additional measures, if any, it will take to ensure containment.

The Center for Global Development’s David Wheeler examines investment in renewable energy sources by 174 countries over the last two decades. His findings “contradict the conventional view of North-South conflict that has dominated global climate negotiations, because they show that developing countries, whether by intention or not, have been critical participants in reducing the carbon load all along. Furthermore, they indicate that poor countries have borne their fair portion of global carbon alleviation expenditures, measured as shares of income per capita.”

Wheeler’s colleague Charles Kenny defends his own suggestion that $100 billion in annual cash transfers would suffice to bring about “a world free of poverty,” by which he means that amount could raise everyone living in a poor country to the World Bank’s $1.25 a day poverty line, which the institution admits is a “frugal” figure.

Nick Dearden, director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign argues Western-style free trade – currently being pushed as the key to African prosperity by British prime minister David Cameron and the business delegation accompanying him on his trip to Africa – is the last thing the continent needs. Instead, he argues, African governments should look to “protecting industries, developing alternative and complementary means of trading, control of food production and banking, progressive tax structures, controlled use of savings, and strong regulation to ensure trade and investment really benefits people.”

While speaking in Nigeria, Cameron also called for the EU to adopt “legally binding measures to require oil, gas and mining companies to publish key financial information for each country and project they work on.” He explained: “We want to disclose the payments our companies make to your governments so you can hold your governments to account for the money they receive.” According to estimates by Global Financial Integrity, Nigeria lost $130 billion dollars between 2000 and 2008 due to illicit outbound financial flows, much of it in the energy sector. And real growth of such flows during that nine-year period was 21.9 percent in Africa. Christian Aid welcomed the prime minister’s words, pointing out that poor countries lose 50 percent more to transnational corporate tax avoidance each year than rich countries provide through aid. “But EU legislation needs to go further,” the group said. “In order to ensure companies are paying the right amount of tax, we need more information on how the taxes they do pay relate to the profits they make.” Christian Aid also wants to see a political push for greater transparency in all industries, not just the extractive ones.

JKL Energy, a Ghanaian company has announced it plans to start work on a $300 million oil and gas project. The venture, which has support from investors in Malaysia and Dubai, will contribute to “ensuring that indigenous companies actively participate in the development of Ghana’s oil and gas industry, seen by many as a major driver of the economy over the next 30 years,” according to a press release.

And Liberia could be the next African country to deal with the double-edged sword of oil production as Chevron is set to start offshore exploration later this year. The US expects a quarter of its oil imports to come from West Africa by 2015 and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has said she hopes her country can avoid the “oil curse.”

A day after a call for a new Marshall Plan in South Sudan, a week after an argument for a Greek Marshall Plan and 18 months after a plea for a Haitian Marshall Plan, a Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network blog post asks if it is time for a “21^st Century Marshall Plan” in the Arab world.

Al Jazeera’s Sebastian Walker investigates the debates and motives behind American military involvement in Libya, which he describes as “a victory for the so-called humanitarian interventionists,” such as secretary of state Hillary Clinton, ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and National Security Council advisor Samantha Power.

An online fundraising plan is set to kick off this week to cover the costs of enacting Arizona state legislation calling for prisoners to build 130 km of fence along the US-Mexico border to keep out would-be illegal migrants. The MSNBC article portrays opposition to the planned construction as being largely practical and logistical – one county sheriff considers it “well intentioned” though ultimately futile – but it also mentions one group taking a moral stand. While Defenders of Wildlife “are in support of effective border security,” they believe in freedom of cross-border movement for imperilled species, such as the Chiricahua leopard frog and the Sonoran pronghorn.

Latest Developments, July 18

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Beyond Aid

In today’s news and analysis…

UN General Assembly president Joseph Deiss has urged reform of the Security Council’s size and membership, saying “any solution to the long-running debate on making the Council’s composition more representative ultimately lies with the 193 Member States of the world body.” Except that in realitiy, responsibility “ultimately lies” with the US, China, Russia, the UK and France who, as the five permanent members of the Security Council, enjoy veto power over charter changes. For example, even if a two-thirds majority voted to scrap Security Council vetoes, any of the five permanent members could trump those 130+ votes with a single “no” of their own.

Former UN assistant secretary general Ramesh Thakur argues the UN “remains our best and only hope for unity-in-diversity in addressing problems without passports that require solutions sans visas,” while conceding the organization has to work harder to meet what he terms the “legitimacy criterion” and the “performance criterion.” He calls for the reform of a number of UN bodies, including the Security Council, as well as “greater transparency, democracy and inclusiveness in decision-making.”

According to a new survey of British public views regarding UK foreign policy, the majority do not think ethics should play a role in international relations. “The government’s conception of security, linking spending on development with a direct enhancement of the security of British citizens, has yet to resonate with the public. Moreover, findings that show “the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain’s international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests” could make it tough for the government to stick to its commitment to raise aid levels to 0.7 percent of GDP, according to Chatham House researcher Rob Bailey.

In an editorial entitled “Human rights at home, too,” Canada’s Globe and Mail suggests the EU needs to do a little introspection if it wants to have a credible voice when criticizing human rights violations elsewhere in the world: “The EU is quick to wag fingers at other countries that fail to respect human rights. It’s time they had a look at the ramshackle dwellings and decrepit shacks the Roma inhabit in their own backyard.” To which one commenter responded: “And Canada should look at how it treats Aboriginal Canadians before we get to (sic) high and mighty about our position on racism and human rights.”

Former G7/G8 sherpa Gordon Smith frets about the future role for Canada, a country which accounts for roughly 0.5 percent of the global population, in international diplomatic power circles. As for what Canada’s current government has to offer the international community, Maclean’s Magazine’s Paul Wells argues now that the Conservatives finally have a majority government and a weak opposition means they can do more or less as they wish within parliament, they are adjusting their persecution complex to see the rest of the world as “an excellent substitute enemy.”

A new Bureau of Investigative Journalism piece disputes the US claim that drones have killed no civilians in Pakistan for nearly a year. The report comes right on the heels of efforts to seek the arrest of ex-CIA general counsel John Rizzo for his role in approving drone targets.

The international community is looking to regulate the conventional arms trade next summer but may yet leave off riot-control equipment, which some critics refer to as “weapons of repression.”

The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting declares South Sudan “the biggest development challenge in the world.” She writes: “What faces South Sudan is daunting: it needs help on the scale of a Marshall Plan for one country. It’s an unprecedented development challenge and, so far, there has been more goodwill than action or sense of urgency.” Meanwhile, the last country to bear that distinction, Haiti, still has 600,000-700,000 people living in tents, most of its destroyed infrastructure has not been rebuilt and most of the rubble has not been removed 18 months after the earthquake, according to physician and longtime Haiti advocate Paul Farmer.

Also writing for the Guardian, Nicholas Watt describes the “new Scramble for Africa,” which, he says, China appears to be winning. Africa also has Google scrambling, as it tries to provide more local content in local languages, in order to get into a largely untapped market.

World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy kicked off a conference to review the Aid for Trade initiative – intended to provide poor countries with the tools and expertise needed to boost trade – with words of praise for the six year-old program: “Results range from increased export volumes to more employment, to faster customs clearance times and impacts on poverty.” Note the language: “increased export volumes,” “more employment” and “faster customs clearance times” but no modifier for “impacts on poverty.” The same conference saw the unveiling of the Transparency in Trade Initiative, described by one UN agency as a “project aiming to eliminate the transparency gap resulting from the lack of access to data on country-specific trade policies”

And finally, Monday also saw the beginning of a week-long conference on intellectual property and genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore.