by Mark Weston | May 16, 2008 | Off topic
A post I wrote last week described a “push” approach to AIDS prevention – circumcise men, tell people to use condoms, encourage them not to sleep around too much etc. The World Bank is trying a different tack, using a “pull” method instead: pay people not to get infected and let them work out for themselves how to stay safe. The Bank will pay 3,000 Tanzanians $45 – good money in Tanzania – if they regularly test negative for sexually transmitted infections (though not HIV, which is more expensive to test for but for which diseases like gonorrhoea are a good proxy). “Reverse prostitution,” they call it, rather alarmingly.
Conditional cash transfers are the new new thing in the development world. The success of Mexico’s Oportunidades scheme, which gives cash to poor families if they participate in health programmes, has sparked a wave of imitations in both developing and developed countries – even New York has got in on the act. A randomised controlled study of Oportunidades found that it reduced illness among children in the programme by 23% compared to a control group. The children’s height increased by 1-4%, and the health of adults also improved. Similar programmes to reduce drug dependency in the US by giving cash to cocaine and methamphetamine abusers in return for clean urine samples have cut stimulant use.
The World Bank scheme relies on a crucial insight, which LSE AIDS guru Tony Barnett and I discuss in a paper to be published in ‘AIDS‘ this summer. In order to take decisions now that will benefit them in the future, people need to value that future. In other words, they need hope:
People with hope for the future are less likely to engage in activities that put them at risk of illness or death in the present…Without future goals, there is little reason to avoid actions that may cause harm in the future but do not do so in the present. People may therefore forfeit future gains in favour of present benefits.
Studies of hope have found strong effects on quality of life. Hopeful children do better in skills tests; adults who have goals have better mental health; and those without hope of career advancement have higher rates of mortality. And it’s not just about money; drug users in the US programmes reported that having something to aim for and receiving rewards for achievement spurred them to quit.
In much of Africa, where HIV is rife, people lack hope and therefore take risks. They exchange safety for pleasure by having unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners. They know they might one day die as a result of this, but the concerns of the present are too pressing, the future too remote. Cash can make a difference – a study in South Africa found that poor women women who received small loans in return for participating in HIV and gender programmes reported increased hope and reduced violence at the hands of their partners.
You might think that not dying of AIDS would be reward enough for practising safe sex. In an environment where people have little to hope for, however, and thus no reason to make plans, you’d be wrong.
by Alex Evans | May 15, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, UK
How much should people in Britain worry about food security? Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm – famine, pestilence and a total breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation. As an editor on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy, or a George Clooney premiere to attend.
But recently, I’ve wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the US, and riots in dozens of countries worldwide. This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis, like a “silent tsunami”, while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through $100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.
In one sense, it’s no surprise that food figures so prominently in her list of concerns: along with shelter and water, after all, food is about as basic as human needs get. But on the other hand, you have to wonder: if you can afford Anya Hindmarch bags, do you really have anything to worry about on food prices? Isn’t the problem actually the converse – namely that as the global middle class grows, its appetite for meat and dairy products (and handbags too) also grows – taking staple grains out of the purchasing power reach of poorer consumers in the process?
Still, the fact remains: people in developed countries who think about resilience a lot are worried about food. John Robb, for instance, sees food as a critical dimension of his concept of the Resilient Community. Or look at the Transition Towns movement in Totnes, who are going nuts about food security (literally):
… the idea is to use town-wide plantings [of nut trees] to create a stock of healthy, productive trees that can serve as a great source of local food, and a buffer in times of scarcity. The reason that the group is concentrating on nut trees is their potential to outgrow cereal crops in terms of carbohydrates, and to utilise poorer soils with fewer inputs. The group has already planted hazelnuts, walnuts and almonds across the town …
So: how worried should we be in Britain, the US or other developed countries? Is it time to head for the hills? (more…)
by Richard Gowan | May 11, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system
From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.
by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by David Steven | May 2, 2008 | Global system
Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here).
One talk drew heavily on my Wilton Park speech on evaluation (read it here), but I also spoke about technology’s impact on diplomacy. The full text is after the jump or read it as a pdf. (more…)
