North Coast Online

For God's Sake, Please Stop The Aid

A Kenyan economist insists that Western aid sent with all good intentions is ruining Africa.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

The interviewer inevitably asks why aid to Africa hasn't worked while the American-sponsored Marshall Plan successfully rebuilt Europe after WWII.  Shikwati points out that Europe had been a highly-industrialised society before the War and that the aid served only to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure.  But aid to Africa now only hinders the development of economic infrastructure there.

When They Make The Movie, Will It Star Johnny Depp?

In their never-ending quest to punish the developed world, activists have come up with a new crime -- bio-piracy.  It's exemplified by the row over a houseplant known in the UK as the Busy Lizzie.  You see, for years botanists have evidently been trying to get the popular Impatiens to change its behavior.  If it would only grow down as it were, to be droopy instead of so damned perky, it would be the perfect hanging-basket flower.

Finally, British researchers discovered an African flower that, when crossed with the venerable Impatiens, produced just the right effect.  And it's made millions.

The patent reveals that Syngenta obtained the seeds of the African plant from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh that had cultivated them 'from a wild collection from Tanzania'. A botanical gardens spokeswoman said it had received the seeds in 1982 from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. They had been deposited there in 1976 by Christopher Grey-Wilson, a former president of the Alpine Garden Society.

'This appears to be a classic case of biopiracy,' says Alex Wijeratna, a campaigner from ActionAid. 'This is the silent plunder of natural resources from developing countries. Here we have a large multinational taking out a patent on a plant that grows naturally in a part of Africa and claiming it is their invention . Now the company is making a fortune selling it to the mass market, but the Tanzania communities that live in these regions will not receive one penny.'

Now, it's not as if evil Westerners are creeping into the jungle in the dead of night and stealing Africa's natural resources.  And it's not at all what the case would be were American oil companies filling their tankers with Nigerian oil and simply taking it back to American without paying for it.  No, a plant native to Africa has been crossed with another and someone's made some money, and that's what the bio-piracy activists don't like.

They are confusing the location of the plant's origin with the location of the human brains that figured out how to do something with it.  The owners of those British brains don't owe a thing to Africa.  And it's past time that Africa grew up and figured out how to develop itself rather than relying on economic-ignoramus, do-gooders who continue to look for ways that the west should give it money for items it can't make itself.

I've got a feeling, though, that bio-piracy will become such a popular cause that we'll be hearing much more about it.  But the idea behind it is just as foolish as suddenly insisting that the rest of the world begin paying royalties to America for growing corn, which, of course, as we all know was "stolen" from America by the Europeans centuries ago.

Duck And Cover

The years of apartheid constituted a horrible period in South Africa's history, but what's replaced it isn't exactly a walk in the park.

Got Marxism?

I posted earlier on Canada's $3.64 gasoline -- here's an interesting look at a country where a beer costs $150,000.

I needed to change 100 U.S. dollars into local currency, and a friend in Victoria Falls, the resort town where I had just arrived from Zambia, said he knew a black-market money dealer. He called a number, asked for a man codenamed "Mashishe" and inquired what the day's rate was. "Three," came the reply. Could he change $100? It appeared he could.

Ten minutes later, a car pulled up in the driveway. My friend took my $100, went to meet his man and, seconds later, returned with a knapsack bulging with thick bricks of Zimbabwean dollars — in notes of 20,000 — held together with rubber bands. It totaled 30 million Zimbabwean dollars.

If it weren't for all the starving, dispossessed and murdered it would be kind of funny.  So, you ask, how did it get to this?

It began in the late 1990s when, in order to pay for a costly military incursion into civil war-torn Congo, President Robert Mugabe ordered the printing of vast amounts of money, and inflation climbed steeply.

But it has reached today's levels only since the commercial farm invasions, in which 4,000 out of 4,500 white commercial farmers were kicked off their land, beginning in 2000. White farmers accounted for an estimated 60% of the country's foreign currency earnings through the export of tobacco and other crops. The invasions not only crippled domestic production, they scared away foreign investment. To dig itself out of debt and pay its bills, the government has simply printed more money.

Meanwhile, production by "new farmers" — landless peasants who moved in to occupy the white farms — is pitifully low. Part of the reason is that although the government offers fuel and maize-seed subsidies to new farmers, many have discovered that it's more profitable to sell the maize seed and fuel on the black market for inflated prices than to use them on the farm. Millions of acres of once-productive commercial farmland lie fallow. Of course, the government then blames drought, even though the rains have been good.

If you ever find yourself in the position of explaining the little-understood concept of "wealth creation" to a wannabe socialist, then use Zimbabwe as your example.  Money only has value if a particular country grows, mines or manufactures "stuff" that people will buy.  When Mugabe kicked the farm-owners off their land and awarded it to supporters who didn't know how to farm -- and didn't really even want to -- the country no longer produced anything.

You can kick business out of the country by force, as Mugabe did -- or you can just convince it to leave through taxation, like New York is doing now.  Either way, you're accomplishing the same goal.  Zimbabwe's economy is worthless.

As the article points out, all the government employees still have their jobs and they've even been given a raise.  But at 450,000 to the dollar, the jig is almost up.  You can pretend to run an economy on government jobs for a while -- New York's trying now -- but it only works for a while.  Pretty soon beer costs $150,000 a bottle and even Buffalo's government employees will move to Charlotte when that happens.

AIDS Numbers In Africa Cooked?

Arnold Kling admits that he's always had suspicions about the African AIDS statistics.

However, whenever I shared my doubts with others, they almost always told me I was way off-base. Biased statistics about Soviet growth were hard to expose; biased statistics about AIDS would not be.

Now the Washington Post is backing me up:

The new data suggest the rate never reached the 30 percent estimated by some early researchers, nor the nearly 13 percent given by the United Nations in 1998.

The study and similar ones in 15 other countries have shed new light on the disease across Africa. Relying on the latest measurement tools, they portray an epidemic that is more female and more urban than previously believed, one that has begun to ebb in much of East Africa and has failed to take off as predicted in most of West Africa.

Why were the numbers exaggerated for so long?

Such disparities, independent researchers say, skewed years of policy judgments and decisions on where to spend precious health-care dollars.

"From a research point of view, they've done a pathetic job," said Paul Bennell, a British economist whose studies of the impact of AIDS on African school systems have shown mortality far below what UNAIDS had predicted. "They were not predisposed, let's put it that way, to weigh the counterevidence. They were looking to generate big bucks."

[...]

"It's pure advocacy, really," said Jim Chin, a former U.N. official who made some of the first global HIV prevalence estimates while working for WHO in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Once you get a high number, it's really hard once the data comes in to say, 'Whoops! It's not 100,000. It's 60,000.' "

Chin, speaking from Stockton, Calif., added, "They keep cranking out numbers that, when I look at them, you can't defend them."

Still, Peter Ghys, a UNAIDS epidemiologist who now acknowledges that earlier numbers were too high, implausibly chalks the the mistakes up to random error:

Ghys said he never sensed pressure to inflate HIV estimates. "I can't imagine why UNAIDS or WHO would want to do that," he said. "If we did that, it would just affect our credibility."

Can't imagine it? Here's a simple model: People face a trade-off between getting the results they want and protecting their credibility. Sometimes they decide that risking their credibility is worth it - and this was one of those times.

We've been had before (US government let more African-Americans die than whites in Katrina,) we shouldn't ignore the possibility that this is yet another case of politically-biased numbers.

The Shores of Tripoli

While there's probably more to this than meets the eye . . .

Libya is to return properties confiscated in the mid-1970s and pay compensation to their former owners, under a cabinet decree, a Kadhafi Foundation official told AFP.

The source said that the decree which rolls back socialist practices of three decades ago would come into effect within days and would be assessed on current values.

The Kadhafi Foundation is headed by Seif al-Islam, son of Libyan leader Colonel Moamer Kadhafi, and has been at the forefront of efforts since last August to have the victims compensated.

At Kadhafi's initiative, the government confiscated goods, property, land and businesses in a wave of socialist reforms after he came to power in a 1969 coup against King Idris. The overall value of the seized assets is unknown.

The operation was carried out under slogans such as "the land for the one who works the land," and "the home for he who lives in it," and "the business for the one who runs it."

Over the past three years the Libyan judiciary, petitioned by the victims of the measures, has ruled that the confiscations were illegal and ordered the return of property to their owners or compensation.

The courts ruled on at least 400 cases, according to legal sources.

Libya's leader last year ordered the formation of a commission, headed by the Kadhafi Foundation, to contact Libyan exiles who fled their country after the wave of confiscations.

Since 2000 Tripoli has been working to dismantle the state-run economy and move toward a market economy.

. . . it sure sounds like a smart move.

I'm Robert Mugabe, Fly Me

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was inexplicably invited to speak at a UN event in Rome this week.  Of course he used the event to insult the United States and the United Kingdom (oh, that's why he was invited.)

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has drawn applause and anger for a speech denouncing the UK's Tony Blair and US President George Bush at a UN event.

Mr Mugabe described the leaders as "unholy men" at the meeting in Rome.

Surely a triumphal moment for the beleaguered despot. But as New Zimbabwe.com points out, getting there was half the fun.

          PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe was last night branded "heartless"           after he commandeered a London-bound Air Zimbabwe plane to the Italian           capital Rome, sparking a four-hour wait for hundreds of passengers after           the plane ran out fuel.        

Air Zimbabwe has           been forced to cancel several domestic, regional and international flights           due to a crippling fuel shortage and the company's terrible track record           of failing to pay for refueling and landing fees at airports around           the world.

       

Mugabe and his entourage           flew into a political storm in Rome Saturday where he was invited by           the United Nations. The United States said it was "amazed"           by the UN agencies' decision to invite the 81-year-old leader who is           banned from travel throughout the European Union, although he can attend           UN events.

       

Furious passengers           told New Zimbabwe.com how Mugabe and his group forced a deviation in           the plane's route, a decision which led to a four-hour grounding of           the plane after Air Zimbabwe failed to pay soon after a refueling had           been done.

       

"It seems Air           Zimbabwe were afraid to tell Mugabe that the fuel would not complete           the journey," said a passenger on the plane. "Frankly, I was           pissed off that our journey was altered to suite Mugabe who dumped us           when he got to his destination."

       

Another passenger           confirmed seeing refueling trucks approaching the plane. He described           dramatic scenes of seeing the plane's captain angrily remonstrating           with one of the men who did the refueling.

       

"For long periods,           we were just being told there was a problem. The nature of the problem           was not revealed to us," said the passenger who cannot be named.

       

"Many people           thought Mugabe had caused the problem, if not politically, at least           by having diverted the plane and the fuel question was never far from           people's lips. Watching the captain arguing with the airport guy, we           were pretty much convinced at that point that Air Zimbabwe had not paid           for refueling.

And Delta thinks it has problems.