Media Awards — With a Difference

18 May

Journalists Protest against rising violence during march in Mexico CityWhat do a documentary film called The Bengali Detective, a 20-something Somali-born model and Indonesian artesanal tin miners have in common?

 

They were all featured in one way or another at what was for me an unusual awards ceremony in London earlier this month, a combination of top-end cocktail party and thought-provoking look at a few of the multitude of fascinating stories from the developing world British viewers are offered on a regular basis by their national media. The annual event is put on by One World Media, a non-profit that promotes and supports media coverage of, to put it broadly, developing world issues.

 

The Bengali Detective, from Native Voice films, is about a team of detectives, actually, who investigate crimes in Kolkata, and attempt to win a talent show with their Bollywood dancing. The model, Samira Hashi, took part in a documentary made by BBC Current Affairs, visiting a refugee camp in Somalia, from which her parents fled when she was a baby. And the tin miners were the subject of the winner of One World’s Press category, an article called Death Metal by The Guardian’s Kate Hodal.

Inside Voladora Radio

For me, personally, the work of both nominees and winners, from journalism students to field-seasoned documentary producers, brought a mixture of admiration (for the dozens of examples of excellent reporting), jealousy (as I couldn’t help recall the many times my article ideas here were met with the ever irritating ‘but-what’s-the-Canadian-angle?’ response), curiosity (to know more about the many fascinating stories to which we in the audience were briefly introduced) and a recognition of the way our nations and cultures the world over are woven together in a vast web of strange, comic, tragic and compelling situations.

That we can only scratch the surface of these worlds through such stories about them is frustrating yet challenging. There is so much going on, so many characters — from Josephat Torner, an albino man in Tanzania who tries to counter the terrible superstitions that have lead to the murders of people with albinism, to former Afghan member of parliament Azita Rahfat, who decides dress one of her four daughters as a boy to gain social respect — and so many struggles in the world around us. Why would we not want to know about these things?

Yet in a recent podcast put out by the Center for Global Development in Washington, Nicolas Kristoff said he was “deeply concerned about the collapse in coverage of global news,” particularly in television.

“Your average news consumer is much less exposed to international stories, and those that they are exposed to are particular, segment stories,” he says. “It tends not to be development stories and I think this is going to be a real blind spot in the US and also, to some degree, globally.”

The contradiction here of course is that we are better able to access global stories and news more easily than ever. We are more avid than ever for information that should help us make better decisions socially and politically. Average people are more aware than ever that we live in an inter-connected world.

Yet national media are more convinced than ever, it sometimes seems to me, that domestic audiences are turned off by anything that is not local and trivial. It is easier to inform ourselves about the Kardashians than Kazakhstan, Kolkata or Cairo. We are encouraged to skim and peruse, to flip through pages, keep our brains on stand-by mode, rather than glue our attention to stories that are factual, compelling and meaningful.

One World Media and its annual awards go a long way to countering the inanity, just as their fellowships and student programs help younger journalists to both learn about and take on reporting in the developing world.

Like the super educated scientists who must spend their days working for Big Pharma searching for weight-loss remedies instead of a cure for malaria, I am sure that most smart journalists would rather be chasing unique and amazing real stories than providing free publicity to people who don’t need it. I have always believed that the whole point of being a journalist is to discover and write about the interesting aspects of reality, to be lucky enough to find curious stories that reveal more than first thought — like my article from Mexico about obligatory literature classes for beat officers to try to combat police corruption — and to give a voice, as many of the winners’ speeches noted, to the voiceless. It should be about explaining the world and shedding a light on its injustices as much as informing the public.

This is not the first time, I know, that I have written about this. But as can be seen in my earlier post ’From Underdogs to Watchdogs,’ a short article about Ayiti Kale Je, or Haiti Grassroots Watch, what One World Media also suggests is that independent, investigative journalism can also, in its own words, “contribute to international development worldwide.”

In a world where ignorance is a tool in the hands of governments, big corporations and the global elite in general, independent information is one of the few arms with which people can fight back. So there is a thread here that is not hard to follow. What we write and what we read, what we film and what we watch, all matter. How we support independent media in nations wracked with poverty, inequality and corrupt governments matters even more.

SPI Demonstrators on September 24

SPI Demonstrators on September 24

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Sebastião Salgado’s Photographic Call to Arms

14 May

The Natural History Museum in London is currently showing a large collection of photographs by a man who is by any account one of the world’s greatest photographers–and one of my favourites.

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The first photo of his I ever saw is probably his most famous: tens of thousands of men, covered with mud and straining under the weight of their tumplines, as they worked the Serra Pelada gold mine in Para, Brazil. It is an arresting, apocalyptic image that hardly seems real, yet that portrayed an undeniable reality of life for the poor of Brazil in the 1980s.  I once met a man who had worked Serra Pelada — some 100,000 worked there at its peak — who told me that what they were doing was going ever further down into the earth, filling sacks, then carrying them up to be upended into a sluice that captured its flakes and nuggets of gold. They were paid for every sack they brought up, depending on how much gold was extracted. In his case, it was enough to buy some land on a fertile island in the Tocantins River.

Yesterday I learned in a lecture that Salgado, who born in Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, actually first came to fame with a photo of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan while he worked for Magnum. But I know him better for all of the work that followed, like Migrations and Workers, as well as his vital support for the Landless Rural Workers Movement, its struggles and victories also portrayed in a book he published called Terra, or Land.

It was Terra, in fact, that caught the attention of his biographer, Parvati Nair, who delivered yesterday’s lecture, and who saw connections in it that evoked her home, India. She not only spoke about his working methods and personal history, including years in exile here in London during Brazil’s military dictatorship, but also about some interesting aspects of his personal life.

Salgado and his wife Lelia Wanick now live on the same farming estate where he grew up, and have been purchasing land to replant with trees. According to Ms. Nair, they have planted some two million trees, setting in motion the regeneration of hundreds of hectares of tropical forest and return of all kinds of wildlife.

A legacy as important as his photographic work? That’s a difficult question to answer. But in crossing the lines of art, environment, economics and modernity, Salgado’s opus stands out for the way it opens up vistas to a natural world both tremendous in its forms and extension yet under constant threat from human beings. In fact, the images of the few human beings who live in some of these vast and often inhospitable expanses are at times all but  indistinguishable from those of the trees and animals and even the extraordinary rock, ice and water formations that make his photographs such compelling works of art and documentation. So that now it are tumbling multitudes of penguins strewn across an apocalyptic rock face rather than people that stop us and make us wonder what we are seeing.

salgado lizard

The exhibit of photographs at the Natural History Museum  takes us throughout a world that remains untouched, in large part because these spaces are so remote, and constitute, in Salgado’s own words, “a call to arms for us to preserve what we have.”

For me, his devotion to chasing unforgettable images that make us re-think both our natural world and human society, on the one hand, and his quiet support for people engaged in the struggle for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable social order, on the other, are undistinguishable. They feed into each other and make Salgado a photographer — and a person –  truly unique and admirable. In fact, it was the experience of seeing the landscape around Aimorés come back to life that inspired Salgado to begin working on Genesis.

Check out Salgado’s official website, here, and Ms. Nair’s book, A Different Light: the Photography of Sebastião Salgado, here.

Transformations, Social and Otherwise

7 May

A few days ago in France, I did something I haven’t done in about 37 years: I walked through the hilly streets of a Paris suburb famous for its large 17th century park called St. Cloud. It took a while but I also found the modern apartment complex where I had lived for almost a year in 1975/6, climbing the steps through its multi-level gardens past dozens of identical glass balconies with the wood-slat blinds I suddenly remembered very well. I ended up at the square shallow pool which sat in front of the building where I had lived and worked as a ‘jeune fille au pair’ when I was 18.
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I don’t have happy memories, I realized, of that period. I didn’t much like the family I had worked for, and never felt at home in their sumptuous apartment. I was then a weird combination of things, a poorly paid servant, a naive rural Canadian and an exploration-minded teenager actually living in Europe – in a European capital city – for the first time ever, chafing at the constraints of no money and bratty children and not enough freedom.

St. Cloud, which is rather small, overwhelmingly white middle-class and probably mostly Figaro-reading conservative, didn’t bring back any of the heart-pumping nostalgia I always feel when I am in Paris itself. Instead, it made me uncomfortable again,and inevitably got me thinking about time, change, my personal history and the human condition itself, I guess, the way we change with time yet are essentially the same, hard as that can be to recognize. Like the French philosopher Francois Julian suggests, you can’t not be the 18-year-old at the same time you are the middle aged, or even elderly, man or woman. You may see radical changes when you look in the mirror, but it’s the same brain, the same you, only looking different and carrying way more of the baggage of experience we accumulate throughout our lives.

That sense of connectedness and disconnection, or maybe the question itself of which one am I really? got me thinking about change, in general. Particularly as it pertains to what I am studying right now, the enterprise of ‘helping the poor.’ The whole point of it really, when you come down to it, is the assumption that our external mediation can bring about changes in people’s lives as drastic as the one I have gone through from being a young person of 18 or 19 to being 56, or even from a time when I wrote continual letters home on thin blue aerograms to being able to communicate face to face with a small electronic device I can carry around in my hand bag.

Yet that other transformation, that of the poor individual with all his or her burdens, lacking rights and resources and open horizons– how often does that happen thanks to the aid process?

I know it can happen, and this comparison struck me the next day when I went to talk to Benedicte Roget at an organization called Freres des Hommes at their offices on a tiny street in the Latin Quarter.

The goals of FDH all have to do with social transformation, she told me, of the communities with which they engage.”We don’t want to do things in the place of, but really to give the means to, people,” she said. “We consider that the real actors, the disenfranchised, have the ability to change things themselves.”

Harvesting the Fruits of Solidairty

Harvesting the Fruits of Solidairty

I have in fact seen some of the results of their support in Senegal, where a network of peasant farmers I blogged about in the early months of The Global Kiosk essentially go to organizations like Freres des Hommes and tell them how they can be helpful — rather than vice versa.

Transforming lives has to be more than a cliche or an NGO advertising ploy. It is not easy or quick or the result of the few dollars you send.

Like our own, it is more mysterious than we think.

Designing It for Themselves

18 Apr
Playground Designed by the Kids Themselves -- including their own idea for a roof-like garden, the Sky-o-Swale.

Playground Designed by the Kids Themselves — including their own idea for a roof-like garden, the Sky-o-Swale.

In the late 1980s, the Mumbai-based Indian Alliance, a grassroots social movement of the urban poor, began talking with the members of Mahila Milan, or Women Together, about housing solutions. Several hundred families were going to be evicted from the sidewalk huts in which had been living, in some cases, for decades. Eventually, the women came up with their own design for the kind of apartments that would suit their and their families’ needs. They were taller than municipal apartment units, with a loft for sleeping, wider corridors and toilets at each end instead of inside the apartment itself. And those features all responded to the realities in which the poor of urban India lived, with frequent power outs and lack of running water, among other things.

In 2008, in the Toronto suburb of Kingston-Galloway, some young designers at a firm called ArchiTEXT became involved with the local community in a design initiative that would also incorporate a poverty reduction strategy. The project included working with about 50 people, mostly youth and even children, in coming up with a design that would transform an old police station to a community centre. Over a year and half, anyone interested in participating in the project could learn about everything from design processes (using a free Google version of Autocad) to green building mechanics to building codes through weekly three-hour sessions.

The result, inaugurated in 2010, is called The Storefront, and with its Eco-Food Hub kitchen, community garden, solar panels and multi-tasking resource centres, it’s pretty amazing. Various foundations and government bodies kicked in the money for it, but it is clearly a project that was directed by a community in need — many of the area residents are new Canadians from nations as diverse as Somalia, Jamaica and India — rather than any authority or developer.

Last week, I had a coffee with Zahra Ebrahim, the founder of ArchiTEXT, a social purpose business that is all about creativity, innovation, community and not fitting in with anything else. “Making social change happen is our new thing,” she said. “We’re calling it funding the misfits, everything from the policy level to the community design level to the financing. It’s really emergent because this is Canada and we don’t think of ourselves as needing to look at poverty in the same way.”

At the same time, traditional non-profits and charities are hampered in the way they work with poor communities. “The things that are frustrating for me is that social problems are generative, they’re root problems, yet not-for-profits get money and if they don’t deliver that outcome they don’t get funding, or if they deliver that outcome more efficiently than they planned, they lose the money.” Instead, she said, we need to be concentrating on finding alternative metrics.

Talking about the 80-unit apartment buildings designed by slum dwellers in Mumbai and also financed by a hodgepodge of different non-profits and other agencies, she picked up on something both groups had in common. Like the women of Nagpada, Kingston-Galloway was organized, had built what Ms. Ebrahim calls “social infrastructure. It’s based on a community that was like this ,” she said, joining fingers — “ten years before we came in.” So when they arrived with tools and learning, this community was ready. “I don’t do anything,” she says.

Now the Community Design Initiative group is looking for ways to help people running small businesses from their apartment towers use space in the community centre instead. They want to attach another wing and a second floor, and is the subject of a national case study.

Sure, Kingston-Galloway is not a developing world slum. But like many urban enclaves in North America, it is a place often described as “troubled,” where people live with little money and narrow horizons; the solutions to their everyday problems are usually delivered from on high, are pretty stingy, and don’t really change anything. Because of their collective experience and ability to take charge, this corner of Scarborough at least represents something different for the thousands of people who live there. “It’s making everyone not go ‘oh my god, I can’t wait to get out of Kingston-Galloway,’” she says. “It’s ‘I love Kingston-Galloway.’”

Readers can check out what’s going on at The Storefront at its website, and the cool stuff ArchiTEXT is doing here — and of course , the story of the Mumbai slum dwellers, and other social movements, is told in my book ‘Broke But Unbroken: Grassroots Social Movements and Their Radical Solutions to Poverty.’

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Repurposing Our International Leftovers

2 Apr

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Yesterday Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development’s U.K. office sent around one of his usual announcements having to do with what’s happening in the world of development aid. Usually these have to do with some of interesting podcasts he hosts called Development Drums.

This one, however, described a new program that would see thousands of tons of otherwise wasted food from our First World supermarkets be sent to hungry people in the so-called Third World. After all, we throw out or otherwise waste an estimated 1.2 billion metric tons of food annually, wrote Mr. Barder –“because of losses in harvesting, storage, transportation and poor labelling.  This is between 30-50% of all food produced: yet at the same time, about 900 million people will go to bed tonight hungry.”

As a result, he said, “(a) consortium of donors, NGOs, supermarkets and agro-businesses are working on plans to use surplus food, currently wasted in industrialised countries, to the developing world to tackle hunger.”

Well, it did take a few seconds but then I realized that it was April 1st — and that Mr. Barder was just kidding us. He even concocted a rather brilliant acronym for this “plan” – the Africa Pilot for Repurposing International Leftovers (APRIL).

Nonetheless, the tongue-in-cheek message did offer some, ahem, food for thought.

How many of us were told , as youngsters refusing to eat something we didn’t like, “to think of the starving children in Africa,” and eat up? Most of us I imagine. Yet as the absurdity of Mr. Barder’s April Fools Day message makes clear, there is something awry in a system where so many people waste food and so many others don’t have enough to eat.

It is pretty clear by now that the reasons for this is not because there isn’t enough food in the world to feed us all. It is because millions of people in the Global South don’t have the money to buy it. Their incomes are so small — either from working, farming or running some kind of small informal business — that the percentage of income available for food is as negligible as our concerns about throwing away a third to a half of what we buy.

What’s more, we are not talking here about the wilted lettuce in your crisper, but the vast amounts that gets lost in the food chain before it even gets to our fridge.

Why is food so expensive in countries where so many people live on one to two dollars a day?

It is, in fact, the same system that still makes huge profits dumping a ton of misshapen potatoes, or pricing their produce so high it didn’t sell so it gets tossed. Poor countries, moreover, are often highly dependent on food imports — which is crazy when you think about it.

Haiti for example was self-sufficient in food, much as many people barely got by, until the 1980s. Now it must import from abroad about 80 per cent of its food, and when prices spike, as they did, in 2007, even people with jobs simply can’t afford the tax-payer-subsidized rice or pasta from abroad. Meanwhile, the farmers that once grew the rice themselves have long been put out of business by the cheaper subsidized product. Rural poverty not only means that farmers have no storage facilities or roads to transport their produce, but they lack enough land to make a decent living.

Yet the wealthy countries of this world continue to promote poor-nation dependence on our “leftovers.” They continue to say that agri-business is better for food production than small family owned farms. And, of course, they continue to receive billions in subsidies.

APRIL may be a joke, but it’s one that illustrates the upside down world of poverty and food. Let’s hope it hits our governments’ brains, for a change, instead of their funny bones.

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Losing our Experimental Lakes

19 Mar
Photo:J. Tyler Bell

Photo:J. Tyler Bell

The closing of the famous Experimental Lake Area research station in northern Ontario was announced almost a year ago,  and its dismantling is apparently already underway.

As is a way of thinking that holds that a clean environment is something worth preserving.

Just imagine this amazing piece of nature — 58 lakes surrounded by forest, where for the past 45 years scientists have made the kinds of discoveries that enhance the value of our freshwater resources — and compare it to the simultaneously smug yet boring features of Tory government ministers and their obsession with the Alberta tar sands.

It makes a picture that, in many ways, illustrates only too clearly the frightening prejudices of our small-minded prime minister, Stephen Harper, and his acolytes — as well as the sharp sense of frustration the more than 60 per cent of us who didn’t vote for them must be feeling.

It was the evidence amassed by ELA scientists that stopped the use of phosphates in detergents and fertilizers. Studies there also made an open-and-shut case against the sulphur oxide pollution from the south that caused acid rain.  As Andrew Nikiforuk, one of Canada’s best environmental journalists, put it in an article last year, “The project not only broadened the world’s horizons on water with more than 750 peer reviewed studies and 120 graduate theses, but provided hard data on the impact of industrial activities on the world’s most critical resource.”

What’s more, the costs of this useful scientific activity were not particularly high — especially when compared to the amounts the Harper government wants to spend on fighter jets, or already spends on the emoluments of our idle and self-congratulatory senators.

And worse, its loss — described by one foreign scientist in Nikiforuk’s article as “the kind of act one expects from the Taliban in Afghanistan, not from the government of a civilized and educated nation” — is only one measure in the Tories’ quest to eviscerate the environmental protections previously afforded to land, air, lakes and rivers throughout Canada.

The Tory government has also taken away funding of the Arctic Institute of North America’s Kluane Research Station, axed the seven-person team of smokestack specialists that worked with both enforcement officers and industry to stop air pollution and is closing the entire Department of Fisheries and Oceans contaminants program next month.

And that is aside from removing environmental protections from aboriginal lands, firing hundreds of scientist from government departments and putting the kibosh on journalists simply contacting and interviewing a relevant scientist for an article without getting permission from Ottawa first — the way we used to.

Little wonder that (now unemployed) killer whale expert Peter Ross was moved to express that “(i)t is with apprehension that I ponder a Canada without any research or monitoring capacity for pollution in our three oceans, or any ability to manage its impacts on commercial fish stocks, traditional foods to over 300,000 aboriginal people, and marine wildlife.”

In fact, apprehension is an understatement. Fear is more probably what we should be feeling. With the determination to push through tar sands pipelines, the disdain for science and the loss of the unique environmental laboratory that was the Experimental Lakes Area, we are now more than ever at the mercy of contaminants, pollution, climate change — and proudly ignorant politicians.

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Some Thoughts on Chavez

7 Mar

There is a quote I use from Tony Benn in my book, Broke But Unbroken, that goes like this: “All progress comes from underneath. All real achievements are collective.”

It is an idea that is neither novel nor unusual, but with the death yesterday of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, I think it’s one many on the Left would do well to ponder.

Yes, he was an unalloyed champion of the Venezuelan underdog, using public money from the country’s oil industry to greatly reduce poverty and inequality. He took a country where an estimated 21 percent of people suffered from malnutrition and turned resources to education, health, housing, pensions for the elderly and agriculture. He supported grassroots social movements like Brazil’s Landless and Rural Workers Movement through scholarships to medical schools and agronomy courses. And in doing all of that he underlined the comparison we can make with other underdeveloped countries, especially the resource rich ones, that have never even tried to makes these kinds of endeavours and where poverty remains endemic and horrible.

But that is not a revolution. At least not the kind I’d prefer to see. Decision-making power remained in the hands of Chavez and his ministers. The improvements they made may have been significant, but they came from and were controlled up top, not down below.

And while I enjoyed his ‘the-smell-of-sulphur-is-still-here’ speech at the U.N. a few years ago as much as anyone,  I don’t think there is any kind of a positive spin that can be put on his embrace of extraordinarily nasty dictators like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Likewise, he may have got rid of the hegemony of profit-minded, rich-country petroleum companies in Venezuela’s oil fields, yet only transferred the same powers to China, one of the most undemocratic nations on earth. According to Intercambio Climático, it now owes China more than $35 billion in so-called commodity backed loans.

The disconnect between popularity and popular power can be seen, I think, in the troubling story of a housing project Venezuela built in Zorange, a district near the slum of Cité Soleil, in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince. Built at a cost of $4.9 million, 128 solid new homes sat empty for 15 months before a few chosen families were finally allowed to move in. By then desperate squatters had already gone in and taken over 50 of the houses. Who would get a house and through what mechanism has never been very clear, but one thing is certain: this was not a project designed with or directed by any organization of the urban poor in Haiti. Representatives of government, both Venezuelan and Haitian, were the one making the decisions.

Anyone can make mistakes, but the emotional, even irrational, adulation of Chavez and hatred of anyone who questioned him makes it impossible to want to cut the late leader any slack. Villifying people who have ideas different from his — and I do not include here the kind of people who would like to roll back time and have a small, ridiculously over-privileged elite return to its position of power — is not just short-sighted and unhelpful but unfair.(Ibid for the folks who lean the other way and think Chavez is the worst leader in the world.)

Venezuela still faces major challenges. Its crime rate is out of control — and along with enough to eat and a roof over one’s head, basic security is also a human right. Its economy is highly unbalanced, raising questions regarding whether it will need to exploit dirtier sources of oil and exacerbate global warming, and of course the wide political gulf still divides Venezuelans.

Authentic political and socio-economic progress still eludes Venezuela, but when it does come, it will be collective and it will come from below.

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