G20 gloom; fragile states are difficult; private sector positives; climate change progress (and comedy); subeditor sabotage at the Guardian; unpacking inequality: links I liked

‘By listening to its own ideologues and the whispers of business, the G20 is sending more and more proposals to the graveyard’, Nancy Alexander is gloomy about this week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

Fragile state slot: How is DFID going to focus its cash on fragile and conflict affected states and have zero tolerance on fraud and corruption? (Madeleine Bunting pointed out the same contradiction 6 months ago.) And why does DFID give such huge chunks of money to the World Bank and other multilaterals? The UK Parliamentary Accounts Committee asks some tough questions.

‘I am increasingly getting the feeling that NGOs working in fragile states are just setting themselves up to under-perform if not actually fail’, Makarand Sahasrabuddhe, who works for Oxfam in East Africa, does some serious agonising.

Private Sector good news slot: Entergy and Starbucks, together with Levi Strauss & Company, Calvert Investments, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Swiss Re, announce a new partnership to tackle growing climate challenges to their businesses.

‘Africa’s biggest gold miner AngloGold Ashanti has started paying 30 percent corporate tax to the Tanzanian government this year for its Geita mine, in line with the east African country’s new mining policy. This is the first time that the mine has started paying corporate tax in Tanzania since it began commercial gold production in August 2000.’ Whatever next? [h/t Beyond Aid]

Two posts (on a Green Growth conference and a Chatham House roundup event) from Simon Maxwell on the state of the climate change debate try to counteract the gloom. Progress is being made on areas like renewables, but is being driven by the search for growth and jobs, not by the UN process. And some depressing-but-funny climate change comedy c/o the UN.

And who’s the dastardly subeditor at the Guardian who seems determined to deter readers from ever clicking on their development posts? Evidence for the prosecution: ‘Report Urges Governments to Act’ has to be one of the most unenticing headlines ever. Close runner up ‘World Bank must match rhetoric with funding’. Pity the poor journalists who write the (presumably unread) articles. Linked here to redress the damage a bit.

Finally, ‘Spirit Level’ author Richard Wilkinson sets out his thesis that inequality harms societies in this nice 16 minute TED talk

The disruptive effect of falling fertility – the real population question?

On Monday the world’s 7th billion person will be born (allegedly) and the press have had a field day. Some poor baby somewhere is going to be nominated for the honour by the UN and find the rest of their life plagued by incessant journalistic visits, as is happening this week to Adnan Nevic (see pic, with Kofi Annan), now a 12 year old in Sarajevo who in 1999 was named the 6 billionth.

Much of the press coverage is pretty awful (see below), but I really enjoyed the Economist’s 3 page briefing. Some excerpts:

“The world’s decline in fertility has been staggering (see chart). In 1970 the total fertility rate was 4.45 and the typical family in the world had four or five children. It is now 2.45 worldwide, and lower in some surprising places. Bangladesh’s rate is 2.16, having halved in 20 years. Iran’s fertility fell from 7 in 1984 to just 1.9 in 2006. Countries with below-replacement fertility include supposedly teeming Brazil, Tunisia and Thailand. Much of Europe and East Asia have fertility rates far below replacement levels.

The fertility fall is releasing wave upon wave of demographic change. It is the main influence behind the decline of population growth and, perhaps even more important, is shifting the balance of age groups within a population.

A fall in fertility sends a sort of generational bulge surging through a society. The generation in question is the one before the fertility fall really begins to bite, which in Europe and America was the baby-boom generation that is just retiring, and in China and East Asia the generation now reaching adulthood. To begin with, the favoured generation is in its childhood; countries have lots of children and fewer surviving grandparents (who were born at a time when life expectancy was lower). That was the situation in Europe in the 1950s and in East Asia in the 1970s.

But as the select generation enters the labour force, a country starts to benefit from a so-called “demographic dividend”. This happens when there are relatively few children (because of the fall in fertility), relatively few older people (because of higher mortality previously), and lots of economically active adults, including, often, many women, who enter the labour force in large numbers for the first time. It is a period of smaller families, rising income, rising life expectancy and big social change, including divorce, postponed marriage and single-person households. This was the situation in Europe between 1945 and 1975 (“les trente glorieuses”) and in much of East Asia in 1980-2010.

But there is a third stage. At some point, the gilded generation turns silver and retires. Now the dividend becomes a liability. There are disproportionately more old people depending upon a smaller generation behind them. Population growth stops or goes into reverse, parts of a country are abandoned by the young and the social concerns of the aged grow in significance. This situation already exists in Japan. It is arriving fast in Europe and America, and soon after that will reach East Asia.”

And some interesting thoughts on China:

“With its fertility artificially suppressed by the one-child policy, it is ageing at an unprecedented rate. In 1980 China’s median age (the point where half the population is older and half younger) was 22 years, a developing-country figure. China will be older than America as early as 2020 and older than Europe by 2030. This will bring an abrupt end to its cheap-labour manufacturing. Its dependency ratio will rise from 38 to 64 by 2050, the sharpest rise in the world. Add in the country’s sexual imbalances—after a decade of sex-selective abortions, China will have 96.5m men in their 20s in 2025 but only 80.3m young women—and demography may become the gravest problem the Communist Party has to face.”

Overall message?

“If you look at the overall size of the world’s population, then, the picture is one of falling fertility, decelerating growth and a gradual return to the flat population level of the 18th century. But below the surface societies are being churned up in ways not seen in the much more static pre-industrial world.”

I tend to avoid the ‘population control’ issue because it is so polarized that it is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation. But here are some past thoughts on the link (or lack of it) with climate change and why the whole issue makes NGO types uncomfortable and a more slapstick discussion of pets and climate change, (which at least one person told me persuaded them not to get a dog – does that count as evidence of impact?). Overall, I have a lot of sympathy with Claire Melamed in her recent counterblast against sloppy thinking on the issue (and with this polemic from George Monbiot) but the level of vitriol in the comments shows just how polarized and unproductive the debate has become. I would much rather reframe the whole thing in terms of reproductive rights and women’s education, but even if you do that, it’s very hard to shake off the underlying frame that ‘they’ are the problem, (and less of ‘them’ the solution). That is a real shame.

Plus here’s a nice interactive feature from the Guardian. How big was the world population when you were born?

Religion and Development: what are the links? Why should we care?

Wilton Park is a wonderful place for a conference – a stately home nestling in glorious English countryside. These days it is used for high minded seminars on global governance, foreign policy etc, linked to the British Foreign Office, but the hosts take care to ‘fess up to the irony that the aristocratic pile was built centuries ago by some long-forgotten military type with money embezzled from the English Crown.

It also insists on a level of confidentiality that make Chatham House rules look positively relaxed – no quotes, even anonymous, without permission from the speaker. Unfortunately, I had to exit early from the conference on religion and development I attended there this week, so didn’t have time to get permissions, so the only thing I can write about is my own presentation. So what’s new?

I was speaking on the need to increase ‘religious literacy’ in the development sector, even in secular organisations like Oxfam. Why? Five reasons, for starters (please add your own):

1. Theories of Change: as we think harder about how change happens, religion keeps cropping up, whether it’s promoting agency and a sense of ‘power within’, for example in our work on violence against women, trying to find out how poor people experience poverty, or exploring the internal structures of social movements like the Arab Spring. In all of these, religion plays a crucial part in forming identity and values.

2. Resilience to shocks: whether it’s the global financial crisis, or the first few chaotic hours and days after the Haitian earthquake, poor people turn to their churches and mosques for help in an emergency. If we are serious about promoting disaster risk reduction before catastrophe hits, we need to be talking to the institutions that are most relevant to poor people.

3. The growing importance of advocacy: in many developing countries, religion is an important shaper of political space and decisions. Political leaders often defer to religious ones, and getting the faith-based organizations on your side can transform the prospects for change. Just look at the role church-goers played in the successful Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign, itself a biblical concept.

4. Campaigners are trying to understand better the deep frames that determine how we see the world. Religion plays a vital role in creating those basic frames and values.

5. One of Oxfam’s big priorities is gender and ‘putting women at the heart of all we do’. Religion plays a huge role in many poor women’s lives, and if we want to understand that, we have to leave behind secular sophistries about false consciousness (to caricature, ‘religion is really anti-women, it’s just that all those women who regularly attend, pray and see their faith as a vital source of wellbeing have all been brainwashed to the true extent of their oppression’.) There was some fascinating debate on the extent of ‘religious feminisms’, with women in all churches arguing for women’s rights, using sacred texts to back up their case. It would be great if someone could identify a cross-faith gendered version of the ‘golden rule’ (treat others as you would have them treat you). Anyone seen one? More on gender, faith and development in this new Oxfam book.

Engagement can fit anywhere along a spectrum from ‘find out more’ through ‘dialogue and critical engagement’ and ‘limited issue-based alliances’ to ‘active partnership’. Don’t get me wrong – in all of these areas, religion can play a progressive or a (sometimes very) regressive role (or both). But if we’re serious about development, we need to understand much more about the diversity, divisions and debates within each church on things like women’s roles. That’s true even if, like me, you are ‘devout atheists’.

So much for theory, how about some examples? These are taken from previous posts and ‘Avoiding some deadly sins’, an excellent new Oxfam paper by Cass Bechin on religion and development.

What happens if you ask people what they want after a disaster and the answer comes back ‘we want a new mosque?’ In Aceh after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, Oxfam said no to one request.  But two years later, after the big Java earthquake of  2006, we said yes.

What happened? The request came in to a small grant scheme for infrastructure, aimed at helping communities recover their normal routines as quickly as possible. While most requests were for furniture, building materials etc, one community asked for money to buy materials to rebuild its flattened mosque (the community had to contribute labour in return).

According to El Tayeb Musa, the Oxfam staffer overseeing the fund for us in Java at the time, we supported it partly because the mosque was also used for community meetings.

The money was duly handed over, the mosque rebuilt, and the community in question was one of the success stories in a badly hit area, rapidly recovering both in terms of rebuilding its infrastructure, but also social cohesion and healing after the psychological trauma of the earthquake. The mosque was at the centre of the rebuilding effort.

El Tayeb stressed the non-religious aspects of the mosque-as-community-centre, but my response to him was ’shouldn’t we have funded the mosque even if it was only used for prayer?’

But any such conversation has to have a clear understanding of the organizations’ own red lines. In the comments on the original post, Caroline Sweetman pointed to an example from Ethiopia, where she was asked if Oxfam would fund new sharp knives to make female genital mutilation less risky. A no brainer perhaps, but why do I feel much more sympathetic to a hypothetical request for prayer mats than to one for bibles? Still wrestling with that one.

And finally, a nice example from Chad.  In Am Nabak Camp for the displaced, residents were asked to select an equal number of men and women to be trained to spray camp tents against mosquitoes. The men opposed women’s participation in the programme, stating that according to local religious practice women are not allowed to enter a man’s house.

OGB staff accepted the men’s point but suggested that the women should undergo the training as well so that they could spray their own tents. It was agreed that the women would also assist the men in mixing the chemicals and addressing safety issues. This suggestion was accepted and both men and women were trained.

On the first day, only the men did the spraying while the women mixed the chemicals and took care of safety issues. On the second day, however, roles were reversed and stayed this way for most of the remaining period. Indeed, the same men who had opposed women’s participation on religious grounds allowed the women to spray while they mixed the chemicals. Why? Because spraying took more effort……

How can Contract Farming work for poor farmers?

The UN’s hyperactive (how often do you see those words in the same sentence?) special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has a new report out on contract farming. At first sight, contract farming (expanding fast, apparently) looks a lot more promising than the parallel boom in ‘large scale land acquisitions’ (aka land grabs). Farmers keep their land rights, get access to markets and value chains, and support with finance, training, seeds, fertilizers etc. The reality is less rosy, with both good and bad contracts in operation. 

“The developing world is a buyer’s market. Even when food prices are high, farmers are struggling to reap the benefits because they lack negotiating power. Entering into a contract is a private choice, but how much choice do farmers really have if their only access to markets is via a single dominant buyer? And how much benefit can this arrangement bring the farmer if the buyer can dictate the terms of that contract? If they are not careful, farmers end up as disempowered laborers on their own land.”

An example from a study conducted for Oxfam: a company in Lao contracted former rice farmers to produce chilli.  Chilli has an intense cultivation pattern and demands constant attention. The company agreed a price and quantity of chillies they would buy, and provided training, plus inputs (fertilizers and pesticides). But the quality and quantity produced did not meet the expectations of either company or farmers.  The company claimed that supervision and follow-up of farmers was a problem, and suspected that poor quantity was due to the fact that farmers sold the best chillies to other traders. Some of the farmers paid their employees in kind with chillies, since the payment of the company came too late. The farmers also complained that fertilizer provision came too late, forcing them to improvise and causing crop failure and accused the company of overcharging for fertilizers. They also expressed doubts on the purchasing price due to the lack of competition.

According to De Schutter, a fair contract should include minimum price guarantees, visual demonstration of quality standards (presumably to avoid the possibility of confusion or deception of illiterate farmers), the provision of inputs at or below commercial rates, tailored dispute settlement mechanisms, and the possibility to set aside a portion of land for food crops to meet the needs of the family and the community. Since decision-making is also proven to shift to men where cash crops are produced instead of food crops, De Schutter emphasizes the need to pay greater attention to the gender impacts of contract farming.

I would add a couple of things – what responsibility do contracting companies have for the wages and conditions of labourers on the contract farms (e.g. the Lao chili story)? And companies should also share risks with the farmers, eg by helping to pay insurance premia against crop failure.

Back to De Schutter, “Without these checks and balances, the door is left open for produce to be summarily rejected, for farm debt to spiral, for labour to be sub-contracted without regulatory oversight, and for a region’s food security to be undermined by production of export-oriented cash crops at the expense of all else.”

He lays the onus on governments to ensure that contracts are fair, but also thinks the imbalance of power can be righted if farmers organize into producer organizations and cooperatives before then negotiating better deals with buyers. He cites MaliBiocarburant SA – where farmers are represented on the Board of Trustees and produce jatropha for locally-consumed biodiesel — as an example of a best practice in the area.

The Divine Chocolate brand, a London-based enterprise (which I highly recommend, especially the fruit and nut one), is another source of inspiration for more equitable value chains. Jointly owned by 68,000 Ghanaian cocoa farmers and other backers, it has brought farmers the benefits of fixed prices, a fair-trade premium, ownership dividends, and a large support program.

Meanwhile the experiences of Belo Horizonte in Brazil and Durban in South Africa have proven the benefits of improving the links between local producers and urban consumers (see this recent example from Colombia).

One example of pro-poor contract farming from Oxfam’s own experience is Plenty Foods from Sri Lanka, which has contractual relationships with 9,000 farmers across the country. Most of these are direct contracts, with the company also providing inputs, training, and extension services to farmers. Outcomes include: improved enabling environment, with land titling and the granting of permits being carried out proactively by the Government and new opportunities to access export markets being explored; better and more extension and support services; increase in farmers’ power to negotiate prices and secure contracts with new buyers, and access to new markets such as fruit juice and dried vegetables; emergence of a number of farmers’ groups and enterprises led by women, e.g. processing fruit and vegetables, leading to an increase in women’s incomes.

Engaging with the market is always messy and difficult (so much easier to be a purist and just criticise them, unless you happen to be a farmer desperate to sell your crop at a decent price), but get it right, and an awful lot of people benefit.

The meaning of OWS; Sachs and the Village(s); China v US; China International Fund; G20 v WTO; Women and the Arab Spring; Oxfam’s first ebook; pink mobiles in Cambodia: links I liked

‘Could this be the moment that inequality becomes mainstream?’ asks Claire Melamed, discussing the reaction to ‘We are the 99%’ and the Occupy Wall Street protests. The Economist surveys the academic research on the link between downturns, austerity and political unrest. And is this the nerdiest OWS placard (click twice to enlarge)? [h/t Chris Blattman]

A spate of Sachs bashing: David Mackenzie does a forensic hatchet job on Jeff Sachs’ (attack is the best form of) defence of his Millennium Villages Project. Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes join the chorus of criticism (basically they argue that the design of the project makes it impossible to know if it has been successful, and this could have been fixed). Berk Ozler adds that Sachs’ funders (e.g. George Soros and the UN) should have checked before bunging him another $72m for MVPII. Michael Clemens (again) tries to get the last word (don’t rate his chances). They’ll be back……

As China’s economy closes in on America, Martin Wolf unpicks the factors that determine who rules the global roost. Guns? GDP? Technology? Learning?

“When a new government comes into power, especially an inexperienced one, there’s one phenomenon that never fails: every crook on Earth shows up. And every crook on Earth has the biggest promises, has access to billions of dollars of lines of credits, of loans.”’ A former African mining minister talking about the sleazy “China International Fund.”

‘The G20 seems to be outpacing the WTO in the march toward irrelevance’ argues Ilene Grabel, highlighting the G20’s growing paralysis on everything from the euro-traincrash to capital controls.

The Economist has a good discussion of women and the Arab Spring, highlighting the complexity of the issue – the revolutions have both galvanized the struggle for women’s rights, and damaged it through the association with characters such as Suzanne Mubarak and the uncertainty over the attitudes of emerging new regimes.

Oxfam has launched a Growing a Better Future eBook, (campaign report + case studies, new research and updates) free to download from the iBookstore, Kindle Store or GROW website . I can see the technological horizon receding into the fog of my ignorance……..

One of my favourite IT-related projects – Cambodia’s pink phones. Oxfam persuaded a mobile phone operator in Cambodia to equip women community leaders with mobile phones so they could stay in touch with each other (the few women leaders feel very isolated). The neat touch was making sure the phones were pink, so the men wouldn’t ‘borrow’ them.

From planetary ceilings to social floors: can we live inside the doughnut?

This is a guest post and a request for comments and suggestions by Kate Raworth, Oxfam’s Senior Researcher, who is doing some really interesting thinking on new economics and the ‘post 2015 agenda’ – i.e. what comes after the MDGs.

In 2009, 29 of the world’s leading Earth-system scientists drew up a set of nine ‘planetary boundaries’: critical natural processes that we must not breach if we want to maintain Earth’s stable state of the last 10,000 years. Like what? Like climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss.  No small fry. They got bold and attempted a first quantification of these boundaries (eg setting a climate change boundary of 350ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere). And the area within these boundaries, they said, define “a safe operating space for humanity”.

Hmm. Environmentally safe, yes, but would it be socially just? After all, an environmentally safe space for humanity could be compatible with a multitude of human conditions, some of which may be appalling. Are there not also social boundaries – perhaps freedom from extreme income inequality, or from illiteracy – that we must not breach if we want to achieve social justice and a stable international order? Superimposing these social boundaries onto the planetary boundaries would define a safe and socially just operating space for humanity: no longer a circle, but a doughnut, bounded by an outer environmental ceiling and an inner social floor.

Planetary and social boundaries: can we live inside the doughnut?

What if 29 (or so…) international development thinkers and doers got together to propose such a set of social boundaries. What would they come up with? Could they be quantified? And could this become a useful framework for developing sustainable development goals beyond 2015?

The idea provokes questions. How should social boundaries be determined? They could, for instance, be derived from human rights, human capabilities, the Millennium Development Goals, multi-dimensional measures of poverty, a mix of all these – or some other source? And how many should there be? (nine would be neat, perhaps too neat…).

But back up a minute. Can we really put Earth systems and social systems in one framework? There are obvious differences. Earth systems existed quite happily without humans, and have been in the safe space for 10,000 years. Social systems don’t exist without us, and have never been fully in the just space (though a lot of people are working on that). And while Earth systems can tolerate a degree of stress, human rights mean that the outcomes for individuals in social systems matter inherently, not only because of their cumulative implications for social dynamics.

Yes, there are differences – but there are surprising similarities too. Both planetary boundaries and social boundaries are part global, but also part regional, or even local. They both have thresholds or danger zones that are difficult to identify (until you cross them…). Quantifying the safe boundaries involves normative judgements about acceptable levels of stress and risk – whether planetary or social. And both sets have interdependencies: staying on the safe side of one boundary depends, in part, on staying on the safe side of others (eg climate change is shaped by land-use change, illiteracy is shaped by gender inequality).

So if this idea has merit, what difference could it make? Three insights become clear:

First, planetary and social boundaries together imply a purpose for ‘economic progress’: to pursue human well-being, while remaining or moving back inside the doughnut – below the environmental ceiling, and above the social floor. Ecological economists have long sought to situate the economy within environmental limits; feminist economists (and others) have highlighted the social (and non-monetised) consequences of economic activity. Planetary and social boundaries help bring these ideas together in a simple, visual way (is this the birth of Doughnut Economics?…).

Second, how we get inside that doughnut involves careful balancing and timing between planetary and social boundaries. According to Earth-system scientists, we are three times over the global limit in our use of nitrogen (it’s polluting lakes, rivers and coasts, and the life within them, and contributing to climate change). But if we cut back by two thirds overnight, say by drastically reducing fertilizer use, the immediate consequences for global food supply, hunger, and poverty would be devastating. Looking at planetary and social boundaries together helps make these challenges starkly clear.

Third, non-monetary metrics must clearly be given more weight in policy making. Economic progress cannot be assessed only – or even primarily – in monetary terms (such as incomes per capita and GDP growth rates). Where the edges are, and whether or not we are hitting them, matters for stability and justice. Policymakers must take more notice of, and be more accountable for, the impact of economic activity on planetary and social boundaries, defined in ‘natural’ and ‘social’ metrics, such as species extinction rates, and unemployment rates.

So there’s the pitch. What do you think? Does the idea of social boundaries make sense, and does it make a difference? What should those social boundaries be, and could they be quantified? And could planetary and social boundaries help define Sustainable Development Goals for post 2015?

Anyone for doughnuts?

Arab and Muslim aid v the UN system – “two china elephants”

This is an edited-down version of an excellent longer piece by the IRIN humanitarian news agency

Many of the crises of recent years have affected Muslim people, including the Bam earthquake in Iran in 2003, the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, the attack on Gaza in late 2008, and the flooding in Pakistan in 2010. In all of these crises, Muslim and Arab donors contributed significantly.

Among the aid agencies that poured into Somalia after famine was declared in July were organizations such as the Arab Federation of Doctors, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment of the United Arab Emirates, and the Deniz Feneri Association of Turkey.

They came with their own style.

The Saudi National Campaign for the Relief of the Somali People, a project of King Abdullah, sent planeloads of food, including jam and cheese. The International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) sent 600 tons of dates. Turkey’s IHH (Foundation for Human Rights, Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief) even ventured outside Mogadishu into territory considered a no-go zone for most international aid organizations because it is not under government control.

They also came with a lot of money.

In an emergency meeting in August, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), pledged US$350 million for Somalia – “numbers we dream of”, one UN aid worker in Mogadishu said – though it is still unclear how much of this is new funding.

Turkey says it has collected more than $280 million for the Somali effort,  while Saudi Arabia’s contribution to UN agencies alone was $60 million, and Kuwait, a country of 3.5 million, contributed $10 million. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Office for Coordination of Foreign Aid, too, received confirmation of $62 million in contributions to the Horn of Africa emergency.

Gulf countries were able to raise funds with remarkable speed and ease. In the span of three hours, a TV telethon in Qatar raised nearly 25 million riyals ($6.8 million), while aid telethons in the UAE reportedly raised an additional $50 million for the Horn of Africa.

With many Western donors cutting budgets amid fears of another recession, this region has gained influence in aid, especially in countries with large Muslim populations. Both in terms of funds and action on the ground, the effort in Somalia has put Muslim and Arab donors and organizations onto centre stage.

But their relationship with the broader humanitarian system has been limited at the best of times, and rocky at the worst. For example, most OIC funds for Somalia are not being channelled through multilateral mechanisms, like the UN-administered Consolidated Appeals Process.

Players from the region say they are accustomed to working on their own – due to a history of mutual mistrust, a lack of awareness on both sides, and a perception by some Muslims and Arabs that they are better placed to help under certain circumstances.

The UN is now actively trying to improve that relationship, but the road to cooperation and coordination faces many challenges.

How did we get here? The history of mutual mistrust between the predominantly Western aid system and its counterpart in the Muslim and Arab world is long, say analysts.

“These are two china elephants looking at each other,” said Abdel-Rahman Ghandour, development and humanitarian worker, and author of Humanitarian Jihad: Investigation into Islamic NGOs. “They see each other; they know that they’re there; but they can’t move towards each other,” he told IRIN.

Some Muslim aid workers see in the UN system a certain arrogance. “They don’t want to understand us,” one Muslim aid worker said. “They only involve us when it suits them”. Some NGOs from the Arab and Muslim world are afraid of being “swallowed up” by the UN system, one Arab aid worker said. “The UN has the experience and the upper hand when it comes to everything – information, communication, movement on the ground. There’s no question. But to give them money and let them implement activities, we have to rest assured that we’ll like what comes out in our name.”

He called for a code of ethics or framework of understanding that would outline what both sides mean by certain fundamental principles and outline boundaries of action.

For example, terms like women’s empowerment need to be defined, he said. “How we understand it is not how the UN understands it,” he added. Organizations from this part of the world would fear partnering with the UN if women’s empowerment is understood to mean “removing the hijab [covering a woman’s hair], destroying the family institution and throwing religion out the window.”

Others do not easily differentiate between the UN Security Council, which has authorized Western interventions into Muslim countries and is seen to be unwilling to tackle the Palestinian question, and humanitarian aid agencies like the World Food Programme (WFP) or the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

For these reasons, many Red Crescent societies in the region, according to one senior aid worker, sometimes try to avoid working with the UN system. “We try to coordinate with – and not be coordinated by – the UN because of neutrality issues,” he told IRIN. “The UN is not considered to be a neutral organization, especially in a conflict set-up.”

But the UN and the broader humanitarian system have their reservations too. “Their awareness and subscription to commonly-understood best practice isn’t necessarily there,” one senior Western aid worker said of NGOs from the region, citing neglect of environmental impact or nutritional balance as examples.

Distributing powdered milk, for example, is no good in an area where there is no clean water, while dates are not ideal in cases of malnutrition because they are high in sugar, low in nutrition, and hard to digest.

There are also complaints about lack of coordination. Planeloads of food arrive from the Gulf – much of the assistance from the region comes in the form of food aid – and “we have no idea where it goes,” the Mogadishu aid worker said. Much of it is sold by its recipients on the open market because the value of some of the food, like jam and cheese, is so high.

The 9/11 attacks also affected the relationship. “A lot of Western charities are still afraid of being associated with Islamic charities because of the stigma that hangs over their heads since September 11th,” the author, Ghandour, said.

US laws about the financing of “terror” have further complicated the relationship between Muslim charities and the West because NGOs working in designated “terrorist” countries, like Iran and Burma, or areas controlled by organizations like militant group al-Shabab – deemed a “terrorist” organization by the US – fear being accused of complicity and so keep quiet about their activities.

Financial transactions to fund work in these areas through the conventional banking system are not possible and the movement of large sums of cash could create problems with some governments. “They can’t afford to be transparent,” said Haroun Atallah, finance and service director at UK-based Islamic Relief Worldwide. “How do you expect them to be transparent if it could come back and bite them?”

Part of the reluctance on the part of Muslim organizations to broadcast their actions comes from a culture that sees charity as something private and humble – that should not be paraded in front of everyone for recognition.

“We do things without saying that we’re doing it. It is part of Islamic culture,” said Naeema Hassan al-Gasseer, a native of Bahrain and assistant regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Similarly, many NGOs from the Muslim world do not understand the UN. Acronyms like UNHCR and WFP can be unfamiliar terms. Many aid workers from the region have never heard of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – charged with coordination of all aid in emergencies – and have no idea what its cluster system is.

“We have become, as a system, so jargonized, so inward looking in terms of how our system works, that hardly anyone else understands it,” Ghandour said.

Small farms can be beautiful – how farmers’ markets changed attitudes and policies in Colombia

As a curtain raiser for this week’s GROW Week at Oxfam (see bottom of this post), this piece appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters site last Friday, as my contribution to Sunday’s Blog Action Day, which this year coincided with World Food Day. I’ll also be doing on online Q&A (on Facebook) on the issues behind the campaign from 1-2pm tomorrow (Friday 21st October).

Small farmers get a bad press: developing country governments often see them as a developmental throwback and hanker after the glitter of modernity offered by large-scale investment in biofuels or export crops. Aid agencies and donor governments with more money than staff prefer the scale the big farms can offer. But there are at least two good reasons for sticking with a small-is-beautiful approach.

First, investing in small farmers brings a developmental double whammy: it helps put food into circulation and at the same time boosts the income of some of the poorest people on the planet – small farmers. It is an enduring and horrible irony that the people who grow the food are often also the ones who go hungry, because their crops are too paltry, or prices too low, for their harvest to see them through the year.  Jobless agribusiness growth in the farm sector won’t help those people; boosting small farm output will.

Secondly, helping small farmers get access to the kinds of things big farmers take for granted – bank loans, technical support, land rights, can have a catalytic effect on their productivity. That particularly goes for women farmers, who in many countries grow most of the food, but have least access to such support. Forget all those myths about stick-in-the-mud peasants – most small farmers are businesspeople, keen to experiment, manage risk, break into new markets and better themselves.

One example from dozens in Oxfam’s work around the world. Small-farmers supply 67 per cent of the food consumed in Colombia’s capital Bogotá (7 million population), but they weren’t earning a decent price for their produce. Much of the produce sold in urban markets is handled by commercial intermediaries, who buy from individual producers at low prices and then sell high.

So Oxfam teamed up with local NGOs and peasant organizations and tried to find out what the problem was by asking the key decision makers – for example, government officials who thought that the peasant economy was no longer viable and that “The peasants are lazy, they support the armed groups, they take advantage of the drug mafias, and take their cut growing coca.” What emerged was the need to change attitudes towards peasant farmers, both among officials, and the urban public.

The timing was propitious: in 2004, the Office of the Mayor of Bogotá had begun to speak openly for the first time about poverty and food security. It had drawn up a draft ‘Food Supply Master Plan’, but this failed to recognize the potential of small producers. The plan was based on obtaining food supplies for the minimum possible price, but did not consider the needs of producers or the potential for reducing rural poverty. Instead of a minimum price, campaigners demanded a ‘fair price’ principle.

The Mayor’s Office remained sceptical of the peasants’ ability to supply food efficiently, so the project organized farmers’ markets in strategic locations around the city, including the main square. Officials and shoppers were duly impressed by the level of organization and capacity on display, but also by the prices. Monitoring showed that the average net increase in prices for farmers was 64 per cent in wholesale markets and 52% in retail while urban consumers also benefited, paying average prices lower by some 15 per cent (a bit different from farmers’ markets in the UK…..).

The markets, backed by some savvy media work, got the message home. The Mayor agreed to revise the city’s plan to one based on fair prices, and backed it up with some investment to help small producers supply the city and representation for small farmers on the relevant committees.

Since then, more than 30 municipalities in the area around Bogotá have decided to organize their own local markets; Bogotá’s Mayor has signed contracts with five other regional governments pledging to increase rural investment for food production and we’re now trying to replicate the initiative in Medellín and Cali, the two other mayoral cities in Colombia.

There are hundreds of millions of small farmers who could benefit from schemes like these. When it comes to ending hunger, how food is grown and marketed (and who by) matters at least as much as growing more of it.

And here’s more about GROW week

The world’s top 100 economies: 53 countries, 34 cities and 13 corporations

This is from the World Bank, which increasingly seems to be adopting the functions (or at least the methods) of campaigning NGOs and thinktanks. Data are for 2009, in purchasing power parity terms. Countries are in black, cities in green, companies in brown. Largest countries are the US and China (with India at number 4); biggest cities are Tokyo and New York, with notable presence of Latin American megacities (Mexico, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires); top companies are Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil (oil still trumps tech, sorry Google).

And yes, of course there’s no obvious reason to equate a company’s turnover with a country’s GDP, but it’s still an interesting indicator of scale. [h/t John Magrath]

Update: Fascinating comment from Peter Chowla, pointing out that a better comparison is between government tax revenue and corporate revenue, and when he crunched the numbers (he didn’t include cities), he got only 29 countries in the top 100 – the rest were corporates. Anyone fancy updating Peter’s numbers (he did this back in 2004/5)?

The defenders of capitalism should have more faith – response by Ha-Joon Chang and me to critics of the Robin Hood Tax

This piece by Ha-Joon Chang and me appeared in various places last week, including South Africa’s Business Day (under the title ‘Financial tax not the death knell of capitalism’ ). It was pegged to the G20 finance ministers meeting, which turned out inconclusive on the FTT – the Robin Hood caravan now rolls on to the  G20 summit in Cannes in early November.

With European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso putting his weight behind it, a generalised financial transaction tax (FTT) — once a pipe dream of the radical fringe — has become an imminent reality. Several of the most influential countries are expected to endorse the idea at the Group of 20 (G-20) finance ministers’ meeting today and tomorrow and at the G-20 summit next month. The Republic of Korea, South Africa, Brazil and India should be among them. 

The critics are howling that this will hurt all of us, by reducing our ability to generate wealth and employment. They say we cannot afford this at a time when we are suffering from one of capitalism’s biggest crises. We say these people should have more faith in capitalism.

Despite all its faults, capitalism has proved the most resilient economic system humanity has invented. It has survived numerous changes, many of which people believed would destroy it. It has disappointed its left-wing critics by surviving the rise of the dispossessed working class and three centuries of cyclical economic crises, which Karl Marx predicted would grow bigger until they finally destroyed the system.

But, more interestingly, it has also baffled its supposed defenders by its capacity to survive threats they thought would be terminal. They include the eight- hour day, minimum wage, regulation of child labour, progressive income tax, the welfare state, mass nationalisation of industries, trading standards, environmental standards, and even the introduction of the limited liability company (which many early free-market economists, including Adam Smith, denounced as a dangerous licence to take excessive risk).

In fact, capitalism has not only survived these changes but often improved itself by upwardly adjusting to them. So, for example, while many people warned that the abolition of child labour would, by eliminating nearly half the labour force, spell doom, it has actually made capitalism more dynamic by generating a healthier and better educated workforce.

The FTT is not some arbitrary tax on, say, white asparagus or Henning Mankell novels, which has no compensating benefits. Yes, there will be some immediate costs of the FTT, in terms of particular trading activities “migrating” to other jurisdictions with no FTT and thereby reducing tax revenue and employment. However, in the long run, the compensating benefits will be far greater.

The FTT is meant to clamp down on the most speculative elements of the global financial system, which has become the proverbial tail wagging the dog of the global economy. The tax will reduce the systemic instability created by big finance, thereby encouraging long-term investment and more stable consumer demands, not to speak of reducing unnecessary economic dislocation. It will make capitalism better.

Of course, the introduction of the FTT is only the beginning. First, we need to decide how to use the money. The European Commission’s initial effort to grab the lot to fund its own operations raised howls of protest, and the latest proposal backs down somewhat, leaving the matter open. Bill Gates argues for “a substantial allocation for development”, as well as pushing G-20 governments not to backtrack on their aid promises. “Rich countries’ fiscal books cannot be balanced off the backs of the poor,” he says. Emerging powers should be making these arguments even more forcefully. The FTT should not be seen as just an easy way to collect more taxes, exploiting the public sentiment against the financial sector.

Moreover, the introduction of the FTT, even if it can be done globally, should not be the end of attempts to regulate global finance in a way that encourages economic dynamism and stability. We have made progress raising capital requirements for banks but we still need to properly regulate derivative products, change rules on corporate takeovers, better supervise rating agencies and accounting firms, and clamp down on tax havens.

The FTT’s time has come. Those who try to argue against it on the grounds that it will do more harm than good, or even cripple the capitalist system, are either ignorant or self-serving. If capitalism has survived, and often flourished, with the help of all the changes listed above, it will shrug off the FTT with ease. In fact, it is most likely to use the FTT as an incentive to improve itself. The defenders of capitalism should have more faith in it.