Making President Obama’s New Vision for Development Work
A Presentation by Ray Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America
This talk will consider President Obama’s new approach to development and explore its impact on how international agencies, governments, and NGOs seek to assist Haiti. Drawing on experience in other countries, the speaker will also present Oxfam’s view on good development practice.
Guest post by Alex Dupuy
Testifying before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10, 2010, former US President Bill Clinton, who is now serving as Special Envoy to Haiti for the United Nations, said that the trade liberalization (aka neoliberal) policies he pushed in the 1990s and that compelled Haiti to remove tariffs on imported rice from the US “may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake… I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.”
Two weeks later, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive appeared in front of the Haitian Senate to present the government’s post-earthquake recovery plan known as the Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti. The Action Plan, originally conceived by the US State Department and co-chaired by former President Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, called for the creation of an Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) charged with deciding on and implementing the programs and projects for the reconstruction of Haiti for 18 months after the Haitian Parliament ratifies it.
When questioned by members of the Haitian Senate that Haiti in effect surrendered its sovereignty to the IHRC, PM Bellerive responded candidly that “I hope you sense the dependency in this document. If you don’t sense it, you should tear it up. I am optimistic that in 18 months… we will be autonomous in our decisions. But right now I have to assume… that we are not.”
These admissions by high-ranking public officials representing the two sides of the international community-Haiti partnership express succinctly the dilemma that Haiti faces in rebuilding its shattered economy in the wake of the massive destruction caused by the January 12, 2010 earthquake.
As accurate as PM Bellerive’s statement about Haiti’s dependence on and subordination to the international community is, that did not originate with the creation of the IHRC, and it is not as temporary as Bellerive suggests. Rather than recounting the long history of foreign involvement and dominance in Haiti, we can consider the 1970s as having marked a major turning point in understanding the factors that created the conditions that existed on the eve of the earthquake and contributed to its devastating impact.
Continue reading “Ideological dogmatism and United States policy toward Haiti”
Global Citizens in Pursuit of the Common Good
A Human Development Conference at the University of Notre Dame
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Ford Family Program in Human Development Studies & Solidarity announces a student research conference on topics vital to human development to be held at the University of Notre Dame on February 11-12, 2011. This student-organized event is co-sponsored by the Center for Social Concerns at Notre Dame and SIT Study Abroad, a program of World Learning.
Guest post by Sam Beck
The European Union must be held accountable if European states continue to expel Roma from member countries. The expulsions are taking place because Roma have created settlements not only in designated campgrounds but also within urban boundaries. This is not new. However, the scale and density of such settlements disturbs the sensibilities of Europeans. This is not only a West European phenomenon. Events of intolerable discrimination are also taking place in East Central Europe and the Balkans from which many of these Roma originate. The history of anti-Roma sentiments in both East and West Europe is torturous and long-standing.
A rather unusual situation emerged in Romania where Roma have lived for hundreds of years, where to this day they appear in abundant variation, from people who have resumed migratory lives to people who have been settled at the margins of villages, towns, and cities for as long as anyone can remember. In Romania, Roma were enslaved and indentured for centuries. They played important roles as musicians, miners, and in producing objects necessary for an agrarian society, crafting metals and wood objects. Today, those that we call Roma, were involved in all sorts of labor, agricultural workers and house servants.
Some may no longer speak their Sanskrit based language, or if they do they speak it with lexical-items borrowed from Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, and so on. In Romania, many no longer speak Romani. In Romania, Roma may identify themselves with this “national” identity, or they may identify as “tsigani,” how others have named them. This is a term of derision. Some Roma have integrated themselves into the mainstream of Romanian society and melted into the Romanian ethnic identity. Some Roma sustain their identity and have experienced upward mobility in many different fields.
Roma were persecuted in the Nazi era, large numbers of whom lost their lives; their population decimated in great proportions to their total numbers, referred to as Prajmos. Oddly enough, when mentioned at all as a persecuted population in Germany’s ethnic cleansing effort they are lumped in with Jews, rather than being mentioned outright as a population. No museums exist for them and if there are memorials for them, I do not know of them. They have no homeland with which they can identify. There is no Israel that was created for them as it was for Jews. Their identities are claimed as citizens of their countries of origin.
An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan
MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?
FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of the Punjab), Sindh, and Balochistan have been devastated by the recent floods. These floods are considered to be the worst in the entire world during the past hundred years. It is not an exaggeration that fifteen million families have been rendered homeless, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been wiped off the face of the earth. Hundreds of villages are no more. Standing crops over thousands of acres, cattle, infrastructure, and productive assets of millions of families have been lost due to flooding. A woman from a very well off and respected family of a rural district contacted by phone said “Everything is gone. We are beggars”. Scores of women from small farm and landless families burst into tears when asked about their plight. “There is no food, no water, no medicine, no help” most of them narrated. If they do not receive assistance soon, they may reach the point where they think that there is “no hope”. Such a situation will add another dimension to the crisis because desperate minds are fertile ground for militants. This is a great humanitarian crisis to which the world’s conscience needs to respond. The scale of this tragedy is so enormous that the country’s entire population is reeling in shock.
MR: What does the devastation in Pakistan look like to you on the ground?
FB: Thousands of human settlements are under ten or fifteen-foot deep water. Dead cattle can be found everywhere. Innumerable people are stranded in areas surrounded by water. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and elderly people who managed to move out of their houses leaving behind their assets accumulated over a life time have squatted along the roads. Tents are in extremely short supply, so the homeless sit under the burning sun without any shade to cover their heads. They often seem overwhelmed and unable to decide what to do. There are shortages of food, safe drinking water, and medicine. Whenever food arrives, scrambling for it leads to scuffles, and inevitably, the poor, weak, and households headed by women are hurt the most. There is no organized, visible, and dependable government assistance available.
Blogger’s note: I depend largely on my Google reader system to feed me the anthropology news every week for my weekly round-up of “Anthro in the news.” But a lot that is anthropological goes on under the covers, so to speak: it is just not named “anthropology.”
Out of curiosity, I went to Google news yesterday and typed in “Paul Farmer.” Farmer is probably the most famous living anthropologist who is not known primarily as an anthropologist. That’s why news items about him don’t pop up in my Google reader.
Here’s the catch of the past few days from Google news about Paul Farmer, cultural anthropologist, doctor, and humanitarian activist.
• Book review in JAMA
Partners in Health: The Paul Farmer Reader has been published by the University of California Press. It is what it says it is: a collection of Farmer’s writings. It was just reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Not many anthropology books get reviewed in JAMA.
• On cancer
The Times of India carried an article about a recent pronouncement by medical specialists in the United States that cancer is a global health issue of high priority. The article quotes Paul Farmer, via the Lancet, as saying “There are clearly effective interventions that can prevent or ease suffering due to many malignancies, and that is surely our duty as physicians or policy makers or health advocates.”
• On why care about Pakistan
An essay in the Huffington Post salutes Paul Farmer in a paragraph pointing to “troubling contrasts” between the amount of aid pledged and given to Haiti after the January earthquake compared to the “averting of eyes” from Pakistan’s tragedy. The author says: “Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up pithily in the title of his book, The Uses of Haiti. The uses of Pakistan are different. We need to move beyond the uses of both our countries and toward understanding them accurately and respectfully in their own terms. Our understanding of Haiti should be more political and of Pakistan less so, or differently so.”
• Pay back time
An open letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy from 90 academics, authors, journalists, and human rights activists around the world urged the French government to repay the 90 million gold francs that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence. Paul Farmer says “there are powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt.”
• Staying alive is more than medical
Fonkoze, an NGO that provides micro-credit loans in Haiti, realized that its programs miss the most needy. Fonkoze talked with Paul Farmer who said that his organization, Partners in Health, would create Fonkoze branches at all their hospitals. This partnership sounds promising and could help with the following comment from Farmer: “I’m really tired of taking these people who are close to death and making them better again, and then I have to watch them starve to death because they have no way to make a living.”
Image: “Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO,” from flickr user GlobalX, licensed with Creative Commons.
Cultural anthropologist, medical doctor, and humanitarian activist, Paul Farmer of Harvard University and Partners in Health, testified to the Congressional Black Caucus on July 27. His focus was on Haiti. His pitch is that the aid money flowing into Haiti must not go only to NGOs, to non-state organizations, but also must be used to strengthen good government and the public sector.
Farmer uses vivid medical metaphors to describe what the situation is in Haiti: “acute on chronic,” for one. In three words, he captures the underlying structural violence and human deprivation over centuries that is painfully punctuated by an acute situation such as the January catastrophe.
Another metaphor is that of a blood transfusion needle that is too small to carry the aid money to the people. Solution? A bigger needle: a stronger public sector. Farmer, a trained doctor, obviously thinks that the veins of the people can tolerate a bigger needle and will benefit from the infusion of fresh blood.
But how does Haiti work its way toward forming a strong and compassionate government? Perhaps a strong and compassionate foreign aid community can (a) not stand in the way, (b) support the right kind leadership in the upcoming election, and (c) infuse financial aid to Haiti’s education system to start training the leaders of Haiti’s future.
Image: “Church chapel converted to hospital ward in compound of Partners in Health hospital in Cange, Haiti”, from flickr user NewsHour, licensed with Creative Commons.
Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell
The XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna concluded on July 23. Twitter buzzed all week with updates from speakers and attendees, and comments from those who, like me, didn’t attend but followed from home.
The biggest stories of the week? Undoubtedly at the top are the speeches of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. They each championed male circumcision as an effective method for preventing HIV transmission.
Some tweeters expressed relief at finally seeing circumcision receive serious attention as a possible preventive measure:
GLOBALHEALTHorg: Male circumcision, proven HIV prevention strategy, finally gets some attention at #AIDS2010, http://tinyurl.com/37ha544
Others, however, doubt recent findings, particularly from activist groups Intact America and the International Coalition for Genital Integrity:
Intactamerica: New study shows circumcision would not halt spread of HIV in the United States: http://tinyurl.com/2evl3cv #i2 #AIDS2010 #humanrights #AIDS
Tweeters representing these groups contend that males who sign up for circumcision are under the impression they no longer need to use a condom.
Dan Bollinger, a spokesman for ICGI, argues that without “fully informed consent,” circumcisions are unethical, even for adult males. But no one is talking about duping men into the surgery. Rather, if the problem is simply a misunderstanding of necessary precautions and possible health benefits, then isn’t the solution more information and more options, not less?
In a press release from this week, Intact America scorches a straw man by claiming that the circumcision solution is just another desperate attempt to find a “silver bullet”.
But the speeches of Clinton and Gates – not to mention the many roundtables, conversations, research presentations, and blog posts of countless others – also highlighted major advances in a microbicidal gel that women apply before and after sex:
Gatesfoundation: microbicide trial: A turning point for women in #HIV prevention: http://nyti.ms/cufJ7B #AIDS2010
Everyone would love a “silver bullet”. In the meantime, some practical, implementable solutions might be the gold standard.
Graham Hough-Cornwell is an M.A. candidate in Middle East Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University and a Research Assistant for the Elliott School’s Culture in Global Affairs program.
Image: “Teaching scouts about HIV/AIDS 15,” from flickr user hdptcar, licensed with Creative Commons.
Possibly trillions of dollars worth of mineral deposits lie untouched beneath the surface in Afghanistan. A recent New York Times report generated a flurry of discussion about whether this subterranean wealth would help Afghanistan and its people or prove to be a “resource curse” that instead brings more violence.
One thing is certain, if the minerals are to be mined, there will have to be substantial infrastructure development (asphalted roads) and security for the mining companies. I can just see Halliburton written all over this, and taxpayer dollars supporting the US military to protect business interests.
A less gloomy and much more informed view than mine comes from long-term expert on Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, professor of cultural anthropology at Boston University.
Diana Putman, a USAID health specialist working with the Pentagon’s Africa Command, spoke up about a poorly conceived idea of the State Department in concert with the US military. She spoke up all the way to the top of the chain of command, to the four-star head of Africa Command, General William “Kip” Ward.
Putman gave the General a brief pitch about the need to substantially revise a plan for US military involvement in providing short-term surgical or psychological treatment to women victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to instead constructing or rehabilitating buildings for use by NGOs who are already working with victims and who have the necessary linguistic and cultural skills to facilitate their work. The General agreed immediately.
On Thursday, Putman was one of three people by the US State Department with a “constructive dissent award.”
The story in the Washington Post never mentions the fact that Putnam is a cultural anthropologist. I figured she must be. I checked. She is: BA, MA and PhD, all from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Thanks, Dr. Putnam, for speaking truth to generals.
Image: “The visit” from flickr user cyclopspr, licensed Creative Commons.
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