It's the time of the year when many gather with family and friends, to share love and warmth, stories of happiness and sorrow, and laughter. It's also the time of the year when we wish each other the best possible for the new year to come. Next year should be even more glorious, joyful and prosperous than the previous one - imagine the challenge these wishes bring with them as you grow older.
I won't wish you the best, for many others have certainly done so already. Instead of looking forward, I wish you time to look back. Take a look back into last year and think about what you have done, what has happened in your life and how you have felt. Try, then, to gather from these experiences the good things and the bad things and see how they were brought about. What would you like to happen again, what would you like to feel again, what would you like to do again?
Not the what is important in that question, but the how: how did you live, how were you back then? And how can you be to create the space for it to happen again? It's a form of taking care of yourself, for only if you feel well, you can take care of others. So I wish you time to reflect, to nurture yourself, for you to feel confident to face the new year, come what may.
Just like this group of Peruvians, sitting in a bus on their way to march the Inca trail. Their eyes all tell a different story. They were sitting quiet in the bus, looking outside; yet, they were also looking inside, inside themselves, building up strength to face the adventure ahead of them. When you're mentally fit and ready, you've conquered half the journey already!
Well, the three most important newspapers in Flanders said so, because they didn't publish this opinion piece I co-authored with a colleague of mine. Not that it is not a hot issue, as this robust exchange of views between Paul de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Pascal Lamy, World Trade Organisation Director-General, illustrates.
Meh. You get it anyway. With a little help for the Dutch illiterates:
For ten years countries have tried to reach a new free trade agreement within the WTO, the so-called Doha Development Agenda. Negotiations have clearly stalled. The 8th ministerial summit (held in Geneva on 15-17 December) won't change this situation. The sought-after result of the Doha negotiations won't be reached, because the key to development is not even on the table: agricultural protection and food security.
Big players, such as the EU and the US, have anticipated the WTO's gradual opening up of food markets to free trade, by creating agricultural policies that protect (read: give income subsidies to) their farmers from cheap imports, with which they cannot compete. They did this because agriculture is a sensitive issue: for, if a country becomes too dependent on food imports, it can no longer guarantee food provision to its people. A crisis only has to occur for export countries to shut their food supplies (and, as of late, they have occurred rather frequently; just think of the 2008 food crisis). Thus, free trade in foodstuffs forces high income countries to subsidise their agricultural sectors, to prevent cheap imports from killing them.
Low and middle income countries, too, have similar issues; their farmers are often not able to compete with foodstuffs that are produced cheaper elsewhere. The difference, however, lies in the absence of a government budget that is able to protect the agricultural sector and (mainly small scale) farmers, who drown and go hungry. This problem becomes even more acute when taking the many concessions of bilateral trade agreements into account, which tend to grant even more access to food markets than is the case in multilateral trade agreements. That explains why West Africa has been flooded in the past two decennia with cheap imports of grains, rice, meat and milk powder (among others), which have seriously disrupted local production and endangered food security.
This situation is not tenable. Which is why low and middle income countries have proposed to introduce flexible tariffs, to safeguard the development of their own agricultural and food sectors, while maintaining the option to cover any food shortages with imports from abroad. These proposals, however, have never been seriously considered. Yet, so long as they won't, these countries will not gain from negotiating further market access in other sectors, as is the case in the present Doha negotiations.
As a matter of fact, the European Union would also stand to gain from questioning free trade in foodstuffs. The common agricultural policy is born out of free market rules, whereas shifting towards more controlled market mechanisms (to harmonise production and import volumes) could render subsidies superfluous.
About time, then, to see this round of negotiations to the door and start designing free trade that is more just and sustainable, offering farmers in the North and the South a fair chance to supply their fellow citizens.
Several magazines have been publishing special reports about women on the workplace, as of late. As The Economistreports in depth, women are closing the gap with men on the work floor. Not surprising, considering the increasing share of women in tertiary education, certainly in many Western countries. For some reason, however, few women really crack the glass ceiling into the top echelon of businesses. Some of the most common arguments to explain this phenomenon are the incompatibility of such time-consuming jobs and having a family, a lack of interest in such positions (admittedly, a controversial argument) and a work atmosphere unkind to women.
Why would that be? Is there some deeper motive that could explain why, when they are in the driver's seat, we are somehow much more intolerant for their mistakes or shortcomings than we are with those of their male peers? As for the incompatibility-with-a-family-argument, we could probably go back into the stone ages, when women were gathering the low-hanging fruits and men were hunting sabletooth-tigers. Yet, it still requires a society to conform these roles and pass them on from generation to generation. And, lest we forget, not all societies were/are patriarchal. Just think back to the early period of the Mesopotamians, worshipping the 'all-powerful mother goddesses'.
But, at a certain point, the Mesopotamians started using the plough in their food production. This heavy instrument thus became the tool par excellence to be used by men, causing a paradigm shift towards a patriarchal society. It seems that the technique used for farming has influenced many societies all over the world, determining the division of men and women at the work place or in politics, researchers at Harvard University argue. How, then, to break these paradigms? It is not easy, that's for sure. Even the most ardent promotors of women at the work place still suffer from subconscious behavioural stereotypes that keep women in men's shadows, as Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg illustrates very pointedly.
It is clear that we, as a society, have to be aware of the images and roles we convey on men and women. As Tony Porter says very poignantly: when a boy says that it would 'destroy' him if he were told that he plays football "like a girl", what does that say about the image, role and value of girls that we pass onto them?
In the meantime, it won't hurt to make sure that everybody, men and women alike, is given the opportunity to unleash their potential. At the very least, there's an interesting business case to make in favour of inviting more skirts to the boardroom:
McKinsey in 2007 studied over 230 public and private companies and non-profit organisations with a total of 115,000 employees worldwide and found that those with significant numbers of women in senior management did better on a range of criteria, including leadership, accountability and innovation, that were strongly associated with higher operating margins and market capitalisation. It also looked at 89 large listed European companies with high proportions of women in top management posts and found that their financial performance was well above the average for their sector. Other studies have come up with similar findings. Nobody is claiming evidence of a causal link, merely of an association, but the results are so consistent that promoting women seems like a good idea, just in case.
