Archive | December, 2011

Selling Land, Stealing Livelihoods

14 Dec

Today the International Land Coalition released a report they and several other organizations joined together to produce on the buying up of arable land in poor nations for immense personal and corporate profit. Think of a country where protests erupt — like Egypt — or where donors send money to help the poverty stricken — almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa — and you will find rural families’ inability to make a living at the root of their poverty. While they own tiny parcels of land that don’t allow them to eat, let alone prosper, either wealthy families or the state itself control extremely large swathes of it.

So the report and its findings make for dire news indeed. In fact, it’s hard to know where to begin. Researchers found purchase or lease deals adding up to 203 million hectares between 2000 and 2010, most of them in Africa. While 78 per cent of those deals they were able to cross-reference went to agriculture, only about a quarter was destined for the cultivation of food. The rest was for revenue-rich bio-fuel production.

Other scary conclusions include the fact the best, most fertile land is usually targeted for lease or purchase; that poor farmers are being dispossessed of both land held by custom and access to water; that rural women are particularly vulnerable; and that extensive areas of natural ecosystems are being felled for bio-fuel, tourism, industrial projects and so on.

“The competition for land is becoming increasingly global and increasingly unequal,” said ILC Director Madiodio Niasse in a press release from the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Weak governance, corruption and a lack of transparency in decision-making, which are key features of the typical environment in which large-scale land acquisitions take place, mean that the poor gain few benefits from these deals but pay high costs.”

I have posted twice already about these ‘new enclosures’ and written about foreign companies coming in to desperately poor nations to make use of their best land. But apparently, national elites – who are often let off the hook for taxes in order to attract investment — are playing a far larger role in land grabbing than previously thought.

What else lies behind this pernicious trend that will only deepen rural poverty in the third world?

It is actually the same political and economic structure that has people protesting from Wall Street to West Africa: the notion that financial elites know what is best for the rest of us. It simply flies in the face of common sense to think we should help the poor of the developing world with meager handouts and let big business convert their land into mega-estates.

But as the IIED’s Lorenzo Cotula (one of the report’s authors) put it, “Part of the problem is … that many policymakers think small-scale farming has no future and that large scale, intensive agriculture is the best way to achieve food security and support national development.”

Personally, I don’t think many policy makers truly believe that. I can’t help but surmise instead that affluent nation governments and the corporations that donate to their legislators think that there are still more ways to squeeze what little they have out of the world’s poorest.

Average People and the Impact of Mexico’s Drug War

9 Dec

Today I have to bring some attention to a very interesting interactive posting on the website of The Guardian. It gives some well-deserved space to different people suffering in different ways the impact of organized crime in Mexico — and by the government’s poorly thought out and executed attempts to reign in the murderous mayhem.

Do their statements help us better understand the nature of what seems like an inexplicable and obscure phenomenon? To a certain extent, they do, I think because they illustrate both the immensity of the business — the vast sums of money, the ability to buy off major power brokers — and the picayune, quotidian aspect. And by that, I mean, the gangs of small-timers linked to bigger cartels or acting independently, carrying out kidnappings and extortions, and of course, retailing drugs.

Who are not, to my knowledge ever investigated, are the legitimate companies involved in the cartels’ support network. Edgardo Buscaglia talked about it when I was working on an article in THIS magazine last year but for which there wasn’t space.

“The main link between political corruption and organized crime goes through legal businesses in Mexico,” he told me. “They provide the logistical structure for (it) to operate. Some provide the transportation infrastructure for organized crime to move weapons, people and drugs, and storage infrastructure. They provide the distribution infrastructure, so drugs from here can reach Canada. Or people — they provide the production infrastructure.”

Today, another legal expert I interviewed for that article, John Mills Ackerman, has an interesting Op Ed piece in The Daily Beast. As he says in the piece, “There are no signs that organized crime actually has been weakened since the present Mexican president came to power in 2006. To the contrary, the cultivation and use of drugs in Mexico has risen dramatically, organized crime groups now have more firepower than ever before, money is freely laundered in the country and the impunity rate has reached an historic high, with, at most, 5 percent of all crimes receiving punishment.”

The situation is so out-of -control that, guess who is now seeking to move to Mexico? Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saadi. Having escaped trial and punishment for his various crimes in Libya, it looks like he thinks he will be right at home in Mexico.

Enrique Peña Nieto’s Sarah Palin Moment

6 Dec

Photo by Ricardo Carreon

The ribbing Mexican presidential pre-candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is taking right now is the subject of today’s admittedly schadenfreude-flavoured blog post.

Yet the predicament of this weirdly handsome-but-not really, Astro-Boy favourite of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party  says a great deal about politics and politicians in that troubled land.

First the facts: Peña Nieto is the former governor of the State of Mexico, and nephew of another former governor, Arturo Montiel, whose full-on process of illegal enrichment ended in 2005, when PRI forces lined up against him. Now, thanks to the generalized disenchantment with President Felipe Calderon and the current ruling party, polls are putting Peña Nieto well ahead of any other contender.

Peña Nieto was at the renowned International Book Fair in Guadalajara last weekend to promote a book — Mexico: the Great Hope — he has ostensibly written. When asked by a member of the audience to name three books that influenced him, he was stymied.  Books? After some prevarication and floundering, one book, the Bible, did finally spring to his mind.

The event has since given rise to a number of jocular posters, with messages like: “Don’t give Peña Nieto your vote. Give him a book.”

It also reminded Proceso magazine’s Alvaro Delgado today of an episode three years ago when another politician gave Peña Nieto a book he’d written. “I really don’t like to read,” he told the author, according to Delgado. “I’ll ask my assistants to write up some flash cards with its most important points.”

Even more newsworthy however are the comments Peña Nieto’s teenage daughter, Paulina, posted afterwards on Twitter, describing his critics as a “bunch of idiots who only form part of the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.”

Peña Nieto’s soap opera-actress wife, Angelica Rivera,  no intellectual giant herself, also used her 140 characters for a few harsh sentiments: “Osea (sic), yo creo que si los indios quieren salir de donde están que se pongan a trabajar y dejen de estar de flojos o violentos, como en Atenco”.

Loosely translated, I can tell you she suggests that if the “Indians” want out of where they are (i.e. poverty) then they should damn well get to work and stop being lazy and violent.

If the fact that these representatives of Mexico’s ruling class didn’t stand an excellent chance of actually running the country by next year, all of this would be laughable. Instead, the prospect, in a nation that is primarily indigenous, is downright terrifying.

The entire incident shows not only the disdain in which anyone but the rich, the corrupt and now, the ignorant as well, are held by Mexico’s powerful political elite. It also shows their disdain for education in general. Thanks to its high dropout rate, the average educational level in Mexico is no more than Canada’s equivalent Grade 8.

While enrollment is high in primary schools, under teachers’ union president-for-life (and Peña Nieto mentor) Elba Esther Gordillo, resources are scarce, curricula hide-bound and academic performance low, with Mexican school children consistently scoring among the lowest of the OECD countries, and the lowest in Latin America.

University education is publicly funded, but there are nowhere near enough places for all who want to attend. Dropout rates are also extremely high, so that less than 10 per cent of Mexicans aged 18 and older holds a bachelor’s degree.

Aside from all that, however, as Delgado writes, “Peña Nieto’s ignorance isn’t only a bookish “error,” but also a conception of Mexico and the world in which ethical principles are subservient to the securing of one’s ends, no matter the means.”

The fact that an aspirant to the government of a country of more than 100 million people doesn’t like, and can’t be bothered, to read only highlights the thoughtlessness with which he plans to govern. The fact that he claims to have written a book and everyone is supposed to believe this, only highlights the lack of transparency and honesty in the entire political system.

Mexico doesn’t need an intellectual genius to head the government. But it does need an honest and capable and compassionate one. So while Peña Nieto’s gaffe may seem like farce, its implications are tragic.

Strange Tales and Press Standards

1 Dec

I don’t know how many of my fellow journalists are following the Leveson Enquiry, an ongoing public investigation into the culture, practices and ethics of Britain’s press after the famous News of the World hacking scandal. But since I read the Guardian every day, quotes and headlines about it keep popping up and grabbing my attention.

The thing that gets me is the utter weirdness of it all. I can’t imagine — nor do I know any journalist, I don’t think, who could either — dressing up as a doctor and sneaking into a hospital to try and interview a celebrity. I also can’t imagine sitting down and just making up an entire story about someone I’ve never spoken to, complete with fake quotes, and seeing it the next day published as fact. I can’t imagine an editor coming up with the idea of sending a bunch of scantily clad women to surround and jeer a government minister, and turn that into an article as well.

I mean you go to school, follow the various courses, hone your writing skills and, at the end of your studies, get hired at a typical tabloid. Great! You’ve got a job, can start to pay off your student loan — and then your editor asks you to do this kind of stuff: ‘Here’s the number for Hugh Grant’s voice mail – listen in and write an article about what you hear.’ Or, ‘Rupert didn’t like his interview with (ITN broadcaster) Anne Diamond, so go out and dig up something so we can make her life hell.’

Yet, according to Enquiry submissions, these are the kinds of things tabloid journalists do all the time. Singer Charlotte Church, after being obliged to sing for free at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s nuptials with Wendy Tang in return for good publicity, was instead constantly targeted in nasty, insinuating stories for years. The News of the World hacked the phones of  7/7 bomb victims, actors and the wife of then-PM Gordon Brown, whereby they learned — and printed a story about — how her new baby has cystic fibrosis.

And Rebekah Brooks, a Murdoch acolyte and close friend of Prime Minster David Cameron, humiliated Labour minister Clare Short by pasting a photo of her head over that of a topless woman and publishing it in the Sun. She sent a busload of semi-naked women to Ms. Short’s Birmingham home to harass her, and printed a headline saying “‘Fat, Jealous’ Clare Brands Page 3 Porn.”

Ms. Shorter must have done something truly heinous, truly damaging to the British public to merit such treatment, right? I mean, that’s how the tabloids defend themselves, suggesting that delving into the personal lives of British politicians and celebrities is in the public interest, and they are informing readers about their real morals and motivations.

In fact all Ms. Shorter had done was mention that she “did not care for” the Page 3 girls tabloid tradition and considered it “pornography.”

According to a former Daily Star freelancer and, later, employee, Richard Peppiatt, tabloid staffers were obliged to come up with three scandal-hued stories a week or face the boot. He told the Enquiry, “There is an overwhelming negativity and it runs throughout the press. A story is not a story unless it is knocking someone … or knocking an ethnic group, whatever it may be.” Yikes.

He also described the paper not so much truth-seeking as “ideologically-driven and … impact-driven.”

Well I can understand why editors and owners are blithely ruining the reputation of the press as a source of non-partisan information. But how can self-respecting journalists do this, day after day, and not lose their minds?

I guess I am thinking about this more than usual since writing a short guide to freelance journalism, which got me considering the reasons for wanting to be a journalist in the first place. The Leveson Enquiry is making me think even more about the importance I see in integrity, the importance of what journalists do — and how little this notion is shared, apparently, by my fellow scribes.

Now I have nothing against a bit of Onion-esque fun and am familiar with the old idiom about the media “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.” But is this what is happening? In an ever-tighter job market, what are journalism students and young writers to think when the business of newsgathering and commentary is such a zoo?

I acknowledge the need for journalists to try to expose the underlayer of governance and finance, to investigate what lies behind the decision and policy-making that affects the lives of everyone. But that doesn’t mean fining out with whom a politician is sleeping, but rather, from whom he or she is taking donations in exchange for favourable or biased treatment.

I still believe that journalism is one of the world’s most important professions. But after reading about the Leveson Enquiry, I only wish more media workers recognized what that implies about the way we carry out that profession. If more and more journalists simply to refuse to write ridiculous and unethical stories, maybe they can change that culture of “overwhelming negativity.”

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