JOHANNESBURG — A partial count in Mozambique’s elections on Friday shows President Armando E. Guebuza of the Frelimo Party far ahead of his two opponents and likely to finish with around 75 percent of the votes.
If the pattern holds up, and political analysts predict it will, it will be the most decisive victory in the nation’s four presidential elections.
Frelimo, with much superior financing and a tightly run organization, is also expected to win overwhelmingly in the race for seats in Parliament and provincial legislatures.
Frelimo insiders had predicted a landslide. “We are really just competing with ourselves; our aim is to win by a margin greater than in the past,” a party spokesman, Edson Macuácua, said recently.
Mr. Guebuza, 66, is one of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen. Among his main campaign slogans was “With Guebuza we will win the battle against poverty.” The fight has quite a way to go. The country, with 21 million people, has per capita income of only $454, according to the World Bank.
Frelimo, a one-time Marxist organization that now eagerly shakes the marketplace’s guiding hand, has managed to stay on top. Renamo has fallen ever further behind, and Wednesday’s election could prove a backbreaker.
The official results may not be announced by the nation’s election commission until Nov. 12. But for now, Afonso Dhlakama, Renamo’s longtime leader, finds himself in a tight race for second place with Daviz Simango, a relative newcomer who started his party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, only last March.
Experts say the Renamo candidate is likely to pull ahead for the runner-up spot when more returns come in from the northern parts of the nation. Yet Mr. Dhlakama, who has headed Renamo for 25 years, is unlikely to make another try. In 1999, he narrowly lost the presidential election. In 2004, he was defeated by 32 percentage points. This time, the margin will be much larger.
Under Frelimo, Mozambique has managed to attract foreign investors eager to exploit the nation’s mineral wealth. It also has become a darling of foreign donors, whose annual contributions come to an estimated $2 billion.
Many of those donors, however, have expressed their disapproval with the way the election has been run.
The election commission, widely believed to be dominated by Frelimo, refused to allow the Mozambique Democratic Movement to compete for parliamentary seats in 9 of the 13 voting constituencies. It cited procedural grounds.
Mr. Simango, the mayor of the country’s second-largest city, Beira, may not even manage 10 percent of the presidential vote. “But even if he gets 9 percent, it’s a good start for someone who first appeared on the national stage less than a year ago,” said Miguel de Brito, the country director for EISA, a group that works for democratic reforms in Africa. “It may be less of a start than Simango wanted, but it shows he has some base.”
On Friday, in a meeting with reporters, election observers from the European Union praised the voting as “well-managed” and “calm.” But they too criticized the election commission for excluding so many candidates on technicalities, calling it a “restriction of voter choice at the local level.”
By Carley Petesch Associated Press Wednesday, October 14, 2009
JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 13 -- More than 1,000 civilians have been killed and nearly 900,000 displaced in eastern Congo by Rwandan Hutu militiamen and Congolese forces since January, humanitarian groups said Tuesday.
The report released by a coalition of 84 organizations said that many of the killings were carried out by Rwandan Hutu militiamen. Congolese government soldiers also have targeted civilians, the report said.
A Congolese military operation has been aimed at forcing out the Hutu militiamen, many of whom sought refuge in neighboring Congo after participating in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which killed more than 500,000 people.
But the groups said Tuesday that the military operation, which is backed by a U.N.peacekeeping force, is not doing enough to protect civilians in the region.
"The human rights and humanitarian consequences of the current military operation are simply disastrous," said Marcel Stoessel of Oxfam.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, has backed the Congolese army in eastern Congo since March, after a joint Congolese and Rwandan operation against the Rwandan Hutu militiamen.
Lt. Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the mission, said the United Nations is working hard to protect civilians in the region.
"We are in conversations with the government, who knows our position on this subject -- the officers who have committed these crimes cannot participate in the army and should be tried by the international or national judicial systems," he said.
However, U.N. officials have said that they do not have enough boots on the ground to perform effectively in Congo, a country bigger than Western Europe but with only 300 miles of paved roads.
The 3,000 additional U.N. peacekeepers authorized by the U.N. Security Council in November are only just arriving in the region, the report said.
"The U.N. needs to make it clear that if the Congolese government wants its continued military support, the army should remove abusive soldiers from command positions and its soldiers should stop attacking civilians," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
JOHANNESBURG — Two independent ratings of Africa’s best- and worst-governed nations — one released Monday, the other last week — both put Mauritius at the top of the heap and Somalia at the bottom and reached often similar, though far from identical, conclusions about the 51 countries in between.
But behind these efforts to assess the voluminous evidence on African governance — a catchall phrase that includes measures like corruption, vaccine coverage, crime rates and armed conflict — lies a dispute between a Harvard political scientist, Robert Rotberg, and a wealthy Sudanese-born philanthropist, Mo Ibrahim, who used to finance his research.
For the past two years, Professor Rotberg, the head of a program on conflict resolution at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Mr. Ibrahim, who leads his own foundation, collaborated to produce the Ibrahim Index of African Governance. But they parted ways over who should have final say.
In an interview after the indexes were released, Mr. Ibrahim said decisions about the Ibrahim index were always meant to shift to the African researchers and institutions that his foundation’s board had increasingly brought into the process — a shift he said Professor Rotberg had resisted.
“Why should an American gentleman sitting in Boston have editorial control?” Mr. Ibrahim asked. “That is unacceptable.”
Professor Rotberg saw the dispute differently. He said he and Ms. Gisselquist had invented the index and wanted to retain authority over it. “The issue is academic freedom versus foundation control,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday.
The two rival ratings count 9 out of 10 of the same countries among the best and worst governed, though not in the same order. Among the best governed, both name Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Tunisia, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa and São Tomé and Príncipe. The Rotberg index also includes Algeria in the top 10, while the Ibrahim index counts Lesotho.
Among the worst performers, both count Guinea, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Congo, Chad, Sudan and Somalia. For the Rotberg index, Angola made the bottom 10, while the Ibrahim index included Equatorial Guinea.
They had more substantive differences over rankings for nations in the middle. For example, the Rotberg index ranked Malawi, a small, impoverished southern African nation, 14th, while the Ibrahim index put it 25th.
Daniel Kaufmann, a Brookings Institution expert on corruption who is advising the Ibrahim Foundation, said the effort to make the index an African assessment of African governance could add to its influence on a continent where there is still suspicion of Western research.
“It will be harder to reject because of the Africanization,” said Mr. Kaufmann, who was formerly at the World Bank Institute, where he shaped its global governance ratings.
The Ibrahim Foundation has placed full-page advertisements in newspapers in 45 African countries describing its findings in local languages, an attempt to inform a broader public and to encourage civic groups to take advantage of the trove of information on its Web site.
Advisers on the Ibrahim index say it relies on more recent data — from 2008, as well as 2007 — and tracks a broader array of information, including assessments by experts, than does the Rotberg index.
Professor Rotberg said empirical data comparable across countries — the main basis for his and Ms. Gisselquist’s rankings — were generally not available for the previous year. That is why they used 2007 data for the 2009 index.
Both indexes offer elaborate and detailed breakdowns of dozens of indicators. Some who have researched similar issues but are not involved in either of the new indexes, like Hennie van Vuuren, in the Cape Town office of the Institute for Security Studies, said the split that led to two indexes was unfortunate.
“It would make much more sense to pool resources and have a methodologically strong index — an instrument that African governments and civil society groups can trust to be a mirror of the state of governance on the African continent,” he said.
Stepping through a low doorway into his small house, Fida Ag Mohammed sits at a table and pats a pile of books in front of him. Even in the dim light it's clear that these are no ordinary volumes. The books are covered with intricately hand-tooled sheep- or goatskin; inside, hundreds of pages of yellowed paper are filled with Arabic calligraphy — the painstaking penmanship of Mohammed's forebears centuries ago. "One of my ancestors from the 12th century began our family library," Mohammed says. "There are hundreds of collections like this."
Those collections — stashed in libraries, locked away in closets or buried in the desert sands — have been preserved, in large part, by Timbuktu's isolation from the rest of the world. Landing in this blisteringly hot Malian town in the southwestern corner of the Sahara feels a little like arriving at the end of the earth. Dirt tracks melt into the featureless desert sands. Chickens peck in the shade between mud-walled houses. Little wonder that Timbuktu is a byword for remoteness. (Read: "Out of Africa: Saharan Solar Energy".)
But Timbuktu's manuscripts might just change that. The books date from between the 14th and 16th centuries, a time when the town was a thriving trading hub and intellectual center for West Africa. Now, scared that Timbuktu's 50,000 or so surviving books might disintegrate or be sold off to foreign collectors, African and Western organizations are racing to salvage the treasures, preserving them from the ravages of climate, dust and the passage of hundreds of years. Millions of dollars have been spent in laborious conservation and cataloguing of the works. A sleek new museum, completed last April, is scheduled to open to the public in November. The museum will display tens of thousands of Timbuktu's books to the world, and, its backers hope, shatter any lingering notion that Africa has no historic literary tradition of its own. (Read: "The U.N.'s World Digital Library".)
There is a catch, though. As Timbuktu opens to outsiders and word of its treasures spreads, so too does the interest in the books from outside collectors. In some ways, saving these old manuscripts could imperil them further. In decades past only the hardy visited Timbuktu; the journey required days of travel up the malaria-infested Niger River. Today, dozens of tourists arrive several times a week on small commercial planes from Bamako, the capital of the former French colony. Timbuktu has become a favorite jumping-off point to explore the world's biggest desert. As the modern world rushes in, attitudes among Timbuktu's youth — the generation who will take custody of all those precious manuscripts — is changing fast. Entertainment in Timbuktu these days includes sitting under the stars watching European football matches on satellite television. "This generation has the Internet, they see movies, they go away to study," says Mohammed, who is astonished at the changes he has seen in his 42 years. To look after the books "we choose a child who can take care of the manuscripts: someone who's always going to stay here." But kids keep leaving, the world keeps rushing in. Timbuktu's books have survived centuries of isolation. Can they survive their modern-day fame?
A Rush to Save the Treasures Sitting at a junction of the Sahara's historic commercial routes on a lazy bend of the Niger River, Timbuktu used to be a hectic crossroads where gold traders heading north met herders and salt merchants trekking south across the desert. The city's lucrative trade fueled Mali's empires as well as a rich ethnic blend of black Africans and Mediterranean people, and an intellectual ferment with dozens of Koranic schools. Refugees from the Inquisition in Spain brought their libraries with them, and soon began writing and buying more books. Timbuktu's literary output was enormous, and included works covering the history of Africa and southern Europe, religion, mathematics, medicine and law. There were manuscripts detailing the movement of the stars, possible cures for malaria and remedies for menstrual pain. "I have here my family's whole history," says Ismael Diadié Haidara, whose ancestors carried their books to Timbuktu from Toledo, Spain when they fled religious persecution in 1467, and later wrote and purchased thousands more. "Families which were exiled, which had no country, had their libraries. It was people's security. They could say, 'This is where we come from.' "
About half the surviving works — some illuminated in gold and crimson, others illustrated with maps — are intact. But even the best works are fragile, the pages brittle, the covers damaged. "There are a lot of problems with the manuscripts," says Timbuktu's imam Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, 62, who has bought several manuscripts from locals who need the cash and sense they might otherwise lose them altogether. "Houses collapse in the rain. The termites eat them. People borrow them and never bring them back."
Malian researchers were amazed at what they found when they began riding camels through the Sahara in the 1970s in search of older works. "We were totally astonished by the volume of manuscripts. There were boxes and boxes of them from the 16th and 17th centuries," says Mahmoud Zouber, who in 1976 became the first director of Timbuktu's Ahmed Baba Institute, the main government-run research center, and who is now counselor on Islamic affairs to Mali's President. Zouber says he immediately realized the manuscripts' primary source importance. "Colonizers had always argued that they were here to civilize Africa," he says. "But there were many points of light. Clearly Africa was not living in obscurity."
The growing sense that the manuscripts are tangible proof of Africa's sophisticated history has inspired a series of projects to restore, conserve and keep them in Mali. A few of the 32 family libraries in Timbuktu have received foreign funding from institutions such as the Ford Foundation or governments such as those of Spain, Norway and Dubai. Six years ago, South Africa's government began the museum project to house the Ahmed Baba Institute's huge collection. Until now there has been no building in Timbuktu with the space or sophisticated temperature control in which to keep old documents. Curators hope the new building will persuade locals to entrust their collections to Mali's government, by loaning or selling them to the museum. "It inspires confidence in people," says Riason Naidoo, who led the Timbuktu project for South Africa.
The End of Isolation The flurry of projects and interest has boosted Timbuktu's tourism trade. The driver who meets me at the tiny airport introduces himself (in perfect English) as "Jack — like Jack Bauer [from television's 24]." Crowds of Europeans converge every January to attend the musical Festival of the Desert in nearby Essakane. And young locals — armed with French and English — ply their trade as guides for adventure tour groups. (See pictures of the Festival au Desert in Mali.)
As news of the manuscripts has filtered out over the past few years, another group of visitors has begun arriving: antiques collectors and dealers looking to snap up rare and valuable treasures at bargain prices. Locals say the number of collectors has increased markedly over the past year. The village of Ber, an hour's drive from Timbuktu across the blazing sand and past boys leading donkeys that haul spindly thorn branches home for firewood, might seem remote and protected. But when I arrived there in May, collectors had recently visited in search of manuscripts, according to locals. "Since April, people have descended on the village from Libya, Burkina Faso, Morocco," says Mohammed Ag Mahmoud, 83, the imam of the tiny community of mostly Tuareg tribesman.
Preserving the documents in normal times is not easy: a flood flattened one house in Ber last October, obliterating more than 700 manuscripts. Mahmoud says his family's collection of thousands of manuscripts include many with termite damage. One of his sons, Omar Ag Mohammed, shows me about 30 of the books, which are kept stashed in a rickety wooden closet in his small house. The most cherished volumes are not here, but buried in the desert. "We use ashes to protect them from the termites," he tells me. "Then we build a dome on top of them, so we know where to find them."
But the real threat comes from people — both outsiders and insiders. Ber might at first seem unchanged by modern life. Tuareg traders still arrive on camel, bearing giant bricks of salt which they transport across the Sahara for weeks — just as traders did centuries ago when the area's manuscripts were originally written. In Mahmoud's mind, too, local attitudes remain unchanged. Locals remain fiercely distrustful of outsiders, he says, including Mali's government in Bamako, with which locals have been at odds for years. Many people still jealously guard family heirlooms as a tangible form of security. "We won't sell our manuscripts, even if you offer us billions. They will be left to the children who will look after them. We know which those are."
And yet younger Malians, even in Ber, deep in Mali's remote north, are very different from their parents' generation. Few can read the manuscripts' old Arabic script, and some are beginning to ignore long-held taboos against selling them. When I visit Essayouti, Timbuktu's imam, at home, he shows me four 15th century leather-bound manuscripts that locals had sold him the day before for about $200. Many locals, he says, simply need the money, or don't know who will next look after the books. "We are trying to explain to each new generation why these are important," he says, peeling back the pages of one of the tomes. "We tell them to pass them along through the generations. But many young people have no use for them. There are some who will see them as an easy way to make money."
If Timbuktu's children decide to sell the manuscripts, there will be nothing to stop them. Unlike antiquities laws which protect old carvings, for example, Mali has no law barring people from taking manuscripts out of the country. As international interest in the works grows, so too could their value on the world market, according to some experts. In 1979, Zouber, the President's counselor, bought 25 Timbuktu manuscripts from the daughter of a former French diplomat who had been stationed in Mali and had taken them with him when he left; Zouber tracked her down in Cannes and paid about $25,000 for the lot. "Now they're worth perhaps 10 times that amount," he says.
Such sums might be a great temptation to a generation that has so far seen little material benefit from its heritage. Fida Ag Mohammed says many elders still favor passing manuscripts down from father to son. "Each generation must appoint one youth to take care of them," he explains. "It has to be someone who will never leave." But as young Malians grow more modern and more mobile, getting them to stay may prove difficult.
WINDHOEK, Namibia — It is not every day that global leaders set foot in this southern African nation of gravel roads, towering sand dunes and a mere two million people. So when President Hu Jintao of China touched down here in February 2007 with a 130-person delegation in tow, it clearly was not just a courtesy call.
And in fact, China soon granted Namibia a big low-interest loan, which Namibia tapped to buy $55.3 million worth of Chinese-made cargo scanners to deter smugglers. It was a neat illustration, Chinese officials said, of how doing good in Namibia could do well for China, too.
Or so it seemed until Namibia charged that the state-controlled company selected by China to provide the scanners — a company until recently run by President Hu’s son — had facilitated the deal with millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks. And until China threw up barriers when Namibian investigators asked for help looking into the matter.
Now the scanners seem to illustrate something else: the aura of boosterism, secrecy and back-room deals that has clouded China’s use of billions of dollars in foreign aid to court the developing world.
From Pakistan to Angola to Kyrgyzstan, China is using its enormous pool of foreign currency savings to cement diplomatic alliances, secure access to natural resources and drum up business for its flagship companies. Foreign aid — typically cut-rate loans, sometimes bundled with more commercial lines of credit — is central to this effort.
Leaders of developing nations have embraced China’s sales pitch of easy credit, without Western-style demands for political or economic reform, for a host of unmet needs. The results can be clearly seen in new roads, power plants, and telecommunications networks across the African continent — more than 200 projects since 2001, many financed with preferential loans from the Chinese government’s Exim Bank.
Increasingly, though, experts argue that China’s aid comes with a major catch: It must be used to buy goods or services from companies, many of them state-controlled, that Chinese officials select themselves. Competitive bidding by the borrowing nation is discouraged, and China pulls a veil over vital data like project costs, loan terms and repayment conditions. Even the dollar amount of loans offered as foreign aid is treated as a state secret.
Anticorruption crusaders complain that secrecy invites corruption, and that corruption debases foreign assistance.
“China is using this financing to buy the loyalty of the political elite,” said Harry Roque, a University of the Philippines law professor who is challenging the legality of Chinese-financed projects in the Philippines. “It is a very effective tool of soft diplomacy. But it is bad for the citizens who have to repay these loans for graft-ridden contracts.”
In fact, such secrecy runs counter to international norms for foreign assistance. In a part of the world prone to corruption and poor governance, it also raises questions about who actually benefits from China’s projects. The answers, international development specialists say, are hidden from public view.
“We know more about China’s military expenditures than we do about its foreign aid,” said David Shambaugh, an author and China scholar at George Washington University. “Foreign aid really is a glaring contradiction to the broader trend of China’s adherence to international norms. It is so strikingly opaque it really makes one wonder what they are trying to hide.”
Until recently, wealthy nations could hardly hold themselves out as an example of how to run foreign aid, either. Many projects turned out to be tainted by corruption or geared to enrich the donor nation’s contractors, not the impoverished borrowers. But over the past 10 or 15 years, some 30 developed nations under the umbrella of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) have made a concerted effort to clean up their assistance programs.
They demanded that foreign money be awarded and spent transparently, using competitive bidding and outlawing bribery. Increasingly, they also are also pushing to give borrowers more choice among suppliers and contractors, rather than insisting that funds be recycled back to the donor nation’s companies.
China, which is not a member of the O.E.C.D., is operating under rules that the West has largely abandoned. It mixes aid and business in secret government-to-government agreements. It requires that foreign aid contracts be awarded to Chinese contractors it picks through a closed-door bidding process in Beijing. Its attempts to prevent corrupt practices by its companies overseas appear weak.
Some developing nations insist on independently comparing prices before accepting China’s largesse. Others do not bother. “Very often they are getting something they wouldn’t be able to get without China’s financing,” said Chris Alden, a specialist on China-African relations with the London School of Economics and Political Science. “They presume that the Chinese are going to give value for money.”
Development experts say they have tried to convince the Chinese government that better safeguards and a more open process will enhance its efforts to gain influence and business. If its projects collapse because of kickbacks or inflated costs, they argue, China will end up exporting not only goods and services, but a reputation for corruption that it is already battling at home.
But Deborah Brautigam, the author of a coming book on China’s economic ties with Africa titled “The Dragon’s Gift,” says Beijing is hesitant to hobble its companies with Western-style restraints before they have become world-class competitors.
Thinking Business, Not Ethics
“The Chinese are kind of starting out where everyone else was years ago, and they see themselves as being at a disadvantage,” Ms. Brautigam said. “The Chinese don’t particularly want a big scandal. That doesn’t further their interests. They just want their companies to get business.”
Sometimes they get both. In 2007, the Philippines was forced to cancel a $460 million contract with the Beijing scanner company, Nuctech Company Ltd., to set up satellite-based classroom instruction after critics protested the company had no expertise in education.
It also canceled a $329 million contract awarded to ZTE Corporation, a state-controlled Chinese communications company, after allegations of enormous kickbacks. ZTE denied bribing anyone, but the controversy has lingered. Last month an antigraft panel recommended filing criminal charges against two Philippines officials in connection with the contract.
A Manila-based nonprofit group, the Center for International Law, has mounted a legal challenge against still another Chinese contract in the Philippines, to build a $500 million railroad. Professor Roque, who leads the center, contends that the price of China’s state-owned contractor “was simply plucked out of the sky.” Officially, China’s directive to its companies is toe an ethical line overseas.
“Our enterprises must conform to international rules when running business, must be open and transparent, should go through a bidding process for big projects and forbid inappropriate deals and reject corruption and kickbacks,” Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, told a group of Chinese businessmen in Zambia in 2006.
But China has no specific law against bribing foreign officials. And the government seems none too eager to investigate or punish companies it selects if they turn out to have engaged in shady practices overseas.
Indeed, it has an added incentive to look the other way because of the state’s ties to many foreign aid contractors — connections that sometimes extend to families of the Communist Party elite.
In January, for example, the World Bank barred four state-controlled Chinese companies from competing for its work after an investigation showed that they tried to rig bids for bank projects in the Philippines. But two of those companies remain on the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s list of approved foreign aid contractors, according to its Web site.
The Namibia controversy is especially delicate because until late last year, the contractor’s president was Mr. Hu’s son, Hu Haifeng. The younger Mr. Hu is now Communist Party secretary of an umbrella company that includes Nuctech and dozens of other companies. As soon as allegations against the company surfaced this summer, China’s censors swung into action, blocking all mention of the scandal in the Chinese news media and on the Internet.
“This is a signal to everyone to back off,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics in Beijing. “Everyone goes into default mode, because once you get the ball rolling, no one knows where it will stop. No one wants their rice bowl broken.”
Nuctech has denied any wrongdoing in court papers filed here in Windhoek. A spokeswoman said the company had no comment because the matter was unresolved. China’s Commerce Ministry and other government agencies did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Namibia’s anticorruption investigators allege that Nuctech funneled $4.2 million in kickbacks to a front company set up by a Namibian official, who split the funds with her business partner and Nuctech’s southern Africa representative, a Chinese citizen.
A Deal Ends in Arrests
China has promoted Nuctech as one of its global “champions.” In 10 years the company has gained customers in more than 60 countries, marketing advanced-technology scanners that help detect contraband or dangerous materials inside cargo containers. Nuctech’s spokesman says it is the only Chinese company that makes such equipment.
The Namibian government was interested in equipping its airports, seaports and border posts with scanners to comply with stricter regulations on international commerce. On a state visit to China in 2005, Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibia’s president, visited Nuctech’s headquarters and factory, according to court testimony. The following year, Nuctech sent a representative, Yang Fan, to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital.
Hu Jintao’s visit to Windhoek a few months later opened up an option for finance. “China says the sky is the limit. Just say what you want,” said Carl Schlettwein, the permanent secretary of the Namibian Finance Ministry, who participated in the negotiations.
At first, Mr. Schlettwein said, the talks stalled because Namibia was unwilling to grant China access to its substantial mineral deposits in exchange for lines of credit. Once China dropped that condition, Namibia agreed in principle to a $100 million, 20-year-loan at a 2.5 percent interest rate, then well below the market. “Purely from a financial point of view, it was a fine deal,” Mr. Schlettwein said.
Namibian officials decided to draw on the credit line to finance most of the cost of the scanners. Mr. Schlettwein, who negotiated the scanner contract, said he wanted to seek competitive bids from scanner suppliers around the world, but Chinese negotiators refused.
“They said ‘that is not our system,’ “ he said. “ ‘We tell you from whom you buy the equipment.’ All of us, including the minister, were very worried about the nontransparent way of doing things,” he said, but reasoned that the Chinese government “will not unduly cheat us.”
Last March, less than a week after the Finance Ministry paid Nuctech an initial $12.8 million, Mr. Schlettwein’s unease turned to distress.
A Windhoek bank official, following the strictures of Namibia’s new money-laundering act, called to ask why Nuctech had deposited $4.2 million in the account of a consulting company set up by Tekla Lameck, a Namibian public service commissioner.
Mr. Schlettwein, who says that he has never met Ms. Lameck and that she had nothing to do with the scanner purchase, alerted Namibia’s anticorruption commission. In July, Ms. Lameck, her business partner and Nuctech’s representative in Windhoek were arrested on suspicion of violating Namibia’s anticorruption law. All three have denied wrongdoing.
Investigations Galore
Investigators charge that Nuctech agreed to hire Ms. Lameck’s consulting company, Teko Trading, in 2007, a month after President Hu’s visit. Nuctech agreed to pay Teko 10 percent of the contract if the average price of one scanner was $2.5 million. If the price was higher, Nuctech would pay Teko 50 percent of the added cost. A subsequent agreement fixed the amount of commissions at $12.8 million, according to court records.
At his bail hearing last month, Yang Fan, Nuctech’s representative, said his company hired Teko because “Teko explained how to do business here in Namibia.” He did not elaborate. But in 2007, another Namibian official complained to the anticorruption commission that Ms. Lameck had introduced herself to the Chinese Embassy in Windhoek as a representative of Swapo, Namibia’s governing political party. She claimed that no business could be done in Namibia without Swapo’s involvement, the complainant said.
Investigators have been seeking Nuctech’s explanation of the affair for more than two months. There is little sign the company has complied with their requests, although investigators say they remain hopeful.
Namibia’s chief national prosecutor, Martha Imalwa, traveled to Beijing in July, hoping to question officials from Nuctech and another company involved in a separate inquiry. But according to her deputy, Danie Small, Ms. Imalwa was allowed to present questions only to the international division of China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
A court has temporarily frozen $12.8 million in Nuctech’s assets while the inquiry continues. Meanwhile, at Namibia’s Finance Ministry, Mr. Schlettwein is belatedly trying to determine what other buyers paid for comparable scanners. When he asked South African officials for pricing information, he said, he was told Nuctech’s contract there is also under investigation.
Perhaps predictably, competitors say Namibia agreed to pay far too much. Peter Kant, a vice-president at Nuctech’s American rival, Rapiscan Systems, said that comparable equipment and services costs about $28 million, or $25 million less than Nuctech’s contract.
Mr. Schlettwein last month tried to send a letter through official channels to Rong Yonglin, Nuctech’s chairman, to ask that the contract be renegotiated. But a Chinese Embassy official in Windhoek refused to accept the correspondence, saying he knew no one with that name.
Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels, and Carlos H. Conde from Manila. Jonathan Ansfield contributed research from Beijing.
Witnesses in western Somalia say at least 17 people have been killed in fresh fighting between Islamist militants and government forces.
Residents of Yeed, a town on Somalia's border with Ethiopia, say fighters from the insurgent group al-Shabab attacked government soldiers on Sunday.
Both sides claimed victory in the clash, and it was not clear who controlled the town Monday.
Most of those killed are said to be combatants.
Al-Shabab and its ally Hizbul Islam have been on the offensive since early May. The groups are trying to overthrow Somalia's government and set up an Islamic state.
The Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by its chairman and prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has radically reformed Ethiopia’s political system. The regime transformed the hitherto centralised state into the Federal Democratic Republic and also redefined citizenship, politics and identity on ethnic grounds. The intent was to create a more prosperous, just and representative state for all its people. Yet, despite continued economic growth and promised democratisation, there is growing discontent with the EPRDF’s ethnically defined state and rigid grip on power and fears of continued inter-ethnic conflict. The international community should take Ethiopia’s governance problems much more seriously and adopt a more principled position towards the government. Without genuine multi-party democracy, the tensions and pressures in Ethiopia’s polities will only grow, greatly increasing the possibility of a violent eruption that would destabilise the country and region.
The endeavour to transform Ethiopia into a federal state is led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has dominated the coalition of ethno-nationalist parties that is the EPRDF since the removal in 1991 of the Derg, the security services committee that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. The EPRDF quickly institutionalised the TPLF’s policy of people’s rights to self-determination and self-rule. The federal constitution ratified in 1994 defined the country’s structure as a multicultural federation based on ethno-national representation.
The government has created nine ethnic-based regional states and two federally administered city-states. The result is an asymmetrical federation that combines populous regional states like Oromiya and Amhara in the central highlands with sparsely populated and underdeveloped ones like Gambella and Somali. Although the constitution vests all powers not attributed to the federal government in them, the regional states are in fact weak.
The constitution was applauded for its commitment to liberal democracy and respect for political freedoms and human rights. But while the EPRDF promises democracy, it has not accepted that the opposition is qualified to take power via the ballot box and tends to regard the expression of differing views and interests as a form of betrayal. Before 2005, its electoral superiority was ensured by the limited national appeal and outreach of the predominantly ethnically based opposition parties. Divided and disorganised, the reach of those parties rarely went beyond Addis Ababa. When the opposition was able to challenge at local, regional or federal levels, it faced threats, harassment and arrest. With the opportunity in 2005 to take over the Addis Ababa city council in what would have been the first democratic change of a major administration in the country’s history, the opposition withdrew from the political process to protest flaws in the overall election.
The EPRDF did not feel threatened until the 2005 federal and regional elections. The crackdown that year on the opposition demonstrated the extent to which the regime is willing to ignore popular protest and foreign criticism to hold on to power. The 2008 local and by-elections went much more smoothly, in large part because the opposition Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) was absorbed with internal and legal squabbles, and several other parties withdrew after their candidates experienced severe registration problems. The next federal and regional elections, scheduled for June 2010, most probably will be much more contentious, as numerous opposition parties are preparing to challenge the EPRDF, which is likely to continue to use its political machine to retain its position.
Despite the EPRDF’s authoritarianism and reluctance to accept genuine multi-party competition, political positions and parties have proliferated in recent years. This process, however, is not driven by democratisation or the inclusion of opposition parties in representative institutions. Rather it is the result of a continuous polarisation of national politics that has sharpened tensions between and within parties and ethnic groups since the mid-1990s. The EPRDF’s ethnic federalism has not dampened conflict, but rather increased competition among groups that vie over land and natural resources, as well as administrative boundaries and government budgets.
Furthermore, ethnic federalism has failed to resolve the “national question”. The EPRDF’s ethnic policy has empowered some groups but has not been accompanied by dialogue and reconciliation. For Amhara and national elites, ethnic federalism impedes a strong, unitary nation-state. For ethno-national rebel groups like the ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front; Somalis in the Ogaden) and OLF (Oromo Liberation Front; the Oromo), ethnic federalism remains artificial. While the concept has failed to accommodate grievances, it has powerfully promoted ethnic self-awareness among all groups. The international community has ignored or downplayed all these problems. Some donors appear to consider food security more important than democracy in Ethiopia, but they neglect the increased ethnic awareness and tensions created by the regionalisation policy and their potentially explosive consequences.
By Karin Brulliard Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, September 12, 2009
LIVINGSTONE, Zambia -- As African countries still struggle to control the deadly AIDS epidemic, they are also grappling with debates over what rights and duties to give those living with the disease -- a growing segment of the population that remains largely hidden.
Across the continent, lawmakers are considering whether to make criminals of those who infect others with HIV, allow bosses to test workers for the virus, punish women who pass it to their babies and give constitutional protections to those with HIV.
Such questions are increasingly landing in courtrooms, presenting judges with cases that mix current science, individual rights and a devastating public health crisis. One, involving two Zambia air force members who say they were unfairly discharged because they have HIV, goes to trial here next month.
Similar questions are raised worldwide, but nowhere do they carry more weight than in a region where as many as one in five adults has HIV and in an era in which anti-retroviral drugs are keeping more people alive. Laws crafted to deal with such a vast constituency, experts say, could help curb the epidemic -- or deepen a stigma that fuels its spread.
"HIV is a systemic issue in southern Africa. It's a huge social problem, and it inevitably becomes a legal one," said Adila Hassim, head of litigation at the AIDS Law Project in Johannesburg. "There's so many ways people with HIV are affected that it does require a whole set of rules."
But those rules are hotly debated. The United Nations and most health and human rights organizations back policies that emphasize rights for people with HIV, an approach that has generally been favored by officials in African nations, at least a dozen of which have passed or are considering HIV-specific legislation. But those officials also face pressure to protect the uninfected.
Laws criminalizing the transmission of HIV have been adopted from western to southern Africa, for example, with backing from some women's groups despite human rights advocates' contention that they deepen stigma. In Botswana, protests by activists have failed to stop employers from testing and excluding infected job applicants. A recent proposal in Rwanda would require HIV tests for many -- an idea supported by observers who say that relying on people to seek testing "can deprive other people of their right to life," as one University of Pretoria researcher wrote in South Africa's Star newspaper.
"It's a very tricky situation, a catch-22," said the attorney general of the island nation of Mauritius, Jayarama Valayden, who successfully lobbied against a proposed HIV criminalization law that had popular support. African nations passing such laws, he said, are "reacting to public opinion."
In some places with unsettled HIV policies, African courts are weighing in, sometimes guided by colonial-era constitutions that never accounted for a large class of people with a deadly infectious disease.
The case of the Zambian airmen, lawyers involved say, could help answer contentious questions in a nation where 15 percent of adults have HIV: Is discrimination on the basis of HIV status unconstitutional? Can the military test recruits or members for HIV and ban those who are positive?
"There are those who feel it's the fault of a person who gets HIV to suffer the consequences . . . others say the best way to deal with HIV is to adopt a human rights approach," said Paul Mulenga, the airmen's attorney. "Zambian society is split."
The two men, Stainley Kingaipe and Charles Chookole, joined the Zambian air force in 1991 and began as members of the band. Kingaipe, 40, eventually transferred to the mechanical fleet, while Chookole, 41, became an academy instructor and armory guard.
Over the next decade, both men said, air force doctors treated them -- Kingaipe for a swollen leg; Chookole for leg pain, a fungal infection and tuberculosis. The men said they and a group of other airmen were summoned in 2001 for a medical checkup where, for the first time, their blood was drawn.
Days later, Kingaipe and Chookole said, doctors instructed them to take three white pills twice a day but did not say what they were for. A year later, they were told they were permanently and medically unfit for service and discharged -- though both felt healthy and said they had been fulfilling their duties as normal. Chookole, in fact, had been promoted to sergeant two months earlier.
"I was confused," recalled Chookole, who said that his boyhood dream was to join the military and that he has been unable to find work since. "Somebody is telling you you are unfit. But I was dressed in full uniform. I did not come before them on a stretcher."
Upon their discharge, the two men said that they discovered the pills were anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV -- and that they were HIV-positive.
They want their jobs back and have filed a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to HIV testing without their knowledge, violating their rights to privacy and protection from inhumane and degrading treatment, and unfairly dismissed.
A military spokesman did not respond to requests for comment, and a Zambian air force lawyer reached by telephone would say only that Kingaipe and Chookole's case is "nonsense." In court filings, the Zambian government said the men were not tested for HIV and were discharged because Kingaipe had Karposi's sarcoma, largely an AIDS-related form of cancer, and Chookole had tuberculosis.
At the time of their discharge, the Zambian military had no policy on HIV. In 2003, it announced a draft policy banning HIV-positive recruits, which one military official called necessary because "defense is not kindergarten or Red Cross. We need people who are fit." The policy, finalized last year, does not allow the military to discharge those who contract the virus after recruitment.
Some Western militaries, including that of the United States, bar potential recruits who are HIV-positive. But the topic of HIV and the military has generated more debate in Africa, where strapped governments offer infrequent medical care. A 2004 study of Zambia's 22,000-member military found a 29 percent prevalence rate, according to a U.S. Defense Department report.
Those kinds of figures have stirred concerns that the virus is weakening African militaries, and that HIV-positive peacekeepers on the continent might fall ill or spread the virus while deployed, either through wounds or sexual activity -- a particularly sensitive subject given accusations of rape that have long plagued U.N. peacekeeping forces.
"My taxpayer money is paying for the defense force, which is supposed to be providing security. That's also a right," said Lindy Heinecken, a military sociologist at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. "The military is a unique organization . . . the circumstances that you are asking them to live and work in are different to going to a factory."
Activists say those arguments are outdated, given the advent of anti-retroviral drugs that can keep people with HIV healthy, and only fuel stigma. Militaries, they say, should not ban all HIV-positive soldiers but should assess fitness for duty through general health exams. That is also the view of the United Nations, which does not require HIV testing for peacekeepers.
"In this society, unless you want to go and look for people from Sweden for your armed forces, you're not going to get away from HIV," said Hassim of the AIDS Law Project. "You must have a nuanced policy."
That view has been backed by recent court rulings in Namibia and South Africa, which found blanket bans unconstitutional. Mulenga said the case of Kingaipe and Chookole could pave the way for a similar challenge to the Zambian military's ban on HIV-positive recruits.
But that would require excluded recruits to come forward, and in a society in which HIV is still considered shameful, he said, few are as brave as Kingaipe and Chookole.
Indeed, the two men said neighbors and acquaintances sometimes whisper that their HIV status makes them "already dead," as Kingaipe put it. He thinks the air force also thought as much.
"Maybe they thought because of my status, I was also hopeless," said Kingaipe, who now works as a security guard, earning half as much as he did in the military. "It's not true."
This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It's a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama's vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you've got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."
In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world's largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.
But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It's true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution.
At best, however, the first Green Revolution was an ambiguous success. As John Perkins writes in his magisterial Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, it was instigated by the US government not out of a direct concern for the well-being of the world's hungry but from a worry that a hungry urban poor might take to the streets and demand left-wing changes in the Global South. The term "Green Revolution" was coined by William Gaud, administrator of USAID in the late 1960s. Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, he announced, "Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution." Steeped in the cold war, the first Green Revolution was designed to prevent any other revolutions from happening.
The Green Revolution appeared successful because the global quantity of food produced increased dramatically. From 1970 to 1990 the amount of food available per person rose by 11 percent, and more than 150 million people were lifted from the ranks of the world's hungry. But most of that rise was driven by transformations inside China. Subtract China from the picture and the heyday of the Green Revolution saw global hunger increase by 11 percent. In South America, hunger grew by nearly 20 percent despite impressive gains in output driven, in part, by improved crop varieties. Those varieties required large landholdings in order to be economically efficient, which meant that the peasants working that land had to be kicked off. Those displaced peasants migrated to the hillsides and tropical forests, doubling the area of cultivated land--in other words, the increase in food came not only through technology but also simply by having food growing on a greater area.
Beyond the massive displacement of peasants, the Green Revolution wrought other social damage--urban slums sprawled around cities to house displaced workers, pesticide use went up, groundwater levels fell and industrial agricultural practices began racking up significant environmental debt. Today, because of the Green Revolution's catastrophic economic and ecological consequences, even its strong advocates in India have recommended that up to 70 percent of farmers farm organically.
The architects of Africa's new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation's agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as "smallholders") and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because "if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse."
Nonetheless, the Green Revolution being prepared for Africa bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, in the 1960s the push for a Green Revolution was accompanied by fears about national security and stability; the recent global spate of food rebellions, in dozens of countries from Egypt to Haiti to India, has made food a security concern once again. Furthermore, the first Green Revolution was made possible through the philanthropy of a billionaire American family--the Rockefellers; the second is bankrolled by Gates. This is not a superficial coincidence: the destinies of millions of the world's poorest farmers are again being shaped by the richest Americans, and philanthropic choices are very different from democratic ones.
One of the most important choices involves the role of technology. At the Gates Foundation, Roy Steiner emphasized that "we believe in the power of technology." It's a belief with clout: about a third of the foundation's $1.3 billion in agricultural development grants have been invested in science and technology, with almost 30 percent of the 2008 grants promoting and developing seed biotechnologies. Through a range of investments, the Gates Foundation is turning its faith into reality. This reliance on technology to address a growing political and social problem loudly echoes the thinking behind the first Green Revolution.
Why Africa Is Hungry and Knowledge Is Never Neutral
Some of the changes made possible by Gates's funding are welcome. An African Centre for Crop Improvement has been set up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which is designed to change the way African agricultural scientists work. Rather than carting them off to Europe or North America, where they learn about the pressing agricultural issues facing French or American farmers, the new center encourages African scientists to face African challenges while based in Africa. Other Gates investments are geared toward training more women PhDs and providing an infrastructure to source food aid locally.
These are valuable efforts, but one might pause to ask why the need for such philanthropic intervention arose in the first place. The faltering quality of African agricultural research institutions, and the decline in government spending on agriculture, is a result of the budget austerity imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in the 1980s and '90s. As Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello has noted, Africa exported 1.3 million tons of food a year in the 1960s, but after being subject to international development loans and free-market fundamentalism, today it imports nearly 25 percent of its food. In a 2008 report, the Bank's internal evaluations group lambasted the policies that led to this situation. What the Gates Foundation is doing is using its private money to fund activities that once were in the public domain and were, albeit imperfectly, under democratic control.
The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."
This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.
The first Green Revolution spawned and exacerbated many social divisions, especially around access to land and resources, since the scale required by Green Revolution technologies meant that it was systematically biased against smallholders. The Gates Foundation is clearly aware of the importance of smallholder agriculture; but a leaked internal strategy document suggests that something else is more important: "Over time, this [strategy] will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production." "Land mobility" is an Orwellian term meaning the land stays where it is but the people on it are driven off. The foundation stands behind this idea, saying that peasants will head to cities "because there are a lot of them who don't want to be farmers [and] people make their own choices."
This idea of choice is an integral part of the conventional wisdom about agriculture in Africa. At least until the financial crisis, it was true that young men tended not to want to remain in agriculture if they could avoid it; but that choice was conditioned, in part, by policies that underinvested in rural areas compared with urban ones. One of the consequences of the financial crisis has been to change that field of choices. For the first time in years, men who had migrated to the cities find there's less opportunity in urban than in rural areas.
They're returning to family land that has been farmed by women, who have developed rich knowledge about agriculture. The technologies that the Gates Foundation funds, like hybrid seed and synthetic fertilizer, require much less know-how than some of the diverse traditional systems managed by women. In many African cultures, women grow the majority of food, but men control access to cash. Rather than supporting and building on women's agricultural knowledge systems, cash-based agricultural technology allows men with the economic wherewithal to displace women as farmers.
African farmers' organizations have repeatedly rejected this high-tech approach to agriculture and instead are making their own choices. Since AGRA announced its plans in 2006, groups representing the largest farmer federations in Africa have come together in a series of meetings to organize support for African agroecological solutions to the food crisis.
Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.
It was innovative ecological technologies like push-pull (and not traditional Green Revolution approaches) that were praised by a recent international effort to assess the future of agriculture. "The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development" (IAASTD), a report modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took more than four years to complete and relied on the expertise of more than 400 scientists. It was adopted by fifty-eight countries in the global North and South (though not the United States, Canada or Australia). The IAASTD found that a focus on small-scale sustainable agriculture, locally adapted seed and ecological farming better address the complexities of climate change, hunger, poverty and productive demands on agriculture in the developing world. That report--the most comprehensive scientific assessment of world agriculture to date--recommended development strategies that are in large part the opposite of those backed by the Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation acknowledges the relevance of the IAASTD's insights. But it continues to invest heavily in biotech solutions to the problem of hunger and gives short shrift to the agroecological approaches recommended by the report. What's more, there's empirical reason to doubt whether biotech can deliver what Gates is hoping for. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are expensive, proprietary and contribute to the corporate monopolization of the world's seed supply. Despite extraordinary restrictions on research into the effects of GM products--the industry refuses to allow independent researchers to study patented seed--evidence is finally emerging of the significant environmental and health risks they pose, prompting the American Academy of Environmental Medicine earlier this year to call for an immediate moratorium on GM food.
Prestigious research organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have demonstrated that GM crops (which are legal for commercial use in only three African countries) do not increase intrinsic yields, and, in the developing world especially, can increase costs and risks to smallholders, with mixed, often negative effects on their incomes. Although the Gates Foundation has promised crops genetically engineered for drought tolerance, these crops have yet to outperform traditional varieties, according to an assessment by the Australian government. The foundation has also spent more than $111 million to "biofortify" (genetically engineer) crops to have a higher vitamin content, despite past technical and cultural failures that indicate a diverse diet goes much further than genetically engineered supplements in supporting good nutrition.
Africa's New Poster Child: The Malawi 'Miracle'
One place where the new Green Revolution has gotten a head start is the small East African nation of Malawi. After a severe drought in 2003, more than a third of the country needed food aid to survive. Bucking advice from the World Bank, the country began giving out vouchers on a large scale for subsidized fertilizer in 2005. The rains returned, yields rose, Malawi began exporting grain and the international community declared the hunger crisis over.
The Gates Foundation has been aggressively supporting the funding of fertilizer in Africa through grants to establish a network of private agro-input dealers. While the program doesn't explicitly subsidize the price of fertilizers to farmers, it encourages national policies to increase fertilizer availability. If the problem for African farmers is soil fertility, funding fertilizer seems unimpeachable. A closer examination of the data raises some troubling questions, though. It isn't clear whether it was the fertilizer or the rain that caused yields to increase. Worse yet, according to sources in Malawi, hunger has not abated at anywhere near the levels believed by the international development community.
Indeed, there's reason to think that fertilizer subsidies may render societies more vulnerable to famine. Roland Bunch, a former agronomist at World Neighbors and author of Two Ears of Corn, a handbook on people-centered agricultural development, explains the problem. "The indirect effects of subsidized fertilizer are that farmers stop amending their soils with organic matter because it is easier to apply fertilizer. When the subsidies dry up--as they invariably do--farmers are left with soils that are so inert that they can't even grow a good green manure to restore fertility. At that point, with neither chemical fertilizer nor green manures being feasible, we could easily witness a famine across Africa like nothing we have ever seen before."
This is a concern echoed on the ground. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been working in Malawi for more than a decade. She says that Malawi's fertilizer subsidies are "masking food security problems for the long term." Bezner Kerr works with a project in Malawi that takes a different approach to soil health by relying on local farmer experimenters. One village headman has, for instance, encouraged his village to adopt ecological agriculture, which not only improves yields but produces a diverse diet that has improved the health of the community's children, at a fraction of the cost of Gates's genetically engineered nutrition projects. Much like push-pull, the result of that project, which spread to more than 7,000 households, is that families--and the soil--are better off.
When asked about how AGRA affects projects like hers, Bezner Kerr says, "When farmers get vouchers [for fertilizer], they wonder, Why incorporate crop residues? If AGRA is putting all that money into fertilizer, it is taking away from efforts like ours." Like Bunch, she's concerned about the economic as well as the environmental sustainability of fertilizer giveaways. "What happens when AGRA leaves?" she asks.
Is Bill Gates Africa's Latest Strongman?
The Gates Foundation responds to criticism of its funding decisions by saying that it is learning all the time, with a state-of-the-art system that will soon let the project officers seek feedback through the cellphones of more than 10,000 farmer stakeholders. It's unusual in the world of foundations to have such a strong commitment to correcting mistakes. In its flexibility and openness to reform, the Gates Foundation seems ready to depart from the trajectory of the first Green Revolution.
Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is an important step, the farm leaders are unhappy about being consulted so late in the game. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, recently convened a dialogue on AGRA. There, Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers' Forum expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: "You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!"
Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, "If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies." This is feedback that can't so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.
The calls from African organizations to be able to set the agenda for their own agricultural development are heard only faintly in the United States. That's largely because when it comes to African hunger, prejudices about the incompetence of African farmers and the marvels of biotechnology do a lot of the thinking for us. But the Gates Foundation isn't a victim of poor reasoning. It actively promotes an agenda that supports some of the most powerful corporations on earth. Far more than the peer-reviewed IAASTD study, Gates's strategy reflects another report, funded by the foundation itself: "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty" from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Knocked out in a couple of months by a small team led by a Gates Foundation senior fellow and stacked with staff from institutions receiving substantial Gates money, the report, while rightly calling for renewed investment and education, again ignores the structural and political causes of Africa's hunger, ascribing it to a technical deficit. The report concludes that the United States needs to "reassert its leadership" in "spreading new technologies," because it will increase trade and "strengthen American institutions." Worse, the council's solutions--with classic Green Revolution hubris--ignore the successful endogenous solutions that have been spreading across the continent for three decades.
Rarely in the history of philanthropy has one foundation--or more correctly, one man--had this kind of power. When Obama made his remarks on the Green Revolution, one Seattle Times journalist suggested that "President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation." It's not hard to see the paths through which the thinking in Seattle might have made it to Washington, DC. Many AGRA and Gates Foundation employees are former industry and government insiders. Rajiv Shah, a doctor with no previous agricultural experience who was headhunted by the Gates Foundation, is now at the Department of Agriculture, as under secretary for research, education and economics, and also chief scientist.
The foundation's reach extends far beyond Washington. With billions committed to agricultural development, the Gates Foundation has a financial heft equal to that of a government in the global North. In 2007 the United States contributed $60 million to the system of international public agricultural research centers. Gates has pumped $122 million into the system in the past eighteen months alone and given a total of $317 million to the World Bank.
Africa's Green Revolution has another similarity with the first Green Revolution: the technological preferences of the philanthropist shape the approaches on the ground. For the Rockefellers, that meant agricultural technology based on industrial chemistry and oil. For Gates, it's about proprietary intellectual property. Africa's Green Revolution is, in other words, just a new way of doing business as usual.
In its push for technological solutions, its distaste for redistributive social policy and disregard for extant alternatives--as well as in the circumstances that have made food an international security concern--this Green Revolution looks very similar to its predecessor. The biggest issue, however, isn't one of commission but of omission. Just as in India, where peasant demands for land reform in the 1960s that might have led to more sustainable and durable progress (as such reforms did in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) were ignored, African farmers advocating their own solutions to the food crisis are being marginalized. In particular, the vocally articulated demands--for agroecological alternatives, state support for farmer-led research, for land reform, for women's rights in agriculture, and for sharing access to water--all fade into the background when Gates's answers are amplified.
It will take a suite of policies, addressing both the technical and sociopolitical reasons for hunger in Africa, to make lasting change. Technologies for development need to be accompanied by other, political reforms, including canceling debt, removing food and agriculture from the World Trade Organization, investing heavily in farmers' organizations and their proven sustainable agricultural technologies, and supporting the peer-reviewed approaches generated by the science of agroecology.
Models for this kind of change already exist. In Mali, peasant movements have successfully persuaded the government to adopt as a national priority the idea of "food sovereignty," a shorthand for the democratization of the food system. Similar efforts are happening at regional and local levels in other countries. But for those initiatives to register in the United States, the conventional wisdom regarding the Green Revolution needs to be replaced. The tragedy here is not that Africa hasn't had a Green Revolution but that the mistakes of the first may be repeated once more, and that one foundation has the power to make the rest of the world bend to its misguided agenda.
About Raj Patel
Raj Patel is a fellow at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...
About Eric Holt-Gimenez
Eric Holt-Gimenez is executive director at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...
About Annie Shattuck
Annie Shattuck is a policy analyst at Food Firstand has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Gimenez) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...
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