On relieving the current flow of people in need

In this post, I'm sharing a few articles that provide a more critical reflection on the recent humanitarian crisis and how it is being framed in the media and online. They voice the troubled gut feeling I've had so far when watching the www overflow with emotional cries and impromptu calls for semi-coordinated citizen relief efforts. This is going to be Band Aid all over again and in a few years, practitioner experts and academia alike will be writing on how this huge amount of goodwill achieved so little.

Simply sharing shocking images of a little boy that had drowned, actually reinforces the divide between us, westerners, and our privileges, and them, refugees, and their hard-wrought plights. It won't bring us any nearer to the solution. I hadn't read the article linked into the Vox one about the white-saviour industrial complex but it definitely complements and deepens that line of thought. Also, as Hans Rosling pointed out, it also is another opportunity for media and politicians alike to present Africa and the Middle East as places of pure horror and chaos, whereas tremendous improvements in peoples' lives have been occuring too and there are many positive stories to be told as well. By depicting them as victims you deprive them of their capacity to contribute to society and be part of positive change.

In case you were wondering why refugees pay so much money to risk their lives in shabby rubber boats instead of buying a much cheaper plane ride

Lest we forget, there is much more to all those people fleeing than just war or conflicts. There are often many reasons why that conflict has come about, and most of them involve us, consumers, or our governments, in multiple ways. (Think climate change; arms trade; resource-linked foreign policies; business interest trumping human rights; to name but a few.)

Rather than discussing the height of barbed-wired fences or the pros and cons of a EU-wide quota system, one of the debates to be had is how to implement the Refugee Convention that our nations have subscribed, more in particular, what to do once the countries of origin do no longer pose a threat to the lives of those we have hosted as refugees. Unfortunately, many of those countries of origin are bound to be in upheaval for many years to come. Refugee children will be born here and will grow up in our societies. Do we simply ship them back, as Tanzania did with hundreds of thousands of Burundese families after ten, twenty or in some cases even thirty years, or do we already think of how to integrate them as of today? Is the latter option practically, not to mention politically, feasible?

All this is not to say that we should not help those thousands of refugees marching through in search of a safe haven. Of course we should. But, leave the relief support to professionals. All those citizen-led initiatives inspired by the inaction and incapacity of our governments in hosting this sudden influx of people are no doubt well-intentioned, but good intentions can sometimes have horrible consequences. Already many stories are to be heard of donated clothes that have to be thrown away because they're dirty or wet or too big; that there is not enough space for all the food to be stored; etc. The only effect this will have is that, in two-three months from now, people won't be there anymore to provide warm clothes or other supplies, because they were turned down today for lack of storage capacity. You want to do something now? Ask professional relief organisations (such as the Red Cross or established refugee organisations) what you can do. And beware that most often it will be by simply donating money, even though that may not be as gratifying as feeding a hungry person yourself.

You can't drink gold, so just swallow bullets

Last week, Ollanta Humala's government has marked another black page in the history of Peru. In a country that has been marred by social conflict as a result of mismanaged extractive industries - a sad continuum across governments of the past two decades - five people have been killed during a peaceful protest march in the town of Celendín, Cajamarca province. One day later, some 20 combat-armed policemen threw Marco Arana, one of the figureheads of an indefinite strike against a huge mining project planned in the province, brutally off a bench in a park of Cajamarca city. He was forcefully grabbed by the head (a jaw was broken), pushed to the ground, hit several times in the kidneys (having passed a severe kidney operation earlier this year) and then abducted to prison [see video below, in Spanish], where he was held without charge and further beaten. His lawyer was refused due access to her client by police officers who could not present any credentials, upon which the officers maltreated Arana's lawyer as well. Apparently, Arana's only crime was to have worn a cardboard sign around his neck saying "Yes to life, No to gold" in a public space during a state of emergency.

Once again, peaceful protest has shown how powerful it can be, considering that the regrettable answer of a seemingly powerless government has been to resort to lethal violence. To be honest, it really takes my breath away to see how far governments are willing to go to safeguard investment commitments made by extractive industries in a region that has patently objected such environmentally damaging investments in its livelihoods. Even more so, when the current president was elected by promising Cajamarca's electorate to respect their decision not to support mining projects in their region, for "you cannot drink gold, so it is of utmost importance to protect natural water sources such as your beautiful lakes and prevent their contamination".

All these lofty promises have been mysteriously forgotten, as President Humala is fully committed to have the infamous Conga mining project started, a Newmont Mining Corporation investment that will affect four precious lakes - essential sources of clean water for the nearby communities - by converting them into depositories for toxic mining waste. Of course, promises have been made to treat the water and turn it into Peru's purest drinking water, but evidence of such practices are scant, not to say inexistent, in the country. Even one of Peru's star projects in terms of social and environmental responsibility turned out to be a fraud, deforming newborn lamas and contaminating nearby rivers.

What strikes me most is how the government has unequivocally sided with private industry, instead of being the gatekeeper that veils over the balance between the public's and the private sector's interests. How else to explain that national police officers are being transported by buses from the Yanacocha mine company (daughter holding of Newmont Mining)? Human rights violations as the ones described above, committed in plain daylight, in front of twenty cameras, while the region's provincial and local authorities have been drawn away from the scene to the capital, do not occur unless they are sanctioned from the highest level downwards.

I cannot even figure how these policies go down, from top government figures into the heads of the national police. It sure is no bed-time story material, judging from the police man's reaction to a Cajamarca inhabitant asking him why the police is treating citizens in such a horrible, irrespectful way: "Because you are a bunch of dogs, you son of a bitch!" And then to figure that this has been happening at a far wider scale over the past year in Syria, under the all-seeing eye of the international community, as world leaders are belt-tightening their way through domestic crises and smother their electorate with election-proof foreign policies...

For those interested, here is more information on the criminalisation of social protest and Marco Arana, and the social conflict as a result of the planned Conga Mining project. There is also a petition running on Avaaz, in case you would like to support the communities of Cajamarca in their struggle.

Ecuadorian democracy in action

As promised, Correa v El Universo was to be continued. In fact, already the week after the Supreme Court's ruling in the case, president Correa invited the whole crême de la crême of the international diplomatic community present in Quito, to assist his pardoning of the condemned directors and editorialist, as well as the authors of the book El gran hermano. The Ecuadorians, the actual target audience in this case of their democratic system and press freedom, were invited to watch the screening of Correa's speech outside the presidential palace.



Mostly, it was a self-congratulatory speech, highlighting the righteousness of his own position and pointing out the lack of journalistic ethos of the international media, who hadn't bothered asking him for his version of the facts when reporting on the Court's ruling. At the very end of his speech, Correa took an interesting turn countering the accusations of disrespecting press freedom and freedom of expression. "Our answer," he says, "are the kids going to Millennium schools, disabled people accessing well-functioning health care facilities, and first class highways connecting our cities." In short, socio-economic well-being trumps democratic principles, an argument not unfamiliar with some other rulers across the globe. (Did I hear you say Paul Kagame or Lee Kuan Yew?)

In the weeks following this mediatic show, huge billboards in support of the president and his policies appeared across those very same highways (paid for with public money, needless to say). Conveniently, this coincided with the start of a huge march of indigenous peoples in defense of water, protesting against the reckless public policy to promote huge mining investments across the Andes. Even before the protesters made it to Quito, Correa didn't leave an opportunity go by without disqualifying the protesters' motives and arguments, arguing that the march has blatantly failed.

As the protesters were about to march into the capital, the president tried to cut their roads of access and means of transport. In the meantime, he started rallying his own supporters with the same buses he forbid the indigenous people to use to enter Quito. From all over the country thousands of pro-Correa protesters marched to his palace to express their support for his government. Ironically, if these people already knew why they were in Quito (except for the free transport, food and drinks, that is), most answered quite vehemently that they were here "to protect our democracy".

Yes, the very same democracy that their star had put to the second stage just a few weeks earlier. In defense of a democracy that delegitimises and impedes the exercise of the constitutional rights of its citizens to gather, use public roads and present individual or collective protests and proposal to the competent authorities. A democratic system in which a governor sends a letter to the president with the names of public servants who did not attend the pro-Correa protests, recommending he shows them the door. Shouldn't this democracy rather open the debate on how to finance social progress (c.q. whether or not mining is the most adequate economic policy to generate sustainable economic growth) in the face of the constitutional rights granted to nature?

Overwhelming history at the sound of a theorbo

It's Semana Santa, and Quito has a wonderful way of celebrating this week before Easter. At several sacred and less sacred locations in the city centre, top notch artists are performing several performances as part of the XI Festival de Música Sacra. Here's to living in the historical centre! I just have to walk a few blocks down the road to enjoy these musical delights. And the best part is, it's all for free!

The other night, I attended a performance of the Colombian 'early music ensemble' Musica Ficta, in the magical Iglesia de la Compañía, just a block down the road from the presidential palace. This baroque ensemble is renowned for playing Hispano-American baroque music, with scores dug up from archives in Bogotá, Quito, Cusco and other cultural centres of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. By default, these historical notes beg for equally historical instruments such as the baroque guitar, the vihuela, the shawm, the dulcian and the theorbo.

As the church got filled with the warmth of guitar strings, graceful puffs and flaring chantings, Carlos Serrano shared with his audience how thrilled they all were to be playing their baroque music in that church, the perfect setting given their historical coincidence. That comment of his made me think back at some of the texts from The Peru Reader that I had read on the Viceroyalty of Peru (stretching from the Carribean beaches of Colombia to Potosi's ore-filled Cerro Rico in present-day Bolivia), the geo-political framework of the very same period in which that music was written and the Jesuit church built.

Musica Ficta performing in the Iglesia de la Compañía

All of sudden, history came alive. Realising I was listening to 16th century music in a baroque church in Latin America, it daunted to me how alien all of this experience was to these lands. Back in the day, locals didn't compose such music; they weren't catholic; and their concept of a fun night out most certainly wasn't attending a baroque music ensemble. Those who did attend such nights out (or, more likely, afternoons), were the nouveaux riches, the local elite seeking social acceptance among the Spanish colonialists, who had imposed their rites and customs on these promised lands.

Nothing else symbolised in a better way this cultural imposition and ignorance of the local richess as the inside decoration of the church, completely guilded with gold leaf, freshly extracted from the land on which it was built, with the blood of people it had expulsed and demonised. The sounds and voices that just a minute back had sounded so warm and joyful, became distantly cool and, in a way, made me feel out of place. The performance got a whole new dimension, moving me immensly, giving me the sensation that history was overwhelming me. And that, at the sound of a theorbo...

On the road again

It's not an easy time for young people, like myself, who have a keen interest in international affairs, development dilemmas and other cross-boundary enigmas, to find a job. Competition is fierce at home, and it only gets worse if you're looking into getting some real field experience that doesn't come straight off your (parents') bank account. For some reason, it just seems that people had it so much easier say twenty-thirty years ago. You just jumped on a plane and went into the field; whatever your experience was, you could turn it into some development-building skills.

Nowadays, however, thousands of students are able to study international development, human rights or even more specific topic areas - unheard of twenty years ago. All these students enter the labour market, eager for a job, preferably in the field, with no other skills but their mind and all the theoretical discussions they've so eagerly engaged in at uni. They face an increasing demand for professional employees -  upward and downward accountability kind of spiked up the game for development organisations - while stimulating local capacity building (i.e. getting locals to do the job you so eagerly want to do).

Many a student ends up quite disappointed in a random office job in his home country, doing whatever to keep the beer flowing. Others prefer to get out there, earning the field cred by having themselves exploited for a dime (or less) as they tick off all the main world wonders along the way. Admittedly, some beer may have flowed as well.

In my experience, it has been as much about following your heart and engaging in the real stuff as it has been about getting to know the people, or, put better, getting people to know you and what you're worth. After all, you do possess the skills needed to make it; it's just, there's like a thousand of you waiting to do the same job!

Anyhow, to cut the chase: I'm off! After a year of doing bits and pieces, some more related to international development than others, I've managed to get hold of a really interesting intern position at UNDP in Quito, Ecuador. I hope to learn more soon about what it is exactly that I'll be doing there, but word is that I'll become a gender strategist, as part of a team that accompanies Ecuador's decentralisation of development cooperation. Of course, I'll do my utmost best to keep you posted on my wanderings, along with the occasional inspiring video. Let's stick to the development area this time: sometimes you just need people thinking outside the box, or applying approaches from different fields to yours, to achieve a break through, or at the very least, to stir up sedated minds. Enjoy!

And you thought you were off for a nice morning of bargain-hunting...

Two weeks ago, I was out on the streets of Leuven, raising funds for Vredeseilanden. Although it is a non-governmental organisation, 68% of its budget comes from the government. (That's quite a lot, considering that most - if not all - NGOs in the South get nothing from their governments.) However, to justify that this civil society organisation is worthy of these tax Euros, it should demonstrate that it actually has a support base in society. That is why, every year, thousands of volunteers seek the financial contributions of the people on the street as a tangible evidence of them conferring legitimacy on Vredeseilanden's mission in our society.

Who could say no to such cute faces freezing in the cold? (source)

As my fingers were getting numb from the cold, I didn't even get to explaining in most cases what we were raising money for. People either pretended not hear me, ditching me with a cold 'no, no' while staring into the shop displays with the newest sales on offer, or happily pulled out their wallets with their minds torn between which gadget to get in return for their contribution. Fortunately, the mix of people's reactions was balanced enough to keep me going through the cold. One guy, however, made my day.

Asked to support Vredeseilanden, he replied in a somewhat offended manner - 'Don't you know how expensive life's become these days? I have to buy a new car, that's taking more than enough out of my wallet!'. Well, then. I reckoned that if he was going to buy a new car, 5 Euro more wouldn't really make that much of a difference in the face of so big an expenditure. Yet, that really seems to have pulled his strings - 'Haven't you got any idea how much a Mercedes costs? You must think I've got money to spare!' Mightily offended, he then strode off to the car salon and left me wondering whether to rip the hair off my head or burst out in laughter.

This anecdote came to my mind as I was thinking back on the seminar I gave yesterday at a development course. During the last part of that session, we were reflecting with the group on solutions for the structural inequality and unfairness of the international trade system, especially when it comes to agriculture. One of the students asked me why it is that policy makers and politicians persistently neglect the evidence that free trade is hurting instead of benefiting the 1.3 billion small scale farmers who - oh gruesome irony - do not have enough to feed their families. 'Because a lot of them honestly believe that free trade is the real solution to this problem,' I said to her. At which point, then,
several other students joined that girl's outrage at willingly turning a blind eye at three decades of failed agricultural free trade policies.

It struck me that the indignation with which the girls at the seminar fumed against those 'blind and ignorant' policy makers, was not too different from the way that man on the street reacted to me for even daring to suggest that he could pinch off a few bucks from his car budget. As this only hit me several hours after that class, I couldn't share these last thoughts anymore, so I do it here. All too often we are so convinced of other people's wrong, that we erupt like a volcano with lava streams of arguments proving our right. Self-gratifying as this may be, it won't bring us any closer to a solution. For this, we should seek to understand why that other person holds these views and figure out a way - if possible - to create common ground, a level playing field from which to reach a better outcome than the status quo; an outcome to which both parties agree and which they honestly support. After all, there is often little point in being right when you're on your own at the right side of the table.

Who said you cannot entertain people with an opinion on the WTO?

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.

Wanted: men to stand behind their powerful women

Several magazines have been publishing special reports about women on the workplace, as of late. As The Economist reports 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.

Source

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.

China's roaring tiger to swallow Africa

We all know it: China is digging deep into Africa, eager to satisfy its vast resource hunger and leaving shoddily built hospitals and roads instead. Lavish sums of aid money won't make up for this, they're barely a fig leaf to cover up China's erection on the international scene. A lavish donor country, you say? Lo and behold, high end estimates even rank China as the biggest donor only after the US! These estimates, then, would mean that China reaches the 'magic' .7% of GNI spending target, which barely five Western countries succeed to meet!

What to make out of these figures? Having just read The Dragon's Gift, a smashing book by Deborah Brautigam about the true nature of China's engagement in Africa, I am eager to share some of the eye-opening findings. For starters, these high estimates are most likely to overstate China's official aid flows as defined by the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. These exclude a lot of financially attractive investment loans (but still at market prices and therefore not grants) and export credits. The confusion originates in the absence of official aid data released by the Chinese government and the fact that China's Aid Department houses in its Ministry of Commerce. However, few people bother disaggregating data from that Ministry, picking the low-hanging fruit instead and creating a murky - and, I must add, inaccurate - image. As Brautigam writes:

In 2004, The Economist reported an erroneous figure of $1.8 billion for China's "development aid" for Africa in 2002. This was repeated in a Boston Globe article, which became the source for an article in Current History that said the 2002 figure of $1.8 billion was the "last" time "official statistics" on Chinese aid to Africa were released. The Current History article was subsequently cited by researchers at the World Bank, who repeated soberly that "The last officially reported flows are for 2002. For that year, China's government reported that it provided $1.8 billion in economic support to all of Africa." An International Monetary Fund study cited the World Bank report as its source for the same figure. Apparently, no one checked to see if there had actually been any official statistics reported by China in 2002 or at any point before or since for its annual aid to Africa (there were not).

China applies tactics in its Africa engagement that is has learnt from back in the days when Japan was jump-starting China's economic development. Big investments in infrastructure and manufacturing were secured by China's resources, and it was allowed to repay loans in kind (manufactured clothes, minerals, oil, etc.). This resulted in a win-win situation for both countries, stimulating China to do the same. Not only is it investing in those areas, it strongly focuses on training its counterparts and offering scholarships to thousands of young students in a time when most traditional donors are foregoing this kind of assistance. The whole idea is to sharpen local skills and upgrade existing practices in the face of Chinese competition, to increase mutual trade flows. (Like everybody, China is in it for the money.)

Brautigam has done an amazing job in revealing the more precise nature of China's engagement with Africa, and there are so many more facts and stories that nuance the West vs. China aid debate ('you cannot reduce poverty and live in a five-star hotel at the same time' vs. 'you cannot finance a presidential palace for a dictator and call it foreign aid'). The biggest lesson I draw from her book, is that we have to go look for the facts, not only China's, but also our own. As long as we cannot prove that our way of delivering aid or casting embargoes is truly resulting in social justice, stability and prosperity for the people our governments mean to help, and that it is the only possible way to do so, we shouldn't condemn actors that try it differently. (Because our banks, too, give loans to corrupt countries, just as our governments deliver weapons to torture-prone regimes.) Rather, we should learn from them and combine the best of both worlds, if we truly mean to contribute to a better present and future. In the meantime, I can only recommend reading The Dragon's Gift yourself!