India's Commonwealth (shame) Games

It was a few weeks ago that I blogged about the various illegal labor practices, particularly child labor, in the construction activities in New Delhi--related to the upcoming Commonwealth Games in October. 

The BBC's online correspondent in India, Soutik Biswas, not only confirms those earlier reports, but adds a lot more details as well.  Biswas writes:

I have just finished reading a 116-page report by a committee appointed by the Delhi high court on the "condition of workers" engaged in construction work on Commonwealth Games sites in the Indian capital. The October Games, on which the government is spending more than $2bn, is the biggest international sporting event India has ever hosted. The report is shocking. It confirms Delhi's worst kept secret - how the shiny new stadia and other infrastructure hide the exploitative and unsafe conditions that 150,000 workers have to work under.

 So, in a vibrant, chaotic and unruly democracy that India is, one would expect such conditions to be huge political issues, right?  Ain't so, writes Biswas:

But what I find particularly galling is the silence of political parties on the state of workers. The local Hindu nationalist BJP has made an issue about the proposed serving of beef to guests at the Games. The Congress-led Delhi government is going to town with a planned "good manners" campaign, imploring the city's people to behave properly during the Games. The parties of the Left are silent. All this even as the government cleared nearly 700 million rupees in extra funds for the Games, taking its bloated budget to more than $2bn.

Even CNBC has reported on this!:

The main stadium is months overdue and remains a tangle of cranes, and residents are furious over new taxes to pay for the Games.

Meanwhile, dozens of construction workers have died and hundreds of thousands are laboring in unsafe conditions in the rush to prepare the city for the Games, a court-appointed investigation said.

... "For poor people there are no benefits from all this," said Ramesh Dubey, a sidewalk vendor angry over a proposed hike in cooking gas taxes. "This whole show is by rich people and will only benefit rich people."

Oh well .... I recall the days of the Asian Games in New Delhi, back in 1982 when I was an undergraduate student.  I boycotted watching any of the events on television because I was convinced that it was a colossal waste of resources in a poor country. 

The lefty in me is always concerned about public expenditures that are not beneficial to the poor.  Which is why even in America, a few years ago I wrote an op-ed that government is not responsible for entertaining the people and, therefore, there shouldn't be any taxpayer subsidies for sports stadia and the like.  If only I ruled the world!!!

Worse than the Swine Flu. Lots.

My niece asked me whether the Swine flu was really a huge issue. I told her something like this: It has the potential to become huge. However, it is gaining so much attention because of the potential in the rich countries. Otherwise, nobody would really care. Which is why malaria or other diseases that kill people by the thousands every day in poor countries barely register a blip in the global health radar.

Case in point: an outbreak of diarrhea has already killed more people in one Indian state than the Swine flu has killed in the entire country.

The deaths have been reported in several villages in Kalahandi district, Health Minister Prasanna Acharya said.

Local newspapers put the death toll at 38. Health officials say 237 people suffering from the disease have been admitted to hospitals.

Diarrhoea is a major killer in the world and is thought to be responsible for around 4% of all deaths.

Yet, all the attention is on Swine flu :-(

Big time casualties of the meltdown? The poor in poor countries

A few days ago, The Daily Beast ran an excerpt from a recent book by Mohammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning economist/microcredit guy from Bangladesh. In that, Yunus notes:

Millions of people around the world who did nothing wrong are suffering. And the worst effects, as usual, will be felt by the poor. As economies falter, as government budgets collapse, and as contributions to charities and NGOs dwindle, efforts to help the poor will diminish. With the slowing down of economies everywhere, the poor will lose their jobs and income from self-employment.

It has been disheartening to see many of the world’s poorest falling back toward poverty just when we thought the planet was ready for a big step forward. We had thought food shortages were a thing of the past, but now they are back – not due to any lack of productive capacity on the part of the world’s farmers, and certainly not due to lack of effort by the poor themselves, but largely because of forces that could have been averted—the financial crisis and the world’s failure to pay enough attention to the need to improve agricultural technology to increase yields. We have to focus our attention at the global level to tackle this great new challenge to the world’s poorest.

One might think that Yunus will be biased--after all, he has been a big time champion of the poor, microcredit for the poor ..... But, not so.
David Rothkopf notes in his Foreign Policy blog that the scariest news is:

the Institute for International Finance's estimate that net private sector capital flows into the emerging world will fall in 2009 to one fifth their 2007 levels. That's, right, an 80 percent reduction in private sector cash into a group of fragile countries for whom such cash is the peace-keeper, the hope-giver.

Eating locally to save the planet? Think again.

A follow-up to an earlier post about food-miles. Ron Bailey cites a study by economic geographer Pierre Desrochers and economic consultant Hiroko Shimizu, who challenge the notion that food miles are a good sustainability indicator. And, importantly:

the debate over food miles is a distraction from the real issues that confront global food production. For instance, rich country subsidies amounting to more than $300
billion per year are severely distorting global agricultural production and trade. If the subsidies were removed, far more agricultural goods would be produced in and imported from developing countries, helping lift millions of people out of poverty. They warn that the food miles campaign is "providing a new set of rhetorical tools to bolster protectionist interests that are fundamentally detrimental to most of humankind." Ultimately, Desrochers and Shimizu's analysis shows that "the concept of food miles is...a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator."

On the market "going south"

It turns out that there are lots of geography lessons, even in the reporting of the current economic crisis.

Over the last few days, stock markets all over the world have been on a losing trend and every other television reporter and commentator keeps referring to this as the market going “south.” And, without fail, I feel myself wanting to yell at the reporter to stop using “south” in this context.

My objection is not simply because “south” is one of the four cardinal directions along with east, west, and north. And my objection is not because the market indicators cannot move sideways—east or west—but can only go up or down, or remain unchanged.

I have trouble with the usage of “south” in the context of bad news because we keep reinforcing the notion, perhaps unintentionally, that “south” is bad and, therefore, “north” is good.

We don’t realize how much such connotations of north and south is ingrained in us until we begin to examine it. Pretty much every region in the world has its own version of the “northern superiority” over its southern neighbor.

Every once in a while I ask my freshman students whether there is any geographic pattern when it comes to the location of rich and advanced countries on a world map. Before long, the majority opinion is always that it is in the north that rich countries are located whereas all the poorer countries are in the south. When I push them for possible explanations, they can’t seem to resist the temptation that a northern location is just better.

After a few minutes of waiting for students to start questioning this framework, I present them with the first of my exhibits to challenge this assumption. When I ask them about Australia and New Zealand, I typically start seeing those light bulbs going on in them. They know that these countries way south of us are no economic basket-cases by any measure. We slowly then begin to reshape our assumptions about any innate virtues of the “north.”

And when I ask them where the richest and advanced countries of the day were located about a thousand or three thousand years ago, they begin to articulate an understanding that a northern location or a southern location does not necessarily make permanent a country’s economic fate. Being in the south is, therefore, no curse either. “Going south” then doesn’t carry the same connotations anymore.

Students get an opportunity to follow-up on this if ever they wander into my office and look up at the world map on the wall. It is a wonderful teaching and learning moment when I see in their eyes a little bit of confusion as they try to figure out why the map looks strange. It takes them only a few seconds to realize that it is an upside down map of the world—one that I purchased when we visited New Zealand.

Well, for all I know, maybe they leave the room feeling that they have just exited the Bizarro World of comics, where up is down, and left is right!

Perhaps it is the geographer in me that makes me write about this. Or, maybe because I grew up in a country that is located to the south of North America and Western Europe. In any case, the unfortunate aspect is that in characterizing misfortunes as “going south” we end up reinforcing an incorrect idea that somehow south is inferior.

I am not sure whether the television audience systematically, and strictly, treats “south” as a metaphor for a certain trend line and nothing else. (I hope I have not messed up with professional grammarians by referring to metaphors!)

Metaphors are powerful tools, particularly in rhetoric. Politicians use metaphors almost all the time because of the deep emotional response they can trigger. Some of the greatest orators, like Martin Luther King Jr. used metaphors that wonderfully blended together and helped convince the populace about the issues and ideas, and energized them into action. Most of us lesser mortals though tend to abuse metaphors.

So, while acknowledging that the economic indicators are “down”, here is to hoping that they will go “up” really soon and fast.