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Latest Developments, March 13

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Systemic atrocity
Former US marine Ross Caputi wonders why Americans who are so outraged at the murder of 16 Afghan civilians by a rogue US soldier do not seem to notice when entire families are wiped out by US drones.
“It is believed in the west that some innocent death is excusable in war, as long as the deaths are not intended, and even if those deaths are foreseeable. But if civilian deaths are foreseeable in a course of action, and we take that action anyway, did we not intend them? I doubt Afghans would feel much consolation knowing that their family members were not directly targeted; rather, we just expected that our actions would kill a few people and it happened to be their family members – an unfortunate side-effect of war.
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The consequentialist will argue that the good results outweigh the bad, that democracy, freedom and the liberation of Afghan women will improve the lives of Afghans so much that the deaths of a few are justified. This is an easy judgment for westerners to make from the comforts of their own homes; but it stinks of the same patriarchy and arrogance of the white man’s burden that justified colonialism for so many years. Has anyone consulted Afghans and asked them if they think the good that the west has promised will come of this occupation is worth the lives of their family members?”

Transparency flaws
The Tax Justice Network has released a new report in which it calls into question the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s mechanism for assessing the financial transparency of the world’s countries and territories.
“At the time of writing, for instance, the OECD is running a ‘black, white and grey’ list of jurisdictions, according to its internationally agreed tax standard. The blacklist is empty. The grey list consists of three jurisdictions – Nauru, Niue and Guatemala. On this measure, everyone else is clean! Including some of the world’s dirtiest secrecy jurisdictions, such as Panama, the British Virgin Islands and the UAE (Dubai.)”

GOP climate change
The Financial Times looks at the shifting climate-change positions of leading US Republicans.
“[Mitt] Romney and [Newt] Gingrich, along with many other Republicans, had previously supported both the scientific case for climate change and the need to address it, as did the party’s 2008 presidential candidate, John McCain.
Observers have attributed the party’s shift since the last election to a range of factors, including the rise of the anti-regulatory Tea Party and fears about unemployment. Others suggest the change is due to fossil fuel interests using so-called super PACs – the new generation of political action committees empowered by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowing businesses and unions to spend much more on political campaigns than previously permitted.”

Sovereignty issues
Former NATO secretary general Javier Solana argues the world must move beyond “certain antiquated ideas about sovereignty.”
“On a global scale, this complex and interdependent world needs an organization of states and structures of governance oriented towards responsible dialogue, the aim being to mitigate abuses of power and defend global public assets. Without such structures, the world risks a competitive and disorderly race to the bottom among states – as often occurs with taxation – together with a protectionist backlash. History has shown that such developments often lead to disastrous conflicts.
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Indeed, the dynamics of interdependence have become well established – so much so that they cannot be reversed. To adhere to a narrow Westphalian concept of sovereignty in this world is an unwise anachronism at best, and a dangerous gamble at worst.”

Eternal pollution
Dow Jones Newswires reports that opponents of Newmont Mining’s controversial Minas Conga copper and gold project in Peru have released a paper detailing their environmental concerns.
“ ‘Effluents from the Conga waste rock piles and the tailings will need to be collected and treated forever,’ the report says. ‘Thus, the Conga site will require active maintenance of the remaining facilities and operation of active water treatment facilities, not simply for 50 or 100 years post-closure, but forever.’ ”

Owning workers
The Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens takes exception to a recent New York Times piece that suggested health workers are being stolen from Africa.
“That article approvingly cites a horrific proposal to put recruiters of health workers on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity. This is breathtakingly misguided. Recruiters do not ‘steal’ people. They give information to people about jobs those people are qualified for. The professional ambitions of those people have equal value to yours and mine, and those ambitions cannot be realized without information. International recruiters allow African health workers the chance to earn ten to twenty times what they could make at home. In other words, recruiters allow them access to professional opportunities that people like me and Times journalist Matt McAllester take for granted by luck of birthright citizenship.”

Natural solutions
Smallholder farmers hold the key to sustainable food security if they practice “climate-smart agriculture” that often bears little resemblance to the Green Revolution of the 20th Century, according to Rwandan President Paul Kagame and International Fund for Agricultural Development head Kanayo Nwanze.
“On a larger scale, farmers across Rwanda are replacing greenhouse-gas-producing chemical fertilizers with manure. In some areas of the country, smallholders are also now terracing their land and using other natural techniques to improve the soil’s water-retention capacity and quality, as well as to increase their crop yields.
Using these approaches, Rwanda has quadrupled its agricultural production over the past five years. Indeed, thanks to such remarkable progress in such a short time, Rwanda is now a food-secure country.”

Wrong changes
In a Q&A with Al Jazeera, Pambazuka News editor Firoze Manji discusses the likely impacts of the controversial viral video Kony 2012.
“What meaningful change will this bring about, other than reinforcing prejudices about ‘the African savage’, someone who needs to be civilised by the white man?
What difference will it make to those villagers and farmers who have been locked up in protected villages? What meaningful change will this bring about to the grabbing of vast territories of land for oil exploitation by multinational corporations?
What this story will legitimise is the greater presence of US troops on African soil seemingly to deal with the [Lord’s Resistance Army], an already defeated entity.”

Latest Developments, March 6

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Costly loophole
ActionAid has released a report on the potential impacts of UK government plans to open a “huge new tax loophole” by watering down regulations discouraging the use of tax havens.
“This loophole will make it much easier for UK-based global businesses to avoid taxes in the developing countries they operate in, at an estimated cost of £4 billion a year. Some of the poorest countries in the world, with minimal public services, will be losing vital revenues they could be investing in healthcare and education, keeping them more dependent on foreign aid.”

DR Congo’s missing revenues
Voice of America reports that anti-corruption investigators cannot locate $70 million that mining companies say they have paid to the Congolese government, but these corporations may be short-changing the government by a “far greater” amount.
“Mining companies may be hiding some of their income and thus paying less tax than they should. [The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s Jeremy] Dumba said he knew of cases where this may have been happening.
He said for example there’s the case of a company that exported 400,000 tons of minerals.  They should have paid 2 percent tax on that, but their tax declaration came to much less, indicating that they hadn’t declared all their income.”

Global poverty numbers
The Brookings Institution’s Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas argue that the World Bank’s latest poverty figures contain too many discrepancies to be taken “at face value.”
“The World Bank’s global poverty estimates extend over nearly three decades, with its earliest estimates provided for the year 1981. Throughout this period, the global headcount (based on the $1.25 poverty line) has been dominated by three population groups: Sub-Saharan Africa, India and China. These three account for a remarkably constant three-quarters of the world’s poor—a share which has never deviated by more than three percentage points on either side. Yet poverty estimates for each of the three suffer from glaring problems: insufficient survey data, flawed surveys, and faulty PPP conversions, respectively. If we cannot believe the poverty estimates for Sub-Saharan Africa, India and China, then we cannot believe the World Bank’s global estimates, and we must admit that our knowledge of the state of global poverty is glaringly limited.”

The UK’s 44%
British MP Diane Abbott calls for an examination of the “underlying reasons” for the UK’s 44 percent unemployment among young black people, a rate more than double that of their white peers.
“Some people will be antagonised by any discussion of the fact that spiralling unemployment is hitting black people hardest. They may think it a price worth paying for cutting back on public spending. Or they may argue that it doesn’t matter what colour you are. But the more unequal a society, the more unstable it is. And inequality with a racial dimension risks creating a time bomb. The immediate response to last summer’s riots was (quite correctly) a call to restore order. But these figures are not irrelevant. Policymakers cannot afford to ignore black unemployment.”

Françafrique lives
Former French ambassador to Senegal, Jean-Christophe Rufin, writes that the end of France’s neocolonial activities in Africa, promised by Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential candidacy in 2006, has not materialized.
“French interventionism in Africa has rarely been stronger than during the last five years. Featuring a military rescue for Chad’s Idriss Déby, support for Mauritania’s coup leader Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, an electoral helping hand for Gabon’s Ali Bongo, armed intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, support for the transition in Guinea, armed operations against Al-Qaeda in Niger, to say nothing of the intervention in Libya, the past five years have been marked by all-out French activism, covert or overt, on the African continent.” (Translated from the French.)

Pacification program
International NGO veteran Rick Arnold argues the new partnership linking the Canadian International Development Agency, World Vision and Barrick Gold in Peru has more to do with pacification than development.
“As [Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations’ Miguel] Palacin is strongly suggesting, World Vision-Canada should focus its efforts on Canada. It should join with other organizations working to bring about needed legislation at home to hold Canadian mining companies responsible for damages done abroad.”

Moral calculus
In a Q&A with the Atlantic, Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom reaches a controversial conclusion in weighing the value of current and future generations.
“Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn’t matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn’t matter where somebody is spatially—somebody isn’t automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time—we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.”

Raging against cupcakes
Exasperated by the theme of several International Women’s Day events, the Overseas Development Institute’s Claire Melamed asks when cupcakes became the “international symbol of womankind.”
“Why does this fetishisation of cupcakes make me so annoyed?  Cupcakes are just so twee-ly, coyly, ‘ooh no I really shouldn’t’-ly, pink and fluffily, everything that I think feminism is not.  It’s feminism-lite, feminism as consumption and ‘me time’ (grr), rather than feminism as power and politics and equal pay.”

World Bank track record
Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs gives a stinging historical account of the World Bank, as he continues to make his case for becoming its 12th consecutive American, male president.
“From the Bank’s establishment until today, the unwritten rule has been that the US government simply designates each new president: all 11 have been Americans, and not a single one has been an expert in economic development, the Bank’s core responsibility, or had a career in fighting poverty or promoting environmental sustainability. Instead, the US has selected Wall Street bankers and politicians, presumably to ensure that the Bank’s policies are suitably friendly to US commercial and political interests.
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For too long, the Bank’s leadership has imposed US concepts that are often utterly inappropriate for the poorest countries and their poorest people.”

Latest Developments, February 8

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Fortress Europe
Agence France-Presse reports the European Commission has rejected a Greek request for funds to help build a fence along the Turkish border in order to stem illegal immigration. “ ‘The commission has decided not to follow up the Greek request because it considers it pointless,’ Michele Cercone, a European Commission spokesman, told a news briefing. ‘Fences and walls are short term measures that do not solve migration management issues in a structural way.’ It is up to EU states to decide how to secure their borders, but they have to take into account ‘international obligations including the respect of migrants, human rights,’ Cercone said.”

Give me your tired, your poor…
Yahoo! News reports that increasingly harsh American immigration laws, such as Alabama’s controversial HB 56 which prohibits “business transactions” between undocumented migrants and the state, are impacting people’s ability to obtain food.
“Last month, Kansas kicked more than 1,000 mixed-status families off its food stamp program when it joined three other states in adopting a stricter food stamp eligibility policy. A low-income family of five made up of two undocumented parents and three citizen children now has to show that its income is close to the poverty level for a family of three–not a family of five–in order to access food stamps. This is intended to prevent illegal immigrants from benefiting from food stamps, but immigration advocates say it will leave citizen kids hungry.”

Mining audit
Reuters reports that Zambia plans to audit all the country’s mining projects in search of back taxes it estimates at between $500 million and $1 billion.
“According to UK charity Christian Aid, more than half of the copper Zambia exported in 2008 was destined for Switzerland, but according to Swiss import data almost none of this arrived and [mines minister Wylbur] Simuusa said this trend continued.
This raises a number of transparency issues and activists say copper exported to Switzerland on paper often fetches a lower price than it would if it was exported elsewhere.
‘Once it leaves, where does it go? We don’t have a clue,’ he said.”

World Bank and tax havens
The Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development’s María José Romero writes about revelations that the majority of clients of the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), are using tax havens.
“According to a recent report by Danish NGOs DanWatch and IBIS, ‘57 per cent of the companies analysed in the IFC’s extrac­tives portfolio from 2010 have channelled their investment in developing countries through an intermediate hold­ing company in a tax haven.’ Additionally, ‘more than a third of the countries hosting [the] IFC’s extractive projects have no specific policies on thin capitalisation,’ which means that IFC’s extractive-industry clients can minimise tax payments in developing countries by injecting as much debt and as little equity as possible into their operating subsidiaries.
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Civil society organisations have demanded changes in the IFC policy in order to ensure that investing in private sector companies has a positive impact on development.  According to Alvin Mosioma from Tax Justice Network, ‘the IFC should stop channelling public funds to companies using secrecy jurisdictions.’ To make effective and measurable progress towards financial transparency, the DanWatch report also recommends that ‘companies supported by IFC should present their annual accounts on a country-by-country and project-by-project basis, which would en­able host governments and civil society to iden­tify tax avoidance and evasion.’ ”

Resource scramble
A new Global Witness report suggests corruption and instability could worsen in Africa unless there is more transparency in the oil, gas and mining industries.
“Firstly, all companies involved in bidding rounds for oil licences, or that hold oil licences should fully disclose their ultimate beneficial owners. This level of transparency provides government and the public with the opportunity to begin to dispel suspicions that government officials may be benefitting illicitly from the allocation of oil licences. Additionally, the terms of all licences and contracts should be published to make it easier for the appropriate authorities and the public to determine that the terms of a contract are not unduly favourable to a company.”

Cynical aid
MiningWatch’s Catherine Coumans argues the Canadian International Development Agency’s decision to fund corporate social responsibility projects near mine sites is “intended to help Canadian mining companies compete for access to lucrative ore bodies in developing countries” where local opposition to mining is growing.
“Subsidizing the CSR projects of well-endowed multinationals is an irresponsible use of public funds by CIDA, particularly as these CSR projects mask rather than address the serious local- and national-level development deficits caused by mining.
If the Canadian government were interested in addressing the negative impacts of mining on development it would have implemented the recommendations of the parliamentary report of 2005 and the CSR Roundtables of 2007.”

Planning ahead
The Inter Press Service reports the Sierra Leone Conference on Development and Transformation has drafted a 50-year plan for the West African nation and intends to submit it to the country’s parliament.
“Many of the communiqué’s recommendations for improving the economy differ from the growing push towards increased foreign investment in mining, instead focusing on the long-term benefits of health, education and infrastructure. In fact, it suggests that no new mineral extraction agreements should be made by the government without first conducting a public comprehensive analysis of the quantity and amount of the resources to be exploited.
‘We’ve had a system that was not set up for a rapidly growing economy that would be prosperous, it was a system set up to ensure we have a quite country where resources could be extracted with us saying very little,’ said [the conference’s national coordinator Herbert] McLeod. ‘The exploitation of these resources could continue to have dangerous consequences if they are not managed well. You could have an already unequal society become more unequal as the benefits accrue to only a small section of the population.’ ”

Pot and kettle
The Overseas Development Institute’s Jonathan Glennie argues that for all the Western criticism of China’s activities in Africa, Chinese behaviour is “more or less” the same as that of other major donors.
“All in all, Chinese aid to Africa is going to come with all sorts of strings attached, despite the ‘no-conditionality’ rhetoric, and it is a huge power play, despite the proclamations of ‘south-south co-operation’. There will be problems, but no more or less than with the more traditional donors; just different, on account of different attitudes and modalities.”

Latest Developments, January 27

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Arms sale loophole
Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin reports that, following congressional opposition to a proposed sale of US arms to Bahrain due to human rights concerns, the Obama administration is moving ahead with a repackaged sale without formally informing Congress or the public.
“Our congressional sources said that State is using a legal loophole to avoid formally notifying Congress and the public about the new arms sale. The administration can sell anything to anyone without formal notification if the sale is under $1 million. If the total package is over $1 million, State can treat each item as an individual sale, creating multiple sales of less than $1 million and avoiding the burden of notification, which would allow Congress to object and possibly block the deal.
We’re further told that State is keeping the exact items in the sale secret, but is claiming they are for Bahrain’s “external defense” and therefore couldn’t be used against protesters. Of course, that’s the same argument that State made about the first arms package, which was undercut by videos showing the Bahraini military using Humvees to suppress civilian protesters.”

Responsibility while protecting
Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans surveys the extent of the damage done to the “responsibility to protect” principle by disagreements over how NATO handled its Libyan intervention.
“The better news is that a way forward has opened up. In November, Brazil circulated a paper arguing that the R2P concept, as it has evolved so far, needs to be supplemented by a new set of principles and procedures on the theme of “responsibility while protecting” (already being labeled “RWP”). Its two key proposals are a set of criteria (including last resort, proportionality, and balance of consequences) to be taken into account before the Security Council mandates any use of military force, and a monitoring-and-review mechanism to ensure that such mandates’ implementation is seriously debated.”

WEF women
The Guardian’s Jane Martinson argues the World Economic Forum in Davos “has a woman problem.”
“Although the days are long gone when one female delegate was asked to leave an event because security assumed she must be a spouse without the required permit, the majority of the women in Davos are not there as participants. Only newcomers to Davos seem to consider this fact remarkable, with the odd feminist exception such as Helen Clark. The former prime minister of New Zealand turned administrator of the United Nations Development Programme called the female participation rate ‘pathetic’. The leader who appointed so many senior women to her cabinet that Benetton ran an airport advertising campaign welcoming visitors to the ‘women’s republic of New Zealand’ called for organisers to commit to the millennium development goal of 30% female participation by 2015. ‘Or why not next year? They should just go and look for the women. In one stroke, participation would go up.’ ”

Forgetting about poverty
Time’s Roya Wolverson argues that, with all the talk about inequality, absolute poverty seems to have dropped of the World Economic Forum’s radar.
“What’s missing in the WEF discussions is the perspective of the poor.  Unfair trade practices and poor working conditions in the developing world, issues that made it onto the WEF agenda a decade ago and keep rearing their ugly head, haven’t been raised at all. Instead, the conversation is acutely focused on the plight of the Western worker and his dwindling pension plan.”

Bad medicine
Intellectual Property Watch reports that the World Health Organization’s executive board has come up with a proposal for an international mechanism that would deal with  “counterfeit and substandard medical products” medicines without taking on thorny IP and trade issues.
“A contentious issue around counterfeits has been the suspicion on the part of some developing countries that concerns about counterfeit and substandard medicines are being purposely confused with trade in legitimate generic medicines from those countries. Removing intellectual property and trade from WHO discussions likely minimises the possibility of confusion.”

Bad money
Reuters reports on how difficult it is for financial regulators to overcome the client privacy provisions of Western banks in order to take action against “undesirable assets and clients.”
“ ‘Our current arrangements for the creation of trusts and the setting up of companies anonymously have created an environment which is permitting kleptocrats to move their loot around (and commit) tax evasion on a monstrous scale,’ said Anthea Lawson, head of the Banks and Corruption Campaign at Global Witness, a non-government organisation which campaigns against money laundering and corruption.
Those determined to hide money have numerous devices at their disposal: for example it is possible to establish an offshore company which belongs to an offshore trust behind which may be another trust, all spread across multiple jurisdictions and set up by an associate of a person on a sanctions list.”

War on finance
The Economist says that François Hollande, the French Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, has “declared war on global finance.”
“The financial industry, he said, had grown into a nameless, faceless empire that has seized control of the economy and society. To tackle the enemy and restore the French dream, Mr Hollande wants to separate banks’ ‘speculative’ activities from their lending arms. He would outlaw ‘toxic’ financial products, keep banks out of tax havens and ban stock options for all companies except start-ups.”

Tackling inequality
British Labour leader Ed Miliband lays out some proposals for a fairer economy.
“I support proposals for a financial transactions tax levied equally on the major trading centers from Hong Kong and Singapore to Wall Street and the City of London. The British government needs to show more leadership on this issue in Europe — and all members of G-20 need to help make it happen.
Britain loses billions of pounds in revenues because of outdated rules that allow our richest citizens to keep their money in off-shore tax havens. Tax authorities need to know about income and wealth hidden behind front companies, trusts and other complex financial products. If these rules cannot be changed by international agreement, progressive governments should go ahead and do it themselves.”

Latest Developments, November 21

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Chevron spill
Agence France-Presse reports Brazil is fining oil giant Chevron “at least $28 million” over a spill from one of its wells off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state.
“Haroldo Lima, head of the National Oil Agency said Chevron was facing a series of fines that each could be worth $28 million dollars for having given false or incomplete information about the incident. Exactly how many fines will be determined by the investigation, he added.
ANP accused Chevron of having released “false information” in presenting an action plan that called for the use of equipment not currently available in the country and also of having presented edited pictures on the damage, according to Lima.
Meanwhile Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira also said more fines would be imposed if environmental violations were proven.”

Reversal of fortunes
The New York Times reports debt-ridden Portugal is appealing to its former colony Angola – “once a prime source of slaves, then a dumping ground for the mother country’s human rejects and now swimming in oil wealth” – for investment, but not everyone sees a new dawn in relations.
“There is still the colonial mentality in Portugal,” according to anticorruption campaigner Rafael Marques de Morais. “They just want to extract resources and plunder the country. The only difference is this time they didn’t take them by force.”

Plundering the Congo
Reuters reports a British lawmaker believes the Democratic Republic of Congo’s government is selling its mining assets at below-market prices to shell companies located in tax havens.
“[Labour MP Eric] Joyce said the documents showed that four sales of assets in Katanga had officially netted the government just $272 million, instead of $5.8 billion, which he said was the estimated total market value for the assets.
The involvement of off-shore vehicles had made it impossible to track who had in fact benefited from the sale, he added.”

Growth not enough
The Guardian reports on a new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development document that warns of the dangers posed by increasing levels of inequality, not only in fast-growing countries such as China and India, but also in 17 of the 34 members of its own rich-country club.
“‘Both poor and middle-class populations are increasingly alienated from the richest in many societies. Stark inequalities persist between groups defined by sex, working status and ethnic origin. Both rising inequalities and their persistently high levels can sow the seeds of future conflict and social unrest,’ says the report. It warns that ‘the emergence of a global elite that is isolated from less fortunate echelons of the societies from which its members originate is an important risk that policymakers must be aware of’.”

Climate cop-out
The Guardian also reports that rich countries have “given up” on the prospect of a new climate change treaty for this decade, even before international negotiations on replacing the expiring Kyoto protocol get underway in South Africa next week.
“The UK, European Union, Japan, US and other rich nations are all now united in opting to put off an agreement and the United Nations also appears to accept this.
Developing countries are furious, and the delay will be fiercely debated at the next round of international climate talks beginning a week on Monday in Durban, South Africa.
The Alliance of Small Island States, which represents some of the countries most at risk from global warming, called moves to delay a new treaty ‘reckless and irresponsible’.”

Africa leading on climate
The head of the UN Environment Programme tells Reuters that Africa is leading the world when it comes to actually implementing clean-energy policies.
“Kenya is currently doubling its energy and electricity generating infrastructure largely using renewables. These are policies that are pioneering, that are innovative,” according to UNEP’s Achim Steiner.
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“We see across the continent both a realisation of how threatening climate change really is and also the inevitable necessity that governments have an interest in beginning to put their own development priorities on a different trajectory.”

Dismissing the three Ds
New York Univesity economist Bill Easterly argues the US aid program has been “taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building” and calls for a clear separation between aid and defense departments.
“The misguided mindset across two administrations has been that development is – as Hillary Clinton put it in January 2010 – ‘mutually reinforcing’ to defence. Experience and commonsense suggest the opposite – aid works better where bullets are not flying. As for aid winning hearts and minds in war zones, it hasn’t worked. Not in Pakistan, where despite $3.7bn in economic aid between 2003 and 2009, the US is more unpopular than ever. Not in Afghanistan, where 52% of Afghans said ‘foreign aid organisations are corrupt and are in the country just to get rich’.”

Food imbalances
World Trade Organization head Pascal Lamy argues the trade policies of major food-exporting countries have as much to do with hunger in Africa as the continent’s low yields.
“The burden must not fall on Africa alone. The developed world also has a role to play by curbing the use of trade distorting subsidies which result in food surpluses being dumped on third country markets.
Low levels of African agricultural productivity have kept the continent on the sidelines of global agricultural trade and helped create a situation today in which a handful of countries dominate production and export. In a world of nearly 200 countries, there are only between five and 10 major exporters of cereals.”