In Cambridge, friends in Cambridge?

February 26, 2019

If you are in Cambridge (or London, or somewhere else not far away), please come to the first of a series of parties that I am organising to raise money for the homeless. The very first party is this Saturday, 2 March. Bring friends! If you are not in Cambridge (or London, or somewhere else not far away), please encourage anyone you know who is in my part of the world to come along.

You can access the ticketing site directly here.

You can access the Facebook Event page here (please hit the Like and Interested buttons on Facebook whatever else you do or don’t do). Facebook also links to the ticketing.

You can download an e-invite that contains the ticketing URL and a QR code that a phone will scan to take itself directly to the ticketing site from just below these words:

The Heart of Saturday Night Poster 3

According to James Brokenshite, the Conservative housing minister, the increase in homelessness since the Global Financial Crisis has nothing to do with government policy and cuts; instead it reflects an unrelated epidemic of drug taking and family breakdowns. To be fair, Mr Gobshite did subsequently row back on his comments, saying that we ‘need to ask ourselves some very hard questions’ about why the number of homeless has increased so much. Since Mr Brokencountry appears to be intellectually lazy, however, hard questions may be difficult to answer.

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The EU works. A bit. And slowly

January 25, 2019

As the Guardian reports below, the EU has finally taken down Italy’s pants and spanked both its cheeks for its grotesque, puerile, unprofessional and corrupt handling of the Meredith Kercher murder case. This is edifying and reminds us that the EU does perform a vital role in setting standards for its more backward members. If only, however, the EU would do more to enforce those standards in a uniform fashion.

Within Italy, the Sollecito-Knox case has led to zero change that I am aware of. Giuliano Mignini, the original narcissistic Italian magistrate-nut-job, continues to work as a public prosecutor in Perugia. No policeman, as far as I know, has been sanctioned for the many, many laws the police broke. And Italy still has no equivalent of the UK’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE, 1984), which makes collusion between courts and police very difficult by imposing a review layer between them — what in the UK is called the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Italy has every single one of the judicial and police problems that led to the passage of the PACE in the UK 35 years ago. But because Italy is presently masquerading as a country called Shitaly, it won’t get on and do the same thing.

 

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Amanda Knox.
 Amanda Knox. Photograph: NBC NewsWire/Reuters

Amanda Knox: European court orders Italy to pay damages

The European court of human rights has ordered Italy to pay Amanda Knox €18,400 for police failures to provide her access to a lawyer and a translator during questioning over the 2007 killing of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia.

The ruling opens the way for Knox’s lawyers to challenge her last remaining conviction, for malicious accusation, in the Italian courts.

The court, in Strasbourg, declared that Italy must pay Knox €10,400 in damages plus €8,000 to cover costs and expenses.

As well as concluding authorities had twice violated her right to a fair trial, the ECHR also found they had failed to investigate her complaints she had been subjected to degrading treatment, including being slapped on the head and deprived of sleep. The court did not, however, uphold her complaint of ill-treatment.

The 31-year-old American’s convictions for murder and sexual assault were previously overturned. She was also found guilty by an Italian court of making a malicious accusation, by allegedly suggesting someone else was guilty of the murder.

The killing of Kercher, a Leeds University European Studies student on a one-year exchange course in Umbria, generated global headlines for several years as charges of sexual assault and murder were fought through the courts – exposing Italy’s justice system to international criticism.

Knox, a language student and Kercher’s flatmate, and Knox’s Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were initially charged with sexually assaulting and killing her. Kercher was stabbed in the neck.

The following year Knox was also charged with malicious accusation for suggesting another person should be a suspect. Italian detectives alleged she was trying to hide her responsibility for the attack by blaming someone else. Knox wants to have that conviction quashed.

Judges at the ECHR said the Italian government had failed to show that Knox’s restricted access to a lawyer had not “irreparably undermined the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”.

Meredith Kercher.
 Meredith Kercher. Photograph: PA

“Ms Knox had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian,” the court noted.

The ECHR’s decision was “not a big surprise for me because the supreme court already said there were many mistakes,” said Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova. “That is one of the reasons that invited us to tell Amanda to go to Strasbourg. For me this is a certification of a mistake, probably the biggest legal mistake in the last years in Italy, also because the attention that this case has had.”

Dalla Vedova said of the malicious accusation conviction: “It is impossible to compensate Amanda for four years in prison for a mistake. There will be no amount. We are not looking for compensation of damages. We are doing this on principal.”

In 2009, Knox was convicted in an Italian court of falsifying a break-in at their Perugia flat, sexual assault, murder and defamation. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison. Sollecito was also found guilty of the attack and sentenced to 25 years.

Both appealed. In 2011, the Perugia court of appeal acquitted the pair of the more serious charges, but upheld Knox’s conviction for malicious accusation.

After nearly four years in custody, Knox was released and returned to the US. She appealed again to challenge the malicious accusation conviction. It was quashed but in 2014 she was re-convicted of both malicious accusation and murder.

The murder conviction was again annulled by the court of cassation, the country’s highest court, the following year but the malicious accusation conviction was not removed. Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede is serving a 16-year sentence for his role in the killing.

Lawyers for Knox, who lives in Seattle, then appealed to the ECHR to overturn the last remaining conviction. They argued she was denied the right to legal assistance when first interviewed by police in 2007, was not given access to a professional or independent interpreter and that she did not receive a fair hearing.

Knox has always denied any involvement in the murder.

 

More:

I wrote a ton of stuff about this case while it was going on. It ought to all be under the ‘Italy to avoid’ tab

 

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And so we locked up a million people…

January 15, 2019

An excellent review of evidence that China has indeed locked up one million or more Uighurs in Xinjiang ‘Autonomous’ Region in an effort to have them toe Beijing’s line. This is the sort of uncompromising approach to dissent that in all too many countries has become a victim of political correctness.

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As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s government detained as part of the campaign? In the absence of officially reported numbers or other hard evidence, researchers of various stripes have converged on the figure of one million as a common estimate of the people the Chinese government is detaining in Xinjiang’s camps.

But where does this figure come from, and how is it formulated?

An August 2018 United Nations session appears to have first popularized the number. At the session, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said it had received “many credible reports” that one million ethnic Uighurs in China were being held in internment camps, though it did not specify the sources of these reports. In the following days, the figure was repeated in stories in The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and HuffPost, all citing the U.N. session. A week later, the U.S. State Department issued a public statement raising its previous estimate of hundreds of thousands of detainees to a number “possibly . . . in the millions.” News coverage in the months since has often referred to the “one million” estimate; other reports cite lower numbers of detainees, though still in the hundreds of thousands. Chinese representatives stated at the August U.N. session that “there is no such thing as re-education centers”; by October, the local Xinjiang government had passed legislation enshrining them as a formal method to “transform” people influenced by “extremism.” But even after admitting to their existence, Chinese officials have chafed at Western reports of the numbers held there, with a spokesperson callingthe estimates “defamatory” and the results of “ulterior motives.”

Given the Chinese government has not released its own official numbers, and given the extreme obstacles that prevent independent on-the-ground accounting of camp inmates, how do outside observers arrive at the one million estimate?

No precise count of the number of people currently detained in camps in Xinjiang has made its way out of China. So investigators must rely on estimates that use small samples to extrapolate the camps’ overall population of inmates.

Two key studies independently arrived around the one million mark, by using limited data samples to estimate what percentage of the ethnic minority Muslim population is detained. Both studies arrive at a detention rate of 10 percent —at least in some areas of Xinjiang—suggesting that just over one million of the region’s 11 million ethnic Uighur population could be in the camps.

The first estimate, from Adrian Zenz, a social scientist at the European School of Culture & Theology, is based on an accounting of the detention camp populations totalling some 892,000 individuals in 68 Xinjiang counties as of the Spring of 2018. These numbers are from a document leaked by Chinese public security authorities to Istiqlal, a Uighur exile media organization based in Turkey, and also later appeared in Newsweek Japan.

As Zenz points out, these numbers are not complete. Several major population centers are missing from the leaked data. One approach to determine how many additional people are detained in these additional population centers would be to simply assume the same rate of detention across all of Xinjiang and use local population figures to calculate an estimate for the missing areas. However, as Zenz explained to ChinaFile, based on his own research and on Radio Free Asia reporting (discussed further below), he presumes that detention rates vary locally depending on the share of ethnic minority population in a given area. Specifically, this means that areas with Han-majority populations see a smaller percentage of their ethnic minority populations detained.

To account for these differences in population and likely differences in detention rates, Zenz zoomed in on just a subset of the leaked data: 27 counties where the vast majority of the population is ethnic Uighur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. The leaked data showed that 693,273 individuals were detained in these counties, out of a total of 4.45 million Uighur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz adults aged 20-79—a detention rate of 12.3 percent. Zenz conservatively rounded down to reach an average detention rate of ten percent in minority-majority areas. To estimate a detention rate for Han-majority areas, he then halved the 10 percent estimate—again, seeking to offer a conservative estimate.

Applying these approximated detention rates to cities and counties throughout the entire region, Zenz writes that “Xinjiang’s total re-education internment figure may be estimated at just over one million.” (It is worth stating that this is Zenz’s high-end estimate; elsewhere in the article he writes that estimates “anywhere between several hundred thousand and just over one million” are reasonable. This estimate is also from spring 2018, and it is possible that more people have been detained since then.)

The second estimate comes from the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Between mid-2017 and mid-2018, CHRD interviewed eight ethnic Uighurs located in eight different villages in southern Xinjiang. Each person gave their own estimate of the number of people detained in their village, which CHRD used to surmise a detention rate for each village. These village detention rates ranged from 8 to 20 percent, averaging out to 12.8 percent across all eight villages. Just as Zenz did, CHRD “conservatively” rounded down to reach a 10 percent estimated detention rate. CHRD then applied this rate to all of southern Xinjiang, assessing that “approximately 240,000 rural residents may be detained in ‘re-education’ centers in Kashgar Prefecture, and 660,000 in the larger Southern Xinjiang [area].”

Extrapolating further, CHRD assumed a 10 percent detention rate across all of Xinjiang, estimating that 1.1 million people are being held, or have been held, in the camps. (CHRD’s figure does not include individuals forced to attend mandatory day or evening “re-education” sessions, which could add another estimated 1.3 million people across southern Xinjiang.)

These two estimates are not the only sources that suggest a 10 percent detention rate. The U.S.-based outlet Radio Free Asia (RFA), which regularly cold-calls government offices throughout Xinjiang, has reported that some local officials must meet detention quotas. Since the latter half of 2017, at least four different local officials in both southern and northern Xinjiang have told RFAthat they were given detention targets to meet, including 10 percent of the population in one village and 40 percent in another. These quotas generally accord with other RFA sources’ accounts of detention figures in their own villagesand townships. RFA itself has not offered a region-wide detention estimate, but its coverage over time and across different localities does buttress the theory that 10 percent of Xinjiang’s Uighur population could be detained. Indeed, Zenz writes in his analysis that RFA’s reporting suggests a “one million” estimate is not far-fetched.

Other reporters and researchers have compiled additional information about the camps that suggest the “one million” figure is credible. This information does not rely on personal testimony or data leaked from official sources; rather, it is based on satellite imagery or on the Chinese government’s own publicly-available documents:

  • Using a list of sites drawn from media reports and other research, a team of analysts from a multinational aerospace company reviewed satellite images for the BBC and judged that 44 of them had a high or very high likelihood of being a “security facility.” Looking specifically at a site called Dabancheng, located about an hour’s drive from Urumqi, a separate team of architects with experience in prison design, and an architect focused on social responsibility in design and planning, estimated it could hold anywhere from 11,000 detainees—on par with the largest prisons on earth—to 130,000 detainees. The lower figure, which one expert said was “likely a significant underestimate,” assumes that each detainee has his or her own private sleeping quarters; the higher estimate assumes that detainees are housed in dormitories.
    • None of the experts consulted in the BBC report address this question, but if there were only 44 camps in all of Xinjiang, they would need to each house an average 22,730 individuals to accommodate one million detainees—twice the low-end estimate for Dabancheng, but still well below the high-end estimate. If facilities such as Dabancheng can indeed hold as many as 100,000 people, only 10 similarly-sized facilities would be needed across all of Xinjiang to hold one million people.
  • The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyzed just 28 camp facilities (noting that there may be more than 1,000 facilities across Xinjiang), estimating that in total these camps contain 2,700,000 square meters of floor space.
    • Although the ASPI report does not include this calculation, taking a very conservative estimate that only 10 percent of this floor space is used for dormitories, and combining it with an estimated occupancy density of 1.5-2 detainees per square meter (as used by Zenz in his analysis of such facilities), the number of detainees in these 28 camps alone could easily approach half a million.
  • In its examination of more than 1,500 publicly-available government documents, Agence France-Presse (AFP) found procurement documents that hint at huge numbers of detainees. Hotan county’s vocational education bureau, which oversees at least one camp, ordered 194,000 Chinese language practice books and 11,310 pairs of shoes in just one month this year.
  • Another CHRD analysis of Chinese government data estimated that criminal arrests in Xinjiang increased by more than 700 percent between 2016 and 2017, reaching nearly 228,000 arrests in 2017. RFA and CHRD reporting indicates that at least some of these cases represent individuals who were initially detained in camps and then transferred to the criminal system for formal prosecution.
    • Even if only 10 percent of these arrests represent transfers from camps, that would still account for more than 20,000 camp detainees. If individuals initially detained in camps were, instead, mostly responsible for this 700 percent year-on-year jump, these figures could easily account for between 100,000 and 200,000 camp detainees.

The Chinese government’s own budget and spending reports show expenditures that, while not directly corroborating the numbers of individuals detained, certainly suggest that very large numbers of detentions are plausible. AFP estimates that Xinjiang’s local justice bureaus, the organs responsible for operating the camps, may have spent 577 percent more in 2017 than they had originally budgeted. Budget documents showed that counties in southern Xinjiang, where the share of the ethnic minority Muslim population is higher, used funds especially earmarked for the camps to fund the additional outlays. Additional research by Adrian Zenz, comparing government data of year-on-year spending in counties throughout Xinjiang, shows similarly outsized spending increases on “social stability management,” “detention center management,” and other domestic security expenditures, particularly in areas with higher proportions of ethnic minority Muslim residents. This spending coincides with a February 2017 directive from the regional Justice Department to use “concentrated educational transformation centers” to manage “key groups” in society. It also corresponds with a more than 10-fold jump in the number of new security facilities the BBC was able to detect via satellite imagery between 2016 and 2017, and with spikes in new and retrofitted camp construction ASPI identified in 2017.

Taken together, these reports offer compelling support for the credibility of the “one million” estimates, even as the estimates themselves remain unavoidably imprecise. But what does “credible” mean?

Much reporting on the estimates of those detained in Xinjiang stresses that the “one million” number is “credible.” Yet it is important to distinguish between credibility and precision. Much of the information that international observers have used to make detention estimates is credible in that it comes from local sources, many of whom are in official positions that allow them access to such information through the course of their work, and who take great personal risk to communicate this information to the international community. Yet it is observers’ inability to conduct any sort of independent verification that prevents these credible estimates from being more precise. This is mainly due to China’s stringent information controls and its restrictions on foreigners’ access to the region—let alone to the camps themselves.

As a result, international observers cannot know with certainty, for example, how detentions are carried out in southern Xinjiang, where about four-fifths of the population is Uighur, versus northern Xinjiang, where only one-quarter is Uighur. Observers also cannot be sure if other ethnic minority Muslim individuals, such as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are detained at the same rates as Uighurs; most available reporting describes conditions only for Uighurs, the largest minority population in Xinjiang. It’s also often unclear whether estimates include the total number of people detained over time, or the number detained only at the time of the estimate.

This much, then, is clear by now: estimates of one million people detained in Xinjiang “re-education” camps are quite credible. Does that mean they are correct? Only Beijing likely knows for sure. And it’s not telling.

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A good car while it lasted

January 2, 2019

Subaru passing

Parked up and went for a walk on the beach on the Isle of Wight after Christmas. When we came back the car was not quite as we left it. There had been a small fire in the engine, of which there was no sign when we set off. The fire brigade, who kindly turned up while we were walking on the beach and wondering where all the black smoke was coming from, said it is not the first time they have seen this.

I had wanted to get rid of the car for some time, as I almost never use it. My wife is less pleased. Still, when it is time to go it is time to go, and I like to think that the Subaru’s soul is now in car heaven.

This post really isn’t about development, but I am hoping it might encourage me to start blogging again.

 

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Happy New Year from America: Mike Pence’s gateway

January 1, 2018

As hung on the Aspen gatepost of Vice-President Mike Pence’s home. The word on the yellow strip, which is not easy to read, is ‘America’.

The local sheriff has not, as I understand it, seen any reason to remove the banner.

A happy new year to everyone, including Mike.

MakeAmericaGayAgain 1217

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Happy Christmas from China: false imprisonment and torture

December 28, 2017

The Chinese Communist Party has a long tradition of doing dirty work at Christmas, because its members think that the world is not paying attention. Some people, however, are…

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China Change, December 26, 2017

 

IMG_1551
Wu Gan on June 8, 2015, two weeks after he was arrested: ““My case is an absurd and entertaining movie. The filming has begun, and I have gotten into character.” 

 

On the morning of December 26 courts in Tianjin and Changsha announced the verdicts respectively of Wu Gan, a seminal activist, and Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer. Xie Yang was found guilty of “inciting subversion of state power” while Wu Gan’s refusal to cooperate led him to receive the more severe “subversion of state power.” Both were “convicted,” but Xie Yang was exempt from punishment, while Wu Gan was handed a heavy sentence of eight years.

In a live broadcast, Xie Yang was made to once again deny that he had been tortured, and to thank all parties for a “fair” trial and for “safeguarding” his rights. The first time he was forced to make this false admission was during his trial in May.

On the other hand, Wu Gan’s lawyer reported that he told the court, immediately after the sentence was announced, that “I thank the Communist Party for conferring me this high honor [subversion]. I will not forget my original aspiration, and will roll up my sleeves and work harder.” His remarks were a play on the official words of Xi Jinping; observers found it remarkable that a man who had just received such a harsh sentence would have the sense of humor, and guts, to do so.

It wasn’t until hours later that the authorities released a short clip of Wu Gan in court. Viewers will see why it took time: the authorities doctored the video, using clips of Wu Gan’s secret trial in August to show he was “contrite.” In August, Wu Gan wore a short sleeved T-shirt and read from a sheet of paper that he would not appeal, while yesterday he wore a dark, long-sleeved top.

Wu Gan’s lawyer Ge Yongxi (???) described on Twitter what the official clips purposefully omitted: Following “I admit that I have harbored thoughts of subverting state power,” Wu Gan added, “but I believe this is a citizen’s right, and my actions do not constitute crimes.”

Lawyer Ge Yongxi challenged the authorities to show the court recording in its entirety.

After Wu Gan’s sentence, his lawyers released a statement on his behalf.

 

Wu Gan’s Statement About His Sentence

For those living under a dictatorship, being given the honorable label of one who “subverts state power” is the highest form of affirmation for a citizen. It’s proof that the citizen wasn’t an accomplice or a slave, and that at the very least he went out and defended, and fought for, human rights. Liang Qichao (???, famous reformist at end of Qing dynasty) said that he and dictatorship were two forces inextricably opposed; I say: If I don’t oppose dictatorship, am I still a man?

They have attempted to have me plead guilt and cooperate with them to produce their propaganda in exchange for a light sentence — they even said that as long as I plead guilty, they’ll give me a three-year sentence suspended for three years. I rejected it all. My eight-year sentence doesn’t make me indignant or hopeless. This was what I chose for myself: when you oppose the dictatorship, it means you are already walking on the path to jail.

I’m optimistic despite the harsh sentence. Because of the internet, more and more people are waking up. The ranks of those ready to stand at the funeral of the dictatorship is growing stronger and larger by the day. Those who try to use jail to frighten citizens pursuing freedom and democracy, thus obstructing the progress of human civilization, won’t meet a good end. Their tyranny is based on a lack of self-confidence — a sign of a guilty conscience and fear. It’s a dead end. When the masses wake up, will the dictatorship’s end be far off?

I have been subjected to torture and other forms of inhumane treatment during my detention thus far — and it’s not an isolated occurrence, but a common phenomenon. I appeal to the international community to closely follow the deterioration of human rights in China, follow the Chinese Communist Party’s criminal detention of its own citizens, and especially of dissidents, along with the other abuses they’re subjected to, including: false charges, secret detention, forced confessions to the media, forced appointment of state-controlled defense counsel, torture and abuse in custody, and the stripping of every civil right of Chinese citizens.

I hereby name the individuals involved in persecuting, torturing, and abusing me: An Shaodong (???), Chen Tuo (??), Guan Jiantong (???), Yao Cheng (??), Yuan Yi (??), Wang Shoujian (???), Xie Jinchun (???), Gong Ning (??), Sheng Guowen (???), Cao Jiyuan (???), Liu Yi (??), Cai Shuying (???), Lin Kun (??).

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Which countries in Africa will get their act together?

November 7, 2017

That is the question. On a continent of 55 nation states, there is not going to be a ubiquitous economic revolution. The polities range from bonkers to transformative, and pro-growth NGOs and rich-country governments waste a ton of money trying to work on transformation with the uncommitted and the incapable; in those instances, donors should stick to mitigation. However there are leaders in transformation — Ethiopia and Rwanda stand out — and there are other countries that might get in the game. The following article, from The Herald in Zimbabwe, gives a snapshot of some of the issues (note that the paper does not claim that Zimbabwe itself is in any danger of making progress).

Africa is now primed for a Green Revolution

November 3, 2017 Features, Opinion & Analysis

Aliko Dangote

ON the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, told investors: “Agriculture, agriculture, agriculture. Africa will become the food basket of the world.”

Prime weather conditions, acres of empty space and well-established agricultural sectors averaging 33 percent of GDP, all make Dangote’s statement more than plausible. Yet, Africa’s thought leaders and businessmen have been emphasising the importance of agriculture for quite some time, and to date, familiar problems remain.

According to a World Bank estimate, the African agriculture sector could be worth up to $1 trillion by 2030, but lack of technology, lack of investment and an ageing farmer population all put this figure and Dangote’s vision into question. Only in the past decade or so has the sector seen a sustained development effort, but more needs to be done.

Vision versus reality

Agriculture is positioned at the forefront of nearly every African government’s development plan. The received wisdom is that rapid economic development comes from developing smallholder farms, evidenced by Europe, North America and Asia’s historical development.

Africa has about 33 million farms of less than two hectares each, accounting for 80 percent of all farms. Rather than create large commercial farms, many believe that by increasing the yields of African smallholdings, and by ensuring manufacturing capability to improve and extend value chains, Africa can retain its agricultural wealth, reduce imports, and profit from a surplus of goods in the market.

Speaking at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2017 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Joe Studwell, author and journalist, said: “I put it to you that smallholder agriculture is not just important; if you want to transform your society quickly there is no other way to do it.”

In 2003 the African Union echoed this belief and adopted the Nepad Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which aimed to revive agriculture by addressing numerous issues as well as pledging that each African country should dedicate 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture.

Faced with substantial budgetary constraints, not all African countries have been able to allocate 10 percent, but progress has been made most recently by Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, who gave $200 million to coffee and cocoa farmers to meet the CAADP requirements and become a net exporter of food.

Other notable public endeavours include Ethiopia and Nigeria establishing an Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to coordinate activities between government ministries across central and local governments, and Rwanda exceeding CAADP expectations by giving more than 10 percent of its budget.

However, policy often lags behind vision and commitment and many countries still have vastly underdeveloped sectors. Dr Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said: “We are starting to see African governments beginning to get their act together but there is still work to do.”

Public-private partnerships fill gaps

At the top of the AGRF 2017 agenda was the importance of using public-private partnerships (PPP) to fill the space left over by government incapacity.

During a panel talk at the conference, Liberia’s outgoing president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, commended the cooperative model: “This forum comes at a time when Africa is more coordinated than ever, in its policies and strategies, and this synergy bodes well for the collaborative approach needed for a successful green revolution.” Many argue that if African governments can better present Africa as a viable emerging agricultural market, then foreign investment and technological know-how could greatly benefit smallholder farms.

Forums like the AGRF work well in bringing together various stakeholders in Africa’s agribusiness landscape, and some important deals were made. The Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA) was formed at the forum and includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID. The partnership earmarked up to $280 million to increase incomes and improve the food security for smallholder households in 11 countries by 2021.

Maslaha Seeds Limited and Syngenta committed to a $1 million investment in increased rice and seed production, while BlackPace Africa Group committed to multimillion-dollar deals to develop potato processing in Nigeria and Rwanda, and Kenya’s Agricultural Finance Corporation settled on investing $2 million in lending to potato farmers – all of which illustrates the usefulness of the private sector in meeting demands.

Pressing concerns

Africa’s agricultural and agribusiness limitations are many and include both the way goods are grown and the way value is added. In a report released by the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience (CABI) at AGRF 2017, the fall armyworm – a large worm that spreads rapidly and destroys crops – has now infested 28 African countries. The worm feeds on more than 80 crops and can cut yields by up to 60 percent, raising a substantial threat to agricultural output. CABI estimates that the financial cost of the worm in just 10 of Africa’s maize-producing countries could be as high as $5,5 billion a year.

Although many farms are starting to use new technologies to counter environmental concerns, such as disease-resistant seed strains, environmentally friendly pesticides and improved irrigation, yields remain significantly under their potential. Finance is also a sizeable barrier to the upsizing of smallholder farms, as financial institutions rarely find agricultural projects bankable in Africa.

As Kalibata explains: “Banks are not in the business of losing money. It becomes about how viable smallholder farms are as entities that can hold and pay back money; that is what enables farmers to access finance.”

As an alternative to banks, more innovative methods of financing smallholdings are beginning to emerge, especially with the ubiquity of the smartphone and the greater connectivity of farms.

A young farmer at the conference said: “We need to find other channels of getting access to finance, we need to start working with other farmers to save money and borrow from other groups.”

Urbanisation and an ageing farmer population are also a concern, causing a quickly depleting workforce. The average age of Africa’s farmers, who account for two-thirds of employment, is 60 and the youth in many rural areas leave for urban centres at home or abroad.

“You need to stop talking about making agriculture sexy and cool to young people, what needs to happen is to actually make it a business and to focus on young people who are taking the choice of investing in the sector,” continued the farmer.

Finally, many raw commodities are being exported across the world and much of their potential value gets lost in the process. As the UK’s Lord Boateng said: “The global cocoa market is worth $100 billion, Africa gets 2 percent of that because we don’t process and manufacture chocolate products in Africa.” – New African magazine

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Another reason to go in to academia

September 21, 2017

This is a wonderful story from today’s South China Morning Post. The only slightly annoying thing is that if they wanted unctuous propaganda masquerading as scholarly endeavour, why didn’t they come to me? I am not saying that I am cheap, but I am absolutely available. My PhD has cost me a fortune.

Have you tried singing ‘Oh, Xi Jinping’ to the sound of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’? It is mildly humouring.

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Chinese universities encourage professors, students to post online content that promotes ‘socialist values’

Content that influences public opinion with ‘correct thinking and culture’ given same weight as academic papers

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 21 September, 2017, 6:43pm

UPDATED : Thursday, 21 September, 2017, 7:00pm

 

China’s top universities are encouraging academics and students to write online articles promoting socialist values, with some offering authors the same academic credits they would get for papers published in journals.

The policy, which follows calls made by President Xi Jinping late last year for academics to become advocates of socialist values and firm supporters of Communist Party rule, has upset some people in the world of academia.

According to a notice issued this month by Zhejiang University, content that is widely circulated online, that shows “core socialist values” and influences public opinion with “correct thinking and culture” now carries the same weight as an academic paper – whether it is in the form of an essay, video or animation.

Content that is posted on the websites and social media platforms of party mouthpieces such as People’s Daily and Xinhua would receive the most credits, the notice said.

“Many professors object to it, saying they do not want to be used for politics,” a PhD student at the university told the South China Morning Post.

“No one is stupid here. The policy is aimed at getting the most intelligent people to say positive things about the country,” said the student, who asked not to be named.

The new scheme is being run by the university’s party committee, he said.

Zhejiang University, which is based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, is not the only seat of learning offering incentives to those who toe the party line. Jilin University in northeastern China is also handing out credits to faculty members whose propaganda is published on state media websites and major commercial news portals.

Propagating the country’s achievements on “mainstream foreign media” also counted as an academic achievement, the university said.

A professor at Jilin, who also requested anonymity, said the new policy had yet to affect his teaching or research work.

“I’m holding onto my own academic standards,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen in the future. A good society should have voices of opposition.”

Shanghai Jiaotong University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology have launched similar schemes, while a number of other schools have promised to follow suit.

The online propaganda drive came soon after inspectors from the party’s discipline watchdog in June named 14 top colleges as being “too weak in their political work”. That announcement followed a nationwide programme of inspections.

Both Zhejiang and Jilin universities were accused of failing to implement a strong system for ideological work.

China is keen to boost the global rankings of its universities and attract the best talent from around the world, but critics have said its efforts were being undermined by too many controls on academics.

In recent years, Beijing has tightened its restraints on higher education, warning of the spread of “Western values” on campuses and sacking lecturers it accused of being critical of the party.

In a speech to universities and colleges in December, Xi said they must become the “strongholds of the party’s leadership”.

Ying Biao, Zhejiang University’s party propaganda chief, said the new scheme was a way to help achieve Xi’s goals.

“We want to … encourage all teachers and students to tell the China story well, to spread China’s voice and to produce more positive views and comments,” Ying told People’s Daily.

According to the Zhejiang PhD student, due to its distance from Beijing’s political centre, the university traditionally enjoyed more freedom than many others and attracted a higher number of liberal scholars as a result.

However, the new policy was likely to encourage young researchers to produce propaganda work rather than academic papers in their bid to get on, he said.

“At least the old people are still here, and they are hard to move,” he said. “But I don’t know how things will be in 10 or 20 years.”

 

 

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TAP: proper crap

September 11, 2017

Air Portugal (TAP) may not be the absolute shittest airline on earth, but it tries hard.

On Monday last week I turned up at Heathrow for a flight to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. The Gates’ and Rockefeller Foundations had very kindly bought me a Business Class ticket to go speak at the 2017 African Green Revolution Forum. I was sent the ticket details about a week earlier.

At check-in, however, the agent said that TAP had not completed the issue of the ticket because it wanted to do a ‘credit card check’. With which card had I paid?

I replied that like most people who travel in Business Class I had not bought my ticket myself. It was purchased for me by the travel secretariat of the AGRF, which I believed was based in Nairobi. If TAP wanted to do a credit card check, shouldn’t it have done one with the travel secretariat a week earlier when the ticket was ordered?

No answer. A phone call ensued between the check-in agent and the TAP office where someone was demanding this random check. I had thought there might have been a payment problem with the credit card, but the agent said this was not the case. TAP just wanted a random, at-the-airport credit card check with a Business Class passenger who had no idea which card had been used for the transaction.

After the call, the agent asked me if I was prepared to pay for the ticket on my card, since there was really no time to chase down the travel secretariat in Nairobi. Figuring that Gates and Rockefeller were good for the money, which was about £1,800, I said yes, because I didn’t want to miss the flight.

By now, however, 20 minutes had gone by and the computer system had automatically shut down the flight’s check-in. Increasingly frantic, the check-in agent started calling numbers of TAP back-office staff asking if they could take my payment over the phone and re-open the flight to allow my boarding pass to be issued.  There were long discussions and calls to other numbers. At half an hour before take-off, I figured I was not travelling.

Just then, however, the senior TAP manager in the airport sauntered past. The check-in agent explained the situation. The manager picked up the phone, called the TAP office, and instructed them to issue to the ticket, charged to the original card. Then he told the check-in agent to walk me through security to the gate. We set off 26 minutes before take-off and arrived about 15 minutes before take-off.

It was all very weird. And it was only the beginning of TAP’s plans to fuck up my week.

The plane was 25 minutes late getting to Lisbon. It was a connection of only about one hour, and security in Lisbon seemed horribly slow and incompetent, at least by the standards of Heathrow or Stansted. A rather nervous woman from TAP who didn’t quite seem to know what she was doing was delegated to round up seven ex-London passengers and get them on the flight to Abidjan. Once we boarded the plane, having seen the chaos in Lisbon airport we asked the crew explicitly whether the check-in bags were on the flight. They assured several of us that they were.

Given that the airport is not huge, and the ground staff had about 50 minutes to make the transfer, there was no reason to believe the bags had not been loaded. Heathrow had loaded my bags in 26 minutes.

The flight was interesting. It was on a Airbus A320, which has a maximum range of about 6,100km (I make no claim to precise figures here; I am going by a quick online search). Lisbon to Abidjan is 6,000km. In other words, TAP was using a short-haul aircraft at the limit of its range.

The result was that, with a Business Class ticket, what one actually got was a Premium Economy seat. There was no greater seat width than an Economy passenger, just a bit more leg room and perhaps a few more inches of recline. The Irish gentleman next to me agreed that this is a business model that Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, would have a wet dream over.

Only two people served the Business section. They closed a curtain after take-off, and took what seemed to me the longest time I have ever experienced to get a meal ready. There was no drink for Business either before take-off, or immediately after. One person serving Business knew what she was doing; the other was clueless and appeared to be being trained on the job (another innovation for O’Leary). All these facets were exactly the same on the way back.

We arrived at Abidjan at about 1030pm. We watched as the baggage carousel rotated for about 90 minutes. No luggage appeared for the London passengers.

After five hours, TAP in Lisbon must have known that the baggage had not been loaded. TAP, as I later confirmed, has an office at Abidjan airport. But no one appeared to inform or help their luggage-less customers.

Instead, we had to register our missing bags (French language only, which was difficult for some passengers) with the general airport lost luggage office. We then took our chances with some pretty aggressive taxi drivers at about 1230am, arriving at the hotel just after 1am.

I arrived at the hotel with the following clothing resources: T-shirt bearing image of large pineapple; expensive jacket; brown corduroy trousers; sweaty boxer shorts; smelly socks; Danish boating shoes. I also had a green jumper in my backpack, but could not think how to make use of it in the tropics. Luckily, I knew the boss of one of the Lost Luggage Seven, and this person lent me a shirt for the start of the conference at 0745.

The conference, probably the key development event of the year for Africa, was full-on, but in the course of the day I managed to a) skip out to a French department store and buy pants, socks, trousers and a shirt for dinner with the vice president and b) track down a number and email address for the TAP office in Abidjan.

In the course of that day, no one from TAP attempted to contact the passengers.

A lady in the TAP office emailed eventually after I called her to say that they had located the luggage and it would not arrive until Wednesday, as there was no flight Tuesday. So would they bring it to the Sofitel, where we all were, I asked? No, she wrote, we would have to go to the airport and get it ourselves at 1030pm on Wednesday using our own transport.

I was the only person in the group who had managed to track down the TAP office, so at least I was able to tell three others whom I had contacts for what was going on. At no point, the whole week, did TAP contact anyone. Even though they could have done so via the original bookings, or via the email and phone numbers we left with the airport Lost Luggage office. They did not give a fuck.

I emailed TAP to ask if I would be compensated for the £150 I had spent on clothes and toiletries. The reply was vague, saying only that I should come to the TAP office. I checked Google Maps. It was half an hour away across town. I would not have time to go there before Friday, and then only if I was lucky.

On Wednesday we went to the airport, waited around for 90 minutes, and eventually got the bags. By a somewhat crafty manoeuvre I managed to recover not only my two bags but also that of the guy who lent me the shirt, who had essential work stuff to do that evening.

I had asked TAP if they would send someone from their office to assist us at the airport that evening and they indicated not. They were as good as their word. We saw no one from TAP all night.

At 4pm on Friday I got my first free hour of the working week and decided to go to the TAP office, if only to complete my anthropological and ethnographic research. The email about reimbursement said that I needed to bring my passport to the office, nothing else.

At the office, about 10 minutes in to a conversation with the woman who had been emailing me, she clarified that the most TAP were going to give me was US$100. In our correspondence, she had consistently refused to address whether I would be repaid the purchases of clothes for which I have no general use. Adding in the US$20 I was paying the hotel for a car that brought be to the TAP office, (because I couldn’t face doing this is an Abidjan taxi after working a 60-hour week), plus the Abidjan taxis that I had taken to do the clothes shopping earlier, I was now out US$200. Plus the AGRF had paid at least US$50 to provide a hotel car to take me to the airport to collect the luggage because it was so embarrassed by TAP’s behaviour (for which, of course, the AGRF has zero responsibility).

In order to get the US$100, the lady asked if I had the lost baggage receipt from the airport. Of course not, I said, because they take it from you when you get your bags back.

The lady said I should have taken a photograph of the receipt with my phone’s camera before handing it over. I agreed that I am an utter moron. However, since I had a copy of the TAP email correspondence with me, the lady had to concede that she had never stated that I should have or bring a copy of the lost luggage receipt.

The lady started to talk with her colleague, who assumed that I did not speak French. I don’t speak great French, but I had mainly chosen not to speak French in the TAP office because I wasn’t clear why I should do anything helpful to a firm that is so contemptuous of its customers. The woman who only spoke French appeared to be the senior person in the office. She made a call to someone apparently more senior than her. She noted that I was a Business Class passenger and referred to me as ‘impatient’.

I smiled. The French-speaking lady said to the English-speaking lady to get a photocopy of my passport. The photocopier was less than two metres from the French-speaking lady, but she did not make the copy herself. Instead, she called the office boy to make the photocopy.

At length, they gave me the US$100.

I had one last question: of the seven people from London whose bags were lost for two days, how many had come to the TAP office to claim US$100? The two ladies conceded that no other passengers had come.

Like me, other passengers would have had to find the TAP office by searching, get the correct phone number after discovering the one given online is wrong, work with a driver to locate the office (the address alone is not enough because the office is inside a small shopping arcade, while no directions are given online), and then found time during the working week to get to the office.

As I drove back to the hotel to get a beer after a very long week, I wanted to reach a reasoned conclusion about TAP, Air Portugal.

My conclusion was that the business is run by Mother. Fuckers.

Still, the key thing is that you can always find a positive. Check-in was a shambles; actually, it was worse. The Business Class seat was not a Business Class seat and hence a total rip-off. The service was slow and half the TAP employees did not know what they were doing. Lisbon airport security was pure Third World. Baggage handling was Third World. The loss of luggage for two days when they could have re-routed it faster if they wanted is off the spectrum for abuse of clients. And our treatment in Abidjan was frankly inhuman.

On the other hand, I did like the tin that the socks, ear plugs and eye mask came in. It is both original and recyclable.

TAP tin 2017

More

In case you have never seen it, here is SNL’s Total Bastard Airlines sketch. I guess that European airlines, TAP (and Alitalia) excepted, are more civilised than American ones, so we have no European equivalent.

I will be saying Bub Aye to PAL. Perhaps you should too.

 

 

 

 

 

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China: GDP-per-capita US$8,123

July 6, 2017

Liu Xiaobo & wife 0717

 

Later, following the death of Liu Xiaobo:

James Palmer in Foreign Policy with a thoughtful overview.

Jerome Cohen on the legal aspects of the Chinese Communist Party’s abuse of Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia, and its impressive hypocrisy.

Novelist Ma Jian writes about Liu Xiaobo on Project Syndicate.

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