Polish Mothers in Krakow. Polish artist Cecilya Malik began a campaign against the removal of the obligation for private landowners to apply for permission to cut down trees. Credit: Tomasz Wiech

By Daan Bauwens
GHENT, Belguim, Dec 6 2018 (IPS)

Unjustified extra charges on drinking water, exploitation of labourers in the countryside and uncontrolled property speculation. In Europe’s periphery, citizens’ initiatives show how all too prevalent modern-day ailments can be tackled successfully. More often than not with the help of artists.

Spring 2014.

Pressured by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, the government of an Ireland suffering from imposed austerity measures decides to introduce an additional levy on drinking water. Spontaneous protest ensue. A single woman, waking up in the middle of the night when workers are installing a water meter outside her house, comes out and blocks their way whilst still her night gown. She manages to get them to leave without finishing the job.

The meter fairy

Thousands follow her example in the following weeks. Some are arrested and convicted. In the southern coastal town of Cobh, citizens set up guard posts on bridges and boats to inform other citizens when the water company is arriving and where exactly it’s heading. Soon the protest receives the support of the trade unions and political parties, leading up to a demonstration march of 120,000 people in October of the same year. Mass demonstrations are subsequently held all through the country, often ending in concerts by popular Irish artists.

The largest protest campaign the country had ever seen forced the government to reduce the proposed water tax by 75 percent. The water tax is currently still on the table, but the Irish now have got the “meter fairy”. Residents of a house where a new water meter has just been installed can text their address to a certain number. The same night craftsmen will come over and remove the meter.

Property speculation

“Let me conclude with a warning,” says Brendan Ogle, one of the leading activists in the protests, “while we are progressing in some ways, we are at the same time slipping back to the darkest of ages.” Ogle refers to the housing emergency in his hometown Dublin, where rents have risen so sharply that this year the city has become most expensive place to live in the Eurozone, leaping ahead of both Paris and London.

“We squatted in an empty building and started a community centre for homeless people where they could stay and sleep,” says Ogle. “The court finally ordered we leave building, stating that while the homeless emergency is important, it is not more important than the right to property. Last Thursday, the 24th person that we housed in the building died on the streets. This in only 16 months.”

It seems to be a trend in cities all over Europe: a housing market under pressure causes speculation, leading to growing numbers of homeless people. The state doesn’t act and the law is not on the side of those who want to solve the problem.

Summit for activists

The same happened to Maria Sanchez of Cerro Liberdad, an citizen’s initiative which occupied an empty Andalusian farm owned by a bank. Sanchez put local labourers to work in decent conditions in a region that suffers from poverty and exploitation, and in March of this year she was arrested. All traces that her movement had left in the farm were erased.

“I did what the government fails to do,” she says, “I told that to the judge. This was not a crime.”

Ogle and Sanchez were just two of the 90 activists from all over Europe present at the summit “The Art of Organising Hope” that was held in early November in the Belgian town of Ghent. At the summit they showed each other how exactly they realised their plans to fight injustice, with the emphasis on the practical side of things.

The summit was the culmination of a research all across Europe that a fellowship of volunteers, journalists, artists and activists undertook in 2016 and 2017. Thoroughly documenting 60 grassroots and civil society organisations, they looked for hopeful discourses, methods and practices to counter the present-day upsurge of Euroscepticism and indifference.

Radical imagination

In the final selection of activists to be present at the summit, the majority turned out to be from Europe’s periphery with an especially large representation from the Balkans. That was no coincidence according to initiator and organiser Dominique Willaert, artistic leader of the Ghent-based social-artistic movement Victoria Deluxe.

“Activism and imagination at Europe’s external borders is much more radical than in Western Europe,” he says, “we brought them here especially to fertilise us with their imagination. During our trips around Europe we noticed that people in the periphery don’t feel as though they belong to Europe. That is most noticeable in countries that have fallen victim to European austerity measures.”

“The difference between them and us is striking,” he continues, “in Western Europe we strive for consensus and negotiation with the government, many organisations depend on the government for funding, so they become policy implementers. The activism and imagination of the external borders is much more radical.”

According to Willaert, it is exactly that imagination and radicalism that Western Europe needs. “We must give citizens the feeling that they have power and can create movements that bring change. Powerlessness can mean the end of Europe.”

Polish mothers on tree stumps

In the citizen’s projects at the summit it was moreover apparent that a large number was led by artists. “In order to develop deep democracy, new methods and symbols are needed,” Dominique Willaert explains his team’s choice, “we must go beyond the idea of parliaments and elected representatives. There is a need for new stories and images that can fertilise communities and mobilise people. That requires the help of artists.”

And social media seem to be quite an effective to tool in bringing that about, it seems. At the main stage, Polish Anna Alboth and Belgian Leen Van Waes told the story of how their Facebook solidarity campaign for for Syrian civilians led to a march that mobilised more than 4000 participants from 62 countries. The Civil March For Aleppo lasted eight and a half months, passing through Europe on foot from Berlin to Syria, an action that got the organising team nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The most mobilising image came from the Polish artist Cecilya Malik. In the beginning of January a controversial new law removed the obligation for private landowners to apply for permission to cut down trees, pay compensation or plant new trees, or even inform the authorities of the plans to cut down trees. Up until now, more than one million trees have been reported cut down with newly cleared spaces in cities, towns and countryside as a consequence.

“I knew I had to do something,” Malik says, “but I had a six-month-old baby. So I came up with the plan to sit on one of the stumps every day, let someone take a picture of me while I was breastfeeding and share that image on social media.” The Polish government did not reverse the law despite the hundreds of mothers following Malik’s example. But the media attention on breastfeeding mothers on tree stumps did lead to a surge in environmental consciousness with the general public. This way, a new draft law excluding the vast majority of NGOs from the consultation process on environmental projects, was shelved for the time being.

In the popular municipality of Estación Central, in Santiago de Chile, a Haitian hairdresser has established a barber shop where Creole is spoken and the nationals are served. At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Nov 30 2018 (IPS)

At the end of this year, migrants will have sent 466 billion dollars to family and friends in their countries of origin. Despite this record amount these remittances have little to no effect on the dire economic state of affairs in those home countries. Earlier this week in Brussels, a group of experts convened to think of ways to make the sent money work in a way that benefits more than just a few lucky families. 

Though relatively stable as a percentage of the world population, there have never been more migrants than today. Out of the one billion people that moved away from their places of birth, some 258 million have found a place abroad while 760 million remained within their own states. Despite it being a heated political debate in the global North, only one third of all international migration is directed from South to North. The overall majority, some 100 million people, move between states in the global South.

These numbers were presented by Laura Palatini, Belgium and Luxemburg’s mission chief for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Palatini was the first of five speakers on an international conference, organised by IOM, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), several Brussels municipalities and local and international NGOs at the Brussels Parliament this Tuesday.

These one billion migrants each year send home approximately 466 billion dollars. “It is said that if remittances would be country, it would have the right to claim its seat in the G20,” says Valéry Paternotte of Réseau Financité, a Belgian network of organisations for ethical finance, “It is three times the annual budget of development aid world-wide.”

But according to Paternotte, the numbers need a closer look. “In Belgium for instance, 38 percent of all remittances are destined to neighbour France and 4 percent for Luxembourg while Senegal, Congo, Rwanda and Bangladesh together account for less than one percent.” Then again, the estimate of 466 billion is most probably an underestimation, as not all countries are being taken into account, second and third generations are not included, nor are informal remittances – migrants travelling with envelopes, small transfer agencies and possible other unknown practices of sending money home.

Nevertheless the 6.4 billion flowing annually into Morocco is just as important for the economy as the entire phosphate sector or tourism. The nine billion dollars sent to Congo by members of the diaspora accounts for twice the country’s annual budget. Remittances are an indispensable source of income for 750 million people worldwide. Research in 71 developing countries indicates that a 10 percent rise in remittances leads to a 3.5 percent drop in the number of people living with less than one dollar a day.

Researchers on the topic agree that remittances are a stable source of income for developing countries that are not affected by economic shocks or cycles of regression and growth. Moreover, they are the first form of help that reaches regions affected by natural disasters or epidemics. This became most evident with the last ebola crisis in Sierra Leone and the recent earthquake in Nepal.

But as of yet, the money flow doesn’t lead to structural changes in the countries of origins whose economies remain in a dire state. “The first obstacle is that the money received is spent, not invested in the local economy,” says Paternotte, “and this is understandable. In the world’s least developed countries less than a quarter of adults have access to a bank account. The received money is kept under the mattress. That is a very practical but very important barrier to saving and investing in the local economy.”

Traditional banks seem not to be interested in putting up branches in developing areas, let alone rural zones in those developing areas, the expert explains. “Moreover, social projects – schools, hospitals, cooperative farms – aren’t invested in due to poor returns. That is a characteristic of the system and not very different in our own country,” the Belgian national says.

Besides that, lots of migrant communities lack financial literacy, which together with cultural factors leads to inefficiency. Pedro de Vasconcelos, manager of the Financing Facility for Remittances at IFAD in Rome, gives the example of a Filipino community in Italy.

“We found out that they couldn’t say no when someone called for money,” he says, “it’s in their culture. It was a revelation for many of them when we told them that you can refuse when there’s not a good reason. Then we began to save. Two hundred out of every thousand euros, which is a lot. With all these savings we started investing in rural areas around their home town which used to be an agricultural area but now had become an importer of food. From three farms for laying hens we quickly went to five. On Facebook, the diaspora followed everything that happened in the homeland.”

Several of the investors in Italy moved back after the project turned out a success. “Because they see that there are possibilities there. That work can be created. The Philippine government is now looking at how this project can be scaled, to achieve real economic growth through the Diaspora.”

De Vasconcelos’ example shows that remittances can play a role in reversing or even stemming migration. But according to agronomist Jean-Jacques Schul of the Belgian NGO, IDAY International, an important factor should not be overlooked: the involvement of the local government.

“Remittances carry a risk,” Schul says, “because thanks to the money from abroad, the government does not have to listen to its citizens. They can survive without the government’s support. And without a government that listens to its citizens, nobody sees a future in their own country. Which makes them leave. It is a vicious circle. ”

The solution? When it comes to any kind of transfers of funds to the South, civil society and the government must be encouraged to start a constructive dialogue.

“Provide a policy in which remittances, or at least a part of those, serve to start up projects together with the government. If development aid is made available, make sure that citizens’ movements can check where that money is going. That is hardly the case now. Only with collaboration between citizens’ movements and the government will sustainable change occur. Nobel Prize winners Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton have been proclaiming this for years, why don’t we listen?”

Pulses are good for nutrition and income, particularly for women farmers who look after household food security, like those shown here at a village outside Lusaka, Zambia. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 8 2018 (IPS)

Lawmakers at the highest levels urgently need a “revolution in thinking” to tackle the twin problem of sustainable food production and migration. Starting with an inaugural event in Brussels, then travelling on to New York and Milan, an international team of experts led by the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) is urging far-reaching reforms in agricultural and migration policy on an international scale.

“We should be scared about the situation that is in front of us, but we should also be fascinated by the solution,” Paolo Barilla, BCFN Vice Chairman, said at the start of the first International Forum on Food and Nutrition which took place June 6 in Brussels."As we see it right now, there is no strategy at all at governmental levels in the EU to deal with migration, let alone how food policy might help.” --Lucio Caracciolo

Barilla and several experts speaking at the event pointed out the many problems lying ahead involving world-wide sustainable food production.

“One third of all food worldwide is thrown away, nearly one billion people go to sleep hungry every night and in the meantime, 650 million are obese. We urgently need new comprehensive, multi-stakeholder food systems to fix this situation,” said Andrea Renda, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, organizer of the event together with BCFN and the United Nations Sustainable Solutions Network (UN SDSN).

“In thirty years we will need to feed nine billion people. But at the same time, because of climate change the arable land is diminishing. The Sahara desert has increased ten percent in size the last decade and the South of Italy and Spain are drying up. How will we feed everyone?” asked Lucio Caracciolo, geostrategist and President of research company MacroGeo.

The experts called on all states that are signatory to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda to urgently establish an Intergovernmental Panel on Food and Nutrition, modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who succesfully achieved international consensus on how to tackle climate change.

Moreover, they called upon the EU to change the focus of its agricultural policies from simply increasing production to focusing on new systems that assure healthy, nutritious, affordable diets for everyone. Instead of a “Common Agricultural Policy,” the EU should shift to a “Agri-Food Policy.”

“In the current EU Common Agricultural Policy, two-thirds of the subsidies have nothing to do with sustainable development,” Andrea Renda tells IPS, “and one third is spent on innovation in agriculture, in a broader, more holistic approach. This must at least be reversed.”

Throughout the event, hunger and food insecurity were repeatedly cited as the long-term drivers of migration across the Mediterranean. For the occasion of the event, MacroGeo launched a 109-page report on the nexus between migration across the Mediterranean and food security in Africa.

The authors state that there is a particularly strong link between migration, food and conflicts. “Refugee outflows per 1000 population increase by 0.4 percent for each additional year of conflict and by 1.9 percent for each percentage increase of food insecurity,” the MacroGeo authors write, referring to recent research by the World Food Program.

“That might not seem a lot but in a country of fifty million that amounts to one million refugees per year,” said Valerie Guarnieri, assistant executive director of the World Food Program who repeated the statistics in front of the audience of 600 attendees on Wednesday.

“The connection between migration and food is heavily neglected in policy, this is a way to push it into the agenda,” Lucio Caracciolo told IPS, “because as we see it right now, there is no strategy at all at governmental levels in the EU to deal with migration, let alone how food policy might help.”

The contentious matter of dumping of European surplus produce – often named as one of the causes of hunger, food insecurity and migration – in Africa was accordingly dealt with in a talk with EU Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan, not coincidentally just ahead of long-awaited negotiations on the reform of the EU’s agricultural policy. The Commissioner pledged that the new Common Agriculture Policy 2021-2027 program will reduce spending on production of commodities often dumped in the developing world. At the same time, he said Europe was ending trade barriers on imports of food from the developing world.

As part of its ambitious list of policy recommendations, BCFN also calls for more awareness of the illegal exploitation of migrants in EU agriculture. According to the experts, specific EU programmes should provide funding for the fight against unethical practices. And spreading a message which does not go well with the current Italian government, MacroGeo’s Lucio Caraciolo called for a “normalisation of the presence of migrant labour. European agriculture in the South cannot survive without their help. So it is up to us to assure that their rights are respected,” he told IPS.

In its report, MacroGeo proposes a circular and seasonal migration model, in which temporary workers are contacted directly from their country of origin on a yearly basis and for determined periods. The workers are granted permits and ensured that they can return to their home country. “Intended results include disincentivizing unregulated economic migration, ensuring employees are granted work conditions as per the law, and the possibility to return to the same farms, enhancing human resources effectiveness,” the report says.

Bob Geldof, musician, activist and organizer of 1984’s Live Aid. closed the event with an at times bitter speech broadening the discussion. “We had a 1200 percent increase in consumption in the last eighty years and we’re talking about sustainability?” he asked. “Sustainability is simply impossible with this irrational economic logic, which boils down to ‘more for ourselves all the time.’”

In September, the International Forum will travel to New York to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly. In November, it will hold a third and final event in Milan.

Bamba Drissa from Ivory Coast was one of the 61,532 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean in January 2016. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
RIGNANO GARGANICO, Italy, Dec 12 2017 (IPS)

Despite deplorable living conditions, loneliness and unemployment, many African migrants in Italy choose to stay – even when they have the means to return.

“Shame is keeping us here,” says one young man named Bamba Drissa. “We cannot go home empty-handed.”“I had no idea or no preconception of what Europe would be like. Work and sending money home, that was all.” --Bismark Asoma

Drissa, who hails from the Ivory Coast, arrived in Europe at the height of the so-called European migrant crisis. He was one of the 61,532 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean in January 2016. That same month, 370 died during an attempt to reach Europe. With a total of 4,713 fatalities, the Libyan corridor would become the deadliest crossing in the world and 2016 the deadliest year at sea.

Trailer on the east side

After a year and a half of traveling around Italy, Bamba Drissa ended up in the ‘Granghetto’ of Rignano Garganico, an illegal settlement of several hundred mostly West Africans without documents. The camp consists of tents and barracks and is located in the middle of the Southern Italian Capitanata plane, only accessible after eight kilometers on dilapidated, potholed streets.

The barracks now only cover a fraction of the original surface of the illegal settlement. On March 1 of this year, police and army started a mass evacuation of the site. It led to a fire that left the bulk of the camp in ashes and killed two Malians in their thirties. The evacuation had been ordered by the anti-Mafia Brigade in Bari due to reported criminal infiltration in the camp. Despite the police action, the brothel, operated by victims of Nigerian smuggling, today is still there.

Residents whose campers or barracks were burnt in the fire bought tents. The tents are still there, on the western side of the camp, protected from the strong wind on the Capitanata plane by the remaining barracks.

When he arrived here six months ago, Bamba Drissa still had enough money to purchase a moldy caravan on the east side of the camp. A month ago he was making money working on Italian farms. Now the harvest is over, the temperature on the plain drops day by day, and the fields where the barracks are built have turned into a sea of mud.

Returning empty-handed

“Life here is much harder than where I come from,” he says. “I have a lot of regrets of coming here.” But returning, the young Ivorian adds, is impossible. “I made my choice to come here. Others chose to stay and build their lives there. I cannot return home empty-handed, this was my choice and now I have to make it happen.”

“It is shame that is keeping me here,” he concludes. “I cannot disappoint my family. They are the reason why we are here. We are here to help them confront their problems. Before we succeed in doing that, we can’t go back.”

Bismark Asoma, 20, from Ghana has been on European soil for three years. He is constantly looking for work and lives in an abandoned farm with a dozen other West Africans in the area around the village of Cerignola, about an hour’s drive south from Rignano Garganico.

The Ghanaian tells a similar story: his father died when he was five. Because his mother struggled to take care of him, his five-year-old brother and 10-year-old sister, he chose to travel to Europe to help her.

“Working and sending money home was the only thing I thought about before leaving,” he says. “I had no idea or no preconception of what Europe would be like. Work and sending money home, that was all.”

Bismark Asoma, 20, migrated from Ghana to Italy. He lives in an abandoned farm with a dozen other West Africans. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

Remittances

The scale and importance of remittances for the African continent can’t be underestimated. The 2017 Economic Outlook Report of the African Development Bank states that remittances are a ‘major and stable source of external finance for Africa.’ In Western African countries like Liberia and Gambia, money transfers even account for twenty percent of GDP. From 2000 to 2016, remittances grew from 11 billion dollars to 64.6 billion.

While being less volatile than development aid and foreign direct investment the report states, migrant remittance flows also have the advantage of ‘increasing inversely with the economic situation of recipients.’ In other words: migrants are likely to send more money when difficult situations arise in their country of origin.

A son in Europe

Not only in Brong-Ahafo, the region where Bismark Asoma comes from, but in many other West African countries and regions, the prospect of remittances has made the fact of having a son in Europe a matter of prestige.

“The money sent from Europe to Africa improves the economic situation of the family and substantially increases their status in the community,” says Senegalese migration researcher Linguere Mbaye, economic consultant for the African Development Bank Group and research affiliate at IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn*.

The Ghanaian Ministry of Migration confirms the logic mentioned by Mbaye and even points out that in some cases, families who do not have children in Europe are looked down upon.

From rural to urban

Though a matter of prestige in African communities, the majority of migrants still leave home out of poverty. A study conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Libya last year showed that 80 percent of migrants left home because of economic hardship. Seven percent left because of a lack of basic services such as education or health care in their home country, and only five percent fled violent conflicts.

An analysis of interviews with migrants who had just arrived at Lampedusa that was published earlier this year by the World Food Program (WFP) confirmed these findings. When speaking to West Africans, the WFP noted that they mainly left home because of a lack of job opportunities. Young men interviewed by the WFP told similar stories to those of Bamba Drissa or Bismark Asoma: they were sent out, “leaving their family with the promise of remittances and hopes of a future reunion.”

The path most migrants follow from the moment of departure is summarized as follows: they “firstly moved within their own countries, mostly from rural areas to bigger urban areas or the capital city. In general, they moved one or two times before migrating across the border.”

According to the report, the search for stable employment leads them increasingly further from home. “On the way, they would locally collect information about transiting routes and following steps. The journey continued in this incremental way, following a general path that eventually brought them towards Europe.”

Three factors

Of course there is a subgroup that wants to make the trip to Europe immediately. According to migration researcher Linguere Mbaye, this migration is triggered by three separate factors: “First, the perception that you cannot achieve anything in your own country. You see with your own eyes how much money is sent home by cousins ​​or friends who do make it, while you keep struggling to get a job.

“Secondly, there is a biased perception of salaries in Europe,” says the researcher. “My research shows that the expectations are much higher than the actual wages in for instance France or Spain.”

Thirdly, there is the effect of networks and family members abroad, “who can give all information about where to go and how to fund migration.”

Poverty reduction is not the solution

Contrary to what intuition suggests, relieving poverty will not necessarily lead to a decline in migration. “On the contrary,” says Mbaye. “Research shows that people who are richer have more aspirations and more resources at their disposal to start the journey.”

“Reducing poverty is of course an aim in itself,” she adds, “but there are other factors to consider if we want to decrease illegal migration. Moving away is sometimes seen as the only way to be successful in life. So the only way to help reduce migration pressure is by making it one of the many options in life. We must create a situation in which a person can choose either to migrate safely or invest in a productive activity at home.’

Linguere Mbaye underlines that in this discussion, migration should not be considered “a bad thing it itself. And for many people it is a way to deal with adverse shocks. It is thus important to find ways to make migration safe and regular.”

*All opinions expressed here are hers and do not represent those of the African Development Bank.

Adolf Ozor, a tomato farmer in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana, is struggling to make ends meet after import surges. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Nov 27 2017 (IPS)

In the run-up to the fifth EU-Africa summit in Côte d’Ivoire, the future of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between Europe and its former colonies looks bleaker than ever. While most of Europe’s trade partners around the world keep refusing to sign the deals, the African Union’s Commissioner for Trade will most likely announce a moratorium on all EPAs.

Ever since independence, Europe’s former colonies have enjoyed preferential (duty-free) access to the European market. In turn they didn’t need to open their own markets. When in 2000 the World Trade Organization deemed this one-sided market opening unlawful, Europe and 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) started negotiating reciprocal trade deals."Trade between neighbors is now more difficult than trade with the EU. We are creating borders within Africa." --Gunther Nooke

The resulting deals, coined Economic Partnership Agreements or EPAs, are not pure free trade deals. Under the agreements, ACP countries are allowed to keep protecting 20 percent of their products – mostly agricultural products – with import tariffs. The other 80 percent will be liberalized gradually over the course of 20 years after the signing and ratification of the deal. The deals were negotiated between the European Commission and seven regions of several countries engaged in economic integration processes.

Stalling the implementation

Seventeen years later only two of the seven negotiated deals have been signed, ratified and implemented, one with the South African Development Community (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland) and one with the Caribbean. The EPA with West Africa is currently blocked by Nigeria, Gambia and Mauritania who refuse to sign, while in the East African region, last year Tanzania sued Kenya for signing while Uganda wants to address more concerns – President Museveni travelled to Brussels on a three-day work visit at the end of September for talks.

Almost all ACP countries fear the possible negative impact of the EPAs on their economies and therefore stall its implementation. “They already had the right to export to Europe duty-free,” said Joyce Naar, a lawyer and activist with the ACP Civil Society Forum. “Now they are expected to open up their markets to Europe without getting anything back.”

Especially in Africa, governments and analysts fear an encore of the tomato and chicken scenario. In Ghana, for instance, after IMF and World Bank-enforced tariff reductions, import surges caused the market share for domestic chicken to fall from 100 percent to a mere three percent today in less than three decades. The chicken industry, once the second largest employer in the country, has now been taken over by competing imports from Canada, Brazil, Europe and China.

As for tomatoes, after lowering tariffs Ghana became the second largest importer of tomatoes in the world and according to FAO data, market share for domestic produce dwindled from 92 to 57 percent in only five years.

Industrialization at risk

Aside from agricultural produce, NGOs also fear that entire industrialization of the continent is at risk. At a recent international trade union conference on the issue of EPAs in Togo, this point was repeatedly made. “To industrialize, we need to protect and develop the internal market until we’re ready for international competition, as has been demonstrated by China,” says Georgios Altintzis of he International Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).

At the conference, Mariama Williams, senior program officer at the South Center in Geneva, also stressed that increased competition would lead to increasing feminization of work.

“Women do the worst jobs in the worst conditions,” she stated at the conference. According to Williams, EPAs will have the greatest impact on labour-intensive industries where women are disproportionately employed. An increase of competition would raise the pressure on these sectors while the internal standards and labour conditions remain unchanged.

“Diabolic” agreements or success story?

“There has always been a diabolic whiff about EPAs,” former EPA chief negotiator Sandra Gallina said a few weeks ago at a meeting of trade ministers from all ACP countries in Brussels. “There is nothing diabolic about them, they were just extremely badly communicated. For the last five years I have been fighting a misinformation campaign.”

On the first day of the Brussels meeting, the European Commission published numbers on its website meant to illustrate the benefits of EPAs. In 2012 an agreement entered into force between Madagascar and the EU. By 2016, exports to the EU had risen by 65 percent. The same for South Africa, which signed an agreement one year ago. The last year, exports of processed fish increased by 16 percent and flowers by 20 percent.

According to Marc Maes, trade policy officer at the Flemish North South Movement 11.11.11, the figures should be taken with a grain of salt. “Madagascar is recovering from a period of total chaos,” he said. “Do these numbers show the influence of the EPA or mere economic recovery? In the case of South Africa, the mentioned period consists of just one year. It’s a bit premature to talk about a steady, reliable impact.”

Migration crisis

The criticism isn’t limited to the content of the agreements. The way in which the European Commission concludes them is also widely condemned. As agreements with entire regions are stalled, the Commission now makes agreements with individual states. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire signed and ratified such interim EPAs a year ago, fearing they would lose preferential access to the European market.

“That’s crazy,” says Gunther Nooke, personal representative in Africa of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and one of the staunchest critics of the EPAs. “Trade between neighbors is now more difficult than trade with the EU. We are creating borders within Africa. ”

According to Nooke, in the midst of a migration crisis the only things that benefits Europe and Africa is more employment in Africa. “This can only be done by protecting the entire African market with the creation of an African Customs Union led by the African Union. African products can be made here and be freely traded across the continent without having to compete with European goods. But now, because of differences in opinion about EPAs, African countries aren’t making any progress in forming a customs union.”

Moratorium

According to Merkel’s envoy, the African Union Commissioner for Trade has already announced that he will call for a moratorium on all EPAs. “And we must respect that,” says the advisor.

Germany is in the perfect position to make its opinion be heard. The country delivers the greatest contribution to the European Development Budget: just over 6.2 billion euros in the period 2014-2020, accounting for 20.6 percent of the total. It is doubtful whether Berlin and Brussels will be able to voice their opinions in unison at the Nov. 28-29 EU-Africa Summit in Abidjan.

Refugees from the Choucha camp in Tunisia. Credit: Alberto Pradilla/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
FOLLONICA, Italy, Nov 9 2017 (IPS)

As countless refugees arriving on Italy’s shores report torture, extortion and forced labour in Libyan detention centers, many say they never intended to make the journey to Europe until the chaos in Libya left them no other choice.

“We were still working on the construction site when I was taken apart from the others. The guard pulled his gun, aimed it at me and told me he’d shoot if I tried to walk away. After ten minutes of trembling with fear, a truck arrived and I was ordered to get in. We drove to a beach where a crowd was being kept at gunpoint by other guards in uniforms. They forced us to board a Zodiac and pushed us into the open sea. The second day we were saved by a European ship.”

Amidou Kone (23) now lives in Follonica, in a refugee center that used to be a tourist campsite in Tuscany. He is one of the 113,722 refugees who made the passage from Libya to Italy, the deadliest crossing in the world with a total of 2,714 fatalities from the start of the year up until now.

Amidou left his home country of the Ivory Coast after his entire family was killed during a raid in the 2011 war. After passing through Burkina Faso and working as a shepherd for a farmer in Niger, he is certain he was sold to Libyan militias after a business trip with his boss to Libya.

“They wanted me to call my family for ransom,” he says, “but didn’t want to believe that everyone had died so they started torturing me.” Amidou shows the scars on his head, caused by blows with Kalashnikov stocks. He points at the blank spots around his right index and right ankle. “They tried to cut off my finger with a knife and then they wanted to beat my foot with a flashlight. Why so much cruelty? I don’t have the faintest idea.”

Kidnapping industry

For over two years, the cruelty of detention in Libyan detention camps has been widely reported and denounced but with no immediate end in sight. Two months ago, the head of MSF Joanne Liu wrote an open letter calling the Libyan detention system “rotten to the bone”, “a thriving enterprise of kidnapping, torture and extortion.” She accused Europe of being complicit in the situation as the Union, “blinded by the single-minded goal of keeping people outside of Europe”, funds Libya to help stop the boats from departing.

Bai, 19 years old from Mali, arrived on the Sicilian coast in early September. He remembers several mass kidnappings. “There was forty of us living in a house in the city,” he says. “One eventing two men with Kalashnikovs came in, started shouting. They told us to get aboard vehicles waiting in the street. We were locked up, they beat us with sticks and chains. We had to call home. Anyone who could convince their family to send money was allowed to go. My family agreed, but I was caught by another group the following week. There wasn’t any more money left so they put me to work to pay my trip to Europe.”

Under laws passed with Europe’s encouragement during the reign of Muammar Ghadaffi, immigration is illegal in Libya and the country does not offer asylum. Every undocumented migrant is therefore liable for detention.

Various rival governments and militias run networks of detention centers. UNHCR can only enter 29 of them, run by the department to counter illegal migration (DCIM), headed by the Serraj government, the government Europe chose to recognize. The total number of camps is unknown and international funding for “official” camps has ignited a battle for control over these camps by armed groups looking for money or international legitimacy.

Forced to cross

In the meantime, both DCIM officials and militias rent out detainees to local employers for personal profit. Amidou and Boi also fell victim to forced labour while detained. “Two years as a mason,” Amidou tells, “without payment. In those two years, I’ve seen nothing but water and bread.” When he was eventually found to be too weak for work, he was taken to the boat.

“Refugees are nothing but commodities,” says Anaspasia Papadopoulou, senior policy advisor at the European Council for Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) in Brussels. “Militias use them to make a profit. When they are no longer useful, they need to get rid of them.”

Amidou’s forced crossing is echoed in the stories told by countless other migrants. In fact, many of them them didn’t come to Libya to cross to Europe but turn out to have lived and worked in the country for years.

Balde Tcherno (37) from Guinea-Bissau was a shoe salesman for five years, making the trip home once every year to be with his family. On his last trip back in 2011, he was arrested and forced, at gunpoint, to board a boat to Italy. Rockson Adams (27) from Ghana arrived in Libya after the removal of Ghadaffi and got a lucrative job in construction, but after two years he was kidnapped and forced to pay ransom. After killings in his circle of friends and explosions in his area, he decided to pay a smuggler to cross over.

“The refugee flow from Libya is clearly a mix,” says Anaspasia Papadopoulo. “There’s people who already lived in the country and who went there because until a few years back, it was still a rich country. Then there’s the internally displaced Libyans. And of course there’s the Sub-Saharan Africans, Bangladeshis and Syrians who’ve come to Libya with the intention of crossing. Many fall victim to exploitation and into the hands of traffickers instead of smugglers.”

According to some analysts, the situation is making it hard to separate “economic migrants” from “refugees” as many who travelled to Libya for work become victims of exploitation and violence.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency designated sugarcane ethanol as an advanced biofuel because it lowers GHG emissions by more than 50 percent as compared to gasoline. Pictured here is a sugarcane harvester in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava /IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

In an unexpected move, European parliamentarians have approved a new biofuel regulation that will take emissions from indirect land use change into account. The new text allows the biofuel sector to expand, sending a clear signal to world food markets and jeopardising food security for the world’s poorest.

The European Parliament’s Environment Committee (ENVI) voted Thursday in favour of a proposal that limits the use of biofuels to 5.5 percent. This percentage is a compromise between the European Greens who asked for a cap of three percent and the centre-right European People’s Party that wanted a cap of 6.5 percent.

The cap was introduced by the European Commission a year ago after criticism that the policy boosted food prices, causing hunger in developing nations.

The approved proposal also requires companies to measure the amount of indirect land use change (ILUC) caused by their fuels. ILUC refers to the clearing of rainforest, peatlands and wetlands rich in sequestered carbon to fulfill the demand for more land, and causing extra emissions. When the indirect land use change factor is accounted for, many biofuels turn out to cause more emissions than fossil fuels.

“The introduction of indirect land use change is the most important element in this vote,” Bas Eickhout, member of parliament for the European Green Party told IPS. “Furthermore, the cap of 5.5 percent includes all land-based biofuel crops that compete with food production in the use of land and water. This is a setback for the industry that just wanted to continue business as usual.

“But it is not over yet. This text still has to be approved at the plenary meeting. We know the industry is now getting ready for a heavy fight.”

Environmental campaigners have mixed feelings about the approved regulation. “From the point of view of the climate, this result is unexpectedly positive: from now on only truly sustainable biofuels will be subsidized,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam International’s biofuel expert, told IPS.

“But as far as food security is concerned, the result is outright negative. Last year the Commission proposed 5 percent to protect the existing industry while blocking its expansion. Everything higher than this percentage is unjustifiable. It signifies a subsidised growth of the sector, resulting in more speculation on land and food, causing more food insecurity and hunger.”

The move to increase the percentage comes despite calls from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. De Schutter wrote to parliamentarians on Apr. 23 and visited the European parliament on Jun. 19 to make clear what detrimental effects the European Union’s policy has on food security in developing nations.

“The EU’s agriculture and energy policies have huge impacts on developing countries whose markets are interlinked with those of the EU,” De Schutter told IPS ahead of the meeting. “Biofuel mandates send a strong signal to investors, and therefore trigger commercial pressures on land in developing countries and increase price volatility.”

De Schutter cites research by the EU Joint Research Centre showing that by 2020 EU biofuel targets could push up the agricultural price of vegetable oils by 36 percent, maize by 22 percent, wheat by 13 percent and oilseeds by 20 percent.

Furthermore, according to De Schutter, smallholders in developing countries fall victim in two different ways.

“EU biofuels demand has increased the existing pressures on land in developing countries,” he said. “It has stacked the odds in favour of large-scale export-oriented projects and against the interests of small-scale farmers who need secure access to land and resources.

“Indeed, the smallholders whose access to land and resources is threatened by large-scale investments are often among those most affected by rising food prices. The poorest farmers, though they depend on subsistence agriculture for part of their consumption, are often net food buyers, contrary to common perception.

“My mandate is to offer a rights-based assessment of major policies which have impacts across the world and to remind policymakers of the requirements of the right to food,” De Schutter told IPS.

International donors pledged yesterday to mobilise 3.25 billion Euros to rebuild Mali, a figure that surpassed all expectations. But experts warn that the country does not have the absorption capacity for so much aid, while others say donors should pressure the Malian government to stop ongoing human rights abuses.

In January of this year, a French-led intervention ended more than a year of sectarian violence in the north of Mali. The intervention managed to stall the conflict, but the situation in the region remains tense.

More than 467,000 people, around one third of the population in the north, are currently displaced, and the United Nations announced on Tuesday that it needs at least 222 million Euros to address immediate food and other humanitarian needs.

Northern Mali is also facing its second food crisis in two years, the country’s economy is in decline, and over the last year it fell to one of the five poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations (U.N.) Human Development Index.

The 3.25 billion Euros were pledged by the international community at a donor conference in Brussels yesterday for the reconstruction of this West African country. The high level meeting, organised by the European Union and France, together with Mali, welcomed 100 delegates from countries, regional organisations, U.N. agencies, EU member states and other development partners.

Pledges were made on the basis of the “Plan for the Sustainable Recovery of Mali, 2013-2014”, presented by the Malian government, which says that an amount of 4.343 billion Euros is needed to fully implement the plan.

Aid agencies and non-governmental organisations were careful in welcoming the influx of aid, however. “These pledges need to be seen as a down payment and not a one-off cheque,” Marietou Diaby, Malian country director for the NGO Oxfam, said in a press release following the meeting."These pledges need to be seen as a down payment and not a one-off cheque."
-- Marietou Diaby,

“Donors must now support a new development contract between the people of Mali and their government which tackles poverty, corruption and inequality – issues that lie at the heart of the crisis,” Diaby noted, adding that crises such as Afghanistan and Somalia show that winning a military conflict is never enough to achieve sustainable peace and security.

EU officials in the field have also expressed concern about the enormous amount of money about to flow into a country that is not yet ready for it. According to one official, who requested anonymity, “The country does not have the absorption capacity yet. Other issues have to be dealt with first.”

“Donors want to move quickly, get the country back on its feet and show results as quickly as possible,” Tidhar Wald, EU conflict and humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam Brussels, explained.

“But if we inject this amount of money, without proper guarantees in terms of sources management and transparency, into a country that is poorly governed, services are not functioning and some parts of society are benefiting more than others, the situation will hardly get any better,” Wald cautioned.

Just ahead of yesterday’s high-level meeting, Oxfam published a report stressing the need for smart development aid. “The Brussels meeting was intended to bring Mali back to normal,” Wald told IPS, “but even before the rebellion in the north started, Mali was in a crisis.”

“Its society has been eroding for decades because of previous ethnic conflicts, corruption, lack of transparency and other governance issues,” he described. “There needs to be a new contract between the Malian government and its people. The reconstruction plan needs to be inclusive; all Malians should benefit from it.”

“We have to make sure that the government is made accountable to its people, that people can influence decision making, that civil society is part of the decision-making process,” Wald concluded.

According to Oxfam’s report, donors should commit to providing aid at least for the next 15 years, the amount of time needed to successfully undertake necessary government reforms and tackle the root causes of poverty. This time frame, however, stands in stark contrast with the two years mentioned in the Malian government’s reconstruction plan.

Other experts also point to the fact the conflict in Mali is not over yet and human rights violations persist. On Tuesday, Amnesty International accused government forces of carrying out extrajudicial executions in the north. Islamic militants have been reported recruiting child soldiers and killing civilians and wounding government soldiers.

U.N. officials, meanwhile, have expressed grave concern about retaliatory attacks against Tuared and Arab communities in the north after government troops retook towns held by Islamic rebels. As a result, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch urge donors to pressure the Malian government to end to human rights abuses in the country.

After two decades of crisis more and more Japanese want to do business for society, not just for money. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

By Daan Bauwens
TOKYO, Mar 2 2013 (IPS)

After two decades of economic stagnation and serial natural disasters, a growing number of young Japanese believe social entrepreneurship is the best way to rebuild their society.

Masami Komatsu (37) is one of them. He founded his investment company Music Securities in 2001, a few years after the Japanese banking crisis of 1998. ‘There was no more investment in vulnerable sectors as music, traditional crafts or sake brewing,” he tells IPS. “We made it possible for people to start investing in what they personally think is important and should be kept alive.”

However, Music Securities does not work by way of donors and donations. It is an investment fund with returns that currently ranks among the best performing in Japan, managing over 33 billion yen (27 million euro) worth of investments held by over 50,000 shareholders including some of the nation’s most wealthy companies. In 2009 Komatsu set up the first retail microfinance fund in Japan, allowing individuals to invest in microfinance projects in Cambodia.

At this moment Music Securities is the largest private financier in the reconstruction of companies that suffered losses from the tsunami. “A month after the catastrophe had happened we visited the area and suggested our plan to the local business leaders,” Komatsu tells IPS. “We had the feeling we had to do something. Not volunteer, but use our existing business to resolve the problems of the stricken areas.”

At this moment more than 25,000 individuals have invested a total of more than 100 billion yen (810 million euro) in the tsunami fund.

In 2001 Music Securities was ahead of its time. It took until 2005 before the concept of social entrepreneurship – a revenue-generating business whose objective is not personal gain but the pursuit of a social goal – was thought of at Japan’s oldest university Keio in Tokyo.

But in recent years, the phenomenon seems to be gaining momentum rapidly. In 2011, Fukuoka on the Japanese Island of Kyushu was the second city in the world to be named a ‘social business city’ for spreading the concept of social business across the Asian continent. Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, who developed the idea of social business, opened the world’s first social business research centre on the grounds of Kyushu University.

According to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, the number of social businesses went up from virtually none in 2,000 to a total of more than 8,000 in 2008, employing over 320,000 people. There is no data on the current number, but everything points to the fact that the phenomenon has been even more on the rise since then. For instance, at the NEC-ETIC Social Entrepreneurship School in Tokyo, numbers of applicants have risen five-fold since 2010.

Since the start, Nana Watanabe has been one of the driving forces behind social entrepreneurship in Japan. Through her work as freelance journalist and photographer, she introduced more than 100 social entrepreneurs to the Japanese public between 2000 and 2005 through several publications.

“Japan was left without role models after the bursting of the bubble economy,” she tells IPS. “It led to a general state of depression, the country didn’t know what to do. In 1999 I discovered the new wave of social entrepreneurship, coming up among elite students in the states. I immediately thought: this is what we need.”

In 2011 Watanabe founded the Japanese branch of Ashoka, an international NGO supporting the work of over 2,000 social entrepreneurs in 60 countries around the globe.

“Social business is definitely an emerging phenomenon,” she tells IPS, “and the reason behind it is simple: people are getting increasingly disappointed in Japan’s large companies. Today’s young have seen their parents sacrifice their lives in exchange for the promise of lifetime employment, only to be have been laid off in recent years. More and more young people prefer to start on their own.”

“The myth of Japanese government efficiency has collapsed,” says Toshi Nakamura, leader of Kopernik, an on-line market place offering technological solutions to problems in rural communities in developing nations.

“Up until the middle of the nineties people had faith in the government’s technocrats to drive the economy and provide social services,” he tells IPS. “This is no longer the case and people realised that a number of social issues had to, and can be tackled by ordinary citizens.”

It is not just disappointment in Japan’s companies or government that inspires the Japanese to get involved in social business. “After the financial crisis we have seen a return to traditional values,” says Japan’s leading business analyst Kumi Fujisawa. “People aren’t looking for short term gain but concentrating on long-term perspectives. There’s a return to idealism, people want to contribute to society again.”

According to polls organised by the Japanese government, the value of work is being reconsidered in Japan since the start of the financial crisis. The number of people that answered that they wanted to work ‘to contribute to society’ rose sharply after the burst of the asset bubble, from 46 to 64 percent in 1991. That number is above 65 percent at present.

“It is the result of a new inward-looking attitude,” says Hirofumi Yokoi, president of the Akira Foundation, one of Japan’s most influential organisations fostering social entrepreneurship that was founded in 2009.

“Growing uncertainty and anxiety about the future have lead to a change in behaviour. For lots of young Japanese, social business is not just a way to solve economic, social and environmental issues. It is also a way to tackle personal challenges. They will have to work as a part of a community and develop self-confidence, friendship, mindfulness, self-actualisation and social inclusion.”

“It is true that people start to reconsider the value of work,” Nana Watanabe tells IPS, “but most still lack the courage to act upon it. Social business is definitely taking off but we need to be cautious not to overestimate its success.

“First of all, it requires people to be very creative and imaginative. Next, at the moment it is very fashionable to say you will start a social business. But in the end, the majority are still looking for security and money.”

Japanese university students survey the tsunami devastation in Minamisanriku before getting to work. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

By Daan Bauwens
TOKYO, Feb 4 2013 (IPS)

Funding for reconstruction is beginning to decline after the tsunami almost two years ago – but in large parts of Japan’s north-eastern region reconstruction has yet to begin. More and more young Japanese are now moving into this area for reconstruction in a new way.

It is six in the morning. A bus arrives on the barren plane that used to be the coastal town of Minamisanriku. Except for two metal frames of what once were large buildings, there is no sign of human presence.

Twenty students from Tokyo step out of the bus and visit the grounds. An hour later they join another group of volunteers and start digging the frozen ground to clear away debris the giant mud wave washed up two years ago.

Among them is Akinori Fujisawa, vice-president of the project University of Tokyo  Aid (UT Aid) that gathers students from all over Japan to volunteer in the stricken areas on weekends.

“Just after the tsunami,” he tells IPS, “all Japanese wanted to come here and volunteer. But many couldn’t. Students had the time but not the money to get here while employed people had the money but no time. That’s how we started: we got funding from individuals and companies and started organising these weekend trips.”

It’s not just students. “We come here every weekend with friends,” says Machiko Ogata, a young Japanese woman in her thirties. “We meet up in Tokyo and drive here together. We all met on one of these sites. It is a social happening.”

But initiatives like this are likely to die out soon. “There will be no more need for people shoveling and digging,” Akinori Fujisawa tells IPS. “We would like to start new projects, like trying to improve studying conditions for children in the area. At the moment most of them are doing homework on the streets. But we can’t do anything about it with the current budget.

“What’s more, it’s getting more and more difficult to gather funds,” Akinori adds. “People mistakenly think the reconstruction is over. You can clearly see that’s not the case. But there’s not a lot we can do about it, in two months our organisation will be put to a permanent stop.”

While grassroots projects as UT Aid are moving out of the area, an increasingly professionalised group of young NGO and social business leaders is moving in.

Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities (ETIC) in Tokyo is a training centre for young entrepreneurs who want to start a social business. Since the tsunami, the organisation has started a fellowship programme that trains and sends young entrepreneurs into the region to help in rebuilding.

“We already sent more than 135 people into the region,” says Yoshi Koumei Ishikawa, ETIC’s research division manager. “Most of them are in their twenties and thirties and almost all quit their jobs at Japan’s biggest firms to start their own social project.”

At the same time, leaders of successful Japanese NGOs choose to relocate to Tohoku, a devastated region. Katariba, an NGO led by Kumi Imamura (33) has already set up three schools for more than 300 children to compensate for the lack of study space at the temporary homes of tsunami victims.

“But most importantly, local residents are employed as teachers and will soon take over the organisation of the programme,” says Retz Fujisawa (37), coordinator of almost all NGOs working in the area. “The first phase of relief is over,” he tells IPS. “Now our intention is to stimulate self-reconstruction, the Tohoku residents must assume leadership now.”

With the Tokyo-based Tohoku Earthquake Consulting Team, Fujisawa is guiding reconstruction efforts by NGOs. He is also member of the government’s Reconstruction Agency and Educational Reconstruction Council, where he defends a brand new reconstruction policy.

“The Tohoku region is devastated, the damage was enormous,” he tells IPS. “But even without a tsunami the region was heading towards a catastrophe. It was suffering from a very bad economic situation, especially caused by an aging society and the emigration of all young people to Tokyo. If we now are to rebuild the region, we must grab this chance to rebuild it in a way that it won’t happen again, and do everything we can to create a new style of living.”

Retz Fujisawa describes Tohoku as a test case for the rest of Asia. “We are suffering from the fact that all resources, capital and education are concentrated in large cities. In the meantime the rest of the country is being forgotten. We now have the chance to reorganise a whole region and to distribute resources.”

According to Fujisawa, Tohoku is not just a test case but also the perfect example that his country is rapidly changing. “This is the first time an NGO leader is invited to work for the government,” he tells IPS. “It is the first time that policy ideas originate from young people down below the decision chain.

“There are as many female as male project leaders in Tohoku. Most are in their twenties and thirties and quit their jobs to come here. There’s one main reason for this: we are all connected by social media, information is being shared and no longer withheld. Young people can start acting on their own. This never happened before in Japan.”

Japanese men heading to work - they continue to dominate work space, Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

By Daan Bauwens
TOKYO, Jan 31 2013 (IPS)

Despite anti-discrimination laws and a steadily growing number of employed women, Japan is falling behind the rest of the world on gender equality. Widespread discrimination persists, and has only grown more subtle over the past years.

Japan is one of the world’s most industrialised countries but has always kept true to its old traditions. In the same way, traditional gender roles have always been a source of inequality in the world’s third largest economy. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Japan has consistently ranked as the most unequal of the world’s richest countries.

And the gap seems to be widening: last October the World Economic Forum’s annual report on gender gaps downgraded Japan’s rank from 99 to 101, alongside Tajikistan and Gambia in terms of political and social equality.

To Yuko Ogasawara, professor of sociology at Tokyo’s Nihon University, Japan’s downgrading doesn’t come as a surprise. “In this country it is still impossible to combine work and family.” she tells IPS. “That is the main reason behind the inequality. People, whether men or women, are expected to work until ten every day. If you want to raise a family that’s an obvious obstacle.”

Fifteen years ago Ogasawara published ‘Office Ladies and Salaried Men’, a book describing the typical Japanese office space where women were supposed to handle clerical work and serve tea while men could climb up the executive ladder. “Much has changed since then,” Ogasawara tells IPS. “There are more female executives now, women are given more chances. But one problem remains: 70 percent of women drop out of the work force after having their first baby.”

“After raising their children, it is very difficult for many women to come back,” says Kathy Matsui, a macro economist at one of Japan’s largest banks who has been studying employment of Japanese women since 1999.

“Oftentimes the problem is situated within organisations and their evaluation systems,” she tells IPS. “Most human resources departments reject women when they have a ten-year blank in their curriculum. For them, that suggests that you must have forgotten everything you ever learned and therefore are not suitable for hiring. That is subtle discrimination.”

“Women who do want to relaunch their careers can only get part-time jobs with a low wage,” Yuko Ogasawara adds. “They are very cheap compared to full-time workers, so lots of companies want to keep the system as it is. It provides cheap labour force.’

Discrimination is deeply engrained into the country’s institutions. “Japan has got numerous anti-discrimination laws,” says Yoshiyuki Takeuchi, professor of economy at the University of Osaka, “but still tax, pension, social security and health insurance are based on the model of a four-person family with a working father and a stay-at-home mother.

“In Japan, companies pay men a higher salary if their wives stay home. Women who restart as part-timers can only earn a limited amount of money. These are rules and regulations that were developed during the seventies based on the economic reality of that time. They have barely changed since then. Nowadays they keep women from trying to restart a career.”

At the same time, Japan’s economic reality is changing very rapidly. The country is deeply troubled by economic stagnation that started 20 years ago. The population is aging very rapidly, the birth rate is declining, and the country’s population is projected to shrink by around 30 percent by 2055.

“The work force is shrinking and Japan is not very open to immigration,” Kathy Matsui tells IPS. “There’s no other solution than to use your existing population more. Women comprise 50 percent of the Japanese population, they are highly educated but stop working at a certain age. There are no other options than to take measures to try keeping women on the working track. This is not a feminist point of view but the objective analysis of an economist.”

However, Japanese society doesn’t seem very willing to accept the idea. A poll conducted by the Japanese government in December showed that 51 percent of the population thinks women should stay at home and care for the family while their husbands work.

That was 10.3 percent more than the view in a similar survey in 2009. The increase was particularly noticeable in the age category 20 to 30.

“Today’s young generation knows what it means to grow up with a working mother,” says Suzanne Akieda, a Belgian archaeologist who has been living and teaching in Japan for more than 40 years. “In the past lots of Japanese women have tried to push aside their personal lives to pursue a career. Now many start to reconsider if that was the right thing to do. This is the backlash.” (END)

The hard-won freedoms of the Arab Spring need support from the international community to survive. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Oct 4 2012 (IPS)

The Arab Spring is far from over. The protracted conflict in Syria continues to swallow lives while the international community, hamstrung by geopolitics, looks on; riots across the Muslim world following the release of a low-budget American movie that is disrespctful of the Prophet Muhammad resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya; Tunisia and Egypt continue to struggle with post-revolutionary economies; and a string of democratically elected Islamist governments has taken root in newly-liberated countries throughout the region.

Activists and analysts are on the edge, fearing that the freedoms fought for and won during the Arab Spring are now diminishing again. The only hope, they say, is the continued support of the international community for the long road ahead.

“Even though we are experiencing setbacks, we do need your continuous support for this momentum,” Tunisian activist Nabila Hamza, president of the international non-profit, Foundation for the Future (FFF), said at the European Union headquarters last Thursday, in a plea to European governments for long-term engagement in the Arab transition to democracy.

According to a recent report by the U.S.-based Freedom House, only Tunisia has shown an improvement in its overall governance score. Bahrain slipped backward while Egypt only showed a minor improvement. The score was based on five criteria: accountability and public voice, civil liberties, rule of law, anti-corruption and transparency.

At the United Nations General Debate last week, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the U.N. not to be put off by setbacks, and called for increased support for people seeking to build democracy. “Achieving lasting change takes time,” Van Rompuy said to the General Assembly.

Last Thursday, during a panel discussion entitled ‘Arab Spring, revolutions and the domino effect’, organised at the Brussels office of the representation of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to the European Union, several experts shed light on the most recent developments in the region and debated the EU’s specific role in democracy promotion in the Arab region.

Professor Todd Landman, director of the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at the University of Essex, pleaded for continuous foreign support for democracy, even if the donors themselves are not satisfied with the results of the elections.

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, European Parliament Member and head of the EU Election Monitoring Mission in Libya, lamneted the many bureaucratic hurdles involved in the EU’s aid allocation process.

Hamza echoed these sentiments, adding, “The EU expects us to hire experts to decipher official aid documents while we’re fighting a revolution.”

Hamza, who, through the FFF, oversees the disbursement of more than 10 million dollars of support to over 166 civil society-led projects spread across 15 countries in the Arab region, is optimistic about the changes sweeping the Arab world.

“The Arab Spring has created space for civil society to grow at an enormous pace,” she told IPS. “Egypt, Libya and Yemen (are witnessing) a multiplication of new organisations, where men and women equally engage in civic matters.

“We have been fighting for human rights, anti-corruption and media freedom since the early fifties, but now we can do it without being prosecuted. New laws about free association have been installed in Tunisia (and) are being drafted in Libya and Egypt. The legal environment is changing.”

According to Hamza, the Arab spring also brought about a new phenomenon: “We see young activists from the diaspora coming back to Tunisia. People who had been exiled and banished are now coming back to help rebuild and reform the country. This cultural meeting between local people and Tunisians from the diaspora is creating a wonderful dynamic, especially in terms of civic engagement.”

In Hamza’s view, the election of Islamist governments should not be regarded as a setback for the revolution. “The Islamists are perceived by the population as martyrs of the oppression, this is what gave them legitimacy as a counter-power. That is why they got elected so easily.

“But in Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries where an Islamic movement tried to include Sharia law in the new consitution, they failed. After weeks of discussion, and under huge pressure from civil society, the Islamist party in Tunisia drafted a constitution in which men and women are equal.”

“We are witnessing a change within political Islam,” Hamza added. “Now that Islamists are running the countries they have to become more pragmatic. There is pressure from within the country: they have to solve issues like unemployment and the distribution of wealth. Then there is external pressure: now they are part of a world (in which) they need the support of Western countries to survive and tell their own people that faith isn’t the answer to their every need.”

Hamza urged the European Union to increase its support for democratisation in the Arab region. “Many pledges have been made and many programmes have been created to support us,” she said, referring to the European Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth (SPRING) programme, under which the European Commission promised to provide support for democratic transformation, institution building and economic growth in the wake of the Arab Spring.

“But we still have the feeling more can be done, especially (for) civil society organisations, the only watchdogs of democracy, the only ones who can hold the government accountable. We need the support because we have to remain vigilant: the danger of new dictatorships still exists. We are still in a transition period.

“And after all, it is also in Europe’s own interest that the Arab Spring succeeds,” she added.

Most importantly, she said, the EU must redefine its aid paradigm. “Transition is a process,” she said. “The international community should support the process, not the short-term project. We need strategic patience in order to look at the real achievement of the revolution. Donors want immediate results, but a revolution has ups and downs.”

(END)

The European Commission has announced it will limit the amount of crop-based biofuels used in transport, but its newly proposed measures are not nearly enough to curb the disastrous impact of the EU’s biofuel policy around the world. Its effects will only worsen, activists say.

According to the existing European rules at least 10 percent of the EU’s transport energy must come from renewable sources by 2020, primarily through biofuels derived from wheat, soy or rapeseed. But in an unprecedented move, EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger and Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard announced Monday that the European Commission (EC) is planning to limit the use of crop-based biofuel to five percent in the total share of renewables in transport fuel.

Just ahead of the meeting, international NGO Oxfam released a new report which demonstrates that Europe’s hunger for biofuels is pushing up global food prices and driving people off their land, resulting in deeper hunger and malnutrition in poor countries.

According to the NGO, despite soy and maize prices being at all-time highs in July and prices of cereals and oil remaining at peak levels in August, the Commission and most governments seemed to turn a blind eye to the devastating impacts that EU biofuels mandates have on food prices and land rights.

At a press briefing after the morning plenary of the informal meeting, European Energy Commissioner Oettinger recognised the fact that the current EU policy had lead to “unfavourable developments such as the tearing down of rainforest to produce biofuel.”

He added that all ministers “agree that every percentage of biofuel higher than five percent should only be achieved by using second generation products like agricultural waste and leftovers instead of food crops.”

“I’m happy the EC is finally recognising the fact that the use of food-crops for fuel is problematic,” says Ruth Kelly, Oxfam’s economic policy advisor and writer of Oxfam’s new report, “but putting a cap of 5 percent on biofuel consumption is ridiculous. At this moment the biofuel use in the EU is only at 4.5 percent. So the new cap of 5 percent is actually an increase of what we’re using at the moment.

“In 2008 biofuels accounted for 3.5 percent of all transport fuels in the EU,” Kelly tells IPS. “That same year, the land that was required to grow crops for those biofuels could have fed 127 million people. The new target of 5 percent is not double, but it is significantly more. Increasing the percentage is obviously not what has to happen right now, given the negative effects we are seeing around the world right now.”

Recent data gathered by Oxfam shows land acquired for biofuels production in the Philippines in 2010 could be used to produce up to 2.4 million metric tonnes of rice, enough to make the country self-sufficient in rice production. According to a recent survey by the International Land Coalition, two-thirds of big land deals in the past ten years are to grow crops that can be used for biofuels such as soy, sugarcane, palm oil and jatropha.

Paraguay has also been hit hard by the EU’s demand for biofuel. According to research by Oxfam, each year 9,000 rural families are evicted and nearly half a million hectares of land are turned into soy fields. For families living beside massive soy plantations in eastern Paraguay, farming has become almost impossible. Water has become increasingly scarce as local resources are used up irrigating the plantations.

As the water table falls, the community has to sink wells twice as deep into the ground to reach drinking water. More than half of the soy grown in Paraguay is exported to Argentina, and much of this is turned into diesel either in Argentina or in Europe to fuel Europe’s cars.

“The key problem is that the EU’s biofuel mandates generate an important demand in the South,” says Constantino Casasbuenas Morales, policy adviser on economic justice at Oxfam UK, and Paraguay expert. “Relatively small countries like Honduras or Paraguay modify their national strategies in order to open up for foreign investment.

“As a consequence, smallholders are evicted from their land and have to move to the capital. Biofuel demand is clearly linked to land concentration, growing city populations and increasing poverty.”

By 2020, countries that are signatory to the Kyoto protocol will have accumulated more than 17 billion tonnes of surplus emission reduction permits, a new study shows. This enormous surplus not only drives the carbon price close to zero, but also jeapordises the chances of reaching a new global climate deal.

All eyes are now on the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18) in Doha which will start Nov. 26. World leaders are expected to come up with ways to save the coal market and to uphold the Kyoto protocol’s environmental integrity.

Under the Kyoto protocol, signatory countries are allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. If a country does not reach its emission limit, it is permitted to sell its surplus capacity under the form of Assigned Amount Units (AAUs). The AAU is an allowance to emit greenhouse gases comprising one metric tonne of carbon dioxide equivalents and can be bought and sold on the carbon market.

A new study by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon published Thursday showed that signatory countries will have accumulated more than 17 billion tonnes of surplus reduction permits by 2020. According to the report, the total surplus from the first Kyoto commitment period (2008-2012) already consists of 13.1 billion tonnes.

Russia, Ukraine and Poland are the largest surplus holders, followed by Romania, the UK and Germany.

The study also estimates that under the current rules, signatory countries will accumulate a surplus of 3.6 billion tonnes by 2020. If Australia and New Zealand then decide not to join the second Kyoto commitment period (2012-2016), the combined surplus would be as high as 17.2 billion tonnes.

“That is more than Europe would emit over the course of five years and more than double what China annually emits. The number is astronomically high,” says Tomas Wyns, director of the Centre for Clean Air Policy Europe (CCAP Europe).

“This is partly because Kyoto uses 1990 as the reference year to which the level of emissions must be reduced. But just after 1990, economies in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed, which led to a downfall in industrial activity and emissions. This allowed these countries to stay under their emission limits and build up a surplus.

“At this moment the same thing is happening: we are in the midst of an economic crisis which again leads to lower emissions all around the world.”

According to the report by the European Environmental Agency that was published a week ago, EU emissions in 2011 fell to 17.5 percent below the 1990 level. “That is only 2.5 percent away from our final 2020 Kyoto goal,” Tomas Wyns tells IPS. “And given the economic projections we will probably reach the same percentage this year.”

Although emissions are dropping worldwide, the build-up of surpluses is an enormous threat to the environmental integrity of the Kyoto protocol. “Of course dropping emissions is good news, but not in this case,” says Wyns.

“The current development shows the Kyoto objectives for 2020 have not been ambitious enough. We need a structural reduction of emissions, based on climate policy. An economic crisis is not a policy measure.”

According to the study by Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, the 3.6 billion surplus projection by 2020 would be realised under business-as-usual conditions without the government taking any measures to reduce emissions. But most importantly, the enormous amount of surpluses causes the price of allowances to drop close to zero. At this moment, the price has already dropped to less than one euro per tonne.

“The supply is three magnitudes bigger than the demand,” Anja Kollmuss, carbon market expert at the Brussels-based CDM Watch tells IPS. “When prices go that close to zero it could lead to a collapse of the market. The allowances are useless to the countries that own them because there is no one willing to buy them. The trade will come to a halt. It’s hard to see how there could possibly be a market under these conditions.”

During the preparatory climate negotiations in Bangkok last week, it became clear that the surplus owned by developed countries is one of the key issues to be resolved before countries can agree on a second commitment period for the Kyoto protocol.

At the meeting, the coalition of developing nations, the G-77 and China presented a proposal on how to restrict the gigantic surplus and save the market. They aligned themselves with the African Group, stating that this proposal reflected the view of 100 countries and over a billion people most vulnerable to climate change.

“The G-77 proposal states all countries can hold on to their emission allowances in the second period, but under the condition that they only be used to fulfill their own commitments,” Anja Kollmuss tells IPS. “Countries with a surplus would not be able to sell them on the market any more, that would effectively stabilise the market.”

The G-77 proposal goes further. “The developing nations asked all developing nations whose total emissions in 2012 will be lower than their 2020 goal to commit to stricter emission objectives in the second period,” Tomas Wyns says. “They also proposed to delete all surplus allowances after 2020. That’s the only way to safeguard the Kyoto protocol and the market.”

At the final plenary in Bangkok on Sep. 5, only Russia remained in opposition to the proposal. The EU reacted with no position due to internal disagreement.

“Poland is disagreeing because they hold the largest surplus in the EU,” Anja Kollmuss tells IPS. “The country thinks all allowances should be carried over, they are still hoping to sell them on the market. But most countries are realising that something needs to be done not just to save the market, but also to maintain a meaningful climate commitment.”

The EU is expected to work out a common position next month. Negotiations between countries are now ongoing.

The Norwegian government has announced it would assess the legitimacy of developing countries’ debt to Norway. In effect it will investigate whether its loans have been useful enough to warrant repayment.

That makes Norway the first nation ever to carry out a creditor’s debt audit. The United Kingdom appears to be following Norway’s example but campaigners are still facing some big hurdles.

Last Wednesday Norwegian Minister of Development Heikki Holmås announced an independent public audit of developing countries’ debt to Norway. The Norwegian government had promised to do so since being elected in 2009, and to work to establish binding guidelines for responsible lending.

“The Norwegian government is bold,” Gina Ekholt, director of SLUG, the Norwegian Coalition for Debt Cancellation, tells IPS. “Something like this has never been done before. It has the potential to change the global creditor society: other countries will start doing the same once everyone agrees this is an acceptable process and a moral obligation. We are proud of the Norwegian government to have made this historical political announcement.”

This is not the first time the Norwegian government has openly questioned its responsibility as a creditor. In 2006, Norway decided to cancel debt worth more than 70 million euros to Myanmar, Sudan, Egypt, Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Jamaica and Peru related to the Norwegian Ship Export Campaign.

During that campaign between 1976 and 1980, the Norwegian government tried to solve a crisis in the ship building industry by offering cheap loans to developing countries to buy Norwegian vessels. Ten years after the campaign the Norwegian Parliament concluded that the campaign had had very little developmental effect for the countries involved and therefore, the loans were illegitimate.

While announcing the debt audit, Holmås added that he does not expect to find any more cases of illegitimate debt. But there is reason to believe otherwise. In 2009, SLUG published a report focussing on Indonesia’s debt to Norway. According to the report, Indonesia is still repaying loans worth 160 million euros for a wave power plant that was never built, and failed technology for sea monitoring systems.

“These loans are clearly illegitimate,” Gina Ekholt tells IPS. “The projects for which the loans were given did not have the wanted effects. The technology did not work when tested in Norway, but it was still exported to Indonesia.”

The audit will apply the newly developed United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Principles to promote responsible borrowing and lending to evaluate the loans. “This is solid framework for the audit, but the challenge arises when they shall consider the legitimacy of the loans. Will they cancel debts from loans that breech with today’s guidelines, or just consider the criteria that were in place when the loans were given?” Ekholt says.

“We believe that we have to use today’s criteria and those are: a population should not owe debt for loans that have not benefitted the population. If the creditor knew that the loan would not benefit the population, there is a clear case of illegitimate debt.”

Ekholt does not believe the Norwegian government is willing to use today’s criteria. “That is where we will disagree. But we look forward to continuing this debate once the audit is finished. The Norwegian government has already taken several bold steps. We believe that they will deal with the consequences of this audit.”

Holmås has said the results of the audit will be available in a year.

Several months before the Norwegian initiative was launched, a group of British Members of Parliament started an investigation into the UK Export Credit Agency, the British institution which backs loans to foreign companies and countries to buy British exports. Unlike the Norwegian initiative, the British audit does not have an official or binding status.

“The government can ignore the results of this inquiry, or respond to its recommendations,” Tim Jones, policy officer at Jubilee Debt Campaign in the UK tells IPS. “Obviously we are pushing them to conduct their own official investigation. We hope the Norwegian example and this parliamentary investigation will help to make them act.”

Jubilee Debt Campaign is increasing its pressure on the UK government, especially since one of the parties in power took up the issue of illegitimacy of development loans before the 2010 general election. “The Liberal Democrats promised they would declare loans given to dictators and not used for development to be illegitimate,” Tim Jones tells IPS.

“There is evidence for development loans given to Indonesia during the time of General Suharto to buy tanks and airplanes. There is evidence for loans to buy arms given to Saddam Hussain, including a loan to build a chemical weapons factory.

“There is evidence for loans given to Egypt to buy equipment for the Egyptian army. The population clearly did not benefit but now has to repay these loans. We counted on the Liberal Democratic Party to denounce these loans, but it seems to be one of the policies they have forgotten about after assuming power.

Coal has brought its own compulsions for Poland, as it has for many other countries in the call to move to more renewable and cleaner sources of energy.

According to analysts, Poland’s staunch refusal of European emission targets is caused by its domestic reliance on coal. Data gathered by the European Commission shows that Poland is the largest hard coal producer in the EU. Currently the country has hard coal reserves totalling more than 16 billion tonnes. As a result, Poland’s import dependency is lowest in the EU, and its electricity generation is based more than 90 percent on coal.

“The country simply doesn’t want to lose sovereignty over its own energy strategy,” Daniel Fraile, senior energy policy officer of Climate Action Network-Europe, told IPS. “And they don’t see how they could move to a higher level of renewable energy. The country is economically too dependent on its coal industry. Even out of principle, they would never support moving to renewables.”

“The Polish economy is indeed largely based on coal, but doesn’t mean there’s no space to consider renewables,” Esther Bollendorff, policy officer at Friends of the Earth Europe, told IPS. “There’s tremendously strong resistance in the country to consider an energy transition. Partly because the Polish government is very much infiltrated by the coal industry. But also because of the personality of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He wants to get his opinion through in the EU, only to show his country is a strong player.”

But recent data shows that resistance to renewables might soon become disadvantageous to the Polish economy. According to Poland’s own energy road map, this is essentially because coal is expected to remain the main fuel for electricity generation until 2030.

Although the government road map foresees a general reduction of energy consumption in the Polish economy and a 19 percent share of renewables by 2020, electricity consumption is expected to increase by 30 percent by 2030.

As a result, although Poland has always been an exporter of coal, according to data by the European Association for Coal and Lignite (EUROCOAL), in recent years it has become a net importer of coal. Two years ago, imports of coal already amounted to 13.4 million tonnes.

“Energy consumption is increasing at such a rate that domestic sources cannot fulfil the demand anymore. The costs will get higher. So the country might want to reconsider what it is going to do in the future,” Bollendorff said.

Poland has isolated itself by refusing to decarbonise its energy system by 2050. During the latest talks between EU energy ministers, the heavily coal-reliant nation argued it would not accept carbon reduction targets without an international agreement. But this could be to their own disadvantage, analysts point out.

EU energy ministers gathered in Luxembourg on Jun. 15 to discuss the energy road map, an ambitious set of measures which would lead to close-to-zero carbon energy production by the middle of the century. The ministers from 26 EU member states backed the plan; only Poland opposed it.

In an official statement, the country’s economy minister said that “Poland cannot accept regulations concerning reduction targets after 2020 without reaching a global agreement on climate issues, and technologies reducing emissions at industrial scale are not implemented.”

In March, the country also refused to support a low carbon road map which sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions. According to the plan, these targets would be a 25 percent reduction by 2020, a 40 percent reduction by 2030, a 60 percent reduction by 2040 and an 80-95 percent reduction by 2050. Poland agreed with the 2050 targets but deemed the intermediate targets unnecessary.

The Danish EU presidency tried to prevent a Polish veto and cancelled out all reference to the 25 percent emission reduction by 2020, but Poland still refused.

At last week’s meeting, Poland requested that the word ‘decarbonisation’ in the document be redefined so it would also account for coal-fired power plants that use carbon capture and storage technology.

It also asked if a section on financial support for renewables could be changed to “financial support for low-carbon technologies”, so that nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage would also be eligible for support. When several states refused to accept this last change, Poland decided to veto the road map.

Because of Poland’s refusal to support both plans, no formal conclusion came out of the discussions, as all EU proposals need to be backed by a unanimous vote. Nevertheless, with the other 26 member states strongly supporting the bloc’s zero-carbon plans, the EU is determined to push its ambitious plans ahead.

Speaking at a press conference after the meeting, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger suggested that legislation for emission targets in the future should only require a majority vote. The spokesperson for the Danish EU presidency said: “The resolution was supported by 26 EU countries, and that is a clear signal to the Commission that it can start working on legislative proposals for 2030.”

Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.

In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.

But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.

The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe’s target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe’s roads by 2020.

ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

NGOs also found that the EU’s planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.

Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.

“The European Commission wants to decide on the 2030 policy without having considered the impacts of the 2020 policy first,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam’s EU biofuels expert, told IPS. “The new communication specifies hard criteria to measure environmental impact, but stays mute on the social impact of biofuels. The word ‘food’ is not even mentioned in the document, let alone food security.”

According to Herman, the Commission is moving too fast because of industry demands. “Investors in biofuel want security,” he added.

“Ever since the first target was set in 2009, the biofuel industry has been growing rapidly. This industry now wants to know what will happen after 2020. And it is an industry with lots of lobby power here in Brussels.”

In the meantime, the social effects of the growing demand for biofuels are aggravating. For instance, a large percentage of Guatemala’s indigenous population is facing a new hunger crisis because of land grabbing, forced evictions and water diversion to create large-scale monoculture plantations of palm oil trees and sugar cane for biofuel.

In one such case in March last year, Guatemalan police and soldiers evicted more than 3000 indigenous people from their homes in Guatemala’s Polochic valley to make room for a large-scale plantation. Banned from their land, these 700 families are now facing severe malnutrition and high child mortality as a consequence of diarrhoea or fever.

Three months after meeting president Otto Perez Molina to discuss the problem, Guatemalan small farmer Daniel Pascual from the Comité de Unidad Campesina (Committee for Campesino Unity) came to Brussels on Jun. 18 to make European policy makers aware of the social impacts of biofuels.

“With a growing demand for biofuel, this hunger crisis will only get worse,” Pascual told IPS. “We need external players like the EU to make sure that they don’t cause more damage with their policies. And we need them to put pressure on our government to respect the rights of the population.”

But it is unlikely that the EU will lower its demand for biofuel. “Who is gaining from this policy? Not the environment but European farmers, because of the positive effect of the demand on the price of products and the biofuel industry that was directly or indirecty built with EU funding and grants,” Herman said.

Herman believes the problem will get even worse as in the years to come, as traditional players have become increasingly interested in biofuels as well. “Shell and BP invested heavily in Brazilian sugar cane last year,” he stressed. “They want to remain leaders in the fuel sector and they are lobbying in Brussels as well.”

“Everyone looks at it from their own rational point of view but the final result is pure madness,” Herman concluded.

(END)

The European Parliament sent a bold message to the world last week with its comprehensive and ambitious resolution to put an end to the illicit global arms trade. But analysts regret the new resolution ignores several key factors, such as the impact of the arms trade on the socio-economic development of recipient countries, and the involvement of civil society in future negotiations.

Next month member states will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to negotiate the first binding Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a potentially ground-breaking humanitarian treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons. Currently, there is no universal set of rules controlling the global arms trade.

According to several analysts the poorly-regulated market fuels armed conflicts and causes unnecessary human suffering. In order to address the problem, Nobel Peace laureates like the Dalai Lama, Betty Williams, Elie Wiesel and José Ramos- Horta – supported by international NGOs – have been actively advocating a binding global agreement since 1997.

According to data gathered by Control Arms, a global civil society alliance, one million of the eight million firearms produced every year are lost or stolen. As many as 747,000 people are killed in armed violence annually, while ten times that number are injured.

In March of this year the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published a report showing that deliveries of conventional weapons to states in Africa had increased by an average of 110 percent during the last ten years. Deliveries to sub-Saharan Africa increased by 20 percent, while deliveries to North Africa increased by 273 percent.

The European Parliament voted Wednesday on the resolution the EU will propose at the upcoming U.N. conference. The text underlined Europe’s tremendous responsibility in the global arms trade, since EU member states account for about 30 percent of all arms exports and are among the world’s leading arms manufacturers.

The resolution also stressed that the new U.N. treaty should cover “the widest possible spectrum of conventional weapons, including small arms and light weapons and all aspects and activities of trade.”

The Parliament called for the establishment of a U.N. support unit to monitor and report on global arms exchanges while tracing possible breaches of the treaty.

Furthermore, the European Parliament wants the ATT to include strong provisions requiring states to report on all arms transfer decisions and keep records for up to 20 years. Stringent anti-corruption and transparency mechanisms would also be necessary since, according to recent estimates, the arms trade accounts for almost 40 percent of corruption in all world trade.

Political hurdles

But according to experts, some key provisions have slipped through cracks in the ambitious text.

“Although this resolution is a strong (first step), we feel disappointed that it failed to highlight the need not to undermine the socio-economic development of recipient countries,” Nicolas Vercken, Oxfam’s advocacy officer on arms transfer control in Paris, told IPS.

Wim Zwijnenburg, advocacy officer on disarmament at IKV-Pax Christi in Amsterdam, added that the EU currently forbids “export (of arms) to states where socio-economic development is low but government spending is high. This criterion has disappeared from the new resolution”, likely because the European Parliament fears several non-EU countries will not accept such a provision at the upcoming U.N. meet.

Countries against the clause, usually major arms exporters or repressive regimes, claim the policy of forbidding export to economically underdeveloped countries is ‘neocolonial’, Zwijnenburg said – an argument that masks a desire to continue selling or acquiring weapons at virtually any cost.

“Exporting countries like Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Russia, China and India are against (this clause) because they want to protect their arms trade. Recipient countries like Zimbabwe, Syria and Egypt are against the clause because of their constant need for new weaponry. But most sub-Saharan states are in favour of the criterion,” he added.

Another troubling aspect of the resolution is that it fails to mention the involvement of civil society during future arms trade negotiations. “When an arms trade deal is discussed between two nations, countries like the United States or the United Kingdom have the capacity to bring a team of ten people to the talks, including economic and legal advisors,” Zwijnenburg said.

“Most African states don’t have this capacity. That’s why we need to involve civil society in these negotioations: to be able to support the poorest states, states that are in fact mostly developing nations suffering from conflict. The new resolution makes no mention of this. Considering the fact that NGOs started the process for a treaty in the first place, it would be a pity if we (are) to be excluded from now on,” he stressed.

Despite these flaws, experts are cautiously optimistic about the European resolution and the upcoming U.N. talks. “We’re going for gold,” Vercken told IPS. “Ten years ago nobody would have dared to dream we would have gotten this far, that we would have all states on board and heading for an international agreement.”

“But we know some states only want a weak or dysfunctional treaty. It is going to be tough. And if it turns out we are heading towards a weak treaty, we will remind the negotiating states we would rather have no treaty than a weak treaty. Because a weak treaty would do nothing else but legitimise current (efforts to regulate the arms market),” he added.

(END)

With governments and international institutions focusing increasingly on a stronger role for the private sector in development aid, a new report by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) released yesterday suggests there is good reason to doubt this approach.

The report examined whether “external (non-domestic) public finance for private investments in the South lives up to promises to provide finance to credit-constrained companies in developing countries and to deliver positive development outcomes.”

To the contrary, the study found that most of the recent development investments went to tax havens and private companies from rich countries, while half of total private investments went directly into the financial sector.

In 2010 external investments to the private sector by international financial institutions (IFIs) exceeded 40 billion dollars. By 2015, the amount of public money flowing to the private sector is expected to surpass 100 billion dollars, almost one third of the total amount of aid to developing countries.

For decades, multilateral institutions and governments have invested in private companies operating in the developing world to provide aid and reduce poverty. However, since the 1990s the scale of support to private companies has increased dramatically.

The global financial crisis accelerated this process even further. The Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy and other donors have reduced their budgets for development aid because of the economic crisis. Development assistance from other European countries has come to a complete standstill despite pledges to allocate 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) to aid by 2015.

“In a time when aid budgets are being reduced, governments are looking at the private sector to fill the gaps,” Jeroen Kwakkenbos, policy and advocacy officer at Eurodad and author of report, told IPS. “At the same time the development finance institutions (DFIs), the bodies responsible for investments in the private sector, have always been around. So we asked ourselves: how do they work? What is really going on out there?”

Eurodad’s study took a closer look at the investments made by eight DFIs: the World Bank International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national development finance institutions in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden between 2006 and 2010. In total, the report analysed over 30 billion dollars worth of private sector investments in the world’s poorest countries.

According to the findings, only one fourth of all companies supported by the IFC and the EIB were based in low-income countries. Furthermore, around forty percent of the companies on the list of beneficiaries were big companies listed in some of the world’s largest stock exchanges. Almost half, 49 percent, of the total amount of development finance went to companies based in one of the 34 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

The study also showed that fifty percent of investments were made directly to the finance sector. “That is, commercial banks, hedge funds and private equity funds,” Kwakkenbos told IPS.

In that same time period, 2006-2010, the “DFIs assessed by Eurodad increased their portfolios by 190 percent”, the report stated.

“Development finance institutions say they are obliged to use these kinds of financial mechanisms because they don’t have branches in every country and can’t reach small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing nations directly,” Kwakkenbos said, adding that this method makes it impossible to assess whether SMEs in poor nations receive the aid that was meant to reach them.

“Even in Europe it’s hard to get banks to lend to (SMEs). Plus the banks do not have to disclose any information on which company they have invested in nor (are they expected) to deliver any kind of development impact assessment. There is a lot of money (floating around) but we don’t know where it is going or whether it is being used effectively.”

The report also discovered that DFIs were investing heavily in companies based in tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions. No less than 36 projects between 2006 and 2010 were commissioned to companies based in tax havens. One fourth of all investments by the EIB went to companies in a secrecy jurisdiction.

“DFIs (claim) they do this because it is the best way to attract capital,” said Kwakkenbos. “Most people working for these institutions come from the banking sector, not from the development sector. They have a very finance-oriented perspective on things.”

But this method raises very thorny questions for the future of development finance and its ability to pull the poorest countries out of debt and poverty.

“What kind of development priorities are these companies looking at? How do they align themselves with country priorities in developing nations if they keep on bypassing the government and investing directly in the private sector? And, most importantly, how do you marry profits and development objectives? What is most important in the project? Is it development outcomes or the long term return on investments?” Kwakkenbos asked.

(END)

All 27 foreign ministers of the European Union have strongly spoken out against Israeli demolitions in Area C of the West Bank. Since the beginning of 2011 not less than 60 EU-funded projects have been demolished while 110 others are currently at risk. Several analysts claim the Israeli authorities are specifically targeting EU-funded projects.

Area C comprises about 60 percent of the West Bank and is under full Israeli military and civilian control under the Oslo Accords. The EU’s focus on this area is a consequence of alarming reports that show an increase in Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes and infrastructure, including projects paid for with European taxpayer money.

The EU’s Foreign Affairs Council called on Israel Tuesday to remove restrictions on Palestinian construction and economic development projects in Area C. It also denounced settler violence against Palestinians and asked the Israeli government to prosecute such actions. Against the background of the EU meeting, development and humanitarian agencies in the West Bank compiled new data on demolitions of EU projects. According to data gathered by the Displacement Working Group, a coordinating body of international humanitarian and development NGOs in the occupied Palestinian territory, since the beginning of 2011 at least 62 structures funded by France, Netherlands, the UK, Poland, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the European Commission have been demolished by Israel. Water cisterns, animal shelters and people’s homes, among others, are on the list of demolished structures.

The Displacement Working Group also reports at least 110 structures funded by Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, UK, Ireland, Sweden and the Commission currently under risk as they have received demolition or stop-work orders from Israeli authorities. The projects at risk include renewable energy projects, water cisterns, animal shelters and water and sanitation structures.

According to another recent report compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, over a quarter of all Palestinian structures demolished in 2011 were funded by international donors including European governments and the European Union.

In response to a recent inquiry by British Member of European Parliament Chris Davies, the European Commission estimated that the cost of EU and member state funded projects damaged or demolished by the Israeli army from the beginning of 2001 until October 2011 adds up to more than 49 million euros, of which more than 29 million euros came directly from the EU. Although most of this damage took place during the Second Intifadah and the 2008 Gaza War, the Commission’s list is far from complete and leaves out the most recent data.

On Feb. 13 of this year the Israeli army demolished an ancient water cistern which had been restored by the Polish NGO Humanitarian Action with funding from the Polish Foreign Ministry. As is mostly the case, the Israeli army argued there was no permit to build the structure. The Israeli Civil Administration and army maintain the right to demolish any structure that was built without such a permit.

But human rights organisations on the ground say it is almost impossible to obtain a permit. According to recent UN data, less than one percent of Area C has been planned for Palestinian development by the Israeli Civil Administration and 94 percent of Palestinian permit applications to construct infrastructure have been rejected in recent years.

As a consequence of this policy, 10,000 Palestinian children in Area C and East Jerusalem were obliged to attend classes in tents, caravans or tin shacks at the start of the 2011 school year because of a lack of permits to build or renovate classrooms.

“The lack of permits is only one of different pretences to demolish,” Ayman Rabi from the Palestinian Hydrology Group, the largest Palestinian NGO working on water and sanitation, tells IPS. “The Israeli authorities also tell us regularly the area we are building in is a security area. In the end the demolishing does not have any legal basis.”

In the end of 2011, five solar and wind energy projects financed by the German Foreign Ministry received stop-work orders in the Massafer Yatta area in the South Hebron Hills. These villages are prevented from being connected to the Israeli electricity grid. Israeli authorities promised not to destroy the project but instead, on Jan. 11, 2012, destroyed the home and animal shelters of one of the Palestinian families the panels were being built for, crushing several of their goats.

On Apr. 23 this year, Israeli authorities demolished two water cisterns near Hebron built with funding from the French government. The aim of the French project was to improve water management and develop farmland.

“Most of the people in these areas are shepherds, whose animals need to graze,” Ayman Rabi tells IPS. “If there is no water they are forced to leave the areas they’re living in. This is exactly the aim: forcing people to leave to be able to confiscate the land and expand the settlements.”

According to last December’s EU heads of missions report on Area C, prior to 1967 between 200,000 and 320,000 Palestinians used to live in the area. Currently the number of Palestinians has dropped to 56,000 due to Israeli demolitions and restrictions. At the same time the Israeli settler population has grown from 1,200 in 1972 to 310,000 in 2010.

At the same time, several analysts presume the Israeli authorities in the occupied areas are specifically targeting European projects. After the incident with the German-funded solar and wind energy projects, the German press described Israel’s behaviour as a riposte to the EU which published a report critical of Israel’s discriminatory policy toward the Palestinians in Area C in January 2012.

“Projects in the exact same area funded by the Americans are not touched,” Ayman Rabi tells IPS, “while generally speaking, all EU projects are demolished.” (END)

In an unprecedented move, all 27 EU development ministers championed budget support Monday as an effective way of reducing poverty in developing countries. At the same time they gave the green light to a new ground-breaking initiative to prevent new humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa.

Ahead of the Rio+20 summit on sustainable development in June and this year’s new EU budget negotiations, the council of EU Development Ministers backed budget support, the aid modality in which money is given directly to the recipient country government, as an effective way to provide aid to developing countries.

All member states agreed on the official Council conclusion that they were committed to “use budget support effectively to support poverty reduction, make aid more predictable and strengthen the partner country’s ownership of development policies and reforms.”

Oxfam, together with several other NGOs who advocate budget support, applauded the Council’s decision. “This is the first time all member states are recognising the benefits of budget support,” Catherine Olier, development expert at Oxfam, told IPS.

The Council’s decision follows recent studies that have shown the effectiveness of budget support in reducing poverty. For example, last December the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report demonstrating the positive effects of budget support in Zambia, Tunisia and Mali.

In all three countries the OECD reported important achievements in education in terms of total enrolment, increased participation of girls, and access for students from poor areas. In Zambia the improved health service led to a decrease of tuberculosis, malaria and diarrhoea incidence. It also brought about a reduction of child and maternal mortality.

“With budget support you give ownership to the country to manage the funding according to their own needs. This way it helps countries to finance vital and recurrent costs,” Catherine Olier told IPS. “It allows them to pay teachers and doctors over the course of several years. It can cover the costs of the drugs to treat illnesses. Project-based aid is shorter in time and therefore less predictable, it cannot cover the costs of doctors and teachers in the long term. This is exactly what a developing country needs.”

The EU Ministers’ move to commit to budget support comes as a surprise since the aid modality has always been heavily criticised. According to many it leads to increased corruption in the recipient country.

“No method of aid is without risk,” said Olier, “but in this case there’s a lot of fear without any justification. In fact it’s the contrary: according to several studies, budget support is a good means to effectively fight corruption. Budget support is not just a blank cheque. It comes with policy dialogue. Donors start engaging with the recipient governments. It makes governments accountable towards their citizens, their parliament and civil society.”

Olier’s statements are confirmed by research. According to the conclusions of OECD’s 2011 assessment of Tunisia, Zambia and Mali, “budget support contributes to improved accountability and transparency of budgeting processes and is a valid support for the implementation of reforms, when governments and citizens are actively committed thereto.”

At the same meeting Monday afternoon, the EU’s development ministers approved a new plan to boost the prevention of hunger and famine in the Horn of Africa. Since July 2011, more than 13 million people have been facing the consequences of extreme drought. To prevent the outbreak of a new crisis, the EU is initiating the ‘Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience’ (SHARE) project. With SHARE, the EU wants to improve the transition from emergency assistance to long-term development aid.

“More than 400,000 members signed our petition urging leaders to break the cycle of famine and take action in the Horn of Africa – today shows Commissioners have listened. We now hope the EU will be able to provide additional funding for this important initiative, and member states should also step up”, Eloise Todd, director of international NGO ONE said in a press release.

“This new project is ground-breaking,” Natalia Alonso, head of Oxfam’s International EU office in Brussels, told IPS. “Until now, emergency response to humanitarian crises only went to the most urgent needs. With this new plan, the efforts will not only be spent on supplementary nutrition for malnutrioned children, but also on supplementary nutrition for a community’s lifestock. So when the crisis is over, the community will still have the means to continue its livelihood. That’s what building resilience means: adapting to the situation but looking at the future as well.”

(END)

By Daan Bauwens and - -
BRUSSELS, Mar 18 2012 (IPS)

A recent proposal to introduce a European financial transaction tax was blocked by Britain. But with Germany and France committed to push ahead, many are confident a tax will be implemented before the end of this year.

All of the European Union’s finance ministers gathered last Tuesday to debate the introduction of a financial transaction tax. The meeting was organised by the Danish presidency after nine member states – Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Finland, Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany and France – wrote a letter to Denmark on Feb. 7 insisting on a debate.

Under the current proposal, a tax of 0.1 percent would be levied on bond and equity transactions and a tax of 0.01 percent on derivatives. Other countries such as Brazil, South Korea and India have already introduced a tax on financial transactions.

Last year, approximately 29 billion euros was raised in the 40 countries that have the tax in place. In 1989 the UK government unilaterally imposed a stamp duty on transactions in UK equities of 0.5 percent. The British government annually earns between two to three billion pounds in tax revenue through the tax. The European Commission’s broader proposal would raise up to 57 billion euros per year.

Governments are facing public pressure in Europe to levy the tax after banks and private financial institutions benefited from bail-outs paid with taxpayer money during the global financial crisis. But Britain, although levies taxes on financial transactions itself, is the fiercest opponent of the European proposal. With 80 percent of Europe’s transactions taking place in the City of London, it has argued a tax would drive business away and weaken its economy.

The Czech Republic joined Britain’s opposition before Tuesday’s meeting. At the meeting, the Netherlands did not take any position but declared that Dutch research on the current proposal had produced alarming results. Swedish minister of finance Anders Borg declared that a tax would “increase the lending cost, the cost of capital for companies and the cost for governments. So it is a proposal that is not good for European growth.”

Although no noticeable progress was made, experts and the civil society are positive about what emerged from the meeting. “We’ve never been as close to an introduction as now,” Prof. Stephany Griffith-Jones, financial markets programme director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University in New York tells IPS. “Several ministers showed a pragmatic search for solutions. It is very probable that the nine member states who advocate the tax will now form a coalition of the willing.”

Max Lawson, senior policy advisor at Oxfam’s London office, agrees. “It is clear that a group of European countries will move ahead and ignore the UK’s pointless opposition,” he tells IPS.

Taxation proposals cannot be taken up in the EU without the approval of all 27 member states. However, the Lisbon Treaty specifies that one-third of the EU states can form “enhanced cooperation” to move ahead with a limited version of a proposal that affects only themselves. Many analysts are confident that Germany will take the lead in forming a coalition and that a first version of the financial transaction tax will be put in place before the end of 2012.

The question arises what the tax revenue will be used for once the tax is introduced. “At a time where most European governments are constrained it should be used for fiscal consolidation,” Prof. Griffith-Jones tells IPS. “After that you can increase government spending. The other possibilty would be to raise other taxes less so that aggregate demand is lifted.”

Civil society is demanding the money is not exclusively spent on domestic purposes. “Last year, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel declared she was open to potentially using some of the revenues to finance climate change and development,” Max Lawson tells IPS.

“Francois Hollande, the socialist opponent of Nicolas Sarkozy in the upcoming French presidential elections, has stated up to three times he would spend the revenue on climate change and development. The big fight for civil society is to hold Germany and France up to their promise.”

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BERLIN, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

Germany is capable of producing as much solar energy as the rest of the world together. But now the German government is proposing dramatic cuts in subsidies for solar panels. They say consumer demand is so high it can no longer support the technology.

A protester in Berlin demands restoration of subsidies for solar energy. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

Germany has a production capacity of more than 25,000 megawatts. In December 2011 alone, a record 7,500 megawatts capacity was added to the German solar park. That is the equivalent of five average nuclear power plants. On sunny days, solar power can provide up to 25 percent of the country’s energy.

The success of solar power in Germany is led by a generous subsidy policy to promote renewables, especially photovoltaic cells. In the German subsidy system, utility companies are obliged to pay people who generate their own solar power, for instance with photovoltaic cells on the roofs of their houses.

Germany has also seen cooperatives renting space on the roofs of public buildings for the placement of solar panels. Over the years, the German energy capacity output has more than doubled the government’s projected target.

But at the end of last month, German Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen and Economy Minister Phillip Roesler proposed a plan to cut subsidies for solar power by almost 30 percent. The decision follows similar subsidy cuts in the UK, Italy and France last year. In Germany subsidies had already been cut 50 percent over the last three years.

To avoid a last-minute boom, ministers Roettgen and Roesler proposed on Feb. 23 that the cuts would be implemented on Mar. 9, giving the industry no more than two weeks to prepare for the change. This proposal sparked anger in the solar industry and amongst environmentalists, resulting in protests at Berlin’s Brandenburger Gate.

“This decision will kill the market for solar energy,” says Stefan Hief, CEO of Cosmoenergy, manufacturer of photovoltaic cells. “If there have to be cuts, they should not be as drastic as the government is proposing. This way, we are going to lose thousands of jobs in the sector, at a time when we are the world leaders in solar power production and the German public is in favour of renewables. For us, this decision comes down to nothing but a total solar phase-out,” he tells IPS.

In an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel, the German solar industry association BSW-Solar stated that the proposed cuts would “undermine Germany’s position as an international textbook example for solar power.” As a result of the German goverment’s recent declarations, employees at the American solar panel manufacturer First Solar in Brandenburg have now been obliged to start working halftime.

It is not clear why the German government wants to cut the subsidies. According to some sources, the cuts are intended to channel more money into other renewables such as wind energy. But the main reason could be that, because of the success of solar power, the costs are getting too high for the German government. The December addition of 7,500 megawatts of solar panels led to a subsidy of more than 8 billion euros.

Power companies, obliged to pay people who generate their own solar power, pass the extra costs on to the consumers in their electricity bill. The goverment says it has to decrease the financial burden on consumers by lessening the subsidies.

But according to Dr. Cornelia Ziehm at the Deutsche Umwelthilfe (German Environmental Aid) in Berlin, the reasons are mostly political. “It is true there is a problem,” she admits to IPS, “the amount of money being put into the solar industry is high. But more than this, in this time of crisis the German minister of economy Roesler was in need of a new theme to tackle. He discovered the subsidies for solar energy were quite high so he proposed to cut them as a means to reduce costs for the German citizens.

“This idea was not warmly welcomed by the Ministry of Environment,” Cornelia Ziehm says. “But since last summer’s decision to completely phase out nuclear energy by 2020 after the Fukushima disaster, environment minister Roettgen has been under a lot of pressure by several people in his party, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). Some CDU politicians are in favour of nuclear energy and still don’t agree with the phase-out, but voted for it under pressure of CDU President Angela Merkel. This decision can be seen as a contra-revolution within the CDU.”

Following protests at Brandenburger Gate Monday last week, an official spokesperson declared the subsidy cuts will not come into force before Apr. 1.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens and - -
BERLIN, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

Women have been at the forefront of each uprising in the Arab world. Last week, the ‘8 Arab Women Filmmakers’ festival offered a platform to Arab women directors to give their perspectives on the future of the region.

Nadia El Fani. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS.

“The idea was born three years ago at a meeting between Latin American and Arab women filmmakers in Cairo,” Paola Rodriguez Sickert, an internationally renowned Chilean-German documentary filmmaker and one of the festival’s curators tells IPS. “At the meeting, I discovered a lot of similarities between the Latin American and Arab cultures. Since then, I wanted to organise an Arab women film festival in Europa, but after the Arab Spring the idea got a totally new dimension.”

“All the news we hear about Arab women comes to us through the media,” Chus Lopez Vidal, a Spanish- German video artist and the festival’s other curator, tells IPS. “Western reporting about Arab women makes us believe they are oppressed by men, and mostly the discussion draws down to one thing: the headscarf.

“We realised that this image doesn’t even come close to reality. Arab women are stronger and more powerful than we think, and they do take part in their societies. So we wanted to bring these women to Berlin, let them show their films and we asked the audience to do nothing but hear them out. We made a platform for these women to speak freely.”

At the festival, both short fiction films as long documentary films were shown. ‘Forbidden’ (2011) by co- curator Amal Ramsis describes the Egyptian people’s daily confrontations with numerous bans and regulations just before the uprising. It will be screened at the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague later this month.

The semi-animated ‘Kingdom of Women’ (2010) by the Palestinian artist and activist Dahna Abourahme tells the story of how Palestinian women in the Lebanese refugee camp Ein el-Hilweh organised their lives in the midst of war.

One of the main features of the festival was ‘Ni Allah, ni Maître’ (Nor God, nor Master, 2011) by Franco- Tunisian documentary filmmaker Nadia El Fani, which was also screened at last year’s Cannes film festival. The film caused a hate campaign by Tunisian Islamists who won last October’s vote.

“I cannot return to my country, there currently are six indictments against me,” Nadia El Fani tells IPS, “all of them caused by this movie. The Islamists found the title of the movie insulting to God and to religion. When I declared on Tunisian television that I was an atheist, they accused me of inciting hatred against religion.”

In the film, El Fani has numerous discussions with people about laicism on the streets of Tunis during the beginning of the uprising. “I was heavily criticised at the time,” she tells IPS. “People told me: this is not the time to talk about laicism. Now the Islamists are demanding the Sharia to be the founding principle for the new Tunisian constitution. So I think I was right during the revolution to say: this is the time to speak about laicism. You cannot discuss, let alone talk about laicism on the day the Sharia becomes the new constitution.”

Even though she is now living in exile, El Fani remains optimistic: “This is the beginning and we are a minority, but one day we will win. It’s not because we’ve lost the battle today that you should stop fighting.”

In the short fiction film ‘A Game’ (2010), 26-year-old director Marwa Zein from Sudan takes a closer look at personal relationships in the Arab world. In the film, based on a short story by Italian writer Alberto Moravia, a divorced mother and daughter exchange roles for a brief moment.

“Being divorced is not accepted in the Arab world,” Marwa Zein says, “it is a curse, but at the same time divorce is getting more and more widespread in our region. So there’s a certain doubleness in our culture: everybody knows it, it happens everywhere but nobody talks about it and if you ignore the problem, it doesn’t exist. It works like this from East to West in Arab communities. People are having serious problems with it, but instead of trying to solve the problem, they hide it.

“As an effect we are having an unhealthy society,” Marwa Zein continues, “we are having a double life, a double character and it is psychologically exhausting. But the youth and the artists, the people who are leading the revolution and are trying to change our society, they are the people who are trying to be themselves. This revolution is not the end, it is only the beginning. It’s a long road to freedom and we have to walk it. It will help the whole of society to express itself in a free way.”

Other screened films were ‘Letter to my Sister’ (2006) by the Algerian documentary filmmaker Habiba Djahnine, ‘Damascus Roof and Tales of Paradise’ (2010) by Syrian director Soudade Kaadan, ‘Lemon Flowers’ (2007) by Lebanese documentary filmmaker Pamela Ghanimeh, and ‘Shouting in the Dark’ (2010) by the American journalist for Al Jazeera May Ying Welsh.

During the six days the eight directors were staying in Berlin, curators and filmmakers Paola Rodriguez Sickert and Chus Lopez Vidal gathered footage of every interview, screening and public discussion, to make a new documentary which will soon be shown all over the world.

Excerpt:

While the international community discusses Somalia’s future in London and Brussels, European and Somali non-governmental organisations are calling for a radical shift from a military to a humanitarian approach as the only solution to the country’s war-torn condition.

Somalia has still not recovered from its last humanitarian crisis. Six months after the United Nations declared a famine in the country, more than 325, 000 children are still suffering from acute malnutrition. Though last summer’s response from the international community and civil society did succeed in saving many lives, expulsions of aid agencies and internationally backed military operations still impede humanitarian assistance from reaching those who are most in need.

During the London Somalia Conference last Thursday, world leaders reached an agreement on seven key areas to put an end to Somalia’s precarious situation, including security, piracy, terrorism, humanitarian assistance, local stability, a reinstallment of the political process and international cooperation.

Talks about the country will resume at the European Union Foreign Affairs meeting starting next Monday in Brussels.

Although NGOs applaud the international community’s initiative and effort to help Somalia, the proposed seven key areas were received with mixed feelings.

“What we had hoped for was a recognition that twenty years of internationally imposed solutions have failed. However, what we’ve seen once again were externally driven solutions that haven’t worked, aren’t working and will not work,” Barbara Stocking from Oxfam International said in a press release on Thursday.

Oxfam is demanding that the international community radically shift its approach in order to effectively brighten Somalia’s future. In its new report ‘Putting the Interests of Somali People First’, the organisation states that although responsibility for Somalia’s crisis lies foremost with factions inside the country, international engagement has at times made matters worst.

For many governments involved in Somalia, military action is seen as a means of providing security and stability, but reports from inside tell a different story.

“Setting out a new approach by shifting the emphasis away from anti-piracy and security concerns and taking practical steps towards an inclusive political process must be at the top of Europe’s agenda if it is serious about bringing long-term peace and security to ordinary Somalis and the region,” Natalia Alonso, Head of Oxfam’s EU office in Brussels, stated in a press release on Wednesday.

“For more than twenty years foreign armies have been coming in and going out of Somalia, without any success,” Tidhar Wald, Oxfam’s EU humanitarian policy advisor told IPS. “What we need right now is an inclusive, Somali-led peace process. Somalis themselves should have a say in the solution the international community is outlining. If you look at the conferences that are taking place right now, you can clearly see there are not enough Somali voices taking part in the decision-making.”

Oxfam’s standpoint is reflected on the ground in Somalia itself.

“The last twenty years have seen numerous military interventions in Somalia,” Aydris Daar, CEO of the Wajir South Development Association (WASDA) in Juba, Somalia, told IPS. “Whenever they occurred, they led to an increase of conflicts inside the country. And when conflicts increase, regular people do not have time to attend to ther daily work, children cannot go to school and there is no time or space to do business, which affects the economic situation. Military actions in Somalia have never improved the humanitarian situation,” he said.

According to WASDA, any solution for Somalia’s war-torn condition should be fully grounded in a humanitarian principle.

“International action should not lead to further suffering in Somalia,” Aydris Daar told IPS, “The solution must come from within  but before that can happen, we need support: funding for Somalia must be (long term), so it can go beyond relief into recovery and development. Seventy percent of the people in Somalia are younger than 35; it is their poverty and unemployment that is pushing them to take sides in the conflicts. This is what is fuelling conflicts in Somalia.”

(END)

The island of Jersey figures as one of the largest exporters of bananas to Europe, due to multinational tax dodging practices. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Daan Bauwens and - -
BRUSSELS, Nov 28 2011 (IPS)

Not corruption but multinational tax dodging is the main reason why developing nations stay aid-dependent, says a new report. And while new proposals by the European Commission try to tackle the problem, they turn a blind eye towards tax havens.

The island of Jersey figures as one of the largest exporters of bananas to Europe, due to multinational tax dodging practices. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“It is estimated that more than a trillion dollars per year is flying out of developing countries,” Marta Ruiz, senior policy and advocacy officer at Eurodad and co-writer of the report, tells IPS. And “more than half of this amount is related to activities conducted by international companies.”

According to Eurodad, multinationals shift profits away to other countries by making use of trade mispricing. “Trade is manipulated between subsidiaries of the same international company operating in different countries,” Ruiz explains. “Goods are sold to the subsidiary abroad at a much lower price than the market price, just to minimise the profits made in the country of origin.”

The report launched Nov. 21 gives two examples of trade mispricing: one U.S. company operating in a developing nation appeared to import plastic buckets from its subsidiary in the Czech republic at a price of 972.98 dollars each, while another U.S. company exported car seats to Belgium for 1.66 dollars each.

“The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has calculated that more than half of world trade is intra-group,” says Ruiz. “The clear implication is that taxes on profits are not paid to the country where the economic activity is taking place.”

As Eurodad’s detailed overview demonstrates, profits are made in countries which have a close to zero tax rate. These are the so-called tax haven islands such as Jersey, the Isle of Man or the Cayman Islands. But European countries like Belgium, Switzerland or Luxembourg are also named on the list of tax havens.

Eurodad’s report cites an investigation done in 2007 by the British newspaper The Guardian. According to this investigation, channel island Jersey is one of the largest exporters of bananas to Europe, even though every banana boat from Africa or the Caribbean travels directly to the consumer country.

But on paper, these banana boats follow a complex journey on which they stop at a half a dozen offshore financial centres where they are sold to subsidiaries before they reach the European mainland. The data show that for every euro that is spent on bananas in Europe, only one cent of taxable profit is reported to the producer countries.

Another cited study from 2010 shows how Google, a U.S. company, is shifting profits away. Google located its European head office in Dublin, where corporate income taxes are low. But Google Ireland is also owned by Google Bermuda, a country without corporate taxes. Last year, Bloomberg revealed that Google cut its taxes by 3.1 billion dollars during the last three years thanks to the use of tax havens.

“This is a global problem,” says Ruiz. “These practices are taking place all over the world, they are related to the current critical situation in Europe. Lots of these companies are European but they are not even paying the taxes they should at home.

“But from a development perspective, we stress that it these practices that are endangering each developing country’s ability to eradicate poverty and to work out a sustainable development strategy.”

Eurodad’s report was launched only three weeks after the European Commission proposed new legislation on corporate accountability. Under the new rules, EU companies in the extractive and forestry sectors would have to disclose all payments to the governments in countries where they operate. The proposal is aimed at tackling the corruption which prevents those living in poverty from benefiting from the raw materials in their countries.

But experts regard the proposed directive to be highly problematic. Richard Murphy, an international tax expert who was present at the launch of the Eurodad report, tells IPS “The proposal will be of benefit, but not nearly as much benefit as we want.

“It will help to hold developing country governments to account because we know how much money they receive. But we will not know if the amount they get is the right amount because we won’t know how much profit is made in those countries. It is only a tiny step forward.”

According to the Eurodad report, only five percent of the illicit financial outflows from developing countries is related to corruption, while criminal-related flows represent 30 percent. The remaining 65 percent is related to trade mispricing.

Ruiz says “the EC’s proposal is a welcome step, but it only tackles corruption, while tax dodging is the greatest source of illicit capital flight. Reporting rules must reveal this picture and apply to all sectors, not just extractives and forestry.”

In its report, Eurodad proposes a country-by-country reporting scheme. The system, originally conceived of by tax expert Murphy and applauded by European leaders and the European Parliament, requires transparency on the part of all multinational companies with respect to their operations around the world.

“When they are present in one hundred countries, we would like to know which countries, what activity they conduct in each of them and under which name,” says Ruiz

“At the moment this data is not available. The country-by-country standard would provide indications to tax authorities which are weak in developing countries. It could help shed light on suspicious cases of abusive practices and therefore help identify cases that need further investigation.”

Excerpt:

Zambia has recently been categorised as a middle-income country, yet two-thirds of the country's population live on less than two dollars per day. Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Oct 31 2011 (IPS)

Last week the European Commission unveiled its ‘Agenda for Change’, a new policy framework outlining priorities for the European Union’s development aid and detailing the Commission’s renewed focus on economic growth as a means of poverty reduction, particularly in the world’s poorest countries.

However, while many have applauded this new agenda, international NGOs fear that several developing nations, especially middle-income countries, now risk loosing the Commission’s much-needed financial support. NGOs also raised questions about the role of the private sector in the new agenda.

The EU is the world’s biggest donor of official development aid: With an annual budget of 53.8 billion euros, the European Commission (EC) and member states delivered more than half of total global development aid in 2010. The EC singlehandedly manages and distributes 11 billion euros worth of EU development funds.

To increase the effectiveness of existing aid, the EC organised several rounds of consultations with global partners, governments, private sector actors and NGOs this year, resulting in the publication of the ‘Agenda for Change’ on Oct. 13.

This document was subsequently discussed at an open stakeholder meeting on Oct. 19 during which Development Commissioner Andris Pielbags stressed the EC’s commitment to focus on “sustainable and inclusive growth”, a policy that includes supporting good governance, respect for human rights and democracy, gender equality, the role of civil society and the fight against corruption.

The agenda also prioritises social protection, health, education, supporting a favourable business environment, sustainable agriculture and clean energy.

Most major international NGOs welcomed the Commission’s focus areas, particularly commitments to crack down on corruption and invest in agriculture, but continue to voice serious concerns about the Commission’s focus on economic growth.

“Basically, the Commission is telling us that greater economic growth is a means of tackling poverty,” Laura Sullivan, an expert in EU development policy for the international NGO ActionAid, told IPS.

“We agree growth is a necessary condition (for poverty reduction) but it’s not the only one,” she said.

“Nigeria, for instance, has had growth rates Europe can only dream of. At the same time, Nigeria has one of the highest poverty rates in the world because of the high levels of inequality in the country.”

“Here we clearly see growth is not trickling down to the poorest,” she added.

The Commission is also considering cutting aid to middle-income countries: nations that fall into a middle-income range set by the World Bank’s world development indicators. Between them, these countries account for almost half of the world’s population.

“The list of middle-income countries contains emerging economies like India and China, but also includes Senegal, Congo, Zambia, Ghana and Namibia,” Sullivan told IPS. “It’s important to bear in mind that 75 percent of the world’s poorest people live in middle-income countries. There’s a risk that development aid will be cut to countries that still need it.”

“For instance, Zambia is a country where two-thirds of the population live on less than two dollars a day,” Sullivan stressed. “The gap between rich and poor is immense. At the same time, Zambia has recently been categorised as a middle-income country. What would the EU’s new strategy mean for Zambia? We are concerned that if you turn off the taps overnight, ultimately people will suffer.”

Natalia Alonso, head of Oxfam International’s EU office, told IPS, “Aid is intended to reduce poverty and should therefore be direced where it’s most needed. Middle-income countries are equipped with robust governmental structures, so these are the places where aid is most effective, where it can fully trigger change. It is very hard to do this in fragile states,” she added.

According to the Commission, no solid decision has yet been taken on the question of middle-income countries.

“We will indeed cut official development assistance to countries that don’t need it anymore,” Catherine Ray, spokesperson for Commissioner Pielbags told IPS. “This concerns emerging economies like Brazil, India and China. But that does not mean we will fully stop all support. We will continue to donate to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, as well as support other initiatives that are active in Brazil, India and China.”

“Regarding the other middle-income countries, we are now studying which of them should continue to receive official development assistance and which countries would benefit from other, more specific types of funding,” Ray added. “Of course, we’ll take the level of inequality and the degree of fragility (in each country) into account.”

In spite of these assurances, NGOs are still troubled, particularly by the creeping influence of the private sector as a development actor.

“The Commission wants to put public money into the private sector as a means of generating more funding,” Sullivan told IPS. “We agree with that, as long as this money is (funneled) into domestic, small- and medium-sized enterprises. That’s where you can really make a change in people’s lives. Too many times in the past we’ve seen public money flowing to foreign multinationals via the World Bank.”

“If we engage the private sector, would it have the same goal as all of us, namely poverty reduction? That is not clear,” Alonso said, adding that the Commissions remains very vague about defining the specific role of the private sector.

But Ray believes that, “If you want growth, you need the private sector. You cannot do without it.”

“So the first objective of the commissioner is to develop a local private sector,” she added.

“Economies in Africa, Latin America and Asia are growing. There are a number of countries on track towards eliminating poverty. They are starting to create jobs and attract foreign investment. So our job doesn’t entail simply delivering aid anymore. We want to help these countries build the conditions for sustainable growth that is long-term, respectful of the environment and fairly distributed,” she concluded.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Oct 19 2011 (IPS)

The new European Commission proposals on a Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) have dropped every reference to development obligations, NGOs point out. They will not stop the European Union from threatening food security in developing nations, they say.

CAP is a European Union system which mainly consists of agriculture subsidies and programmes. It currently represents 48 percent of the EU’s budget, equalling about 55 billion euros.

The European Commission published its new CAP proposals last Thursday. “We have to make sure money is spent in a fair and more effective way,” Roger Waite, spokesperson for the European Commission, tells IPS. “In the new proposals, we put the emphasis on sustainability, greening agriculture, and making sure agriculture helps the whole of society.”

But one day before the publication, the European development NGO confederation CONCORD released a press statement saying the new CAP proposals had dropped every reference to Europe’s development obligations. According to article 208 of the Lisbon Treaty, Europe is legally bound to take all effects of its policies on developing nations into account.

This is the so-called Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) principle. While the latest EU Parlament Resolution in July 2011 and the original Commission communication from November 2010 featured a commitment to PCD, the new proposals do not mention it.

“We are not against farmers, nor are we against farming in Europe,” Laust Leth Gregersen, policy officer at CONCORD Denmark tells IPS. “Our only concern is that sustaining agriculture in Europe must not hamper food security outside of Europe, especially in developing countries.

“All around the globe, you can find developing nations where artificially cheaper exports from the European Union squeeze local farmers out of the production chain and out of their local markets. This leads to food insecurity. The only sustainable solution to world hunger is to increase productivity in developing countries where people live.”

According to the United Nations, last year 925 million people went hungry, equalling one in seven people worldwide. At the same time a third of the food produced for human consumption is thrown away. CONCORD says that by dropping its development obligations, the European Commission is not taking its responsibility in tackling world hunger. As the Commission is not committing to phase out export subsidies, the EU can continue to export below full production costs.

“It is true phasing out export subsidies has not been mentioned in our proposals,” the European Commission’s Roger Waite tells IPS, “but this is an offer Europe has repeatedly made during negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), on condition that everybody else would get rid of their trade distorting export subsidies.

“We are not going to disarm unilaterally, but at the same time we have to stress that our use of export refunds has come down massively in recent years. This year the budget for export refunds is less than 0.5 percent of the total CAP budget. The Commission remains committed to phasing out export refunds in the long run, but only within the context of the WTO.”

According to the European Commission, reducing its internal support for agriculture isn’t an option either. “You would see a concenration of production in the most efficient areas, which of course would have a negative environmental impact. But at the same stage, we would more and more see desertification in the more periferal regions which would mean in the long term, we would be reducing our potential because it’s always difficult to restart once you have given up farming.”

CONCORD says the continued subsidies will still lead to higher levels of production and higher levels of export. “Besides, basically it is not a question of subsidies,” says Laust Leth Gregersen, “it’s about how we manage our relations with developing countries. If developing countries were allowed to have the policy space to save their own markets, the case would be rather different. But they don’t.”

According to CONCORD, the new CAP proposals should include mechanisms that analyse its impacts on the developing world. For instance, farmers’ organisations in countries that are EU trading partners should be given adequate space to be heard. A process should follow to revise situations where it is proven imports of EU products have a negative impact on local markets.

“Way too often we see the Commission argue that there is no external impact. To design a policy and to discuss it in a meaningful way is difficult when you have one party just denying that there is an external impact. It is not our mandate to design the European agricultural policy in detail, but our purpose is to bring the stories of farmers outside of Europe, start monitoring and start the dialogue,” says Gregersen.

After a debate in the European Parliament and Council, the approval of the new CAP proposals is planned for the end of 2013. The reformed CAP should come into effect in the beginning of 2014.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Sep 10 2011 (IPS)

The European Commission has decided to push for more ambitious reforms ahead of the aid effectiveness summit to be held in Busan later this year. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is looking for a common EU position that could save the EU 4 billion euros which can be spent on additional aid.

But NGOs have expressed concern about the Commission’s new proposal to drop several indicators of aid effectiveness. They have doubts about the recommendation to blend loans and grants from development banks and donors to leverage additional development funding. The European Commission does not clarify in its report how and which financial institutions are going to be chosen, and how the social impact of the aid will be tracked, experts say.

The European Commission has prepared a report ahead of the high level forum on aid effectiveness in Busan, Korea, to be held from Nov. 29 to Dec 1. The report has been sent to all EU member states who now have to decide on a common position at the summit.

The Commission’s communication highlights the fact that the EU has made considerable progress in improving its aid effectiveness policy. Currently, the EU is the world’s biggest donor, giving 53 billion euros to partner countries. “We are happy to note that the way we offer aid is better now than ever before,” Catherine Ray, spokeswoman for the EC’s development department tells IPS. “There is a lot more aid transparency than five years ago. But now we have to go further.”

In the report, the Commission suggests implementation of the Paris and Accra agreements more closely. The Paris agreement was adopted at the second High Level Forum on aid effectiveness. It lays out an action-oriented roadmap to improve the quality of aid by suggesting a series of specific measures and a monitoring system to assess progress and to make sure donors and recipients hold each other accountable for their commitments. The Accra agreement was developed to accelerate the advancement towards the Paris targets.

One of the proposed reforms is stronger coordination between donors. “We can achieve this by joint programming,” Catherine Ray tells IPS. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, high representative for foreign affairs of the EU Catherine Ashton declared to the United Nations that the EU would jointly deliver aid, for the first time ever. Since July 2011 the EU is also using joint aid programming in South Sudan.

According to the Commission, the number of these practices have to increase. “Studies show that if we better coordinate aid policies and programming by member states and the EU, we can save up to 4 billion euros,” says Ray. “And we also need better coordination on an international level. Countries as the United States, France, Italy, Canada and Belgium, but also institutions such as the Commission all have their own aid programmes. These should all be tuned into each other.”

But civil society is looking at dangers inherent in such moves. “At present there are 15 indicators of aid effectiveness,” Franz Berger, aid effectiveness coordinator at CONCORD, the European Confederation of Relief and Development NGOs, tells IPS. “The Commission proposes to drop seven of them. We are very critical of this; it decreases the gobal accountability and peer pressure on donors.”

CONCORD is also highly sceptical about the Commission’s suggestion to involve the private sector in development aid. “That is our biggest concern,” says Franz Berger. “The report does not explain why more private sector involvement makes aid more effective.”

Both NGOs and the Commission agree the private sector has to be developed in recipient countries to eradicate poverty. “But some EU countries only use their development aid to open new markets for their companies,” says Berger. “There is a very thin line between the EU who wants new global opportunities for their own companies, and developing a local private sector in developing countries.”

The confederation of NGOs says the Commission’s report makes no mention of increasing untying of aid. ‘Tied aid’ is aid in which all purchases for development are made from firms in the donor country. A study by by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) released earlier this week revealed that two-thirds of all development aid is channeled to companies in the donor country.

Currently 82 percent of EU development aid is officially untied, although the EU’s 2010 target was 87 percent. But according to Eurodad’s study, most untied contracts still go to firms from rich countries.

Reacting to the NGO’s comments, Ray tells IPS: “Untying aid is an important issue. We have increased national purchasing of goods and services during the last five years, but we have to strike the proper balance to make sure that the taxpayer’s money is given to entities – NGOs, institutions, governments and companies – that can ensure the highest level of accountability and management standards.”

Finally, the Commission recommends blending loans and grants from donors and development banks such as the European Investment Bank or the African Development Bank as a way to raise money to leverage additional development fund.

“The argument is that there is too little aid and therefore aid should be used to provide incentives for private companies and banks to invest in developing countries,” says Berger. “But private companies are looking for profit and growth, and there is no evidence this will really help lift people out of poverty. Instead of downplaying the role of aid, we think the EU should live up to its commitment to provide 0.7 percent of their GNI (gross national income) as aid, which they promised to reach in 2015. The EU will have to mobilise more than 50 billion extra to reach this goal.”

EU Development Ministers have until Nov. 14 to work out the EU’s position based on the European Commission’s report.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Sep 6 2011 (IPS)

Development aid is ineffective mostly because it is tied to contracts worth billions of dollars awarded to firms in developed countries in a phenomenon called boomerang aid, a new study says.

The study by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), released Tuesday, shows that more than two-thirds of all aid contracts are bagged by companies in the developed countries.

Eurodad is a network of 58 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from 19 European countries that researches and works on issues related to debt, development finance and poverty reduction.

The new study was released ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum in Busan, South Korea, that will bring together the world’s governments and stakeholders in November to consider how to make aid more effective.

Eurodad examined case studies in Namibia, Ghana, Uganda, Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Bolivia to arrive at its conclusions, one of which links aid effectiveness with procurement, or the purchase of goods and services in implementing aid.

Procurement refers to the awarding of contracts to private companies for aid projects such as building roads, supplying drugs or delivering schoolbooks to poor countries.

Few poor countries have managed to become independent from international aid. This is partly due to donors’ procurement practices, the report states.

“We found that most aid never enters the economy of a developing nation,” says Bodo Ellmers, a Eurodad policy officer who spent two years preparing the report.

According to official statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the total amount of official development assistance in 2009 was 92 billion euro (128 billion dollars).

“Most people think these 92 billion euro were given to developing countries, but, when you take a look at the aid contracts, two-thirds were awarded to companies in the North, only benefiting the North’s economy.

“That’s one of the main reasons why aid is not steering development, including decent jobs and higher incomes,” Ellmers told IPS.

“Aid doesn’t work as well as it could because it is not delivered in the way it should be delivered,” Nuria Molina, director at Eurodad, told IPS. “It is striking to see that most of the aid never gets pumped into the economy of a developing nation.”

In 2001, countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development signed the first agreements to untie aid. ‘Tied aid’ refers to aid in which all purchases for development aid are made from firms in the donor country.

Notwithstanding the promises made 10 years ago, 20 percent of all bilateral aid is currently still tied, says the Eurodad study. Furthermore, most untied contracts still go to firms from rich countries.

The study shows that half of the contract value in World Bank-funded projects in the last decade went to firms from donor countries, with the share increasing with the size of the contract. In 2008, 67 percent of all World Bank-financed contracts went to firms from just 10 countries.

According to Ellmers, this is a consequence of World Bank procurement practices.

Most recipient countries are pressured to allow transnational companies to bid for contracts. “The message often is: we will give aid if you open up your market for international competition,” Ellmers said.

“The company that offers the best value for money will get the contract, but then we miss out on the fact that most developing countries are undeveloped exactly because they don’t have companies that can compete on a global scale.”

Eurodad pleads for ‘smart procurement’ and preferential access for local or regional companies to be awarded aid contracts.

“If we want to build a road in Ghana, we should give the contract to a Ghanian company,” Ellmers said. “It gives us double dividend: the road will be built, but most importantly there will be new jobs, income and increased capacity.”

Smart procurement also means imposing conditions on contractors that ensures that aid contributes to sustainable development. “It makes no sense to employ local people if they stay poor or become sick during the job,” says Ellmers.

“It doesn’t make sense either if the aid project ruins the environment. The awarded companies have to take social and environmental criteria into account.”

Molina is convinced that the Eurodad study can change the way people look at development aid. “There is a powerful stereotype that corruption or lack of capacities in developing countries are the only reasons why aid doesn’t work effectively.”

The study, Molina said, brings a strong message about donor co-responsibility in making aid work. “I hope this message is strong enough to make donor countries and development banks rethink their policies.”

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Sep 1 2011 (IPS)

There is increasing political will now for a globalised strategy for the European Union to raise awareness about development, experts say. But at the same time, the European budget for education on development issues remains strikingly low.

The European Union lacks an explicit strategy on development education, experts said at a first ever hearing on the subject at the European Parliament on Tuesday. The event was organised by the EU Parliament’s Development Committee.

Most European states already have national policies on development education. Recently, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic set up strategies to ensure greater public engagement in development matters. The UK currently does not have a national strategy as the current government revises its policies on awareness raising.

The European Commission and the member states annually spend 30 million euros on development education. “This amount is specifically dedicated to education projects in Europe by civil society and local authorities. That includes formal education activities in schools, non-formal activities with youth organisations and awareness raising campaigns such as the Clean Clothes Campaign,” says Tobias Troll, advocacy officer at the Developing Europeans’ Engagement for the Eradication of global Poverty (DEEEP), the development education programme of CONCORD, the European Confederation of Relief and Development NGOs.

According to Troll, the EU’s development education budget is not used to fund activities aimed at fundraising, promotion of aid or publicity for organisations. Several politicians said at the meeting of the Parliament’s development committee that they would support actions to increase awareness on development issues.

Polish member of the European Parliament (MEP) Filip Kaczmarek said development education “strengthens the support to active engagement at the local and global level to promote justice, human rights, and sustainable development.”

Development Commissioner Andris Pielbags said the EU should “step up its efforts not just to achieve general support for development, but also real engagement on the part of our citizens. I believe we can have a real impact on attitudes and perceptions, and I am willing to support actions that strive to achieve just that.”

According to the latest European Commission’s ‘Eurobarometer’, real engagement among European citizens is very low: although 89 percent of all Europeans attach a high value to development cooperation, only four percent actively engage in it through volunteering.

Also, the money spent on development education remains low. According to a recent report by AidWatch, a group of civil society aid experts across the 27 EU member states, this year the EU and its member states combined will spend 53.82 billion euros on aid. Of this, the European Union institutions provide close to 13 billion euros. But only 30 million euros from this budget is spent on development education.

“Compared to the important amount spent on development aid to overseas countries, European citizens do not have a large amount of money spent on informing them about development,” Daniel Puglisi, communications officer at CONCORD, tells IPS. Tobias Troll at DEEEP agrees: “The funding is not enough: for the 2007 call for project proposals only 39 out of 343 applications were selected. Every year, many very positively evaluated projects have to be rejected due to lack of funding.”

Currently, only 0.38 percent of the European Commission’s official development assistance budget is spent on development education. The United Nations, as well as several NGOs ask for at least 3 percent.

“Despite the high support for development policy there is still a lack of understanding about global issues,” Daniel Puglisi adds. “Clearly more can be done to engage EU citizens in the story behind global inequalities.” According to Rili Lappalainen, CONCORD board member and one of the Parliamentary hearing’s panelists, “getting European citizens to be more aware of global issues is fundamental; they need to know the story behind immigration, poverty and global inequalities.”

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
STRASBOURG, Jul 6 2011 (IPS)

A crucial proposal to move to higher climate targets in the EU was resolutely voted down Tuesday after amendments by Conservatives heavily watered down the proposal. Several members of parliament blame business lobbying for the loss, even though dozens of corporations called out for higher climate goals.

One year ago, European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard launched the proposal to unconditionally move to 30 percent cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2020. This step would make it substantially easier to achieve the 80-95 percent CO2 cuts that Europe wants to attain by 2050.

Furthermore, projections made by the European Commission have shown that the European Union is on a trajectory of meeting the 20 percent cuts by 2020 without any extra effort by industry.

The Parliamentary Comittee for Environment (ENVI), led by green Member of Parliament (MEP) Bas Eickhout, investigated the proposal and came up with an ambitious draft resolution. According to the resolution, the EU should pledge to cut its emissions by 30 percent by 2020. Limited offsets must be allowed, but 25 percent of the emission reduction should be achieved domestically.

Moreover, the draft pointed out that this strategy could create up to six million new jobs in green sectors and provide a needed boost to the European economy. The draft resolution was approved in the Comittee on May 24, but still had to make its way through the plenary voting in the Parliament.

The report did not survive the plenary. After an orchestrated action by a group of Conservative and centre-right MEPs, the proposal was watered down to such an extent that Bas Eickhout himself called for the rejection of the report. ‘With a mere surplus of three votes, the conservatives voted in favour of amendments that took the core out of my proposal,” Eickhout told IPS.

One of these amendments stated that all emission reductions should only be achieved by saving energy, another amendment said that the proposed emission reductions should not be binding. “If the proposal would have been approved including the conservative arguments, we would have been warped back in time,” said Eickhout. “In 2008, we had already agreed on a binding target of 20 percent by 2020. With the new amendments, the 2008 resolution would not make sense any more.”

Watering down the initial proposal, the European conservatives clearly sided with industry lobbyists who have been resisting every form of European climate policy since 2008. Ever since Bas Eickhout reopened the discussion about higher climate goals at the beginning of 2011, industry lobby groups have launched a campaign against higher climate targets, arguing that it would harm the economy and lead to job losses.

Documents compiled by the Brussels-based NGO Corporate Europe Observatory show lobby groups BusinessEurope, representing employers’ federations, Eurofer, the European steel manufacturer’s association, and CEFIC, the association of the European chemical industry, have intensively lobbied the Commission and Parliament to prevent them from approving the new climate legislation.

In letters to Climate Commissioner Hedegaard and several MEPs, BusinessEurope complained about the fact that emission reductions should be achieved domestically. It threatened that such legislation would force the industry to relocate outside of Europe.

Furthermore, the lobby group encouraged member states to “not acknowledge” any binding emission reductions and to make any change to the 2020 targets conditional to a legally binding and enforceable international agreement with equivalent actions from major economies.

In March 2011, the chemical lobby group CEFIC met with Commissioner Hedegaard, with similar arguments. At the meeting CEFIC president Giorgio Squinzi was accompanied by the CEOs of BASF, Bayer, Dow, Dupont, ExxonMobil, Procter&Gamble, Rhodia, Shell and Solvay.

“Industry lobbyists always repeat these arguments: it is going to cost us jobs and we cannot do anything without an international agreement,” Eickhout told IPS. “That is how they convinced the conservative MEPs. But saying that, they miss the most fundamental element of the discussion: it is in Europe’s interest to take the lead in the green economy.

“New branches of industry would appear, creating new jobs. A recent study said that Europe could create six million new jobs with higher climate ambitions. China is already heavily investing in green technologies, and we cannot keep up with them. If we wait for the rest of the world to take action, we are going to lose competitiveness. It is turning into an international race and because of industry’s choices, we are loosing it.”

While BusinessEurope claims to represent the business community as a whole, its legitimacy was questioned in October 2010 when a group of ‘green’ companies including Vodafone, Google, Unilever, Philips, Marks & Spencer and Nike called on the EU to increase its ambition to cut EU emissions to 30 percent. The debate reached it peak when this May Greenpeace activists sealed off the entrance to the European Business Summit in Brussels that was organised by BusinessEurope, only allowing representatives of ‘green’ companies to enter the Summit.

“When BusinessEurope says we are against more climate policy in Europe, they are only speaking for a small fraction of their actual members,” Matthias Duwe, director of Climate Action Network Europe told IPS. “Lots of companies and business sectors are actually seeing the opportunities that come with saving energy, renovating buildings, investing in renewable energy. Our main challenge to BusinessEurope is: you do no longer represent the actual voice of Business in Europe, you should rather stay silent and let the positive voices come forward.”

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 3 2011 (IPS)

For years, European governments and corporations have made use of a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change to make exorbitant profits. According to some sources, this lucrative scheme has caused more pollution than ever before while lobbyists in Brussels have methodically undermined the European Commission’s decision to put a stop to it.

The Kyoto protocol allows European companies to ‘offset’ their excess emissions of greenhouse gases by buying emissions reductions in developing nations. This provision is called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The eligibility of the overseas projects and the issuance of emission credits – which in this case are called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) – are controlled by a council at the U.N., the CDM Executive Board.

In June 2010, two environmental NGOs – CDM Watch, based in Bonn, and Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), with offices in Washington, DC and London – discovered that European governments and corporations were grossly misusing the CDM. Fifty-nine percent of all CERs originated from the same 19 projects, out of a total pool of 2,800 U.N.-registered projects. These 19 projects all produced HCFC-22, a refrigerant gas that is banned in the U.S. and Europe under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer because of its ozone-depleting properties.

Just weeks before the 2010 U.N. COP16 climate talks in Cancún, Europe’s climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard proposed a ban on all HFC-credits in the European system of emissions trading (ETS) to take effect Jan. 1, 2013. On that date, the second phase of the ETS is due to end, after which new rules could apply.

Industry lobby groups and business organisations resisted the ban. Brussels-based NGO Corporate Europe Observatory made use of Freedom of Information Regulations here to obtain documents and reconstructed the full story.

BusinessEurope is the most influential lobby group in Brussels, representing 40 industrial and employers’ federations from 34 European countries. In October 2010, BusinessEurope’s Director- General Philippe de Buck sent a letter to Hedegaard and Commissioner of Industry and Entrepreneurship Antonio Tajani in which he spells out his opposition to limiting the use of credits from the CDM.

BusinessEurope also made use of a new employee, who had just finished three years of work at the European Commission of Enterprise and Industry. In an email to his former colleagues at the Commission, this employee refers to a recent goodbye drink and expresses his wish to keep on working together in his new lobbying function. In an attachment, he forwarded the position paper of BusinessEurope – which opposes the ban.

Italian energy giant Enel is involved as an investor in seven of the 19 HFC-projects receiving CERs. Next to that, the company is one-third owned by the Italian government. In November 2010, the head of European institutional relations at Enel, Roberto Zangrandi sent a letter to several members of European Parliament (MEPs) stating that, “it is critical to trust the system and the procedures of the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and CDM in order to ensure the integrity and credibility of this mechanism.”

But just two weeks earlier, Zangrandi sent a letter to Antonio Preto, cabinet member for Tajani. In the letter, Zangrandi invites Preto to have a friendly talk about a serious problem: Zangrandi explains that if a ban would come into force on Jan. 1, his company would loose “at least 20 million credits with a significant value”.

In an interview with carbon markets website PointCarbon.com in November, Simone Ruiz, European policy director at the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), states that the Directorate- General for Industry and Entrepreneurship would focus on moving the date forward. According to PointCarbon.com, a delay of just four weeks would mean that 30 to 100 million extra HFC-credits would enter the European market. This way, companies would be able to make full use of the credits they had invested in.

According to Eva Filzmoser, programme director of CDM Watch, lobbyists behaved in a very unethical way. “The right thing to do is: insist on a thorough investigation, wait for the findings and take a decision,” she told IPS. “Many investors only took the decision to invest in these projects after the European Commission had opened the door for possible restrictions in 2008. It was a calculated risk and most investors have already been abundantly rewarded. Furthermore, we have informally been told by investors that they knew Indian and Chinese plants were increasing their production for the sake of credits.”

Eventually the industry got what it asked for – when the Commission released its final proposition on Jan. 21, 2011, the date for the ban had been moved from Jan. 1 to Apr. 30. According to some estimates, this will result in 52 million extra CERs flowing into the European market – allowing companies to emit an amount equal to the annual emissions of Belgium.

*This is the second part of a two-part series on how European governments and corporations are profiting from a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, Jun 2 2011 (IPS)

For years, European governments and corporations have made use of a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change to make exorbitant profits. According to some sources, this lucrative scheme has caused more pollution than ever before.

The Kyoto protocol allows European companies to ‘offset’ their excess emissions of greenhouse gases by buying emissions reductions in developing nations. This provision is called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The eligibility of the overseas projects and the issuance of emission credits – which in this case are called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) – are controlled by a council at the U.N., the CDM Executive Board.

In June 2010, two environmental NGOs – CDM Watch, based in Bonn, and Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), with offices in Washington, DC and London – discovered that European governments and corporations were grossly misusing the CDM. Fifty-nine percent of all CERs originated from the same 19 projects, though a total of 2,800 projects were registered. These 19 projects all produced HCFC-22, a refrigerant gas that is banned in the U.S. and Europe under the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer because of its ozone-depleting properties. In developing countries the gas must be phased out by 2030.

HCFC-22 is also a ‘super green house gas’ that is 1,810 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Furthermore, HFC-23, the unwanted by-product of the manufacture of HCFC-22, is 11,700 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

When the producers of the refrigerant choose to burn the by-product HFC-23 instead of venting it into the air, they are eligible for heaps of credits under the CDM. Burning one tonne of HFC-23 would bring in 11,700 CERs or emission credits for the plant burning the gas.

It turned out this was a very lucrative business. Burning the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide only cost 25 U.S. cents while the credits could be sold on the European market for not less than 19 dollars.

These projects soon attracted Western investment banks that wanted to share in the profits: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Rabobank and Fortis. Next to these banks, the Italian, Dutch and British governments appear several times on the list of investors. Large energy companies including E.ON (Germany), Nuon (Netherlands), RWE (Germany), Enel (Italy) and Electrabel (Belgium) are also involved as project participants.

According to records compiled by CDM Watch and EIA, the offset profits stimulated the increased production of ozone-depleting HCFC-22. According to EIA, the price of a tonne HCFC-22 varies from 1,000 to 2,000 dollars, while the same tonne generates 5,000 to 5,800 dollars in CERs when sold on the European market.

In economics, this is called a ‘perverse incentive’ – when the incentive has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the scope of the policy. On the whole, European companies and governments have financed these projects for no less than 1.5 billion dollars, while the true cost of the gas abatement is only 150 million dollars.

“This money was invested into phony emission reductions,” says Eva Filzmoser, programme director at CDM Watch. “According to the CDM, the earned credits represent emission reductions. Instead of that, more greenhouse gases were being produced while Western companies kept on emitting as much greenhouse gas as before. The resulting damage for the environment is immense,” she told IPS.

According to data from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), from 2004 to 2009, the production of HCFC-22 grew from 15 million to 28 million tonnes.

After complaints by CDM Watch and EIA, the U.N. started its own investigation while blocking the issuance of new CER credits.

This investigation, which was concluded on the Nov. 16, 2010 was marked ‘confidential’ by the U.N. because of the ‘commercially sensitive information’ it contained. The document was however handed over to IPS. It states that some of the investigated production facilities were “maximising credits rather than filling demand for product”. Nevertheless, the report concludes there are only “indications” of perverse incentives and that the evidence is not “conclusive”.

On Nov. 26, the U.N. CDM Executive Board decided to issue another 20 million credits to 12 HFC- projects.

Jos Delbeke is the Director-General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action that was set up last year. According to Delbeke, the European Commission was already aware of the problem before the NGOs started campaigning against it. “At the U.N., we have been complaining about this problem for several years. You should not earn CERs with gases that are forbidden in Europe,” Delbeke told IPS.

The main problem, according to Delbeke, is not the damage to the environment. “There are usurious profits being made and that is repugnant,” Delbeke said. “We cannot make our climate policy work in this way. We have to ask ourselves: couldn’t we have done much more with the amount of money spent?”

When it was clear the U.N. would not undertake action, the European Commission’s Directorate-General of Climate Change decided to propose a ban on HFC-credits. Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has proposed Jan. 1, 2013 as a start date for the ban.

*This is the first part of a two-part series on how European governments and corporations are profiting from a loophole in the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Excerpt:

By Daan Bauwens
BRUSSELS, May 19 2011 (IPS)

A proposal to put an end to the highly anti-democratic nature of the European Union’s Bilateral Investment Treaties was heavily watered down by a plenary voting in the European Parliament. However, in their current form the treaties may pose a serious risk for European democracy.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) establish the conditions for private investment by companies of one state in another state. The treaty can be signed by any two nations but in most cases BITs are agreed upon by EU member states and developing countries. Without BITs, many investments would not be done in insecure environments that need economic development.

During the last couple of months, BITs have become the subject of heavy debate at the European headquarters here. Since the Lisbon Treaty came into force in 2009, foreign investment has become a European Union competence instead of a national one. Subsequently, the question had to be answered what should happen to the existing national BITs while Europe was developing its own investment policy.

INTA, the Committee on international trade, was commissioned to find a solution. As rapporteur of the Committee, Carl Shlyter of the European Greens (EGP) took the opportunity to try to change the highly problematic nature of existing BITs.

“BITs were invented to protect your investment,” Carl Shlyter tells IPS, “but in reality, they are much stronger: they are used throughout the world by companies to challenge democratic decisions of a state, whenever the company thinks this democratic decision could harm its profits.”

Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder is an international lawyer and leads the investment programme of the International Institute on Sustainable Development (IISD). She was called upon by INTA in November 2010 as an international expert on investment. “In these cases the investor instead of a state implements the treaty,” she tells IPS. “Investors are less hesitant than stated to challenge a democratic decision because they themselves can’t be challenged for the same issues.”

According to recent UN data, last year 25 new investor-state cases were filed, bringing the total number of known investor-state cases before UN tribunals to 390. One emblematic case is the case of Chevron vs. Ecuador. In 2003, Ecuadorian Amazon residents sued Chevron because of environmental harm and personal injuries caused by the company’s operations.

Chevron filed a lawsuit against the state of Ecuador, based on a BIT between the United States and Ecuador, arguing that the Ecuadorian court’s handling of the lawsuit between the Amazon residents and Chevron was unfair. This would constitute a violation of Chevron’s rights under the BIT. The international arbitrary tribunal awarded Chevron 700 million dollars damages.

“Investor-state disputes have a chilling effect,” says Shlyter. “Politicians might not even dare to proceed with a new law out of fear they will be challenged by companies and will have to pay the compensation. They are very harmful for policy-making,” he tells IPS.

Shlyter suggests that the EU should have the power to challenge existing BITs when they are in conflict with the Lisbon Treaty provisions on equal opportunities, human rights, social and environmental development.

But there are more reasons why the current form of BITs is troublesome. “The cases are decided on by an ad-hoc arbitrary tribunal, not by a permanent panel of judges,” Nathalie Osterwalder-Bernasconi tells IPS.

“The arbitrators mostly are lawyers working for a private law firm. In one case, they can be arguing for the investor or the state. In the next case, they will be the arbitrators. In investment treaties, you just have a few recurring legal questions that keep coming up. If you’re an arbitrator, you can make a decision knowing that can help you in your next case you’re doing as a lawyer.”

Next to that, the decisions of the tribunal are not made public. “The investor-state disputes remain completely unknown to the public,” says Shlyter. “Not even the European Commission has access to the documents of the cases.”

Next to the conflict of interest and the lack of transparency, there is a reversal of the burden of proof. “While the investor can bring a claim, the state can never bring a claim,” Bernasconi-Osterwalder tells IPS. “States have no real rights under these treaties, only obligations.”

In the proposal Carl Shlyter wrote for the EU Commission on International Trade, he proposed that future BITs should should contain a clause to prevent the watering down of social and environmental laws. He also proposed to end the existing investor-state dispute system and suggested improvements in transparency.

Shlyter’s proposals were defeated at the Committee vote on Apr. 13. Because the Committee vote was very close, the Committee decided to put the report to a plenary vote in the European Parliament. But also in the plenary vote last week Tuesday, the proposals did not make it through.

However, in their current form, the BITs also pose a threat to European democracy. Seventeen percent of all known investor-state disputes are against EU member states. In 2009, Swedish energy giant Vattenfall sued the German government for 1.4 billion euros because of new environmental laws. According to the most recent U.N. data, the case has been settled. The terms of the settlement, however, remain unknown.

But it is the emerging economies Europe has failed to take into account while voting on the proposal. “Nowadays, there are big Indian and Chinese private investors,” says Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder. “China will have more and more private investment in the future, I think that is part of their strategy. The investment flows are really going in both directions and I’m sure it will increase. In that sense, the danger exists European states will get increasingly challenged,” she tells IPS.

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