Reason Magazine - Topics > Africa

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Who Wants to Bury a Billionaire?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:00:00 EDT

You can't sum up the entire sorry situation in Zimbabwe in just one sentence. But this one goes a long way:

Now the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has rewarded the people of Zimbabwe with a new $50 000 000.00 bank note to reduce the number of notes they have to carry around.

This picture might help, too:

The country faces an inflation rate of approximately 200,000 percent. One of the few saving graces: an extensive black market, which allows Zimbabweans access to more stable foreign currencies.

Demon Seed

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.”

Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.

reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?

Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.”

reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?

Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.

reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?

Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.

What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.

reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.”

Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.

reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?

Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.

reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?

Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.

reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?

Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.

There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination” and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.

The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.

reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?

Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.

reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.

Paarlberg: Everywhere!

reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?

Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.

But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.

reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character” for the same governments.

Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.

It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.

reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.

Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.

reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?

Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19^th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.

In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.

reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?

Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.

reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.

Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.”

So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.

I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.

reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?

Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.

reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?

Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.

reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?

Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.

That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.

There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.

reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?

Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.

Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

Qaddafi Abolishes Libyan State -- Again!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:08:00 EST

The Economist reports:

The Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, has taken the traditional conservative quest for smaller government to a new plane by calling for the dissolution of the country's existing administrative structure and the disbursement of oil revenue directly to the people. Colonel Qaddafi's tirade against what he described as the "octopus" of government, which has sucked up Libya's massive oil wealth and provided little of value in return, came during his opening address to the General People's Congress (GPC), an annual gathering of the popular committees that notionally hold power in his "jamahiriyya" (entity of the masses)....

His premiss was that the GPC every year considers the annual budget, on this occasion US$37bn, based on estimated oil export revenue. The funds are paid into the central bank and disbursed to various government departments, or committees, and public sector companies in the hope that the capital spending targets are achieved. However, Colonel Qaddafi said that it doesn't happen like that: "It is like the cloud that fills the desert, and you think it is water, but when you reach it you find that it is nothing." He said that the people had lost confidence in the government and the public administration, and had grown to believe that the country's wealth was being systematically plundered for personal gain.

He proposed that from now on oil revenue would be paid directly to every Libyan family every month. They would then decide on their spending priorities, individually or in the form of ad hoc committees interested in investing in a new agricultural or industrial project, or in education, health or housing. These committees would also decide how much tax to pay to the remaining centralised institutions.

Don't get excited; we've been through this before. As reason reported a few years back:

On at least three occasions, the colonel has made a big show of abolishing the Libyan state. His most recent display began in March 2000, when he eliminated 12 ministries and declared that the remaining five would soon follow. "You have no government to complain against," Qaddafi declared to the masses. "Now everything is in your hands and in the future you can complain to yourselves."

Nonetheless, the state stuck around. (Just ask Amnesty International.) It'll stick around this time, too. The Economist notes: "The Libyan leader, having let off steam, can be expected to acquiesce in a somewhat less dramatic change in the system of government than that suggested in his speech -- indeed, he said at the end of his oration that the current system could be maintained on a temporary basis." I assume "temporary" means "until the next faux-anarchist outburst."

Rodney King's Children

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Over the last few years, a brave group of Arab activists has circulated footage of Egyptian cops striking, lashing, and even raping detainees. The torture videos, which had been filmed by the policemen themselves, prompted protests both inside and outside the country. They also prompted censorship: YouTube temporarily shut down the dissident blogger Wael Abbas' digital video channel after the company received complaints about the violent clips.

The channel can now be viewed on YouTube again. Much of its footage can also be seen on a website called The Hub, which is what YouTube would look like if it had been designed by Mohandas Gandhi. The site first appeared in pilot form in 2006, and a beta version launched in December 2007; over 500 pieces of media—videos, audio clips, photo slideshows—have been uploaded to it since its debut. The offerings range from raw footage of a massacre in Guinea to a detailed documentary about forced labor in rural Brazil. Most are accompanied by further information on the issues examined and on ways to take action against the abuses.

The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group first focused on getting cameras into the hands of human rights groups around the world and then on training them in the most effective ways to use those tools—creating, in Gabriel's phrase, a network of "Little Brothers and Little Sisters" to keep an eye on Big Brother's agents. Now Witness wants to move that community of camera-wielding activists online.

Gabriel serves as the group's celebrity face and as chairman of the board, but he stays out of the organization's day-to-day operations. Those decisions are made by people like program manager Sam Gregory. A human rights activist since he first joined Amnesty International in his teens, the U.K.-born Gregory became a student filmmaker at college, where he "was always trying to find a way to combine" his two interests. In addition to his managerial work, Gregory, 33, has co-produced videos about human rights issues in Burma, the Philippines, Argentina, Indonesia, and the United States.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker met Gregory at the DIY Video Summit at the University of Southern California, where Gregory gave a presentation about The Hub; Walker interviewed him via phone in mid-February.

reason: How did Witness get started?

Sam Gregory: Peter Gabriel had been traveling the world with the Amnesty human rights tour in the late '80s. He repeatedly encountered activists who were saying, "We've experienced this abuse, we've heard these stories of abuses, and we have no ways of responding." He had been carrying a Hi-8 camera with him, and it struck him that if those activists had access to cameras they would be able to document what was happening around them and share it in a way that would be totally different from the typical text-based approach.

The Rodney King incident brought that idea home. You had this example of an amateur, George Holliday, on the balcony of his apartment filming a graphic instance of abuse and receiving massive news coverage. That gave the impetus to start the organization. What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn't be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups. In the absence of technical training, they couldn't produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn't craft the stories that would engage audiences.

We also found it was challenging to reach the right audiences. For example, it's very hard for most human rights activists to get mass media coverage. Their issues are either censored by their governments or not considered newsworthy or are hard to represent in just a single snapshot—they're more structural or deeper than just a single image of, say, police brutality. Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence did not work. It's challenging to get it into court, and the Rodney King experience taught us that video evidence can be turned either way—in the Rodney King case, used in the defense as well as the prosecution of LAPD officers.

reason: Were there any notable successes in that first period?

Gregory: There was footage that got into the news media, but it wasn't a successful period in terms of creating real change. I'm trying to think of what was especially effective in those first few years. I'm actually hard pressed to put my finger on an example.

So we learned to think more strategically about what kind of training you provided to groups, how you helped them tell stories, and, most importantly, where you tried to place that material. We train them to develop something called a video action plan, which is essentially a strategic communications plan around video. They'll say, for example, "We're trying to persuade this UN committee to recognize that the government is not reporting the whole story on this issue." And we'll say, "This is how you might think about crafting videos so you'll be able to persuade that committee of the truth of your side of the story." Or they might be doing community organizing—to give a concrete example—around child soldiers in eastern Congo. They faced a problem in terms of persuading parents not to let their children be voluntarily recruited. They needed to find a way to show the impact on the children and present a range of voices explaining the damage without pointing the finger at the parents so they just feel guilty, but instead giving them an option to find alternatives for their children.

reason: How do you get the video in front of those parents? I assume this stuff isn't aired on Congolese TV.

Gregory: The idea at the root of our work is that the voices that need to be heard are the ones closest to the violations. It's not a centralized vision, and all our work derives from the agency of those locally based human rights groups. At any given time we're working with around 13 groups around the world—our core partners—on a range of issues. They'll come to us with a campaign and a strategy that they already have in place.

The group in the Congo, a group called Ajedi-ka, was already doing village meetings all around this area affected by voluntary recruitment. What they were doing with the video is bringing it into that setting: They're bringing a TV, they're bringing a generator, literally just carrying it there.

In other settings you take a different approach. In a high-tech setting, you might carry a video around on an iPod. On Capitol Hill we'll get a screen up and do a much more traditional showing. But the root of it is always the human rights groups themselves thinking about how to use it as a tool to complement what they've done before, and not assuming that video is a magic bullet that will get people to react. It has to be within this context of options for people to take action.

reason: How do you train the people?

Gregory: We train them initially around how to film. We're not trying to make human rights workers into filmmakers, but we give them the tools to be mediamakers within their work. It's media literacy: Just as they can write a written report, they should be able to pull out a camera and film. Alongside that we develop this video action plan.

Usually there's a process after that where we receive footage from them and we provide feedback. We'll say everything from "Maybe you should put that person a little bit to the right in the frame" to "Have you thought about whether you're getting the right testimonies in order to persuade the audience you want to reach?" Typically, at least in the first instance, groups will come to Witness to edit. We do that partly so they can tap into a range of experiences here. In a lot of the relationships, as time moves on, we train them how to edit on their own. So, for example, a group we've work ed with on the Thai-Burma border that secretly travels into Burma to document atrocities there—they produce all their videos in the villages on the border. At this point we're really just a strategic consultant to them.

reason: Did you have any notable successes during that period after you rethought your approach and before you launched The Hub?

Gregory: I would highlight Ajedi-ka. We worked with them first on that campaign around child soldiers, and they've seen a decline in voluntary recruitment in communities where they've been doing work. They then identified a need to reach a completely different audience, to communicate with people at the International Criminal Court, which was making a decision about what to investigate in the Congo. We worked with them to develop a video that spoke to the impact on children of being involved in conflict. The organization did private screenings with senior members of the International Criminal Court, and that helped push the court to prioritize that issue. The first arrest warrant they issued in their investigation was for a warlord, and it was specifically on the child soldier issue.

Another example is in Mexico, where a group called Comisión Mexicana has been looking at murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez. You've had this pattern of murders of young women, failures by the local police to investigate, and choices to arrest and torture scapegoats. We worked on a video that found a very powerful individual story that spoke to the broader pattern. It was the story of a young woman who disappeared shortly before she was due to go to university. She's never been found, but the police two weeks later arrested her uncle, accused him of the murder, and tortured him into confessing. So this one story wrapped together both the murders and the abuse of power.

They used this video to lobby Congress here in the U.S. but also showed it to the attorney general's office in Mexico and to local politicians there, and as a result of that the young man who had been arrested was released.

reason: What were they lobbying for in Congress?

Gregory: They were lobbying for a House statement that Mexico should do more to investigate these murders. I wouldn't place much emphasis on that, but you can use it in human rights advocacy. For example, recently we've done a lot of screenings around Burma with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in D.C.—again, trying to bring those voices of people driven from their villages directly into a committee room in Washington. You can sometimes see the boomerang effect of that.

reason: What did you think of the way the Burmese atrocity footage was used at the beginning of the new Rambo movie?

Gregory: The people we work with inside Burma are tremendously excited that the Rambo movie came out, because it's another way of focusing attention on the crisis. I think it was effective. I have some concerns about how you then go into, essentially, a Hollywood revenge fantasy. But I think it was important that people knew that this was a real situation, and I think it is important to think about how this accesses other audiences that might not know about Burma.

reason: Most of the examples that you've given so far have involved one form or another of narrowcasting. Do you still make an effort to get something out to a mass audience like that?

Gregory: We absolutely do think about how you reach out to a broader audience. In fact, some of our footage appeared in the opening credits of Rambo.

We try to build media attention when we think it's complementary to the advocacy goals. We don't assume that media attention will work. The experience of many of the groups that we've worked with is that the way they're represented in the media doesn't represent either them or their communities well and can be counterproductive. So we try to find opportunities where we can help navigate how it's covered and retain the advocates' point of view. Certainly with The Hub we're thinking about how the media gets access to a broader range of grassroots footage.

reason: How do you police the clips on The Hub for accuracy?

Gregory: We don't police heavily. We made a decision early on that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of every clip. But when we look at clips, we look for red flags, such as someone being exposed to a risk by being seen, or graphic sexual violence that's not in a human rights context. If it's something we're not sure about, we'll try to contact the user who uploaded it and ask more questions. If there's a big question mark in our minds we won't upload it.

We're trying to move to a more community-based model of assessing human rights footage. We've seen success in a number of instances. There was a case from the Ivory Coast where collective intelligence helped identify falsification of footage around a shooting of civilians there.

reason: But nothing goes up until you've approved it. It's not like YouTube.

Gregory: At the moment, nothing goes up until we've approved it. In the long run, I think we'd like to move to a situation where more material can go directly up. We'd like to trust more to the community to assess that material, but right now we've got to build that community.

reason: What are some of the other differences between what you do and YouTube?

Gregory: One key area is the issue of security. We are very aware that people may be uploading from situations where the government is watching the Internet and there may be potential repression. So when someone tries to upload to the site they're given an indication of the security risks. We provide ways to upload safely and securely. Once they upload, we don't hold onto their IP address, so if someone tries to obtain that information either legally or illegally we are unable to identify where users are based.

Another element is editorial control. We're trying to tap into a participatory community of human rights activists rather than leave it in the hands of a corporation. That's an important difference.

Another element is that the pages are designed to provide space to contextualize and act around the footage. We're building a number of advocacy options into the site, so people can find ways to generate online or offline action. If you look at the Shoot on Sight clip from Burma, for example, the video itself is quite self-contained, but the underlining material gives more information, gives the statistics, gives more background about what's been happening, and gives ways to act.

One of the functionalities that will launch shortly is an ability to download the clips, so people can use them in the kind of offline settings that are particularly common outside the global North. Perhaps there's only one connection to the Internet, so what you want to do is download it and take it into a communal setting.

We're definitely encouraging people to port the media out. We want them to share it, to embed it in their blogs, and to take it offline, in a community setting or on a mobile phone.

reason: Are there projects outside of Witness that have influenced what you're doing?

Gregory: I think the Amnesty International Unsubscribe Me campaign, which shows six minutes of someone going through a stress position, is an interesting one to look at, in terms of how you use the vaudevillian characteristics of something like YouTube and turn it around for human rights purposes.

reason: The definition of human rights activism gets kind of hazy around the edges sometimes, and you'll often see groups with very broad political agendas. There are also times when people in different parts of the community have had very different ideas about, say, whether to call for military intervention. Do you accept clips from groups with different analyses? How do you deal with those tensions?

Gregory: We don't have any particular focus in terms of human rights issues. We define human rights very inclusively, so we include economic, social, cultural, political, and civil rights. We wouldn't typically take two core partners that have dueling perspectives, but we're open to groups that are on the edge and leading. We worked, for example, with the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban when they were definitely not the mainstream of human rights activism there. We don't necessarily go for the middle-of-the-road groups.

In the context of The Hub, there's a clear set of community guidelines in terms of how people should act on the site. So advocating violence or posting hate speech or slurs will violate the terms. But we don't legislate a particular point of view, and in fact we encourage different points of view on how to address human rights violations.

We also, in some cases, will contextualize clips that have a public service value, even though they may be a piece of hate speech. If we were to receive footage similar to, say, the incitement to violence by the Rwandan government during the Rwandan genocide, I think there would be a strong reason to feature that on The Hub, but then to put a comment around it. So there is a place where we might editorialize, to explain why something is there.

reason: How does the site deal with informed consent?

Gregory: The overall framework we've set is to think about informed consent in a victim- and survivor-focused model. That means making sure that someone who is filmed is doing it voluntarily, that they understand the risks, that they understand how it's going to be used, and that they're competent to agree, so it's not someone who for reasons of mental disability or age or trauma is incapable of making an appropriate decision. Often oppressive governments will hunt down people who are featured in human rights material. People should be aware of the risks, and they should be aware that any piece of media, once it's out there, can be seen by their worst enemy.

We recognize that we can't impose that standard on people uploading to The Hub. So we emphasize that people shouldn't just think about consent as something legalistic. It's not a legal question whether someone in Burma is filmed and faces risk. They're never going to sue you. You should think about it in a much deeper way that centers on the safety and security of the person filmed as much as the person filming.

reason: The site includes clips of beatings in Egypt that were filmed by Egyptian police officers themselves. How often does that kind of footage appear on the site?

Gregory: There's quite a lot of it. One piece of footage that surfaced in the pilot project was something that became known as squatgate. Police officers in Malaysia used a cell phone to film the humiliation of a young woman who had been arrested. They forced her to strip and to squat in a jail cell. Similar to the Egyptian footage, that escaped from the closed circle of police officers sharing it among themselves and sparked a national outcry in Malaysia around police misconduct.

reason: Do you worry about consent issues in that context?

Gregory: We do. In fact, with the Egypt videos, we made a decision not to show the most grotesque of them, which included the sodomization of one of the detainees. And in the squatgate example we decided not to post that video because it had been seen so widely, and the woman involved specifically requested to me, "Please don't circulate this anymore."

In the case of the Egyptian footage, the people involved said they really wanted people to know about what was happening. When we can get that kind of cue from the people in the material, that helps.

reason: What other approaches have the clips taken?

Gregory: One of the primary modes is witness journalism. Clips filmed by the right people in the wrong place. We have a clip, for example, from a group in Cambodia that is recording forced evictions in Phnom Penh.

Another genre is advocacy videos—videos that speak to a particular audience and push for a particular change in policy, behavior, or practice. Most of the videos from Witness are in that mode, including the videos I talked about from the Congo.

And I think there's a third kind of video: more traditional documentaries that follow a story in a human rights context but don't necessarily have an explicit call for action. It sort of splits into two. For example, we have footage from Al Jazeera on The Hub. So that's a news story. And there's a video that explains the history of West Papua under Indonesian control. That's more of a documentary.

The important elements for us are to go beyond a space where footage is viewed to think about how you create a human rights community around it and how you turn that visual media into action. It's not OK just to see scenes of misery. In fact it can be deeply draining and frustrating both for the people creating it and the people watching it. You have to think about ways to contextualize and ways to act.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Bill Gates Aims to Save Africa

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:20:00 EST

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is following in the footsteps of the Rockefeller Foundation by fomenting a Green Revolution for the 21st century. The first Green Revolution blossomed from Rockefeller Foundation funding for plant breeding in Mexico in the 1940s. At that time, Mexico could not feed itself and was importing half of its wheat supplies. The Rockefeller Foundation hired young plant breeder Norman Borlaug to see what could be done to boost the productivity of poor Mexican farmers. Backed by $100,000 in annual funding from the foundation, Borlaug and his colleagues flourished. They created highly productive dwarf wheat varieties enabling Mexico to become self-sufficient in grains by 1956. By 1965, Mexican wheat yields rose 400 percent over their 1950 level.

In 1952, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding a similar effort to boost the productivity of poor Indian farmers. In the mid-1960s, India was importing grains to avert looming famines. The dwarf wheat varieties developed by Borlaug and his colleagues were again decisive in winning the battle against hunger on the subcontinent. Indian wheat production grew from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970 and the country was self-sufficient in grains by 1974. Green Revolution food production in Asia grew much faster than its population did, increasing calorie availability per person by nearly 30 percent and making wheat and rice cheaper. The Green Revolution prevented the deaths by starvation of perhaps a billion people. In terms of human well-being the Rockefeller Foundation's modest investment in agricultural research arguably paid the biggest dividend in history.

Unfortunately, the Green Revolution did not extend to the entire planet. Sub-Saharan Africa remained largely untouched. As a consequence, average per capita food production in Africa has declined by 12 percent since 1980.

Enter the Gates Foundation. In September 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations announced a joint $150 million effort to create an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Last week, the Gates Foundation upped its ante on boosting production by another $306 million. About half of these new grants will fund efforts to improve seeds and soils in Africa. The Gates Foundation has clearly identified the right target. "For the poorest people, GDP [gross domestic product] growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth originating outside the sector," according the World Bank's World Development Report 2008. But why did the Green Revolution not take off in Africa?

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has noted, "Poor infrastructure, high transport costs, limited investment in irrigation, and pricing and marketing policies that penalized farmers made the Green Revolution technologies too expensive or inappropriate for much of Africa." This list is basically an international bureaucracy's euphemism for saying that government corruption and mismanagement has kept African farmers poor. "Poor infrastructure" means that governments built no roads over which seeds, fertilizers and pesticides could be shipped cheaply to farmers. And conversely, without good roads, farmers can't get their crops to market.

For example, Uganda has just 58 miles of paved roads per million citizens, Mozambique just 87 miles . By contrast, the United States has 8,000. In addition, African governments have a history of imposing price controls on food crops ,which discourage farmers from growing more than they need for their families. Africa has not been alone in pursuing this destructive policy. In the 1960s, India paid its farmers 40 percent less than the world price for their grain. Green revolutionary Borlaug managed to persuade the Indian government to drop grain price controls. Restored market incentives persuaded Indian farmers to rapidly adopt new high yield crop varieties.

Interestingly, modern crop technologies fostered by the Gates Foundation might enable poor farmers to outflank, in part, these corrupt and stupid government policies. For example, seeds that contain traits like pest-resistance and drought-resistance could reduce farmers' dependence on government subsidized pesticides and irrigation systems. In fact, the Gates Foundation has provided nearly $40 million to researchers to develop drought resistant corn varieties for Africa. In addition, the foundation is funding low-cost drip irrigation systems designed by International Development Enterprises that can reduce the cost of irrigation from about $6,000 per acre to about $37.

About half of the $306 million in agricultural grants announced last week will go to the African Soil Health Program which aims to work with 4.1 million small-scale African farmers and regenerate 6.3 million hectares of farm land through better soil management practices. For the time being, AGRA supports only conventional crop breeding and does not fund the development of new varieties by means of genetic engineering. Rich countries have poured almost $600 billion in foreign aid into Africa over the past four decades. Result? Zero increase in per capita incomes. Is the Gates Foundation now pouring in good money after bad? Let's hope not.

The Gates Foundations' new Green Revolution has already provoked resistance from anti-globalization and anti-technology activists. For example, the California-based Food First/Institute for Food Development and Policy held a conference in Mali in November opposing the new Green Revolution. Food First peddled the now standard activist line that the first Green Revolution was a colossal mistake that primarily helped rich farmers become richer.

Like many such fables there is a grain of much exaggerated truth to the claim. Small farmers were slower to adopt Green Revolution techniques but most of them eventually did. Furthermore, higher farm incomes boosted demand for other goods and services, which in turn stimulated the rural nonfarm economy. Real per capita incomes doubled in Asia between 1970 and 1995. By doubling farm yields, tens of millions of acres of forests and wetlands were spared the plow and hundreds of millions of lives saved from starvation. The Green Revolution was not perfect, but critics ignore how bad poverty and hunger would have been without it.

In The Seattle Times, Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez denounced the Gates Foundation's efforts to foster an African Green Revolution. "It's a corporate strategy for colonizing Africa's food and agriculture systems, which thus far have resisted," he said. Considering that today some 200 million Africans subsist on the thin edge of starvation, Africa's food and agricultural systems should be so lucky as to be colonized by new Green Revolution agricultural research and technologies.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

For the Love of Allah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:49:00 EST

Here's one way to disguise your contraband sex flicks:

Algerian police have uncovered a criminal group that made pornographic DVDs and put well-known Islamic preachers on the covers to disguise the films, the Al Shuruk al Yawmi daily reported on Monday.

Police said tens of thousands of copies of the erotic films were sold in the capital, Algiers, and that many customers bought the discs in good faith, innocently unaware of their contents.

"Many" customers, eh?

Elsewhere in Reason: Porn as psychological warfare.

Africa: Are Wages Too High?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:28:00 EST

Counterintuitive economist's observation for the day: the real problem with wages in Africa is that they are too high. From Yale University development economist Chris Blattman:

...the big fact that jumps out at you when you look at industrial production in Africa is not the ups and downs, but just how little of it there is.
........
One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms in China and India seem to be more productive than their African counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don't manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or informal business?
Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India?.....
There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa, which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages are erroneous.
Another possibility, however, is that the largest employers of skilled workers in most African countries are international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.
Could the government and NGOs be distorting local wage markets and pricing African industry out of the world market? I don't know, but this is a question some economist ought to start investigating.

The Center for Global Development, where Blattman is a visiting fellow.

Katherine Mangu-Ward raises some other questions about aid to Africa and what good it does, or doesn't, do.

[Link via Tyler Cowen]

The Minute Standard

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:31:00 EST

A free-market currency of sorts emerges in Kenya's post-electoral wreckage:

Kenyan phone users do not have monthly phone plans; they pay for prepaid credits (like most of the world). Prior to the election, getting credits was easy -- they were available in kiosks, stores, bars, anywhere you could imagine. Yet, these venues all closed shop after the election because of the violence and looting. Credits have become a rare commodity and the price has skyrocketed. Credits have also turned into a currency and people are trading credits for food and medicine. Credits are worth more than the government's currency. Because of difficulties in getting credits to citizens, a service called Pyramid of Peace has popped up to help people send credits to Kenyans.

For more on grassroots activism in Kenya, see this excellent roundup at Global Voices Online.

Bonus link: R.A. Radford's classic account of cigarettes evolving into money in World War II POW camps.

Foreign Aid Hokey Pokey in Kenya

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:26:00 EST

I recently returned from a trip to East Africa. I spent most of my time in Kenya in areas unaffected by the post-election violence, and saw no demonstrations or looting. Even if I had been in the thick of things, I'm not sure I would have had much to say besides the commentary most outsiders have offered: Man, this totally sucks.

(For great, well-informed, in-country, ant's-eye-view commentary, check out Alex Halperin's blog)

What I did see on my trip was a little political graffiti--and a lot of evidence of the impact of foreign aid on the region. The single decent road I drove on in Tanzania, for example, was a gift from Japan. Everything else was broken gravel at best.

As Kenya, previously held up as a model of stability and relative prosperity in Africa, falls apart, the U.S. and other nations that contribute aid dollars are threatening a tug on the purse strings if the government fails to act. The Kenyan government isn't taking it well:

Kenya’s government also brushed aside threats by its major international donors, including the United States, to review foreign aid.
“Our budget is not dependent on foreign funding,” said Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman. “The government cannot be blackmailed. “You are here as our development partners, you are not here to blackmail and threaten us,” he said referring to foreign donors. “We have said our government will continue as always. They should not try to threaten us.”
Fourteen of Kenya’s leading donors, including the United States, issued a statement this week warning the Kenyan government that they were reviewing foreign aid in light of the crisis. The United States gives the country more than $600 million in aid each year.

There's a certain amount of foreign aid hokey pokey going on in the region: You take the foreign aid out/ you put the emergency aid in/ you take the aid workers out/ and you shake it all about.

Of course, it matters who is administering the money. We're taking money from the hands of the government, which is part of the problem, and putting it into the hands of independent aid efforts. But still, this kind of aid dollars switcheroo doesn't seem to be making much of an impact.

This seems to be a classic case of "do-somethings." But is there a better option than my response (reminder: "Man, this sucks") or just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

Bullish on Cows

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:48:00 EST

Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen take a nuanced look at what microcredit can and can't do to help poor people around the world. I won't try to summarize all their points, but I will quote my favorite part of the piece:

Westerners typically save in the form of money or money-denominated assets such as stocks and bonds. But in poor communities, money is often an ineffective medium for savings; if you want to know how much net saving is going on, don't look at money. Banks may be a daylong bus ride away or may be plagued, as in Ghana, by fraud. A cash hoard kept at home can be lost, stolen, taken by the taxman, damaged by floods, or even eaten by rats. It creates other kinds of problems as well. Needy friends and relatives knock on the door and ask for aid. In small communities it is often very hard, even impossible, to say no, especially if you have the cash on hand....

Under these kinds of conditions, a cow (or a goat or pig) is a much better medium for saving. It is sturdier than paper money. Friends and relatives can't ask for small pieces of it. If you own a cow, it yields milk, it can plow the fields, it produces dung that can be used as fuel or fertilizer, and in a pinch it can be slaughtered and turned into saleable meat or simply eaten. With a small loan, people in rural areas can buy that cow and use cash that might otherwise be diverted to less useful purposes to pay back the microcredit institution.

Too Much Money for AIDS

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:28:00 EST

Here is something you don't see every day: an AIDS researcher calling for less spending on AIDS. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Daniel Halperin, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, suggests that politicians who criticize President Bush for seeking "only" $30 billion over five years to fight AIDS don't know what they're talking about:

Even the current $15 billion in spending represents an unprecedented amount of money aimed mainly at a single disease.
Meanwhile, many other public health needs in developing countries are being ignored.

Halperin argues that more lives could be saved by reallocating money earmarked for AIDS to less fashionable causes, such as prevention and treatment of the diarrheal diseases that are a major cause of mortality in Africa. The "rigid focus on AIDS," he says, has led to a deadly waste of resources:

This year [Botswana] will receive about $300 million to fight AIDS—in addition to the hundreds of millions already granted by drug companies, private foundations and other donors. While in that sparsely populated country last month, I learned that much of its AIDS money remains unspent, as even its state-of-the-art H.I.V. clinics cannot absorb such a large influx of cash.
As the United States Agency for International Development's H.I.V. prevention adviser in southern Africa in 2005 and 2006, I visited villages in poor countries like Lesotho, where clinics could not afford to stock basic medicines but often maintained an inventory of expensive AIDS drugs and sophisticated monitoring equipment for their H.I.V. patients. H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die.

Power Shops

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:02:00 EST

From Sierra Leone, an interesting VOA report about entrepreneurs with electric generators:

Shops like these dot every neighborhood. They offer a range of services, from haircuts with electric shavers to pay phone calls.

And for about 35 cents at almost any of the shops, you can charge your cell phone.

Although video games, haircuts, and cell phone charging do not seem related, there is one thing they have in common: they all require electricity. And that is something in short supply in Freetown.

Alvin Williams, who owns and operates the video-game, telephone, and cell phone-charging shop, says it has been more than a week since he has had electricity at home....But the 22-year-old electrical engineering student turned entrepreneur has been able to turn his city's lack of power into an opportunity for himself. He will use the profits from his shop to pay for school.

[Via Timbuktu Chronicles.]

The Battle of Algiers

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:36:00 EST

At least 62 people were killed today in terrorist attacks around the Algerian capital Algiers, according to reports from the British media (thus far nothing from CNN, MSNBC, et al). Initial reports say that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was targeted by a suicide bomber and the country's supreme court—or a target in the vicinity—was hit by a powerful car bomb. BBC News has the latest:

At least 62 people have died in two bomb blasts in the Algerian capital, Algiers, officials have said. The first explosion happened in the Ben Aknoun district, near the supreme constitutional court. That was followed shortly afterwards by a second blast at the United Nations offices in the Hydra neighbourhood. A UN worker caught up in the Hydra attack told the BBC that a large part of the building was destroyed and it was feared people were trapped inside. Dozens were wounded in the explosions, officials said.

"These are crimes that targeted innocent people. Students and school children were among the victims. Nothing can justify the crime," he said. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, also condemned the bombings, saying they were "just unacceptable". "I would like to condemn it in the strongest terms. It cannot be justified in any circumstances," he told reporters.

In the attack near the court, a bus packed with university students was passing by the vehicle containing the bomb when it exploded. Security officials said the bus took the full force of the blast and was ripped apart, killing and injuring many of those on board. At the UN offices in Hydra, it was the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) building which bore the brunt of the blast. A residential building and the UNHCR headquarters across the road were also damaged, witnesses said.

The Telegraph has further details and live video from the scene.

Sudan Shows Its Tolerance

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:36:00 EST

Yesterday Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir pardoned Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher who last week was found guilty of insulting Islam by letting her 7-year-old students name a class teddy bear Muhammad. Sentenced to 15 days in jail, light punishment compared to the six months and 40 lashes she could have gotten, Gibbons was freed halfway to her release date and promptly returned to the U.K. (Apparently she got credit for time served awaiting trial.) Gibbons' defense attorney explains:

This was all political. The government did this to show they are tolerant. They don't need any more problems with the world and the international media.

The sad thing is that Bashir does look pretty tolerant compared to his constituents. "On Friday," The New York Times reports, "hundreds of Sudanese in Khartoum, the capital, protested what they considered a lenient punishment and called for her to be put to death."

Teddy Bears on Trial

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:37:00 EST

Contrary to reassurances from the Sudanese embassy in London, Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Khartoum who did not realize naming a teddy bear Muhammad was verboten, has been charged with blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam. The possible penalties include a fine, 40 lashes, and six months in jail. The government promises a "swift and fair trial," saying, "she will be brought in front of a judge, and now she must prove her innocence"—which gives you a sense of how the court system works in Sudan. Gibbons' lawyer says the defense will be straightforward: She had "absolutely no intention to insult religion, and for blasphemy to take place there must be an insult."

Some observers speculate that Gibbons' arrest and trial are payback for her country's excessive interest in Darfur. ("You say we're a repressive regime? We'll show you!") But A.P. suggests the truth is more disturbing:

The country's top Muslim clerics have pressed the government to ensure that she is punished, comparing her action to author Salman Rushdie's ''blasphemies'' against the Prophet Muhammad.
The British novelist was accused of blasphemy by many Muslims for his 1988 novel ''The Satanic Verses,'' which had a character seen as a reference to the prophet. Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious edict calling for Rushdie's death.

What's worse than cynically prosecuting a harmless schoolteacher for accidentally violating a taboo that even her Muslim students (who overwhelmingly voted to call the stuffed animal Muhammad) did not know about? Doing so in the sincere belief that she represents an intolerable threat to morality and public order.

She's Lucky It Wasn't a Stuffed Pig

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:23:00 EST

Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher at a private school in Khartoum, was arrested on Sunday for insulting Islam because she had her 7-year-old students vote on a name for the class teddy bear, and they picked Muhammad. The possible punishments for this offense include up to 40 lashes and up to six months in jail. A spokesman at the ~~British~~ Sudanese embassy in London says, "I am pretty certain that this minute incident will be clarified very quickly and this teacher who has been helping us with the teaching of children will be safe and will be cleared." Well, not exactly cleared:

Several Sudanese newspapers ran a statement Tuesday reportedly from Unity High School in Khartoum where Gibbons taught, saying the administration ''offers an official apology to the students and their families and all Muslims for what came from an individual initiative.'' It said Gibbons had been ''removed from her work at the school.''

The Iraqi Crackup

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:58:00 EST

I used to believe the easiest way to extract ourselves from Iraq would probably involve breaking the country into three separate states. Then I realized there was a problem with that approach, one far larger than the familiar questions of how to divide the oil revenue or how to keep Turkey calm in the face of an independent Kurdistan. Toby Dodge pointed it out in September, when Joe Biden was promoting a "soft" partition of the country:

If you look at the three communities that are allegedly going to be partitioned, go down to the supposed Shiistan in the south. What we have in the south is a low-level civil war between the two main Shiite parties led by members of the Badr Brigade and al-Sadr. So, are we going to partition the south into a Badristan and a Sadristan? When we come up to supposed Sunnistan, we have a fight between al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely indigenous organization with foreign leadership, and the so-called sheikhs of Anbar -- that is an intra-Sunni fight. Then we have Kurdistan. The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan fought a vicious civil war in the 1990s, where the KDP actually asked Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard to come in and help them. The idea that we have three neat communities is sociologically and politically illiterate.

For Dodge, this is an argument against partition. For me, it's an argument against carelessly invoking the number three. Iraq is already devolving into far more jurisdictions than that.

The recent reduction in violence reflects both the ugly side of that devolution, as ethnic cleansing runs its course, and the positive side, as local institutions fill the void left by the central state. With no sign of a national political "reconciliation" -- the original point of the surge, you may recall -- those shaky local institutions are all the Iraqis have to work with.

How should the U.S. react to that? Marc Lynch has been hosting a debate about that very question at his Abu Aardvark site. Here, from the latest post, is Lynch's summary of the points of consensus:

[W]e all basically agree on where Iraq is heading -- a highly decentralized state, without a formal or even semi-formal partition, where governance and security is increasingly devolving to localities. Whether this is "federalism" or a "warlord state" is what is in question; a strong central democratic state rooted in a general consensus on political identity and norms is off the table. Whether we state it or not, we all seem to expect that the formal Iraqi state will likely remain governed by the existing political rules, meaning a monopoly of the major Shia parties supported by a deal to leave the Kurds alone in exchange for their votes. We all agree that the situation in the Shia areas is beyond American control and likely to remain violent, fragmented and unstable. And none of us think that there will be any national level political accomodation. Never mind that the situation just described used to be defined as "failure" -- the important issue here now, as Kahl and Katulis agree, is how to respond to this lousy scenario to best protect American (and Iraqi?) interests.

My one contribution to the discussion: Is there anything to learn from Somalia's experience? Virtually everyone predicted the Somali civil war would worsen when the U.S. pulled out. But it didn't take long for the pent-up violence to run its course, and the country (if we can still call it that) soon reached a relatively peaceful equilibrium, with a political system that fell somewhere on the spectrum between anarcho-capitalism and a collection of mafia fiefdoms. It wasn't ideal, but it also wasn't nearly as violent as the civil war had been -- at least until recently, when the war on terror undermined the emerging social order.

Iraq is not Somalia. But Somalia shows that local reconciliation can have positive effects even when national unity is impossible -- and that sometimes it's easier to reconcile when outside troops aren't around. At this point in the Iraq war the U.S. has no good options, but withdrawal looks far better than all the others.

Mugabe: Zimbabwe is a "laughing stock"

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:42:00 EDT

In a rare display of honesty, Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe has acknowledged that his "redistribution" of white-owned farms (which included giving land and equipment to thousands of people who hadn't a clue how to farm) has been a disaster, and that it has turned his country into a "laughing stock." But, according to Mugabe, it's still not his fault. The Telegraph reports:

The malnutrition that afflicts millions of Zimbabweans has reduced the country to a "laughing stock", President Robert Mugabe has admitted. Distributing equipment to black farmers resettled on land seized from white owners, he said: "We have become the laughing stock because of hunger. We all need to eat, whether you are Zanu-PF or MDC. Let's unite."

Since Mr Mugabe began confiscating farms Zimbabwe has gone from being an agricultural exporter to a country where millions need food aid. He blames supposed Western sabotage for the situation, rather than his own actions.

Full story here.

Last year, Jens F. Laurson and George A. Pieler made the moral case for ending foreign aid to African dictatorships. As they point out, Robert Mugabe "takes the cash and blames the West, trashing the human rights of both large landowners and defenseless slumdwellers in Harare."

Rattled and Glum

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:33:00 EDT

From a story in the latest Rock & Rap Confidential (not on the Web yet, alas):

At June's Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Tanzania, Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and social worker, spoke out against reliance on foreign charity, pointing out that it had never succeeded in reviving an economy anywhere in the world, least of all Africa. He made his points only with difficulty however because throughout the speech he was heckled from the back of the room with shouts of "Bullshit!" and "Bollocks!" The heckler was Bono.

More on Bono's switch from headliner to heckler here.

Robert Mugabe Exerts Downward Pressure on Prices

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:54:00 EDT

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's predictable response to the soaring inflation caused by his ruinous, kleptocratic economic policies: a decree commanding lower prices. But as The New York Times observes, "not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand." The state-ordered bargains were snapped up by Mugabe's cronies, tipped off to which stores would be visited by price inspectors. And since farmers, manufacturers, and distributors cannot sell products at a loss indefinitely, food, gasoline, medical supplies, and other necessities have disappeared as a horrendous economic situation continues, incredibly, to get even worse. In response, Mugabe is nationalizing more and more industries, asserting that the problem is greedy businessmen. Although Mugabe's policies won't find many defenders in the U.S., they reflect the same mentality that leads American politicians to denounce (and legislate against) "price gouging" and "windfall profits."

The Voice of the Kalakuta Republic

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:55:00 EDT

The Afrobeat star Femi Kuti, son of the great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, talks with the L.A. Weekly:

Q: What's your take on Bono and concerts like Live 8 that campaign on behalf of Africa?

A: Bono doesn't need to tell us that we are poor. We know we are poor. All these concerts come and go and nothing changes in Africa.

Q: So then what's the best way for concerned Americans to get involved with helping Africa?

A: Not to feel sorry for us but to be positive toward us. Do more business with us. Come and visit us. We, in turn, have to get stronger and not rely on leaders to do everything for us. We must take action ourselves. But Western democracies must also stop turning a blind eye to African corruption and start taking action -- then we can start moving forward as a nation.

Unfortunately, the interviewer doesn't ask what sort of "action" Femi would like those Western democracies to take. (From his comments here, I'd guess he means cut off aid.) But he does elicit an interesting answer to this query:

Q: You've said in the past that you don't believe in democracy. What do you believe in?

A: I'm going to be a leader of myself. All I can do is just try to be a good human being and fight to eradicate bad vibes like jealousy and greed from my way of thinking. I want to be happy and make other people happy too.

Most of the time, anyway. In a follow-up story, the Weekly reports that during Femi's show at the House of Blues last Friday, "a less-than-perceptive crowd cheered wildly when Femi took a mid-set break to address the plague of corruption among African leadership. 'Our leaders take the people's money and come spend it in places like Los Angeles,' he said, surprised when his words were greeted with hoots of joy from the crowd."

"You're not listening," a frustrated Femi scolded.

Patronizing Africa

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:11:00 EDT

Here's the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala, writing in yesterday's Washington Post:

...Such campaigns, however well intentioned, promote the stereotype of Africa as a black hole of disease and death. News reports constantly focus on the continent's corrupt leaders, warlords, "tribal" conflicts, child laborers, and women disfigured by abuse and genital mutilation. These descriptions run under headlines like "Can Bono Save Africa?" or "Will Brangelina Save Africa?" The relationship between the West and Africa is no longer based on openly racist beliefs, but such articles are reminiscent of reports from the heyday of European colonialism, when missionaries were sent to Africa to introduce us to education, Jesus Christ and "civilization."

There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one's cultural superiority. My mood is dampened every time I attend a benefit whose host runs through a litany of African disasters before presenting a (usually) wealthy, white person, who often proceeds to list the things he or she has done for the poor, starving Africans. Every time a well-meaning college student speaks of villagers dancing because they were so grateful for her help, I cringe. Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head -- because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself. And not only do such depictions tend to ignore the West's prominent role in creating many of the unfortunate situations on the continent, they also ignore the incredible work Africans have done and continue to do to fix those problems....

Whole thing here.

A Grotesque Lesson in Political Economy

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:08:00 EDT

As Nigerian election season passes, the price of machetes plummets:

The price of machetes has halved in parts of Nigeria since the end of general elections in April because demand from thugs sponsored by politicians has subsided, the state-owned News Agency of Nigeria reported.
............
"A price survey on machetes, which served as a popular weapon among political thugs in the state, indicated ... a drop in the price of the implement," NAN reported over the weekend.
Machetes are primarily used as a tool for farming in Nigeria but they are also popular among political gangsters.
"Before the conduct of the general elections, I was selling a minimum of seven machetes daily but can hardly sell one a day now," said Usman Masi, a trader quoted by NAN.

A Different Sort Mass Killing (Zimbabwe Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:47:00 EDT

How is tyrant Robert Mugabe celebrating his nation's independence day? By attacking his critics near and far:

Zimbabwe marks 27 years of independence today, but mounting economic problems and a government crackdown on the political opposition have overshadowed celebrations.
Critics accuse President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, of plunging the southern African state into crisis through policies such as the seizure of white-owned farms and the lack of economic reform that has see inflation spiral to 1,700 per cent.
Mr Mugabe claims the highest inflation rate in the world and a rapidly shrinking economy is a result of economic sanctions imposed by the West.
Yesterday, he lauded his success in beating off an attempt by "evildoers" to unseat him and urged people to be patient as his government battles the economic crisis.
Speaking at a children's party ahead of the independence anniversary, the Zimbabwean leader said he had managed to "override the little storm" he said had been mounted by the opposition and his critics in the West.

Mugabe at a children's party! Imagine the pants-wetting terror going on there as that murderous thug declaims his enemies and starts swinging at the pinata. Kids, let him win in whatever games you're playing! More here.

Over at The American, Marian Tupy offers up a four-step plan to help Zimbabwe get back on track. The quartet of suggestions--stabilize currency, liberalize trade, reform taxes, and secure property rights--is right on target. And stands no chance of being implemented as long Mugabe is drawing enough breath to confiscate land and persecute his ever-growing list of enemies.