Week 7: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight

1. Mark Whitaker

2. Opinion piece by Paul Collier in New York Times a year ago: Concentrate on the Bottom Billion More than One Year

3. I was unaware that Collier has received a lot of media attention in the past year. He even appeared at the TED conferences in January 2009 and was one of five people to address a special "TED@State" (U.S. State Department presentation of policy oriented TED presenters like himself). You can find these small films of him all over the web. This was the first time I attempted to look for Collier video on the web, because I had assumed that his message would be little heeded. However, it seems I was wrong thankfully. At least people are widely aware of these causality debates he is starting from his comparative statistical modeling. However, the message published below sounds more like Milton Friedman's Shock Doctrine of military invasion to force neoliberalism and heedless anti-environmentalism as well--a powerful combination already in place. Perhaps Collier without being clearly aware is being aired more publicly to give a different ideological coating to the discredited neoliberalist-by-force model where powers that be require a fresh ideological coat of paint from Collier to continue to be legitimated. Here's an editorial of Collier from a year ago.

I think you can see echoes of the books we discussed this week by Williams, by Karl, and by Bunker/Ciccantell.

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September 22, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
A Measure of Hope
By PAUL COLLIER

Lusaka, Zambia

THANKS to the copper boom, Zambia’s economy at last is growing. Last year, per capita gross domestic product rose by around 4 percent. The capital is busy with new construction, and traffic between here and the copper belt is so heavy, travel time has doubled to eight hours.

Still, Zambia is diverging from the rest of mankind. Its tax system has until last month been so lenient that most of the new copper profits have gone to the foreign companies that now own the mines. [A "Karlist" argument about the political frameworks that become implaneted with dependency on raw material extraction, yielding little state autonomy.] And the political and economic collapse of neighboring Zimbabwe has meant a loss of trade.

Zambians remain in the “bottom billion” of the earth’s poorest people — those whom Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, declared would be the focus of development efforts for 2008. If the U.N., whose General Assembly convenes today, really rises to this challenge, how can it help the countries in the bottom billion? Presumably by more vigorous pursuit of its Millennium Development Goals, whose shaky progress toward ending poverty by 2015 is now subject to mid-term review.

The Millennium Development Goals have been a major improvement on the unfocused agenda for poverty that preceded them, but the world has changed radically since they were announced in 2000. And the assumptions on which they are based need to be rethought.

The World Bank has just raised the bean count of global poverty to 1.4 billion people, from just under a billion. It had previously overestimated the level of Chinese and Indian per capita incomes [which I had already decided to include in class], so the count now shows that the number of poor Chinese and Indians far exceeds the number of poor Africans. But this is misleading because Chinese and Indian incomes are rising far faster and more surely than African incomes.

The big difference between a poor Asian household and an equally poor African one is hope, not necessarily for the present generation of adults but for their children.

Hope makes a difference in people’s ability to tolerate poverty; parents are willing to sacrifice as long as their children have a future. Our top priority should be to provide credible hope where it has been lacking. The African countries in the bottom billion have missed out on the prolonged period of global growth that the rest of the world has experienced. The United Nations’ goal should not be to help the poor in fast-growing and middle-income countries; it should do its utmost to help the bottom billion to catch up. Anti-poverty efforts should be focused on the 60 or so countries — most of them in Africa — that are both poor and persistently slow-growing.

A further weakness with the Millennium Development Goals is that they are devoid of strategy; their only remedy is more aid. I am not hostile to aid. I think we should increase it, though given the looming recession in Europe and North America, I doubt we will. But other policies on governance, agriculture, security and trade could be used to potent effect.

What do I mean?

Well, take, for instance, the American biofuel scam (the ethanol subsidies that have diverted 30 percent of American corn away from the food supply) and the European ban on genetically modified seeds [which anyone knowledgeable supports because corruption and ignoring profound health difficulties found by many top scientists was seen! it was authorized only without or against test data in the U.S. government under Bush Senior/Reagan and under Blair in U.K.! read: Seeds of Destruction by Jeffrey Smith], imitated by Africa, have both contributed to Africa’s worsening food shortage. [Alas, I find Collier blissfully unaware of the bad long term ramifications of GMOs for private property markets in food, farmer income and development, or the ecological and human health implications.] Where is the United Nations pressure for an end to these follies? [Or the education about this to end his?]

Why, also, did the United Nations not intervene militarily when the democratic government of Mauritania, another country in the bottom billion, was overthrown by a coup last month? [Perhaps because it served some player on the Security Council itself?

INSET: "In Mauritania about 20% of the population live on less than US $1.25 per day [much less than North Korea]...The first fully democratic Presidential election since 1960 occurred on 11 March 2007 [even though it was the outcome of a military coup toppling a previously democratic leader. The election effected the final transfer from military to civilian rule following the [previous] military coup in 2005. This was the first time that the president had been selected in a multi-candidate election in the country's post-independence history. The election was won in a second round of voting by Abdallahi, with Daddah a close second. The head of the Presidential Guards (who had recently been fired by the incoming President) took over the president's palace and units of the army surrounded a key state building in the capital Nouakchott on 6 August 2008, a day after 48 lawmakers from the ruling party resigned. The army surrounded the state television building after the president sacked (fired) two senior officers, including the head of the presidential guards. The president, the prime minister and the minister of internal affairs were arrested. The coup was organized by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, former chief of staff of the Mauritanian army and head of the Presidential Guard, whom the president had just dismissed."

[Here goes the third coup in four years....etc., etc.] The civilian government of Mauritania was overthrown on 6 August 2008, in a military coup d'état led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. On April 16, 2009, General Aziz resigned from the military to run for president in the July 19 elections; which he won. [this is a complete repeat of the earlier coup: resign from the military after a coup to run for election I think done by someone else three years ago.... Will it happen once more after him as well?]

["Mauritania has extensive deposits of iron ore, which account for nearly 40% of total exports. The nation's coastal waters are among the richest fishing areas in the world, but overexploitation by foreigners threatens this key source of revenue. The country's first deepwater port opened near Nouakchott in 1986. Before 2000, drought and economic mismanagement resulted in a buildup of foreign debt. In February 2000, Mauritania qualified for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and nearly all of its foreign debt has since been forgiven. In December 2007 donors pledged $2.1 billion at a triennial Consultative Group review. A new investment code approved in December 2001 improved the opportunities for direct foreign investment. Mauritania and the IMF agreed to a three-year Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) arrangement [i.e., what? free zone underdevelopment extraction, like was a failure in Jamaica though great for top billion investors?]in 2006 and Mauritania made satisfactory progress, but IMF and World Bank suspended their programs in Mauritania following the August 2008 coup; following the July 2009 Presidential elections, the IMF and World Bank agreed to meet with the Goverment to discuss a resumption. Oil prospects, while initially promising, have largely failed to materialize."]

Where is an alternative initiative to open international trade to poor countries now that the Doha round talks have collapsed? [Begging the question: is opening the bottom billion to the world economy the only course that leads to development for them? Even Collier argues it fails to work because of the "Asian effect" for the long interim, though here is is arguing in print for it! Second, he's being hypocritical: if he's so prodemocratic, why does he imply it is time to throw out the democratic outcome of the failed Doha round--as people democratically challenge his developmental modernistic paradigm for the poor countries? So, will he soon call for invasion to enforce global neoliberalism as well, similar to the "Shock Doctrine" imperialism of Milton Friedman? (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism--a huge international best seller that the "economic press" is censoring and hope will go away. It's currently in the top there books in Amazon.com categories, and this is several YEARS AFTER it has been published! )]

Above all, with a five-year-old commodities boom transferring wealth to some of the countries of the bottom billion, where are the international guidelines on taxation and investment that might help these countries convert earnings from exports of depleting minerals into productive assets like roads and schools?

I applaud Ban Ki-moon. Like Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, Mr. Ban is offering more thoughtful leadership on development strategy than has been provided for decades. But he has been stymied by the powerful countries’ failure to rally to his call to focus on the poorest countries. No nation, not even the United States, is now sufficiently dominant for its actions to be decisive. International coordination is needed more than ever. For all its manifest limitations, the United Nations must work.

International coordination has been, indeed, the great achievement of the Millennium Development Goals [though they are symbolic coordination and will fail because of lack of implementation, even lack of funds promised according to Jeffrey Sachs whom we will read later]; all the major donor countries have bought into them. But they should now be revised so as to focus on the challenge of helping the bottom billion to converge with the rest of mankind — and on a more realistic timescale. We need not just a “Year of the Bottom Billion,” but several decades. This session of the United Nations is an appropriate moment to get started.

Paul Collier, a professor at Oxford, is the author of “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22collier.html?
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