Alternatives International

'Tis not too late

Michael Ryan Wiseman — 2010-04-01T23:12:36Z

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome back to the Alternatives International Journal, as it rubs its eyes gingerly, throws its arms in the air and arches its back to get some kinks and an exaggerated yawn out, and then emerges ravenous from its winter hibernation.

We have a new format, new partners, and a new lease on life, but— alas— the same editor.

Firstly, we'd like to direct your attention to the Support Alternatives campaign. If you've already thrown your weight behind that trifling and thoroughly unnecessary for the proper functioning of a democratic society dissent-and-differing-points-of-view thingy, then read on. If not, consider that old saying about how dissent, being a muscle like any other, will atrophy from lack of regular use.

Now, having saved us, let us move on to the significantly less difficult task of saving the world. The articles that have our attention run the gamut of social justice issues: from landgrabs in South America to elections in Sudan, by way of aid transparency, aid volume, Haitian rice, a Robin Hood Tax, and Israeli Apartheid Week. Also be sure to lend your eyeballs to Artthreat, where art and culture meet politics to produce the greatest triumvirate since peanut and butter joined forces before co-opting jam.

As Tennyson's Ulysses was apt to say, "Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Ulysses was never one to shy away from a voyage, and it may very well be true what they say about a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step, but if we'd all just take the step, we'd be there in no time.

An Art-Changing World: Stories from Art Threat

Ezra Winton — 2010-04-01T23:12:30Z

Myself and the other editors at Art Threat, a media outlet devoted solely to political art and cultural policy, are very excited to be collaborating with Alternatives. Each month I will, with the help of the other Art Threat editors, select a handful of our stories from the past month to be republished in the Alternatives newsletter.

In keeping with the mandate of Alternatives, stories that touch on international solidarity and communication, human rights, progressive politics, and public space will be selected. Of course these stories will also have everything to do with art and culture, the focus of Art Threat.

For the inaugural collaboration we've selected stories that reveal the possibilities for progressive change when art intersects with politics and public space (both virtual and on-the-ground). The first piece (short text and a video interview) looks at one of the many interventions made during the past olympics in Vancouver, linking the problem of homelessness to the shrinking public space during the games. The second piece reviews a new political video game that intricately weaves narratives around the deaths of inmates at Guantanamo, in particular that of Boubacar Bah, who died while in custody in 2007.

This is of course a short sample of the many posts at artthreat.net that bring together art, culture and world politics. From film reviews about the Alberta Tar Sands [link: http://artthreat.net/2009/11/h2oil-shannon-walsh-interview/] and the fight for Iceland's environment [link: http://artthreat.net/2010/01/documentary-dreamland/] to creative public space interventions in Windsor [link: http://artthreat.net/2010/03/broken-city-lab/] to documenting ethnic cleansing in the Serengeti [link: http://artthreat.net/2010/03/a-place-without-people/], there is no shortage of interesting critical stories that Alternatives supporters can find at our site.
We hope this collaboration of our two organizations continues for as long as this world needs changing.

Art Garden on East Hastings: a refuge for the imagination
by Michael Lithgow
Link: http://artthreat.net/2010/02/art-garden-east-hastings/

Art confounds so many of the problematics that come with the politics of power and poverty. Take the Hastings Folk Garden, for example. You can't find it through the Cultural Olympiad. There are no Tourism BC pamphlets that tell you how to get there. You find it by walking around in Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown East Side (DTES). In its own very quiet way, it defies the Olympic corporatization of public space and corresponding rendering of this beset community only in terms of a problem to be fixed.

The Downtown East Side is a neighbourhood that was not invited to the Olympic buffet — at least its residents weren't. As the poorest community in Canada, the Olympic games are largely an unaffordable party that views their neighbourhood as a potential “public relations embarrassment” rather than vibrant albeit troubled home.

What was once an empty lot among the ruin of storefronts along the East Hastings corridor (a few steps from Insite, North America's only safe injection site), is now a community garden owned by the Portland Hotel Society. And for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the garden has been filled with art to create a little urban oasis with found objects and recycled materials.
The garden was created over the last 300 days largely by DTES resident Jim — who was unavailable to be interviewed on the day that I visited. I spoke briefly with Dominique, one of the artists who helped to make the art garden happen.

Video game puts you undercover in America's Homeland Guantanamos
by Leslie Dreyer
Link: http://artthreat.net/2010/02/homeland-guantanamo-game/

In solidarity with the detainees currently on hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions at the Los Fresnos immigration jail (Port Isabel, TX), I'm highlighting Homeland Guantanamos. Much more than an educational online game, this project documents actual detainees' stories and the abuses they endured while in detention. Approximately 300,000 immigrants both legal and illegal are being detained in the U.S., many without conviction of any crime. This non-linear storytelling/investigative project invites players to discover what's really happening on the inside.

The game's assignment: go undercover by working as a prison guard and find the truth about what happened to Boubacar Bah, an immigrant from Ghinea who died while in ICE custody May 30, 2007. Free Range Studios built the virtual facility to match the Elizabeth Detention Center (run by the private company Corrections Corporation of America) where Bah was detained and designed the story around the actual events and people involved. While exploring each room, I found clues to help solve the case including embedded video interviews with Bah's friends and family, his fellow detainees and their families. The video and written evidence reveal human rights abuses that mimic those committed at Guantanamo and other U.S. secret prisons.
Partnering with Free Range Studios, the international human rights organization Breakthrough used this project to launch a national engagement campaign. Included on the site are innumerable ways to take action, a memorial wall for the 87 immigrants who've died while in detention and a searchable U.S. map that locates local Gitmos by zip code. The article that triggered this project along with the recently released video What Really Happened to Boubacar Bah can both be found here. Spreading, creating or participating in projects as informative and comprehensive as this encourages the beginning of the end of real homeland Guantanamos.

The Robin Hood Tax

Fraser Reilly-King and Abdallah Khazaal — 2010-04-01T23:12:27Z

T-A-X. Such a simple three letter word, and yet it elicits responses from people out of all proportion to its size. Perhaps it isn't surprising. Taxes are scary.

But let's not forget, as much as you may hate them, without them, we wouldn't have public health care, education, infrastructure, police and ambulances, government, politicians… (OK, maybe scratch that one)

You get the idea. Boring and controversial as they are, taxes are essential.

Right now, the world is in crisis, so the last thing you may want to hear is someone going on about taxes. But hear us out. It is a story worth telling.

In September 2008, the global economy crashed into one of the most significant global recessions ever. Millions of people North and South lost their savings, their livelihoods, and their homes. In Canada, we may be slowing crawling our way out of this recession, but for the majority of countries worldwide, the situation is still grim.

Globally, poverty remains a fact of daily life for about three billion people. Most are women and children, the vast majority living in rural areas. They are the working poor who face inadequate access to jobs, food, education, clean drinking water, sanitation and health services. The impacts of climate change are already having tangible impacts on the lives and livelihoods of people around the globe. Countries North and South are facing burgeoning deficits and debts, many on the brink of default.

Bruno Jetin, an Economist at Paris University, estimates that it would cost us about $710 billion annually (all figures US), between 2012 and 2014, to buy our way out of these crises: $360 billion to meet the budget deficits in developed countries resulting from the financial crisis; $170 billion to finance the costs of climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries; and, $180 billion to help developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). And this is probably a conservative estimate.

In contrast, financial institutions in Europe and North America have enjoyed fat profits, big bonuses and bailouts galore. Doesn't make much sense, does it?

All of this has forced leaders and thinkers worldwide to figure out how the financial sector could make a “fair and substantial contribution” to recovering some of the costs of crisis they helped cause, and of the bailouts they received. But many also want to put in place measures to help pay for the impacts of the crisis and help avoid future ones.

Enter “T-A-X” (stage left).

Since last September, when the Group of Twenty (G-20) met in Pittsburgh, the idea of implementing a global financial transactions tax (FTT) or “Robin Hood Tax” as it is being called in many quarters, has been gaining increasing momentum.

So, what is the Robin Hood Tax?

It is a tiny tax of 0.05% that would be levied on all financial market transactions.

On what?

On the trade of stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and derivatives - anything that goes through the stock exchange or futures exchanges. It would exclude ordinary consumer transactions such as payments for goods and services, paychecks, as well as short-term inter-bank lending and central bank operations. But it would tax the one sector that, as former French President Jacques Chirac has noted, is still relatively exempt from paying their fair share of taxes.

So just like every time you go to a store and exchange your money for something you want and are taxed, bankers and stock traders will be taxed when they want to trade.

How much would this kind of tax generate?

The amount of revenue generated would depend both on how widely the tax is adopted and what rate is applied to different transactions. The Austrian Institute for Economic Research has estimated that a global transactions tax of 0.05% on all transactions could yield, using the International Monetary Fund's 2007 estimate of global gross domestic product, around $650 billion a year. And this assumes a drastic reduction in market activity as a result of the tax. [1] That easily covers the costs of burgeoning deficits, climate change and the MDGs.

OK. But how much would it cost me?

Fifty cents— if you buy $1,000 worth of shares— every day. (How much are banking fees again?) But the tax is really targeting speculative investors who trade the same stocks several times a day. For Toronto-based trading company, Infinuim, which makes between 500,000 and one million trades a day, it would cost a lot more. So the intent is to also use the tax to help to discourage frequent short-term speculative trading (that creates bubble economies like the one that eventually burst in 2008 and helped put us in this mess) without affecting productive economic activity.

This sounds complicated. How would the tax be collected?

Easily. The tax would automatically be collected at centralized clearing or settlement systems that are already used on all major exchanges, and through which all financial transactions must pass. Evasive actions by market participants would be almost impossible if the G20 stood united in implementing the FTT. Besides, the costs of evading the tax would likely be higher than the benefits. [2]

Ideally, the FTT would be introduced globally, but this does not prevent countries from introducing it unilaterally. The UK already has a tax (called a stamp duty) of 0.5% on the trade of stocks. And Economist Stephan Schulmeister with the Austrian Institute has estimated that even if just Britain and German introduced the FTT tax, it would capture 97% of transactions within Europe.

But is anyone listening? Is this even a possibility?

France, Germany, the United Kingdom (including the British Financial Services Authority [3] ) and Austria back the idea. The European parliament and the European Commission have also spoken out in favour, and Belgium wants the FTT front and centre when it takes over the European Union Presidency in July. Recently, the Japanese Finance Minister and the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India came out in support. US President Barack Obama spoke favourably of the idea on the campaign trail in 2008, and one-time opponent, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, has “come around to the idea” of some kind of a global tax. [4]

The tax also enjoys the support of over 350 influential economists, some Noble Prize winners including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik, and Jeffrey Sachs, as well as weighty financiers like George Soros and Warren Buffet. [5]

And Canada?

Well. That's a different story. Along with Wall Street and Bay Street and the City of London, and some Finance Ministries, Canada is… completely opposed.

Why? Simple. Taxes bad. (The Conservatives do not support increasing taxes.) Canadian banks good. (The Canadian banking sector is well regulated already, so we didn't have to bail them out, and don't need to recoup these costs.)

If you focus on regulation, Finance Minister Flaherty has a point. The Canadian banking sector is one of the best regulated in the world. Canada, as a result, has gotten off pretty lightly, and is showing the strongest recovery among all the Group of Eight countries.

But it is also pretty short-sighted. Canada has done better than most. Sure. But what about our growing deficit? This same deficit is in part due to spending we had to (and needed to) incur because of the global crisis; can we be sure that we will be as well protected the next time around if measures like the FTT are not taken?

What about the rest of the world? Unfortunately for them, if Canada's opposition to the Robin Hood tax remains when the G20 comes to Toronto in June, expect to see mean King Stephen and Sheriff Flaherty of Nottingham.

To throw your support behind the Robin Hood Tax, go to: http://atthetable2010.org

[1] Schulmeister, “A General Transaction Tax”, WIFO, 2009, Table 1. Estimates were based on hypothetical transaction tax receipts in the global economy 2007 (0.68% - 1.56% of GDP), and 2007 world nominal GDP of $65.61 trillion.

[2] Vince Heany, “Tobin tax talk not without merit”, Financial Times, December 20, 2009

[3] Paul Taylor. Enthusiasm Builds for Financial Tax Data. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/business/global/22inside.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=tobin%20tax&st=Search

[4] Fifield, Anna. “G7 warms to idea of bank levy.” Financial Times. February 6, 2010.

[5] http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/in-the-news/350-economists-call-for-a-financial-transaction-tax/

This article was written by Fraser Reilly-King, Coordinator, and Abdallah Khazaal, an intern, with the Halifax Initiative. The Halifax Initiative, http://www.halifaxinitiative.org , is a coalition of development, environment, faith-based, human rights and labour groups, and the Canadian presence for public interest education and action on International Financial Institutions, namely the World Bank and the IMF. HI is also a member of the 2010 “At The Table” campaign. The views expressed are their own.

Photo: flickr/ DaveKav

The Reality of Canadian Official Development Assistance

Vanessa Gordon — 2010-04-01T23:12:19Z

On 8 September 2000, following a three day Millennium Summit of world leaders at the headquarters of the United Nations, the General Assembly adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration of 2000 reminds us that without intervention from the world's wealthiest, increasingly large numbers of people would face destitution.

This process provided the Canadian government with the political rationale to increase development budgets to the approval of both Canadian voters and the international community and after almost a decade of decline, Canadian Official Development Assistance rose from C$2.6 billion in 2000-2001 to C$4.1 billion in 2004-2005. This corresponded to the UN Millennium Development Goal aimed towards allocating 0.7 percent of gross national income to foreign aid.

The problem is that while the Millennium Goals were used as the political rationale for increased aid spending, in practice the Millennium Goals are no longer the only target: observers such as University of Ottawa professor Stephen Brown remark that as Canada's official development assistance budget expanded, so did things like ‘interdepartmental coordination' and as the Canadian International Development Agency gained importance, its autonomy to achieve its mandate declined: resources were captured by parties more interested in Canada's own security, diplomatic or commercial interests.

Two years ago, Canada passed its own Development Assistance Accountability Act, also known as the Better Aid Bill, Bill C-293. The bill was designed to ensure the transparency and accountability of Canada's aid spending. Aid spending was also supposed to be used for the clear purpose of poverty reduction, as per the Millennium Goals and as per where Canadian taxpayers believed their aid money should be going: doing things like taking into account the perspectives of the poor in a manner consistent with Canadian values, foreign policy and international human rights standards. There were three exceptions, though: when official development assistance goes to ‘natural disasters' or ‘artificial disasters' or other ‘international emergencies'.

The exceptions mentioned in the Better Aid Bill became all-important and as perhaps an ‘artificial disaster region', Afghanistan remained the lead recipient of Canadian Official Development Assistance – by far – to the point that most of Canada's Official Development Assistance increases over the last three years went directly there.
It was difficult for CIDA to establish its mandate in Afghanistan. Security considerations meant that Canada's Department of National Defence, not CIDA, called much of the shots and much of CIDA's budget was handed over to the World Bank, various United Nations Agencies and the Asian Development Bank.

The end result is that today, Canadian assistance rarely serves to facilitate marginalized populations in finding their own solutions to poverty. Professionals still committed to the Millennium goals found themselves shut out of the Canada's new aid picture. Only 32% of Canadian aid in 2004 was made available to community organizations in poor countries to implement their own development strategies, down from 39% in 2000. Development aid administered in cooperation with Canadian civil society organizations has been dropping correspondingly: in the five years up to 2004-2005, the proportion of CIDA aid resources managed by Canadian non-governmental organizations declined from just under 30% to less than 20%.

More recently, strenuous efforts on the part of civil society organizations and Ministries such as CIDA to renew the role of the grassroots for poverty alleviation in development led to High Level Forums in Accra, Ghana in September of 2008. But today, civil society organizations still in operation are finding working conditions near impossible, funding delays exorbitant and bureaucracy slow to the extent that it precludes adequate planning. In addition, a number of non-governmental development experts most critical of what's happened to Canada's assistance programs have found themselves audited and evaluated to no end, demonized in the press, and unemployed.

Now with an economic crises, the Millennium Goals receding into the distance and CIDA's reputation ruined, the government has announced a freeze on future aid budgets. According to recently-released OECD data, Canada provides the 16th lowest percentage of Gross National Income to aid amongst the world's 22 richest nations, 0.32%. Its aid allocation in 2007 was even lower than its contribution in 1969.

Get ready for it – like the 0.7% promise of a generation before- the Millennium Development Goals are set to become yet another promise to the world's poor that was not kept.

This article was written by Vanessa Gordon, a former internship program officer for Alternatives and editorial board member of Alternatives International Journal. She holds an MA in Comparative Ethnic Conflict, and is a Professor at Dawson College.

Photo: Musee McCord Museum

GLOBAL: Recession boosts donor transparency

IRIN — 2010-04-01T23:12:10Z

The global financial crisis has catalysed increasing transparency and accountability regarding public finances, say aid experts, which has helped open up disclosures on aid-giving.   

Karin Christiansen, director of the NGO Publish What You Fund, told IRIN the financial crisis has brought the issue of transparency much higher up the donor agenda.   

“There is a resonance about transparency these days… The pressure is mounting… It is an inevitable trend and it's happening in other sectors too,” she said, pointing to websites such as usaspending.gov, and wheredoesmymoneygo.org, which respectively track US and UK government spending.   

Marc Navarro, monitoring officer at the Spanish aid department's Catalan agency for development cooperation, told IRIN at an aid transparency conference: “We have a responsibility to be open about any money we use from our citizens, even more so in periods of crisis… Our budget is very small - we need more effort on quality than quantity.” Spain has been hit hard by the global recession.   

Transparency drives   

A number of transparency initiatives are under way. A five-year project to disclose information on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development's non-Development Assistance Committee givers online has just culminated in the launch of aiddata.org which tracked US$4 trillion of giving in 2007.   

Iceland, which suffered financial collapse in 2009, halved its aid budget in 2010 but simultaneously opened up its spending decisions to greater scrutiny by being one of the first governments to voluntarily provide and code all the information needed for aiddata. “After the crisis we wanted to focus on our internal workings, effectiveness and transparency,” Iceland development agency representative Borianna Soebach told IRIN.   

Germany and Poland are voluntarily disclosing more aid information, according to Christiansen, while the USA will unveil new transparency measures in late 2010. Meanwhile, the World Bank has issued a new information disclosure policy to come into effect in July 2010 which will provide broader, easier-to-access information on the Bank's activities.   

Transparency is also now more often stressed earlier in emergency response, said Christiansen. In the early days following the Haiti earthquake, the UN Development Programme and the government worked together to set up a donor disclosure system.   

A long way to go   

But there is a long way to go: With the exception of Canada's information, most Development Assistance Committee development aid reporting (DAC is the principal body through which the OECD deals with issues related to co-operation with developing countries) takes 18 months to go public, according to aiddata head Mike Tierney. Furthermore, non-DAC donors such as China disclose only bits and pieces of information, while other potentially major donors, including Libya, Iran and Russia, disclose no aid statistics at all.   

Meanwhile, all reporting donors stress aid committed rather than detailing how and where the aid was spent.   

The picture is also skewed because reports of significant private donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are tracked separately.  

Some aid analysts fear donors see aid transparency in terms of disclosing more information on their websites, as opposed to providing detailed raw data to third parties, which is required to systematically track it.   

Daniel Kaufman, senior fellow at US non-profit the Brookings Institution, says we should not expect too much too soon. “There is a learning curve for any donor,” he told IRIN. “Good governance may not be China's priority, for instance, but they do care about economic returns on investment, and reputation. Donors have to learn the hard way, and so will China.”   

In 10 years time most donors will be posting details of their giving, he predicted.

Christiansen looks forward to an era where donors lead, not follow, the transparency trend. “We need them to lead by systematically pumping the information out so others can start to compare and track it and make sense of things,” she said.

Courtesy of IRIN- humanitarian news and analysis, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. http://www.IRINnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88617

photo: flickr/ arenamontanus

Land grabbing in Latin America

GRAIN — 2010-04-01T23:10:52Z

Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories.

These invaders are not the descendants of the European conquistadores, who appropriated land, gathered slaves and plundered their colonial domains. Nor are they the big finqueros (estate owners) of the 19th and 20th centuries, who expanded their properties by carving up the territories of indigenous peoples and creating vast plantations for the production and export of commodities such as sugar cane, coffee, cacao, banana, henequen, gum, rubber and hardwoods, and who relied on what has been called “indebted servitude”, forced labour under slave-like conditions. The new landowners are not those who brought industrial agriculture into Latin America either, who exploited local people's ancestral knowledge in order to adapt their methods to the new environment and climate.

It may be said of all these notorious characters, rooted to “their” lands and mansions, that they were physically present and politically powerful within the region. They fought continually among themselves to consolidate their fiefdoms (leaving a huge toll of dead soldiers). They made enemies and forged alliances to expand their control over water, labour, commerce, elections, public policies and access to land – regardless of the rights and the lives of others. Yet these overlords lived on or frequently visited their properties, and so came face-to-face with the resistance and rebellions of the people who had been invaded and dispossessed. No one feels nostalgia for them, but communities fighting them could do something directly, know who to struggle with, where to do it and when.

The history of Latin America is one of agrarian conflicts, and of indigenous peoples struggling to defend their ancestral territories. A new chapter of this history is opening. Another wave of land grabbing is hitting the Americas, and this time it operates from a distance and wears a halo of “neutrality”. Today's land grabbers (as thoroughly explained in governmental web brochures) say that they are merely responding to food insecurity and a world crisis “that forces us to grow food wherever we can, even if we outsource production, because we will bring home this food for the benefit of our citizens”. But when we dig a little, the financial monster shows its tail. The land grabbers are in fact big corporations and joint ventures investing enormous amounts of money in land, food production, the export and import of commodities, and food-market speculation.

Millions of hectares of farmland in Latin America have been taken over by these foreign investors over the past few years for the production of food crops and agrofuels for export. Much of the money comes from US and European pension funds, banks, private equity groups, and wealthy individuals like George Soros, and it is being channelled through special farmland investment vehicles set up by both foreign and local companies. Brazil's largest sugar company, COSAN, has a specialised farmland investment fund called Radar Propriedades, which buys Brazilian farmland on behalf of clients such as the Teachers' Insurance and Annuity Association–College Retirement Equities Fund of the US. Louis Dreyfus, one of the world's largest grain-trading multinationals, has a similar fund into which American International Group (AIG) has invested US$65 million. While media attention has focused on land deals in Africa, at least as much money and more projects are in operation in Latin America, where investors claim that their farmland investments are more secure and less controversial – ignoring the struggles over access to land being waged in practically every country on the continent. More and more investors and governments from Asia and the Gulf are training their sights on Latin America as a safe place in which to outsource food production.

Most governments in Latin America embrace these developments, with diplomatic missions frequently being sent abroad to sell the advantages of investing in their countries' farmland. The Brazilian Minister of Development, Miguel Jorge, recently told reporters: “Some Saudi princes with whom we met last year […] told President Lula that they do not want to invest in agriculture in Brazil in order to sell here in Brazil, they want food supply sources. They need food. So it would be much more effective to have them invest in agriculture in Brazil in order for us to be direct suppliers to those countries.” [1] But Brazil is not only a target of the new land grabbers, it is also a source. Brazilian investors, backed by their government, are buying land to produce food and biofuels in a growing number of other countries in Latin America and Africa. In neighbouring Guyana, for instance, the Brazilian government is financing the construction of roads, bridges and other infrastructure to open up Guyana's ecologically sensitive Rupununi savannah to large-scale agricultural projects that will export crops to Brazil. Some Brazilian rice producers who are now negotiating with the Government of Guyana for 99-year leases to large areas of indigenous lands in the Rupununi savannah were recently forced by the Brazilian Supreme Court to abandon lands that they had taken illegally from indigenous communities on their own side of the border, in Raposa Serra do Sol. [2] The multinational seed company RiceTec has approached the government of Guyana for about 2,000 ha of land in the same region – a diverse and fragile ecosystem that is home to several indigenous peoples. With this new way of doing business, the former landlords and invaders get new opportunities to grab land, with fewer economic and political risks, and a new, “respectable” title of “foreign investors”.

Evading responsibility

Much is at stake in this new wave of large-scale land grabs. They entail a huge loss of national sovereignty. Any country that sells or leases vast expanses of arable land through long-term contracts to another country or foreign corporation is jeopardising its own national sovereignty. Such deals hasten the more general dismantling of the State – in which more and more functions are cut, privatised and transformed to suit the interests of big business – and the larger territorial dispossession of peoples and communities. As a result, labour is dislocated and migration intensifies. Food production too is dislocated, since, under these deals, governments or private investors take over land to produce food for export to people elsewhere. Investors arrive with their seeds and tractors, and even labour, to extract nutrients from the soils and water of the “host country” and ship them back to their home countries or to global markets in food commodities. The host countries cannot be considered “exporters” in the traditional sense, since no country, no local people are really involved in the projects – just land that corporations exploit for their own profit, without restriction.

Yet the lands targeted are never empty, idle or not needed by local people without access to sufficient land. The first question that must be asked is, therefore: who are the real owners or custodians of the land that is being grabbed and controlled from afar? How is it that our governments can put such huge expanses of land at the disposal of foreign governments or corporations? Are they privately owned? Or are governments simply expropriating them for ad hoc commercial arrangements? It is said that the lands are only being leased, not sold, but what is the difference – in terms of the devastation – between being sold outright and leased for 50 or 99 years? The lessees will eventually hand back not only the land, depleted and ruined, but also the cost of recovering its fertility. These land grabs all drive forward the expansion of a destructive model of industrial agriculture.

The new wave of land invasions also complicates people's defence of their territories. The invader is more difficult to identify. The legal mechanisms that communities can utilise to defend against dispossession, devastation or pollution are not clear. Even where the investors can be identifiable, they are shielded from the affected communities by distance and by complex legal structures. Any “battle” against them is set in a time and space that is not defined at all by the communities or organisations.

The State, instead of protecting its people, protects the investments of foreign companies and governments by criminalising and repressing the communities who defend their territories. Borders thus lose meaning. The structures of the host State serve the interests of their new foreign “bosses”, not in the manner of the old colonial system of tribute, but through the new neoliberal commercial system, where laws and regulations are dictated by free trade agreements and investment treaties instead of national constitutions or even international law.

But the most profound long-term consequence of this new wave of land grabbing is the expansion of corporate control over food production. Over the last fifty years, corporations have constructed the framework that facilitates today's land grab, and now they are moving in to reap the harvest. Land grabbing is not simply the latest opportunity to make speculative investments for quick, massive profits; it is part of a longer process in which agrochemical–pharma–food–transport corporations are taking control of agriculture.

This is why self-governing communities prepared to defend their territories and their systems for managing communal land are a real threat to these schemes. Every organisation that stresses the importance of food sovereignty, from the community level up, will understand that this becomes an impossible feat in countries or regimes that allow and encourage land grabbing. Indigenous communities in Latin America know that without control of their own land they lose control of food production, and their farming simply becomes a new form of sharecropping. Thus more and more communities and organisations insist upon full control over their land, to grow their own crops, using and freely exchanging their native seeds and local knowledge. They insist on complete control of their water, forests, soils, settlements and pathways. And they insist on self-government, making decisions in assemblies.

The new land grabbers, on the other hand, want to enclose more of the commons. They want to dismantle our relationships and connections. They no longer need to invade: they can make commercial deals. They no longer have to carry the burden of maintaining slaves; they can rely on a ready supply of low-wage labour. They are no longer responsible for crushing the rebellious; the host governments will deal with those issues. If they do not, appropriate international companies will provide the service through informal gunmen. Neoliberalism is the invention of scheme upon scheme to avoid responsibility. To reverse the tide, we need to base our future upon taking responsibility.

Going further
• The website that monitors land grabbing worldwide is http://farmlandgrab.org 
• The new farm owners, Against the Grain, October 2009. http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=55 
• Seized! The 2008 land grab for food and financial security, GRAIN Briefing, October 2008. http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212

[1] Alexandre Rocha, “Brazilian Minister: Arabs are great opportunity”, ANBA, 8 February 2010: http://farmlandgrab.org/11020

[2] “Expelled Brazil rice farmer looking to shift operations to Guyana”, Stabroek News, 14 May 2009: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/stories/05/14/expelled-brazil-rice-farmer-looking-to-shift-operations-to-guyana/

Courtesy of GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. Our support takes the form of independent research and analysis, networking at local, regional and international levels, and fostering new forms of cooperation and alliance-building. Most of our work is oriented towards, and carried out in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=61

Photo: flickr/ articotropical

Southern Rice

Sue Sturgis — 2010-04-01T23:10:49Z

As in so many countries throughout the world, an important staple of the Haitian diet is rice, first brought by slaves from West Africa and cultivated on the Caribbean island nation for hundreds of years.

Until the mid-1980s, Haiti produced enough rice for domestic consumption — but that changed after U.S. President Bill Clinton took office.

A champion of trade liberalization policies, Clinton pressed impoverished Haiti to cut tariffs on rice imported from the United States. Much of the U.S. rice that flooded Haiti as a result — known by Haitians as "Miami rice" for the city where the shipments come from — is produced by Riceland Foods, a farmer-owned agricultural marketing cooperative based in Clinton's home state of Arkansas.

The world's largest miller and marketer of rice, Riceland — whose members include some 9,000 farmers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas — enjoyed sales of $1.3 billion in the last fiscal year. It's also a major beneficiary of taxpayer support, as the recipient of more than $500 million in agricultural subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

What's been good for Riceland and U.S. rice farmers has not been so good for Haiti, though. With its market flooded by U.S. rice, Haiti's domestic rice production has dropped dramatically. That's made the country dependent on other nations for food and driven farmers out of the countryside and into the crowded cities that proved so vulnerable in January's earthquake.

Since the disaster, imported rice prices have climbed 25% and would probably be even higher if not for all the food aid, the Associated Press reports.

But it appears change may be coming. President Clinton — now serving as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti and helping lead U.S. fundraising efforts in the wake of the devastating January earthquake — acknowledged during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month that the trade policy he promoted has failed the Haitian people:
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did..."

Agricultural trade policy is expected to be a topic of discussion at a U.N. Haiti donors' conference set for next week in New York. The Haitian government is seeking $722 million for agriculture, including an estimated $31 million for quake-related damage to its agricultural sector, part of an overall aid request of $11.5 billion, according to the AP:
"A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have ... resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed," U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told The Associated Press. "That's a global phenomenon, but Haiti's a prime example. I think this is where we should start."

Haitian President René Préval — an agronomist by training — has said he wants agricultural investment in his country prioritized over food aid.

But Riceland isn't pleased by the talk of changing agricultural trade policy vis-à-vis Haiti. Speaking to the AP, a spokesperson for the company insisted that its exports to Haiti are necessary to "feed countries which cannot feed themselves."

This article was written by Sue Sturgis of Southern Studies. Since its founding in 1970 by veterans of the civil rights movement, the Institute for Southern Studies has established a reputation as an essential resource for grassroots activists, community leaders, scholars, policy makers and others working to bring lasting social and economic change to the region.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/03/southern-rice-and-haitian-hunger.html

Photo: flickr/ bullington

Election Ballots Printed by Sudan's Currency Printer Controversial

David Widgington — 2010-04-01T23:10:27Z

Sudan's first elections in 24 years are set to begin in less than 22 days. And not without major controversy.

The logistical challenges faced by Sudan's National Election Commission (NEC) and organizations providing support toward the elections are staggering. According to the a UNifeed report, “The first batch of ballot papers was airlifted to Sudan's southern capital city Juba, on Friday [March 12, 2010].” The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is providing logistical support to the National Elections Commission for printing and distributing the estimated 180 million ballot papers to the “close to 15,000 polling centers countrywide,” established by the NEC.

Opposition party Umma Reform and Renewal Party (URRP) accused the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) of granting contracts for the printing of the election ballots to printers inside Sudan. UNMIS denied the accusations, saying that they regret the news reports that their Chief Electoral Affairs Officer was involved. According to China Radio International (CRI) English news service, “UNMIS spokesperson categorically dismisses such an allegation as unfounded.”

In a later Reuters report published on AlertNet, opposition parties are demanding an investigation into the Sudanese printing company who holds a contract to print the ballots for executive offices that include presidential and gubernatorial positions. Apparently, the UNDP had planned to give the contract to a Slovenian printer but the NEC intervened and gave it to the Sudanese Currency Printing Corporation, the government printer that also prints Sudan's currency. It is unclear why the UNDP did not report the irregularity.

Other ballot papers were awarded by the UNDP to South African and British printing companies. Fears of potential fraud are mounting as the Sudanese Currency Printing Corporation could conceivably print illegal ballot papers to manipulate election results by stuffing ballot boxes. This opens the door to the dispute of election results after the voting period and increase instability in an already volatile setting.

Courtesy of David Widgington of http://southsudaninfo.net/
http://southsudaninfo.net/2010/03/election-ballots-printed-by-sudans-currency-printer-controversial/

Photo: flickr/ ratinasock

Counterpoint: In support of Israeli Apartheid week

Jaggi Singh — 2010-04-01T23:10:19Z

This week, for the sixth year in a row, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) events are taking place on campuses and communities across Canada and worldwide. It's also during this week that Conservative MP Tim Uppal of Edmonton will rise in the House of Commons to introduce a motion to condemn IAW, seeking the unanimous approval of all MPs.

Uppal's anti-IAW motion adds to a recent spate of similar statements and motions— from the MPPs of Ontario's Legislature to Federal Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff— not to mention numerous editorials and op-eds in the pages of Canada's mainstream newspapers, including a National Post editorial not-so-subtly entitled "A festival of bigotry". In sum, the public condemnations of Israeli Apartheid Week are an extraordinary— and arguably unprecedented— rhetorical attack by the highest levels of Canada's political class on autonomous organizing and free speech on Canadian campuses.

It's a platitude to state there is wide disagreement between pro-Israel and Palestine solidarity supporters on even basic understandings of history and contemporary events. But the recent critics of IAW allege bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism, using language that is meant to smear. Another platitude: you can disagree with the use of the term apartheid in relation to Israel, but it can certainly be the basis for a rational discussion, debate and disagreement.

In all the rhetoric condemning IAW, never has one shred of clear proof been offered to indicate that any words or actions by IAW speakers or organizers are linked to anti-Semitism. In reality, IAW is organized by diverse groups of students and political organizers, including both Jewish and Palestinian organizations and individuals. IAW is rooted in social justice organizing, which unequivocally and pro-actively condemns racism and anti-Semitism in all its pernicious forms. Jewish anti-occupation groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Not In Our Name actively support IAW.

In light of recent motions and statements that equate calling Israel an apartheid state with anti-Semitism, it's instructive to remind ourselves about the different people who've applied the term previously and recently.

In Israel itself, various politicians, including current Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have used the term. In Barak's words, as reported by the Economist in February 2010: "If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic... If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don't, it is an apartheid state."

Several South Africans who understand firsthand the reality of South African-style apartheid have made the connection as well, from Desmond Tutu to John Dugard, formerly the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Palestinian territories.

This week, Michael Ignatieff described Israeli Apartheid Week as "counter to our shared values" and urged "all Canadians to join with us in condemning Israeli Apartheid Week." But the 2010 version of Michael Ignatieff needs to speak with his 2002 edition. Writing in the Guardian (before the separation barrier or "Apartheid Wall" was constructed inside the Palestinian occupied territories), Ignatieff wrote: "When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control."

Clearly, the apartheid comparison is fair grounds for discussion and debate, at least by Israeli politicians, South African human rights advocates, and Michael Ignatieff before he became a politician.

What the political and media attacks on IAW amounts to is a form of neo-McCarthyism. Classic McCarthyism dismissed progressive movements as treasonous agents of a foreign Communist regime, offering little to no evidence to back up their destructive smears. It was a useful tool during the Cold War to marginalize and silence left-wing dissent. Similarly, the 2010 neo-McCarthyism dismisses certain critics of the state of Israel as anti-Semites, particularly those who support the Palestinian civil society call for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, and are skeptical of the justice of a "two-state solution".

The extraordinary condemnation of IAW by Canada's politicians doesn't show any particular insight into the Israel-Palestine conflict, but rather obliviousness to grassroots solidarity organizing that grows in its effectiveness each year. If readers are curious about what has provoked Canada's politicians to near-unanimously take steps to condemn a series of modest educational events organized mainly by students on campuses across the country, I encourage them to consult www.apartheidweek.org and to attend an IAW event in your community. Make up your own mind.

This article was written by Jaggi Singh, who has organized in support of Israeli Apartheid Week in Montreal for five years.