China’s Aid to Africa: Monster or Messiah?

February 7, 2014 wantok Leave a comment

In recent years, China’s economic presence in Africa has led to a heated debate, some of it well-informed and some of it not, about the nature of Chinese involvement and its implications for the continent. The debate is partially motivated by the rapid growth of China’s economic presence in Africa: for example, Chinese investment in Africa grew from USD 210 million in 2000 to 3.17 billion in 2011.[1] Aid is an important policy instrument for China among its various engagements with Africa, and indeed Africa has been a top recipient of Chinese aid: by the end of 2009 it had received 45.7 percent of the RMB 256.29 billion cumulative foreign aid of China.[2] This aid to Africa has raised many questions, such as its composition, its goal and nature.

What constitutes China’s aid?

Officially, China provides eight types of foreign aid: complete projects, goods and materials, technical cooperation, human resource development cooperation, medical assistance, emergency humanitarian aid, volunteer programs, and debt relief. [3] China’s aid to Africa covers a wide array of fields, such as agriculture, education, transportation, energy, communications, and health. According to Chinese scholars, since 1956, China has provided almost 900 aid projects to African countries, including assistance supporting textile factories, hydropower stations, stadiums, hospitals, and schools.

Official development assistance is defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as concessional funding given to developing countries and to multilateral institutions primarily for the purpose of promoting welfare and economic development in the recipient country. [4] China is not a member of OECD and does not follow its definition or practice on development aid. The bulk of Chinese financing in Africa falls under the category of development finance, but not aid. This fact is privately acknowledged by Chinese government analysts, although Chinese literature constantly blurs the distinction between the two categories.

The billions of dollars that China commits to Africa are repayable, long-term loans. From 2009 to 2012, China provided USD 10 billion in financing to Africa in the form of “concessional loans.”[5] During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first overseas trip to Africa in March 2013, he doubled this commitment to USD 20 billion from 2013 to 2015.[6] The head sovereign risk analyst of Export-Import Bank of China announced in November 2013 that by 2025, China will have provided Africa with USD 1 trillion in financing, including direct investment, soft loans and commercial loans. [7]

China’s own policy actively contributes to the confusion between development finance and aid. The Chinese government encourages its agencies and commercial entities to “closely mix and combine foreign aid, direct investment, service contracts, labor cooperation, foreign trade and export.”[8] The goal is to maximize feasibility and flexibility of Chinese projects to meet local realities in the recipient country, but it also makes it difficult to capture which portion of the financing is – or should be – categorized as aid. One rather convincing theory is that the Chinese government in effect pays for the difference between the interest rates of concessional loans provided to Africa and comparable commercial loans. Therefore, only the small difference in interest rates could qualify as Chinese aid.

Who does China’s aid serve?

Despite Chinese leaders’ claim that China’s assistance to Africa is totally selfless and altruistic, the reality is far more complex.[9] China’s policy toward Africa is pragmatic, and aid has been a useful policy instrument since the early days of People’s Republic of China.

During the Cold War, foreign aid an important political tool that China used to gain Africa’s diplomatic recognition and to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union for Africa’s support. Between 1963 and 1964, Zhou Enlai visited 10 African countries and announced the well-known “Eight Principles of Foreign Economic and Technological Assistance.”[10] These aid principles were designed to compete simultaneously with the “imperialists” (the United States) and the “revisionists” (the Soviet Union) for Africa’s approval and support.

These efforts were enhanced during the Cultural Revolution under the influence of a radical revolutionary ideology, motivating China to provide large amounts of foreign aid to Africa despite its own domestic economic difficulties. [11] One famous example was the Tanzania-Zambia Railway built between 1970 and 1975, for which China provided a zero-interest loan of RMB 980 million. By the mid-1980s, China’s generous assistance had opened the door to diplomatic recognition with 44 African countries. [12]

Since the beginning of China’s reform and opening up, especially after 2000, Africa has become an increasingly important economic partner for China. Africa enjoys rich natural resources and market potential, and urgently needs infrastructure and development finance to stimulate economic growth. Chinese development finance, combined with the aid, aims at not only benefiting the local recipient countries, but also China itself. For example, China’s “tied aid” for infrastructure usually favors Chinese companies (especially state-owned enterprises), while its loans are in many cases backed by African natural resources.

Much Chinese financing to Africa is associated with securing the continent’s natural resources. Using what is sometimes characterized as the “Angola Model,” Chinas frequently provides low-interest loans to nations who rely on commodities, such as oil or mineral resources, as collateral.[13] In these cases, the recipient nations usually suffer from low credit ratings and have great difficulty obtaining funding from the international financial market; China makes financing relatively available—with certain conditions.

Though commodity-backed loans were not created by China – leading Western banks were making such loans to African countries, including Angola and Ghana, before China Eximbank and Angola completed their first oil-backed loan in March 2004 – but the Chinese built the model to scale and applied it using a systematic approach. In Angola in 2006, USD 4 billion in such loans probably helped Chinese oil companies win the exploitation rights to multiple oil blocks.[14] In 2010, Sinopec’s acquisition of a 50 percent stake in Block 18 coincided with the disbursement of the first tranche of Eximbank funding, and in 2005, Sinopec’s acquisition of rights to Block 3/80 coincided with the announcement of a new USD 2 billion loan from China Eximbank to the Angolan government.[15] In 2008, the China Railway Group used the same model to secure the mining rights to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s copper and cobalt mines under the slogan “(Infrastructure) projects for resources.”[16] According to Debra Brautigam, a top expert on China-Africa relations, between 2004 and 2011, China reached similar unprecedented deals with at least seven resource-rich African countries, with a total volume of nearly USD 14 billion.[17]

In addition to securing Africa’s natural resources, China’s capital flows into Africa also create business opportunities for Chinese service contractors, such as construction companies. According to Chinese analysts, Africa is China’s second-largest supplier of service contracts, and “when we provide Africa assistance of RMB 1 billion, we will get service contracts worth USD 1 billion (RMB 6 billion) from Africa.”[18] In exchange for most Chinese financial aid to Africa, Beijing requires that infrastructure construction and other contracts favor Chinese service providers: 70 percent of them go to “approved,” mostly state-owned, Chinese companies, and the rest are open to local firms, many of which are also joint ventures with Chinese groups.[19] In this sense, China’s financing to Africa, including aid, creates business for Chinese companies and employment opportunities for Chinese laborers, a critical goal of Beijing’s Going Out strategy.

How to understand Chinese aid to Africa?

With a few exceptions, there is a strong tendency among observers to assert moral judgments in the assessment of Chinese aid and development finance to Africa: China’s activities are either “evil” because they represent China’s selfish quest for natural resources and damage Africa’s fragile efforts to improve governance and build a sustainable future; or they are “virtuous” because they contribute to a foundation for long-term economic development, through infrastructure projects and revenue creation.

This polarization reveals the two sides of the same coin. On the positive side, China’s aid and development financing fills a void left by the West and promotes the development of African countries. Many Chinese projects require large investment and long pay-back terms that traditional donors are reluctant to provide. On the other hand, however, these short-term benefits should not form a cover-up for the potential long-term negative consequences associated with neglecting issues of governance, fairness and sustainability. For example, when the “tied aid” is linked to the profitability of Chinese companies, it becomes questionable whether China would prioritize Africa’s interests or its own.

There is also an ongoing debate inside China about the goal and management of Chinese aid to Africa. For the foreign policy bureaucrats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, foreign aid is essentially a political instrument for China to strengthen bilateral ties and facilitate the development of African countries. In their view, political considerations should be the most important criteria in aid decision-making. Economic benefits associated with aid projects, such as profitability, resource extraction, or the acquisition service contracts for Chinese vendors, should only be secondary.

However, trade promoters such as the Ministry of Commerce have rather opposite perspective. In their view, foreign aid serves China’s overall national priority, which by definition is economic growth. Therefore, all aspects of aid decisions should reflect broad economic considerations. Under this logic, the inclination is to allocate the aid budget to countries that offer China the greatest number of commercial opportunities and benefits. Since China’s top economic interest is Africa’s natural resources, aid decisions are inevitably skewed toward resource-rich countries while others receive less favorable consideration.[20]

This practice is problematic in that many of the resource-rich African countries with which China works also suffer from serious political problems, such as authoritarianism, poor governance, and corruption. When the Ministry of Commerce pursues economic gains and associates aid projects with resource extraction, it uses aid packages to promote business relations. This directly contributes to the negative perception that China is pouring aid, funding, and infrastructure projects to prop up corrupt governments in exchange for natural resources. As many Chinese analysts observe, the Foreign Ministry in recent years has been fighting fiercely for the authority to manage China’s foreign aid projects, which are currently under the purview of the Ministry of Commerce.

The intention of China’s aid to Africa is benign but not altruistic. China does not seek to use aid to influence the domestic politics of African countries or dictate policies. Instead, it truly hopes to help Africa achieve better development while avoiding meddling with the internal affairs of African countries through conditional aid. But on the other hand, China is not helping Africa in exchange for nothing. Chinese projects create access to Africa’s natural resources and local markets, business opportunities for Chinese companies and employment for Chinese labors. When Chinese officials emphasize that China also provides aid to countries that are not rich in natural resources to defuse international criticisms, they often forget to mention that China may have its eyes on other things which these countries can deliver, such as their support of Beijing’s “one China” policy, of China’s agenda at multilateral forums, and of China as a “responsible stakeholder.” In this sense, China’s comprehensive, multi-dimensional agenda of its aid to Africa defies any simplistic categorization.

[1] “Report on Development of China’s Outward Investment and Economic Cooperation, 2011-2012,” [中国对外投资合作发展报告], Ministry of Commerce, December 2012.

[2] He Wenping, “China to Africa: Gives It Fish and Teaches It Fishing,” [中国对非洲：授其以鱼，更授其以渔], JinRongBaoLan, May 6, 2013, http://finance.sina.com.cn/money/bank/bank_hydt/20130506/200915363934.shtml.

[3] “China’s Foreign Aid,” Xinhua News Agency, April 21, 2011, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/21/c_13839683_6.htm.

[4] “Official Development Assistance: Definition and Coverage,” OECD, http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/officialdevelopmentassistancedefinitionandcoverage.htm.

[5] “China To Complete 10 Billion USD Concessional Loans to Africa before the End of Year,” [中国将在年底前完成对非洲100亿美元优惠贷款计划], China Radio International, July 20, 2012. http://gb.cri.cn/27824/2012/07/20/3365s3778295.htm

[6] “China to Provide 20 billion USD Loan Credits to Africa in Three Years,” [中国三年内将向非洲提供200亿美元贷款额度], Cai Xin, March 25, 2013, http://international.caixin.com/2013-03-25/100506116.html.

[7] Toh Han Shih, “China to Provide Africa with US$1 trillion financing,” November 18, 2013, South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1358902/china-provide-africa-us1tr-financing.

[8] Piao Yingji, “The Evolution and Future Trend of China’s Direct Investment in Africa,” 《中国对非洲直接投资的发展历程与未来趋势》, [Hai Wai Tou Zi Yu Chu Kou Xin Dai], 2006 Volume 5. 　www.eximbank.gov.cn/topic/hwtz/2006/1_19.doc.

[9] “Wen Jiabao: China Did Not Exploit One Single Drop of Oil or One Single Ton of Minerals from Africa,” China.com.cn, September 15, 2011, http://www.china.com.cn/economic/txt/2011-09/15/content_23419056.htm.

[10] The principles include: China always bases itself on the principle of equality and mutual benefit in providing aid to other nations; China never attaches any conditions or asks for any privileges; China helps lighten the burden of recipient countries as much as possible; China aims at helping recipient countries to gradually achieve self-reliance and independent development; China strives to develop aid projects that require less investment but yield quicker results; China provides the best-quality equipment and materials of its own manufacture; in providing technical assistance, China shall see to it that the personnel of the recipient country fully master such techniques; the Chinese experts are not allowed to make any special demands or enjoy any special amenities. “Zhou Enlai Announced Eight Principles of Foreign Aid,” China Daily, August 13, 2010.

[11] “African Expert Interprets the 55 Years of Sino-African Relations,” 《非洲专家解读中非关系55年》, China Talk, Feb 23, 2011, fangtan.china.com.cn/2011-02/21/content_21965753.htm.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Yi Yimin, “China Probes Its Africa Model,” China Dialogue, August 18, 2011, http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4470-China-probes-its-Africa-model-1-.

[14] Zhang Changbing, “Opportunities and Challenges in Exploring and Developing African Oil Resources,” [勘探开发非洲石油资源的机遇与挑战], Guo Ji Jing Ji He Zuo, 2008, Volume 3, http://waas.cass.cn/upload/2011/06/d20110619154331656.pdf.

[15] Lucy Corkin, “China and Angola: Strategic Partnership or Marriage of Convenience?”, The Angola Brief, January 2011, Volume 1, No.1 http://www.cmi.no/publications/publication/?3938=china-and-angola-strategic-partnership-or-marriage.

[16] “Projects for Resources, China Railway Heads for DRC to Develop Cobalt Mines,” [以项目换资源中国中铁赴刚果（金）开发铜钴矿], Zhong Guo Zheng Quan Bao, April 23, 2008, http://ccnews.people.com.cn/GB/7153049.html.

[17] Debra Brautigam, “China: Africa’s Oriental Hope,” [中国：非洲的东方希望], Hai Wai Wen Zhai, August 25, 2011, http://www.observe-china.com/article/51.

[18] Yang Fei, “People Should Rationally Understand the USD 20 Billion Assistance Loans to Africa,” [对“200亿美元援非贷款”应理性看待], China Radio International, March 29, 2013, http://gb.cri.cn/27824/2013/03/29/2165s4069180.htm.

[19] Jamil, Anderlini, “China Insists on ‘Tied Aid’ to Africa,” Financial Times, June 25, 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/908c24f2-2343-11dc-9e7e-000b5df10621.html#axzz2RtN8dPxR.

[20] Interview with a Chinese analyst, Beijing, March 2013.

Tribal Chiefs

Tribal Democracy (Tribal jirga, Afghanistan)

November 27, 2013 yumiwantok 1 Comment

By Bilal Ahmed
Posted on 18 November 2013
Posted in Asia, Politics

I was speaking to my mother about democracy, expressing wariness about European models, which many Pakistanis associate with the Soviet-inspired experiments of the Afghan Communist era. I mentioned the jirga, as a way of envisioning direct democracy, in South Asian vernacular. She found it appealing. “That’s like the old days, people coming together to talk about their problems, that isn’t from the West,” my mum replied. I began thinking about the virtues of the jirga in future democratic projects, particularly in Pakistan, and especially in the restive province of Khyber-Pakhtunwala.

Jirgas are an ancient practice in the subcontinent, particularly among Pashtun groups in modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Today, they are often called as part of dispute resolution efforts, appointing a mediator of stature who appoints a jirga which fairly represents all sides and then uses it to arrive at a decision by consensus. This has been especially important during Pakistani military operations in tribal areas. Jirgas usually consist of community elders, and have been outlawed by the Pakistani state in many areas due to their informal nature and sometimes brutal sentences.

However, these practices do not have to mark jirgas, which can exist with some wider framework and still be effective in their mandate to reach fair decisions, and voice grievances productively, in a manner that ultimately benefits the community. The Pakistani state needs to make room for them, and view jirgas as a democratic partner to state functions, rather than an anti-modern barrier that must be choked out in favor of liberalism. And that space can, and should, be democratized.

But how is one to democratize the jirga? It is a complicated question, part of which requires a different approach to the law itself. Western approaches to law-and-order rely on institutions in order to ensure that practices are liberal in their scope, which is where we find the central court, responsible to a consistent volume of laws, with its experts in lawyers, judges, and so on. However, the danger, which has certainly become manifest in many areas of Pakistan, is that the role of community healing in ensuring justice is lost in state violence and bureaucracy. There must be a middle ground to ensure that the law does not lose touch with its ethical base in the hallways of legal institutions that hold an eerie aura of omnipotence over the populations that they govern. In other words, they should be used to help facilitate restorative justice.

Zabul jirga. Afghanistan, 2011. — More than 250 Zabul village and district elders from throughout the province attended a jirga held May 7 in the capital city of Qalat. Minister Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, chief executive of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program, was amongst the many who traveled to the province’s capital city to discuss security, peace, and reintegration programs, and the future of the people in the province and the country. The minister’s two-day visit yielded several productive meetings regarding the local provincial peace council and the future reintegration of Taliban commanders and fighters, and the contract signing of the Provincial Joint Secretariat Team. Other key officials from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security and High Peace Council, the Afghan National Army and Police, several provincial district governors, members of the newly approved Zabul Provincial Joint Secretariat Team, as well as members of the local provincial reconstruction team and the International Security Assistance Force were also present.

Jirgas can easily work in conjunction with the Pakistani state by handling civil matters outside of the scope of criminal law. This ensures that laws which dominantly affect the community (particularly its property) are discussed and enforced within that same community. Jirgas, in this regard, would invite community discussion on seemingly insignificant problems like vandalism, which increases the likelihood of effective decisions since community members are more likely to understand their area’s intricacies, as well as those of the accused parties. The latter is particularly significant, since jirga sentences are more likely to be effective in reforming the defendant simply because the defendant knows everyone intimately, and also feels culturally connected to the legal structures.

Criminal law is more difficult, since there is a valid concern that practices like stoning will find a home in the jirga, especially since those aspects of feudal culture have achieved somewhat of an anti-statist imperative. However, at the same time, criminal law is exactly where communities must feel like the law works for them, and is a mechanism for healing the social fabric rather than dividing it further through violence.

This does not mean surrendering the courts to the jirga. But it does mean understanding that they should be a part of the process, while being anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the rule of law. It wouldn’t happen to be that much of a jump, considering that the modern trial-by-jury is arguably very similar to a summoned jirga. And it would make the crucial democratic step of inviting local communities into matters of legal justice that directly affect them, and understanding that justice requires wider forms of healing.

And this would ideally include a host of different matters. Jirgas should be called for anything that affects the community, such as food production, water infrastructure, and city planning. They can become a broadly effective means for gauging local opinion on a number of projects, and then meeting those desired needs through official policy, particularly if the jirga is given a degree of legislative power.

However, all this would only work if the makeup of jirgas themselves are expanded to include more than local elders. They can only serve the community if the entire community is represented, whether through elected leaders, or simply through mass participation. This cannot happen if jirgas continue to be constricted as the domain of elders, though they can still be respected in new models. But jirgas need to be pushed to include young people, women, and minorities if they are to represent the broader social fabric. This is already being done to local praise in Saidu Sharif, Swat, where an all-female jirga has formed in order to better represent women in the model, and ensure justice for women locally, despite apathy from the all-male Swat Qaumi Aman Jirga.

The democratized jirga has potential to become a crucial lynchpin of Pakistani democracy that has local, and perhaps most importantly cultural, legitimacy. And although many discussions need to be had about how to implement them effectively, and the correct balance between jirga and state may be elusive, they need to be approached as an essential part of inviting Pakistanis themselves into state functions such as the law. Otherwise, these functions will be increasingly suspended from the people they affect, which cannot seriously be called democratic.

Source: http://souciant.com/

Asia Oceania

5,000 expected for Solomons blackbirding anniversary

September 17, 2013 wantok Leave a comment

Descendants of a Malaitan man captured during the blackbirding era are preparing to welcome his Australian family members to Solomon Islands for the 150th anniversary of his capture.

John Kwailiu Fatanowna was taken from the Rakwane tribe of the Fataleka region of east Malaita to work on a sugar plantation in Queensland.

The president of the organising committee says for many of the 60 members of that branch of the family coming from Mackay at the end of the month it is the first time they have left Australia.

Enoch Mani Ilisia says local Rakwane people have been busy over the past few months putting in a new water supply, building toilets, houses and ensuring there are enough swamp taro, potatoes and cassava to feed everyone.

He told Annell Husband there will be more than 5,000 people taking part in the two-day commemoration, with presentations and opportunities to hear the chiefs tell the tribe’s history.

ENOCH MANI ILISIA: Unlike today, when we keep our documents and information in computer hard drives and whatever, back home they’ve stored it in the human brain. The chiefs there are very good at recollecting past information by word of mouth. And it’s kept only with the first borns. And the first borns are the ones who have the right to store that information and pass it orally. Due to instances we come across where people try to steal information and pass on information that is confidential to the community.

ANNELL HUSBAND: And that oral tradition, is that still alive and well, that’s still going well?

AH: That’s right. We have in our village [Indistinct]. It’s simply a house that all the men go to. The ladies are not allowed to go there. And even strangers, too, because in there, that’s where all the confidential information is passed on from our chiefs, our first borns, to the general tribesmen and the younger men, as well.

EML: I guess it could bring up a lot of emotion for people, coming together like this?

AH: A few weeks ago one of the tribal members came over from Mackay. He met with us, the committee members, in preparation for the grand event. We met and we exchanged money. It’s a moving event. [Indistinct] I was there with him. They embraced each other for a long time. It was a very moving experience.

Source: RNZ

Personal Stories

Kehancuran Black Brothers Akibat Agenda Politik

June 17, 2013 blcafe Leave a comment

Kompasiana – Masih akrab di telinga kita lagu-lagu lawas seperti ‘Kisah Seorang Pramuria’ dan ‘Mutiara Hitam’. Hits era 1970-an ini dipopulerkan oleh grup musik Black Brothers dari Tanah Papua. Grup ini didukung sejumlah personil berbakat, yakni Benny Betay (bass), Jochie Phiu (keyboard), Amry Tess (trompet), Stevie MR (drums), Hengky Merantoni (lead guitar), Sandhy Betay (vokal), Marthy Messet (lead vocal), Agus Rumaropen (vokal) dan David (saxophone). Formasi grup ini juga dilengkapi dengan seorang manajer, Andi Ayamiseba untuk memudahkan mereka berkiprah secara profesional.

Personel Grup Band Black Brothers, West Papua

Kepiawaian Andy Ayamiseba memanej grup musik boleh diancungi jempol. Salah satunya adalah mengubah nama grup musik ini dari sebelumnya bernama Iriantos dan setelah hijrah ke Jakarta tahun 1976 namanya diubah menjadi Black Brother. Kehadiran Black Brothers di ibukota cukup mendapat tempat di hati pecinta musik Indonesia. Banyak produser ternama yang mengikat kontrak dengan grup musik ini. Namun akibat disusupi agenda politik Papua merdeka Andy Ayamiseba pula, grup ini akhirnya lenyap dari blantika musik nasional kendati sempat tenar di Belanda dan Vanuatu. Inilah sekilas perjalanan Black Brother di penghujung ketenarannya. Tahun 1978, dibawah bimbingan sang manejer, grup ini melakukan show di Kota asalnya di Jayapura. Usai melakukan show di Kota Jayapura, mereka show ke negara tetangga Papua Nugini. Dan sekitar tahun 1980 mereka meminta suaka politik di Negeri Belanda. http://tabloidjubi.com/2012/08/20/dari-iriantos-hingga-black-brothers/ Tahun 1983 grup ini hijrah ke Vanuatu atas undangan pemerintah Vanuatu yang saat itu dipimpin Presiden Walter Lini dan Barak Sope. Konon, Black Brothers punya peran khusus dalam memberikan dukungan lewat musik untuk mendirikan negara di Pasifik Selatan itu.http://rastamaniapapua.blogspot.com/2011/06/inspirasi-perjuangan-black-brothers.html Kedekatan Andy dengan Barak Sope membuat Andy ikut marasakan dampak kejatuhan Walter Lini dari kursi kepresidenan tahun 1988 akibat mosi tidak percaya dari rakyat Vanuatu. Ia dideportasi dari negara Vanuatu. Group musik Black Brothers pun tercerai berai. Personilnya ada yang tinggal di Vanuatu dan sebagian lagi tinggal di Australia. Beberapa di antaranya sudah meninggal dunia di negeri orang.

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Namun Andy tak mau bergantung pada Black Brothers yang pernah dibesarkannya. Ia melenggang sendiri demi ambisi politiknya. Ia kembali ke Vanuatu tahun 1990-an setelah namanya dihapus dari daftar imigran terlarang di negeri itu. Ia melakukan beberapa kunjungan ke Vanuatu dengan dokumen perjalanan yang disediakan oleh pemerintah Australia. Kali ini tidak lagi berkaitan dengan urusan musik, tetapi untuk menjalankan agenda politiknya yaitu membujuk pemerintah Vanuatu mendukung gerakan kemerdekaan Papua Barat. Ia mengisi hari-harinya dengan usaha dagang eksport-impor dan terus menjalin hubungan dengan faksi-faksi pendukung Papua merdeka di Vanuatu.

Atas pelanggaran urusan dagang, Andy pernah dideportasi ke negara Kepulauan Solomon oleh pemerintah Vanuatu pada 9 Pebruari 2006. Namun pihak imigrasi Solomon menolak Andy masuk ke negera itu. Andy kembali dimasukan ke dalam pesawat yang kemudian mengantarnya ke Australia, namun Andy ditolak oleh pihak imigrasi Australia yang kemudian mengirimnya kembali ke Vanuatu tanggal 10 Pebruari 2006.http://www.paclii.org/journals/fJSPL/vol10no2/5.shtml Tahun lalu, tepatnya tanggal 14 Mei 2012 mantan manajer Black Brothers ini ditangkap karena melakukan protes kepada pemerintah Vanuatu tanpa izin yang sah. Andy memprotes kebijakan Pemerintah Vanuatu menjalin kerjasama latihan militer dengan pihak Indonesia. Andy menolak kedatangan pesawat militer Vanuatu yang membawa 100 unit komputer, sebagai bagian dari perjanjian kerja sama yang ditandatangani pemerintah Indonesia dan Vanuatu. Ayamiseba menilai tindakan ini telah mengabaikan dukungan rakyat Vanuatu terhadap hak penentuan nasib sendiri bagi Papua Barat.http://politik.kompasiana.com/2012/05/17/aktivis-anti-indonesia-di-vanuatu-ditahan-463672.html Andy lahir di kota Biak, 21 April 1947 dari pasangan Dirk Ayamiseba dari Papua dan ibunya Dolfina Tan Ayomi keturunan Tionghoa. Ayahnya, Dirk Ayamiseba pernah menjadi Gubernur pertama di Papua dan Ketua DPRD-GR pertama. Sayangnya, ideologi Andy tidak sejalan dengan ayahnya yang sangat nasionalis. Andy memilih ikut berjuang bersama para aktivis Papua merdeka untuk melepaskan Papua dari NKRI. Hingga kinipun, upaya Andy itu terus dilanjutkan.

Dengan dukungan Barak Sope, Andy semakin intens terlibat bersama faksi-faksi pendukung Papua merdeka di Vanuatu. Kini Andy bersama lima rekannya sesama pengusung ideologi Papua merdeka telah dipilih mewakili Papua ke Noumea, ibukota negara New Caledonia menghadiri upacara pembukaan The 19th Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) Leaders Summit yang akan digelar Rabu, 19 Juni 2013 nanti. Andy tidak lagi membawa nama Black Brothers tetapi mengusung nama baru yakni West Papua National Coalition for Liberation (WPNCL). Mengingat forum MSG itu adalah forum ekonomi negara-negara Melanesia, apakah Andy akan memanfaatkan WPNCL untuk memuluskan usaha dagang yang sedang dijalankannya? Hanya Andy Ayamiseba yang tahu, karena dialah yang empunya agenda itu….

English

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review

January 28, 2013 yumiwantok Leave a comment

Should we look to traditional societies to help us tweak our lives? Wade Davis takes issue with the whole idea

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, envisioned societies as stages in a linear progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from savagery to barbarism to civilisation.

Each of these phases of human development was correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations. Fire, ceramics and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture and the invention of metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied civilisation. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same stages, in the same sequence. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to civilisation. It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilise the savage, a moral duty that played well into the needs of empire.

Oddly, it took a physicist to challenge and in time shatter this orthodoxy. Franz Boas, trained in Germany a generation before Einstein, was interested in the optical properties of water, and throughout his doctoral studies his research was plagued by problems of perception, which came to fascinate him. In the eclectic way of the best of 19th-century scholarship, inquiry in one academic field led to another. What was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? Boas became interested in how seemingly random beliefs and convictions converged into this thing called “culture”, a term that he was the first to promote as an organising principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.Advertisement

Far ahead of his time, Boas believed that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. He became the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. Boas insisted that his students conduct research in the language of place, and participate fully in the daily lives of the people they studied. Every effort should be made to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, the very nature of their thoughts. Such an approach demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions.

This ethnographic orientation, distilled in the concept of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the field of physics. It became the central revelation of modern anthropology. Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before. The goal of the anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has haunted humanity since the birth of memory.

Boas lived to see his ideas inform much of social anthropology, but it wasn’t until more than half a century after his death that modern genetics proved his intuitions to be true. Studies of the human genome leave no doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.Advertisement

It follows, as Boas believed, that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great historical achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth – a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia – is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old.

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The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7000 different voices, and these answers collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species as we continue this never-ending journey.It is against this backdrop that one must consider the popular but controversial writings of Jared Diamond, a wide-ranging scholar variously described as biogeographer, evolutionary biologist, psychologist, ornithologist and physiologist. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond set out to solve what was for him a conundrum. Why was it that some cultures such as our own rose to technological, economic and political predominance, while others such as the Aborigines of Australia did not? Rejecting notions of race, intelligence, innate biological differences of any kind, he finds his explanation in the environment and geography. Advanced civilisations arose where the environment allowed for plant domestication, leading to the generation of surplus and population growth, which in turn led to political centralisation and social stratification. No surprises there.

In Collapse, Diamond returned to the theme of environmental determinism as he pondered why and how great civilisations come to an end. Evoking the ecological fable of Easter Island, he suggests that cultures fall as people fail to meet the challenges imposed by nature, as they misuse natural resources, and ultimately drift blindly beyond a point of no return.

Again nothing to suggest controversy, save for the shallowness of the arguments, and it is this characteristic of Diamond’s writings that drives anthropologists to distraction. The very premise of Guns, Germs and Steel is that a hierarchy of progress exists in the realm of culture, with measures of success that are exclusively material and technological; the fascinating intellectual challenge is to determine just why the west ended up on top. In the posing of this question, Diamond evokes 19th-century thinking that modern anthropology fundamentally rejects. The triumph of secular materialism may be the conceit of modernity, but it does very little to unveil the essence of culture or to account for its diversity and complexity.Advertisement

Consider Diamond’s discussion of the Australian Aborigines in Guns, Germs and Steel. In accounting for their simple material culture, their failure to develop writing or agriculture, he laudably rejects notions of race, noting that there is no correlation between intelligence and technological prowess. Yet in seeking ecological and climatic explanations for the development of their way of life, he is as certain of their essential primitiveness as were the early European settlers who remained unconvinced that Aborigines were human beings. The thought that the hundreds of distinct tribes of Australia might simply represent different ways of being, embodying the consequences of unique sets of intellectual and spiritual choices, does not seem to have occurred to him.

In truth, as the anthropologist WEH Stanner long appreciated, the visionary realm of the Aborigines represents one of the great experiments in human thought. In place of technological wizardry, they invented a matrix of connectivity, an intricate web of social relations based on more than 100 named kin relationships. If they failed to embrace European notions of progress, it was not because they were savages, as the settlers assumed, but rather because in their intellectual universe, distilled in a devotional philosophy known as the Dreaming, there was no notion of linear progression whatsoever, no idealisation of the possibility or promise of change. There was no concept of past, present, or future. In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word for time. The entire purpose of humanity was not to improve anything; it was to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation. Imagine if all of Western intellectual and scientific passion had focused from the beginning of time on keeping the Garden of Eden precisely as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful conversation.

Clearly, had our species as a whole followed the ways of the Aborigines, we would not have put a man on the moon. But, on the other hand, had the Dreaming become a universal devotion, we would not be contemplating today the consequences of climate change and industrial processes that threaten the life supports of the planet.

❦Jared Diamond’s failure to grasp that cultures reside in the realm of ideas, and are not simply or exclusively the consequences of climatic and environmental imperatives, is perhaps one reason for the limitations of his new book, The World Until Yesterday, in which he sets out to determine what we in the modern world can learn from traditional societies.

He begins by opportunistically selecting nine topics to explore, limiting the scope of his inquiry from the outset. He examines how indigenous peoples raise their children, treat the elderly, resolve conflicts and manage risk. He addresses the benefits of multilingualism and healthy diets. And he devotes two chapters to the dangers inherent in indigenous life, which lead to a chapter on religion, for “our traditional constant search for the causes of danger may have contributed to religion’s origins”. From certain of these topics – child rearing, for example – he distills lessons that might be incorporated into “our personal lives”. The treatment of older people, healthy lifestyles and multilingualism suggests “models for individuals but also policies that our society as a whole could adopt”. The discussion of dispute resolution suggests “policies for our society as a whole”.Advertisement

Diamond is at his best when drawing on his lifetime of fieldwork in New Guinea, home to 1,000 of the world’s languages, where his achievements as a naturalist and scholar have been truly remarkable. Stories of his time among the Dani, his years in the field studying birds, his random encounters whether in airport terminals or the most isolated of communities, are humorous and insightful. His observations in any given moment are invariably original and often wise. Yet the lessons he draws from his sweeping examination of culture are for the most part uninspired and self-evident. One could be forgiven for concluding that traditional societies have little more to teach us save that we should embrace healthier diets, include grandparents in child rearing, learn a second language, seek reconciliation not retribution in divorce proceedings, and eat less salt.

Simply put, when it comes to culture, Diamond is on unsteady ground. In The World Until Yesterday he makes reference to 39 indigenous societies, 10 of which are from New Guinea, seven from Australia, and the remainder scattered about the world. Diamond makes no claims to be an ethnographer, and most of his conclusions and observations are drawn from his experience with Dani porters who assisted him during his New Guinea bird studies. His personal experience of indigenous peoples outside of New Guinea is limited, as apparently is his knowledge of the anthropological literature; the bibliography of The World Until Yesterday is meagre. A book of great promise reads as a compendium of the obvious, ethnology by anecdote.

Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way. A child raised in the Andes to believe that a mountain is a protective deity will have a relationship with the natural world profoundly different from that of a youth brought up in America to believe a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. The mythology of the Barasana and Makuna people is in every way a land management plan revealing how human beings once thrived in the Amazon rain forest in their millions. Take all the genius that enabled us to put a man on the moon and apply it to an understanding of the ocean, and what you get is Polynesia. Tibetan Buddhism condenses 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind. A lama once remarked that Tibetans do not believe that Americans went to the moon, but they did. Americans may not believe, he added, that Tibetans can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but they do.

The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. This is a sentiment that Jared Diamond, a deeply humane and committed conservationist, would surely endorse.Advertisement

• Wade Davis’s Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction last year.

English

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond: review

January 8, 2013 yumiwantok Leave a comment

Tom Payne is riveted by a thought-provoking study of peoples from New Guinea to the Kalahari Desert, which asks what we can learn from such societies.

By Tom Payne

7:00AM GMT 08 Jan 2013

Parents: when your child cries in the night, should you pick him up and let him snuggle in your bed? Or, like a mother in a traditional society, would he be in your bed already, his skin touching yours for much of his first year at least? Like the Aka pygmies, should you start weaning him gradually after about three years? If he rolls towards a fire, should you pick him up, or let him get a bit singed, as some families in New Guinea do? If he dies in an accident, should you go to court, or hope that whoever seems responsible will help to pay for the wake?

At last, when you feel you are becoming too dependent on him, do you (a) rely on food taboos to make sure he can’t eat the best cuts of bandicoot; (b) wait for him to kill you; or (c) once you become a widow, insist that he strangle you, and shout at him witheringly until he complies?

Not all of these options sound pretty, let alone practical. But it’s Jared Diamond’s belief that some aspects of traditional cultures can be beneficial to modern ones. And even if they are unlikely to be useful, still, a closer study of the Nuer tribes of Sudan, the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, or the Dani of New Guinea can perhaps explain some aspects of our own behaviour. And if that doesn’t work out either, then at least the inquiry is fascinating.

He’s completely right about the last point. What we can learn from traditional (which is also to say, earlier) societies is more a matter of cherry-picking. Even so, anyone kept awake by that crying baby would be informed as well as diverted by the chapter on child-rearing. Diamond confesses that he tried controlled crying as a father, but now admires the strong sense of independence he finds in the youth of New Guinea, where he has spent months at a stretch birdwatching.

That claim of independence, which he sometimes calls autonomy, could be a flaw in his argument. At times he suggests that we as individuals could thrive on ancient precepts (such as, watch less television and eat less salt). At others, for example, a thought-provoking discussion of restorative justice, the advantage comes to the wider society.

Jared Diamond: Mitt Romney misrepresented my views 02 Aug 2012
What are we thinking of? 19 Jan 2005

But in the societies from which this wisdom comes, such steps are taken in the interests of a group of people, often for pragmatic reasons of survival: face-to-face atonement is vital in a world where people confront their wrongdoers daily. It can even lead to such apparent oddities as a family who, for historical reasons, ended up giving pigs to another family, even though the latter had killed a father from the former.

The anthropology throughout the book is scholarly and accessible; Diamond’s application of it is balanced and careful. Maybe it’s because of that care that he sometimes withholds an assessment of cause and effect.The chapter in which we read of New Guinea’s well-adjusted children follows one in which we learn that the wars on that island kill hugely greater percentages of the population than any of the 20th century’s mechanised conflicts. The question remains: what sort of social system could offer one without the other?

His discussion of traditional religions is similarly fascinating, particularly since he approaches the subject as an evolutionary biologist. But here, too, he praises tribal communities for not using religion to justify their wars.

That may be so, but something causes them. And in other societies – Rwanda, say, or South Africa – the healing process is something that can owe a lot to a shared faith that transcends racial division.

This is a chapter that uses Diamond’s impressive knowledge of traditional cultures to give us a broad sweep through all humanity.

I put this book down not completely convinced that I could incorporate many of its teachings into my life, nor thinking that New Guinea was all that attractive a place for a long holiday; but it did leave me riveted, thinking hard and, I dare say, a bit less begrudging of bed space if someone wakes up crying with a cold tonight.

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?
by Jared Diamond

Melanesia Network

The Wantok System as a Socio-Economic and Political Network in Melanesia

June 12, 2011 wantok Leave a comment

Abstract

Understanding the wantok system as a socio-economic and political network in the Western Pacific is critical to understanding Melanesian societies and political behavior in the context of the modern na-tion-state. The complex web of relationships spawned by the wantok system at local, national and sub-regional levels of Melanesia could in-form our understanding of events and development in Melanesian states in the contemporary period. This paper will analyze the concepts and historical roots of wantok and kastom in Melanesia, with particular reference to the Solomon Islands. It will also assess the impact of colo-nialism in the development of new and artificial wantok identities and their (re)construction for political purposes. It concludes with a con-textual analysis of wantok as an important network in the Solomon Islands emphasizing its central role to people’s understanding of social and political stability and instability.

The Wantok System as a Socio-Economic and Political Network in Melanesia (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260002701_The_Wantok_System_as_a_Socio-Economic_and_Political_Network_in_Melanesia [accessed Mar 12 2018].

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/

Modernization

The Slave Mentality

June 15, 2010 yumiwantok Leave a comment

June 15, 2010, By Kevin Jackson

When slavery is implemented by force, it is certainly a despicable institution. But is it any less despicable when the slaves are there by choice?
The interesting point about slavery is that whether it’s forced or voluntary, the master is responsible for the slaves. The master feeds, clothes, and cares for his slaves, some masters better than others. But masters also manipulate their slaves. Eventually, all slaves start to notice the dichotomy between their lives and the lives of their masters.

There is an urban legend of a slave owner named Willie Lynch who recognized that slaves needed to be controlled. In a purported speech he gave to slave owners in 1712, he laid out a strategy that he said would keep slaves (blacks) in check for three hundred years. This strategy of control replaced hanging rebellious slaves with using fear, distrust, and envy. Lynch supposedly said, “[D]istrust is stronger than trust and envy is stronger than adulation, respect, or admiration.”

Another thing the likely fictional Lynch went on to say in his speech was,
Don’t forget you must pitch the young Black male against the old Black male … You must use the dark skin slaves versus the light skin slaves … You must use the female versus the male … You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust only us.

Whether Lynch existed or not is unimportant. Whoever it was, the true author of this strategy was right in his approach for the continuing servitude of blacks and in establishing a slave mentality in our race. All that was subject to change is exactly who the master is at any given time.

Regardless of the time, however, one thing we do know is that the master was a man of means, and it doesn’t matter how he came to financial prominence. The one obvious truism is that the master lived comparatively lavishly, and even more so because of his slaves.

Think of all you could do if you had the free availability of somebody doing your cooking, cleaning, running errands, sewing, watching your children, performing chores, and so on.

Then when the lean times came, you could occasionally loan out your slaves for barter or even to create extra income for your home. What an amazing life that would be! Your complete focus could be on personal or creative endeavors.

Are things much different today? Not really. I contend that the government is the 21^st-century master — new and improved. And the new Master has a monopoly on slavery. That monopoly on slavery has allowed for enough creativity in the government that all the government seems to occupy its time with is considering, “How can I get more productivity out of my slaves?“
During lean times in the old days, the master would work slaves incrementally harder and harder, providing them incrementally less and less. Longer work hours, cramped quarters, and leftover food, all for the slaves to live their lives of quiet desperation until the next day, and the next.

Slaves would finally become desperate with hunger. When the master ordered a pig slaughtered, the entrails, feet, hide, and head were all that didn’t go to the master. Yet nothing went to waste, with slaves eating everything on a pig, “from the rooter to the tooter!”

Slaves ate pig’s feet, skin (pork rinds), or “chitterlings” (pig intestine), while the master ate pork chops, pork steaks, and pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon.

For slaves, minutes dragged into hours that limped lazily into days, weeks, and months, as they slowly developed the “slave mentality.”
In my book, I described the worst kind of prison: the prison of the mind. Slaves then and now are more captive than prisoners in SuperMax facilities — because the prison of the mind has no need for walls or guards. Escape is as simple as walking away, yet few people leave.

There is little argument that blacks are the biggest sufferers of the slave mentality today. Most blacks believe the government will take care of us from the cradle to the grave. What they don’t know is that the government carefully guards that ratio of black votes versus black sycophants, employing stealth weapons like placing abortion clinics mainly in black neighborhoods, ignoring crime in black neighborhoods, and essentially ushering blacks to prison.

The government has not forgotten the lesson of the Willie Lynch, pitting black liberals against black conservatives. Use fear, distrust, and envy.
Many think that the “slave mentality” is for only blacks or the poor, but they are wrong. How many things are all Americans conditioned to accept without question or protestation? Once you buy your home, the government demands a property tax, and you have been conditioned to pay it. Is there a time when enough taxes have been paid, and you can own your home outright?

Perhaps we have willfully accepted illegal immigration, only now getting to point of making it an issue thanks to Arizona. Perhaps all but Arizona have bought into the new terminology of “undocumented worker.” Do all illegal immigrants work? Are some of them undocumented criminals or even undocumented terrorists?

One could educate oneself out of the slave mentality if it weren’t for the fact that we begin acquiring the slave mentality in government schools.
It is mandatory that children attend school in America, with only a small percentage of kids who opt out of government schools in search of alternatives. Still, our master takes tax money from all and gives it to the 70% of the students who attend government schools. The schools get paid by the master for attendance, not results. So attendance is enforced, but results are dismissed as arbitrary.Everybody passes; just show up.

In our slave mentality, we have become comfortable with the idea that the fox is guarding the henhouse. Teachers control the schools through their unions. Our tax dollars pay the salaries of teachers, who pay money to their unions, who lobby for the rules. Circular dysfunction.
The 30% of the kids who are not educated in government schools get none of the funding, yet ironically produce the best results! Yet, our master laments, if only he had more of our money.

Americans have all been enslaved little by little for many years. There can be no doubt that the federal government is the new slave master, something the Founding Fathers warned us against.

We have all made the unconscious choice to be slaves. Now the question is, can we make the conscious choice to leave the plantation and truly become our own masters?

If we can, then 2010 will truly be Emancipation II — the year everybody gets freed!
Kevin Jackson is a best-selling author of The BIG Black Lie. Follow Kevin at www.theblacksphere.net.

Development Projects

James Lovelock: ‘enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan’

March 1, 2008 wantok Leave a comment

The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do? By Decca Aitkenhead

James Lovelock. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and “all sorts of fanciful technological stuff”. When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. “It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business,” he said.

“And of course,” Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, “that’s almost exactly what’s happened.”

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we’re trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on – all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? “No we don’t. Because we can’t.” And recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, “on the face of it, a good thing”. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, “but I’ve learnt there’s no point in causing a quarrel over everything”. He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all – renewable energy.

“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

Faced with two versions of the future – Kyoto’s preventative action and Lovelock’s apocalypse – who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock’s readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: “People who say that about me haven’t reached my age,” he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: “Personality.”

There’s more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren’t his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

“Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can’t help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don’t like it because it upsets their ideas.”

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he’s found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. “Oh no! In fact, I’m writing another book now, I’m about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead.”

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose – that’s what people want.”

At moments I wonder about Lovelock’s credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it’s not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth – or Gaia – it is in the purest scientific terms all.

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Melanesia Network

Foreign Aid – the facts

December 1, 1979 wantok 1 Comment

Source: https://newint.org/

The reasons for giving foreign aid are usually couched in humanitarian language. Our governments contribute food, technical advice, cash loans and grants because they are ostensibly interested in improving the lot of the world’s poor. But the actual impulses behind foreign aid are far more complex. Here the New Internationalist cuts through the jargon of aid and comments briefly on the aid policies of some of the more important donor nations.

WHAT IS AID?

BILATERAL OR MULTILATERAL – Aid givers decide whether their assistance should go on a government-to-government basis (bilateral) or be channelled through international agencies like the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organization or the regional development banks (multilateral). Aid has increasingly been disbursed multilaterally – 16% in 1970 and nearly 30% in 1977.

PRIVATE INVESTMENT – Investment by private corporations is a major part of total resource flows to the Third World. But private investment is not geared so much to human needs as to a profitable return. Of the $36 billion in total resource flows to the Third World in 1976, over $20 billion was from private sources. Some countries like France continue to include private investment in their total aid figures.

VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS – Aid from private voluntary development agencies like Oxfam, Community Aid Abroad or Development and Peace is the smallest component of total aid – $1.3 billion in 1976 – although it is widely claimed to be the most effective.

TIED OR UNTIED – Bilateral aid is given often on the condition that it must be spent on goods and services from the donor country. This ‘tied’ aid really amounts to subsidizing Western manufacturers. Poor countries dislike tied aid because it means higher prices than on the world market and sometimes goods of lower quality. Tied aid has increased from 35% of total aid in 1972 to 53% in 1977, despite pledges from the rich countries to untie aid,

GRANTS OR LOANS – Aid can be in the form of grants – which are often tied – or loans which have to be repaid with interest. Aid loans are given at ‘concessional’ rates below the rates of private loans. Nearly two-thirds of all aid is now in grant form.

THE AID GIVERS

USA

Total Official Aid – $4.15 billion.
% GNP – 0.22%
Major recipients – Egypt, Israel, India, Pakistan, Jordan.

The U.S. is near the bottom of the list of Western aid donors in percentage GNP terms. U.S. aid has been and continues to be overtly political – intended to reward allies and pay off anti-communist governments. About 75% of all U.S. aid is spent on American goods and services. Half of all U.S. aid goes to only ten countries. Egypt, Israel, and Jordan get as much aid as all other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America combined. About 70% of U.S. aid is bilateral. Nearly half of all aid falls under the Security Assistance Program to promote ‘political and economic stability’ and 90% of this goes to the Middle East.

CANADA

Total Official Aid – $1.1 billion.
% GNP – 0.50%
Major recipients – Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Tanzania, Malawi.

Committed on paper to directing more aid to the poorest countries and to untying bilateral aid, Canadian aid is under strong attack from the new Conservative government. The new Finance Minister recently told the Third World, ‘Our obligation is to our own people – the people who elected us.’ More than 80% of Canadian aid is tied and the push for greater exports is likely to keep the tied portion high. More than a quarter of Canadian aid in the form of food. Canada has taken the initiative in debt cancellation to the least developed countries and at least 90% of total bilateral aid is directed towards low and middleincome countries.

USSR

Total Official Aid – $260 million.
% GNP – 0.03%
Major recipients – Egypt, India, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam.

Considering its economic power, Russia is the skinflint of the international community. Soviet aid is miniscule, but highly concentrated on ideological allies – Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Mozambique. Most loans are on harder terms than the West, while the grant portion continues to decline below half. Virtually all Russian aid is tied to purchasing Soviet specialities – electrical generating equipment, steel mills and the like. Russia refuses to reschedule the debt of its three main aid recipients. India now pays back more every year than it receives in new aid. Excluding Cuba and Vietnam, the USSR now gets back more in interest and capital repayments than it gives out every year.

UNITED KINGDOM

Total Official Aid – $914 million.
% GNP – 0.37%
Major recipients – India, Bangladesh, Zambia, Kenya, Jamaica.

U.K. aid as a percentage of GNP has declined steadily for more than 10 years to one of the lowest levels in the West. Main recipients are former colonies in Asia and Africa. Like the U.S., but to a lesser degree, British aid is also an arm of foreign policy. Indeed, the Conservatives have now re-absorbed the Aid Ministry into the Foreign Office. Aid is concentrated on the poorest nations in grant form, albeit mostly tied. Multilateral contributions are about 40% of total aid. Britain has also written-off some loans to Poorer countries.

AUSTRALIA

Total Official Aid – $427 million
% GNP – 0.45%
Major recipients – Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Philippines.

Like most Western powers, Australia’s aid agency the Development Assistance Bureau (ADAB) is responsible to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Australia’s geographical priorities are with its Third World neighbours in the South Pacific. Over 80% of it is bilateral. Papua New Guinea receives the lion’s share, about 56%, Domestic economic problems mean Australia will likely remain a low-profile aid donor.

NEW ZEALAND

Total Official Aid – $52 million,
% GNP – 0.39%
Major recipients – Cook Islands, Indonesia, Fiji, Western Samoa.

Like Australia, New Zealand aid is directed primarily to the South Pacific and South-East Asia – over 70%. The emphasis is on rural development and agriculture. Bilateral aid is usually tied and New Zealand continues to be the only country to tie a major portion of its multilateral aid to the purchase of local goods and technical advice.

OPEC

Total Official Aid – $6.7 billion.
% GNP – 2.65%
Major recipients – Pakistan, India, Syria, Jordan, Sudan.

Oil producing nations have become major aid givers since the 1973 oil price increases. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) now supplies more than 25% of all aid to the Third World. Most of it is untied and more than 75% goes to non-Arab states. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates give more than 10% of their GNP in aid. Saudi Arabia commits about 5% and Kuwait 7%. OPEC members have also set up two multilateral development banks and appear likely to become major forces in bilateral aid. However, since 1975 although oil prices continue to rise, the total amount of OPEC aid has steadily declined.

Source – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

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