Aid fade

Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, poverty in Africa rose from 11% to a staggering 66%" - roughly 600 million of Africa's billion people are now trapped in poverty. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.

-- Dambisa Moyo in an interview with the ubiquitous Aida Edemariam

Aid donors and recipients alike have good reason for preferring to focus on aid rather than trade or governance. Industrialized countries don’t want to liberalize trade in agricultural products, while making new commitments to aid targets provides popular headlines. African governments like aid because most of it comes to them, and while they are strongly in favour of trade reform they are understandably resistant to governance reform. Therefore we see that NEPAD began with a focus on governance, trade, and debt, with aid at the margins, but was reduced very rapidly to an aid disbursement mechanism.

-- Alex de Waal in a note on The Trouble with Aid by Jonathan Glennie

Climate priority

I have long agreed with the conclusion that Paul Klemperer comes to in his recent paper What should be the top priority for climate change?:

More R&D into clean energy is probably the highest priority of all. There are other priorities too, of course. In particular, curbing deforestation is cheap and cost- effective, and has the collateral benefit of preserving biodiversity. But finding a clean energy source that is cheaper than those currently available is the only politically plausible way of curbing growth in developing nations’ emissions.

But, Klemperer cautions, "the vagueness of [my] remarks demonstrates an urgent need for research into the economics of innovation!"

Hope

In 2002 there were 200 mobile phones in Afghanistan. Today there are more than four million, and over 70% of the country has signal coverage -- Ashraf Ghani talks about hope, development and much else in GlobalBiz, 29 July 08

Clay-based food

"It stops the hunger," [says] Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. "You eat them when you have to."

-- Rory Carroll reports from Cité Soleil. More photos.

Perspectives on Afghanistan

Rory Stewart on How to save Afghanistan (17 July)

Conor Foley on A counterweight to a failing state (18 July)

P.S. 24 July (altho' article dated 27 July): Thomas Schweich asks Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?

Shocked

...The analogy between Chile and Iraq cuts both ways. After arguing that Chile was a laboratory for Friedman’s free-market ideals, Klein has to acknowledge the inconvenient fact that Pinochet refused to reverse Allende’s nationalisation of the copper mines. This suggests that Chile’s military rulers were not the lackeys of foreign companies, did not view nationalisation as a step on the road to Communism and were nationalists before they were neoliberals. At one point, Klein herself admits that Pinochet’s Chile was not a laboratory for Chicago School ideals. But this concession is soon forgotten and she continues to hold up the Chilean analogy as evidence that torture in Abu Ghraib, too, had a primarily economic rationale and, indeed, was part of the same ‘crusade to liberate world markets’.

Klein argues that the invading forces deliberately allowed the National Museum in Baghdad to be looted and the National Library burned. These apparent acts of criminal negligence were in fact a form of cultural lobotomy, a collective shock treatment meant to ‘depattern’ the minds of the Iraqis and reduce their capacity to resist free-market reforms. She never explains why ancient manuscripts stored in a library would have fortified Iraqi resistance to a radical economic agenda. Indeed, this example shows how far Klein is willing to go to deny the decisive role of imbecility and obliviousness in the making of the Iraqi disaster.

The supposed primacy of neoliberal ideology and business interests in the Iraq war is also thrown into doubt by another consideration. Nothing we know about Dick Cheney suggests that he wanted to ‘redeem’ Iraq or make it into a model society of any kind. If he followed any example in his dim plans for post-invasion Iraq, it was not Milton Friedman’s but Ariel Sharon’s. No one would suggest that Sharon aimed to ‘redeem’ the Palestinians or create a model market society in the West Bank and Gaza. What he aimed for, and achieved, was managed anarchy: a weak, internally divided and festering society unable to project power outwards but susceptible to periodic violent intrusions. Free-market orthodoxy was not on Sharon’s mind, or on Cheney’s either...

-- from a review by Stephen Holmes of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

Klein may sometimes project and distort, but for outrageous manipulation nothing beats the 'mainstream', as Nick Turse shows.

[P.S. another interesting review of The Shock Doctrine here]

Yes, we can

I said seven years ago we need a fund to fight HIV AIDs. That’s been put in place, and now there are more than 2 million Africans getting treatment and that same fund has gotten more than 50 million bed nets out there [to reduce malaria incidence]. The puzzling thing to me in truth is the sense of ‘No we can’t’.

-- Jeffrey Sachs, 5 May

Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz is not infallible, but he has good very service in many ways, not least in his recent analysis with Linda Blimes, The Three Trillion Dollar War. So I was a little disappointed at a talk he gave today in Oxford, Meeting the Challenges of Global Governance in the 21st Century.

He made some strong points, of course, regarding government and regulatory capture by banks and big financial players -- plenty to justify the old saying "if you're not angry you're not paying attention"; but for all his gifts, Stiglitz is not always an outstanding public speaker, and he was frustratingly sketchy on how a Financial Product Safety Commission and a Financial System Oversight Commission would work.

The poor eat mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

-- Marc Lacey, NYT

Saudi boom

One of the most noticeable illustrations of the industrialization push is a plan...to build six new cities throughout the country — including the King Abdullah Economic City on the western coast, near the city of Rabigh; the Knowledge Economic City, near Medina; and the Prince Abdulaziz bin Mousaed Economic City, in the north.

...these cities together will have four times the geographical area of Hong Kong, three times the population of Dubai, and an economic output equal to Singapore’s. Other plans include building four refineries, two petrochemical plants and a modern graduate-level university with an endowment of $10 billion.

-- from The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia

King Leopold's cell phone

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back.

-- from Jon Mooallem on The Afterlife of Cellphones.

An undeveloping country

In Kibombo he meets a stationmaster who diligently turns up for work every morning even though no train has reached the town in six years.

-- from Rory Maclean's review of Blood River by Tim Butcher.

The Human Development Report

The 2007 UN Human Development Report, focussing on climate change, is out! I contributed to this, with a background paper in the spring (a version of which is online here; unfortunately not the final draft!), a box about coral reefs and development, and other inputs, and it's great to see this final result (as well as all the background papers including this one on the role or religions and this one on discounting in the context of climate change economics).

A target of a 50% cut in global emissions by 2050, and a strong critique of the UK government survived into the final report. Newspaper reports include this and this (Robert Mendelsohn's comment at the end of the latter may be worth attention, and some assumptions on which it's based examined).

Meanwhile in another part of the woods Worldwatch releases the optimistically titled Powering China's Development: The Role of Renewable Energy. The blurb says:

In 2006, China burned more than twice as much coal as any other country, according to the latest Vital Sign Update. China's coal use amounted to 39 percent of the global total, followed by the United States with 18 percent. The European Union and India came in third and fourth place, accounting for 10 percent and 8 percent of total coal use...

[Chinese demand]... accounted for more than 70 percent of the global growth in coal use in 2006 and for more than 60 percent of the rise in coal use over the past decade. But China also leads on renewables, and is poised to achieve—and even exceed—its target to obtain 15 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020.

P.S. An enlightening first response to the UNHDR comes from Marc Levy of Columbia University in this comment on the DotEarth blog. Here is an extract:

The HDR is very well suited to help us reframe climate change as a development problem, because its use of Amartya Sen’s human development paradigm is rooted in human choice and agency, as opposed to more narrow economic development. Typically, when the development agenda gets assessed in light of climate change, you tend to see estimates of loss of GDP, and even the Stern report, which tried very hard to break new ground in this area, ultimately came down to a cost-benefit calculus. What the Human Development report provides is a framework for thinking about how climate change affects the range of options for improving human lives, as experienced through food security, education, health, natural disaster risks, migration, and so on. In addition to framing the impacts in a more coherent manner, it also provides a better framework for prioritizing next steps and evaluating actions.

What makes a catastrophe at the world’s largest dam?

...the Communist Party is hoping the [Three Gorges Dam] does not become China’s biggest folly. In recent weeks, Chinese officials have admitted that the dam was spawning environmental problems like water pollution and landslides that could become severe. Equally startling, officials want to begin a new relocation program that would be bigger than the first.

The [dam] lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy conundrum: The nation’s roaring economy is addicted to dirty, coal-fired power plants that pollute the air and belch greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Dams are much cleaner producers of electricity, but they have displaced millions of people in China and carved a stark environmental legacy on the landscape.

“It’s really kind of a no-win situation,” said Jonathan Sinton, China program manager at the International Energy Agency. “There are no ideal choices.”

--from Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for Their Human Costs by Jim Yardley, with research contributed by Zhang Jing.

By 2020, it seems, China wants to nearly triple its hydropower capacity, to 300 gigawatts. 100 hydropower stations could be built on the upper Yangtze basin within two decades.The article nearly ends with:

...The quality of land is getting worse and worse the higher they go. And there are now more people than the land can sustain....

...Winter is approaching, and [Ms. Lu] is trying to block out cold air — and rats — by pinning down the tent flaps with rocks...

Equity, growth, climate

In a post touching on the ethics of climate change, Andy Revkin links to a striking illustration of global carbon emissions per capita by nation and mortality per million by region. There is likely to be some shift in the balance of carbon emissions as/if global energy needs 'grow inexorably', with China 'to be largest energy user'.

Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day...But improving gas mileage will take us only so far. Once the Chinese and the Indians really start driving, doubled or even tripled fuel efficiency won’t suffice.

-- from Does the “car of the future” have a future?, Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Zoom and Auto Mania.

Things can only get bitterer

All the surviving members of the twenty five most endangered primate species combined "would fit in a single football stadium" (BBC, IPS).

More widely, "there are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable" (as quoted from GEO4).

World bank critic

[Robert] Zoellick's focus [as new head of the World Bank and IFC] is on globalisation, helping multinationals extract oil, gas and other resources from developing countries. This hugely helps industrial nations, but does nothing for the world's poorest, who should be the paramount focus of the bank. Fostering climate change through deforestation, cattle ranching and fossil fuels are all anti-poor priorities that the Bank must halt.

-- from How to aid destruction by Robert Goodland.

In the Financial Times on 19 Oct Kuen Lee, John Mathews and Robert Wade outlined what they see as a preferable alternative to 'The Washington Consensus, titled t the Beijing-Seoul-Tokyo Consensus, or BeST for short (Rethinking development policy: A new consensus).

Thabo Mbeki's problem

David Beresford reported in yesterday's Guardian that:

Justice Malala, the highly regarded former editor of the defunct newspaper This Day, accused Mr Mbeki of "stepping into the worlds of [the late Zairian president] Mobutu Seso Seko and [Zimbabwe's Robert] Mugabe".

"Mbeki's Stalinist leanings are fully on show," he wrote. "Journalists and editors arrested, opponents jailed upon trumped up charges; everyone in government living in fear that they are being followed, watched and bugged."

I accept that outsiders, not least white ones from former colonial powers, can too easily and without even being aware of it slip into unduly facile condemnation of some post-colonial African leaders. But Mbeki's trajectory as described by Justice Malala doesn't seem surprising to me.

An anecodote. More than ten years ago I was in San Francisco to report on a conference organised by Mikhail Gorbachev with the aim of bringing together leaders and thinkers from different cultures to help chart a course for the 21st century less insane than the 20th. Participants included the late, wonderful Carl Sagan, Jane Goddall, Richard Leakey, Gorbachev himself and Thabo Mbeki, who at that time was deputy president of South Africa (Nelson Mandela was still president). Most of the participants I spoke to impressed me with their humanity, warmth and absence of bullshit -- including, to some degree, Gorbachev himself, who at least the very least displayed a convincing simulacrum of humanity, but had not succeeded in shaking off Soviet-era abstractions and bromides in his language.

I had about ten minutes with Mbeki, who I was told was more than usually busy as he was (I think) engaged in intense long-distance discussions relating to the new South African consititution. Mbeki instructed me ('instructed' would be the right word) in how remarkable and progressive the document was -- explicitly recognising, for example, the rights of homosexuals. (And I have no reason to doubt that the South African constitution is indeed an impressive document). But I felt no spark of warmth or connection, only ideology, in his mini-sermon.

Now one should always make allowances for politicians being over-tired, over-stretched and so on. Mbeki may have a warm side. Obviously he operates in tough circumstances. But all I can say is that the vibe was not great. I found it a little creepy in fact, and at odds from what one felt from other participants in that struggle, including of course Mandela himself.

Another ancedote, from Desmond Tutu (reproduced by Jonathan Glover) about his mother, an uneducated black woman in Apartheid-era South Africa:

In the eyes of the world this lovely person was a nonentity. I was standing with her on the hostel verandah when this tall white man, in a flowing black cassock, swept past. He doffed his hat to my mother in greeting. I was quite taken aback; a white men raising his hat to a black woman! Such things did not happen in real life. That gesture left an indelible impression. Perhaps it helped deep down to make me realise we were precious to God and to this white man; perhaps it helped me not to become anti-white, despite the harsh treatment we received at the hands of these white people.

The tall man in the cassock was Trevor Huddleston. Many years later (but some years before the San Francisco conference) I, a confirmed atheist at least as far as this universe is concerned, gave him a lift to and fro in a crapped-out Hillman Imp (which I had failed to look after for friends) so that he could give a blessing to some native North Americans plus Buddhists who were running from London to Moscow for peace (yes, this was the during the gap in the reign of fear between the Berlin Wall and 9/11). Huddleston was a Mensch.

For a recent, moving insight into some of the long-term consequences of Apartheid, and related catastrophes, see Anthony Sher on A tidal wave of violence.

Blood money

"Conflicts in Africa since the end of the cold war have cost the continent £150bn, equivalent to all the foreign aid it has received over the same period" -- from The devastating cost of Africa's wars: £150bn and millions of lives, a report on the Oxfam study Africa's missing billions.

'A Nobel Cause'

Stefan Rahmstorf at Realclimate draws attention to an event in Potsdam where 15 Nobel laureates are meeting with top climate and energy experts and politicians to discuss global sustainability.

There are some interesting participants along with 15 Nobel laureates, including the economist Paul Klemperer and the novelist Ian McEwan.

[Comments on Realclimate suggest political maniuplation in association with the event -- for example with regard to ongoing German government support for new coal-fired plant.]

P.S 11 Oct: New York Times report here