Haroon's devlog

eight ways Monsanto fails at sustainable agriculture

2012-02-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

From the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States, an excellent introduction to the failures of industrial agriculture by way of Monsanto.

Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture | Union of Concerned Scientists

CPI (M) in crisis

2012-02-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

An excellent assessment of the Draft Political Resolution of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which highlights the extent to which it will tie itself into knots in order to become electable.

CPI(M) in Crisis

the epistle of Gates and the gospel of agricultural innovation

2012-02-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting analysis by Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development in Washington. I don't agree with all of it, but the challenge that he lays down to the Gates Foundation and their emphasis on agricultural innovation is on the mark.

The Epistle of Gates and the Gospel of Agricultural Innovation

Ghana’s advantage: an agriculture board?

2012-02-01T06:46:00.000-08:00

Last week I gave an interview to MacLeans.ca on the prospects for cocoa in Ghana. Here is the article:

Ghana’s advantage: An agriculture board? - Econowatch - Macleans.ca

recent activities, fall 2011

2011-12-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

The 2011 - 2012 academic session is now upon us. This year I will only be teaching our first year introduction to international development, Human inequality in global perspective. In addition to my administrative responsibilities as Chair of the Department, I will continue my advisory work for the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme. This will see me travel to Korea, Bahrain and possibly Senegal as the Initiative is 'rolled out' into Asia and the Pacific as well as the Middle East and North African regions. I also will be continuing to revise my current research on land grabbing in the developing world. As usual, it will be busy.

food movements unite!

2011-11-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

Food Movements Unite! is a new book edited by Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck. It provides a sector by sector road map for bringing the tremendous transformative potential of the world’s food movements together into a powerful transnational force capable of ending the injustices that cause hunger.

Food Movements Unite! from Food First on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Food First for bringing together such an extraordinary range of contributors, and for facilitating a vision of a different food future.

occupy your democracy

2011-11-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

The single most important Robert Reich clip you can share today; it’s two minutes and sixteen seconds of pure common sense that you can share with everyone.

The Single Most Important Robert Reich Clip You Can Share Today

How to write about Africa

2011-11-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

An excellent article by Binyavanga Wainaina originally published in Granta 92 that challenges us to rethink our assumptions.

Page 1 | How to Write about Africa | Granta 92: The View from Africa | Magazine | Granta Magazine

Thanks Laura for directing this to me.

the case for an alternative economic strategy

2011-11-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Jayoti Ghosh is one of the best heterodox development economists working today. Here is her recent prescription for equitably fixing the global economy.

Overpopulation: the making of a myth

2011-11-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

An excellent tutorial introduction as to the creation of the myth that the world is overpopulated.

As some students have remarked, in the words of Raj Patel, 'scratch a Malthusian and you'll find a racist.'

Putting growth in its place: Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze on India's political economy in the 21st century

2011-11-07T10:55:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent article by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen on India's social and economic performance in the 21st century. It was first published in Outlook.

www.outlookindia.com | Putting Growth In Its Place

The right to food in Canada: inputs to the forthcoming mission to Canada of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food

2011-11-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

On 27 October while on mission in Korea for the United Nations Development Programme I along with several others received a request from the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to provide inputs to frame his forthcoming mission to Canada in May 2012. As none of what I have said is confidential, I thought I would share what I think should be the focus of the mission:

i. Issues
a. continuing food insecurity is a fact of life across much of the country – the use of food banks was at a historic high in 2010 and growth was most rapid in the fastest-growing part of Canada, Alberta. More information can be found at http://www.cafb-acba.ca/default.aspx and in particular Hunger Count 2011, available at http://www.cafb-acba.ca/getmedia/34ebd534-14db-4bed-96d2-4fcadd5d9a33/HungerCount-2011-web-print-friendly.pdf.aspx?ext=.pdf. There are systemic violations of the right to food in Canada.

b. the threat to small-scale 'family' farming across the breadth of Canada continues to rise as high costs and low incomes facilitate the ongoing consolidation of large-scale export-oriented farms. More information can be found at http://www.nfu.ca, who as recently as May 2011 produced a policy brief on these processes for Ontario, available at http://www.nfu.ca/briefs/2011/farm_ontario.pdf. Despite being a massive producer of food, Canada does not have food sovereignty.

c. in western Canada the threat to small-scale 'family' farming has been deepened by the Federal Government's Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act. This bill abolishes the sole-purchaser role of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) (which also buys barley), which currently negotiates bulk commodity prices on behalf of western grain farmers with the global grain-buying companies to whom the CWB sells. The clear intention is to enable global grain-buying companies to buy directly from farmers, forcing them into competition with each other, and thus driving down prices. While this will benefit large-scale farms that reap economies of scale, small-scale grain farmers incomes' will fall. More information can be found at http://www.nfu.ca, while the Government's position can be found at http://www4.agr.gc.ca/AAFC-AAC/display-afficher.do?id=1318619331542&lang=eng. Bill C-18 will make securing food sovereignty more difficult.

d. the consolidation of corporate concentration in input provision, food traders, processors and supermarkets is ongoing in Canada. This is clearly documented every year in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's An Overview of the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food System, a summary of which can be found at http://www4.agr.gc.ca/AAFC-AAC/display-afficher.do?id=1295963199087&lang=eng. The complete report must be ordered from the ministry. The issues surrounding corporate concentration in the food system are similar in Canada to those facing some other developed capitalist countries, and stand in clear contradiction to the concept of food sovereignty.

ii. Populations
a. aboriginal Canadians living in more remote parts of the country witness specific violations of the right to food. Food is much more expensive than in urban Canada, and particularly perishable fresh food. This can be documented at http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100035941, although the data is not current. Also of note is the dated http://www.gov.mb.ca/ana/food_prices/2003_northern_food_prices_report.pdf. One result of expensive fresh food is a need for food baskets to rely on processed foods, which in turn produce a concomitant tendency towards food-based health problems. For example, the link between food security and aboriginal diabetes is explicitly recognized (http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=3067091&Language=E&Mode=1), and has resulted in Federal government intervention (http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/diseases-maladies/diabete/index-eng.php).
b. in addition, over the past few decades environmental changes have reduced the supply of indigenous foods and indigenous food knowledge has more generally declined amongst aboriginal Canadians (http://www.fao.org/wairdocs/other/ai215e/AI215E04.htm). This compromises the ability of aboriginal Canadians to achieve food sovereignty.
c. in many parts of Canada access to indigenous foods requires access to lands from which aboriginal Canadians were expelled long before the 21st century. Thus, ongoing land claims across the country have implications for the right to food amongst aboriginal Canadians (http://ainc-inac.gc.ca/eng/1100100030285, http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/acp/site.nsf/eng/ao20009.html)

iii. Programs and initiatives
a. the interest in food access, quality and production issues amongst urban Canadians in their late teens and early twenties and in tertiary education is quite remarkable, where there is a growing explicit awareness of food sovereignty as a means of achieving the right to food (for example, http://www.mealexchange.com/). Canadian civil society takes food issues very seriously.
b. in addition to the National Farmer's Union (http://www.nfu.ca) and Slow Food Canada (http://www.slowfood.ca/) there are a number of civil society groups organized around food (for example, http://foodsecurecanada.org/; a comprehensive list can be found at http://www.foodstudies.ca/organizations.html)
c. the Toronto Food Policy Council is widely recognized as a model for community mobilization around improved access to and control over the local food system (http://www.toronto.ca/health/tfpc/).

I am looking forward to the Special Rapporteur's mission with great interest.

Glen, Gary and Ross: a film about land grabs

2011-09-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

An excellent short video from Oxfam that explains the motivations behind land grabbing in developing countries.

recent activities, summer 2011

2011-09-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

The 2010 - 2011 academic session has all but ended, which means that now I am entering, as usual, my 'busy' time of the year. I have just recently returned from facilitating a Training of Trainers Workshop for the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative - Rwanda in Gisenyi, Rwanda. In the next few weeks I should be facilitating a workshop for the United Nations Development Programme's Regional Bureau for Africa. I will then head to Emory University in Atlanta, to do some teaching on the Global Master's in Development Practice. In June I will return to Dakar, and the United Nations African Institute of Economic Development and Planning, to facilitate a Training of Trainers Workshop for the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative - Africa. Towards the end of June I will travel to Livingstone, Zambia, to facilitate a week-long short course on gender and economic policy for the Zambian Ministry of Finance. All in all, a very busy few months!

Crash club: when sputtering economies collide

2011-09-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

Trust Mike Davis to tell it like it is. It is going to be a difficult few years.

Crash club: when sputtering economies collide - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Freedom for Palestine

2011-06-28T04:58:00.000-07:00

A week ago I transited through Johannesburg -- my first time in South Africa. I found it quite ironic that I arrived in O.R. Tambo International Airport -- I am sure that I was the only person on the plane that had actually met Oliver Tambo, as the African National Congress headquarters in London during the apartheid years was just down the street from where I was living.

South Africa in the 1980s. Palestine in the 2010s. Different time, same struggle.

Thanks to David McNally for directing me to this.

Twenty-two years later, we still believe the Tiananmen myth

2011-06-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent post on the myths and realities around the Tiananmen events of 20 years ago.

Brian's blog

the curious case of the missing recovery

2011-05-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

Join Jim Stanford in this excellent search for Canada's economic recovery.

My thanks to Brian Robinson for showing me this.

"Every 30 minutes": crushed by debt and neoliberal reforms, Indian farmers commit suicide at staggering rate

2011-05-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. Democracy Now! speaks with Smita Narula of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University Law School, co-author of an excellent new report on farmer suicides in India.

Thanks to Peter Mollinga for drawing my attention to this.

The death of Osama bin Laden

2011-05-07T06:42:00.000-07:00

An excellent personal reflection by Richard Jackson on the meaning of the death of Osama bin Laden, published in The Hindu, India's best newspaper.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : The death of Osama bin Laden: it's a pity …

My thanks to Sharada to forwarding it on to me.

Painful staffing cuts ahead

2011-04-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

It has been drawn to my attention that there is a malicious rumour circulating that I am advising upper-year students at Trent University to reconsider completing their degree in Peterborough. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this recent interview in the Arthur makes clear.

Painful staffing cuts ahead

Dorothy Millar Osborne-Stewart, 22 April 1934 - 16 April 2011

2011-04-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

I am sad to announce that my mother, Dorothy Miller Osborne-Stewart, passed away on 16 April 2011 at the Peter Lougheed Center in Calgary following a brief battle with cancer, at the age of 76 years.

She was born in Darvel, Scotland on 22 April 1934, the daughter of James Miller Osborne and Dorothy Asquith. She was evacuated to Loch Katherine during World War II, attended school in Musselburgh, East Lothian, and worked as a golf caddy at Gleneagles, before moving to Glasgow, where she studied nursing. After living in Hainault, Cumbernauld and Cambuslang she immigrated to Port Arthur, Ontario on 27 June 1967, and in Thunder Bay she became very well known in the community for her professional social work, particularly tending to the needs of the homeless and the abused. She opened Thunder Bay’s first shelter for abused teenage girls, and subsequently two shelters for battered women. In the late 1970s she was the first person in Ontario to be granted a divorce for mental cruelty. In 1980 she met John Stewart, marrying in 1985 and eventually moving to Winnipeg, where she was the founding director of that city’s Ronald MacDonald House. In 1986 she moved to Manitou and retired with John, her cats, and her dog. Following John’s death she moved to Coleman, Alberta in 1997, where she lived with her beloved dog Kelpie and devoted herself to her garden and her cooking.

She will be dearly and deeply missed by her children, Haroon Akram-Lodhi of Toronto and Soraiya Boland of Calgary; and by her grandchildren Cameron Lodhi and Róisín Lodhi, both of Toronto.

A person with a profound sense of warmth and generousity to all, she was predeceased by John in 1990 and her sister Margaret in 2010.

current activities, winter 2011

2011-04-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

With snow falling in southern Ontario, winter has arrived. My teaching of IDST - ANTH 2210Y, Agrarian change, peasants and food production in a global context, has resumed, and is going well, while my administrative duties as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies continue. In January and March I will be giving seminars on my forthcoming paper on the global land grab and its implications for the world food system, while in February and March I will be working in Dakar and Tunis on the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative Project of the United Nations Development Programme.

international aid worker meets African villager

2011-03-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

An excellent, sartorial view on aid workers in Africa.

Thanks to Deborah for passing this on.

equals

2011-03-08T05:49:00.000-08:00

It is International Women's Day. Here's the truth.

Thanks to Norah for passing this on.

How imaginary demand has made food prices more volatile

2011-03-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

An excellent article on food price volatility by one of my former students.

How imaginary demand has made food prices more volatile

It is only a coincidence that I am interviewed!

the voice of freedom

2011-02-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

On every street in my country, the voice of freedom calls.

From Tahrir Square, The Voice of Freedom by Sout Al Horeya:

why Egypt's progressives win

2011-02-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

Why Egypt's progressives win - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

events in Egypt: background

2011-01-28T05:32:00.000-08:00

As tens of thousands are on the streets of the cities of Egypt, it appears that members of the security forces are starting to refuse to follow their orders. If the uprising is to be successful, this must happen. Jack Shenker, who is on the ground in Cairo sending continual reports for The Guardian, has today written this short but accurate account of the background to the current unrest in Egypt, which puts it in its appropriate context. The media is portraying the uprising as being driven by young, tech-savvy educated and underemployed men and women. Shenker sets the record straight. I reproduce part of the account in full:

"It was a 2008 strike by textile workers in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla al-Kubra that fired the imagination of many of those on the streets today. The three people shot dead by security forces during the Mahalla unrest on 16 April inspired an online movement which took its name from the date.

The traditional working class from all corners of the country has continued to provoke and inspire dissident activity ever since, occupying pavements outside parliament for weeks on end to highlight the devastating impact of the neoliberal reforms pursued by the ruling NDP party. Some trade unions – most notably the real estate tax collectors – have gone on to break free from state control.

Away from the economic concerns, anger at police corruption and brutality has been at the heart of the new wave of protest."

To which, of course, one must add the authoritarian corruption and brutality of the Mubarak regime.

the fall of the West's little dictator

2011-01-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

An excellent analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia by Esam Al-Amin:

Esam Al-Amin: The Fall of the West's Little Dictator

I'm mad

2011-01-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

Take the 10 seconds needed to sign this petition. One billion hungry in the world is unacceptable.

1billionhungry.org

Beverly Bell in Haiti

2010-12-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

This blog from the ground in Haiti is excellent, as well as very positive about the power of Haitians to build a better future for themselves.

Beverly Bell in Haiti — YES! Magazine

Thanks to Liz, a former student, for pointing this out to me.

false economy: why the cuts are the wrong solution

2010-12-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

An excellent illustration of how to challenge the perverse deflationary logic that now governs economic policy making in the developed capitalist countries.

Captain SKA's Liar Liar

2010-12-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

The one good side of ConDemNation: the return of British political pop.

My thanks to my former colleague, Deborah Simpson, for showing me this.

Hans Rosling's 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes

2010-12-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

Swedish statistician Hans Rosling's latest graphical presentation of how the countries of the world are, slowly, getting wealthier and healthier. The trick: how to move all to the upper right hand side.

Thanks to my former student, Azra Abdul Cader, for bringing this to my attention.

the rise of Canada's richest 1 per cent

2010-12-03T09:58:00.000-08:00

This interesting paper from the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives shows how over a 90 year period there have been cycles in inequality in Canada, and that the most recent cycle demonstrates a marked sharpening of income inequality.

The Rise of Canada's Richest 1% | Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

message to the US – blame the wars, not China

2010-12-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

An excellent post from my former colleague, Paul Kellogg, on the sources of US financial instability.

PolEconAnalysis: Message to the U.S. – Blame the Wars, not China: "There is a growing chorus of voices in the media and the academy singling out the actions of the Chinese state as central to the dilemmas of..."

the rage of the ignorant

2010-11-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

Transiting through Dulles Airport in Washington, DC on my return from Dakar on Sunday, I was struck by the titles of the mass-market books on US politics in the bookstore. The shelves were full of books fulminating against US President Barack Obama; the rage was so palpably strong I could almost taste it.

That rage appears to be reflected in the results of the US mid-term elections on Tuesday. The media has been proclaiming the Republican triumph as the most dramatic mid-term swing since the 1930s, although the fact that only 37 per cent of the eligible electorate actually voted makes this result far less dramatic than the media would like. The mid-terms represent the rage of the white, socially conservative, Christian fundamentalist right, commonly called the Tea Party, which clearly represents a minority of the US electorate.

It seems to me that the rage of the Tea Party movement is the rage of the ignorant. While supporters of the Tea Party movement claim that they are interested in limited government and reduced regulation (although they love Federal entitlement programs that proffer largesse to their core constituency, such as Medicare) they seem to forget that in late 2008 US capitalism was in the midst of its worst crisis since the 1930s. Obama did not cause the crisis, which originated in the financial market de-regulation engineered by Alan Greenspan under Bill Clinton following Clinton's rightward tack after the 1994 mid-term elections. De-regulation was designed to address the dramatic rise in US social and economic inequality, and was predicated upon the type of policies the Tea Party supports, most notably the liberalization of US financial markets. True to his neoconservative ways, George Bush recognized that the crisis of US finance capital was turning into a crisis of US capitalism, which he and Hank Paulson therefore attempted to shore up by a massive injection of government spending designed to stabilize the US economy: at a cost of US$700 billion the Troubled Asset Relief Programme was enacted by Bush, in the face of Congressional hostility, a hostility that was only overcome in the wake of a stock market panic and a huge sell-off of equities as US financial markets plunged.

TARP was barely underway when Obama entered the White House, but to the 'right Keynesians' that populated his economic team following his inauguration, it was clear that TARP was, on its own, inadequate to sustain the resurgence of US capitalism. More was needed, especially as banks, fearful for their existence under the weight of so-called 'ninja' mortgages, has stopped lending. The Obama administration therefore enacted a second fiscal stimulus, the Recovery Act, worth some US$787 billion, within a month of his inauguration. The Recovery Act cut taxes, raised government spending and transferred money to cash-strapped states.

The Tea Party movement may not like government, but US finance capital knows that most of the 7800 banks in the US still exist because of the various liquidity interventions engineered by the Federal Reserve, along with guarantees, loans and outright bail-outs engineered by the US state. Obama did not take the banks into public ownership, as some were advising him to do. Drastic bank reform was off the table as the Federal Reserve embarked on a round of 'quantitative easing' to flood markets with cheap money designed to complement the Recovery Act. Instead, the Treasury designed 'stress tests' to increase the capital reserves of banks, with the result that US banks are now better capitalized –and financially healthier – than at any time in recent decades.

The companies that relied on those banks would have gone down if the financial system had collapsed. Instead, with cheap money, low interest rates, and rising unemployment not only have the companies, for the most part, remained in business, but profits after taxes in the US during the worst crisis in decades have actually increased by one-third. Consider the case of General Motors and Chrysler. The Obama administration brought GM in temporary public ownership under stringent conditions that allowed the company to rewrite its labour contracts, fire its ineffectual management, and quickly close its less efficient lines and activities. Placing GM in short order into such a favourable corporate environment allowed the company to quickly repay its government loans and rapidly return to profitability.

Strong profitability across the US corporate sector has produced a predictable result: equity prices in stock markets have boomed. From March 2009, some 7 weeks after Obama's inauguration, equity prices have nearly doubled. Booming profits and equity prices were not translated by the Obama administration into a tax grab: in the second quarter of 2010 total corporate taxes in the US were, at about US$442 billion, almost the same as during the peak of the credit boom in 2007, prior to the crisis; the US corporate sector is paying a lower share of its income in tax.

Of course, part of the discontent that the Tea Party has played to is high unemployment. Yet increased unemployment has been pivotal to the success of the US corporate sector since the depths of the crisis were breached. Unemployment disciplines the labour force and in so doing sustains the corporate profits that have restored the vigour of US capital. Indeed, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan body, far more would have been out of work without the stimulus and quantitative easing.

Claims that Obama is the first US president not to believe in the US Constitution, that Obama is committed to fundamentally rewriting the relationship between the US state and civil society, and that Obama is a socialist thus seem to brazenly ignore what Barack Obama has done since he became President. In the face of a crisis of US capitalism, under the advice of his 'right Keynesian' economic team Obama's actions have robustly restored the reign of capital – and particularly finance capital – in the US. Indeed, the new round of quantitative easing announced on the day of the US mid-terms is great for finance capital – it is good for equities, for bonds, as well as real assets, while at the same time cheap money will depress the US dollar, stimulate exports, and stimulate corporate profits in circumstances where labour has been fiercely disciplined by increased economic insecurity. The US has gone back to the future, facilitating the continued rise of the plutocrats that increasingly shape the operation of the US political economy, and in so doing directly shape the process of global development.

The Maoist insurgency in India

2010-09-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

From Jairus Banaji, this is a typically astute and erudite analysis of the Maoist insurgency in central India, written partly in response to Arundhati Roy's “Walking With The Comrades”. It is, in my view, essential reading for those interested in India, but also in anti-capitalist political forces and factors more generally.

The Maoist insurgency in India: End of the road for Indian Stalinism?

What’s the new global source for fresh, shiny produce?

2010-08-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

As people scramble to make a living, food is being exported so that European supermarkets are full of fresh produce in the off-season. There is a systemic injustice in our food system.

What’s the new global source for fresh, shiny produce? - World - Macleans.ca

Rural India's communication divide and rural class differentiation

2010-08-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

An excellent article from The Hindu on how social inequality in access to mobile telephones in rural India mirrors social inequality in access to land and other productive assets. Not surprising in the least, but having the evidence is extremely good.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Rural India's communication divide

the moment of truth in Afghanistan?

2010-07-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

This morning saw the biggest leak of classified military files since the Pentagon Papers. In The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, the true extent of the failed military 'strategy' in Afghanistan became apparent. Unreported incidents that have led to the deaths of many hundreds of civilians; 'black' units with instructions to kill or capture Afghan insurgents without any recourse to any kind of judicial process; the increasing use of Reaper drones to hunt and kill by remote control from Nevada; the acquisition by the insurgents of surface-to-air missiles.

Emerging from documents leaked by a 22 year old military intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, who is now in prison facing court martial, the 'collateral damage' of the conflict has never been starker: French troops strafing a bus full of children in 2008; a US patrol machine-gunning a bus; Polish soldiers mortaring a village wedding party, apparently in reprisal for a previous attack, which constitutes a war crime--in all, the files document 144 unreported incidents. For example: British forces are identified as being involved in 21 unreported incidents resulting in at least 26 deaths; at least 16 children were killed or wounded. This is a brutal war against the Afghan population; no wonder the insurgents are growing stronger by the week. War crimes tend to do that.

Richard Norton-Taylor, writing in The Guardian, said this:

'The logs...provide unprecedented insight,...painting a picture...of brutality, cynicism, fear, panic, false alarms and the killing of a large number of civilians -- many more than of foreign troops or insurgents -- by all sides in the conflict. And, inevitably, "friendly fire". It is a story of deep-seated corruption by senior members of the Afghan police, of black operations by coalition special forces engaged in assassinations of dubious legality, of spies, and of unmanned but armed drones controlled by "pilots", including private contractors, sitting in front of computers thousands of miles away.'

Every citizen concerned about this war should read these files, and decide for themselves:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks

I have little doubt that these files will make an enormous contribution towards government leaders finally coming to say what the world has said for a long time: that this war is not only unwinnable, but quite fundamentally unjust.

how not to solve an economic crisis

2010-07-26T05:48:00.000-07:00

Thirty months ago the contours of the global economic crisis began to become apparent. Twenty-two months ago the developed capitalist countries came exceedingly close to a private sector financial collapse. The causes of the global economic crisis have been laid out, in full, in previous entries to this weblog. What is remarkable, however, is how little has been learnt by global economic policymakers.

Outside of the United States, where the fiscal stimulus designed to offset the worst possibilities of the crisis is gradually winding down but is nonetheless still having an impact, there has been a move to 'fiscal consolidation'. In Europe in particular--Germany, Britain under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, the Netherlands and elsewhere--economic policymakers seem to be blithely unaware of the grievous state of their economies. In an effort to cut government budgetary deficits sooner rather than later, European economies are slashing government spending and raising taxes as their attempt to steer their countries out of the crisis. I have seen economic incompetence amongst policymakers in the developed capitalist countries before: but never on this scale.

Consider: the current driver of global economic growth are the developing capitalist countries, and in particular China, India, Brazil. All of these countries have an economic model predicated upon producing goods and services for the developed capitalist countries that are comparatively cheap because of their lower unit labour costs. For these countries to continue to grow, and pull the world economy along with them, they need to be able to sell their products. Who are supposed to be buying these products? We are: the developed capitalist countries where we live.

However, the withdrawal of the fiscal stimulus and the shift to fiscal consolidation has to make one wonder how we are supposed to buy these products that the developing capitalist countries are supplying to us. As budget cuts hit Germany, Britain and elsewhere, this is a stark question. It is, however, most starkly posed by the most important developed capitalist country of all: the United States.

How are Americans going to buy the products of China, India and Brazil in the current economic climate? Consider these findings of a recent Pew survey on how the recession has affected Americans:

* more than 50% of all American workers have either experienced a period of unemployment, taken a cut in working hours or rates of pay, or have been forced to go part-time since the onset of the crisis
* an average unemployed worker in America has been out of work for almost 6 months
* collapsing share and household prices have destroyed 20% of the wealth of an average American household, making them effectively poorer than they were 35 years ago
* 60% of Americans have either cancelled their holidays or have cut back on their holidays, in a country with the shortest holidays in the developed capitalist countries
* 25% of those between 18 and 29 have had to move back in with their parents
* less than 50% of all American adults believe that their children will have a higher standard of living than theirs, and more than 25% believe that their children will have a lower standard of living

One does not have to be an unreconstructed Keynesian to see that the only way that this crisis will not be borne by those least capable of bearing the costs of the it is to maintain the purchasing power of households that have been hit hardest by the crisis. Chinese, Indian and Brazilian goods need people to buy them: but right now governments in the wealthiest parts of the world seem to be doing everything in their power to ensure that those that would most want to buy goods and services from the developing capitalist countries are not able to do so. Weak consumer demand for wage goods is no way to solve the crisis; it is a recipe for deepening the crisis.

current activities, spring 2010

2010-07-26T05:47:00.000-07:00

Spring seems to always see me quite busy, and the spring of 2010 will be no different, even though my teaching responsibilities in the Department of International Development Studies take a holiday. The biggest delight I have this spring is attending the Convocation of the first international development studies cohort at the University that I have seen through from the beginning to the end. Even more pleasing, I will be handing out their diplomas.

The only teaching I will do in the spring will be to act as External Examiner at a PhD defence at Wageningen University in the Netherlands on 16 June, which will require my presence. Of course I will have to maintain my ongoing responsibilities as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies to students, staff and faculty. This will also involve, for the first time, attending the annual meetings of the Canadian Consortium of University Programs in International Development Studies.

In terms of my research, I will be revising the manuscript of my forthcoming book for Fernwood Publishers, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis as well as my chapters in the forthcoming textbook An Introduction to Gender and Economics: Foundations, Theories and Policies. I will also be giving a paper at the Second Annual North American Historical Materialism conference in mid-May, while late May sees me at the annual meetings of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development.

Finally, a large amount of my time in the spring will be taken up undertaking some advisory work for the United Nations Development Programme New York, and possibly elsewhere if it is required.

I will find some time, though, to enjoy the new season.

David Harvey and the crises of capitalism

2010-07-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

Han Rosling's new insights on poverty

2010-06-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

An excellent overview from 2007 that I have just seen, courtesy of Adam McCarty, of the improvements in the human condition over the 20th century. Development happens.

who speaks for Africa?

2010-05-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have admired Bob Geldof for a long time. Here, in answering why 2 white men should presume to speak for Africa, he offers a spot-on answer:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/video/who-speaks-for-africa/article1562615/

of volcanos and flowers

2010-04-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

Sent to me by one of my students, this BBC posting provides a fascinating glimpse into the logic of the world food system, as thousands of farm workers in Kenya are laid off as a result of the eruption in Iceland:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8629079.stm

agribusiness in Brazil

2010-04-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

An excellent video article from the Financial Times on agribusiness in Brazil, the superpower of the new agricultural countries.

http://www.ft.com/cms/1644d08e-f450-11dc-aaad-0000779fd2ac.html?_i_referralObject=16029375&fromSearch=n

a history of modern Sudan

2010-04-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

An excellent piece of reportage to place this week's elections in Sudan in context has been produced by The Economist. Sudan is far too often thought of these days in the context of Darfur. Yet Sudan's history of conflict goes back 4 decades, and has seen at least 2 million deaths in addition to the 300000 dead in Darfur. More than 9 million Sudanese rely on food aid; and in the south of the country, an area twice the size of Italy, there are only 50 km of tarmac roads. We need to pay more attention to Africa's biggest country.

the whirled bank

2010-03-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

I have just come across a defunct site that I think was put up by the 50 Years is Enough campaign. The site mirrors the registered site of the World Bank, but tells a very, very different story. Check it out:

http://www.whirledbank.org/

I particularly liked the interactive banking game that lets you drag your country ever deeper into a debt quagmire.

a short, recent history of Congo

2010-03-25T04:20:00.000-07:00

More from The Economist's excellent videographics: in 5 minutes anyone can understand why the world's worst war since World War II in the Congo is ultimately about the control of resources for our cellphones.

global fertility

2010-03-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

The Economist offers some remarkably accessible videographics that explains some of the key international development issues. This one, on global fertility patterns, demolishes the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 3:32, demonstrating how there is no 'population bomb'.

walking with the comrades

2010-03-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have just read an excellent article by Arundhati Roy, the famed Indian novelist, entitled 'Walking with the comrades', in which she tells of her visit to armed Maoist insurgents in eastern India this year. The full article can be read here:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/22-walking-with-the-comrades-aj-07

The article has provoked an interesting debate on an excellent website called Run from big media. You can review the debate here:

http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/#comments

These resources give an interesting insight into what Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls 'the gravest security threat' facing India today.

the 2nd annual David Morrison lecture in international development

2010-03-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to say that Trent University's excellent David Morrison Lecture in International Development is now on YouTube. Part 1 is below.

The rest of the lecture can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM8nqN4YZBE&feature=related

halt the cuts in IDST's budget

2010-03-24T13:56:00.000-07:00

The students of international development at Trent University are an exceptional group of young people. The following article was published in the Arthur, the Trent University and Peterborough community newspaper, this week:

Halt the Cuts in IDST’s Budget: Shortsighted Decisions a Serious Blow to Trent’s Educational Experience

Written by Andrew Skinner and Christina Franklin

Monday, 22 March 2010 14:22

What would you do if your department were planning to cut its fourth year course offerings in half, attempt to stuff 40 fourth-year students into seminars meant for 15, and shrink the department faculty by one third? This is the current situation facing the Trent’s International Development Studies (IDST) Department. On the chopping block are:

- IDST 314: ‘Global Institutions and Development’
- IDST 411: ‘Capitalism’
- one section of IDST 424: ‘Canada, Globalization and Development’
- IDST 425: ‘Topics in Global Political Economy: Money and Finance’
- IDST 470: ‘Religion and Social Movements’
- IDST 476: ‘Family and Modernity’.

Gone also would be the Oshawa serial of IDST 100: ‘Human Inequality in Global Perspective,’ which effectively means there would no longer be an IDST program offered in Oshawa. So, if any of the 40 students currently enrolled in IDST 100 in Oshawa want to continue with an IDST degree, they will have to come to Peterborough.

Though it appears that cuts are being made in the ‘instructional budgetary allocation’ of all departments to help make up Trent University’s deficit, these cuts will negatively impact the IDST department in a particularly deep way. For those who may not be aware, the Trent IDST program – which examines the sources and consequences of global inequality from the economic, cultural, political, historical, gender, environmental, and social perspectives – is one of the best in all of North America, and certainly in Canada. Its year-abroad programs are unparalleled, and its small but dedicated faculty are second to none. The proposed cuts not only eliminate the growth of an outstanding program (particularly its expansion in the growing Oshawa market) at Trent, but cut deep into the core of what makes the program so great: its breadth and depth of courses, and the exceptional professors it attracts.

This decision seems to be a shortsighted one. On a primitive financial level, the IDST enrollment for the 2009-10 year is up by at least 15 per cent. As it is right now, the department is almost coming apart at the seams to accommodate this growth. Beyond simple accounting, the proponents of these cuts do not seem to realize that the net worth of an educational institution (or any business for that matter) cannot be captured on a spreadsheet. The long-term reputation of one of Trent’s image-defining departments is seriously jeopardized by the proposed cuts. As Trent IDST students return to their hometowns or graduate and move into socially-minded careers, they will tell the story of how Trent’s IDST program is declining. The most powerful marketing tool is still word of mouth.

While the situation of the IDST department is particularly bleak, it is certainly not unique. It is part of what we perceive to be a larger strategy to move away from the liberal arts foundation of the university towards the more grant-rich pastures of science programs. Don’t get us wrong: we have nothing against science or making money! But the reality is that Trent’s niche in the university market is as a smallish liberal arts university, and it needs to continue doing what it does best.

If you are a first, second, or third year student we encourage you to investigate the cuts in your department because they will directly impact the quality of your education in your remaining years at Trent, should you choose to stay. If you are a fourth year student, we also encourage you to investigate cuts in your department, because the value and reputation of your degree will be undermined by the loss of Trent’s prestige that these cuts necessarily entail.

To become more involved in this student-led campaign there is a Facebook group called ‘Petition to Halt Cuts in IDST Instructional Budgetary Allocation’ which you can join to find out about announcements regarding this important issue (you must be part of the ‘Trent network’ to join). Students from all departments are encouraged to join.

We call on President Steven Franklin and/or the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Mark Parnis, to make an official statement about the planned cuts, and to open a dialogue with students (who are also ‘consumers’ of education). We believe that the stunning breadth and depth of the proposed cuts compromises the future of Trent University’s long-term financial viability and its ability to deliver a top-quality education. The value of our education cannot be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. If you would like to sign the petition please visit either the Seasoned Spoon or the TCSA Office, both in Champlain College.

President Franklin’s Office: sherrygosselin@trentu.ca
Vice President, Dr. Christine McKinnon: cmckinnon@trentu.ca
Dean of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Mark Parnis: mparnis@trentu.ca
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Jocelyn Aubrey: jaubrey@trentu.ca

Postscript: Following the publication of this article, both the Dean and the President agreed to meet with a group of IDST students. Let's see what happens.

recent activities, winter 2010

2010-03-22T05:51:00.000-07:00

As the winter of 2010 settles, it will be a busy period for me. In addition to my ongoing responsibilities to faculty, staff and students as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies, I will continue to teach IDST-ANTH 221, Agrarian Change and the Global Politics of Food. In terms of research, I will be revising the manuscript of my forthcoming book for Fernwood Publishers, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis. My two-part survey article on the agrarian question for The Journal of Peasant Studies will be published and I hope to complete work on a review article for the Journal of Agrarian Change. I will also be revising my chapter in the forthcoming textbook An Introduction to Gender and Economics: Foundations, Theories and Policies. Finally, I am scheduled to give invited talks at the University of Western Ontario as well as Amnesty International.

Of course, it is likely that a number of unexpected activities will also occur: they always do!

rock & roll jihad

2010-03-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

A lot of the people who offer their opinions about the global political economy really know very little about the realities of people's lives or their beliefs. This is especially true when you consider the way in which Islam is often depicted in the mainstream media. The dominant image is the burka, a head to toe covering worn by women that a majority of people in Europe apparently want to see banned--even though in France, the principle country pushing for a ban, women that wear the burka number in the few thousands. The burka is a symbol of the oppressive medieval mind-set that many uninformed people associate with Islam. The word that strikes me that best describes this viewpoint is: monolithic. For it to be true in other religions, all the Christians of the world would have to share the narrow fundamentalism of the US religious right.

Modern Islam is, despite 30 years of the Shia Iranian Revolution, remarkably diverse and indeed pluralist. This came back to me with force when over the weekend I read Salman Ahmad's autobiography, Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star's Revolution. Salman Ahmand is the leader of Junoon (obsessive passion), Pakistan--and South Asia's--leading rock band. For many outsiders, the idea of a Pakistani believer wanting to play rock 'n roll would sound anathema. Not Ahmad. Born into an upper middle class family, Ahmad tells a compelling story of how his religious and social beliefs can be channelled through his electric guitar--much in the same way as U2's The Edge. More to the point, from his point of view, some of Junoon's music matches the best rock 'n roll the world has to offer, in its intensity and commitment.

Ahmad does not shy away from the contradictory politics of Pakistan, lambasting former dictator Zia-ul-Haq for attempting to impose his one-dimensional, Wahhabist vision on the country--a vision quite at odds with the views of the 'Pakistani street'. Ahmad continually reminded me of the tolerance and pluralism that pervades urban Pakistan, even as it is quite conservative--something that is too easy to forget in a world where caricatures are easier to depict in the mainstream media.

Ahmad's book shows how he creatively channels Sufism and the spirit of Faiz Ahmed Faiz into his music and his life, quoting at one point Faiz's poem 'Speak':

Speak, for your two lips are free
Speak, your tongue is still your own
This straight body still is yours
Speak, your life is still your own
Time enough is this brief hour
Until body and tongue lie dead
Speak, for truth is living yet
Speak whatever must be said
Speak

In reminding us of the need to speak the truth to power, Ahmad reminds us of our common humanity and the common challenges that we all confront. Read the book--it is a first-person account of a world that you will recognize, but which is not your own.

of markets and men

2010-02-27T16:10:00.000-08:00

As some readers of this weblog are aware, I believe that one of the ways that we can understand the prevailing social and economic system under which we live is to consistently read the voice of the social and economic system under which we live. Which is why I have read London's Financial Times for more than 25 years. To read it is to educate yourself, day in and day out, about the realities of our planet.

Yet despite reading the paper for such a long time, it is only in the past 3 months that I have started reading the columns of the FT's investments editor, John Authers. I am very sorry that it took me so long--for Authers' columns are an exemplary explanation of the intracies of contemporary global capitalism. Today's paper in this regard does not disappoint. In talking about the impact of bad weather on investing, this is what Authers has to say:

'The world's markets are driven by a few small tribes of investors working for large institutions, who tend to live close to each other in a few well-defined population centers. This propogates groupthink'.

If only all analysis of contemporary global capitalism was so lucid!

my home town

2010-02-26T15:11:00.000-08:00

Although it is far too commonly ridiculed by Canadians that I have met, I feel that I am extremely fortunate to have been raised in Thunder Bay. In a very real sense, Thunder Bay--the people and the place--made me what I am today.

I have just come across a remarkable song by Jordan Burnell of Thunder Bay. It really captures the essence of a lot of what it is about. So here it is.

pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

2010-02-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

Many people find the times that we live in to be profoundly disempowering. Despite the fact that the social and economic system under which we live is, at less than 300 years, relatively new, in human terms, too many people feel that the world is as it is and will never change--even though it needs to!

I have just come across a remarkable BBC/GlobeScan poll, conducted in the summer of last year, which shows that a large number of people around the world thinks that there is a need for fundamental change. Take a look at the chart above. It really is quite remarkable. It suggests that in the United States alone almost 40 million people think the social and economic system has to change. It suggests that in Canada 6 million people think that the social and economic system has to change. Around the world, millions want a different world--one that they think will be a better world.

Who would have thought. There are lots of folk out there that want to see the kinds of changes that you do!

who is the enemy?

2010-02-11T09:13:00.000-08:00

If this testimony impressed you, as it does me, learn more by visiting the website of Iraq Veterans Against the War: www.ivaw.org

living with landmines

2010-01-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

death of a communist

2010-01-20T10:40:00.000-08:00

Jyoti Basu, who was the longest-serving democratically-elected communist leader in the world, has died in Kolkata. For students of international development in the North in the 21st century, the name of Jyoti Basu is all but unknown. It should be known. First elected to the legislature in 1946, before India's independence, as leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) in West Bengal he turned a slogan into a reality: land to the tiller.

In 1977 Basu's CPM was first among equals in the newly-elected Left Front Government in West Bengal, and Basu became Chief Minister. The Left Front under Basu's leadership implemented Operation Barga: it broke the concentration of land in the hands of a few rural oligarchs, offering tenurial security for sharecroppers and small plots of land to the landless. In so doing, the Left Front halted the rapid de-peasantization that had been taking place in West Bengal. The Left Front also implemented a decentralization of elected governance down to the local, or panchayat, level, allowing the peasantry to bypass the rural oligarchy and the lower rungs of the state bureaucracy, which was controlled by the rural elite in any case, and take more effective, more direct control of their lives. In effect, Basu was able to build a rural redoubt for a political party that in theory was supposed to be the party of the urban working class. Basu's accomplishment lead to 5 consecutive election victories for the Left Front, and Basu retired, undefeated, in 2000.

A very fair obituary of Jyoti Basu has been posted on The Guardian's website. You can read it at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/17/jyoti-basu-obituary

Pragmatic but radical change is possible within the prevailing social and economic system: Jyoti Basu, 1914 - 2010, showed this to be so.

how to help Haiti

2010-01-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

I have just come across an excellent posting by Food First, giving a list of organizations that it is confident can both provide immediate emergency medical assistance, as well as engaging in fighting the looming hunger crisis in the country.

They are:
Partners in Health

Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, this nonprofit health delivery program has served Haiti’s poor since 1987. To donate for earthquake relief, go to

https://donate.pih.org/page/contribute/haiti_earthquake?source=earthquak...

In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, Partners in Health clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: "Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS... Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us."

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

Doctors Without Borders was working in Haiti prior to the quake with a staff of 800. Here is a report on January 13, 2009 with a link to their donation page.

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=4148&cat=field-news

Haiti Action

Haiti’s grassroots movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators, human rights activists, support committees for prisoners and agricultural cooperatives – will attempt to funnel needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. Grassroots organizers are doing what they can with the most limited of funds to make a difference. Please take this opportunity to lend them your support.

http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html

Grassroots International

Long time Food First partner Grassroots International has a long history of working with organizations on the ground in Haiti. Grassroots has committed to the extent possible to, “provide cash to our partners to make local purchases of the items they most need and to obtain food from farmers not hit by the disaster.”

http://www.grassrootsonline.org/news/blog/all-hands-responding-haiti-eme...

As usual, Food First has provided excellent assistance to the international development activist community.

the real cost of a hamburger

2010-01-19T07:43:00.000-08:00

One of the most startling claims in Raj Patel's excellent new book, The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think, is that the 'true' economic cost of a hamburger in the United States would be around $200. When I told my students this last week, they were flabbergasted, and, being my students, they wanted to know the basis of the calculation.

I went back to the book to find out. Raj says that it is based on a report done by the Center for Science and Environment (www.cseindia.org) in India, as quoted in the Financial Times. Unfortunately, the FT article is from 1994: and so both the article and the original report, being 15 years old, are not available on the web--yet!

Luckily, I have found Raj's own explanation in an interview with the NYC Independent Media Center (www.indypendent.org). Here it is:

'The Center for Science and Environment in India tried a few years ago to figure out the true cost of a hamburger. Assuming that it was raised on pasture that was once rainforest, the ecological services provided by that rainforest, the loss of diversity, carbon sequestration, water cycling, fuel and tropical product sources, among many other things, the cost would come to $200. The U.S. food industry has huge hidden costs, from the agricultural run-off that causes a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to the cultural destruction wrought by the “Western” diet. There are also huge health costs associated with poor diet — in 2007, $174 billion was spent in the U.S. caring for people with diabetes — as well as the public funds that support the industrial food system.

Cheap food is “cheat food.” There are all kinds of costs that are externalized from the price we pay at the checkout. We pay those costs one way or another — but the food companies don’t. Merely having a system of free markets with accurate prices still doesn’t address the underlying issues of poverty and disenfranchisement.'

Incidentally, I have arranged for Raj Patel to deliver the 2011 David Morrison Lecture in International Development at Trent University.

land grabbing in Africa

2010-01-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

I have just been sent this excellent report from the NHK World Service on land grabbing in Africa. It is well worth the 9 minutes it takes to view. Note that the first 8 seconds the screen is blank.

current activities, fall 2009

2010-01-13T11:52:00.000-08:00

The fall of 2009 will be a very busy time, if for no other reason that I have become Chair of the Department of International Development Studies for the first time, and envisage a steep learning curve in administering the affairs of faculty, staff and students.

In addition to these administrative tasks, I will, as usual, be doing my regular teaching of IDST 100, Human Inequality in Global Perspective, and IDST-ANTH 221, Agrarian Change and the Global Politics of Food. Both courses have been substantially revised for the 2009 - 2010 academic session. I also will be externally examining two PhD theses, one from Australia and one from the United Kingdom.

In terms of my ongoing research activities, I will be revising my two-part survey article on the agrarian question for The Journal of Peasant Studies, my chapter in the forthcoming textbook An Introduction to Gender and Economics: Foundations, Theories and Policies, as well as revising my forthcoming monograph, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis. I also have a number of smaller publishing commitments that I need to honour.

In short, it will be a busy few months.

hypocrisy over Haiti

2010-01-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

The horrific earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, on Tuesday has apparently destroyed large parts of the city and will result in tens of thousands of deaths: the Haitian Prime Minister is already saying at least 100,000 have died. As communications were restored, the world started to respond: the US, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, China, Mexico and Venezuela all pledged immediate support in terms of personnel, cash and supplies, while the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations and the World Bank have all released money to be used for emergency relief.

No one should doubt the extent of Haiti's need in the face of the worst earthquake to rock the country in 200 years. But the reality is that the need has been present in Haiti for decades. The response of the global community to the calamity is necessary: but Haitians have been living in a calamity for years. More to the point, some of the very countries that are rushing to the aid of the country are the ones that are responsible for the systemic calamity that Haitians have had to endure. The hypocrisy in evidence over the Haitian earthquake is breathtaking: the countries and their corporations that have mired Haiti in poverty must now be seen to be 'doing something' because a global media event demands a response. They rush in, having created the very conditions that enabled the earthquake to be so deadly.

Haiti, the first country to overthrow colonial slavery and achieve independence, is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Two-thirds of its population of 10 million live on less than US$2 a day, and two-thirds of the population still live and work in the countryside. Yet Haiti is a prime example of the fact that poverty is not a naturally-occurring phenomena: it is created, and has been created in Haiti.

Between 1957 and 1986 Haiti was brutally ruled by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or "Baby Doc". Their private militia, the Tontons Macoutes, killed tens of thousands as the country lived in fear. As was common during this period, the United States, which had occupied the country between 1915 and 1934, turned a blind eye to the terror in its backyard, as the Duvaliers were fiercely anti-communist. But there was more to the support of the US than just political ideology: there was also an economic interest at stake, because during the reign of the Duvaliers Haiti set up two tax-free export-processing zones in Port-au-Prince, with, at their peak, 180 factories assembling light manufactures for US transnationals exporting into the US market. So Haiti had a classic 'dual' economy: a small enclave of a manufacturing sector owned and operated by US capital that generated dollars for the Haitian elite, surrounded by a vast agrarian hinterland; beyond the small number of jobs that were generated in the export-processing zone, the linkages between the enclave and the hinterland were minimal. This economic structure became the modern foundation of the extreme inequality that has characterized Haiti since independence and which continues to do so: within the French-speaking minority that constitutes Haiti's ruling class, 1 per cent of the population own nearly half the country's wealth even as the Creole-speaking black majority remains impoverished.

The political instability that has rocked Haiti since the overthrow of the Duvaliers in a military coup in 1986 has its origins in this profound inequality. A vibrant civil society fought it; it was from civil society that Lavalas, a popular movement for social change, emerged, and their candidate, the Roman Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected President in 1990. Yet when Aristide's government started proposing radical reforms that challenged the interests of Haiti's dominant class, the military intervened again in support of the status quo. It was only a US-led intervention that forced a return to constitutional government in 1994, and that intervention came with a price: the restored government of Aristide had to implement an IMF-led structural adjustment program. Radical reform was overthrown, along with the military, by the US intervention. Aristide was de-fanged--he now lives in exile in South Africa--and the former radicals that had confronted the Duvaliers and the military starting scrambling for the crumbs of elected office as the boundaries between political parties and urban gangs faded and the state became increasingly dysfunctional.

One aspect of the structural adjustment program was particularly pernicious: the country had to dramatically reduce import tariffs on rice, the staple food of Haitians. To an uninformed outsider, this might seem sensible--why not import rice that was cheaper than Haitian rice? But the impact of this reform for the bulk of the Haitian population, who were peasant farmers, was nothing short of catastrophic. Even in the late 1980s Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, which meant that Haitian peasants could make a rudimentary living selling their surpluses for urban consumption. Cheap imports undermined Haitian rice farming, and hence peasant livelihoods, and now 2 out of every 3 spoonfuls of rice that are eaten in Haiti are imported.

The wanton destruction of Haitian farming massively contributed to the deforestation that plagues the country and, through the latter's impact on flooding, severely aggravates the destructive impact of the tropical storms that periodically sweep Hispaniola. It forced hundreds of thousands to leave the land to search for non-existant jobs in the cities: a lucky few were able to migrate to the US or Canada, but most ended up unemployed and living in squalid shanties such as Cite Soleil, in wooden or tin shacks, with no running water, no sewage systems, and no electricity. Cite Soleil, the outcome of an economic policy foisted on the country by outsiders, was at the epicenter of the destruction on Tuesday.

Cheap rice imports sustained the perverse inequalities of wealth, power and privilege that define Haiti's ruined political economy. Where did those rice imports come from? The United States. From which countries did the rice trading companies originate? The United States. Structural adjustment may have been a disaster for Haiti's agrarian economy, but, as I argue at length in a chapter in my forthcoming book Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis, it was a boon for Louisana's rice farmers and trading companies.

That the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, which propped up the Duvaliers in return for cheap manufactures and then not only neutered radical reform but indeed destroyed the livelihoods of Haiti's peasantry, should now express dismay at the destruction of Port-au-Prince compounds the depth of the tragedy on Tuesday: to the social wreckage wrought by decades of foreign tutelage and about which we did very little there now lies physical wreckage, to which we will respond.

Un atomiste iranien assassiné

2010-01-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

From La Presse, 13 January 2010:

Un atomiste iranien assassiné

Judith Lachapelle
La Presse

Le nucléaire iranien a fait une autre victime, et ce n'est pas la faute aux radiations. Massoud Ali Mohammadi, professeur de physique nucléaire à l'Université de Téhéran âgé de 50 ans, a été tué hier par l'explosion commandée à distance d'une moto piégée alors qu'il quittait son domicile à Téhéran, selon le correspondant d'AFP sur place.

Le gouvernement iranien a attribué l'attentat à Israël et aux États-Unis. «Les premiers éléments de l'enquête montrent des signes de l'action maléfique du triangle États-Unis, régime sioniste et leurs mercenaires», a accusé le porte-parole des Affaires étrangères iraniennes, Ramin Mehmanparast.

«Ces actions terroristes et l'élimination de savants nucléaires du pays n'empêcheront certainement pas le programme nucléaire de l'Iran mais vont l'accélérer bien au contraire», a-t-il ajouté.

Les États-Unis ont été prompts à démentir toute implication. «Absurde», ont répondu les porte-parole de la diplomatie américaine à Washington et celui de la Maison Blanche.

Second à disparaître
M. Ali Mohammadi est le second scientifique nucléaire iranien à disparaître en un an. L'an dernier, un autre physicien nucléaire, Shahram Amiri, a disparu lors d'un pélerinage en Arabie Saoudite.

L'Iran est menacé de nouvelles sanctions internationales pour son programme nucléaire. Le régime affirme qu'il utilise le nucléaire à des fins pacifiques, mais l'Occident craint plutôt qu'il ne cherche à se doter de l'arme atomique.

Qui pouvait bien vouloir la peau de Massoud Ali Mohammadi? Hier, les activités du scientifique dans le domaine nucléaire n'étaient pas confirmées. Selon des étudiants interrogés par l'AFP, l'homme était spécialiste en physique des particules. Il avait travaillé avec le Corps de Gardiens de la Révolution et a été présenté comme «un professeur bassidji», ou membre de la milice islamique.

Mais selon un porte-parole de l'Agence atomique iranienne, cité par AP, le scientifique n'était pas lié à l'agence.

Certaines sources officielles ont désigné des groupes d'opposition au régime, appuyés par Israël, tandis que des sites d'opposition ont affirmé que le scientifique avait appuyé Mir Hossein Moussavi, le candidat rival d'Ahmadinejad aux dernières élections.

Les Israéliens ou le régime?
Pour le professeur Haroon Akram-Lodhi, de l'Université Trent, une implication américaine est à écarter d'emblée. Les services secrets israéliens, par contre, pourraient y avoir trouvé un intérêt. Les installations nucléaires iraniennes sont bien protégées, note-t-il.

«Ce serait extrêmement difficile de les détruire, dit M. Akram-Lodhi, joint hier par La Presse. C'est donc possible que le Mossad ait pu être impliqué parce qu'éliminer un des dirigeants du programme nucléaire serait une méthode plus efficace que détruire les installations. Mais en ne sachant pas si le scientifique était impliqué ou non dans le nucléaire, c'est difficile à dire.»

L'auteur le plus plausible serait le régime lui-même, croit Haroon Akram-Lodhi. «Son appui à l'opposition est documenté et sa mort envoie un message au mouvement vert, dit-il. Sa mort n'aura aucun impact sur le programme nucléaire, puisque le professeur travaillait dans une autre discipline de la physique.»

what's happening in Yemen

2010-01-07T10:44:00.001-08:00

The international community has turned its full attention to Yemen in the wake of the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound aircraft on Christmas day. This is not only because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of attempting the attack, appears to have been radicalized while living in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. Ever since the attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in October of 2000, US security advisors have been aware of the potential of Yemen to become a focal point for Islamist radicalism on the Arabian peninsula. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power since the assassination of the previous president in 1978, was swift to visit Washington and pledge support for US actions following the September 11 2001 attacks, fearing that Yemen might be a target in the aftermath of those attacks, and Yemen has received significant US military aid since 2001. Indeed, the US Administration has doubled its military aid to Yemen since the attempted attack on Christmas day. Yet the events of the past two weeks betrays the extent to which the US and its allies are, as in Afghanistan, getting involved in a place that they know remarkably little about and understand even less.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world: half of the population of 23 million lives on less than US$2 a day. It is also a deeply unequal country. The country is plagued by a dwindling supply of oil, its principle export, and high unemployment in urban centers. But first and foremost Yemen is an agricultural country: the agriculture of Yemen is perhaps facing the most acute water shortage of any farming country in the world, and it is in the rural economy that the causes of openness to militancy can be found.

As I demonstrated in a paper for the United Nations Development Programme in Yemen in the early 2000s, following the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 the country drifted towards a civil war that erupted in 1994. It was during this time that President Saleh expanded the use of the state’s coffers to maintain the system of patronage over powerful tribal leaders that he had established in order to sustain his political supremacy and the concentration of power around his family. A pivotal act in the creation of this system of governance was land redistribution towards the already powerful during the 1990s. With the redistribution of land came the redistribution of water, which was pumped out of the ground by the powerful in pursuit of money-generating agricultural exports; and the livelihoods of Yemen’s vast number of smallholding peasants quickly became unsustainable. The result was that President Saleh presided over a remarkably rapid rise in rural poverty and inequality, an economic malaise that the state failed to address because of the patronage network around the President and his family. As the state all but disappeared in rural Yemen, basic services—education and health care—failed to be delivered, the secessionist movement in the south grew, and a political rebellion in the north arose, making the country even more ungovernable.

It is poverty combined with the absence of the state that has allowed Islamist militants to establish a foothold within Yemen. In 2003 and 2004 a number of Saudi Islamists fled the kingdom following a crackdown by the authorities. In 2006 a number of Yemeni militants escaped from a high-security prison in Sana’a. Last year militants began to shift from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to Yemen. Yet what allows the militants to establish support in the ungoverned regions of rural Yemen is not fealty to a vision of the meaning of Islam but rather money: the money that can buy the loyalty of deeply impoverished people by providing jobs, education, health care and the smallest modicum of social protection. In other words: the outcomes of the very mechanisms that President Saleh has used to sustain his power are the basis by which militant Islamism flourishes.

In this light, the attempt to shore up the position of President Saleh by increasing military aid is precisely the wrong thing to do if al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is to be challenged. As Yemeni reformers know, the problems in Yemen are economic and political: problems of poverty and power that need to be addressed if the foundations of Islamic radicalism are to be undermined. As I argued in the last decade, a decisive step in this direction would be pro-poor redistributive land reform; but given the current alignment of political forces and factors in Yemen, this is, as yet, still remote. Yet it nonetheless remains the case that helping a political leader complicit in the system does not even constitute offering a band-aid; it constitutes supporting militancy. As in Afghanistan, this is the likely outcome of the current course of action being pursued by the US and its allies in Yemen.

what's happening in Yemen

2010-01-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

not who we think we are

2009-12-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

Canadians have a self-image of themselves as well-meaning, liberal, polite and open. Canada as a nation is often seen in much the same way. Yet every so often a series of events collide that forces us to question some of these core precepts. The past 2 weeks has seen 3 sets of events that force me, once again, to ask a fundamental question: who do we think we are?

The first event was the spectacular testimony of Richard Colvin, who claimed to have repeatedly warned his superiors while he was posted in Afghanistan that Afghan detainees held by Canadian forces were being tortured upon their transfer to Afghan custody. The subsequent attack upon Colvin by senior government and military figures was staggering, and was clearly designed to deflect attention away from the central issue: were Canadian forces complicit in the torture of innocent Afghans?

What surprises me about this issue, though, is that in any event it deflects attention away from an even more central question: are Canadian soldiers complicit in the deaths of innocent Afghans. This question is not asked because we already know the answer: yes, of course they are. That the Canadian military kills innocent people is not the image that Canadians have of their armed forces; but the blue-capped Canadian peacekeeper is a thing of the past, replaced by a war-fighting machine that is currently involved in a mission that cannot be won and which has produced tens of thousands of dead non-combatants. Is this who we think we are?

The second event has been the series of racist attacks targeting international students in central Peterborough, where Trent University is located. Is Canada a country that respects difference? Canadians think they do; but these attacks say otherwise. They say that there are many places in Canada where the right to be different should not be assumed but instead remains an ongoing struggle. It says that Canada is not what it thinks it is, and Canadians are not who we think we are.

The third event is the Copenhagen conference on climate change. Writing in The Guardian George Monbiot described Canada as a 'corrupt petro-state'. There is more than an element of truth here: Canada is amongst the worst contributors to global warming on a per capita basis, the government's plan to deal with greenhouse gas emissions is derisory, and the government continues to promote the Alberta Tar Sands project, one of the dirtiest energy projects in the history of the past 2 centuries. Canadians as despoilers of the environment? It's not who we think we are.

Canadians, like people everywhere, need to face up to the realities of their country. Only then can improvements be made, and the reality start to begin to match the aspirations that Canadians have for themselves.

37000 won't work

2009-12-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week US President Barack Obama announced, after a long and often heated debate within the US administration, that an additional 30000 US troops would be sent to Afghanistan by the summer of 2010. This morning in Brussels NATO foreign ministers were able to agree that an additional 7000 soldiers would be sent to supplement US and NATO forces already operating in the country. So, by next summer 140000 foreign soldiers will be fighting in Afghanistan. The plan is that the military surge will create the conditions for a transition to an improved security situation, which can then be reinforced by a civilian surge that takes advantage of improved security to kick-start development efforts in the country, particularly in agriculture, creating the preconditions by which the US can begin to exit the country in July 2011.

This plan will not work. The mission in Afghanistan will end in failure, for a very straightforward reason: from the beginning the US and its allies have profoundly misunderstood the nature of Afghan civil society.

Following the September 11 attacks the US overthrew the Taliban government that had been harbouring Osama bin Laden; but they did not do this on their own. They supported the Northern Alliance, a grouping of former Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara mujahideen fighters, which retook the major cities of Afghanistan from the Taliban, including Kabul. The factions of the Northern Alliance then sought to strongly control Afghan politics by facilitating the establishment of a government notionally led by a Pakhtun, Hamid Karzai, but dominated by elements of the Northern Alliance. It is this alignment that to this day controls the rudimentary state that exists in parts of urban Afghanistan; it is this group that rigged the last presidential election so that Karzai, who allows them to act with impunity, could remain in office. They control this restricted state in order to further one objective, and that is lining their pockets. Afghanistan in December 2009 is little more than a corrupt narco-state run by the warlords and criminals that used to control the Northern Alliance.

In supporting a corrupt and anti-democratic government the US and its allies have alienated the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan: the Pakhtuns. Granted, it was the Pakhtuns that formed the militant base of the Taliban, and it is the Pakhtun that form the base of the current insurgency. But it was also the Pakhtuns that militantly opposed the Taliban in its very heartland: the prolonged history of radical Pakhtun nationalism demonstrates some of the deeply anti-authoritarian tendencies within Pakhtun civil society, tendencies that Mullah Omar unsuccessfully tried to stamp out during the years of Taliban rule.

The alienation of progressive Pakhtuns was then reinforced by 'collateral damage': according to Human Rights Watch the numbers of non-combatant deaths over the past 8 years in Afghanistan has been 65000, of whom the vast majority have been Pakhtun; only 2000 insurgents have been killed. So the 'mission' in Afghanistan has since 2001 become progressively little more than an all-out one-sided assault on the Pakhtun by forces aligned with an illegitimate government dominated by druglords and criminals. It is little wonder that this has generated resistance amongst the Pakhtun; resistance that the West terms Taliban but which is in fact a far more complex manifestation of Afghan realities.

The Pakhtuns have never accepted occupation, and they never will. The international mission in Afghanistan will fail because it is in support of a regime that does not enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of the very population in whose name it is supposed to rule.

recent activities, summer 2009

2009-08-28T11:12:00.001-07:00

The summer of 2009 promises to be a very busy time even though I am currently on sabbatical. I have completed a first complete draft of my next book, entitled Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis, and will be revising the manuscript in consultation with an editor for publication later in the year. I have also completed a draft chapter of my forthcoming An Introduction to Gender and Economics: Foundations, Theories and Policies, which is being co-written with Irene van Staveren and Nicky Pouw; work will be done on revising this chapter shortly. I have been commissioned to write a survey article on the agrarian question for the Journal of Peasant Studies, and the first draft of this article is complete, with revisions to come. Finally, I will be finishing the editorial work on an article to be published in the Journal of Peasant Studies and a book chapter to be published in a book on engendering human security.

I will be attending 4 conferences over the summer months where I will deliver papers. At the end of May the annual meetings of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development will be held in Ottawa. In July I will attend the annual meetings of the Association of Heterodox Economists in Kingston, UK, in August I will attend the 25th World Historical Congress in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and also in August I will attend an international conference on the global food crisis at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Zacatecas, Mexico.

In July I will be Visiting Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, UK, while in August I will be a Visiting Professor at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Zacatecas, Mexico, in conjunction with the Critical Development Studies Network.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can't escape unscathed

2009-06-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

From the Toronto Star, 23 June 2009

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can't escape unscathed

Iranian leader's image tarnished as outrage over vote hurts regime, undermines presidency

Jun 23, 2009 04:30 AM

Olivia Ward
FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPORTER

It was only a few months ago that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was bidding for a role as the new Iranian idol. With flamboyant appearances at home and abroad, plaudits from hardline clerics and a 15-member council dedicated to popularizing his "thought and works," the hardline president might well have expected a shoo-in at the polls. But as swelling protests, and widespread allegations of vote-rigging, rolled through the country, Ahmadinejad's "landslide" has turned to a dust. His image has faded and that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who unswervingly supported him, has come into sharp relief.

Doubts are escalating about the extent of Ahmadinejad's authority to lead, if he is able to resume the presidency after the unexpectedly muscular challenge of his more moderate rival Mir Hossein Mousavi. "The mask has been lifted and people clearly understand that it was Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad, who was really wielding the power," says Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "He says publicly that his personal views are closest to Ahmadinejad's, so it is obvious that he is the one who was really conducting the country's policy for the last four years."

The outcome of the ill-starred election is still unpredictable, even for long-term Iran experts, and some believe Ahmadinejad may have won by a narrow margin rather than the large numbers that were officially endorsed. Meanwhile, inside the Islamic Republic, clerical factions for and against Ahmadinejad's victory are quietly struggling for power. The picture is blurred by the murky nature of the election's vote tallying. Yesterday, Iran's most senior election monitors acknowledged that votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters in two provinces. Previous election results in some rural areas are also too far from the current ones to be credible.

But the continuing protests show that whatever the outcome, the electoral waters are now too muddy for many citizens to swallow. "The fact that people's votes were overturned poses a real threat to the legitimacy of the regime," says Haroon Akram-Lodhi, a professor of international development studies at Trent University. "That will also undermine Ahmadinejad's position, and not just in the urban areas, where he was less popular." Whatever the ultimate result, Ahmadinejad can't escape the effects of the protests unscathed, Akram-Lodhi says. "He will have been compromised, and widely seen as occupying a position to which he was not legitimately elected by the majority of Iranians."

The dilemma over Ahmadinejad's legitimacy makes it difficult for the United States to deal with Iran, even as the crisis over its nuclear ambitions drags on. Some are advising President Barack Obama to engage with the proclaimed winner of the poll, others to ignore him and reach out to Iran's opposition.

But questions also remain about whether the roots of Ahmadinejad's power run deeper than his critics believe. Although he has presided over soaring cost of living increases and rising unemployment, he has also poured money into popular housing and infrastructure projects and proposed cash handouts to replace fuel subsidies.
An overwhelming number of Iran's legislators have backed his return to power, with 220 out of 290 reportedly endorsing his election victory.

Ahmadinejad may also have a covert network of power that makes Khamenei's unprecedented public support more than just backing for a puppet politician, says Arang Keshavarzian of New York University, who witnessed the polls and their aftermath in Iran. "One of the questions is how much Ahmadinejad is in the forefront and Khamenei is following him, and how much it's the other way around," Keshavarzian told the Council on Foreign Relations, citing hints that Ahmadinejad and his "military-intelligence circle" may be putting pressure on the supreme leader.
"Some of these events in the past few days suggest it may in fact be Khamenei who is reluctantly following Ahmadinejad's lead."

But the behind-the-scenes power struggles have little relevance for the protesters who have risked life and liberty to join the demonstrations in the past week.
"If Ahmadinejad continues in power, he'll become an Iranian version of (Zimbabwe's discredited president) Robert Mugabe," predicts Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a history professor at University of Toronto. The election has brought Iran to the crossroads, Tavakoli-Targhi says. "The future is in danger. In the past 30 years, Iranian society has been increasingly secularized. Now there is the possibility of an Islamic democracy that could be a model for the Middle East. "If it fails, it's not only Ahmadinejad that will be seen as worthless. The only way to save the revolution is to empower the individual. If that doesn't succeed, Iran will be a failed state."

the elections in Iran

2009-06-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

This weblog has been silent for a long time, and a lot has happened that I should have commented upon, but have not had the time: the A-H1N1 pandemic; the end of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka; the dramatic drops in international development cooperation as a result of the global economic crisis; the continuing deaths of non-combatants in Afghanistan; the revival of the military commissions in the US, with implications for Omar Khadr; and more.

But today, as protest in Iran gathers pace, it is important to clearly state that the election in Iran last Friday has been stolen. This is not the view of a foreigner who has been deceived by western journalists focusing on Tehran and the educated elite that have been quite public in their support for Mir-Hossein Moussavi. The election results themselves suggest that the election has been stolen.

Consider this: they election results that gave Mahmoud Ahamdi-Nejad 63 per cent of the vote suggest that a core component of Moussavi's support, the urban middle class, in fact voted against him. Educated young people, women, the private business community, and both reformists and conservative figures in the Iranian political establishment--all must have changed their minds and voted for Ahamdi-Nejad. Moussavi is an Azeri: the election results suggest that the Azeri community voted for Ahamdi-Nejad. Even Moussavi's home town is said to have voted for Ahamdi-Nejad. Or consider the position of Mehdi Karoubi, who 4 years ago came very close to beating Ahamdi-Nejad for the Presidency: according to the election results, he did not even win his home province.

The elections in Iran have been rigged. The implications for Iran are far reaching.

recent activities, winter 2009

2009-05-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

In addition to carrying my normal teaching load during the fall, I was pleased to attend 2 meetings. In October I delivered an address to the annual conference of the Global Political Economy Group at the University of Manitoba on the global food crisis. In November I attended an intensive 2 day workshop in New York on unpaid work, care and the economy, as a member of a United Nations Development Programme Expert Group, speaking on the issue of modeling the macroeconomics of care.

My teaching responsibilities for the fall of 2008 have been completed, and now I am looking forward to my first sabbatical. In January I will be working on Hungry for Change, which I hope to substantially complete. In February I will be working on analyzing the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey at the University of Manitoba, working on a short article for the Journal of Peasant Studies, and scoping out my proposed development economics textbook. In March and April I will work on a chapter for my forthcoming co-authored textbook in feminist economics. In May I will undertake field research in rural Vietnam and work on an article for the Journal of Agrarian Change on land markets and the character of landlessness in rural Vietnam. In June I will assume a 2 month visiting professorship at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, in the United Kingdom. I am also, through this period, scheduled to give half a dozen public seminars in both North America and Europe. It will be a very busy sabbatical.

don't expect much in London

2009-03-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

On Thursday this week the 25 leaders of the G20 grouped of developed capitalist and developing capitalist countries meet in London, in what is being billed as the most important global economic crisis for 75 years. They are supposed to come together and come up with a mutually-agreed plan to tackle the global economic crisis that continues to gather in fury, despite what some dewy-eyed optimists might say, as well as putting in place the preconditions to ensure that the current crisis is never repeated. Don't count on it. The one-day meeting will issue a communique that is all sweetness and light, to be sure, but don't expect the problems facing the world economy to be solved on Thursday.

A critical reason why this meeting cannot solve the problems facing global capitalism, other than the absurdly short period of time that the leaders are willing to devote to the problems at hand, is that the key leaders of the most important developed capitalist countries do not agree about what has caused the crisis. There is a fundamental division between the Anglo-Saxon economies--the US, Canada and the UK--and the 'social market' economies--notably France and Germany--about why this crisis has emerged. Don't get me wrong: all 5 countries agree that the crisis has been propelled by the excessive risk-taking of US finance capital. Where they differ is in their understanding of why this propellant has assumed the destructive force that it has.

The US and British position is one that is probably most widely trotted out by the English-dominated global financial media. For Barack Obama and Gordon Brown the key problem facing the global economy has been the seizing up of the financial markets as a consequence of a 'flight to safety' engendered by the collapsing value of 'toxic assets' such as 'collateralized debt obligations'. The answer, then, is to pump money back into the system in order to get banks in particular but also non-bank financial institutions to start to lend money and advance credit again. Public sector deficits--like those created by Barak Obama's US$787 billion stimulus bill--and looser monetary policy--like the Bank of England's adoption of 'quantitative easing' to put more money into the economy, and thus ease the availability of money, and hence of lending--are the way to kick-start a financial sector that is right now unwilling to take chances to start taking chances again, lend, and get the US and world economy moving again.

The French and the Germans have a very different view. For Angela Merkel and the French policy-making elite, the problem is not too little money; it was the fact that there was too much money sloshing around the global financial system. For the French and the Germans, the response of the US Federal Reserve, under the then Chairmanship of Alan Greenspan, to the last 2 significant global events in finance--the 1997 Asian crisis and the financial impact of the terrorist attacks of 9/11--was to loosen up the availability of money in order to keep the financial markets working. This loosening encouraged excessive risk-taking on the part of global finance capital, in pursuit of profit-driven growth that was by definition unsustainable. In this view, the chickens were bound to come home to roost, and they have, with a vengence.

It's going to be hard for Angela Merkel and Barack Obama to reach agreement when they don't even agree as to what caused the problems in the first place. But here's the rub: they're both wrong. Both the Anglo-Saxons and the social market economies fail to grasp the essential characteristics of the crisis of global finance capital: finance capital has become steadily and increasingly divorced from the 'real' productive economy that produces the goods and services that people need. Moreover, in becoming divorced, global finance capital has contributed to the crisis in global manufacturing: a crisis that is well-documented to be threatening the Detroit car industry, to be sure, but which is the result of widespread, deeper, structural and systemic problems. The branch of global productive capital that makes the goods and services that people actually need has yet to find a convincing way out of the productivity and profitability-driven crisis that was unmasked in the 1970s. Finance capital, which was supposed to help sustain profits in the productive economy, has not helped; in many cases, realizing there was not enough money to be made by the 'Masters of the Universe' in the productive economy they have invented new and more esoteric ways of trying to make paper profits on the back of an inability to produce anything of worth to anybody in need. The global economic crisis has been driven by finance capital becoming increasingly divorced from the reality facing the productive economy, and the only way of dealing with the long-term issues created by the crisis and maintaining capitalism as a viable mode of social and economic organization will be to re-connect finance to industry--there is a need to shorten up and tighten the chain between credit and creditor.

The Anglo-Saxon economies want the developed capitalist and developing capitalist countries to do more, in terms of spending, to try and address the crisis. The social market economies want greater regulation of global finance. Both answers only go part of the way to addressing the problems of the global economy; more spending, yes, but redistributive spending that puts money in the pockets of people that actually spend, who tend to be those in the lower 60 per cent of the income distribution. Greater regulation, of course; finance capital cannot be allowed to run rampant. But together they are not enough, given the failure of finance to address the core needs of industry under modern global capitalism.

The communique that is issued on Thursay will praise existing efforts at fiscal stimulus, without committing anyone to more; it will highlight the need to increase financial regulation in the medium-term, which is not the here and now; it will stress the need to clean up bank balance sheets, without making any commitments to nationalization, which at this stage is probably inevitable for some key global institutions; it will lambast protectionism, even though in the months following the last G20 meeting 17 of the 20 countries increased protectionism; and it will give the International Monetary Fund more money, but more money for reasonably well-off developed capitalist countries rather than the developing capitalist countries whose people are, literally, dying as a result of the crisis. None of the core problems facing the G20 will be, in the end, comprehensively addressed. The crisis will continue: for it is a global crisis rooted in the disconnection between finance and production, and in the massive increase in global inequality that such a disconnect has fostered over the last 20 years.

global economic crisis and the case for nationalization

2009-03-03T09:54:00.001-08:00

March 1 2009 was an awful day on financial markets around the world. The economic crisis that erupted into the public eye on September 15 2008, and which fundamentally transformed the dominant approach to governing neoliberal capitalism in the developed capitalist countries, is deepening. Let there be no doubt: things will get worse, because this crisis has been a long time coming. Over the course of this decade the developed capitalist economies allowed current account deficits to build up, in large part because they imported consumer goods from China to a far greater degree than they were exporting to the rest of the world. Normally, such a deficit would have put pressure on currencies: but with the Chinese accumulating foreign exchange reserves, this safety valve did not work. China thus sustained global imbalances.

At the same time the developed capitalist economies let investment outpace the savings needed to pay for the investment; in the US in particular, savings rates are dismal. Notwithstanding the creation of ‘innovative’ financial products designed to attract savings (such as sub-prime mortgages) but which instead turned into ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’, to borrow Warren Buffet’s phrase, investment was financed by attracting inflows of capital into the US from the oil producers, China and other developed capitalist economies. Such inflows were never sustainable in the long term without major adjustments in the US economy. Moreover, that investment that did take place was often channelled into unproductive residential construction rather than productive capacity expansion. Similar patterns were witnessed elsewhere: the UK, Ireland and Spain come to mind. The developed capitalist economies did not enhance the productivity of capital but rather allowed financial accounting profits to boom.

Concurrently, governments in the developed capitalist economies, most notably the US under George Bush, introduced government spending and taxation policies that reinforced the consumer-led boom that they were creating. By not considering the relationship between spending and taxes, governments produced a slide into budgetary deficits that will only be corrected through, at some point, a severe structural adjustment.

Capping all this was business. Finance capital was neither regulated nor supervised, allowing credit and house-price booms, booms that morphed into bubbles that were sustained by flows of Chinese money into the US dollar and into US Treasury bills. Companies became even more led by the short-term dictates of senior managers that had to show ever-increasing profits and dividends to major shareholders. In order to do this, increasingly private capital started engaging in financial activities of questionable morality. They did this because the ethics of business during the decade deteriorated behind the mask of ‘corporate social responsibility’, encouraging corruption on a scale that, in the Madoff affair, is historically unparalleled. This is the world that we have allowed to be created in the early years of the 21st century.

The inauguration of Barack Obama and the introduction of his economic recovery plans have not stopped the rot, as witnessed by yesterday’s chaos on global financial markets. In the last few weeks the deepening crisis of the American and British financial sectors in particular has led to widespread speculation that in both the US and the UK there is going to have to be some kind of nationalization of it. Nationalization is needed because certain banks, particularly in the US and the UK but also in other parts of Europe are all but insolvent, having too little capital and too many bad debts. They will go under unless taken over by the government, and, in the eyes of many, they cannot be allowed to go under, because the web of finance capital is so tightly interwoven into the interstices of our society that their failure might threaten the very viability of capitalism as a mode of organizing social and economic life. In a very real sense, banks such as Citigroup are ‘too big to fail’.

Of course, nationalization has already, to a degree, happened, if we define nationalization as the systemic transfer of the ownership of assets from the private to the public sector: the UK government owns 95 per cent of the Royal Bank of Scotland, all of Northern Rock, and in the US the government already controls 36 per cent of Citigroup, with probably more to come. Around the world major financial institutions now rely on large amounts of taxpayer money. Increasingly, government is needed to save capitalism from itself.

In the US in particular nationalization is viewed with dismay by many as a harbinger of ‘socialism’. Despite the fact that Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, whose belief in the self-regulating power of the market set the tone for the excesses of the decade, now believes that nationalization may be necessary, and despite the fact that some Republicans in the US Congress believe nationalization is needed, there is still reluctance to bite the bullet. Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor as Chairman of the Fed, has been at pains to claim that nationalization is not on the cards: but he has defined nationalization as governments seizing banks and starting to directly run them. This is definitely not on the table: if nationalization occurs, it will see governments around the world stepping in to temporarily take over financial institutions in order to clean up their balance sheets and make them viable once more, before eventually privatizing them. Social democratic Sweden of the 1990s is the model for the policy-makers advocating this kind of intervention, for this is exactly what Sweden did.

In the developed capitalist economies there is a fundamental belief that private capital does a better job of allocating financial and physical resources than governments using state-owned enterprises to pursue a set of economic objectives. This is the reason that private ownership in developed capitalist economies is preferred to public ownership--nationalization--by the government. However, the supposed benefits of having private capital dominating business decision making in developed capitalist economies are not what they seem. I can think of 4 supposed benefits from having private capital dominate the business affairs of the developed capitalist economies:
1. Private firms have to respond to market demand for their goods and services, which means that firms must respond to the preferences of consumers. Government companies, subsidized by the state, do not have to respond to consumers. Allowing consumers to express choice fosters competition between private firms and in so doing increases efficiency, leading to the creation of more goods and services for everyone than would be the case if state-owned enterprises dominated the developed capitalist economies.
However: the efficiency of capital has nothing to do with the ownership of capital. Efficiency, which should be sought, requires competition; many private sector companies operate in oligopolistic markets with only a few rivals, with whom they often collude implicitly and explicitly. When this happens, private capital does not have to respond to the needs of consumers any more than monopolistic state-owned enterprises have to respond to the needs of consumers. In this instance, it is the lack of competition that precludes efficiency improvements, not ownership.
2. Private capital cuts government interference in the economy.
However: private capital has to be heavily regulated, in order to prevent oligopolistic abuses of corporate power, and such regulations represent government intervention in the day-to-day running of capital. Indeed, the history of the decade is that regulation has to be substantially enhanced if the abuses of the past few years are not going to be repeated. Private capital and state-owned enterprises are both subject to government regulation.
3. Private capital has to raise investment capital on financial markets, and to do this they must secure the confidence of financial markets that they are well run and effective in the markets in which they operate. State-owned firms, on the other hand, can raise money from governments and do not have to demonstrate to disciplinary financial markets that they are well run.
However: investment capital from financial markets for private capital may not be available to firms seeking to make long-term investments because of the short-run profit-obsessed time horizon of the financial markets. The lure of quick returns for the financial markets got us into this mess; it also guides how they allocate money to private capital.
Which means that: financial markets cannot be relied upon to make good decisions about the investment needs of private capital.
Moreover: in many instances private capital does not turn to financial markets to raise investment capital; instead, they reinvest their profits. This source of finance is available regardless of the character of corporate ownership.
Finally: in some countries the only reason state-owned enterprises cannot not raise investment capital in financial markets is because of government regulations which prevent them from doing so. This need not be the case, in which financial markets can still discipline the activities of state-owned enterprises. Suggestions by some that state-owned enterprises, by competing for investment capital with private capital, ‘crowd out’ investment, have been demonstrated to not be true.
4. While private capital does not require government resources, state-owned enterprises do. State-owned enterprises therefore increase government spending, weakening monetary policy and forcing central banks to set higher interest rates in order to sustain monetary policy.
However: if private capital does not invest in expanding productive capacity, as was the case during this decade, growth will eventually deteriorate because of a lack of corporate investment, with implications for jobs, equity and social justice.

It is clear to me that the case in favour of the private ownership of capital is not what it is made out to be. There is a strong case that can be made that the financial system as a whole should be treated as a public utility, in which the distribution of investment capital would be done on the basis of democratically-established criteria. This would of necessity involve controls on the international movement of capital and controls over the pattern and pace of investment within a country. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have recently noted, ‘the point of making finance into a public utility is to transform the uses to which it is now put.’

the failings of (financial) markets

2009-02-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

As the world recession continues to unfold, and every day brings more bad news, in terms of job losses, home foreclosures, and large and small companies going under, the high priests of global finance capital are beginning to doubt the strength of their convictions. Last week I was shocked to read that Jean-Claude Trichet, who, as president of the European Central Bank is the second most important central banker in the world after Ben Bernanke of the United States Federal Reserve, appears to be losing his faith in the self-correcting features of financial markets. Trichet said, in the context of European banks and financial markets hoarding capital rather than lending, and in so doing deepening the recesion, that 'what the markets are suggesting is not appropriate'.

Similarly, Alan Greenspan, who was Bernanke's long-serving predecessor at the Fed, has, since last autumn, recanted some of the core beliefs that drove his decision making years: that free markets would handle the risks involved as the financial system created what Warren Buffet called 'financial weapons of mass destruction'; that because free markets would self-correct too much regulation was wrong, because it would damage Wall Street, and hence the US economy; and that banks would always put the protection of their shareholders first, rather than the protection of their executives, as witnessed in the US$4 billion in bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch just as it was being taken over, with government money, by Bank of America (US bilateral aid to Sub-Saharan Africa last year was about US$5 billion).

Perhaps global finance capital needs to read Marx to understand what is going on. Old grey beard, as he used to be called by the Chinese, warned that financial crises were inevitable 'where the ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully developed'. Where's my copy of Capital?

the York University strike

2009-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

As a resident of Toronto, with friends who work and study at York University, I have, like many Torontonians, followed the strike by contract faculty represented by CUPE local 3903 with great interest. The voices that seem to be aired in this labour dispute seem to be of those who do undoubtedly lose out: the students. Nonetheless, while I have a great deal of empathy for the difficulty that the 50000 undergraduates at York have faced, I sometimes wonder if they 'get it'.

CUPE 3903 has 3412 members, and, like many universities in Canada and the US, does more than 50 per cent of all undergraduate teaching at York. The union wants a wage settlement that is above the rate of inflation, a 2 year contract to harmonize the York contract with those of other CUPE university locals, job security, better working conditions, an end to the student code of conduct at York, and post-residency fees. Utlimately, though, this strike is about improving job security.

It is, in my view, important to remember just who are striking. Within the membership 871 are 'contract faculty' who sign a contract to work a certain number of months a year. The remainder--teaching assistants and graduate assistants--work part-time. So the York strike is above all else a strike by part-time workers for improved terms and conditions of employment, including some job security. It is the sort of thing that sensible people take for granted.

In this light, that the provincial government feels that it is necessary to pass back-to-work legislation to force the local back to work should be seen as an affront to sensible people. Back-to-work legislation, which I disagree with in principle, is usually passed to get essential services back up and running. This is what happened last year, for example, when the Toronto Transit Commission, which runs public transport in the city, went on strike. However: how can part-time workers be deemed an essential public service? If their work is essential, why don't they have a properly paid and secure job? These are the key questions that are missing in discussions about the strike.

The reliance of North American universities on part-time and insecure faculty demonstrates the extent to which neoliberalism has reconfigured tertiary education. Neoliberalism in the public sector relies on insecurity and fear to get the job done. However, casualization and flexibilization are not the basis by which to create a worldclass tertiary education sector where students actually learn. The strike demonstrates that some people are not prepared to kow-tow to such a regime. CUPE 3903 continue to deserve the full support of the people of this city.

the contradictions of hope

2009-01-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Last week there was near euphoria around the world when Barack Obama was inaugurated as 44th President of the United States. I must confess that I spent most of the day glued to the television, watching a remarkable event unfold: one of those moments when you had to be there, at least watching, as when 9/11 occurred, Nelson Mandela walked free, the Berlin Wall came down, or Nixon stepped into the helicopter to leave the White House for the last time.

Obama has been extremely active in his first 6 days in office, and has already done some remarkable things. There was widespread press coverage of Barack Obama signing a Presidential order on 22 January 2009 mandating that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba be closed. In the same order it was decreed that all detainess held by the US would be covered by the Geneva Conventions. Less well noted were the fact that in the same order Obama ordered the closure of the Central Intelligence Agency's network of secret prisons, and that the CIA had been banned from using interrogation methods that are not contained in the US army field manual. At last, water boarding will come to an end as the official policy of the US government.

I don't expect the CIA or the US military not to resort to torture, or rendition; but if they do, at least now they can be held, to some degree, accountable. That is a positive return to a previous status quo--and after 8 years of Bush, a positive return to a status quo appears fresh and new.

Most remarkable of all, from an international development perspective, was a Presidential order that once more allows US aid agencies to deal with global groups that advocate family planning, like Marie Stopes and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. George W. Bush had imposed a moratorium on dealing with these groups within days of taking office; there can be little doubt that lifting the moratorium will save the lives of thousands of women throughout the developing world. This move reinforces the emphasis on development made by Hillary Clinton when she first addressed State Department staff last week--she is going to try and have development activities that lie under the control of the Defence department moved to State, where they clearly belong.

Cynics might decry these immediate--and fairly politically easy--changes under the new US President. I don't. These former US policies were an afront to the American people, served to galzanize opposition to the United States around the world, violated international law, and violated the rights of women. It was important that these wrongs be righted.

Nonetheless, it is still necessary to confront these changes against a more mundane and messy reality. On 23 January a US missle strike in North Wazirstan, Pakistan killed at least 21 people, including 3 children. These were the first such strikes--there were 30 in 2008--under President Obama, and as such must have received the direct approval of the President. On 24 January a US military raid in Aghanistan killed 22, including 2 women and 3 children--although the US military, with no observers on the ground, claimed that all the dead were militants. It is likely that a raid of this sort, in a civilian area of Afghanistan, was also explicitly authorized by President Obama. Thus, with the hopes that Obama has raised comes the contradictions of continuity. Such contradictions, however, are inevitable, as Barack Obama cannot and will not transform the US political economy. His role is to manage it better: and as such, President Obama will do much that will disappoint.

voices from Gaza

2009-01-22T15:02:00.000-08:00

From the Financial Times of 23 January 2009:

'Sabah Abu Halema lies on her bed in Gaza's Shifa hospital, her arms and legs covered in once-white bandages and her hands covered in brown scabs.'

'Mrs Abu Halema is a victim of white phosphorous burns after being caught in a bombing early in the 22-day Israeli assault on Gaza...'

'Mrs Abu Halema and her family were eating lunch during the second week of the conflict when three bombs hit her house. Her husband and four of their nine children were killed.'

'"You should tell everyone about these scandalous acts by the Israelis', she told the Financial Times yesterday.'

From the Financial Times on the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, 20 January 2009:

'When an Israeli airstrike destroyed the Imad Akl mosque in the Jabaliya area of Gaza City that night, it also took his house.'

'Tahreir, 17, Ikram, 14, Samar, 12, Dina 7 and Jawaher, 4, were all killed when the mosque collapsed through their bedroom wall. Baraa, who was only 12 days old when the war began, was saved when the force of the explosion flipped her cot over and gave her shelter.'

'"Before, I used to count my children when we went out for family lunch or dinner, to make sure all 9 were there," says Mr (Anwar) Baalousha, 37. "Now I don't need to."'

'The airstrike has change Mr Baalousha's life in more than one way. "I'm ready to become a martyr now", he says dispassionately.'

'His brother, Nafez, chimes in: "The thing is, he wasn't political at all before the attack"'.'

From The Economist, 17 January 2009:

'"My brother was bleeding so much and right in front of my eyes, he died. My other brother Ismail, he also bled to death. My mum and my youngest brother, they are gone. Four brothers and my mother, dead. May God give them peace."'

1500 dead. 5000 wounded. Why?

Gaza's silent victims

2009-01-07T10:04:00.000-08:00

The Israeli Defence Force's air and ground assault on Gaza has been disproportionately deadly on one group of Palestinians: children. It is not widely enough known that of the 1.5 million people that live in Gaza, half are children under the age of 15. In any military operation, then, it was inevitable that children would die. Since the assault began, of the 636 Palestinians that have been killed, at least 115 have been children, according to reports in the Financial Times.

The Israeli assault on Palestinian children is easily seen in the repeated bombing of schools, which has been roundly condemned around the world. The latest tragedy, in which 40 civilians, including children, were killed when a United Nations school was bombed, reminds the international community that despite repeated assertions by the Israeli Defence Forces that they seek to minimize civilian casulties the reality is that civilian populations, whether they be in private homes, schools, or medical facilities, are systematic targets, and this includes children.

Who can forget the murder--for that was what it was--of Rami Jamal al-Durra in September 2000? French television filmed the scene of the 12 year old huddled next to his father, hiding, as his father pleaded with the Israelis to stop shooting. In response, the Israelis shot at the father, wounding him, and killing Rami Jamal al-Durra. It is a scene that we have, unfortunately, had to witness again this month.

Prior to the assault, as a consequence of the Israeli blockade of the territory, some 50000 children were malnourished; as in Iraq in the 1990s, there can be no doubt that some children have died as a consequence of the conditions created by the blockade. To this horror must now be added the horror of the deaths of far too many wholly innocent children.

The irony of this assault on children is not lost on the Israeli leadership: as Ehud Barak, the defence minister who is directing the assault, once said when asked what he would do if he were a Palestinian facing the Israeli Defence Forces, 'I would join a terror organization'. In attacking Gaza's children, the Israelis are creating the conditions that perpetuate the cycle of violence that plagues the region.

slavery's ground zero

2008-12-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

I have been spending the holiday season in Richmond, Virginia, my first trip to the former capital of the Confederate States of America and my first trip to the U.S. South in almost 30 years. Before I came to Richmond, I had not thought much about the significance of the trip from an international development perspective, but for the past week I have not been able to avoid it. The reason is simple: in one of my early first year lectures I focus my attention on the role of slavery in facilitating the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States, and Richmond is the ‘ground zero’ of the American slave trade.

The U.S. stopped the international trade in slaves in 1808. It was Virginia’s slaveholders that stepped in to replace international trade by transforming Richmond into one of the biggest, if not the biggest, slave markets in the U.S., particularly in the neighbourhood known as Shockoe Bottom. What Île de Gorée in Dakar, Senegal, is to the slave trade from Africa, Shockoe Bottom is to the slave trade in the U.S. Owners of slaves from Virginia plantations brought them into Richmond to sell to owners developing new plantations in the Deep South. As a result, between 1808 and 1865 anywhere between 300000 and 3500000 slaves were sold out of Richmond’s slave markets. Considering that in 1865 the African-American population of the U.S. stood at around 4 million, this means that today hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of African-Americans can today trace their ancestry back to the slave markets of Richmond.

However, slavery in Richmond was not only about securing unfree labour for agricultural export production from the South. It was also about ‘developing’ the economy of a Virginia witnessing declining soil fertility and a decaying agrarian economy. Granted, a large proportion of Richmond’s slave population worked as ‘domestics’. Nonetheless, the development of industrial capital in Richmond—a legacy that can still be witnessed today—was predicated upon unfree slave labour. Hired slave labour was an important part of the work force at the Tredegar Iron Works, and the other iron foundries, that provided the industrial basis of the Confederacy’s attempt to sustain the class power of agrarian elites. Hired slaves also dominated the labour force in Richmond’s tobacco industry, performing the hard, back-breaking work needed to process tobacco. Finally, slave labour was necessary to create and maintain Richmond’s transportation networks. Unfree labour worked on the construction of the James River and Kanawha Canal, the first canal in the U.S., while crews of slaves, alongside free African-Americans, made up the bateau crews that navigated cargoes into Richmond.

The truth is thus that the history and development of Richmond, like the

United States

as a whole, and indeed the North, was, to a large extent, built by slave labour. As I try to argue in my lecture on colonialism and slavery, a convincing case can be made that industrial capitalism in its infancy required slavery in order to gain economic ascendency in the North. Capital was built, initially, on slavery.

This reality demands two final comments. The first is that slaves incessantly resisted their unfree status. Richmond paradigmatically illustrates this. Following the Haitian Revolution of 1792, the first major slave revolt in the south was led by a 24 year old slave named Gabriel (often, incorrectly, named Gabriel Prosser), a deeply Christian blacksmith. In 1800, disgusted by the slavery that bound him, Gabriel made plans to take the city of Richmond by force. By August of 1800 Gabriel had thousands of slave supporters and had secured a cache of weapons, including guns. Gabriel’s plans came to naught: he was betrayed by two of his ‘followers’ and, moreover, on the day of the planned revolt, the bridges into Richmond were destroyed in a flood. The Virginia militia attacked Gabriel and his thousand followers the next day; they were captured, and he and his followers were hanged. Gabriel’s revolt, little acknowledged outside African-American historiography, was the closest the U.S. came to a home-grown slave-led revolution.

The second comment follows from the fact that Gabriel’s revolt is little acknowledged. The history of capitalism’s development, and our globally-privileged life, is predicated upon slavery; yet this is not discussed, freely and openly. Our lives are built on a hidden history of power and privilege, a transcript that needs to be revealed and confronted if the poverty that stalks the world is to be eliminated.

Postscript: It should be acknowledged that Richmond was, in 2007, the first city in the U.S. to formally apologize for slavery. In mid-2008 Gabriel was informally pardoned by the Governor of Virginia. In late 2008, in the Shockoe Bottom area, a Slavery Reconciliation Statue was unveiled. These acts, which are about revealing a hidden transcript, do not come about autonomously, but as the result of citizens seeking to reclaim history. Such acts are a precondition of further, deeper social change.

remembering Samuel Huntington

2008-12-29T13:57:00.000-08:00

Samuel P. Huntington, one of the most influential and important American political scientists in the field of international development studies, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81. Huntington embodied the contradictions of the U.S. intelligensia towards international development: a lifelong Democrat, with ideas that many of his friends and colleagues considered quite liberal, and an ability to move between the academic and the political world, he nonetheless throughout his life articulated a set of ideas that apologized for the powerful and accommodated authoritarianism.

Huntington's first book, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, published in 1957, was still required reading when I was an undergraduate. In it, Huntington argued that the U.S. had to protect conservative military institutions and individuals because they in turn protected the U.S. from the foibles of human nature: 'irrationality, weakness and evil'. The argument was developed in relation to the U.S., but it was one that could be used more broadly, in both developed and developing societies. However, it was, in effect, an ideological apology for what Eisenhower had called 'the military-industrial complex': the economic fractions that dominated U.S.--and hence global--capital and shaped a set of hegemonic ideas that sustained their own power.

These ideas were further crystalized in Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1969. In this hugely important book, Huntington argued that international development had not taken place in the South because of a lack of political 'order'. 'Order' mattered, and not the character of the political governance: and thus, for the good of 'development', the U.S. could support authoritarian dictatorships such as those in South Vietnam, Zaire, Iraq and beyond because they brought 'order', which was more important than 'democracy' (however defined). These were the ideas that had allowed Huntington to advise the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, a campaign that was, in part, based upon ensuring that the Vietnam War was continued until military victory was ensured--and 'order' established.

Huntington will, however, be best remembered for 1996's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which argued, well before the September 11 attacks, that differences in history, tradition, language and religion would be the cause of wars to come. Huntington asserted that these differences were particularly evident in the 'continuing and deeply conflictual relationship between Islam and Christianity'. He also asserted that these differences would produce essentially unresolvable conflicts that would continue until one side had secured victory. In essence, Huntington was arguing that as a consequence of this 'clash of civilizations' one side would have to impose order on the other. He was thus providing the intellectual justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and, before the mistruths of the Bush Administration were revealed, the invasion of Iraq.

Samuel Huntington was extremely influential in the world, even if few have heard of him. He provided the intellectual justification for the imperial misadventures of the early 21st century, just as he provided the intellectual justification for the imperial misadventures of the 1960s and 1970s. He was, in the sense of Antonio Gramsci, an organic intellectual of the ruling class: an individual who propogated a set of ideas that shaped the way people think and facilitated their willingness to accede to the deployment of class power, no matter how much it was not in their interest and no matter how relentless it might be.

more on the case of Omar Khadr

2008-12-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

As a followup to my weblog entry of 27 October, it is worth highlighting the fact that Lietunant-Commander Bill Kuebler, who is part of Omar Khadr's U.S. government-appointed defence team, last week tried to have entered into evidence at Omar Khadr's military commissions hearing at Guantanamo Bay photographs of Khadr buried under the rubble of a collapsed roof at the time he was supposed to be throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. The judge at the hearing, Colonel Patrick Parrish, banned Cdr. Kuebler from showing the photographs. Asked why Col. Parrish banned the photographs, Cdr. Kuebler said: 'Because they show he's innocent'.

There has been no response from the Canadian government to these photographs, which have been known about for a year.

senseless sacrifice

2008-12-09T12:59:00.000-08:00

On 5 December 2008 a grisly milestone was passed in Canada's war in southern Afghanistan: the 100th solider to be killed died as a consequence of a roadside improvised explosive device.

This weblog has previously argued why the war in Kandahar being fought by Canada's army is a mistake. Canada is not 'fighting global terrorism' or sustaining 'peace in Canada', as the Canadian government has suggested. It is fighting local Pakhtun tribesmen who see the Canadians as a foreign occupying force. Moreover, the local Pakhtuns are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to fight, having won a number of set-piece battles in both Kandahar and neighbouring Helmand province. Fighting in Afghanistan in general, and southern Afghanistan in particular, is getting heavier, not lighter, as time goes by, and more, not fewer, foreign soldiers are dying as more and more of the country falls out of the control of NATO forces. Increasingly, NATO military commanders suggest that the war is not about winning, but about containing an acceptable level of violence. Indeed, given the deep unpopularity of the massively corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai, a former friend of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, even achieving an acceptable level of violence may be a difficult, if not impossible task. Insurgents now target heavily-guarded areas of Kabul, the previously safe capital, and increasingly international non-governmental organizations are being targeted.

It is, without a doubt, true that Afghans have better access to health care, to education, and to economic opportunities than was previously the case. However, it is also true that much of the country remains desperately poor, and is unlikely to see its prospects improve during the next 15 years. Hunger is widespread. Finally, of course, there is death: we have no idea of knowing how many Afghans have died during the war (I have seen numbers of around 13000 bandied about), but we know that many that have died have died at the hands of the occupation forces, by accident. Wedding parties have been bombed, drivers have been shot, goat hearders have been strafed. A recent attack in Shah Wali Kowt in Kandahar killed 3 dozen villagers. The price of a life in rural Afghanistan is just under US$2000--that is what the U.S. government pays in compensation for the death of an innocent bystander in the countryside. Those who are injured typically get paid around US$140.

It is the death of innocents, along with tribal grievances, that drives the insurgency--as I forecast would be the case in October of 2001. For many--most?--rural Afghans, NATO forces are no different than the Soviet occupiers of the 1980s; indeed, in some instances, the Soviet occupation is viewed more positively than the NATO occupation, for the government was more coherent. Let us hope that it does not take another 100 dead Canadian soliders to make the government realize this.

recent activities fall 2008

2008-12-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

After a wet summer, the first few days of the Fall Term have been extremely pleasant: a fine way to commence the 2008 - 2009 academic year.

In addition to teaching my regular courses at Trent University, Human inequality in global perspective and Agrarian change and the global politics of food, this fall will see me very busy, in terms of research activities. I will continue to work on the draft of my next book, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Global Food Crisis and Agrarian Questions. I have a book chapter, on gender and development, to complete in due course. I also have a commissioned paper for the Journal of Agrarian Change, and a number of book reviews that I have promised. Finally, in October I will be delivering a paper on global food insecurity and the agrarian question to a conference at the University of Manitoba.

Administratively, the new International Advisory Board of the Journal of Peasant Studies, of which I am a member, will assume their duties in the fall, and I will take part in executive meetings of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

I expect that I will be working flat out through the fall.

a possibility of hope?

2008-11-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

It has been my unfortunate experience, too many times in my life, to be judged by my name, my (apparent) ethnicity, and even (less apparently) the colour of my skin. I rarely think of myself in those terms, although the reality of my origins are an important part of who I am, of what I have chosen to do, and of how I have chosen to do it. Those origins help explain why, for me, the election last night of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was very emotional.

I have reached the time in my life when I am aware that I have lived through history. I recall, vaguely, Dr Martin Luther King. I recall, vividly, when he was assassinated. I recall, too, from a very early age, being aware of apartheid (I had a special loathing for John Vorster), and of the white-minority regime in what is now Zimbabwe, led by Ian Smith. I remember being aware of the fact that while I was in my teens in some parts of the world if I had wanted to go out with someone who was white it would have been against the law--just as it would have been for my parents if they had lived in another country. Indeed, one of the reasons that my parents opted to immigrate to Canada was because of the history of segregation in the US (along with the ongoing Vietnam War). I remember the Soweto uprising, the horrors of the South African military gunning down schoolchildren, but also the acute knowledge that had I been living in South Africa at the time I would have been told the places where I could live, just like those living in Soweto. I remember the violence in the northern US around school busing and the efforts--sometimes for better, sometimes for worse--to integrate schools. I, of course, marched--and marched!!--and marched!!!--for the release of Nelson Mandela, and consider myself extremely fortunate to have met, albeit briefly, Oliver Tambo. I remember when Nelson Mandela finally walked free: the world stopped, and marveled. Walls indeed can come tumbling down, and the impossible is possible.

This is how I feel about the election of Barack Obama. In the global struggle for dignity, equality and social justice, we as humanity have taken a tremendous step forward. By electing a young African-American from an impoverished single-parent background to replace a deeply unpopular plutocrat from an aging political dynasty, the voters of the United States have struck a blow for equality for all of us. It is an event that will reverberate throughout this century. As I said to my son yesterday, one day someone will ask him: 'Where were you when Barack Obama was elected?'

Barack Obama is not capable of fulfilling the tremendous aspirations that the world has placed on his shoulders. For many--especially those energized by political advocacy for the first time--there will be, in all likelihood, a moment of near-transcendental disappointment, when they come to the realization that, in the cold light of day, Barack Obama is an American politician. For Obama is not going to fundamentally transform American society, let alone global society. This was never part of his political agenda. He is going to govern the United States from the political center, very competently, but also very pragmatically. The evidence for this is demonstrated by his already well-established transition team, and the host of economic advisers that he has surrounded himself with. As President, then, he will resemble, somewhat ironically, a more decent, more efficient, and more effective version of former US President Bill Clinton.

However: Barack Obama will not forget that his grandmother lives in a rural village in Kenya and lacks both electricity and clean water. He will not forget that he went to an Islamic school in Indonesia and had a lot of friends there. He will not forget that it was social provisioning and public support that allowed him to realize that his aspirations were achievable. He will not forget the empty lives that he saw while working on the South Side of Chicago. Barack Obama will, within the constraints of the political economy within which he is enmeshed, try and make a difference; the extent to which he actually succeeds remains to be seen, for the constraints of the US political economy are indeed strong, especially now that US finance capital is in crisis.

So, while the election of Barack Obama is an event that could and should bring both joy and hope to billions of people around the world, the world has not been transformed by his election. Rather, his election brings the possibility of transformation that little bit closer. It is a transformation that will--and must--come. This morning, more than yesterday morning, there is a possibility of hope.

In Age of Extremes the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm accurately described the 20th century as being 'short', having lasted from 1917 to 1991, the life of the Soviet Union and the world that it ushered in. As the great British comic Eddie Izzard said last night, '4 November 2008 is the first day of the 21st century.'

how do you feel about human rights?

2008-10-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

Here in Canada the discourse of human rights is ever-present. My own University has a senior management appointment that has the specific task of ensuring that people's human rights are respected. People up and down the country expect that their human rights will be observed. Yet Canada's record on human rights is not what it appears. The 'war on terror' has produced several significant cases of Canadian complicity in quite profound human rights abuses. To my mind, however, none is more damning than that of Omar Khadr.

Born in Ottawa, Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces on 27 July 2002, having been moved to Afghanistan by his family in 1996. He was accused of killing a U.S. soldier, and, following his capture, was transferred to Guantananamo Bay in Cuba. He has been there ever since.

Omar Khadr must define one's attitude to human rights. This is the case for 2 reasons. First, because Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by U.S. forces (having been shot 3 times): Khadr was taken to Afghanistan by his family when he was 11, and thus had no say in the matter. Second, Khadr comes from a family that quite openly proclaims their support for anti-Western Islamist fundamentalism, and thus falls within a category that many people would find deeply disagreeable.

The key question in Omar Khadr's case is whether a minor can be held responsible for their supposed actions. The U.S. government thinks so; it argues that as Khadr turned 16 in Bagram base in Afghanistan, after his capture, he can be treated as an adult. As a consequence, he has been treated to the standard techniques used by the U.S. military in dealing with 'terrorists'. The digital footage of Khadr's interrogation is pretty harrowing. He comes across as a frightened boy that is clearly out of his depth with the circumstances that he is facing. From this footage, there can be little doubt that by any stretch of the imagination Khadr has been fairly systematically physically abused at Guantananamo. Moreover, there can also be little doubt that Canadians that visited Khadr in Guantananamo saw the evidence of abuse and did nothing about it.

Omar Khadr is the last citizen of a Northern country to be held at Guantananamo. He is still there because the Canadian government's position on Omar Khadr is that he has to go through the 'legal' processes put in place by the U.S. government. The fact that it has been 3 years since he was charged and that his 'trial' (under a format that has been globally condemned) has still not begun however makes one wonder how meaningful are these processes. Moreover, if found guilty, he faces life in prison. Khadr is now 22.

Imagine: a kid is indoctrinated by his family. He is shot. He is abused while in custody. He spends almost a third of his short life in a legal limbo and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. I don't know Omar Khadr, and I don't know for a fact what he has or has not done. However: what he has or has not done is irrelevant. Omar Khadr's fundamental human rights have been systematically abused from the time he was a small boy.

Anyone who claims to believe in human rights and who does not support the immediate return of Omar Khadr to Canada is a hypocrite.

dead economists for new times

2008-10-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

It really is quite remarkable who the financial and political elite have turned to in order to understand the ongoing crisis. Two economists stand out: John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx.

As my good friend Ardeshir Sepehri of the University of Manitoba pointed out, in order to understand the times, one would do very well to read Chapter 12 of Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, written in 1936. Indeed, as Keynes wrote in 1933, in the absence of state intervention to save capitalism from its tendency towards crisis, one could expect

'the progressive breakdown of the existing structure of contract and instruments of indebtedness, accompanied by the utter discredit of orthodox leadership in finance and government, with what ultimate outcome we cannot predict'.

The U.S. government, and in particular Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, along with the U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, have rediscovered the virtues of Keynesianism after being strongly involved in the deregulation that got the world into this mess in the first place.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been doing slightly different reading, stating that 'we need to found a new capitalism, based on values that put finance at the service of companies and citizens'. He reached this conclusion apparently reading Das Kapital volume 1, which some people spotted him reading last week.

Marx understood the mysteries of finance, writing

'To the possessor of money capital, the process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of moneymaking. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production'.

We have been so seized! I suspect that these two political economists will be read a bit more carefully in the next few months than they have been in the last few decades. At stake: the need to end the de-politicization of money, which has been underway for 60 years, and which has allowed, in an ever increasing way, for government and finance to become increasingly separated. Although this de-politicization took place in the name of Keynes, he would never have subscribed to it; and, of course, Marx would only have seen it as the logical outcome of an increasingly irrational economic system.

is neoliberalism finished?

2008-10-17T06:02:00.000-07:00

Readers of this weblog will know that the global financial crisis of the past 3 weeks has, in my view, fundamentally changed the landscape of global capitalism. A world that was effectively born on 4 November 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. President (I was in San Francisco at the time) has ended, and a period of untrammelled global neoliberalism will have to change if global finance capital is to survive.

How much has the world changed? Consider this. In the United Kingdom, where, of course, London is the second most important financial center in the world, the Royal Bank of Scotland, one of Britain's most important financial institutions, will soon be 57 per cent owned by the British state. It is also expected that the British state will own up to 40 per cent of the newly merged (and so far unnamed) Lloyds-TSB-Halifx Bank of Scotland combination, which is also one of the largest and most important British financial institutions. The British state already owns Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley, specialist mortgage lenders that overreached their market niche and paid the price. In other words: the British state, which was one global center of the de-regulating neoliberal project, now is steering some of the most important components of British finance capital. Consider also another paragon of neoliberalism (indeed, as a consequence of the Wassenaar Accord, possibly the earlist adopter of neoliberalism in the North: the Netherlands' state owns the Dutch rump of ABN-AMRO and Fortis Nederland, two of the three biggest banks in the Netherlands. Again: the Dutch state is steering the most important components of Dutch finance capital. Examples of this degree of state intervention in finance capital abound in the North: in Germany, in Belgium, in Denmark, in Ireland, in Italy, in Iceland and, in all places, in Switzerland. The most significant intervention, of course, is the one that I have saved for last: the U.S. state owns 79.9 per cent of AIG, which at one time was the largest insurance company in the U.S., and as a consequence of the policy moves made by the U.S. Treasury on Monday will soon own significant shares in nine major U.S. financial institutions, including Bank of America (with which one-half of all U.S. households does some kind of banking), Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs (former firm of the U.S. Treasury Secretary), J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch. This is a consequence of their agreement to take part in both the Treasury’s ‘voluntary’ capital purchase programme--which was nothing of the sort, which U.S. finance given no choice by the state--and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s guarantee programme of senior bank debt and assorted deposit liabilities.

The world has changed; the state has acted to save capitalism, just as it did in the 1930s, and where this will lead is very difficult to know.

some 3 weeks!

2008-10-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

The past 3 weeks have been a period of intense scholarly activity for me; a period that has deeply reminded me why I do the work that I do. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that they have been the best 3 weeks, professionally speaking, since I returned to Canada after an effective absence of 25 years. Set against the backdrop of a deepening global financial crisis, and the effective collapse of neo-liberalism, I have been fortunate to be able to engage with a number of leading intellectuals in the field of international development, and this has left me remarkably refreshed.

Three weeks ago I attended the inaugural Development Studies Seminar at York University, organized by my old friend and colleague Sharada Srinivasan. My former colleague at the Institute of Social Studies, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, delivered an outstanding talk on transnational cultures and 'deep culture'. Now at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Pieterse is a major international figure in post-development thinking, and I must confess that, in this light, I was surprised by how few academics from York University attended his seminar.

Pieterse argued that throughout history relations between cultures has paid attention to difference, rather than the commonalities that he terms deep culture. However, increasingly global communities now articulate their differences in terms of a common global transnational culture, which allows a shared deep culture to come to the foreground, creating, in effect, a global multiculture that balances sedantary cultures, non-place bound culture, and increasingly mobile flexible acculturation. Pieterse reflected afterwards on the place of violent conflict in the processes he described, with violence seen as a means of locating oneself within a transnational culture. Pieterse's seminar was very, very good; and later in the evening we enjoyed our first meal together in a decade, reflecting upon life in the North American academic environment, changes in European society, and his reflections upon U.S. society, as well as, of course, his current thinking on international development issues.

One week later I had dinner with Diane Elson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and one of the world's outstanding feminist economists. The former Chief Economist for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem), I am privileged to be able to call Elson a friend (I hope!), for along with a sharp and critical intellect she has a remarkably inclusive and open approach to intellectual engagement (something that she shares with another great feminist economist, Nancy Folbre). We had no agenda, per se, but nonetheless had a lively discussion on the role of the International Monetary Fund in Africa, on the Gender Team within the United Nations Development Programme, and on (again!) the North American academic environment. Elson has been actively engaged recently in a major, and important, intervention in international development studies, the creation of a master's degree in gender and economics at Makere University in Uganda, and this we also discussed.

Five days later the Department of International Development Studies at Trent University hosted the first David Morrison Lecture in International Development, and Professor James C. Scott of Yale University, whom I have read for decades but whom I had never met, delivered an outstanding address on globalization and the relationship between the 'vernacular' and the 'official'. Scott described how the state seeks to standardize society by creating national systems of taxation, legal codes and land rights, language and names, and even weights and measures, and that this follows a logic of control, manipulation and management over populations. He then went on to argue that the 'Washington Consensus' represented an international effort led by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to standardize the world’s economies even though it was itself a vernacular approach of 19th century North Atlantic world. Hence, globalization is a vernacular that is presented as a universal.

Following Scott's lecture there was a very good open discussion, and this discussion continued amongst colleagues in the Department into the second U.S. presidential debate, and indeed on into the next day. Along the way I learned a great deal about Southeast Asia, the United States, and Scott's own intellectual development.

Two days after the Scott lecture I attended the University of Manitoba's Global Political Economy Group conference on the world food crisis. The Keynote Speaker at the conference was Professor Utsa Patnaik of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, one of the world's most formidable political economists. I had not seen Professor Patnaik in more than 14 years, and she delivered an important address on the contemporary food crisis, arguing that it witnessed the articulation of 3 contemporary contradictions: of food versus feed, of food versus exports, and of food versus fuel. She demonstrated that the structural causes of the food crisis lie in the increasing indirect demand of Northern consumers for grain, in the form of the meat that they consume. She demonstrated the fallacy of free trade and comparative advantage, explaining how the drive to export, imposed as a consequence of the 'Washington Consensus', was predicated upon the compression of demand in the South, a compression that directly contributed to rising poverty and inequality. She also explored the geopolitical ramifications of the quest for agrofuels.

The excellence of this lecture paved the way for a great conference; I was particularly moved by Fred Tate of the National Farmers' Union, who explained how corporate agribusiness was driving farmers out of farming. The conference also allowed me to catch up with old friends from the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba, Canada's outstanding heterodox economics department: John Loxley, Robert Chernomas, Ardeshir Sepehri and Fletcher Baragar. Much of our time was spent discussing the financial crisis, as last weekend was the watershed of it, with the Canadian dollar collapsing on Friday along with global stock markets before UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown saved the day by beginning a process in which national governments around the world assumed partial ownership of a number of major banks, in order to recapitalize them and thus inject liquidity into the global financial system.

As I have also been teaching my full load at Trent University during this period, it has been a very tiring, but also quite exhilirating, time. I have learned a lot over the last 3 weeks, and am extremely fortunate to be in a position where I can continue to learn, from new acquaintances, old colleagues, students and friends.

activist burnout

2008-09-22T15:35:00.001-07:00

People who study or work in international development studies often tend to start from an action-oriented, activist and advocacy perspective. Yet later, they can appear to either become more bureaucratized, or disappear from the scene altogether. There are, in my view, 3 simple rules to trying to sustain an activist life:

1. keep your goals small and feasible, not large and impossible;
2. make sure that you have a life outside of your activism;
3. understand that while your choices matter, being an activist is not the same as denying yourself some of the elementary pleasures that this short life has to offer.

Keep activism grounded in the real world, and one's own real world needs, is how to avoid burnout.

regime change for global finance capital

2008-09-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

My undergraduate students commonly seem to think that the world doesn't change very much. Yet last week, between 14 September and 18 September, the world changed in quite dramatic ways. The era of free market fundamentalism, ushered in globally with the election of Ronald Reagan on 4 November 1980 and the continuing tenure of then-US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker at the time, has, without doubt, come to an end. It was, as Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond fund manager Pimco, said in the Financial Times, 'regime change'. Nouriel Roubini of New York University put it this way in The Globe and Mail: 'this financial crisis signals the beginning of the decline of the American empire'. To adapt the words of Gil Scott Heron to fit the times, the revolution was televised on MSNBC; but many people missed it.

The origins of the events last week have been well-rehearsed in previous entries on this weblog. The US financial crisis has multiple origins, but two dates stand out. Eight years ago Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, argued that over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, the contracts between banks, insurance companies and other non-bank financial firms, should not be subject to US government regulation. As a consequence, OTC derivatives have not been subject to oversight by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. A year later, in 2001, the same Alan Greenspan started cutting US interest rates in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Greenspan's role in these two events, in that they laid the groundwork for the creation of a huge speculative financial bubble amongst global finance capital searching for profits and households searching for livelihood security, has meant that the man who was once the hero of global finance capital is now a man whose reputation stands, at long last, in tatters.

As US interest rates went lower, US mortgage providers started to look for new markets for their products: and the principal market turned out to be cheap mortgages that could be offered under the low-interest rate regime to people that, for various reasons, could never before in their life have thought about owning a home. The result: too many Americans started buying homes (and, through re-mortgaging, other big purchases like cars) with loans that they could not afford. These mortgage providers then 'bundled' these mortgages together, and sold them to investment banks, who started to repackage the mortgages into a set of increasingly arcane products that could be sold to investors such as non-bank financial institutions looking for 'safe' products with a better rate of return than that offered by 'conventional' investment products such as US government bonds.

In doing this, the investment banks started entering into a world in which they had little experience. Moreover, in order to continue doing this business, investment banks and other non-bank financial companies (like American Insurance Group [AIG]), who do not have deposits that they can tap into as an inexpensive source of money, depended upon continually securing short-term loans from other financial institutions, which they would secure by using the assets that they held--the 'bundled' mortgages. Investment banks and non-bank financial institutions were thus borrowing against assets that were ultimately held by less-creditworthy consumers. In essence, the investment banks and the non-bank financial companies that bought their products were counting on home prices continuing to rise, and thus that the holders of the mortgages being able to meet their debt obligations; the financial alchemy behind the crisis sees finance capital shuffling risk like a juggler keeping balls in the air, while all the while not really understanding the complex products--and obligations--that they were peddling. Indeed, as John Gapper writes in the Financial Times, it was as if finance capital had become addicted to complexity.

The house of cards started to collapse last year, when American mortgage holders who had been paying sub-prime interest rates suddenly found out that, as a consequence of the terms and conditions of their mortgage, their interest rates ratcheted up, and they were now paying far, far more in repayments than that for which they had budgeted. They couldn't afford it; and a wave of foreclosures followed. US house prices of course started to tumble; and the investment banks and non-bank financial companies were left holding bundled complex financialmort products predicated upon bundled mortgages that no one wanted to buy. These are the 'toxic assets' that people talk about now: bad loans rooted in the decision of US mortgage providers to provide home loans for consumers that were not adequately solvent, with such loans being then converted into bonds and other securities and being traded in a way that, in effect, spread their poison throughout the financial system. As a result, finance capital increasingly had trouble securing the short-term loans that they needed to stay afloat; and thus, for many companies, a crisis of liquidity opened up, as they became unable to borrow to meet their day-to-day needs. This was the background to last week's events, a process that had been unfolding slowly for more than a year.

One irony of recent events was that the American financial system's liquidity crisis took place in a world awash with money. The excess savings of China and other Asian countries, as well as that of the petro-economies, means that globally their is lots of money sloshing about (it is very fortunate for the US that China is not prepared to sell its holdings of US government Treasury bills and bonds; were such to happen, the crisis would be infinitely worse, becoming, no doubt, one of global capitalism). However, increasingly, US investment banks and non-bank financial institutions had a difficult time accessing that money as the awareness of their toxic assets grew. Growing legions of sovereign wealth funds, who at first seemed the most likely corporate partners to solve the crisis, balked when confronted with the true extent of what was going on; hence, the Korea Development Bank walked away from Lehmann Brothers, sealing its fate. In this way, overleveraged US finance generated the foundations of an economic panic amongst global finance capital.

Last week was one of high drama. After the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the previous week, the US government ended up guaranteeing almost half the mortgages in the US. However, the fun really started on Sunday, when Lehmann Brothers (founded 1850) collapsed and Merrill Lynch (founded 1915) was forced to welcome being bought out by Bank of America at a fraction of the stock market value that it had been worth just weeks before. AIG then required a stringent loan of US$85 billion (with the effect that the US government owns one of the largest insurers in the world). Financial markets started to panic. On Wednesday, the 'flight to safety' was so severe that the interest rate on one-month US Treasury bills turned negative, meaning that finance capital would rather lose money holding a safe asset than invest in financial markets awash with unforeseen toxic assets. The yield on three month Treasury bills that day was 0.02 %, the lowest rate since 1941, before the entry of the US into World War Two. Global finance capital was running for cover.

On Thursday and Friday, the US Treasury had no choice: with the financial system threatening to seize up, the world's central banks pumped US$180 billion into global money markets, the US government pledged US$50 billion to guarantee money-market mutual funds, US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson unveiled a plan to mop up toxic assets with government money, and in both the US and London the short-selling of stocks is halted. In effect, the US government has socialized the US financial system, to deal with toxic assets whose worth has been estimated to be anywhere between US$500 billion and US$1 trillion. Of course, many of these assets will be sold at a fraction of the value; nonetheless, the cost of this socialization of US finance will run into the billions of dollars. The US government acted to save American finance capital.

Perhaps of all varieties of economists a Marxist economist would understand the causes of the crisis best. US finance capital has become increasingly divorced from the real economy where goods and services are produced. As such, it is increasingly having to slice and dice ever smaller amounts of the surplus value that is produced in the real economy and then redistributed from the productive economy into the financial sector. As it has to slice and dice, it was finding ever-more esoteric ways of trying to make money on top of an asset base that was not fundamentally changing. It was, in effect, a massive Ponzi scheme, and was bound to come crashing down.

Many things are going to change for global finance capital as a consequence of the past week. No doubt other financial institutions may fail. Investment banking is, as a business, finished, and global finance will start to shift back towards using assets based in the real economy as the basis of its activity. Thus, the market for credit derivatives is also finished, for now, and if it is revived, it will be very, very different. There is also little doubt that for the next little while the ability of consumers and firms to access credit will be heavily constrained; the US government has seen its public debt increase substantially with the socialization of US finance, which suggests that increases in US interest rates will be forthcoming, with implications for economic growth in the US economy, because it is so heavily reliant on debt, and for the rest of the world, because it is so heavily reliant on the US economy.

However, the most critical outcome of this past week is that the era of free market fundamentalism, in which is was believed that the system would work best if left to its own devices, has drawn inexorably to a close in the home of capitalism, the US. If the US government believes the only way to save finance capital is to nationalize assets on a scale greater than that witnessed in Russia under Vladimir Putin, then the era of free market capitalism is finished.

We should not be surprised. This past week has highlighted the fact that in deregulated financial markets market-based outcomes are not necessarily the best for society. If they were, there would have been no need for the socialization of US finance. Those who participate in markets are often motivated by private and professional greed, and will try and do what they can get away with, even if regulatory laws are in place. The financial bubble is a clear demonstration of this greed: financiers chased their astronomical bonus payments, and households jumped at the chance to buy something valuable--their homes--that they never thought they could afford because the mortgage providers told them they could afford it. As Adam Smith said, 'people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public'. Today, Smith might put it thus: markets cannot be trusted to work in the public interest, because they are a function of the legal and social environment within which they are created, and that environment may encourage actions that are detrimental to the public good in the pursuit of private profit. That has happened, recklessly, in the US over the past 5 years. The truth of Smith's insights have once again been revealed this past week.

elections (III): Canada

2008-09-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

According to polling done for the CBC just before Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked the Governor-General to issue the writ to dissolve Parliament and have an election on 14 October 2008, the three most important issues on the minds of Canadians were: 1) healthcare; 2) the environment; 3) the economy.

Fourth on the list, being of most concern to only 5% of those polled, was the Afghan war. This is, to my mind, very disappointing. My reasoning here is fairly straightforward: in an election a country can consider those issues that affect the citizens of the country, and make a judgment as to which political party is most likely to address their concerns. What directly affects Canadians? Healthcare, our environment, and the economy.

Alternatively, in an election a country can consider those issues through which the citizens of a country directly affect the citizens of another country, and make a judgement as to which political party is most likely to address their concerns. Where in the world is Canada most directly affecting the citizens of another country? Afghanistan.

Much of what Canada is doing in Afghanistan is entirely laudable: supporting the education system, supporting the healthcare system, supporting the economy--issues of which Canadians know the importance, because we face similar issues, although of a different magnitude. Where what we are doing is different, however, is obvious: the military mission.

Today the Prime Minister has said that Canada's mission in Afghanistan 'as we've known it' will end as agreed by Parliament in 2011. Presumably, that means reducing the military role and increasing even more the developmental role. To my mind, that date is too far away. It is not too far away because of the numbers of dead Canadians: 97 soldiers, 1 diplomat, and, of course, 2 aid workers. Terrible as that is, it is too far away because of that other matter which the media tends not to report: the number of dead innocent Afghan children, women and men. No one seems to accurately know how many civilians have been killed in the Afghan war. It is a statistic that, if known, is not released. Human Rights Watch, a respected New York-based non-governmental organization, has offered a number of figures for civilian deaths in recent years, most of which are inconsistent with previous reports. Thus, in its most recent 8 September 2008 report on civilian bombing casualties Human Rights Watch suggests that in 2006 116 Afghan civilians were killed in 13 bombings. In 2007 321 Afghan civilians were killed in 22 bombings, while hundreds more were injured, and more Afghan civilians were killed by airstrikes than by US and NATO ground fire. In the first seven months of 2008 at least 119 Afghan civilians died from airstrikes, according to Human Rights Watch.

While we do not know how many innocent have died, this is clearly too many. Moreover, one cannot hide from an inescapable fact: Canada is an active perpetrator in these civilian deaths. We do not know how many innocents Canadian soldiers have killed, but let us not forget that on 28 July 2008 cannon fire from a Canadian troop carrier killed a 2 year old boy and a 4 year old girl--children killed because their father's car came within 10 meters of the troop carrier. What makes this case unique is that most civilian deaths by Canadian troops go unreported (although not for lack of trying--I am sure The Globe and Mail's Graeme Smith would report it if he could obtain such information). These 2 deaths are not only 2 too many, but are also in all likelihood the tip of the iceberg, in terms of civilian deaths and injuries directly attributable to the activities of the Canadian Forces.

The response of the Department of Defence to those lamentable deaths is a keen indication of how this war is being fought, and its attitude to civilian deaths, most notably amongst the Department of Defence: the Department has hired Blackwater, the US company that supplies 'contractors' (for which read mercenaries) to train Canadian troops in better understanding Afghan culture and society. This is the company which in 2007 killed 17 Iraqis, of whom at least 14 were killed 'without cause'. Blackwater's training is to enhance force protection, not reduce the numbers of dead civilians.

Canadian soldiers are killing innocent non-Canadians in a land that is far away: our country is doing harm to families, to communities in a place that we do not know. Surely this should be what the election is about?

elections (II): Angola

2008-09-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

On 5 September Angola went to the polls for the first time in 16 years to elect a new parliament. It is expected that the governing Popular Movement of the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and in power since 1979, will win a handsome victory in what is currently Sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing economy, with gross domestic product per person having increased several times over in the past 6 years.

The secret to Angola's 'success'? Oil. With production of close to 2 million barrels a day, Angola will soon become the biggest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing Nigeria. In 2007 the country exported US$30 billion worth of oil, and according to the Financial Times US$250 million flow into the government's bank accounts every day. This begs a question: why do two-thirds of the population of 17 million live on less than US$2 a day, why is 40 per cent of the workforce unemployed, and why does a bucket of water in Boa Vista, one of Luanda's worst slums, cost C$0.75? The answer is simple: corruption on a kleptocratic scale generating unimaginable inequality.

Senior MPLA ministers own the key companies with which the international oil companies do business in order to work in Angola. Dos Santos and a small group of advisors personally oversees the overall oil industry, according to the ever-reliable Stephanie Nolen of The Globe and Mail, while his daughter, Isabel dos Santos, is the majority shareholder in many important national companies. This allows the MPLA leadership to enrich itself with wealth that is, by first world standards, immense, showering themselves, while many cannot get access to clean water.

However, it is important to always remember that it is the foreign oil companies that do business in Angola. In other words, they are part of this deeply corrupt system that impoverishes the majority of Angolans. The misery facing Angolans, which Friday's election will have done nothing to help, is a function of oil (soon to be joined by diamonds), a corrupt political elite that is transforming itself into a rentier class, and transnational oil corporations that make sure that our cars get cheap oil. We too are implicated.

elections (I): President Asif Ali Zardari

2008-09-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

On 6 September in Islamabad Pakistan's 702-member electoral college, consisting of members of the upper and lower federal houses of parliament and the four provincial legislatures, gave Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the widow of assasinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a resounding victory in a presidential election to replace former military dictator-turned President Pervaiz Musharraf. Zardari received 482 votes from the electoral college, and will become President of Pakistan on 9 September.

On the face of it, the replacement of a military dictator-turned President by a civilian politician should be welcomed. However, such a proposition fails to account for the murky goings-on within Pakistan's ruling political and military classes; for my part, I am concerned.

Pakistan has witnessed varying degrees of political instability since the death of former military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in August 1988. Through the 1990s Pakistan had a series of civilian governments, led alternately by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. These governments were notorious for their corruption, for their implicit support for Islamist fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and for their failure to improve the living standards of ordinary Pakistani peasants and workers. Many middle-class Pakistanis, and leaders of the advanced capitalist countries, therefore welcomed Pervaiz Musharraf's coup in 1999 while Nawaz Sharif was out of the country. Following September 11, and a clear warning from US Vice-President Dick Cheney that if Pakistan did not sign up to the 'war on terror' it would be 'bombed back to the Stone Age', Musharraf eagerly signed up to the overthrow of the Taliban. Musharraf's legacy for Pakistan is really quite remarkable: he turned an unstable country into what The Economist described, in an editorial in January 2008, as 'the most dangerous country in the world'. With nuclear weapons, with increasingly wider swathes of the country under the effective control of armed Islamist militants, with a deepening inability to promote living standards amongst the often illiterate poor of urban and rural Pakistan, Musharraf, an apparently socially-liberal man, laid the groundwork for the resurrection of a deepening fundamentalism amongst segments of what is more generally a society that is religious but not fundamentalist.

It might appear that, in these circumstances, the return of civilian government would be welcomed, and indeed it would: but not the current alignment. Asif Ali Zardari assumes an office whose powers were expanded under the Musharraf regime; while traditionally the Pakistani President had been a figurehead, Musharraf gave the presidency the power to appoint provincial governors and service chiefs and to dissolve parliament independently. Zardari will thus be the most powerful civilian President in decades.

And what a President! He has no political experience in Pakistan, having only entered politics upon the assassination of Bhutto. Instead, during the prime ministership of Benazir Bhutto, Zardari was widely known as 'Mr 10 Per Cent': that was the cut that he was rumoured to demand from government-awarded contracts. Certainly, while Bhutto was alive, during the period of her marriage to Zardari the family fortune, which was already stupendous, grew; but while Zardari was imprisoned for corruption and murder by Nawaz Sharif and remained in prison under Musharraf, and while the Spanish and Swiss governments have investigated him for money-laundering and other crimes, he has never been convicted by an impartial court of anything. Nonetheless, corruption allegations will undoubtedly dog his presidency.

Moreover, as the Financial Times revealed last week, corruption charges laid in a British court were postponed when his lawyers presented to the court documents said to substantiate major psychological problems: dementia, depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. That such an individual will have some say in the deployment of nuclear weapons should give everyone pause for concern; I certainly believe that in the global sweepstakes for the role most unstable nuclear power, Pakistan has now reinforced its claim to the title. Iran, by way of contrast, the country that US presidential candidate John McCain has said that he is prepared to bom in order to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons, is, in my view, far less of a threat to world peace than a country run by a possibly corrupt, possibly pyschologically ill person.

Not that I would want Nawaz Sharif to have the power to appoint the President! Prior to becoming prime minister, Sharif amassed a fortune in Punjab through a variety of shady deals involving government pharmaceutical purchases, which in turn allowed him to diversify the family business portfolio to the point that the family became one of the richest in the province. Sharif's principal interest is, like that of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, protecting his family business interests.

Behind these political machinations lie the Pakistani 'deep state': the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), a security service with a long history that was built up and 'Islamicized' by former President Zia, armed by the US CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and is now a formidable political power behind the scenes in Pakistani life. Beyond civilian control (despite a recent attempt to rein it in), the ISI is accountable only to the military. It was a major factor in the Taliban assuming control of Afghanistan, and its rumoured involvement in the bombing of India's embassy in Afghanistan in July 2008 is but the most recent of many rumoured involvements in terrorist activity.

The ISI is the real source of political power in Pakistan at present: and no one, to my knowledge, understands its true objectives and operations. Most importantly, the relationship of the ISI to the military is entirely unclear. It is, however, important to remember that the current military chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kiyani, who many see to be as a neutral bystander in Pakistan's political machinations cannot be so, for he is a former director of the ISI. President Zardari will not challenge the power of the intelligence-military 'deep state'; his concern is to remain out of jail. Nawaz Sharif will not challenge the power of the intelligence-military 'deep state': his concern is to keep the family business empire running. The only challenge to the ISI can come, not from the fossilized remains of the political parties that dominate Pakistani politics in order to promote the ambitions of a venal political class, but from the workers and peasants of Pakistan, who continue, as they have for the past 60 years, to bear the brunt of the development failure that is the legacy of Pakistani politics.