Pormes: ‘Asociaal, onbegrijpelijk en onbeschaafd’

Pormes: 'Asociaal, onbegrijpelijk en onbeschaafd'

Vice Versa

Sam Pormes is door Personele Samenwerking in Ontwikkelingslanden (PSO) uitgezonden naar de Molukken in Indonesië. Vice Versa ontmoet hem op Ambon, de plek waar zijn wortels liggen en hij bijna anderhalf jaar heeft gewoond en gewerkt. Door de bezuinigingen kan hij zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het eiland verlaten. Pormes uit felle kritiek op het Nederlandse ontwikkelingsbeleid en de ontwikkelingsorganisaties.
Door de bezuinigingen van het vorige kabinet kan Sam Pormes (54) zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het voor hem bijzondere eiland Ambon in Indonesië verlaten. De plek waar hij zich echt thuis voelt. 'Voor het eerst in mijn leven hoef ik mij niet te legitimeren, wie ik ben en waar ik vandaan kom', aldus Pormes die in het verleden onder meer voor GroenLinks in de Eerste Kamer zat. Sinds 1989 is hij betrokken bij OS en de Molukken. Op dit moment is hij voorzitter van stichting TitanE in Nederland en vertegenwoordiger van de stichting op Ambon.
Karaoke
Tijdens het afscheidsdiner, die de partnerorganisatie Baileo voor hem organiseert, houdt de van oorsprong Molukse Pormes zich op de achtergrond. Hij is een geliefd man en wordt een paar keer geknuffeld door de aanwezige dames, maar blijft bescheiden. Er wordt volop meegezongen met de karaoke, want zingen is een geliefde bezigheid van vele Ambonezen.
Baileo is gevestigd op Ambon en is een van de elf lokale partners die deel uitmaakt van het netwerk waar steun aan wordt gegeven door PSO. De organisatie wil een bijdrage leveren aan structurele armoedebestrijding door het sterker maken van maatschappelijke organisaties in ontwikkelingslanden door capaciteitsopbouw. Zij zenden professionals uit, waaronder Sam Pormes, om geleerde lessen te verspreiden en actief te delen. Het zijn de lokale organisaties die rechtstreeks contact hebben met en de belangen behartigen van de arme mensen, de uiteindelijke doelgroep. Eind 2012 wordt de vereniging opgeheven door veranderingen in het Nederlandse financieringsbeleid.

Is China Really Building 100 Dams in Africa?

Is China Really Building 100 Dams in Africa?

China in Africa: The Real Story

I've just a short article on the website of the Oxford University China-Africa Network stating that Beijing is involved in "more than 100 dams" in Africa.

Really?

Here's what the author, Dr. Harry Verhoeven, says: 

"Beijing especially is using its formidable technical expertise in hydro-infrastructure and immense foreign reserves to resurrect dam-building overseas: in half of all African countries, from the Sudanese desert and the Ethiopian lowlands to the rivers of Algeria and Gabon, Chinese engineers are involved in the planning, heightening and building of more than 100 dams. The tens of billions of US dollars and thousands of megawatts involved in these projects have so far remained off the radar in the China-Africa debate, but are possibly more consequential for the future of the African continent than the exports of oil, copper and other valuable resources."(emphasis added)

Verhoeven cites a 2009 publication as his source for this statement: Michael Kugelman (ed.), Land Grab? The Race for the World's Farmland. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2009. Verhoeven doesn't provide a page number, but I searched through this online publication for "dams" and "100" and found nothing relevant to this claim. Sources aside, this claim is problematic for several reasons.

It's true that there has been a resurgence of interest in building hydropower dams in Africa, and that Chinese banks and construction companies are part of this. (This interest has not been "off the radar" however. I wrote about it in The Dragon's Gift. Peter Bosshard at International Rivers has been following this trend and wrote about it for Pambazuka.)

The Last Hunger Season: a fine but flawed study of poverty in rural Kenya – Review by Magnus Taylor

The Last Hunger Season: a fine but flawed study of poverty in rural Kenya – Review by Magnus Taylor

African Arguments

Reporting Africa is too often a game of big politics: elections, coups, terrorists, oil deals and Julius Malema. You can easily be an expert of all these things by reading everything available online, but as well-informed as this may make you, you still won't have the faintest idea what it's actually like to live the life of a person who lives there. This, however, is the great strength of Roger Thurow's new book: The Last Hunger Season: a year in an African farm community on the brink of change. It also happens to be its weakness. Here's why.
Roger Thurow cares about Western Kenya. In authoring The Last Hunger Season, he spent enough time in the region to really know what living there is like. Thurow sought to write a book that followed the fortunes of 4 small-holder farmers as they negotiated the challenges another year brought them, eking out a living from the land. But he also wanted to make some bigger points about how we can combat poverty and hunger in such communities.

Safaricom & CBA Launch MShwari

Safaricom & CBA Launch MShwari

Bankelele

This week saw the launch of what is likely to be a revolutionary mobile phone product  called  M-Shwari. It comes from two long term partners - Kenyan mobile company Safaricom, well known for it's world famous  mobile money product - MPesa, and a local bank, the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) who have been custodians of M-Pesa funds for years

MShwari is a savings and loan product that is immediately accessible to the 15 million users of Safaricom's  MPesa. It gives them access to banking services – savings and loans without having to walk into a bank hall or fill out a single form. It allows them to save as little as 1 shilling (earning interest of between 2-5% a year) or borrow as little as 100 shillings (Kshs 100 is equivalent to about $1.17) and attracts no account maintenance fees or transfer fees.  It will be a great product for people who run informal businesses and take money home at night in pockets or blouses, or envelopes to stuff into mattresses, as they now have a simple tool which they can use to instantly and simply save by clicking into their phone SIM menu. 

China and Mauritania: Whatever Happened to the Railway?

China and Mauritania: Whatever Happened to the Railway?

China in Africa: The Real Story

In 2007 and 2008, many of us read in the Western and Chinese media that a Chinese-Sudanese joint venture was going to build a railway to Mauritania's phosphate deposits in the border town of Kaedi, and that China Eximbank had agreed to finance 70 percent of the $686 million project.

This project was listed in the World Bank's 2008 study of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa, Building Bridges, and has been assumed by many to be ongoing.

I was more skeptical about this project, as there was no further word about it after 2008. I didn't include it in my 2010 book, The Dragon's Gift. But I always wondered what had happened.

Now we know, and the answer is: nothing.

In an April 2012 article, "Phosphate of Bofal: Dream or Reality?", a Mauritanian journalist, Ahmed Yahya Kowri, solves the puzzle. He writes that he'd been hearing about the potential of this "famous" project since he was a schoolboy in the 1970s. The idea that the Chinese would finance a railway was a more recent part of the dream.

Now, Kowri writes, an Indian company is actually mining the phosphate. While Kowri applauds the realization of the long-promised mining venture, he also writes that there are problems: the Indians are bringing in a lot of Indian workers and managers, they are not respecting the environment or the communities, or "law in general," and they are putting a lot of pressure on the government to get exemptions and special facilities. People are made to work 12 to 14 hours a day, and the labor inspector is nowhere to be seen.

What's interesting about this, to China-Africa watchers? A few things.

(1) First, it shows how important it is to be skeptical that an agreement is actually a project. Always follow up on any signed agreement. They come with many different levels of concreteness, varying from a simple MOU (which merely means, "let's continue talking about it"), to "Protocols" to "Contracts" and "Conventions". I am always skeptical until I see work actually beginning (and even then it can still all fall apart, as we have seen many, many times).

(2) Second, we often hear that the Chinese are the "worst" investors in Africa, with regard to the environment, social relations, labor practices. Perhaps a more useful way to see it is that emerging market investors are not going to have the corporate social responsibility ethos or knowledge of those from wealthier industrialized countries. As the complaints concerning the Indian investor suggests, this probably has nothing to do with being a democracy or not, and all to do with being a developing country, with developing country standards. 



Photo: A Mauritanian herds camels near the ancient desert town of Chinguetti, 500km (300 miles) north-east of the capital Nouakchott. Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters.

Chinese investments in Africa....

Deborah Bräutigam, Professor and Director of the International Development Program at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, debunks common myths surrounding Chinese investment in Africa

The West is worried about Chinese investment in Africa. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton regularly makes veiled references to the danger of Africa's "new colonialists". Last summer, UK prime minister David Cameron warned Africans about the risks of partnering with authoritarian China.

Why? Everyone knows that the Chinese are aggressive newcomers to Africa, only interested in resources, including land to feed China's growing population; bringing in all their own workers in countries desperate for employment. Yet much of what "everyone knows" about Chinese investment in Africa is simply wrong.  

In July, as rain beat on the roofs of the Chinese-run Eastern Industrial Zone outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, I walked along the production lines where more than 800 Ethiopian workers are producing shoes for major American labels. Attracted by Ethiopia's high quality leather, Huajian, one of China's largest shoe factories, is part of China's own nascent globalisation. Down the road, a manager at Sino-Ethiopian Associates, explains that a pharmaceutical joint venture – launched in 2001 – was one of the first to produce drug capsules in Africa. Several kilometers away, David Huang's seven hectare farm produces vegetables for the growing Chinese population. Stitched together from small plots negotiated from 15 local farmers, his is the largest Chinese farm in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia represents much of the reality of Chinese investment below the headlines. Are the Chinese leading a land grab in Africa? Researchers from the California-based Oakland Institute who did months of fieldwork in Ethiopia were surprised to find no large-scale Chinese agricultural investors. Experts from the Center for International Forestry Research travelled to the Congo to check out a widely circulated story about a 3m hectare Chinese palm oil project. Again, they found nothing. My own research at the International Food Policy Research Institute discovered that from Mozambique to Zimbabwe, stories about alleged Chinese land grabs turn up very few actual projects, aside from several dozen Chinese-owned farms producing for local markets in Zambia and a handful of long established sugar and sisal plantations, purchased in the 1990s during Africa's era of privatisation. "We're getting lots of investment from India," the head of Ethiopia's commercial farming promotion office told me, "but not from China."

Do Chinese companies bring in all their own workers? In a small number of countries where local labour is expensive, such as Algeria, Libya, even Angola and Sudan, Chinese construction companies with infrastructure contracts have brought in large Chinese crews. Yet in Ethiopia and most other parts of Africa, Chinese managers direct teams of local employees. Huajian brought in nearly 200 skilled Chinese workers to kick-start their production lines while training more than 800 Ethiopians. SEA started production in 2002 with 15 Chinese engineers. Today, the production manager is Ethiopian and a single Chinese engineer remains, along with a skilled local staff of close to 100. The main complaint from Africans is not that they aren't finding work with Chinese companies, but that wages and working conditions are often worse than they had expected to find with a foreign firm.

Chinese companies, like Western firms, are certainly interested in African resources, and sometimes, like Western firms, in countries ruled by unsavoury regimes that don't respect human rights or elections. Yet although a Hong Kong firm, PetroTrans, won an oil exploration concession, Beijing hasn't bothered to look for oil in Ethiopia.  China's largest economic partners on the continent include stable, democratic South Africa, Mauritius, and Ghana, where Chinese firms have invested in banks, factories, telecoms and (more controversially) small shops. Chinese infrastructure projects are knitting the continent together, from wireless networks to roads and bridges.

Rather than "fear" of China's invasion, the West should take a more constructive and informed interest in what the Chinese are really doing to take advantage of Africa's multiple business opportunities. We should assess more carefully the benefits and challenges of Chinese investment. And we should give Africans not just warnings but more credit for taking their own development decisions.  

Deborah Bräutigam is Professor and Director of the International Development Program at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS

Visualizing the arms trade | Reinventing Peace

http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2012/11/19/visualizing-the-arms-trade/


(verzonden vanaf tablet)

Slowing population growth in Malawi is essential for poverty reduction strategies to work

Slowing population growth in Malawi is essential for poverty reduction strategies to work

Eldis Ageing Populations

Malawi adds over 400,000 people each year to its population. Without a reduction in the average number of births per woman, health, education and employment ...

Inequality and the rise of the global 1%: great new paper by Branko Milanovic

Inequality and the rise of the global 1%: great new paper by Branko Milanovic

From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green

Ricardo Fuentes on an important new paper. Tomorrow, Ricardo and I continue the conversation

The rich in the West are getting richer. Many countries have experienced a sharp concentration of incomes over the last three decades. The top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of national income (from 8 to 17%) since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 32 years ago – see graph, source here. The elite in other advanced economies, including, Australia, the UK, Japan and Sweden, have also gotten a larger share of the pie. We have been able to understand the concentration of incomes at the national level thanks to the study of tax records by enterprising scholars such as Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Picketty and Sir Anthony Atkinson. But until recently, we didn't know much about the global concentration of incomes (there's no global tax collector with a similar database).

How Africa's first commodity exchange revolutionised Ethiopia's economy | Lauren Everitt

How Africa's first commodity exchange revolutionised Ethiopia's economy | Lauren Everitt

Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

Eleni Gabre-Madhin on how a market has empowered Ethiopian farmers by focusing on distribution as well as production
While government leaders, NGOs and corporations devise strategies to churn out more food for future generations, Eleni Gabre-Madhin is taking a different approach. Concerned by a 2002 famine in her home country of Ethiopia that followed bumper crops in 2000 and 2001, the Stanford-educated economist decided it was time to go beyond food production and take a hard look at distribution.
The result? Africa's first commodity exchange. As the founder and outgoing CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), Gabre-Madhin established a reliable interface for buyers and sellers to meet – an idea that has inspired other African countries to follow suit. Gabre-Madhin won the Yara award at the African Green Revolution Forum in Arusha, Tanzania, for her role in transforming Ethiopia's commodity market.
What prompted your decision to found Africa's first commodity exchange in Ethiopia? I had been doing research on grain markets and other agriculture markets in Africa for many years and, as it happened, I did my PhD on grain markets in Ethiopia. One of the things I kept seeing over and over, which I'd seen in other parts of Africa, was just how difficult it was for buyers to find sellers and sellers to find buyers, and how difficult it was to enforce the contract.
You'd see that a seller, such as a farmer, for example, who sold grain to a trader wouldn't get paid for weeks, sometimes months. There were cases in the coffee market in Ethiopia where people had committed suicide because they had outstanding loans and their buyers hadn't paid them. So there were all sorts of cases of contract default.
Then from the buyers' perspective you'd hear that they'd have to inspect the grain or coffee visually to check if it was really the quality they'd been told it was. They would have to reweigh it and rebag it to see if it was the actual quantity and quality that they were contracting.
So these are all the problems in the supply chain that make us poor and make us food insecure. If people can't get grain where it's produced really efficiently to where it's needed, then you have markets that are segmented. You have pockets of surplus where prices collapse and places in other parts of the county where prices shoot up because there's a deficit and there's no grain coming in.
That's exactly what happened in 1984 in the big famine that claimed a million lives in Ethiopia. There was obviously a shortage in the north and yet Ethiopia had to go to the world and beg for food aid, but there was a grain surplus in the fertile parts of western Ethiopia.
When I found out about this, I said: "It can't just be about producing more – sure, producing more is important but we've got to figure out how to distribute it. We've got to figure out how to make an efficient market work for everybody – for the farmers, for the buyers, because otherwise we're always going to be in this cycle."
The same thing happened in 2002, when there were consecutive bumper harvests in 2000 and 2001, and Ethiopia was doing really well. Then six months later prices collapsed almost to zero, and farmers could not sell the grain. Six months later, in mid-2002, Ethiopia went to the world for emergency food aid for 14 million people at risk of starvation.
I was so shocked. By that time I had my PhD and I knew this was what I wanted to work on. I had the idea of a commodity exchange – I'd written about it in my dissertation. I did my PhD at Stanford, which is really specialised on commodity markets.

How do people die? Global mortality and causes of death visualised

How do people die? Global mortality and causes of death visualised

Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

What kills people around the world - and how does it vary from place to place?

Simon Rogers

How committed is Europe to development really?

How committed is Europe to development really?

Owen abroad

This joint post with Alice Lépissier and Liza Reynolds first appeared on Views from the Center.  It announces the launch of the Europe Beyond Aid initiative and presents a summary of the research and preliminary analysis in its first working paper.
Europeans more than pull their weight in aid to developing countries. Last year Europeans provided more than €60 billion ($80bn) in aid, more than two and a half times as much as the United States. European members account for just 40% of the national income of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) but give more than 60% of the aid.

Furthermore, Europeans have reason to be proud of the quality of aid they give. They tend to focus on poverty eradication and sustainable development, and have largely shaken off the vested commercial interests in tied aid.
But development cooperation means more than effective aid. The partnership agreed a year ago in Busan (endorsed by more than 150 countries) called for its signatories to move "from effective aid to cooperation for effective development".
So if European countries are serious about development – and not just giving aid – then we must also consider how European policies on trade, investment, migration, environment, technology and security all affect the developing world.
Improvements in any of these policies could have much more impact on poverty and prosperity in poor countries than any increase in the quantity or quality of aid we are likely to make.  Taken together, they are far more important than aid for creating the conditions for development. Yet they get relatively little attention in development circles.