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South African wine industry rooted in human misery, says report Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Unsuitable housing, pesticide dangers and barriers to union membership catalogued by Human Rights Watch monitors There is no question of its flair for producing a world-class chenin blanc, cabernet sauvignon or pinotage at an affordable price. But the provenance of South Africa's wines is altogether less savoury, an investigation by human rights monitors has revealed . Workers on the country's wine and fruit farms lead "dismal, dangerous lives," according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which found on-site housing unfit for habitation, exposure to pesticides without proper safety equipment, lack of access to toilets or drinking water while working and barriers to union representation. Farm workers contribute millions to South Africa's economy, with products that are sold in Tesco and other British supermarkets, yet the...

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Is Meritocracy Good? The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak Two years ago I wrote a post arguing that smart, well-educated, hard-working people did not deserve to make more money than other people, at least not as a normative (as opposed to a utilitarian) matter. Last night I was re-reading A Theory of Justice  by John Rawls. This is what he has to say on the matter (§ 12, pp. 73–74): "[The liberal conception of the second principle of justice] still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune. . . . Even the willingness to make an effort, to t...

Why Are We So Critical of China in Africa? China in Africa: The Real Story The German newspaper Die Zeit has published an op-ed " Why are we so critical of China in Africa?" that I co-wrote. The English version can be found online at the German Development Institute ). We make three points challenging the conventional wisdom about the size of China's aid flows, the alleged links between Chinese aid and natural resource investments, and the impact of Chinese aid on governance and human rights.    The final edits for the column deleted a portion that I wrote: Sensational stories may sell more newspapers, but their exaggerated (and often erroneous) claims do no service to a realistic and balanced understanding of a growing power. As just one example: on July 28 the Frankfurter Rundschau carried a story saying "China's practice of buying up land" had contributed to the famine in Ethiopia, based on a statement by Günter Nooke, the German...

Ethiopia and the BBC: The politics of development assistance – By Peter Gill African Arguments Share 'Also tonight,' said Kirsty Wark in the opening link to Newsnight on BBC2 on August 4, 'torture, rape and deliberate starvation.'  She promised that Newsnight's 'exclusive undercover investigation' would reveal evidence that 'the Ethiopian government used millions of pounds of international aid to punish their political opponents.'   That was not all.  'We also investigate allegations of human rights abuses.' By Peter Gill In the course of 17 minutes, Newsnight managed to review six years' worth of all that had gone wrong in Ethiopia, from post-election violence in 2005, to the intensified anti-insurgency operations in Somali Region after 2007, to more recent opposition complaints that their supporters were being deprived of international development assistance.   To emphasise the British aid connection, ...

Is This A Second Great Depression – Or Could It Become Something Worse? The Baseline Scenario By Simon Johnson With the US and European economies having slowed markedly according to the latest data, and with global growth continuing to disappoint, a reasonable question increasingly arises: Are we in another Great Depression? The easy answer is "no" – the main features of the Great Depression have not yet manifest themselves and still seem unlikely.  But it is increasingly likely that we will find ourselves in the midst of something nearly as traumatic, a long slump of the kind seen with some regularity in the nineteenth century, particularly if presidential election-year politics continue to head in dangerous direction. The Great Depression had three main characteristics, seen in the United States and most other countries that were severely affected.  None of these have been part of our collective experience since 2007. First, output dropped sharpl...

Half of Somalian aid may not reach starving refugees The Center for Public Integrity : Investigations World A family sits in Mogadishu after fleeing their home in Southern Somalia.   Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP MOGADISHU, Somalia — Thousands of sacks of food aid meant for Somalia's famine victims have been stolen and are being sold at markets in the same neighborhoods where skeletal children in filthy refugee camps can't find enough to eat, an Associated Press investigation has found. Sent with Reeder