Global Kiosk

Burning Rain Forest in the Amazon: The Cargill Corporation will plant soy here, put the oil from it in your fuel tank and save the planet. What a great idea. (Photo:FAO)

Twenty-seven years ago a friend asked me if I planned to attend the Rio Summit on Climate Change and Environment (or whatever its official name was) and I kind of laughed and said, ‘Why would I?’ I knew nothing concrete would come from a bunch of world leaders once again talking about what was best for all of us when, historically, this has never been their priority. Unfortunately, I was right, and now all these years later, the problem is worse and the leaders are meeting once again.

Now however, like the global economic summits, affected groups are preparing to protest at Copenhagen, bringing the voices and opinions of “all of us” to that forum. In Indonesia, for example, the Indonesian Peasant Union, or SPI, is joining with environmental organizations to point out all the many flaws in a new 550-million-euro fund the European Union wants to disperse in Indonesia to promote the cultivation of crops for biofuel. The idea, which is the big, expensive, top-down kind governments love, is a bad one. It will transfer millions of dollars to millionaires, do little if anything to stop global warming and cause more land conflicts between plantation owners and small holders and forest peasants, of which there have been some 500 already as of 2008. A much better (and cheaper) idea — that of promoting peasant tenure rights, technology transfers, encouraging mixed cropping of plants for biofuels as well as food crops — is not even on the cards. 

In a recent New York times column, Thomas L. Friedman cited an intergovernmental working group study suggesting that reducing deforestation by 25 per cent in places like Indonesia, Brazil and the Congo would cost about $30 billion. Now this is crazy. Every one of these places have governments that are (and always have been) totally against empowering the rural poor. They all want to make money from their forest resources and to allow corporations the right to profit from agroforestry and agribusiness. They all have people living in or near forests, who survive from them and would take care of them — if allowed.

The governments of wealthy nations, meanwhile, are also more interested in propping up a system of profits than in really tackling global warming. As Andrew Simms, co-author of a new report called Other Worlds Are Possible, put it: “Every government planning to attend the Copenhagen climate summit says they want to stop catastrophic global warming. Yet every government also promotes economic policies that guarantee disaster. None is steering us genuinely to live collectively within our environmental means. Without new economic development models that chart how to meet human needs within ecological boundaries, any climate deal will be set up to fail. This report shows that better, new economic models already exist. The challenge is for governments to stop clinging to old, failing economic theory that treats the Earth like a business in liquidation, and people as an inefficient factor of production.” 

There are solutions to environmental destruction and global warming, and like the solutions to poverty, they come from the people most affected by these. They come from below, and are collective, solidary and fair, which means they don’t cost $30 billion. Their price is simply a new way of thinking. So while I would never have gone to Rio to listen to its spurious sumiteers, I would definitely be happy to go to Copenhagen — to protest outside the meetings of the self-important and powerful with the thousands of average people no one ever listens to.

I am finally reading Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa after a several-month wait in the Toronto Public Library system. Moyo’s thesis got outsize attention a few months ago, so much so that in spite of the negative reviews from some, I figured it must have some good points. After all, the extraordinary waste of aid money is a fact, and not exactly a  new one. Hence my patience.

So, was the wait worth it? In a word, no. Moyo’s style of writing is not great, to the point where it has taken me three weeks to read and it’s only about 150 pages. Aside from the turgid prose, there are also many innate contradictions. The author makes the case that poor countries, particularly in Africa, should try and raise money through bond issues, rather than accepting soft loans from the World Bank. At the same time, she does, rather unabashedly, admit that many African countries defaulted on such investment money in the past and even refers to Argentina’s massive default in 2001 (a subject I cover in the final chapters of my book) on emerging-market bonds its government issued throughout the 90s.

She is also a big fan of investment from China: Now I am not an expert on the deals China has made in several African countries, and don’t think there is anything wrong with it building infrastructure in them. But from the little I do know, it seems pretty clear that China has gotten a very good deal on the commodities it is exploiting in those countries, to the detriment of their national populations. In other words, the resources of a nation have been dealt away for less than their value, while the people to whom such resources ultimately belong won’t see much if any improvement in their lives because — in part — of this. In many ways, the Chinese are simply replicating the what earlier colonial powers did in Africa throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. 

The real problem, though, is this: The issue we are dealing wtih here is not the lack of money flowing into these poor countries. Rather, it is their rampant misuse. The overseas development aid that goes to the Third World is handed over to recipient governments, not to the poor themselves for whom it is ostensibly intended. And these recipient governments, whether national, regional or urban, are the very entitites that have proven themselves chronically unwilling or incapable of dealing with the economic injustices that keep millions in poverty. They are, moveover, completely unaccountable to either them or to the people making the loans or grants to help alleviate poverty.

And while people like Bono and other aid activists want affluent countries to at least keep their promises of giving .7 per cent of their GDP to poor nations, (which practically none of them are) the problem is not the amounts of money. The problem is that it doesn’t get spent on improving the lives of the poor or anyone else, really. The problem is corruption, arrogance, poorly devised projects, infrastructure meant to boost the macro-economy yet end up displacing people and causing more poverty, as well as all kinds of regulations that make it extremely difficult to do things like build housing. In Mumbai, for example, the construction of apartment buildings by the National Slum Dwellers Federation required 75 different permits just to begin.

When you look at it this way, you can’t help but feel that national, regional and local governments really don’t care whether they alleviate poverty or not. So how will giving them greater access to funds help? The trickle-down theory doesn’t even work in rich nations, like the U.S., so how is it supposed to work in Nigeria?

Anyone looking for a good analysis of why “aid is not working” — and what does — should look at articles written by David Satterthwaite and Diana Mitlin in a journal called Environment and Urbanization. These offer informed reasoning on what happens to most aid money, as well as a description of a fairly new Urban Poor Fund that makes loans and grants directly to the organized poor for specific projects they have defined and designed themselves.

“Dead Aid” meanwhile is going back to the library today, leaving me with the distinct impression that it garnered the attention it did for reasons other than its arguments.

Last night, I went to hear a speech given by Malalai Joya. An MP in Afghanistan’s parliament, she has become a forceful and charismatic voice in the defence of average Afghanis. By doing so, she opens up (for many, I think) an entirely new vision of what is really happening in her country, caught as it is in a quagmire of utterly corrupt and inept governance, druglords, warlords, the Taliban and the occupying NATO forces. The invasion, so heavily touted to us who are paying for it as essential in bringing freedom to Afghanistan, “has pushed us from the frying pan into the fire,” she said. Life for women “is like a hell,” their situation “as catstrophic now as it was under the Taliban.”

The truth of what is really happening there is something I’ve felt a need to know about for a long time now. Sure, I was and still am against the invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, not because I believe there is any saving grace whatsoever to either the Ba’ath party or the Taliban, but because I wholeheartedly agree with Malalai Joya when she says that “democracy never comes by guns, cluster bombs or white phosphorous.” Yet I recognize that most average people in Canada, the U.S. and Britain really don’t know what to think –in spite of the fact that most polls now show a slight majority of Canadians at least to be in favour of immediate withdrawal. But we’re not up-in-arms about it, no longer marching in the street. The mainstream media here has been surprisingly silent about any other view but the one that insists that people are better off with the Taliban (sort of) gone . Well, out of power at least.

But last night, Joya described how the war on terror that governments, particularly the US government, claim to be fighting is really a war on civilians. By now more than 65,000 innocent civilians have been killed, compared to only 2000 Taliban fighters. Recently three wedding parties have been bombed, with hundreds killed. Women activists are under constant physical threat and many have been killed for daring to demand human rights.  The Parliament, which sets aside a much ballyhooed 25 percent of its seats for women, has been unable and unwilling to enact laws that bring people, especially women, any real freedom. And most of those female MPs, says Joya, are either pro-Karzai, pro-Taliban or just as conservative. The burkha has not only not disappeared but is worn by women “to keep alive,” she said, “even in Kabul.” Poverty is so rife and so dire that women are selling their babies for $10. (The country is still the lowest on the UN’s Poverty Index.)

She describes president Hamid Karzai as “a shameless puppet man who compromises with warlords and drug dealers.” His competition, Abdullah Abdullah, is cut from the same cloth, and will be given another top job, she predicts, in the Karzai government. There is absolutely no one, it seems, who wants to bring about real democracy in Afghanistan except the millions of beleaguered people who quietly go about the business of daily survival, praying they don’t get killed, and still hoping they will someday be able to live normal lives. And for this appalling state of affairs, Canadian taxpayers have shelled out $18 billion — so far.

While the audience who came to listen to her last night had to put up with an hour of truly irritating warm-up speakers — every single one of them pronouncing her name incorrectly — it was hugely  worth it in the end to see and hear this electrifying young woman. Anyone interested in knowing more about what is really going on in the country we’re supposedly saving should look for her book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman who Dared to Raise Her Voice. Proceeds will go to a clinic and orphanage she has set up in her province, Farah, and can have a far greater impact, I’d bet, than the millions misspent on infrastructure projects, most of which ends up in the pockets of corrupt politicians. I am also convinced that this kind of solidarity is better than charity. As Malalai Joya herself said, “No nation can donate liberation to another nation.”