David Lammy is right about Africa (but wrong to make it about skin colour)

David Lammy is the worst sort of politician - lots of sound and fury, avalanches of slogans pretending to be wisdom, and a complete absense of any considered or measured assessment. You only have to watch how he attacked, without any evidence, the police over the Grenfell tower tragedy to understand the basis of Lammy's politics. And at the heart of everything from him is race - it is always (sometimes hilariously) about black or white.

The problem with this is that, when there's an underlying truth in something Lammy says, his painting it black and white means we lose sight of that truth - here's an example in a Tweet:

The world does not need any more white saviours. As I've said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes. Let's instead promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate.

I pretty much agree with what Lammy is saying here - our portrayal of Africa is trapped in images of semi-naked black children, in the memory of Live Aid, and in the pictures drawn by aid charities touting for cash. Through agencies like Oxfam, and our faux-virtuous obsession with international aid we perpetuate the idea that, without our help, Africa will not 'develop'. But it is not about the colour of anyone's skin, its about how we in the developed world perceive Africa.

The problem is that the 'help' we've given Africa has, in large measure, led to the problems people there face. After 100 years of exploitative colonialism we left and gave Africans socialism which when applied in Ghana, Tanzania and Ethiopia resulted in more poverty, starvation and death. In other places it led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. As noble ex-colonialists we then galloped in to the rescue with aid programmes designed to allow subsistence agriculture - the hard, brutish and short life too many Africans endure - to continue. What we didn't do was point Africans at what it was that made us rich (and is making the Koreans, Chinese and Indonesians rich too) - open markets, enterprise, free trade and the idea of business.

Today, despite the best efforts of us in the west, African countries - some of them at least - are turning themselves round in that proven capitalist manner - six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa with Ghana and Ethiopia topping the pile. It's true that Africa still faces problems - the persistence of insect-carried disease, the scourge of AIDS - but it's biggest problem is still the stupidity of government:

The number of people paying the tax for sites listed as “Over the Top ” (OTT) – chosen by the government because they offer voice and messaging services – fell by 1.2 million.

The value of mobile money transactions also fell by almost a quarter, to 14.8tn Ugandan shillings (£3.4bn) between June and September.

So I agree with Lammy that, instead of British celebrities (even celebrity investigative journalists) indulging in poverty tourism we should perhaps use the occasion of a national telethon to get Africans to tell their success stories. Step through the marketing-speak here to see that, given a chance, business is thriving - and African business sounds just like business everywhere, driven, exictable, enthusiastic:

3 Wise Pixels (3WP) is a creative technology company dedicated to reimagining Nigeria’s digital landscape through curated technology and bespoke design. Based in Lagos, the company mirrors the ever-evolving landscape of the continent’s largest city – rapid growth, innovation, targeted problem-solving and distinct overtones of a rich cultural identity. 3WP champions innovation and authenticity at its core, resulting in a creative yet highly functional hybrid approach that cuts through the noise and congestion of the modern world.

This is where Africa's future lies and what we should be saying isn't "have some aid money" but rather "how can we help your businesses". Plus, I hope, helping resolve Africa's biggest challenges - set out clearly by the guys from 3WP:

Most of the risks we face come from the unstable political landscape in Nigeria. A lack of proper basic utilities like clean water, steady electricity, and waste management (to name a few) all contribute to a very tough living situation, which affects the physical and mental health of employer and employee alike. Not to mention the lacklustre education system, poor public transport solutions and even poorer roads, and the corruptible government agencies that oversee these things.

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How the left use the myth of the noble savage to keep black people poor

We are often reminded that levels of poverty across the world have fallen. We need to remember that the natural state of man isn't some sort of bucolic utopia but abject, brutal, painful poverty. Before the 19th century all but a fortunate few lived in absolute poverty, the sort of 'less than a dollar a day' subsistence that is still the reality for too many in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We also need to consider that we're not so very far from returning to that terrible past - read about the decade after WW2 or take a look at Venezuela today.

There are some people, however, who (as they would doubtless put it) challenge the neoliberal narrative of poverty decline. They are, I guess, the economics version of climate change deniers:

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.

What an idyllic description of life in Africa, India and America before bad people arrived. It's like one of those old romantic characterisations - the noble savage living a carefree life unconstrained by the hideous trappings of civilisation. From its progenitor in Rousseau through to Engels and other early socialists comes this idea that somehow man fell from a state of near perfection to a corrupt state obsessed with possessions. It is still found in literature (popular science fiction is riddled with it) and has a more troubling home in academia where it still exercises a malign influence on international aid strategies and policies.

At the heart of this argument, promoted by Oxfam as well as elite academics at top London universities, is the idea that people like subsistence agriculture (not the academics or aid workers obviously, just the darker coloured peasants). That those "robust systems of sharing and reciprocity" are in any way real. And that disease, famine, murder, rape and brutality aren't more typical of the noble savage's world. What's still more depressing is that rich white academics like Jason Hickel (whose article I took that Rousseau-esque quote from), living a lovely life among the western elite want to deny the opportunity for that life to poor black and brown people elsewhere in the world.

It is a ridiculous idea that, presented with the idea of faster travel, with piped water, with telephones and safe packaged food, people will choose to remain scraping at half an acre of garden with a blunt hoe. Yet Hickel - and so many of his fellow left-wing academics - persist with the idea that somehow there's a way to maintain the noble savage in their mythical perfection while allowing them to have (doubtless state funded) access to a few of those good things that are enjoyed by the western elite. We have an ideology so invested in opposing neoliberalism that it is prepared to use a myth, the noble savage, to justify keeping black people trapped in brutal, abject poverty.

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Antiyanquismo

You'll recall that Jeremy Corbyn's eulogy to Fidel Castro talked about his contribution to ending apartheid. Of course, Fidel didn't send his troops to South Africa but rather to Mozambique and Angola. The official story was that these troops were there for advising and training the local troops that faced opposition from nasty "right wing" insurgents. This - filched from Tim Newman's blog - is what those troops were like:

Among the dead were two very young Cuban conscripts, some of the tens of thousands of troops sent by Fidel Castro to prop up the brutal pro-Communist regime in Angola. They were probably well under 20 years old. They hadn’t even finished growing; they still had that gangling, slightly disjointed look of late adolescence. Both looked as if they didn’t yet need to shave every day. They never would, now. Their AK-47’s were still half-slung. They hadn’t even managed to raise them to a firing position before the RPD bullets found them.

A grizzled NCO looked down at them, and an odd look came over his face. He spat to one side, very expressively, and murmured, “Just one more. That’s all I ask. Just one more.”

I looked at him, and my eyebrows rose. He caught my expression, and nodded. “I want the bastard who sends kids like this over here to die.”

The cause of antiyanquismo required not only that Fidel destroy the hopes and futures of the Cuban population but that this population could be used to promote this childish creed everywhere. It's for this reason that a part of me wishes it were the Castro brothers dead in that Angolan field not two blameless young Cuban lads.
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Why Africa will leave us behind later this century

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We're still building railways - nineteenth century technology albeit jazzed up with improved kit. Africa - on top of sophisticated mobile telephony (and banking) - will have this:

Norman Foster is often hailed as the inventor of the modern-day terminal-style airport with his design of London’s Stansted. And now, his new plan is to build the world’s smallest airport. For drones. The dynamic, futuristic technology of drones is still mostly associated with the military. But the endless opportunities of the speedy and compact air vehicles are quickly being discovered as their use is expanding in commercial, scientific, recreational and other applications. It is estimated that over a million civilian units were sold in 2015.

Who needs expensive multi-lane highways when, for a fraction of the cost, you can zip in the goods, medicines, and people needed to make the place tick on a drone? And then watch the produce of formerly remote - now connected - places fly off to serve the world. Brilliant.

In the (currently) rich world we're stuck with a creaking and high maintenance transport network because, in a world of drones, autonomous cars and driver less buses, we've convinced ourselves that the answer is spending all the spare cash on high speed trains.

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Starving Africans show that the Common Agricultural Policy is a lousy justification for EU membership.

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Second fundamental: the Common Agricultural Policy is a sophisticated mechanism for making sure we don’t starve. Scarcity causes disputes and without food security, peace would be impossible: people do nearly anything if they are hungry enough. Europe’s complex network of subsidies means that when a harvest fails at one end of the continent no one starves because we have slack in the system and the only ‘crisis’ to speak of involves pricing. Europe subsidises its food production, which makes it more expensive than food in most of the rest of the world, but – guess what? – we can afford our expensive food due to the prosperity that our long-term political stability has given us. Moreover the percentage of our income spent on food is diminishing.

People don't buy this crap do they? The CAP makes food more expensive and, to cap it all, means that we make a major contribution to killing folk in Africa who might want to compete with our expensive and inefficient farmers. Using the CAP as a justification for EU membership is an exercise in masochism - all the CAP means is higher food prices and more poverty in developing countries.

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So Fairtrade may be making some Africans poorer?

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One of the things about studying development in poor places is that you quickly realise that it isn't as straightforward as the aid charities would like to have you think. We are given a picture of poor farmers scraping a meagre living - either through subsistence alone or commodity crops such as cocoa, coffee and bananas. However, as I recall from studying both Latin America and South East Asia, the reality on the ground is much more complicated. Indeed, the very poorest people in these places, the ones who were going to get done in first when the drought and famine arrives, are what we'd call 'landlass labourers'.

So part of me is pleased to have my ancient geography lectures confirmed by a comprehensive study - this time in Africa:

...wage employment in areas producing agricultural export commodities is widespread. FTEPR survey results from the short questionnaire addressed to a very large proportion (in some cases 100 per cent of the sub-site populations) show that a large percentage of people had experience of working for wages specifically on farms and processing stations producing the commodities that were the focus of the research.

The people who own the farms on which these labourers toil are not the poorest. Yet the focus of development efforts is directed at these owners and, in particular, through Fairtrade at the small and medium sized commodity growers. These findings come from the Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) unit at London's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and they remind us that, as we should know, the most vulnerable in any society are those without wealth. And in Africa wealth means land.

What FTEPR go on to describe is perhaps more worrying still for policy-making and suggests that the western narrative on development and poverty in Africa is mistaken:

This research was unable to find any evidence that Fairtrade has made a positive difference to the wages and working conditions of those employed in the production of the commodities produced for Fairtrade certified export in the areas where the research has been conducted. This is the case for ‘smallholder’ crops like coffee – where Fairtrade standards have been based on the erroneous assumption that the vast majority of production is based on family labour – and for ‘hired labour organization’ commodities like the cut flowers produced in factory-style greenhouse conditions in Ethiopia. In some cases, indeed, the data suggest that those employed in areas where there are Fairtrade producer organisations are significantly worse paid, and treated, than those employed for wages in the production of the same commodities in areas without any Fairtrade certified institutions (including in areas characterised by smallholder production).

This challenge to Fairtrade is serious. We are not talking here of some right-wing think tank but a highly respected institution presenting findings that suggest Fairtrade, far from being a way to address poverty, could merely be enriching the relatively wealthy smallholder at the expense of increasing poverty among the landless peasants employed to harvest that smallholding. And the research also challenges the presumption that the Fairtrade governance model is beneficial - concluding that Fairtrade organisations (and the retailers that exploit the branding) overclaim the beneficial impact of the model, that the co-operative model is unequal in that it favours the larger producers within the co-operative, and that policy-makers need to shift their focus away from producers and towards those who are employed by those producers.

As someone who has been critical of Fairtrade for some while, I guess I ought to be happy that a major piece of research confirms its weakness. However, such an enormous amount of good will has been invested in Fairtrade products by a lot of good people - it will be very hard for them to come to terms with the fact that, while the model has benefited some people, it may be creating a bigger divide between the family farmer and the landless worker. It will be interesting to see the response of the Fairtrade organisations to the work - they've faced criticisms before but never from such a comprehensive review or in such a critical form.

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The good of community and the bad of government - in one paragraph

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From a blog post entitled  "How Africa Works":

This is Ronald Ngala Street Nairobi, it 6.00 in the evening, multitudes on their way home, buses honking their way through the city. The hawkers in coordinated chirrups as they sell their wares, from; vests to Chinese watches, handkerchiefs to exotic Kiwi fruits, they trade their ways. All of a sudden hell breaks loose, the hawkers dis-assemble their small table top shops within seconds and run, run they must from the dreaded City council police. Some hawkers with their tiny toddlers, some pregnant they disappear among the multitudes, they will be back. Much, much later in the night they will sit together, each will contribute to the benevolent fund and each will contribute their savings and credit scheme, one of them will walk with five thousand shillings today.

Community and freedom works, government tries to stop it working. Sadly 'twas ever and everywhere thus.

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A glimpse of another Africa

Nairobi

You're all familiar with the Oxfam picture of Africa. The starving children, the smiling farmers kept from death's door by the good work of one or other 'aid programme', the wells dug and the women with bundles on their heads.

This is the Africa of development charity marketing and of the politicians' justification for the international aid budget. It's a rural, poor Africa where food crises are only a dry month away and where fair trade evangelists bring the good news - you can stay on your smallholding barely scraping a living for another year!

And the image is something of an insult - dare I say it, a rather neo-colonial insult. The implication is that, without the expertise of us rich, clever Europeans those Africans are condemned to a life of malnutrition, disease and desolation. It is wrong.

Think back to the terrible events in Kenya back in October - not the terrorism but the target of the terrorists. It was a Westfield shopping mall. Hardly the Oxfam image of Africa. This is another Africa, an urban Africa that isn't filled with subsistence farmers and big-eyed hungry children but with trade, with making, buying and selling things and with entrepreneurs:

I present to you Africa’s brightest young entrepreneurs. These are the ones who are making the most dramatic impact in Africa today in manufacturing, technology, real estate, media & entertainment, financial services, agriculture, fashion and the service industry. They are impatient to explore new possibilities and slowly but surely, they are building empires. 

OK, it's a bit gushing but this is a positive, exciting, growing Africa not the supposed basket case that the likes of Oxfam would have us believe. An Africa with people like Christian Ngan:

After working in financial services in France, first as an analyst at French investment bank Quilvest Group and as an associate at Findercord in Paris, Christian Ngan returned home to Cameroon to start his own business in 2012. With $3,000 of his savings, he founded Madlyn Cazalis, an African hand-made bio cosmetic company that produces body oils, natural lotions, creams, scrubs, masks and soaps. Madlyn Cazalis products are sold and distributed across more than 30 chemist stores, beauty institutes and retail outlets in Cameroon and neighboring countries in Central Africa. 

And with Seth Akumani:

Akumani, 30 is a co-founder of ClaimSync, an end-to-end claims processing software that enables hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities all over the world to automate patients’ medical records and to process records electronically. Claimsync’s solution allows these healthcare providers to easily prepare medical claims and send electronically to health insurance companies. In 2013 ClaimSync was the sole African company to participate in the high-profile, IBM, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline backed Accelerator program HealthXL in Dublin. ClaimSync was recently acquired by GenKey, a Dutch-based biometrics company.

These men and women - more than all the international aid, fair trade campaigns and guilt-tripping charity appeals - are the future hope for Africa. But we never talk about them preferring instead our cosy little colonial myth. Believing it when we're told - again and again - that Africa is filled with poor farmers whose only protection and hope is the caring, kind and white face of Oxfam. That somehow the sort of society we enjoy - of urban wealth rather than rural poverty - is not something Africa can attain.

Africa has a long way to go - it's still too rural and too poor. But the answer isn't propping up poverty with subsidy but rather promoting business, entrepreneurship and trade. Backing the continent's entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs did for Europe, Japan and the USA - make us all, compared to today's Africans - rich.

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Helping Africa (well sort of...)

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This is brilliant - and so true:



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A glimpse of Africa...

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We're always shown the doom and gloom of Africa - the famines, the war, the corruption, wizened old dictators. Here's a glimpse of another - busier, more exciting - Africa. Watch Coutonou in Benin:


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Hunger will disappear IF...we stop subsidising poverty and promote free trade

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This year, many of the world’s most powerful leaders will meet in the UK. They must change the future for millions of people who live with the day to day struggle against hunger. But that will only happen IF we get together and make them act.

So goes the blurb from the latest campaign to feed the starving and hungry. As ever, the campaign has roped in a cavalcade of the great and good – Desmond Tutu, Bill Gates and even pretty pop boys, One Direction. And we are enjoined – nay, demanded – to take part in the great campaign to feed the hungry! To take this message to the G8 – that hunger will disappear if:

• IF we give enough aid to stop children dying from hunger and help the poorest families feed themselves
• IF governments stop big companies dodging tax in poor countries, so that millions of people can free themselves from hunger
• IF we stop poor farmers being forced off their land and we grow crops to feed people not fuel cars
• IF governments and big companies are honest and open about their actions that stop people getting enough food

All sounds pretty good stuff doesn’t it folks! Until of course you actually think about it for a minute.

Firstly, this is 100 organisations – NGOs they like to call themselves until they ask us for money when they suddenly become charities – that are very interested in how much aid is given. And, of course, most of the aid does very little to “stop children dying of hunger” since governments prefer instead to prop up badly managed national budgets, lecture poor countries about climate change and, more of this in a minute, keep subsistence farmers trapped in subsistence farming.

Corporate tax-dodging is the issue du jour – no progressive campaign would be complete without a call for action on tax-dodging by “big” companies. It may be the case that large companies aren’t paying enough tax in Kenya or Peru but where is the connection with getting people out of hunger? Unless you live in a sort of Stalinist world where only the benign state can feed people (which didn’t work in the Ukraine or China, I seem to recall).

Now we get to the big issue – those big companies, secretly backed by the World Bank “behind the scenes”, as Oxfam put it, are buying up land and forcing farmers off that land so they can grow commercial crops (too many of which, because of our bonkers response to climate change are bio-fuels). Yes folks, you’ve guessed it – the reason for all those taxes is so we can pay poor farmers to stay poor farmers.

This is a monumentally stupid proposal – that very subsistence farming, dirt-scrabble and back-breaking, is the main reason why people in these places fall repeatedly into famine and starvation. We should be encouraging more efficient farming – after all Oxfam and their mates aren’t suggesting that we G8 residents step away from our computers and return to the land! Nor are these NGOs proposing that the big British or Canadian farms are broken up and handed out in parcels to city dwellers – doubtless with a hoe, a horse and a plough.

So why on earth do these organisations want to condemn this and future generations of Africans to live a short, unpleasant life scraping a bare existence from a tiny farm? Why do Oxfam and others believe that subsidising subsistence is the way to proceed? Why do all the great and good – the bishops, pop stars and philanthropists – think it fine for them to live a comfortable life with soft hands but that those Africans cannot aspire to be web designers, software writers or management consultants?

Why does this alliance for good not campaign for the G8 to make some changes that really will help those Africans out of poverty – things like removing agricultural tariffs and trade barriers, ending the subsidising of industrial agriculture and promoting trade rather than the dependence of aid?

I can only conclude that these campaigners believe Africans to be somehow different – that free markets and free trade won’t make them rich as they made us rich. Only through state direction and intervention will people be fed and the resources for this feeding will come from our taxes distributed to the grateful peasants of Ethiopia and Laos through the agency of Oxfam and others in the aid industry.

So I won’t be supporting this “If...” campaign – not because I don’t care but because the best way to stop Africans – and other poor people around the world – from starving is to do business with them, to set them free from the tyranny of subsistence and to promote free enterprise and free trade.

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David Attenborough - eugenicist

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I was very tempted to title this comment "David Attenborough - fascist" but people might misunderstand my point. Others - via the fine medium of Twitter suggested: "David Attenborough - fabian" in recognition of all those social democrats and pseudo-liberals (and apologists for mass murderers) like Sidney & Beatrice Webb, G B Shaw, H G Wells and J M Keynes who were in favour of government intervention to stop the masses from breeding.

However, I thing that "David Attenborough - eugenicist" will suffice for that is what he is:

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so,” warns David Attenborough in an interview in the new issue of Radio Times magazine. “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde,” says the natural history broadcaster.

And it's not us Western white folk - we're fine (or more pertinently failing to meet replacement levels meaning, but for immigration, negative population growth). It the huddled masses in Africa:

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

 A less kind blogger might sniff a little racism there!

Now David Attenborough - along with the other posh eugenicists in organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Green Party - has a pretty loose association with actual facts about population and indeed about famine in Ethiopia - true there are food shortages most years in this country but no objective observer - or even the development industry - identifies population pressures as the cause.

The real problem for nasty eugenicists like Attenborough is that economic growth, trade and open markets - by making us richer - are the means to 'control' population. Coupled with sending women to school rather than to arranged marriages. Here are the facts that the eugenicists ignore:

...in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country's population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

Attenborough and his posh eugenicist mates can sod off. Humankind doesn't need him to sort its population growth - getting richer and better educated is doing the job just fine.

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Millennium Villages - the wrong kind of aid?

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I have an abiding interest is the great trade or aid debate. I've always - since my days studying development economics thirty years ago - tended to favour trade as the best route out of poverty. Indeed part of me suspects that aid programmes may even crowd out local development.

The Millennium Villages project seems such an appealling idea:

The Millennium Villages Project addresses the root causes of extreme poverty, taking a holistic, community-led approach to sustainable development. Our work unites science, business, civil society and government in these efforts by empowering communities and partners alike to become a part of the solution to ending extreme poverty.

And that appealling message - wrapped up in the UN's Millennium Goals - has attracted a huge investment from charities, philanthropists and, of course, governments.  The idea of creating new villages with excellent infrastructure, schools, health centres and the benign advice of development experts seemed just right. A challenge met, resources directed and Africa freed from poverty!

But there's a problem. For all the grand talk, the list of great and good 'partners', endorsement from bilateral and multilateral aid agencies and the gushing words of politicians and celebrities, these Millennium Villages are not making the difference Professor Sachs claims:

Documents recently made public by the UK government reveal the cost of poverty reduction in the Millennium Villages Project, a self-described “solution to extreme poverty” in African villages created by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs. The project costs at least US$12,000 per household that it lifts from poverty—about 34 times the annual incomes of those households. This highlights once again the importance of independent and transparent evaluation of development projects. 

"So what" you might say - the benefit to those families helped by the programme in incalculable. That may be so but what of the opportunity cost? We know that relatively small cash transfers can transform lives:

There is robust evidence from numerous countries that cash transfers have leveraged sizeable gains in access to health and education services, as measured by increases in school enrolment (particularly for girls) and use of health services (particularly preventative health, and health monitoring for children and pregnant women). Effects are typically larger in LICs with lower baseline levels. Cash transfers also have a proven role in supporting specific vulnerable groups (people living with HIV and AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children). (DFID 2011)

The Millennium Villages programme represents a huge transfer of resources (34 times average incomes in the receiving country) but any evaluation lacks balance - indeed Sachs has made a virtue out of measuring only the impact in the villages themselves:

...Jeff Sachs noted in a 2006 speech that they were not doing detailed surveying in non-MV sites because—he said— “it’s almost impossible—and ethically not possible—to do an intensive intervention of measurement without interventions of actual process.” A paper the following year went on to explain that not only is there no selection of control villages (randomized or otherwise), there is also no attempt to select interventions for each village randomly in order to isolate the effects of specific interventions, or of certain sequences or combinations of interventions.

What we've discovered is that if you throw huge amounts of money at a relatively small number of families, you can transform their fortunes. The problem is that this can't be done for the entirety of Africa's poor families and, more worrying, the approach acts to embed susbsistence farming which is not in the long term interests of these families. And, as Michael Clemens points out:

...causing short-term improvement of some kind with charity does not make a development project successful. A successful development project does more with the money than an alternative project can—otherwise diverting money to the former makes everyone worse off than if that project didn’t exist. And that has ethical dimensions.

The Millennium Villages programme is perhaps the last of the grand Victorian ventures, a hangover from an approach to development that assumes poor Africans can't do it for themselves and have to be helped. Maybe its failure will change our approach to development and we'll realise that patronising the poor is wrong and appreciate that our protectionism, green exclusivism and home preference kills more Africans than we save with aid.

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Fabrice Muamba: a reminder of why we grant asylum...

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Quite rightly the airwaves, blogs, newspapers and twittersphere is filled with the terrible news of Fabrice Muamba's on-pitch heart attack. Like everyone else I hope he pulls through, just as Mervyn Davies - who died yesterday - did after his on-pitch brain haemorrhage in 1976 playing for Swansea against Pontypridd.

Reading Muamba's story brought out another aspect of his life, something other than that he was a successful premier league football player living in Cheshire and playing for Bolton Wanderers. Muamba was only here and playing football because Britain gave his parents political asylum.

...the only reason Muamba was in England is because his father, Marcel, was a political refugee, granted indefinite leave on the basis that his life would be in danger if he were made to return to Africa. Muamba talked of going to sleep at night amid the backdrop of gunfire. His uncle, Ilunga, was murdered. Friends and neighbours died, too. When it was safe, he and his friends would play football but, very often, they would be called back inside.

We give asylum because it is the right thing to do - forget about the fiddles and abuse, the false claims, the political football. We give asylum so youngsters like Fabrice Muamba can play football without being kidnapped or shot because their Dad's on the wrong side in politics or a civil war.  There are thousands of other stories - less high profile - that tell us the same thing, that we give sanctuary to those fleeing threats without fear or favour and give them the same chance we give our own people, our own children.

It's one of the things that make us a great nation and a great people.

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Will we still have banks? Pondering on the future of money....

This is a serious question about banks – in days to come will we still have banks as the businesses we love and cherish (so much we’ve given then billions of newly minted pounds and dollars so they didn’t have to cry any more)?

Now I don’t know the answer to this question – except to say that there will be a need to store money safely away from the burgling and thieving sorts (and perhaps the taxman too), there will still be investments made with aggregated funds and there will be an important role advising us on how we should be using the cash we’ve earned, inherited or squirreled away.

Firstly however we need to distinguish between the various businesses calling themselves ‘banks’ and the bank (and banking) itself. It is very likely those businesses will survive – or most of them will – but not as banks in as much as we understand banks:

The principle has been proved that innovation often occurs where the need for change is greatest. Look to Africa, where there are few banks, poor physical infrastructures and a rural population often dependent on remittances from the city. It is here that technology can really demonstrate value by offering a secure, efficient alternative to cash transactions. Such has been the success of products like M-PESA in Kenya that we are at a point where, looking forward to 2020, many experts, as well as the key players such as banks, governments and retailers, can see a world, particularly in emerging economies, where the majority of cash transactions have been replaced by digital ones – and where most of these will be made by our phones.

In the developed world we are lagging behind – partly because we have an extensive, mature and (wrongly) over-protected banking system and partly because consumers are very conservative in matters financial. In Africa people don’t have access to banks – you know those big buildings in the town centre – but are very likely to have a mobile phone:

In Ghana, for example, one in 20 people has a bank account. Meanwhile, one in three has a cell phone. 

So the mobile phone means that we are going to move our money around digitally and this money – the stuff the government prints – will be joined by a host of other forms of digital “cash”. From supermarket points schemes through coupons to ever more sophisticated digital bartering systems. After all barter is alive and well out there:

Watches, baseball cards, cupcakes and cookies, artwork, a journal entry, a bike and even a dog have all found new homes at Main Street Family Dentistry in Tupelo, Miss.

Dentist Harry Rayburn and his staff accepted the tokens as a barter from patients on a single day in exchange for fillings, extractions and cleanings, mainly from uninsured patients.

And it is but a short step from this situation to the creating of transferable forms of what amounts to “private money”. By this I don’t mean non-banking investment such as that from angels but de facto money that can be used instead of pounds, dollars and euros.

The problem with all this change isn’t that it isn’t possible – converting Tesco Clubcard points into transferable currency is simple and they could join emerging on-line approaches to payments such as Bitcoin, PayPal and so forth. It is that the authorities don't like it.  Where we previously had no effective competition in the administration and effecting of transactions – you used the government’s money – we now have a more complex, enterprising and creative system brokered on-line but (as we know from Clubcard) applicable in the real world too.

The problem with making this happen faster is that it isn’t what either the banks or the government want. After all, they will tell us, we can’t have just anybody setting up an on-line system for financial transfer and transaction – that’s what we have banks, banking regulation, banking lawyers and treasury departments to do.

Indeed, as virtual cash pops up the lawyers aren’t far behind (although, being lawyers rather than economists they don’t actually understand what money is):

Dax Hansen, an attorney at Perkins Coie in Seattle and one of the experts in this field, says virtual currency can be used to buy anything from a sword or armor in a game to a ring tone on a phone.

"It can be given away for free as a promotion," Hansen says. "It also can be given away as a marketing campaign if you provide some information. It has a value for which the marketer is willing to pay."

The trouble begins when that virtual currency can be redeemed for cash--particularly if it involves more than one company. At that point the financial services laws kick into gear, including those used to prevent money laundering.

Mr Hansen stills sees this emerging ‘money’ as a sales promotion rather than as a competitor to what he call “real money” but it is clear that we shall see challenges – indeed China has already begun:

In the latest wrinkle in the fabric separating reality from virtual reality, virtual money is being exchanged for real yuan on a booming scale. The practice is so widespread that it has raised concerns that virtual money could challenge the renminbi's status as the only legitimate currency in China. 

And not just a competing currency but one outside the control of the government. Which bothers American politicians too:

This has not stopped some American politicians from expressing grave concern about the virtual currency. Charles Schumer, a prominent Democratic senator, has inveighed against it, claiming it is just what drug dealers have been waiting for. All the clever cryptography means Bitcoin dealings are difficult to trace. But not impossible.

It seems to me that these people are railing against the dying of banking’s light – the industry has had a decent innings - latterly with the connivance of government in preventing new entry, controlling innovation and protecting the profitability of the existing system. However, just as the on-line world is transforming publishing, altering the dynamic of political discourse and changing how we communicate, we may see it first destroy banking as we know it today and then remove the state’s monopoly over money.

And this change will take place in places where government is weak – in Africa particularly – rather than in the developed world where government is strong. It will be interesting to see this play out and to discover how systems created to sell more tins of beans or allow gamers to buy a magic potion will challenge and perhaps replace the monetary systems of today.

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Into the woods - some thoughts on reforestation

I was all ready to tear into the nonsense that is Oxfam's "Growing a Better Future" - how these organisations get to the point of presented half-truths, inaccurate analyses and daft solutions I'll never understand. However the point was made very clearly here:

This is much less a report about the iniquities of the international food system and the perils of climate change than it is a report about what happens to food prices as we abolish absolute poverty and destitution.

More people with more money means higher food prices - simple really!

So I'm going to talk about wood instead - after all wood is very important. Across most of the world it is the dominant source of fuel for heating and cooking - indeed this is one of the reasons why we've seen so much deforestation in Africa:

Developing countries rely heavily on wood fuel, the major energy source for cooking and heating. In Africa, the statistics are striking: an estimated 90 percent of the entire continent's population uses fuelwood for cooking, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, firewood and brush supply approximately 52 percent of all energy sources.

And you've guessed it - that fuelwood gathering doesn't rely on "sustainable" sources. Moreover, the clearance of forests is further accelerated by the persistence of low labour productivity farming - the very farming systems preferred by Oxfam and the ludicrous proponents of "fair trade".

England's woods of oak and birch were destroyed for much the same reason - to provide fuel, to build houses (and famously ships) and to make room for agriculture. System shocks like Dutch Elm disease added to the decline and the poisoned landscapes - like the face of the moon as the song goes - of mining destroyed still more old woodland. Strangely enough - although you'd not believe this to hear the NIMBYs cry sometimes - not much of our woodland was felled to make room for houses.

And woods recover - forest cover is now at its largest extent since 1750:

The amount of woodland in the UK now stands at 11,200 square miles, 11.8 per cent of the total land area. The growth, attributed in part to a boom in individuals branching out into forestry because of tax breaks, was greeted with cautious optimism by woodland historians. So much new forest is being planted that some areas could even reach the 15 per cent of woodland recorded in England by the Doomsday Book in 1086, the figures suggest. 

And much of the growth in woodland is private planting - nothing to do with all that public forest so many people fussed about recently:

The new Forestry Commission report, conducted for the UN’s food and agriculture department, disclosed that the amount of woodland owned by individuals now accounts for almost half of all our tree cover, having grown by 22 per cent in 15 years.

 

In an advanced society, free from the need to burn wood and no longer trapped in subsistence or semi-subsistence agriculture, woods are an asset that it treasured, managed and valued. Perhaps there's a lesson in this for the Oxfam's of this world - but don't hold you breath!

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