Activism FAIL.

I received an email today from One.org. As regular readers will know, I’ve often spoken well of this charity, having found them to be pretty right on most of the time. The email says that today is the global day of action against extreme poverty. So far so good. What does One.org want me to do? Write to my MP? Organise a march? Write to my local newspaper? Give some money, perhaps?

Not at all. That’s just not sexy anymore. They’d prefer I tweeted:

I’m standing up to end poverty today with @ONEcampaign. Pls RT and join me. #standup09

or posted a Facebook status:

I’m standing up to end poverty today with @ONE. Please post this as your status and join me.

How does this constitute standing up to end poverty? Saying that I’m against poverty? How original. How productive.

Apparently:

The last 2 years we’ve set a new world record, and if everyone takes part and spreads the world, we may very well go down in the pages of Guinness again this year. So start right now. Stand up.

Now I know that the average person doesn’t have time to get involved with in-depth activism. And I know that raising awareness is important. But I wonder if this kind of request isn’t actually counter-productive. If all NGOs can muster for the global day of action is twittering, I simply despair. I see a race to the bottom, with organisations competing against each other to see who can ask for the least committment and the least meaningful action from their supporters. Am I being too cynical?

Norman Borlaug is dead

Norman Borlaug, best known as the man behind the ‘Green Revolution‘ has died. According to The Guardian:

Borlaug won the Nobel in 1970 for his contributions to the science of high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine.

Thanks to the revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled over the period…

Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, Borlaug realised that improved crop varieties were just part of the answer to world hunger, and pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible.

His obituary is here and you can also read his Nobel Lecture here.

‘One World Conservatism’: international development policy from the Conservative Party

The Conservative Party here in the UK have been unveiling their proposed policies on international development, should they (as widely expected) win the next general election, expected in May. Having admirably promised to ‘ring fence‘ international development spending, their green paper states that:

Any future government will have to take tough decisions to balance the books – and that means cutting back the rate of growth of government spending. The Conservative Party has made the bold pledge, even in the context of this fiscal squeeze, to increase the level of British aid. We have done so, above all, because it is morally right to do so. Cutbacks must not cost lives.

However, they also propose to:

establish a new MyAid fund, worth £40 million in its first year. Every taxpayer will be able to log on to the MyAid website and view details of ten ongoing DFID-funded aid programmes, and vote for which one they think should receive the extra money. The options will include programmes run directly by DFID, as well as those run by respected NGOs. The Fund will then be distributed between the ten programmes in proportion to how many votes they receive. For example, if 25 per cent of people vote for the DFID programme in Malawi, that programme would receive 25 per cent of the Fund – £10 million. Everyone who votes will be kept up to date with regular email updates about the progress of ‘their’ project.

(H/T Brian Barder.) Now I like to think of myself as a democrat. I also like to think that by and large, on broad moral issues, the people as whole know best. But international development is a much, much more complicated field than many people think. With the greatest of respect to the British citizen, if the average person in the street was able to competently evaluate development projects, then why is it that the development industry continues to be plagued by horror stories of projects gone wrong, even as the expertise of aid workers is ever increasing? The truth is that workable aid projects are really really hard to do well. A vox pop/Big Brother approach is not the way to go about it.

The Overseas Development Institute concluded that ‘there are as many questions here as answers’. This is to be expected of a green paper. Yet:

the devil lies in the detail and there is much in the chapter on value for money, and indeed in the whole report, that raises further questions. On how aid is spent, for example, it is not clear what the criteria will be for allocating aid by country if, as the Green Paper states, the 108 countries in which DFID works at present  is too many (even though 90% of current spending is concentrated in 23 countries).

Duncan Green adds that the Tories ‘love NGOs. Get ready for weird lobby meetings in which NGOs are arguing for channelling funding for essential services via the state, rather than via NGOs’. Yet the Conservatives’ free market preferences haven’t gone down well with charities, particularly when it comes to their proposals on aid vouchers. The vouchers:

would be redeemable for development services of any kind with a supplier of their choice. Such an innovation would help demonstrate what poor people really want – and who they perceive to be most effective in meeting their needs. Clearly, this will only work where there is a genuine choice between different service providers, and is not a substitute for comprehensive efforts to strengthen the capacity of national governments to guarantee access to essential services for their people. We will also examine carefully the case for using a more limited type of voucher in certain emergency situations, where providing people with aid vouchers rather than food would enable them to access products through local markets, rather than shipping in imports and putting local providers out of business.

In response, an Oxfam spokesman emphasised the impotence of vouchers where basic services do not exist, arguing that ‘what is needed is aid money invested in helping poor countries build and maintain free public health and education systems.’ Kevin Watkins was more outspoken, arguing that a voucher system would be ‘using vulnerable people to advance an ideologically loaded, market-based vision for education, which would exclude millions of kids from school. It completely overlooks the achievements of publicly financed, publicly provided education in countries such as Ethiopia and Tanzania. Watkins is right to call out the Conservatives on what they claim is a ‘non-ideological approach’ to aid delivery. There is no such thing.

Fairtrade as ’supermarket internationalism’

Matthias Varul has a nuanced assessment of fairtrade over at e-IR – it’s worth a read and I reckon he’s got it pretty much spot on. To top and tail it:

The idea of fairtrade is, at first glance, a paradoxical one. Observing that the capitalist world market works to the disfavour of producers in the Third World, left wing and Christian campaigners from the 1970s onwards tried to use this unfair market to establish equitable North-South trade relations. The paradox is encapsulated in the slogan: “In the market against the market”…

Fairtrade goods on the supermarket shelves may be sometimes misused to buy a clear conscience – but at the same time they are the bad conscience of the postcolonial world of consumption. The Adam Smith Institute complains about a “moral monopoly” that the fairtrade movement has established – and in a way it’s fair to say that it has. There now is compelling plausibility for fairtrade. Such plausibility might not be strong enough a reason to determine individual purchasing decisions – but it may prepare the ground for institutional safeguards and legislation that might one day make fairtrade a thing of the past by making sure all trade is fair.

I’ll probably be blogging more about this as my dissertation progresses. Dr Varul is also running a day seminar on the topic in October – more info here.

Media and the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2009 in Jordan

This is a guest post by Kyle Christie, a blogger, political analyst and student of journalism. He writes at The Christie Communiqués and Through the Middle East.

Yesterday saw the end of the World Economic Forum’s meeting on the Middle East, held on the banks of the dead sea in Jordan. A range of panel discussions took place, and you can find reports on ‘Sustainability in the Middle East, Middle East E-Living‘ and ‘Closing the food gap among them.

If you really want, you can also see photos from Flickr of the conference.

There was also a panel discussion on ‘Race for an Audience: Media in the Middle East‘, the (hour and a half long) video of which can be seen here (sorry, embedding didn’t work).

By the end of the forum, the participants challenged themselves in two areas, as the Dubai Chronicle reports:

Energy – increase conservation; develop alternative energies; and utilize smart grids.

Youth – with 65% of the Arab world’s population under the age of 25, the region must develop this bulge by “providing them with education and developing, retaining and attracting talent,” said Samir Brikho, Chief Executive Officer, Amec, United Kingdom, and Co-Chair of the meeting.

For a critical opinon of the World Economic Forum, see ‘Leftist Youth’ writing at 7iber.com, a Jordanian website for young citizen journalists.

Unfortunately, there was little talk of micro-payment projects or, beyond the above discussion which is well worth watching, much discussion of the role of the media in the Middle East. Obviously the World Economic Forum can be expected to have other things on it’s mind – petrodollars and the wider recession – but press freedom and a focus on developing the Middle East (where there is still widespread poverty) are issues worthy of greater, more expansive debate.

Coffee, aid and trade

Whilst I am still working on various projects before the end of formal teaching, my thoughts have begun to turn to my dissertation, which will address the topic of trade justice – what it means, how it works and so on. If that sounds vague, that’s because (at this stage at least) it is. This video should give you some idea of what I might be looking at and why I’m going to be looking at it: because trade is more important than aid.

If that piques your interest, you can find out more and take action at the film’s website.

‘There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.’

News from Kenya, care of the Daily Nation:

According to Dr Elizabeth Juma, who is the head of malaria control under the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, there has been evidence of people turning [mosquito] nets into fishing gear especially in Nyanza Province. Now a different group has discovered another lucrative business venture, and are using the nets to make wedding dresses.

I guess you have to give credit to the business acumen of it. Del Boy could learn a thing or two from these guys. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of the bridal wear available as yet.

(H/T: Aid Watch. Title quote courtesy of Thomas Jefferson.)

Leopards and spots

Marc Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written an op-ed on the IMF’s increased funding and possibilities of reform. At the core of his argument is the belief that the Fund simply hasn’t changed since the bad old days so excoriated by the likes of Stiglitz and Sachs:

in spite of the depth of the world recession, the Fund is too willing to sacrifice employment, and increase poverty, in pursuit of other goals. A country can always reduce a trade deficit by shrinking its economy, since that causes households and businesses to import less. The main purpose of IMF lending in the current crisis should be to enable low- and middle-income countries to do more of what the rich countries are doing: adopt stimulus packages that counter the downturn.

It’s not often that an article comes along with that you can agree with without reservation or qualification, but I think that this might be one of them. In the meantime, The Economist worries that all the attention the IMF is getting runs the risk of sidelining the World Bank. Over at the Bank, Shanta Devarajan insists that ‘even though it is the least integrated with the global economy, Africa may be the worst hit region by the global economic crisis’, due to falling private capital investment inflows, falling remittances, falling commodity prices and falling foreign aid. Owen Barder addresses this last point when he notes that while Wednesday’s Budget didn’t cut aid, it didn’t raise it either. Duncan Green is right to suggest that with Britain’s fiscal condition the way it is, this demonstrates the Prime Minister’s genuine (and somewhat exceptional) commitment to international development.

Across the pond, Simon Johnson argues that the current financial crisis is a similar one to those that plagued middle-income countries in the 1990s:

In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the [U.S.] banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

It’s been widely observed that the US (and other western countries) are now engaging in the very economic recovery strategies denied to the likes of Argentina, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea. (See Marc Weisbrot’s article for more on this – even now, El Salvador’s agreement with the IMF prevents it from using expansionary fiscal policy.) But for Johnson the financial sector has learnt little from the crisis:

there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

A G20 roundup

The London Summit

Alex Evans at Global Dashboard is reporting on the current state of negotiations at the summit and all-round good egg Adam Groves interviews Mr Billy Bragg in the City of London. While just about every respectable politician in the world is sounding off about the importance of avoiding protectionism (with their fingers crossed), a contrarian Noreena Hertz in The Times calls for protectionism. Though, on that note, prospects for Doha are predictably bleak.

The crisis and the developing world

Jeremy Seabrook thinks Gandhi had the right idea (he really didn’t).The FT has a nice supplement on the the financial crisis in Africa and the UK is boosting foreign aid (a bit).

Global governance

There’s some big academic thinking from Saskia Sassen at oD about a world economy powered by finance. Stiglitz et al. at the UN are arguing for the G20 to be replaced by a Global Economic Council, while the Sec-Gen is afraid of total meltdown. On the subject of disaster, we should apparently be expecting a ‘”perfect storm” of food energy and water shortages’ sometime before 2030. More broadly, Timothy Garton Ash highlights the G2 (US and China) in the light of the EU’s failure to work cohesively. The New Statesman, on similar lines, believes that ‘no-one rules the world’ and CEPR welcomes us to a truly multi-polar state of affairs.

Stories from recent American trade history

2001: Developing countries agree to a new trade round. The Doha Round was to be a ‘development round’. These countries agreed on the condition that the round would work towards significantly reducing agricultural subsidies in industrialised countries.

2002: George W. Bush signs into law the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act, increasing agricultural subsidies by 80%.

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Another story from 2002: A proposal was made to loosen WTO intellectual property (TRIPS) rules in order to allow countries to use generic drugs instead of their more expensive (read: unaffordable) patented versions without fear of being punished for copyright violation. This would apply only during a public health emergencies such as the AIDS/HIV pandemic. American pharmaceutical companies subsequently donated $50 million to Republican Congressional candidates. Representative Nancy Johnson ($204,817 donation), Senator Orrin Hatch ($387,824 donation) and Senator Charles Grassley ($100,000 donation) were amongst the Republicans who opposed the plan. The US vetoed the proposal at the WTO. Of the 144 members, it was the only one in opposition.

Development aid in a global crisis

The British Government has predicted that what is now being called the ‘Great Recession’  will leave 90 million more people in poverty. It is also being assumed that the financial crisis will set back progress towards the MDGs by at least three years. Indeed, Ashley Seager writes that:

The Global Monitoring Report from Unesco estimates the 390 million poorest Africans will see their income drop by around 20% – far more than in the developed world.

The global financial crisis has seen a fall in commodity prices as well as a drop in investment flows to poorer countries. The report’s authors – Kevin Watkins and Patrick Montjourides – estimate this will cost sub-Saharan Africa’s poorest people $18bn (£12.8bn), or $46 per person

[...]

The report says aid budgets in rich nations are being squeezed because they are expressed as a share of GDP, which is contracting. It estimates the EU’s commitment to provide 0.56% of GDP in aid by 2010 will actually mean a drop of $4.6bn.

Yet at the same time, the prime minister yesterday reaffirmed Britain’s commitment to the target that 0.7% of GNI be earmarked for development aid, which was agreed to at Gleneagles in 2005. The Secretary of State for International Development said that ‘we must continue our unwavering support for the MDGs. This must be the focus of the G20 summit’. On that, we may be forgiven some cynicism. Meanwhile, Global Dashboard provocatively questions the 0.7% shibboleth.

P.S. Further to my post linking to the ‘why aid is to blame’ interview with Dambisa Moyo, Humphrey Mulemba is articulating the counterargument.

Bloggers at the G20 London Summit

The people at the Global Call to Action Against Poverty are ‘inviting 50 influential and knowledgeable bloggers from around the world to join us at the London ExCel centre with the G20 leaders and the world’s press.’ More details here.

So if there are any fans of this blog out there, I would humbly say that I’d appreciate any nominations. You can nominate From Davos to Seattle to attend the London Summit by clicking here – just fill out the short form. Thanks.

P.S. I’m currently working on an extended article on what the world needs from the G20 – I’ll link to it on the blog when it’s finished.

Why aid is to blame…

I’d just like to link to Aida Edemariam’s interview with Dambisa Moyo, discussing Moyo’s belief that development aid to Africa is actually counterproductive and must be stopped. Key quote:

More than $1 trillion has been sent to Africa over the last 50 years. And what has it all achieved? She wants to know. “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. She would admit that aid has done some good on a local level, however her conclusion is uncompromising: “Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world” – and Africa in particular, which is “shearing off. The rest of the world is going one direction, on one growth trajectory, and Africa is going completely in the opposite direction. And yet we sit around and discuss sending another $50bn dollars of aid? I mean, come on.”

Representation at the London Summit

Some of you will have read my previous post on One’s campaign to ensure African representation at the G20 meeting in April. Well, mission successful. In the end, Downing Street acted before the petition could be delivered, so it was converted into a thank you note! According to the One blog, ‘32,319 ONE members around the world, including 1,104 in the UK, signed that thank you message.’

The London Summit’s official website reports that invitations have been sent to ‘the Chair of The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the Chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the President of the EU Commission are also invited. The Chairman of the African Union Commission will also attend.’

There’s also an interesting interview on the site with Lord Malloch-Brown, Foreign Office Minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations (a suspiciously large portfolio?). One thing that strikes me is how comfortable he seems with articulating the desires and interests of Africa. Speaking on behalf of an entire continent seems to come a little too easily to the minister.

Africa and the G20 summit

Ngaire Woods profiles what’s on Africa’s agenda for April’s meeting. The list is fairly modest and the matter of institutional reform is eminently reasonable. The worry is the funding:

To deliver on these, obviously the IMF and World Bank will need significant resources. Food security alone will require a step increase in donor support in the light of higher food prices ( World Bank paper detailing this). The IMF and World Bank should be measuring and informing the G20 of the scale of these new needs, and seeking adequate finance to meet them.

Obviously we’ll have to wait and see. But if there was some kind of priority considering being given to this, we might have heard something more about it. It just worries me that all that seems to be going on is a lot of talking about talking. Check out this press conference with the Foreign Secretary:

Kristof on sweatshops

Food for thought:

Poverty and inequality: a partial discussion

The original poll can be found here.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who voted and apologise for having taken so long to address the results.

Secondly, the results: 52% voted for poverty, with inequality receiving 48% of the votes. A slim majority believe that poverty is a greater evil than inequality.

I would like to accept at the outset that I should have phrased the question better (though formulating the phrasing that was used was hard enough). I was asking about the international scale – that is, inequality between incomes worldwide, rather within one (for example, national) society. (It is worth noting that the most iniquitous societies in the world are the US and UK.) I was trying to get at the question of whether it is morally/ethically more concerning that absolute poverty exists – that is, that some people’s quality of life is so low, or whether it is more concerning that there should be such a great divergence between qualities of life. My opinion is that, while poverty is a socially constructed and embedded concept, my main concern would have to be ensuring a basic minimum quality of life, with an equitable world system being a secondary concern.

Of course, whether we see inequality or poverty as the more serious problem has dramatic consequences for policymaking.

Context of inequality and poverty

On inequality, the statistics are eloquent. According to the UNDP’s 1996 Human Development Report:

Between 1960 and 1991 the share of the richest 20% rose from 70% of global income to 85%-while that of the poorest declined from 2.3% to 1.4%. So the ratio of the shares of the richest and the poorest increased from 30:1 to 61:1-by 1991 more than 85% of the world’s population received only 15% of its income.

Similarly, we can look at poverty. Of course, much ink has been spilled on the thorny problem of defining that term, but that is not an issue I wish to dwell upon at this time. Current figures reveal that 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 per day. Moreover, income inequality is getting worse while poverty declines slowly, if at all.

What does the vote mean?

To me, a vote for poverty suggests a concern with absolute and basic needs, while a vote for inequality suggests the socially enmeshed nature of deprivation. Yet at some level, poverty remains unavoidable, or at least seems a natural, rather than man-made phenomenon. The same cannot be said for inequality. Inequality as a concept is much closer to injustice, suggesting a greater moral obligation to correct it. To put it another way, inequality is a more political problem than poverty.

At the same time, we should remember that inequality is seen by some (more economically liberal thinkers) as a necessary condition for a socially mobile society. Inequality, they argue, provides incentives for self-improvement. Yet the obscene degrees of global inequality manifest today go far beyond any system of ‘incentives’.

Closing thoughts

Questions remain. Jan Nederveen Pieterse asks whether rising global inequality is a consequence of ‘the transformation from national market capitalism to global capitalism’. Is this just a matter of ‘the victims of progress’?[1]

What does increasing global inequality say about the idea of trickle-down economics? What judgement does it pass on neoliberal globalisation?

See also…

• Duncan Green, in From Poverty to Power discusses inequality.
• Raphael Kaplinsky, Globalization, Poverty and Inequality, chapter two.

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[1] Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Global Inequality: Bringing Politics Back In’, Third World Quarterly, 23 (2002), pp. 1023-1046.

Poverty and inequality: a poll

I hope to discuss the results in due course.

EU’s €1bn budgetary surplus – where to spend it

Given that I failed to write yesterday (Blog Action Day) and may well fail to write tomorrow (International Day for the Eradication of Poverty) and that today is World Food Day, it seems like a good time to take some (blog-based) action on food and poverty.

My friend Alex at Global Justice: Tipping the Scales emailed me about this petition from the anti-poverty campaigning organisation ONE. Apparently, the EU has a billion euro surplus from this year’s budget. Now some would say that this money should be saved up for when the Union needs it, perhaps in some kind of financial crisis… Others will say that it should be returned to citizens who had to contribute towards it in their taxes. But, given the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and its malign impact on food supplies and poverty, there is a certain justice in the idea that it ought to be spent on ‘additional development assistance’ for African farmers. If anyone should be told this, it’s President Sarkozy (see my previous post on Sarkozy’s attitude as regards European agriculture). So, in the same of arbitrary international observances days (all of them), get yourself to ONE.org and sign the petition.

World Bank presidency now open to all nations

The US has foregone its traditional powers of appointment over the presidency of the World Bank. By (absurd) convention, the Bank is run by an American while the IMF is managed by a European.

According to the Guardian’s report, the British Secratary of State for International Development, Douglas Alexander played a crucial role in extracting the concession. I’ve long been impressed by the work of the British government in the field of international development. Not only do we as a nation punch well above our weight in terms of financial efforts, but we do sometimes find the courage to stand up to, or moderate (even mitigate?) American interests.

At any rate, the surrendering of the power of appointment is a significant improvement. Even as a gesture, it is a good one. The reform of the Bretton Woods twins is becoming increasingly urgent and yesterday’s development indicates a real readiness for substantive change.

P.S. Speaking of DFID, it’s worth highlighting the new DFID bloggers site. It’s a promising project and I’m looking forward to what they have to say.