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Latest Developments, August 24

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In today’s news and analysis…

Libya’s rebels are calling for $5 billion in emergency funds to be unfrozen from Gadhafi regime assets. The US is working in the UN on getting $1.5 billion. Of course, as the Globe and Mail’s Eric Reguly writes, it is no secret that Libya has something everybody wants: “By Wednesday it was amply clear that NATO’s mission creep was lubricated by oil.” The question, he says, is “who will get the prizes.” Earlier in the week, a rebel spokesman said they had good relations with an eager bunch of NATO countries but “may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil” who were less keen on providing military support against Gadhafi. And although the rebels have pledged to honour all legal contracts, Reguly writes that “Libya is looking suspiciously like an oil war and the countries that delivered the bombs want their rewards.” But human rights NGO Global Witness is calling first for measures “to guard against a Libyan “oil grab” and ensure the Libyan people benefit fully from the exploitation of Libya’s natural resources.” It wants no new oil deals before democratic elections are held, extensive and “concrete” transparency measures, recovery of Gadhafi-regime money stashed abroad and sanctions against banks that sheltered such funds.

Anticipating a possible European oil embargo against Syria, international petroleum companies are not signing any new deals with the increasingly isolated country, which announced the discovery of a new gas field just last week. But for the time being, company executives said they “still had outstanding contracts that were signed months ago, to either supply refined products or buy crude,” according to the Financial Times. Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney took a much harder line with Damascus in his day, as he reveals in his upcoming autobiography that he wanted to bomb Syria in 2007. The New York Times reports he also defends the use of waterboarding in interrogations and is “happy to note” that current US President Barack Obama has not shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay as promised.

Meanwhile, there is still a famine going on in Somalia and the African Union is holding a “pledge summit” to address the Horn of Africa food crisis. International Foundation for Agricultural Development President Kanayo Nwanze welcomed the intiative, saying Africa cannot wait for other countries to solve its problems: “No nation, no people ever had sustainable growth that sprang solely from external support. Africa’s development must be made in Africa, by Africans, for Africans.”

The UK and Switzerland have agreed on a new deal that would require taxes be paid in Britain on money held in by British citizens in Swiss bank accounts but would preserve the anonymity of the account holders. Drawing a parallel with the tough-on-crime frenzy that has taken hold in Britain since the riots, the Tax Justice Network’s Richard Murphy is livid: “So at a time when the government is demanding respect for the law, high moral standards and responsibility by all in society one group of criminals – those who have deliberately and knowingly broken the law by tax evading in Switzerland – are going to be let off without paying anything like what they owe even in tax, let alone in penalties and interest. What is more, instead of these people being brought before an all night court sitting to make sure justice is done with names and addresses being published for all to see anonymity is instead being guaranteed to those criminals so they can still held (sic) their heads up high in polite society.”

The Canadian Medical Association has denounced the federal government for blocking the inclusion of chrysotile asbestos on a UN treaty’s list of hazardous substances. “This is an important health care issue and a product that causes significant illness and even death,” according to the organization’s outgoing president Jeff Turnbull. “Canada should not be in the business of exporting such a dangerous product.”

The Guardian’s John Vidal says “plans for a US-based investment company to lease up to 1m hectares of South Sudan for only $25,000 a year appears to have stalled following protests by local communities over the potential “land grab“.” But Indian agribusiness investors are showing major interest in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda, where they say there is as much arable land as in their home country. As in South Sudan, however, local populations are expressing misgivings: “No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security,” according Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia’s Obang Metho.

Also writing in the Guardian, Rick Rowden argues that the UK’s Department for International Development’s new emphasis on promoting private sector growth in poor countries fails to distinguish “between the needs and interests of domestic private sector firms and those of foreign investors” and “perpetuates the foggy notion that the needs and interests of the two parties are somehow exactly the same. They are not.” He argues that, in countries where the private sector has taken off over the past decades, domestic companies got help from their own governments, whether in the form of temporary trade protection, cheap credit or R&D investment. But far from encouraging such measures today, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the proliferating bilateral trade agreements between rich and poor countries proscribe them as “bad government intervention.”

Richard Falk, a retired Princeton law professor, argues “the Afghanistan war is being fought against the nationalist Taliban and on behalf of a corrupted and incompetent Kabul regime for political control of the country” and as such is hurting America’s image and giving “extremism a good name” in the region. “Such an analysis yields a single moral, legal and prudential imperative: when foreign intervention is losing out to determined national resistance, leave the country quickly, stop the killing immediately, and declare victory with pomp and circumstance.”

 

Latest Developments, August 17

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In the latest news and analysis…

The Guardian reports on new research regarding the death of former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961, which suggests his “plane was shot down over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) 50 years ago, and the murder covered up by the British colonial authorities.” Among the new pieces of evidence are telegrams from the days before Hammarskjöld’s death “which illustrate US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary-general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region” and interviews with eyewitnesses describing a second plane firing on the ill-fated UN one. “Suddenly we saw another aircraft approach the bigger aircraft at greater speed and release fire which appeared as a bright light,” one man recounted and another said: “There were some who witnessed the crash and they were taken away and imprisoned.”

Some of the biggest British banks – the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and HSBC – are investing hundreds of millions in companies that produce cluster bombs, despite the UK’s obligation under an international treaty banning the devices. According to the Convention on Cluster Munitions which came into effect in the UK last year, ratifying countries must not assist or encourage the production of such weapons. But the Independent’s Jerome Taylor writes that a loophole allows for investment in companies such as Alliant Techsystems and Lockheed Martin as long as the financial backing does not go directly towards manufacturing the bombs: “None of these investments is illegal. But they will lead to further concerns about the moral behaviour of the banking industry at a time of public anger over its role in the credit crisis and bankers’ bonuses.” Only Belgium, Ireland, Luxemburg and New Zealand have implemented legislation forbidding direct or indirect financing of cluster munitions.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to nationalize the country’s gold industry in order to retain control over the increasingly valuable resource. “We have close to 12 or 13 billion of dollars in gold reserves,” according to Chavez. “We can’t allow it to continue to be taken away.” In a less radical move, the Tanzanian government is trying to increase its share of mining profits by collecting four-percent royalties on exports, up from the current three.

Chatham House has just released a European Parliament-commissioned report entitled “The Effects of Oil Companies’ Activities on the Environment, Health and Development in sub-Saharan Africa.” The study concentrates on the region’s top two producers, Nigeria and Angola, and rattles off a list of the industry’s negative environment and social impacts.“While oil companies are implementing certain measures to address these impacts, corporate social responsibility activities largely remain piecemeal and short-term, community engagement is inadequate and requirements for accountability and transparency are either insufficient or not enforced.” Moreover, over the last decade in Nigeria, “the way that oil corporations chose to engage with local communities through development projects caused inter-community conflicts in the Delta between communities participating in such projects and those that did not.”

The Canadian government is threatening legal action against Michaela Keyserlingk, the widow of a man who died of asbestos-related cancer, because she is using the ruling Conservative Party of Canada’s logo in an online campaign against her country’s “hypocrisy in exporting chrysotile asbestos to the developing world, while guarding against its use at home.” The offending, logo-appropriating banner ad, designed by her son, reads: “Canada is the only western country that still exports deadly asbestos!’’ Keyserlingk says she will take the ad down if she can meet with a senior member of the government to discuss the asbestos export policy. In June, Canada sided with Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to prevent chrysotile asbestos from being added to the UN’s Rotterdam Convention’s list of hazardous materials, a measure that would have required exporting countries to warn buyers of potential health risks.

The Canada-Colombia bilateral free trade agreement which came into effect this week “is a global precedent and will be closely watched,” according to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation Gauri Sreenivasan. What makes the treaty unique is the provision that both parties must produce annual parliamentary reports on the human rights impacts of the deal in both countries. But Sreenivasan worries the absence to this point of specific details on how the governments will live up to their duties may justify fears the reports, the first of which are due in May 2012, will be “mere public relations exercises.”  Nevertheless, she concludes: “The opportunity is there to ensure the reports can be a tool for greater accountability, highlighting that states have obligations not just to international trade rules, but to international human rights law.”

University of Virginia historian and former US Department of State staffer Philip Zelikow argues “the domestic-foreign dichotomy is anachronistic” and “foreign policies should focus on how to harmonise “domestic” policies.” He says the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks is an example of how “a traditionally conceived foreign policy negotiation founders on the inability to reconcile domestic policies.” Zelikow has little patience for high-profile summits that give pride of place to heads of state and foreign ministry officials, envisioning instead “a model of distributed foreign policymaking, in which many ministries and non-governmental organisations will move into the foreground of diplomacy.”

The Overseas Development  Institute’s Jonathan Glennie argues the “widespread public revulsion” caused by a video in which a bloodied Malaysian student was mugged during the London riots suggests “the British want to see decency and ethics at the core of national policy and community strategy.” This observation leads him to ask: “Why not, then, on the international stage? Should we not be equally ashamed when our government or companies act unethically in foreign countries? Or do our ethics stop at the border?” He has concerns about promoting international cooperation using national self-interest arguments, such as increased trade or greater security, because “appealing to self-interest entrenches the traditional position that national interests should generally predominate over ethical conduct.” Instead, he calls for ethics-based arguments supported by tangible evidence in order to “make the case that a country should never act unethically, any more than a person should.”

As for why people do evil things, the University of Exeter’s Alex Haslam writes in the Guardian that the classic Milgram experiments which took place 50 years ago this month remain important not so much for highlighting the “banality of evil” but for raising the question of “why participants identify with the authority rather than with the victim, and hence are willing to follow him down the destructive path he sketches out.” Haslam believes ordinary people commit organized, terrible acts “not because they were blindly obeying orders but because they were working creatively towards the goals of a leadership with which they identified.” In other words, atrocities “involve not just passive obedience but also dynamic followership.”

In yet another round of the “aid vs. foreign direct investment” debate, Christian Aid’s Dereje Alemayehu writes: “Can we realistically rely on foreign investors to deliver development? The amount they steal through aggressive tax evasion is at least fourfold what comes in as aid. I can’t see how ending aid would make them change their behaviour. I have nothing against Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but let us make a distinction between scavengers and investors. And in Africa, we have more of the former.”

Latest Developments, July 22

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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 6

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In today’s news and analysis…

Joseph Stiglitz says rich countries have learned nothing from the global financial crisis or the failure of earlier austerity measures in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere. But the Nobel laureate’s emphasis on growth and “still further growth” suggests sustainability does not factor into his vision.

Patrick Michaels goes a step further, arguing there are no limits to potential growth, at least when it comes to food production, and it is policies aimed at halting global warming that are killing people: “This “limits to growth” argument is as tired as a farmer at the end of harvest.”

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik lays out his position on the place of democracy in economic policy making: “Ultimately, the question concerns whom we empower to make the rules that markets require. The unavoidable reality of our global economy is that the principal locus of legitimate democratic accountability still resides within the nation state. So I readily plead guilty to my economist critic’s charge. I do want to make the world safe for democratic politicians. And, frankly, I wonder about those who do not.”

One of the architects of the Kimberley Process praises Canada’s stand on blood diamonds, while an editorial (also in Embassy Magazine) refers to asbestos as Canada’s blood diamond after Canada opposed the substance’s inclusion in the Rotterdam Convention’s list of hazardous substances. “So in the same day,” the editorial reads, “Canada stood up for a process designed to save lives and provide accountability in an industry that is wrought with death and hypocrisy, and then took a position of hypocrisy that will contribute to more deaths in developing countries.”

Meanwhile, gold is reportedly fanning the flames of Colombia’s violence. Canada, which is home to a number of the world’s largest gold mining companies, has signed a bilateral free trade agreement which is set to kick in next month. A similar US-Colombia agreement appears stalled for now.

And one final Canadian mining note: The Canadian International Development Agency is teaming up with Teck Resources and the Micronutrient Initiative for zinc treatment in Senegal. Perhaps surprisingly, a spokesperson for watchdog group Mining Watch Canada believes the project goes beyond the kind of “advertising” he says is typical of corporate social responsibility endeavours: “This looks to me like a perfectly positive thing with concrete benefits to children, and it has accountability already built in.”

UNAIDS is praising India’s decision to resist pressure, most notably from the European Union, to adopt more stringent intellectual property protections that would make it more difficult to produce generic HIV/AIDS treatments. “Millions of people will die if India cannot produce generic antiretroviral drugs, and Africa will be the most affected,” UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé said. “For me, it is an issue of life or death.”

Marta Ruiz draws attention to a couple of initiatives, one in Africa and one in the Netherlands, intended to rein in abusive transfer pricing by transnational corporations. But the tax news out of the Netherlands is not necessarily all good for poor countries.

A Chinese prosecutor is calling for international cooperation in tackling the “global cancer” of trans-border corruption, the world’s largest mining company has banned “facilitation payments” in order to comply with the UK’s new anti-corruption law, and the World Bank is looking into possible asset recovery in foreign bribery cases.

In case anyone needed a reminder of the problems inherent in trying to establish a one-size-fits-all global justice system, an angry crowd in Egypt wants tough penalties for police officers who used violence against protesters earlier this year, while a woman who lost her home in Cote d’Ivoire’s recent violence has other priorities.

Nigeria’s president worries about his country’s “huge food import bills,” and the Economist asks if housing is the most dangerous asset of all.