by Charlie Edwards | Dec 6, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global Dashboard
46°14?00?N 63°09?00?W Prince Edward Island, Canada.
I’m taking part in a roundtable on community resilience, 4&5GW and the decline of the state. The aim of the roundtable is to bring together individuals from a range of backgrounds to challenge current thinking and assumptions in our present political and societal systems. Two presentations which I’ll be live blogging on will be Chet Richards on Mindsets and Character and John Robb on Community Resilience. There is no set agenda for the conference. This afternoon we will be running a series of open sessions… one of which is likley to be on community resilience.
If you have a question for Chet or John send me a tweet. Update: Thanks for the questions – answers will be tweeted soon.
Update: Notes from John Robbs’ presentation after the jump + MP3 of Chet.
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by Mark Weston | Nov 3, 2008 | Africa
Defying the global financial crisis, Guinea-Bissau, Gambia and Guinea have recorded sharp rises in foreign direct investment in recent months. Trouble is, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, most of the increase is drug money. “Foreign direct investments in these (three) countries, unexplained so far by their economic performance, have exploded. Remittances have grown. Even the currencies of the region are being revalued,” says the beleaguered head of the organisation, Antonio Maria Costa. “This is a form of money laundering, it comes in as foreign direct investment, it goes into rural real estate, purchase of land, hotels, tourism,” he told West African leaders in Cape Verde, who are meeting to discuss the problem.
As well as the above three countries and Sierra Leone, which I wrote about in July, a researcher who works for Kofi Annan claims that Ghana has become another hub for the drug deluge, which he believes will affect the country’s current election campaign. Here’s a helpful map of West Africa’s Cocaine Coast – expect Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, which like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau are struggling to rebuild after devastating wars and which are surrounded by drug havens, to be next.
by Alex Evans | Oct 31, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Take note of the important signal of problems in store on the front of today’s FT. Reckitt Benckiser, the consumer goods manufacturer, has broken ranks to express its outrage that Tesco (the UK supermarket group) is extending the time it takes to settle invoices from 30 to 60 days. Reckitt’s CEO says:
The question is [if] in the long term they drive the smaller suppliers out of business, that is the key question and it might happen … I don’t think it is reasonable – no, it is not. There is absolutely no logic to that. They turn over the inventory [in] much less [time] than 60 days, so why should they have 60 day payment terms?
For a supplier to go public with a criticism like this is very unusual, as the FT notes. Yet Reckitt’s certainly not the only company that’s worried – I’ve heard other food groups express private fears that a serious crunch will build up in the food supply chain over the next two months.
Senior policymakers in the UK, the US and elsewhere are already underscoring their concerns about small businesses in the credit crunch, and making noises about pressuring the financial sector to do more for them.
On the same basis, they need to focus hard on the supermarket sector – which through its sheer market power risks causing serious damage to supply chains we all depend on. There are important questions here of shared responsibility for shared resilience in conditions of severe stress. Governments should not be shy of reminding supermarkets of that fact.
by Jules Evans | Oct 25, 2008 | Conflict and security
There’s an interesting interview with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao by Fareed Jakaria on the CNN website. Wen again talks about his love of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and how it plays a role in his political philosophy.
This philosophy, as far as I can tell, is one of Stoic resilience in the face of catastrophe, such as the earthquake that hit China in May, when Wen immediately flew out and took command of the recovery situation.
He spoke at greater length in New York in September:
I had a background in geological studies and I am familiar with an important theory in the study of the history of geological periods: that is the catastrophic theory. In the past six years since I took office as the Chinese Premier, it is fair to say that we have encountered numerous disasters and difficulties.
From the outbreak of the SARS epidemic, to the sleet- and snow-storm that hit southern China, and then to the massive earthquake that devastated Wenchuan, Sichuan province, and from the accidents in the coal mines to the food safety incident that occurred recently, all this has given us a very informative experience, and we have learned new things from overcoming these difficulties. As I always say: what a nation loses in a disaster will always be compensated by progress later on.
As you may know, I very much enjoy reading Meditations, a classical work written by Marcus Aurelius. In this classical work I once read: as for so-called great men, where are they now? They are all gone. Some of them may be enough to form a story and some others may not even be enough to form half a story. So I would rather prefer leaving some spiritual legacy behind, mainly as the following two points:
Number one, in the wake of a disaster, we should not yield to the difficulties, rather we should have the courage to face up to the difficulties head-on and we should have the courage to lead our people to surmount the difficulties. To do that, we need to have a firm stand; we need to have courage and confidence.
Number two, as far as a government is concerned, a government should be responsible for its people, should be dedicated to serving the people, and should be marked by dedication and its clean and honest behavior. Except for these, a government should not have any privilege whatsoever. All the power belongs to the people and all the power should be used for the people.
As an old Chinese saying goes: a spring silkworm keeps producing silk until it dies and a candle keeps giving light until it burns into ashes. I am already sixty-seven years old, and I will dedicate the rest of my power and energy entirely to the Chinese nation and to the Chinese people and I hope that when I leave this world people will remember that I, as the Premier, have actually followed the two principles that I mentioned before, and that way I will also rest in peace.”
Grandpa Wen’s love of Marcus Aurelius has done wonders for the old Stoic’s reputation in China. The Meditations has been in the top ten bestseller list there for several months.
