Anastasia Moloney
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With the G20 spectacle behind us, the next big gathering of world leaders scheduled this month is the 5th Summit of the Americas. Heads of states from 34 nations from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and the US, will gather in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial capital between the 17th and 19th April. It will be the first time President Obama steps foot in Latin America; an ideal opportunity to kick-start a new approach in US foreign policy in the region. And in Washington, there are high hopes pinned on the increasingly assertive regional leadership of Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. Lula is the key player who can help open the doors to a new era in Washington’s relationship with Latin America—less Chavez-and-Bush-style aggression, and more mutually beneficial cooperation.
Ahead of the summit, Obama has begun to tentatively nurture a new relationship with Brazil. In March, Lula, a former shoe shiner and metal worker, was the first Latin American leader to be invited to the White House since Obama took office, signaling the end of the “special relationship” that Colombia’s conservative President Álvaro Uribe enjoyed with the US during the Bush era. And with Brazil’s other main regional rivals—Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina—consumed with domestic problems, the timing couldn’t be better for Lula to assert his country’s regional leadership. While Mexico grapples with drug violence, Venezuela suffers double-digit inflation and Argentina struggles to keep its economy afloat, Brazil is emerging as the natural regional leader. It has enjoyed steady economic growth (an average of nearly 4 per cent) for the past 5 years, driven largely by the global commodities boom. The tenth largest economy in the world, Brazil is the leading producer of sugar cane-based biofuels, and its newly discovered offshore oil reserves which could propel it to a top ten oil exporter by 2011. It is already overshadowing the influence of oil-rich Venezuela.
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Philip Bobbitt
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A piece related to this article, in which whistleblower Michael Soussan reflects on the UN’s failings, can be read here.
YES
Phillip Bobbitt
NO
David Hannay
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Peter Bergen
In the November issue of Prospect, Jason Burke has argued that the west needs to better understand the Afghan origins of the Taliban if it is ever to win the war in Afghanistan. Here, the New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen provides a different perspective on the need for a new strategy in Afghanistan.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Taliban and al Qaeda leaders were on the run. Now they are running free. In Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, attacks are up by 40 per cent in the last several months, and more American soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq. By 2002, the Taliban were little more than a nuisance; today, they are encircling Kabul and ambushing convoys of supplies on their way to the capital, and have appeared in force in the neighbouring Wardak province. They are beginning to convince the population that international forces are losing control of the country.
One western diplomat in Kabul described Nato operations in the south of the country as “mowing the lawn.” Every year, Nato forces go in and clear out Taliban sanctuaries, only to have to go back the following year and cut back the new growth. This deteriorating situation has, finally, grabbed the attention of American politicians. Both presidential candidates have called for a significant increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan. But simply throwing more soldiers at the problem won’t help unless the next occupant of the White House abandons our current stopgap approach, and initiates a “strategic reset” of the sort that helped the US military dampen the violence in Iraq.
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Joshua Kurlantzick
This article responds to to Prospect’s symposium on the credit crunch, “Reflections on the meltdown,” which can be read here .
The financial crisis will do great harm to the US economy. But more importantly America’s image as the global economic leader, which has carried it through past military victories and defeats, has been irreparably damaged. The sheer scope of US banks’ speculation is causing other nations to question whether America will ever be a safe investment again. And after years of lecturing others, the US dithered in its response, at first even failing to approve a rescue package. Now, Washington is even looking to London for leadership. But it is events in Beijing that should most worry US policy makers.
The financial crisis will not prove as damaging to China. With its $1.9 trillion in currency reserves, $370bn current account surplus, capital controls, and an essentially closed stock markets, China is well prepared to weather the financial panic. Though its economy remains driven by exports, which will be hit by falling demand in the west, the Chinese have amassed massive pools of savings. Their government can also rely on domestic consumer demand to power through global economic hard times. The World Bank predicts China will post over 9 per cent growth this year. That’s not a typo; by comparison, the US will almost certainly fall into recession.
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Alex De Waal
One month after Cyclone Nargis, millions of Burmese remain with inadequate food, contaminated water and no proper shelter. At least 130,000 have died or gone missing, and the toll from epidemic disease in the coming months could be as high again.
We hear much about the administrative and logistical mire of Burma, of a government denying that disaster has struck and obstructing aid work. We hear about the confiscation of relief supplies. We hear less about the host of local Burmese organisations, often enjoying co-operation from local authorities and supported by a smaller number of international agencies, that are present on the sodden ground of southern Burma. There is an Asian response: experienced disaster teams from India and Thailand are arriving. Expatriate Burmese physicians are flocking home to help in a quiet relief effort. Senior monks have also joined the cause, gaining access to the hardest-hit regions, such as Bogale. Monastic, church and local volunteer networks are able to reach even remote villages inaccessible to international personnel. “Building trust with the military is essential,” said a local doctor. “Without it, the politics take over.”
Most emergency supplies can be procured locally, but relief teams lack funds to purchase fuel, rent vehicles and pay volunteers. Tragically, the first days of the disaster, when emergency logistics were most needed, passed without outside help. With a few days’ warning and the aircraft and boats for an immediate response, many lives could have been saved. It’s a rule of thumb in disaster response that the first assistance comes from the nearest source, and that it is small in scale but efficient. People struck by calamity are responders as well as victims. One of the big lessons from the response to the 2004 tsunami was that official aid efforts should support those local responses rather than—as too often happened—foreign experts arriving and deciding that they knew best.
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Clare Lockhart
We would like to tell you the story of $150m going up in smoke,” said the young villager. “We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back from exile, and we were very pleased.”
This was the summer of 2002. The village was in a remote part of Bamiyan province, in Afghanistan’s central highlands, and several hours’ drive from the provincial capital—utterly cut off from the world. UN agencies and NGOs were rushing to provide “quick impact” projects to help Afghan citizens in the aftermath of war. $150m could have transformed the lives of the inhabitants of villages like this one.
But it was not to be, as the young man explained. “After many months, very little had happened. We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid. So we went to find out what was going on. And this is what we discovered: the money was received by an agency in Geneva, who took 20 per cent and subcontracted the job to another agency in Washington DC, who also took 20 per cent. Again it was subcontracted and another 20 per cent was taken; and this happened again when the money arrived in Kabul. By this time there was very little money left; but enough for someone to buy wood in western Iran and have it shipped by a shipping cartel owned by a provincial governor at five times the cost of regular transportation. Eventually some wooden beams reached our villages. But the beams were too large and heavy for the mud walls that we can build. So all we could do was chop them up and use them for firewood.”
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Erik S Reinert
In the latest issue of Prospect, Paul Collier reviews two books, Lawrence E Harrison’s “The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture and Save It From Itself” (OUP) and my “How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor” (Constable & Robinson). Both books represent an alternative thinking to that of the Washington institutions, including the World Bank, where Collier was director of the development research group.
The starting point for this debate is the striking failure of the IMF and World Bank to create wealth in many countries. In fact, their advice has led to real wages being halved in a number of countries, from Mongolia to Peru, over the last 20 years. To compensate, the Washington institutions insist on receiving the credit for the successes of China and India. Yet the success of these two countries is based on a) protecting their industrial structure for more than 50 years, and b) opening up their economies gradually, not with shock therapy. These strategies contradict the key recommendations of the Washington institutions. Yes, these countries had too little competition and they probably protected their economies for too long, but that is the side on which you want to err.
Mainstream analysis often concerns itself with symptoms of economic growth rather than its causes. My approach has been to study the strategies successful nations have employed when making the crucial step from poor to rich, from England under the Tudors in 1485 to Japan in the 20th century and Ireland and Korea in the electronic age. The surprising element of 500 years’ history of economic policy is the consistency over time. All nations which have escaped poverty have protected and subsidised an industrial or manufacturing sector in which economies of scale can be accomplished, before successfully opening up for free trade. England protected her manufacturing sector for some 350 years, the US for more than 100, and Korea only for 40, but they all protected an initially “artificial” comparative advantage outside raw material production. With a comparative advantage in activities that delivered increasing returns—manufacturing and advanced services—free trade works to the benefit of both trading partners. Alternatively, nations with a considerable manufacturing sector geared towards the domestic market can follow the example of Canada and Australia, and make a good living exporting from the primary sector (raw materials).
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William Easterly
Dear Hilary Benn
27th September 2006
We share a concern for the world’s poor and the tragedies they confront every day. However, I must respectfully disagree with the approach that your department for international development (DfID) takes to world poverty. I have similar concerns about other aid agencies, but the flaws I discuss below are exemplified perhaps even more in DfID than elsewhere. Let me use your recent white paper on international development to illustrate my concerns.
In your introduction to the white paper, you spoke of keeping promises and taking responsibility. Both are critical to making foreign aid reach the poor, as it has so often failed to do. However, I don’t see how the idea of “promises” or “responsibility” offered by DfID are at all meaningful.
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Richard Dowden
Too small to reach the seat, she cycles with one leg through the frame of the old-fashioned bicycle and stops in front of me, blocking my way. She greets me with full African solemnity, looking straight into my eyes and says, “Please help me, sah.”
Her long green skirt and bright white shirt say student, but it is late morning and she is not in school. I guess what is coming next: “I beg you please sah. Help me for school fees.”
I have just come from one of the squalid, disease-ridden encampments that the people of northern Uganda, some 2m of them, have been imprisoned in since the early 1990s. Strangely beautiful from a distance, they consist of hundreds of traditionally built circular huts of mud and thatch. Jammed together without sanitation, they are sprawls of squalor, breeding disease and hopelessness. Known in NGO-speak as “displacement” camps, they are home to a population that has been forced into dependency and for some, almost 20 years of purposeless, barren days.
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Philippe Legrain
Globalisation isn’t working, according to Robert Wade (July). If you exclude China—a mere 1.3bn people—it has not made much of a dent in global poverty or inequality, he claims. And if you ignore the boom years since 2000—why bother using up-to-date statistics?—it hasn’t delivered faster growth either. This is a weak argument, which appears to stand up only by excluding evidence that contradicts it—but even on its own terms it isn’t correct. In fact, developing countries that have embraced globalisation are growing faster than before; so fast that they are closing the gap with rich countries, slashing poverty and reducing global inequality for the first time since the industrial revolution catapulted Europe forward. Globalisation is working.
Wade claims that, “If the liberal argument holds, we would expect the global shift towards free markets in the past 25 years to have raised the rate of world economic growth. Instead, there has been a slowdown in developed and developing countries. Between the era of managed capitalism (roughly 1960-78) and the era of globalisation (roughly 1979-2000), the growth rate of world output fell by almost half, from 2.7 per cent to 1.5 per cent.”
Not so. According to the latest IMF figures, the world economy grew by 3.3 per cent a year from 1986-95 and by 3.9 per cent a year from 1996-2005. Better still, while in 1986-95 emerging economies grew only fractionally faster than advanced economies (3.7 per cent a year compared with 3 per cent), in 1996-2005 they grew over twice as fast (5.5 per cent a year compared with 2.7 per cent). Far from stagnating, the world economy is booming—and developing countries are outpacing developed ones.
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