Loliondo and the Shiek

The A marks Loliondo, a Maasai village and district in northern Tanzania.



I have written about the Maasai before, on this blog in The Wheat Field, and in African publications in the 90s. In the fight between pastoralists and farmers, I tend to support the farmers, if only because poor countries need food sources. But in the fight between the pastoralists and the oil sheiks who want to turn Maasai land into the Disneyworld of Big Game Hunting, you have to support the Maasai.

At this very moment, the government of Tanzania is evicting Maasai from their land in Loliondo to please Mohamed Abdul Rahim Al Ali, an uber-wealthy Arab who bought the rights to hunt there. This is the sad end to a land dispute that has been going on for over 20 years.

Eighteen years ago, I visited Loliondo and saw what was going on.

The drive from Arusha to Loliondo is less than 400 km, but it's a hard trip. The first few miles are paved, but quickly you have to turn onto a road with ruts so deep that people are regularly killed when their cars roll. The going is slow. About 100 kilometers from Loliondo, in the heart of the Serengeti plain, we had to abandon roads altogether and drive cross-country, navigating by the stars. We used all three of the spare tires on our truck. It's not a trip that anyone would want to make frequently.

The rich man from the United Arab Emirates doesn't have to drive. He built himself an airport. He also built himself a large compound, which for some reason I was invited to visit. Two decades ago large screen TVs and satellite reception were rare even in North America, but he had both in a huge tent with a sand floor covered in layers of carpets. Giant hookahs with many hoses were scattered around, along with large pillows. The compound was surrounded by high fences, and there were lots of security personnel with lots of guns.

Tanzania doesn't allow hunting, but this fellow apparently bought himself an exemption. His airport and compound awaited his occasional weekend visits with friends.

The Maasai are semi-nomadic cattle herders who graze their herds over large areas. They don't believe in killing wild animals, or even their own cattle if at all possible. However, the Tanzanian government (apparently at the behest of this fellow) is claiming that the Maasai are killing wildlife, and that the wild animals need to be protected by ousting the Maasai and their cattle from large tracts of land. The restrictions that are being imposed right now are so large that Maasai cattle herds will have to be reduced by 75%.

There aren't a lot of people in Loliondo, and those that are there live on a narrow margin. These reductions mean depopulation, the end of a traditional way of life, and possibly starvation. For the wildlife they have stewarded so well, the future also does not look rosy: with no laws to stop them, the Arab hunters are already known to hunt from helicopters.

Here's an excellent brief video that shows the Maasai speaking on this issue: Voices of Loliondo.

Tanzania relies greatly on tourism, and so the government is sensitive to international public pressure. There's a petition that needs a lot of support: http://www.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_the_maasai.

More information:
History of OBC in Tanzania

Update: I just remembered how I got on to that compound. I met a Maasai man who was selling honey to the cook on the compound, and I tagged along - then got a tour.

Meddling with the Most Vulnerable

In all the newsprint spent on Harper's controversial G8 maternal health plan, I can't find mention of a very important implication of the Conservative decision to not fund abortions: how organizations that support abortion will be funded.

George Bush was explicit about it. He prohibited US funding of international groups that performed abortions or provided information about abortion. Harper's decision could have the same effect, depending on how it's implemented.

Say you have a poor country and there's an organization that provides maternal health services - it could be a clinic or a hospital or a group that covers several facilities. Say their services include family planning and/or abortion. Are they still eligible for funding under this plan?

Does someone work out what percentage of their budget is related to abortion, and then Canada asks some other country to fund that portion? That seems unlikely. But if not that sort of scenario, then it seems we must be disadvantaging organizations that support abortion. That's not just wrong; it's immoral.

It's beyond belief that a country that provides free abortions to its citizens would use its foriegn aid policies to prevent poor women in Africa from having abortions - especially since abortion is needed even more in poor African countries, where poor women have less control over their bodies and it is estimated that a third of pregnancy-related deaths are due to botched abortions.

Foreign aid is a tricky business. One of the reasons that sub-Saharan Africa is still so poor is the mess we've made with our foreign aid-slash-meddling. Just think of this scenario: there's a village with a maternal health clinic that's funded with western money, and now that clinic has been told that it won't be funded unless it ceases performing abortions - or even giving advice about them. Thanks to George Bush wooing the evangelical vote, that went on for eight years. Thanks to Stephen Harper wooing the evangelical vote, that might be about to start happening again.

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Brought Down by the Meanness that Drives Them Forward

I was doing some research on the government defunding of KAIROS, a multidenominational aid organization that Harper&Co have apparently decided is too left wing, and I came across this very good opinion piece in Straight Goods.

Our government makes us ashamed of Canada

Harperites' bully tactics and corporate ethics contradict Canada's national and economic values.

Dateline: Tuesday, December 15, 2009

by Ish Theilheimer

While the Olympic torch makes its way across Canada tugging at national pride, Canadians are being pelted every day with news that makes us feel shame internationally and a sense, at home, that the whole idea of Canada no longer matters.

A good example is the controversy that began with Richard Colvin's testimony to a Parliamentary committee about Afghan detainees. The government's initial response was to attack Colvin, a diplomat with an outstanding service record and an avowed supporter of the Afghanistan war. This reaction exposed the ruthless meanness of the Harper government and destroyed a lot of its credibility on Afghanistan and everything else.

The Harperites seem doomed to be brought down by the very meanness that drives them forward.

Harshness hurt the Harperites. Public opinion swung against them, even when they brought in top military generals to parrot the party. They were caught completely wrongfooted by hard-copy evidence in the form of a Canadian soldier's 2006 Afghanistan field notes, that conclusively disproved Peter MacKay's repeated claims that there was no documentation of Canadian detainees being tortured.

Someone had to had to walk the plank. The Conservatives appointed General Walt Natynczyk to the task. He was forced to change his story in humiliating, public fashion, saying he was suddenly given new documentation on the three-year-old file.

You can’t help but feel for the general. Like diplomat Richard Colvin or detainees handed over for torture, he appears to have been just another pawn sacrificed on the Harperites' strategic chessboard.

The Harperites could have quietly disagreed with Colvin, praised him as a dedicated public servant and shuffled him back to Washington. The story might have ended at that point. Instead, they were derailed by their apparently uncontrollable desire to smear Colvin and cause pain. They seem doomed to be brought down by the very meanness that drives them forward. Like the crack about artists at galas that lost Quebec for Harper in the last year's election, or last November's economic statement that targeted political party financing, the Conservatives exposed themselves once more as ruthless bullies.

A nasty attack-reflex can quickly undo a lot of Bollywood dancing and Beatles songs. The Colvin affair showed that the government has no heart, and totally undermined the PM's ability to lecture anyone about human rights when he visited China.

The Conservatives have stonewalled a public inquiry on the Afghan detainees matter because they know they can get away with it. This is true, technically, but polling shows the affair has hurt them badly among the constituencies they've worked so hard to win over — urban and suburban voters in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.

And the time was awful. At the UN Copenhagen Climate Change conference, Canada is being held up to daily international ridicule, thanks to the Harperites. While the people of this planet are debating how to reverse the global catastrophe that's threatening our existence, Canada's representatives are stalling and obstructing.

This country, which used to be seen as an environmental leader — the Montreal Protocol brought world action to protect the ozone layer, for instance — now regularly receives derogatory Fossil of the Day awards. The whole world knows that our government is run by the tar sands lobby. Canada’s position that poor countries should equally share the cost of reducing pollution, when the rich ones have profited from profligately burning fossil fuels, can well be called immoral.

The Harperites have a very narrow agenda and anything that doesn't fit with it goes. For instance, on November 30, Bev Oda, the minister in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), cut all funding to KAIROS, "an ecumenical partnership working to promote human rights, justice and peace, viable human development, and ecological justice." In a brief phone call, a CIDA staffer told KAIROS its projects do not fit with CIDA's criteria.

As contributor Dennis Gruending points out, KAIROS has been a leader in humanitarian assistance, such as setting up a legal clinic to assist women in eastern Congo. This sort of work doesn't fit with the new Canada. Axing KAIROS works for the Harperites, because they see KAIROS as a funding source for left-wingers, like the Court Challenges Program (which they also axed). Settling political scores and undermining potential opposition matters more to them than victims of famine and war.

Nor does this government care about keeping Canada in control of its own economy. Straight Goods has covered the five-month old Vale INCO strike in Sudbury. In Timmins, international mining giant Xstrata shut down the Kidd copper and zinc metallurgical plant. Meanwhile in and near Hamilton, ON, the former Stelco steel mills, now owned by US Steel, lie dormant.

In each case, the Harperites allowed the sale of critical — and profitable — industries, to foreign corporate giants with no commitment to Canada and almost none to Canadian jobs. In the Xtstrata case, the company closed down just months after the end of a three-year jobs agreement it was forced to adopt. If these three international giants walk away from their Canadian holdings as they appear quite willing to do, many thousand manufacturing jobs will be gone forever, resulting in widespread suffering and devastated communities.

Another example of the Harperites profits-before-people approach is last week's government decision to overrule its own regulator and license the foreign-owned cell phone company Globalive. It is no accident that the lobbyist who sealed the deal for the Globalive was Stephen Harper's old friend and former policy advisor Ken Boessenkool. A key colleague of Harper during his rise to political power, Boessenkool left politics for corporate lobbying, and has successfully represented corporate giants like Taser International and Merck Frosst Canada.

Today there are news reports that the government could prorogue Parliament until March. This would let the Harperites avoid more fallout from Colvin and Copenhagen and give Cabinet ministers plenty of opportunity to bask in the glow of the Vancouver Olympics. The government would have more opportunity for self-promotion at taxpayer expense, without the inconvenience of answering to an elected parliament.

Medicare under attack in the USA? So what. Cultural funding? Who needs it. Public broadcasting? Ditto, ditto. Working multilaterally with other countries on key issues like the environment, agriculture, fair trade, or health? Not a priority. We've become a corporate-driven, military nation, and our bizarre regional politics make this unlikely to change soon.

How ironic, that while our athletes will be going all-out for Canada's pride, our government is doing so much to make us ashamed to be Canadians! What does make us proud is that millions of ordinary Canadians don't buy Harper's mean vision. They are working, through the environment, labour, and social justice movements to maintain Canada's role as a nation of people who care about others and their world.

Ish Theilheimer is founder and president of Straight Goods News and has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since September 1999. He is also Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.

Email: ish@straightgoods.com.

The article source is here.

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Ethical Responsibility and the Flu

I heard a debate on CBC's The Current this morning about the amount of money western countries are spending on preparation for the H1N1 virus. Some fellow has called it an "epidemic of indecency" to spend billions on a relatively mild virus while millions around the world are dying of malaria, TB and other diseases.

This is one of those cases where rational reasoning talks its way around to absurdity. We have to be able to hold to our own interest: first myself, then my family, then my circle of friends, then my community, my country, my country's allies. A flood in my town that kills two people is more important to me than a flood in China that kills a thousand people. It has to be that way: we each have to take care of our own, look out for our own, before we can reach out further.

To suggest that I should be more worried about children in Africa than about my own child is simply not on. Yes, I know that children in Africa are much more in need than children in Canada, but it is my right and my responsibility to put my own first. We applaud Bill Gates for providing aid to people in need around the world, but we would also rightly condemn him if he neglected his own children.

In this case, there is a lot more riding on the preparations for H1N1 than just the fatality rate. The world has not yet come out of a global financial crisis and recession, and H1N1 could destroy our recovery - whether or not a single person dies. Even in its current "mild" form, H1N1 makes people very ill for a week or two. Look at the transmission rates in Australia and New Zealand during their flu season last year. Look at the transmission rates on US college campuses this fall. Now imagine your company: what would happen if 50% or more of employees, suppliers, and service workers were too ill to work for two weeks? Even if they weren't sick, parents would have to stay home if their kids were. What if schools closed, transit was curtailed (due to sick drivers), grocery stores went unstocked, banks shut down, we had electricity brown-outs? That's not even mentioning chaos at doctor's offices and hospitals, where staff unavailability could threaten people who require care for other sorts of ailments. And it's not taking into account the very real threat that the virus will mutate and become more dangerous.

It's not "indecent" for our government to spend a lot of money preparing for this year's flu season: it would be indecent if they didn't.

I am reminded of a small section of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: a church group in the small southern town is collecting money for people in Africa while showing no concern for persecuted African-Americans in their own community. The reader's instincive response should be that it's appalling and hypocritical that they care for people far away more than for their neighbors.

Other than the ethical issues, there is a practical problem with caring more for the far-flung than the local: help is much more effective when applied locally. Parents have to be the ones to take responsibility for their children, and governments have to take care of their citizens. It seems absurd even to have to argue this point, but I increasingly run into arguments that deny the primal importance of the personal and local, and attempt to assign a universal guilt because of the mountain of suffering elsewhere in the world. Part of this line of reasoning is the fallacy that our own problems are somehow invalid because other people have bigger problems.

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Free Market Civil Society

After the Asian tsunami, Ian Smillie proposed a new system for disaster relief, modeled on the British system. He made the observation that there is so much competition among relief organizations in most countries that it results in (1) unnecessary fund-raising costs and (2) lower donations due to public burnout from too much solicitation.

By contrast, in the British system, which has been operating since the 60s, the 12 main disaster relief organizations have formed a Disasters Emergency Committee. This committee:

- Maintains a fund so they can respond to disasters immediately.
- Coordinates their activities.
- Has relationships with TV networks, banks and the post office to streamline and hasten the donation process.
- Keeps fund-raising costs low.
- Gives the money to organizations deemed most likely to be effective in that particular location/type of disaster.

Smillie is a level-headed, pragmatic fellow who is always coming up with good ideas and insightful comments. His suggestion that other countries adopt this approach is bang on.

But the other thing that interests me about this idea is the depiction of the civil society as a competitive free market (which of course it is). While all of us who are bombarded with junk mail from NGOs know this, we don't normally think of it that way.

For example, Wikipedia defines civil society as being "the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state (regardless of that state's political system) and commercial institutions of the market."

Part of the problem with the Wikipedia entry is that it's wrong to say that civil society is voluntary. Many positions within NGOs are paid, and some command some very hefty salaries. (To be fair, the British word for NGO is VCO, Voluntary and Community Organizations, which may explain the Wikipedia definition.) But the other problem is the distinction of civil society and the commercial market.

We have an idealistic view of NGOs (charities, advocacy groups, church organizations, community groups, unions, professional organizations) that they are somehow selfless, outward-oriented organizations. Of course they aren't. Their goal, just like corporations, is to meet payroll, grow, provide services, and improve their brand. Many have endowment funds. Like corporations, most have boards of directors and auditors. Operationally, the distinction from for-profit corporations is often not great.

Many charities have a lot of influence over very vulnerable people, whether at home or in poor countries, and many have enormous resources. They may have do-gooder intentions, but they don't always do good - such as when they go to countries with high rates of AIDS infection and tell people they'll go to hell if they use condoms (Catholic church) or they tell women who've been raped that they'll go to hell if they have an abortion (American evangelicals) or when they have general tax exempt status but only help people who profess to be of the same faith (of which there are tons of examples, but just one is many groups that work in prisons).

They might just be incompetent, like charities that bring canned fish to disaster areas where starving people think of fish as gross and inedible (many non-coastal parts of Africa) or they may do good works that have unintended but dire consequences, like setting up refugee camps that lead to deforestation and destruction of roads (giant UNHCR trucks) or arriving at a disaster zone without a plan and impeding real help (everyone but the Red Cross). Then there are leftists who like to go to Africa to tell people that all their problems are caused by colonialism, which disempowers Africans and wrecks attempts to solve their problems.

None of that even touches the issues of lack of coordination, obnoxious and expensive fund-raising, inefficient duplication of efforts, and so on.

There are some attempts at coordinating NGOs, but not enough. (I worked at an umbrella organization for NGOs in Tanzania in the 90s so know a bit about the difficulties of doing that - we had physical altercations sometimes among warring factions.) There are some attempts at collective disclosure, such as web sites that compare NGOs on percentage of funds that go to the intended targets, but not enough. Tax exemption rules have some built-in safeguards. There are attempts at self-regulation within civil society. I wonder if there should be more direction provided to this competitive arena by government. Smillie says (link above) that it was the BBC that made UK charities coordinate their efforts. Perhaps our government should be regulating, or at least playing a role in advising, our NGOs.

Buth there are problems. For example, it's not true that the best-run charity is one that spends the maximum percentage of its funds on its targets - because you have to have adequate planning and auditing, and that costs money.

When the UK government commissioned a large study on this issue in 2005 (Better Regulation for Civil Society), they found that regulation dampened enthusiasm and innovation in civil society. It was red tape that many NGOs don't have the resources to maintain.

So it looks like small steps are the way to go, like the Disasters Emergency Committee - and more clear-headed thinking about what NGOs really are and what they should be doing.

Correction: My dad the philosopher sent the following to me in an email (which shows that I should discuss these things before posting!): "“Voluntary” when applied to civil society doesn’t connect with “volunteering”. Wikipedia was alluding to the classical view of the distinction between society and the state, where the state is said to be coercive and compulsory [you can’t unilaterally withdraw from the state, but it has to let you go and it has a monopoly on force] whereas society is voluntary [you choose to join social groups are not]. So whether people in civil society are paid or not is beside the point. I wrote a paper a long time ago criticizing this standard view of the distinction between state and society, arguing that a state could have only laws that are permissive [promising rewards if people do wanted things] and none that threaten people with punishment for non-compliance; such a state could collect the money it needs not through coercive taxation but through raffles, etc. One might say that such an institution would not be a state, but in my view that would involve circular reasoning or begging the question."

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The Tamil Protests

Tamil protests have been going on in downtown Toronto for a long time now - certainly throughout the last five months that I have been working there. Torontonians are getting fed up, and a media backlash is starting with the message that the negative public reaction is due to racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, or just plain insensitivity. The media is wrong.

The protests are way out of line. The blockage of the Gardiner Expressway last week was not the first time the protesters have blocked roadways. Back in January they formed a human chain down Front Street during a Friday rush hour, preventing people from getting home. I have had to walk past numerous huge rallies of protesters screaming aggressively, all with the disturbing aspect of including small children, even late at night. Many of the rallies have blocked sidewalks and roads.

Last week I walked past at least a hundred police officers in full riot gear, many imported from Durham Region, waiting at Front and York in case the protesters came that way. Presumably there were similar pockets of police throughout the downtown core. That's expensive and it diverts resources from important activities like preventing crime.

When people say that the protests are terrorist acts, they have a point. Downtown workers are being held up from getting home and are being subjected to aggressive behavior in an attempt to force our government to do something about the situation in Sri Lanka. (Although it's not clear that the Canadian government can do much of anything.) That's a mild form of terrorism, but it's the same strategy.

This is not a one-off demonstration that aims to get media attention. This is months and months of disruption. Among other things, it is counter-productive for the protesters, as it is turning public opinion against their cause.

And the cause is a lot more complicated than the fact that Tamils are dying in Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) is a vicious terrorist organization. It employs child soldiers, has killed thousands of people, and has links to al Quaeda - and it wants to become the government of part of the island of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government is by most reports close to finally crushing the Tamil Tigers after decades of conflict; it has not taken enough precautions to protect the Tamil population while doing so, causing a huge humanitarian crisis. The humanitarian crisis should be decried, but the cause of the Tamil Tigers is hard to support, and the protesters seem to be supporting the Tamil Tigers, not just by carrying LTTE flags, but also by carrying signs saying that the LTTE is the legitimate government of parts of Sri Lanka.

We need to be careful not to assume that all protesters support the LTTE. We need to be careful not to assume that all in the Tamil community are protesters. And we need to be sensitive to humanitarian crises. But there is nothing racist or insensitive about not supporting every protest. I do not support the Tamil Tigers, and I do not support months of disruptive protests. If the conflict really is nearing its end in Sri Lanka, this may be a very bad weekend in Toronto.

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A Personal Account of the Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal

A week ago today, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Theoneste Bagosora, who is widely seen as the mastermind of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, on eleven counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

I was a spectator in the court on the day Bagosora was indicted, back in 1997. I happened to be in Arusha several times during the first few months of the tribunal and went to the court whenever I could. I saw the indictments of Bagosora, who ran the army, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of a small town called Taba, and I heard a fair bit of testimony.

To imagine the court, think of a large rectangular room that is divided long-way down the middle, creating two long, thin rooms. The rooms were divided by a large glass window. One side of the window was the spectator area and had bleacher-type seating with about four or five long rows. Each chair had headphones so we could hear simultaneous translations of the proceedings. In the court area there was a long high bench in the middle, facing us, at which the half-dozen judges sat, with the chief judge in the center. To our right was a table at right angles to us with prosecution lawyers (who rarely seemed to be there), and behind them were places for a number of clerks, who were always busily doing things. To our left was an area for the accused and their lawyers.

There were never very many spectators when I was there (I don't think there were ever as many as ten) and they mostly seemed to be, like me, aid workers who had dropped in. The day that Bagosora was indicted we had a celebrity in the spectator room: Philip Gourevitch, a writer for the New Yorker. He carried a big stack of black and white photocopies of the cover of a New Yorker that identified him as the author of an article on Rwanda; this apparently is how he establishes his bona fides. He sat in the front row chatting with people nearby, to the annoyance of those of us who were trying to listen to the court. The event seemed to call for a more respectful, somber attitude than he displayed.

The Rwandans in the court spoke in Kinyarwanda, which sounded to me like a mix of French and Swahili. I mostly used the headphones but could follow along pretty well without, and did that from time to time to get a sense of the speakers' emotions. Everyone was quite dispassionate: very articulate, respectful, not nervous, not sounding at all upset - even those who described watching their families get hacked up.

The initial phase of the court seemed a bit jumbled to a spectator. Testimony came from survivors of the massacres, but also from Human Rights Watch workers and journalists who were there during and after the genocide. There was a mix of first and second hand information, some of which would not be admissible in a regular criminal court. I assumed that they were trying to get every bit of information into the record.

My overwhelming reaction was utter incomprehension. I heard one journalist describe standing at a bus stop shortly after the genocide ended. She was eavesdropping on some Rwandan housewives who were holding groceries and waiting for the bus. As the journalist described it, they were perfectly ordinary middle-class women with homes and children, but they were calmly discussing their part in hacking up their neighbors.

The eeriest moment was during the indictment of the mayor, Akeyesu. A young man testified that Akeyesu came to his neighborhood with a gang of killers and he, his family and neighbors all fled to the crop fields behind their houses. The young man climbed a tree but most people hid in the crops. He described watching the killers fan out through the crops, finding and killing the people hiding there. He described Akeyesu hacking his little sister and mother to death with a machete. Then the judge asked the young man to show where this took place. A big blown-up map was brought in on an easel, and the man stood in front of it and pointed to the various killing spots. The judge then asked Akeyesu to indicate where something happened, so the mayor went up and stood next to the young man to point at the map. The two men stood so close that they were touching, and the young man didn't flinch at all, or even seem uncomfortable.

I have read about the Rwandan genocide but I have never heard anyone explain the emotional response of the victims and killers. I can't explain it. I can think of possible explanations for the reactions of the victims - life is cheap in Africa, or the victims were so traumatized they were numb, or the victims share the emotions of the killers and so understand why they did it - but none of those seem right. Likewise, I can think of explanations for the killers - they were riled up by the Interahamwe, they believed they were acting in self-defence - but those don't seem sufficient for the frenzy of killing by perfectly ordinary people. If it were not for the ID cards that identified people as Tutsi or Hutu, it would have been difficult to even distinguish the two, as there is no ethnic or linguistic difference and they lived together in the same neighborhoods.

The court is now done - its prosecution phase ends next week, although it will hear appeals for at least two more years. In its 12 years of operation, the court convicted 30 people and acquitted five. It also amassed a record of what went on during those fateful 100 days in 1994.

Note: I took extensive notes while watching the proceedings but have lost them, so all of this is from my memory of events 12 years ago, and I may have mixed up some of the details. It would be great if anyone else who was there could correct or augment these recollections.


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Save Us From the Sociologists

I heard a lecture today by a political scientist who argued that international peacekeeping needs to move from a "top down" approach where western countries try to force their norms and institutions on a country in conflict to a "communitarian" approach where local institutions are encouraged to develop and flourish.

Sounds good until you hear the details. In the case of Afghanistan, it doesn't matter if local politicians and bureaucrats want to develop western-style institutions; they are the elite and are by definition corrupted by their exposure to the west. The new theory is that we need to send in teams of sociologists and anthropologists to study indigenous power structures and determine how to transfer authority to them. It took the West 300 years to evolve democratic systems, the argument goes, so there should be no attempt to impose a quicker time frame on countries in conflict. We should work with the war lords and the Taliban to rebuild the country, and not fuss about corruption: our Western disdain for third world corruption is a prejudice born in ignorance of the way other cultures get things done.

In a way I'm predisposed to agree with this argument. My work in Africa led me to believe that much of Western aid does a lot more harm than good. But the idea of teams of Western academics imposing their latest ideologically-based theories on vulnerable populations is a far, far scarier notion. And any argument that dismisses the importance of the middle class in creating a stable society is just plain crazy. A grand experiment that has the West funding warlords to try to bolster feudal institutions makes me shudder.

I can certainly see the need for sensitivity to local power structures. And in some cases, like perhaps the more moderate sections of the Taliban, it may be necessary to do business with the enemy. I don't see that we have to be so morally pluralistic that we can't agree on any norms at all, and must accept whatever our researchers say the local population believes - especially when the researchers exclude the educated, working population from their study. I have no doubt they will over-emphasize the views of women and groups that look particularly ethnic, after indoctrinating those groups with their own, western, politically correct notions.

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Facts Counter Conventional Wisdom

The Center for Global Development has released its Commitment to Development Index ranking "21 rich countries on how much they help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security." Canada's scorecard is somewhat surprising - you might even say it goes against conventional wisdom. To wit:

* Among the G8, Canada ranks 1st overall. Among all 21 industrialized countries, it is tied for 5th.
* Among the G8, Canada ranks 1st in aid.
* Overall, Canada ranks 1st in positive trade policies with developing countries.

Things that run against the grain are not limited to the positive:

* Canada's immigration record is not so hot (it's ranked 9th of 21).
* Canada is ranked 18th of 21 on the environment.
* Canada is ranked 12th of 21 on global security (which includes peacekeeping).

There is nothing surprising about the highest-ranked countries (Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway) - they always top indexes of enlightened governance. But I was surprised by the last-place country (and it was not even close to the next-to-last): Japan.

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The Fluid Supply of Labor

A year or so ago people were saying that off-shoring had peaked. The argument was that companies were starting to realize that North Americans did a better job. Or that all the best Asian professionals were already hired and so wages were rising there. Or that companies couldn't cope with the problems of time difference and the need to travel half way around the world on a regular basis.

But the decline in hiring off-shore didn't happen. And now even if it did
it wouldn't matter much because Asian countries are developing their own indigenous companies in a broad range of sectors. If North American companies didn't hire Asians, then Asian companies would just under-sell them. The only way to stop the internationalization of labor would be to go back to high tariffs. That's not a winning proposition in any event, but it is unfeasible in the current situation because China, Japan and Korea own so much US debt.

The internationalization of the labor market has happened and it's here to stay. I once thought my job (software technical writer) was immune because the software market is still mostly English and hey - English is my native tongue - but in my company a large part of the writing team is in Singapore. I heard on As It Happens tonight that even journalism jobs are being out-sourced to Asia, and that Reuters has had over a hundred business reporters in Singapore for years - writing about North American business.

All that brings me to the purchase of Chrysler by Cerberus. Some people are arguing that Cerberus is a strip-and-flip specialist, but there's more to it than that. The private equity company makes its money by buying a company that is nearly insolvent, restructuring and making large cuts to the company, and eventually selling it for a profit. Cerberus is dead serious about restructuring companies and it has a lot of management expertise.

Cerberus is not a new investor in Detroit, probably because the US car industry is, in general, completely in the crapper. The Detroit Free Press writes, "In southeast Michigan, Cerberus already has purchased a controlling interest in General Motors Corp.'s finance arm, GMAC, as well as Michigan auto suppliers CTA Acoustics in Madison Heights and GDX Automotive in Farmington Hills. It has offered to invest $3.4 billion in parts giant Delphi Corp., which is in bankruptcy. And earlier this month, a judge gave auto supplier Tower Automotive, also in bankruptcy, preliminary permission to sell nearly all of its assets to Cerberus for $1 billion."

It's like this: The unions and the government have been holding their finger in the US car manufacturing dyke for years, keeping change at bay, maintaining not just high salaries and benefits for workers but also lousy workmanship, lousy design, and second-rate management. Not to mention a steadily eroding workforce as the companies crumbled. The resistance to change also extended to not reforming health care in the US, taking out some of the many profit-takers who contribute to the crippling health costs of unionized companies.

And that's all over now. Cerberus is a private company that doesn't have to disclose its doings to the SEC and doesn't have to answer to shareholders. It isn't going to follow the old car manufacturing paradigms. The future for Chrysler is far different than if Frank Stronach had been successful in his bid.

Change is coming. Not just to US car manufacturers, but to all of us who earn a salary in a rich western country. And isn't that what we always said we wanted? - Better education in developing countries. Equalization of pay scales around the world. An end to the western countries hogging all the world's wealth?

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A Big Mess is Brewing

China and the US have entered an unholy alliance: China finances the US war in Iraq and in compensation the US keeps its markets open to Chinese consumer goods. Marcello De Cecco, an expert in the international monetary system, calls this Bretton Woods Two. Another way of describing it is that the US is forcing foreign central banks to finance the US trade deficit in order to keep their exchange rates from appreciating and their export-based economies from collapsing.

De Cecco, who is a professor at the University of Pisa, advisor to the Italian government, newspaper columnist and author of Money and Empire, gave a lecture this week at Waterloo's Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

De Cecco argues that the current situation has some parallels to the years leading up to the First World War. Then, the pound sterling was the international currency, backed by gold, but the UK was in decline. The two emerging superpowers were the US and Germany, neither of which had ambitions to replace the pound with their own currency. It was France who challenged the pound as world monetary standard, and France that also threw instability into the system, sometimes deliberately (in 1907-14 there were several episodes where France removed money from German markets for political reasons, forcing Germany to hoard gold). The dollar became the world currency after WWII.

Now, it is the US that seems to be in decline. China is the emerging superpower, but again it is not interested in replacing the dollar as the world currency. In fact, China is behaving very responsibly, doing its best to keep the current system working. The euro is the challenger to the dollar. Half of all world assets are held in private hands in Europe, and European investors may dump the dollar if the dollar starts to decline - as may Americans and everyone else, including even China. Of the many sources of instability in the current system (not the least being the behavior of the US government), Russia, a country that is on the decline and bitter about it, may prove to be a problem.

Professor De Cecco called his talk "From the Dollar Standard to a Multiple Currency Standard: Current Developments in the Light of Pre-1914 Experience" and summarized it as: "The world in which we live today is in many ways similar to, and in other ways different from, the one which existed in the two decades before 1914. New world powers are in the making now, as they were then. Power politics seems to have superseded the politics of alliances based on ethics and values. Is the multiple currency world towards which we seem to be going bound to prove as dynamically disastrous as the one which came to an end in 1914?"

De Cecco ended his talk with the ominous statement, "A big mess is brewing."

Related post:
The Unsustainable World Economy

Update: Gwynne Dyer

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The Unsustainable World Economy

We live in precarious times. The US dollar is the official world currency - around the world, over two-thirds of all national reserves are held in US dollars - and yet it is very, very vulnerable. The vulnerabilities of the US dollar include:

* Supply-side financial markets: Enormous amounts of US debt are being held by East Asian countries, notably China, Japan and Korea. These countries are keeping their currencies artificially low (thus propping up the dollar) to fuel their growing export market. If they change their policies, the US dollar could crash.
* Supply side politics: If countries lose faith in the dollar, they could start moving their reserves and transactions to other currencies, causing the US dollar to crash.
* Demand-side US markets: US consumers are fueling the current world financial system by buying enormous amounts of cheap imported goods. (Ninety percent of Wal-Mart's sales are from imports.) If US consumers reduce their demand, say because of a housing market crash or rising interest rates, the whole financial system could topple.

The current system evolved somewhat by accident. There were a series of financial crashes in 1997, notably in Russia, East Asian and Brazil. Countries responded by building reserves of dollars in case of future crises. This caused the US dollar to rise, which fueled exports from those countries. The countries liked that and started to manage their exchange rates to keep their exchange rates low against the US dollar, which caused them to hold more US currency and debt.

Meanwhile, back in the US an ideological president was elected who didn't believe in government intervention. To be fair, currency exchange intervention had been declining in the US before Bush, but Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, did intervene in the currency market a couple of times. Under Bush, there has been no currency market intervention whatsoever. The US dollar - a key component of economies the world over - has been largely ignored by the US government.

This has had some benefits. The US has enjoyed a ton of cheap goods, and the reliance on cheap imports has helped dampen inflation. East Asia has seen enormous growth. Multinational corporations are making a ton of money off the cheap labor. Stock markets are booming.

But there is a huge downside. While US consumers are getting great prices, this situation is keeping their wages down. East Asian exports are growing, but the wealth isn't flowing to citizens who could in turn create a domestic market for goods. In fact, we're in a bizarre situation where capital is flowing from poor countries to the US.

Furthermore, the whole system is becoming increasingly unsustainable and could result in a huge crisis. If it does, the world economy is very vulnerable. The problems of capital flight which caused the 1997 currency crisis have not been addressed and could happen again, worse. The countries who rely on exports will be devastated if the US dollar collapses. The US currently has a huge deficit and will not be in a good position to help soften the blow for its citizens.

In addition (and this may be meandering into the genre of conspiracy theory), the US could react to such a financial crisis in a very bad way. I'm not just talking about protectionism and nationalism. Is it a coincidence that the Bush administration is trying to position China as a national threat to the US? China holds enormous amounts of US debt and the US seems to be positioning China as an enemy. Who knows what might happen.

I went to a lecture today by Thomas Palley, who argued that the solution is to create a revised Bretton Woods system. He proposes two main mechanisms:

* Managed capital flows: Put in place systems that will avert currency collapse due to capital flight. For example, a "speed bump" law on capital inflows: when someone brings capital into a country, they have to park it for a set period of time with the central bank at a set interest rate. Another example of this sort of safeguard is to require hedging on foreign exchange-denominated borrowing.
* Managed exchange rates: Currency rates should be managed to ensure sustainable trade deficits/surpluses. But the onus must be on the strong currencies to bail out the weak currencies: financial markets are now so strong that they can muster more financial clout than just about any economy, so the weaker currencies can't defend themselves. Also, the stronger currencies are reaping a benefit that they should pay for.

Palley wants these innovations to be put in place before there is a crash, to avert it. However he sees no political will in the US or elsewhere to do so. He suspects there will be a worldwide financial crash, and soon, and hopes that we can put his policies in place at least after the fact.

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Not NIMBY - Just Good Planning

Today's Kitchener-Waterloo Record has a report of a recent public planning meeting. Some politicians are calling for another soup kitchen in downtown Waterloo.

I believe in a strong social safety net, in affordable housing and subsidized services for people who need them. I have done extensive volunteer work at food banks and give generously to my local food bank every year without fail.

But I'm a single woman who lives in downtown Waterloo and in recent years I have felt unsafe walking by myself downtown. The reason is that I am threatened by strange men. Most recently it was after dark (about 9 PM this winter) and I was walking on King Street. Noone was around when a man emerged from the shadows of a doorway and asked me for money. I said no but he continued to walk beside me, pestering me. My mother, who gets around very slowly with a walker, had a worse experience when a man who seemed to have severe mental problems planted himself in front of her, blocking her way on a narrow sidewalk while yelling at her. It doesn't take many of these experiences for a woman (quite rationally) to be reluctant to go out on her own.

AND THAT REALLY SUCKS. Both my mother and I live downtown (in different places) because we like the freedom of walking to shops and entertainment. Both of us are without male escorts. Thanks to these experiences, both of us have limited freedom to go out.

We already have a mess in downtown Kitchener, which has a lot of scary people. I have witnessed fights twice in the last couple of years, once where a bunch of teens were beating up a homeless man in the square in front of City Hall. Downtown Kitchener has several institutions to help homeless teenagers and adults - and that's great and we all praise them for their good work - but a side effect is that downtown Kitchener is no longer a place where most citizens can safely and comfortably spend any time. I do go there (occasionally, always in a group and always parking close to my destination), and I see a lot of shady characters.

The Political Correctness Police can tell me that I have no right to question any help we provide to the underpriviledged, but I'm underpriviledged here too. I know that most people who use soup kitchens are good people who wouldn't cause me any trouble, but it's just a fact that a soup kitchen will attract a percentage of people whose presence will make the downtown more unsafe for me. I know this because of some of the people who live in a halfway house near downtown or who go to a soup kitchen near my house. It's probably the case that the people who cause problems are people with severe mental problems or people with criminal records.

If these politicians (none of whom, I'd bet, walk alone downtown at night) insist on putting another soup kitchen or shelter in my neighborhood, then they should also pay for increased police foot patrols at night... enough police that a woman can walk on her own without fear.

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Climate Wars

Tonight at the University of Waterloo, Gwynne Dyer launched a world-wide lecture tour. The title of his tour is "Climate Wars." Dyer's a great speaker, speaking completely off the cuff with as much first-hand knowledge of the world as anyone I've ever seen, and I recommend that you get to his lecture if he's appearing near you. It's must-hear. This post is from my notes.

Dyer argues that the effect of uncontrolled global warming will be:

- mass starvation
- mass population movement
- war

He says if we let climate change go to the tipping point we will face dire changes in rainfall distribution that will change agricultural production that will in turn destabilize world politics. He says many governments and institutions are studying the implications of climate change on the world food supply and other factors, but they're keeping it quiet.

The way it works now is that water is absorbed into the atmosphere at the equator and then comes down, in most part, at around the same latitude north and south of the equator. This results in a band of desert at about 20-25% latitude north and south of the equator, and just past that desert band there is a breadbasket. Global warming causes the rain to shift further away from the equator.

Dyer talked to a researcher in India who recently did a study for the World Bank on the effect on Indian agricultural production if the mean temperature rises by 2 degrees and 5 degrees Celsius. (These are the lower and upper limit on what is expected to happen this century.) Her conclusion: at a 2 degree increase, India's agricultural production will decrease by 25%. I didn't quite get what he said about a 5 degree increase but it seemed to be close to no agricultural production. The World Bank has not made this study public.

Other studies predict that if the temperature rises by 5 degrees, the world will lose 50 to 70% of its agricultural production. The US agricultural breadbasket, the Midwest, will be hit hard. At a 5 degree increase, the US will lose more than half of its agricultural production. Greece, Italy, Spain and southern France will also do very badly. Australia, China and India will lose almost all their agricultural production.

Canada (with the exception of southern Manitoba), Britain, Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, Tasmania and New Zealand will be fine. Some of those countries might even become a bit more productive. It might be difficult to bring agriculture online in the far north, however, because the land will be water-logged.

When Dyer was born, in 1943, there were 2 billion people. There are now 6.5 billion. The prediction is that the population will plateau at 8.5 billion. That is already pushing to the limit our ability to feed ourselves. Dyer says that about the only way we have left to increase our agricultural productivity is to stop diverting so much grain to meat production. But currently there is very little slack in the system. The world has less than a 45-day reserve of grain.

Dyer says that Britain is one of the most knowledgeable countries in this area because, in part, Margaret Thatcher was a trained chemist and she understood what the climatologists were talking about. Britain is conducting massive research on the issue with the idea that they may become "lifeboat Britain" - an island with food surrounded by countries without. Russia, too, faces a problem because of its border with China. In China, only Manchuria will retain agricultural productivity if the temperature rises by 5 degrees.

Dyer stressed that his figures, which largely come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are conservative. The Panel works by consensus, so tends to low-ball figures. Their predictions also take into account that many countries are lowering emissions. Their predictions don't take into account unknowns such as methane gas being released when the permafrost melts or other possible types of ecological collapse.

Over the 150 years since the industrial revolution, 95% of man-made green house gas emissions have come from the wealthy northern countries. At the start of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was 285 parts per million. Now it's 380 parts per million, and rising 4 ppm per year. The point of no return is thought to be 450-550 ppm.

Dyer thinks that we can still avert disaster. He says that outside the US and Canada, emissions are stabilized. Northern countries have significantly improved the amount of GDP they get from a ton of emission.

The reason we need a framework like Kyoto is that emissions/GDP and overall emissions are increasing in southern countries as they industrialize. He said, "They may be adding the bit that makes the cup overflow but we filled the cup." Climate change initiative must be global and must address this issue.

Northern countries need to make deeper cuts so that southern countries can grow. Dyer said that developing countries like India are very aware of the dilemma they're in of needing to industrialize to meet their citizens' basic needs, but the planet being in a precarious situation. He said they're extremely bitter about the level of pollution caused by the north.

Dyer thinks that the US is finally coming around - that the coal, gas and electricity industries had flooded the media with PR and junk science to deny global warming, but that now even they have cut it out and the government is acknowledging the need to do something. The good news, he said, is that once the US gets going they can be very effective.

He said this is about the best time in the history of the world for us to have to deal with a problem like this. It's a golden age: we're at peace, unified, and have strong international agreements.

But, he says, we won't be able to deal effectively with global climate change if we slip into another cold war. And another cold war is what the Bush administration has been heading us towards.

According to Dyer, the Bush government is in full-out panic about the rise of China. He said the buzz at the American Enterprise Institute (a think tank that is enormously influential to the Bush people) is that the US is currently facing what Britain faced in 1900.

In 1900, Britain had been a global superpower for about 50 years. There were two countries who threatened Britain's position: Germany and Russia. (Britain's traditional enemy was France, but it was not then a threat.) Germany was stronger, so Britain chose to isolate it. Britain made treaties with countries surrounding Germany, including Russia, and so squeezed it. Britain's tactics were successful (except for the two world wars), and it retained its position for an extra 50 years.

The position of many at the American Enterprise Institute is that the supremacy of the US is threatened, and it should follow a similar strategy. The two main economic threats are India and China, but China is the bigger threat so the Bush administration has made significant moves to isolate it.

The US has pressured Japan to remilitarize. The US has moved the 7th fleet into the area. They have made a number of treaties and pacts, including with Singapore, but the main one is with India.

India was non-aligned since its independence, but that changed with the 2005 military cooperation agreement it signed with the US. The Bush administration has been wooing India for years to reach this agreement. India gets all sorts of things out of it: full technology transfer (which the US doesn't even give to its NATO allies), missile defense, military training. Congress has voted to take India off the nuclear blacklist (which it has been on since its 1998 nuclear tests) and allow it to trade in nuclear technology.

Dyer cited an official visit made to India by Condoleeza Rice. A state department spokesperson announced at a press conference that the US would help make India into a great power by the 21st century. Someone asked: Do you mean in all aspects, including military? The spokesperson answered yes. Dyer said he has heard this exchange quoted at least 20 times in India.

Dyer says that for now, China is taking the high road on this, pretending to ignore what the US is doing so as not to provoke them further. But if the Chinese population find out about it - an ironic twist given the west's demands for greater freedoms for the Chinese populace - then they will demand that China take counter-measures.

And at this point, an international incident, such as something happening in Taiwan, could drive the US and China into cold war. If that happens, we won't have the kind of international agreement on climate change that we need to avert disaster.

Note: If there are any poorly argued statements in this post or any incorrect facts, it's much more likely to be due to my note-taking than mistakes by the speaker.

See also:
Global Warming Report
UN Predicts 50 Million Environmental Refugees by 2010
Unsustainable Growth
America's Indian Ally

Reprints:
Vive Le Canada
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The Weird Wild World of Debt Relief

For over a decade there has been a powerful international movement to provide debt relief to developing countries. This movement included religious leaders, heads of state, rock stars, a large coalition of US conservative religious organizations, and on and on. They had votes in the US congress. They had money and power and visibility. They had a strong argument: debt repayments from the south to the north are crippling the south. And in many cases very poor countries were being forced to pay back loans that in the US or Canada a court would declare illegitimate - because it was money borrowed by individuals that the IMF or World Bank turned into public debt, or because the debt was acquired by an unelected dictator who no-one should have been loaning money to.

Despite having all this on their side, the debt relief movement didn't get very far. Oh, a little program called Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative was started in which the indebted poor countries had to jump through hoops for three to six years in order to get some help on their interest payments, but no serious successes were achieved.

Then the US invaded Iraq.

As the occupiers of Iraq, the US had to deal with Iraqi international debt, which amounted to a staggering $120 billion. Only $4B of this amount was debt held by the US; most of the rest was owed to France, Germany, Russia and some Arab countries. Notice that all of those countries opposed the US invasion of Iraq. The US tried to declare that the debt was, in legal terms, "odious" and so did not need to be repaid, but that ploy failed. The US then tried to get the international community to give debt relief to Iraq, but that too was not accepted. In particular, French President Jacques Chirac spoke out against the US plan and said that if Iraqi debt should be forgiven, then so should the debt of all poor countries. It's not clear at all that Chirac meant what he said, but Bush & Co. called his bluff and said Well okay then: let's have a widespread program of debt relief.

Bush & Co. didn't actually fall on their noggins and start caring about the poor and dying of the world. They wanted to clear the Iraqi debt, and they thought they could manipulate the situation so that they could achieve a dual goal of crippling the IMF and World Bank. So they proposed that the debt of some poor countries should be forgiven, and the entire cost of the operation should be borne by the IMF and World Bank.

They almost won. They got some of the Iraqi debt written off, and the $55 billion cost of the debt relief program is falling almost completely on the IMF (the World Bank escaped relatively unscathed). Eighteen other countries also got some relief, including Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

It isn't all champagne corks and car horns though. The countries still have to abide by IMF/World Bank restructuring conditions - reductions in infrastructure spending which have long been an impediment to their development. Also, in some cases the debt relief is matched by a reduction in future loans, which means some countries might not actually get anything out of it. It's possible that Tanzania might even lose funding from having its debt forgiven.

Still, it's an interesting insight into the self-interest that drives humanitarian achievements.

The Wheat Field

In the chaotic world of African aid, where rights and ownership are often not clear and there are equally persuasive yet completely conflicting viewpoints for every decision, I often use as my litmus test the question, What would we do in Canada? Another way of phrasing this is: How would a population with full empowerment react to this situation---how would it play out in the court of public opinion and halls of power?

For example, in the 1990s two Canadian aid organizations, CUSO and CIDA, carried on a feud over a wheat field that CIDA had funded in Tanzania. CIDA considered the wheat field a successful program that improved Tanzania’s food self-sufficiency. CUSO considered the wheat field a major human rights abuse because of its displacement of the Barabaig tribe. For many years, much of CUSO's resources were devoted to a bitter legal and public relations battle.

In the 1970s Tanzania had a food shortage and so was forced to import a lot of grain, thereby depleting its foreign exchange reserves and forcing it to rely on foreign aid. By 1980 foreign aid accounted for 70% of the Tanzanian GNP. In an effort to address the food shortage, after meetings between Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Tanzanian President Julius Nyere, CIDA and the Tanzanian government started the Tanzania Canada Wheat Programme, a large-scale wheat growing operation in the Hanang District. Tanzanians were trained in wheat farming techniques by Canadian wheat farmers. By 1989 the Hanang wheat field was supplying over half of Tanzania’s needs, and it didn't use any chemical fertilizers. It was one of the most successful aid programs ever enacted.

However, the semi-nomadic Barabaig, a tribe that numbers about 40,000, had been using the land to graze their cattle. They weren’t completely displaced, but their grazing land was curtailed by the wheat. Their livelihood was threatened and some of them were forced to accept aid. There were protests and a Barabaig man was killed.

CUSO took up the Barabaig cause, providing them with cars and buildings, recruiting lawyers to argue their case in court, and publicizing the human rights abuses of the CIDA project. CIDA was portrayed as a murderous pack of insensitive bureaucrats who were destroying indigenous culture by inflicting capitalist practices on the country. During my years in Tanzania it was not uncommon for Tanzanians and foreigners to complain to me that my country was a human rights abuser because of the wheat field.

Despite government support, CIDA was eventually forced to withdraw from the project. When CIDA managers left, local corruption quickly doomed the wheat fields to nonproductivity and bankruptcy. The land claim battle, as far as I know, continues.

But back to my litmus test. What would we do in Canada? I doubt that in Canada an industry of vital importance to the economy would be destroyed by land claims. We can complain about our capitalist, consumerist economy, but there are benefits to adhering to the goal of prosperity. For example, municipal government decisions always consider the impact on the local tax base, a criterion that has many times infuriated me but that keeps us economically healthy. Public support tends to maintain an element of self-interest, even when conflicting moral values arise.

We in the rich countries frequently impose a double standard on poor countries. For example, we get all worked up about the Brazilian rain forest with not nearly as much concern about our own clear cutting. We deplore all poaching of African animals while we allow culls of deer and bear in our own back yards. Elephants are a big problem in parts of East Africa: there are a lot of them, they're not controllable, and they destroy lives and property. If it were North America we wouldn't let them rampage around human settlements, but Africa is flooded with foreign wildlife conservationists who protect animals over people. I don't know if it actually happened, but a conservationist group in Tanzania was even planning to re-introduce deadly tsetse flies into an area to keep poor Africans from moving in and disturbing the wildlife.

The interest group model of civil society works well in rich countries where rights are protected and all people are able to speak up. It is a laudable goal of international organizations to build civil society in poor countries, but in the early development of a civil society lobbying is often dominated by the agenda of foreigners and debates can become lopsided very fast.

In highlighting the wheat field controversy I deliberately used an example involving human rights abuses because it isn't easy. On the one hand there is a large group of people that is being displaced. On the other hand there is a country that can't afford medical care or education for its 30 million people. Many aid workers consider the wheat field to be an infamous example of the failure of top-down aid: instead of building on the wishes of local residents, a large-scale agribusiness project was conceived by government and imposed on the people. I saw it quite differently, as an example of how meddling ideologues are holding back African countries from becoming self-sufficient.

PS: I worked for CUSO.

See also: Peanut Butter Jars

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Peanut Butter Jars

Back in the 1960s an aunt and uncle of mine were Peace Corps volunteers in a remote village in the Himalayas. This small village had no electricity, no manufacturing and no stores. My aunt and uncle had a garden plot, but other than that they had to carry all their food and other supplies in from the nearest town, which was a long hike.

Every once in a while they carried up a jar of peanut butter. When they finished the jar, they washed it out and gave it to one of their friends.

One day they came back to the village after being away to get supplies, and they found that their garden had been completely destroyed. When they asked their friends what happened, they were told to talk to the village elders.

The village elders told them that they had destroyed their garden as punishment for the peanut butter jars. They explained that the peanut butter jars were very precious in the village, and by handing them out to their friends they were disrupting the structure of the community. From now on, peanut butter jars would be distributed by the village elders, or my aunt and uncle would not be welcome in the village.

When I did aid work in Africa in the 1990s a lot of peanut butter jars were being handed out by foreigners and there was nobody to monitor the disruption at all.

For example, in villages nearly as remote as my aunt and uncle’s Himalayan one, all of a sudden one small interest group would get money, an office building, and a vehicle and driver. Talk about destroying the structure of the community.

In East Africa, it is the semi-nomadic cattle herding pastoralists who are the darling of leftist aid workers. (That's not terribly surprising, as the pastoralists are the coolest people I have ever met in the entire world.) These pastoralists, such as the Maasai and Barabaig, migrated into East Africa in the 1900s and so are by no means the indigenous peoples of the area, but western aid workers equate them with the indigenous North American Indians, so they treat them as indigenous. In Tanzania, the pastoralists even have an NGO called PINGO: Pastoralist Indigenous NGO.

The reason the bogus indigenous claim is so important is that pastoralists need lots of land, and pastoralist aid work is all about land claims. Pastoralists and their cattle migrate over large areas during the year, and their land needs butt up against other Africans---even poorer---who try to eke out a living farming. Aid workers have been trying for decades to displace the farmers.

In the same area as the Barabaig there is the Hadzabe tribe, which is related to the Kalahari Bushmen. Hadzabe are short in stature and speak a click-language, and are among the most primitive people left on the earth: they are hunter-gatherers not dissimilar (it is believed) to prehistoric man. The Hadzabe, who now number only about 200, are both the most exotic and the most vulnerable of people. Anthropologists love them.

I met an anthropologist who lived with the Hadzabe for a year, itemizing and measuring everything they ate. He didn’t want to take advantage of them so he handed out hunting knives as parting gifts---thereby forever changing the diet of the community. Of all people, you'd think an anthropologist might have realized the repercussions of such an act in a community that literally lives hand to mouth, surviving mostly on berries and roots. What if the use of knives causes the food sources to be deplenished, or leads to youngsters not learning traditional bow and arrow techniques? I think, sadly, that this is now moot, based on the number of tour operators advertising that tourists can now visit the "primitive bushmen".

Part of the reason there are so few Hadza left has to do with a meddling NGO who tried to help them out a couple of decades ago by building houses for the community. Traditionally, the Hadza sleep in the open. When they were made to sleep in houses, mysteriously and quickly many of them died. It was never understood why they died, unless it had to do with hygiene problems.

I met a Hadzabe man who had once been the leader of his community. Aid workers often believe that international conferences should include everyone who is affected by aid, so some NGO plucked him from his hunter-gatherer life and sent him to a conference in Geneva, from which he returned a dysfunctional alcoholic.

Call it politically correct insensitivity. Call it careless distribution of peanut butter jars. I left Africa feeling that aid was doing more harm than good.

There is noone to stop the mammoth presence of the Catholic church from telling people in an AIDS-racked country that they'll go to hell if they use condoms, or to stop Habitat for Humanity from demanding religious conversion from the destitute in exchange for a house for their children. There are foreigners at all levels---UN, governmental, NGO, religious, academic, and individual---all operating on their own agendas, all thinking up ways to help the poor Africans and in many cases buggering off before the results become clear.

Even when projects are good, the very presence of foreign aid often hinders local progress. I dread the current plan to ship massive quantities of $100 PCs to the third world because it may wipe out fledgling computer industries, alienate children from their culture, create unsustainable expectations, and who knows what else. It's another do-gooder plan that sounds wonderful till you start to think through the repercussions.

The head of AIDS in Tanzania for the World Health Organization told me that ten or more unemployed Tanzanian doctors could have been hired for his salary and would probably do as good a job. The counter-argument is that when local doctors administer programs there tend to be corruption problems. But maybe we focus too much on corruption; we ignore a ton of "profit taking" in our own society but deplore all "corruption" in the third world. On the other hand, there are lots of clinics where almost all of the medicine is stolen and sold privately, and they don't do much good.

I'll write more on one possible way to sort this out in my next entry.

See:
The Wheat Field

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