Patrick Smith wrote an insightful analysis for BBC News on the trend that keeps Africa in poverty — the continent’s illiberal and anti-democratic governments.

As Smith notes, at the beginning of 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair focused on debt relief as a means of lifting African nations out of poverty, but debt relief will do little if not coupled with a liberalizing of African regimes.

In 2005, though, a number of prominent African nations saw liberal democratic advances reversed. Take two African leaders, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Both were appointed by Blair to his Africa Commission, and both were responsible for egregious anti-democratic actions in 2005.

Mapinduzi helped rig Zanzibar’s election in late 2005. Meles initiated a crackdown on opposition members after a disputed election that led to more than 80 deaths and thousands of arrests. According to Smith, Britain is also the largest donor to Yowerie Museveni’s regime in Uganda, who has remained in power for more than 20 years and recently had the leader of the largest opposition party arrested.

As Smith writes,

That raises more awkward questions as 2005, which UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had said would be the year of Africa, draws to a close.

The campaigners in Africa and the West who called for more aid, less debt and fairer trade for Africa and bolstered British government efforts to negotiate a better deal for Africa from the rich countries’ G8 club have won important concessions.

But in most states, regime security trumps the development imperative.

The sad thing is that even the more liberal democratic states in Africa go out of their way to legitimize the illiberal anti-democratic ones. Nothing epitomizes this m ore than the African Union’s decision to hold its January 2006 summit in Khartoum, Sudan despite Sudan’s genocidal war in Darfur.

Source:

Africa’s year of democratic reverses. Patrick Smith, BBC News, December 29, 2005.

Writing for TechCentralStation.Com, Pavel Kohout asks “where have all the children gone?” specifically in Europe where birth rates have fallen through the floor. Pavel ends up blaming everything from pay-as-you-go government-run retirement programs, heavy taxation that disproportionately effects younger people, and an increasingly secular culture. Oddly, what it all comes down to is this — young people have to be given an incentive to have children. Without that incentive, they simply don’t (at least enough of them choose not to that it has brought birth rates down far below replacement level in many European countries).

This is correct, in my opinion, but it represents a pretty radical shift in thinking. When doomsayers were writing about the horrors of overpopulation in the 1960s and 1970s they offered a slightly different version of human reproduction. On their model, human beings were simply another animal that followed the same sort of population dynamic models that animals such as deer did. Inevitably, they maintained, human beings would do what every other animal does and convert additional resources into additional offspring. The richer we got, the more offspring we’d have in a loop that would ultimately lead to the sort of population crash that animals such as deer experience.

But a funny thing happened along the way. After reaching a certain level of societal wealth, many people choose to severely limit the number of children they have or forego having children at all.

This, of course, culminated with an event in the 1960s that must have seemed very bizarre from the biological reductionist model. Effective, safe chemical birth control was introduced and in wealthy societies became ubiquitous. In the United States, birth control is so common that government experts became worried when a report on birth control use found that in 2002, of women who had had sex three months prior to a study of their birth control habits, 7.2 percent had not used any form of birth control.

Or, to put it another way, 92.8 percent of sexually active women were intentionally reducing their risk of becoming pregnant. This is an extremely odd behavior if you look at humanity purely through a biological model. Do members of any other species go to such lengths to reduce their fertility and lower their odds of propagating their genes?

Now, however, some like Kohout worry that we’ve gone too far. As he writes,

In the so-called “New Europe”, the situation is even gloomier. According to UN projections, Latvia will lose 44 percent of its population by 2050 as a result of demographic trends. In Estonia, the population is expected to shrink by 52 percent, in Bulgaria 36 percent, in Ukraine 35 percent, and in Russia 30 percent. In comparison with these figures, the projected population decline in Italy (22 percent), the Czech Republic (17 percent), Poland (15 percent) or Slovakia (8 percent) looks like a small decrease. France and Germany will lose relatively little population, and the population of the United Kingdom will even see a slight growth — thanks to immigrants.

But what real options are there to prevent this?

Kohout argues that the pay-as-you-go retirement systems common throughout Europe create a negative incentive to have children. In previous generations, he argues, couples would have had children in part to ensure their own financial survival when they were too old to work. That may or may not be true, but its hard to see how to get away from that now. After all the knock on government-run pay-as-you-go social security systems is that they underperform. If they are eliminated they will simply be replaced with non-government schemes that, if anything, are likely to be more efficient. And even if they are not immediately, at some point a given society is going to become wealthy enough that economic fortunes in old age can be moreorless assured with private means. Short of prohibitive taxes on people over 50, its hard to see how an alternate regime could be created.

Similarly, Kohout argues that the European welfare state disproportionately affects the young, who have relatively less income and wealth, and so acts as a disincentive to have children. Couples who are barely making it or relying on public assistance are, presumably, less likely to have children who might represent a further drain on their limited resources. Frankly, though, its just as likely that additional disposable income from lower taxes would simply go to additional consumption. After all, there are certainly many couples who could afford another child if they simply forgone buying that late model SUV or similar luxuries, but who find they can be fulfilled having a small number of children, or none at all, and still enjoy the fruits of the sort of consumption levels that citizens of Western nations enjoy.

Finally, Kohout cites cultural and social issues, but that’s a losing cause as well. Basically, Kohout notes the obvious that societies that are very religious are producing many more offspring than societies that are very secular. Of course many of those relatively religious societies, such as in the Middle East, perceive their culture as threatened by the secularism that Western culture and economic success are spreading across the globe. Besides, its hard to see how one could reinstill non-secular values to the extent they existed in the past in now-secularized countries.

Certainly its possible to envision possible future cultural changes. Perhaps children born to relatively small families will react against that and grow up to have large families. Perhaps at some point per capita income in developed countries will reach the point where the trend will swing around and couples will begin having more children simply because the opportunity cost of each additional child suddenly becomes relatively low.

Or, more likely, we’ll do what we’ve always done — adapt. I suspect the same human beings who could do the unheard of thing from a natural selection standpoint and voluntarily limit their own fertility will also come up with creative solutions and ways to deal with an increasingly older population and an age structure unlike anything every experienced before in history. For the past several thousand years people have been saying “this situation is unique and will prove a disaster,” and yet we keep chugging along, finding ways to respond and adapt to whatever challenges face us.

My prediction — 50 years from now we’ll have figured out how to adapt to the coming demographic changes, only to have people wringing their hands in learned articles and books about the next supposedly insurmountable challenge.

Source:

Where Have All The Children Gone. Pavel Kohout, TechCentralStation.Com, January 27, 2005.

The European Union Commission demonstrated this month that developing nations hardly have a monopoly on official corruption that rises to the top of political systems.

At the November 19 meeting of the EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso shamefully threatened UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage with “legal consequences” for daring to reveal the shady past of EU Commission Vice-President Jacques Barrot.

Barrot, it turned out, received a suspended prison sentence for his role in a political fund raising scandal in France. Barrot was later given amnesty by the president of France. Under French law, the media there was barred from mentioning the conviction or suspended prison sentence.

The resulting furor at that revelation forced Barroso to back off his threat of “legal consequences” but that it was made at all in response to a corruption accusation is yet more fuel for the fire of well-founded Euro-skeptics.

Moreover, the revelation about Barrot’s past apparently wasn’t enough to force his resignation. Barroso, in fact, has taken to telling European newspapers that he has 100 percent confidence in the convicted criminal, Barrot.

Is this the EU or Zimbabwe? I’m sure developing nations can’t wait to hear Europeans lecture them about corruption after such a blatant failure to deal with official corruption in their own corner of the world.

The EU should be ashamed of itself.

Source:

New furore shakes EU Commission. The BBC, November 22, 2004.

Barrot given reprieve by European Parliament Socialists. EU Observer, November 23, 2004.

Euro team are liars and crooks, says Ukip. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph, November 19, 2004.

Members of the United Nation’s Global Fund met this month and agreed to a new round of funding for projects to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in 2005.

The Global Fund was started in 2002 by the United Nations, but funding has been a major problem. Kofi Annan originally hoped that developed countries would contribute up to $7 billion annually to help the fund fight the three diseases. So far, though, only $3 billion total has been committed to the Global Fund by donor nations.

This year the United States threatened to withhold approval for projects after other developed nations had failed to give significant money to the fund (the United States is the single largest donor to the fund). The United States also expressed concerns over how grants were disbursed.

In the end, the United States joined the unanimous decision by the Fund’s members to move forward, but scaled back its donations from $546 million in 2004 to just $200 million in 2005.

Source:

Focus on deadly Africa diseases. Will Ross, BBC, November 17, 2004.

Deadly disease fight ‘underfunded’. The BBC, November 17, 2004.

Global fund to fight deadly diseases. Associated Press, November 18, 2004.

US Suggests AIDS Fund Delay Grants. Mark Lacey, The New York Times, November 17, 2004.

The World Bank reports that East Asia is experiencing its fasted rate of economic growth since the 1997 financial crisis. The upshot is that the strong economic growth has lifted an estimated 40 million people out of poverty in China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

In a press release, the World Bank’s Regional Vice President for East Asia and Pacific Mr. Jemal-ud-din Kassum said (emphasis added),

We are estimating that by the end of this year, the number of people living on less than $2 a day will be around one third of the region’s population. Even excluding China, the absolute number of poor would be at their lowest level ever, finally overcoming the higher poverty created by the 1997 crisis. This expansion is happening during a time of major political advances with a sweep of legislative and presidential elections, including Indonesia’s first ever direct election of a president, capping what looks like being a remarkable year for the region.

The main obstacle to further growth in 2005 and beyond, the World Bank notes, are continuing high oil prices which could cut 0.5 to 1 percentage point off of the current 7 percent growth rate the region is experiencing.

Economic growth, as usual, is the key to lifting people out of poverty.

Source:

East Asia Region Set To Grow by Healthy 7 Percent In 2004. Press Release, World Bank, November 9, 2004.

East Asia poverty at ‘record low’. The BBC, November 9, 2004.

Economy pushes Asia poverty down. CNN, November 8, 2004.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, reported this month that they had developed a method to increase the resistance of grain crops to drought.

In research to be published in the December issue of The Plant Journal, the researchers describe how lowering the levels of an enzyme called ACC synthase in turn reduces production of ethylene. Ethylene is responsible for the deaths of leaves in response to adverse environmental conditions, such as drought.

The researchers searched through thousands of plants, looking for ones that had naturally lower levels of ACC synthase. In a press release announcing their findings, the University of California, Riverside noted,

In addition, the plants were more resistant to the effects of adverse environmental conditions. Surprisingly, by reducing the level of ethylene, all the leaves of the altered plants contained higher levels of chlorophyll and leaf protein, and functioned better than control leaves.

“Thus, they are able to survive conditions of drought and remain productive,” said Professor [Daniel] Gallie, who led a research team that included UCR Colleague Todd E. Young and Robert B. Meeley, of Pioneer Hi-Bred. “Erratic rainfall and conditions of drought have plagued farmers from time immemorial, and are responsible for substantial losses in crop yield when they do occur.”

This opens the possibility, of course, of using traditional plant breeding or genetic modification to create crop plants well suited for more arid parts of the world.

Source:

Researchers discover new way to boost grain crops’ drought tolerance. Press Release, University of California, Riverside, November 17, 2004.

Earlier this month the United Nations released its Human Development Report 2004 which notes that the AIDS crisis has caused declines in life expectancy compared to 25 years ago.

In Rwanda, for example, the life expectancy in 1970-1975 was 44.6 years. In 2000-2005, however, it had declined to 39.3 years.

The African states of Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire, Zambia, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Congo, Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia all saw declines in life expectancy.

In the case of Zambia, whose life expectancy rate is now estimated to be only 32.4 years, life expectancy today is lower than it was in 1960. Not surprisingly, 16.5 percent of the adult population of Zambia is believed to be HIV positive.

Source:

Big fall in African life expectancy. The BBC, July 15, 2004.

UN Human Development Report 2004. United Nations, 2004.

On January 25, 2004, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights entered into force creating an African court to judge human rights violations on that continent.

Comoros paved the way for the Protocol to come into effect when it became the 15th African state to ratify the Protocol in December 2003. The other states that have ratified the Protocol since its creation in 1998 are: Algeria; Burkina-Faso; Burundi; Côte d’Ivoire; Gambia; Lesotho; Libya; Mali; Mauritius; Rwanda; Senegal; South Africa; Togo; and Uganda.

Unfortunately — as with other human rights initiatives associated with the African Charter — this is likely to be just another paper tiger. The African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, for example, took six years to admonish Nigeria to respect the rights of the Ogoni people.

Proponents of the Protocol argue that the Commission’s decisions were not binding while Protocol will create a decision whose findings are binding . . . right up until the point that African nations decide to ignore them. Does anyone really believe that the same group of nations that has looked the other way at Zimbabwe’s human rights violations is suddenly going to grow a spine because 15 nations have adopted a protocol?

I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Sources:

African human rights court created. UN Wire, January 28, 2004.

Establishing an African Court on Human Rights. Press Release, Amnesty International, January 26, 2004.

The Food and Agricultural Organization released a report in November finding that the total number of people who are undernourished is now increasing by about 5 million a year. The number of people malnourished is now about 850 million according to the FAO report.

The number of undernourished people continues to decline in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, but is increasing in the Middle East and Africa. In those regions, according to the FAO, people still go hungry largely due to political reason,

Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will. The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in rural areas of the developing world, far from the levers of political power and beyond the range of vision of the media and the public in the developed countries.

The report also noted that AIDS and limited irrigation in the developing world also makes it difficult for countries to effectively fight hunger.

Sources:

World growing hungrier, says UN. The BBC, November 25, 2003.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003. Food and Agricultural Organization, 2003.

Ronald Bailey reported for Reason magazine from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, Mexico, including an excellent article on the idiocy of developed world farm subsidies and the surprising reaction to the subsidies from those who claim to represent the interests of the poor.

Bailey highlights the insidious inequity of farm subsidies in the United States, Europe and Japan — the elimination of which would do far more than any international aid program to help the developing world. Bailey wrote,

However, access to world markets is blocked by the protectionist policies of the world’s richest countries, the European Union, the United States and Japan. These countries shovel out over $300 billion per year in subsidies to their farmers. Such largesse means that the average European cow receives an infamous subsidy averaging $2.50 per day. Consequently, farmers in developing countries and least-developed countries suffer a double whammy—rich country subsidies keep world prices artificially low so poor farmers can’t compete in world markets; rich countries then turn around and dump their subsidized agricultural surpluses in the poor farmers’ local markets. The New York Times recently and correctly editorialized that this situation is not only unfair, it is also “immoral”.

It is indeed immoral. Lack of free trade and developed country agricultural subsidies are literally killing people, according to a recent report by the Brussels-based Center for a New Europe (CNE). The CNE finds, “6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the European Union (EU). That is 275 people every hour.” Think of it like crashing a Boeing 747 filled with people every hour, 24 hours per day.

Given that state of affairs, you might thing that those speaking on behalf of the poor in developing countries would want to see an end to such subsidies. Some may, but some prominent activists prefer a third way — a return to subsistence agriculture.

Bailey wrote,

Indian political environmentalist Vandana Shiva insightfully told the IFG activists, “Domestic agriculture in India has been destroyed by developed country farm subsidies and dumping.” Then she quickly veered from this reasonable observation to unthinking environmentalist dogma. Her solution is not to eliminate the subsidies and open up food trade. Instead she wants Indian farmers to reject the Green Revolution which boosted Indian grain production four-fold over the past four decades and move back toward small-scale agricultural production. This is a recipe for famine.

Will Allen, an American organic farmer, noted at the IFG meeting that in the United States, only 9 percent of the farmers receive nearly 80 percent of the subsidies, so the subsidies aren’t really helping small farmers in the U.S. either. But instead of calling for the end of subsidies, Allen declared, “We advocate there be subsidies all over the world to convert agriculture into sustainable agriculture.” Sustainable agriculture for Allen is organic agriculture, which is less productive than conventional or biotech farming. Lower productivity means more food insecurity and more natural lands like forests chopped down to create farm fields. . . .

Apparently, many environmental activists prefer that poor farmers and their families remain doing the backbreaking, mind-numbing labor of subsistence farming. U.S. organic farmer Allen recounted with evident nostalgia the fact that in 1848, when chemists had finally learned how to use fertilizers to boost crop production, 90 percent of Americans lived on farms. According to Allen, a century later, 37 percent of Americans still worked on farms. Today, only 1 percent of Americans are farmers. Did Americans become poorer because they fled the farm? Hardly. They moved up from farming to become the richest, most technologically sophisticated economy in history. It is past time that the richest countries remove the barriers that block the poorest countries from following this same trajectory to prosperity. The Cancun WTO conference is the place to begin.

Great, just what the world needed — a nascent “Back to the Farm” movement. The goal should be to remove these stupid subsidies so that agriculture in the developing world can compete with the developed world and advance to the point where it is as efficient as the developed world.

Source:

Cancun Delusions: Subsidizing the poor to death. Ronald Bailey, Reason, September 10, 2003.