Ugly food price effects

This is a strange pair of articles in today's morning news:

Across globe, empty bellies bring anger. Food prices are spiraling out of reach, sowing volatile discontent and putting pressure on volatile Governments.

Ottawa to pay struggling pork producers $50 million to kill 150,000 pigs by fall. ...Most of the meat is to be used for pet food or otherwise disposed.

Wasteful rich and hungry poor are hardly news, but I find it striking that rising grain prices should affect us so differently. There is less to eat for the poor, and more must be thrown away by the rich.

Canada is great

Nothing to do with development, but beautiful:

Plans for Canada anti-terror unit found in garbage. No, this is not from the Onion. I'm happy to see that in spite of all the talk, we aren't really that worried about terrorists.

It's hard to be good

The ever busy Chris Blattman complains about Development Tourists, people who go on short trips to developing countries to do things like build houses with Habitat for Humanity, or run inane research projects or work in NGOs for less than a year at a time. Who are these fools, and who do they think they are helping?

It's a classic complaint among development workers, but I really don't get it. We complain that rich country Governments don't pay enough attention to International Development, that they don't meet their international commitments, that most Americans couldn't find Kenya or Darfur on a map. But it's when a person gets themselves organized enough to find out about Habitat for Humanity and go on a home building trip, that's when all the cranky and experienced development types really get their knives out.

Why are we development workers so quick to attack people who are trying to do the same thing as us, if perhaps a little bit less informed and less cynical about it? My suspicion is that it is an expression of deep anxiety about our own ability to make a difference. By attacking the Development Tourists, we can feel better about ourselves, because we're the real thing, not like those boneheads over there.

Blattman's blog is generally focused on positive undercurrents in development. If he is going to turn on the criticism, I can think of a lot of things worse than Development Tourists. How about the jaded development types who have spent years in Africa and know exactly how to abuse the system to reap huge consulting fees for work they know is useless? How about the preachers and con men selling false cures for AIDS? The promoters of abstinence-only HIV education? Or the majority of Americans who can't tear themselves away from their reality television shows for long enough to go on a short term Habitat trip and see something outside their own country?

Why would you attack the one group of people who are trying to learn more about how they can make a difference?

Seeking a new colonial master

I'm struck by the language used in the Economist's article about the lifting of the European travel ban on Robert Mugabe, the man largely responsible for the ongoing destruction of Zimbabwe. The story goes thus: faced with an increasing Chinese and Indian influence on the African continent, Europe can no longer afford to moralize to Africa's tinpot dictators, or it will lose out on the spoils. Hence the decision to allow Mugabe to visit Portugal to attend an Africa-EU summit, with one conscientious abstainer, the prime minister of the UK.

What strikes me is that all the sound bites, from African and European leaders alike, indicate a story that is not about partnership, but about sale.

Nigeria's minister of finance:

"Nigeria is becoming a beautiful bride. What is happening is the Chinese, the Koreans, everyone is coming around, and if European companies do not wake up, they will see that most of the best businesses are taken."

Apparently the goal is to have all of Nigeria's businesses taken by foreigners. Interesting.

Another unnamed "African official":

"Europe is jealous. They say we have gotten a new colonial master, but our old one wasn't so good."

(I naively thought the best idea would be to have no colonial master at all.)

The [Europeans'] main concession is to be less critical of regimes that are a bit light-fingered, or disdainful of human-rights.

It is interesting that at the end of the colonial period, most of the African colonies were loss-making enterprises for the colonial Governments. Now that Africa's resources are again perceived to be valuable, I guess we can drop the talk about democracy and human rights, and get back down to business.

Where have we heard this before?

I would guess that journalists must be most willing to take liberties with the truth when they are discussing subjects or places they can count their readers knowing very little about.

So I gather from this cover story that Business Week readers can be assumed to know very little about Africa. I assume that's why the author chooses to join a couple of entrepreneurs with a factory in rural Mozambique, and incorrectly generalize this experience to a continent. He describes Africa thus:

Airports open and close arbitrarily. Roads are often unpaved and clogged. Gasoline and diesel are scarce, and rolling blackouts common. The medical precautions are even more forbidding: Traveling to mosquito-infested interiors requires a round of injections and weeks of antimalarial pills that often induce hallucinations.

Was our correspondent really taking mefloquine? Only if his physician is seriously out of touch or old-fashioned - Doxy and Malarone and far more commonly prescribed, especially for short trips like our correspondent's. And even mefloquine produces hallucinations very rarely, not "often". But hallucinogenic anti-malarials sound like a great story, so why not take some liberties. (And the round of vaccinations is not that different from what you need to travel to South America or Asia.)

As for scarce gasoline and airports that close down, that's a bit dramatic. 25% of Africa's GDP comes from South Africa, where neither of those things are true, and another good chunk comes from North Africa or various capital cities with pretty robust refueling infrastructure at least. It's not really fair to pretend that this is a normal part of the business environment.

But I am nitpicking - the rest of the article isn't that bad. The title "Can Greed Save Africa" does make one think of another time in history that greed drove all kinds of investors into Africa, harvesting resources and cutting off hands and the like...

At least one thing hasn't changed - it's the land that matters. The world is experiencing an unprecedented commodities boom. Africa is one of the planet's last untapped resources. (Though the BusWeek article talks mostly about microcredit and agriculture, the biggest business in Africa is still natural resources, and the commodities boom is driving the credit boom.) So do you think these resource extraction projects are sustainable?

The most telling comment for me is by the Dutch South Africa manager of a project in Mozambique: "I'd be the last person in history to go down as a philanthropist, but you cannot run a business when your workers are out with malaria or sick from dirty water."

This then, is the trade being offered. Anti-malarials and clean water, for the land.

Stupid headline of the day

Thanks to that pillar of quality journalism, the New York Times, for bringing this barbaric practice to the front page. Just when we thought those Africans were becoming modern, embracing internet cafes and mobile phones, now they think children are witches. I guess some things never change...

Some more fishy reporting on the MDGs

The folks over at the United Nations have developed a flashy new web site, the MDG Monitor, which tracks progress toward the completion the Millennium Development Goals, those "achievable" targets agreed to by all the nations in 2000.

I've long been convinced that the driving force behind the MDGs was not to increase foreign aid or development, but to increase the UN's influence in those areas. But I was curious to see how the UN is representing progress in some of my favorite countries.

So I punched in Lesotho, and received the following result.

How disingenuous! Whenever there is a goal that has virtually no possibility of being achieved, the UN is shrugging its figurative shoulders, uhhh, we're not really sure about that one. But I know for a fact the information is not insufficient - I have it on my computer! Lesotho has a comprehensive Demographic and Health Survey from 2004 that shows pretty clearly what the direction of progress is in these areas.

In fact, there's almost no hope of attaining the mortality goals, since the MDGs are measured from 1990, which predates the explosion of HIV in Southern Africa. Southern Africa's infant mortality rates, which the MDGs forecast to decrease by half, were higher in 2005 than in 1990. Should that not be described as "off track"?

This icon appears occasionally. I guess this means possible in theory. i.e. If development agencies became effective, if governments and civil servants in poor countries started to care about their poor, and if we find a cure for HIV in the next six months, then maybe this target could be achieved.

But try as I might, I couldn't find a single goal for a single country that the United Nations acknowledges to be Off Track. Sudan? No information. Congo? Nada. Surely Zimbabwe at least must be off track on some of its goals? Never heard of the place! That's right, Zimbabwe doesn't even appear on the UN's list of countries. Out of sight, out of mind!

Why does the UN want to hide the fact that so many countries are clearly failing to meet the Millennium Development Goals?