Category Archives: News

Egypt is Cool and All, But

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Assessment of human conditions in a police state is a trying experience. You need a permit to blow your nose. Actually, you probably need three permits, because the ministry of health will want to ensure that it’s not due to swine flu, the ministry of environment will feign concern over emissions so as to secure a bribe, and the ministry-whose-name-no-one-can-remember needs to register you as someone liable to sneeze in the future. Also, you should probably forewarn the police. The National Police, the City Police and the Tourist Police. Just to be “sure.” Sure of what? No idea.

I can’t find a driver to take me to site, because unmarked vehicles are unsafe for foreign passengers, and taxis are registered by the state and terrified of being caught taking foreigners to non-tourist areas. This fear is not unfounded; my driver’s friend spent a month in stress positions for taking foreigners to photograph semi-urban poverty and pollution. I’d like to think I’d be subtler than your average poverty tourist (or “poorist” – it’s a word, just ask wikipedia), but that’s kind of beside the point.

Hi from Cairo. I came here from crisp, clean Geneva. The change was welcome at first — Geneva was full of fog, suit-wearing bureaucrats, and NGOs discussing Special Representative John Ruggie’s UN framework for Human Rights and Business. Cairo promised grit and heat, and it has delivered. For those who I’ve neglected, I’m here trying to determine whether the Mubarak government will make it impossible for Nomogaia to investigate the impacts that a new oil refinery (owned by Citadel Capital, the Arab world’s largest private equity group) will have on human rights.

I had not expected it would be such a struggle. Indonesia loves bureaucracy, but even there I could walk into the Ministry of Environment and ask questions. Walking into the Citadel Capital headquarters, the polite Chief Accountant’s first question was “Who gave you this address?” and his second was “How did you obtain information about us?” In no way am I at risk for poking around — to quote my driver, “One American’s life is worth a million Egyptians to our government,” but it wasn’t the Canadian/Australian/Norwegian reception we’ve had at other projects.

My best contact, provided my by my most awesomely connected colleague, assured me that she has no way of getting me into any ministries for several weeks. “These things take time,” she notes. It is now clear that there will be no quietly assessing the Egyptian Refining Company. All authorities will be notified.

Dole

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Much changed in El Muelle San Carlos since my last visit to the plantation, which was to be expected. My last trip was just before peak season, when hirings were up, wages were about to rise, and optimism abounded. High season ended in July, and the layoffs, which happen every year, have reached much farther this time. Dole has cut nearly 200 workers since last year’s high season, some of whom had been with the company over six years.

It’s not totally clear to me what’s going on. Part of it is streamlining the business and increasing efficiency, but workers were told not to worry about their jobs as long as they follow rules, which does not appear to be the reality. Workers allege that the company has fired (or pushed out) over half of the Asociacion Solidarista (a collective bargaining entity) leadership since April and one member of the permanent committee. Prior to this year, no such firings had ever occurred.

The story behind the firing is really messy. Turns out the treasurer of the Asociacion was also the HR guy for the company. He left a checkbook out, 7 checks were forged (in his name) and the money was never found. The details are still foggy, but from the start there’s a problem when the guy responsible for hiring/firing is also running the books for the “union”. Much of the workforce thinks he stole the money. The company hired a PI to look into it, but the findings haven’t been made public. I don’t know who stole the money, but among the dozens of workers I met, non thought the people who were fired took the money, and all thought the HR guy was a nightmare. His name came up in every interview and every meeting – never favorably. His predecessor was beloved (he quit to run his own farm).

From the department of good news: those documents on environmental impacts and monitoring were available at the government ministry (SETENA)

Monitoring is very limited, especially compared to what is seen in extractive industries. They don’t do sediment monitoring, all they look for is pesticides. This seems inadequate, as pineapples are themselves wildly acidic, and pineapple waste was responsible for at least one significant fish kill on the property we’re assessing.

Tilapia farmers, teachers and general residents living in neighboring communities have found Dole to be great at promising things and inconsistent in follow-through. One tilapia farmer’s fish were killed through seepage. He told the company, they agreed it was their fault, and they promised to replace the fish and repair the damage. As he tells it, a month later, nothing happened. Then he brought them the video of the fish all dying and floating to the surface… suddenly his lake was dredged and his fish stock replaced with a hefty, hefty check. The other fish farmer whose fish were killed didn’t take a video… they say that, three years later, they’ve still seen no cash from the company.

Dole doesn’t mean to be bad, but there is no strong sense of duty to surrounding communities. The HR guy is in charge of community relations (which says a lot). The roads go unrepaired during high season, the promises go unfulfilled until lawsuits are threatened… This project looks like a textbook representation of what UN Special Rapporteur on Business and Human Rights John Ruggie admonishes for letting small grievances turn into significant human rights campaigns.

Pineapples are still a nonissue in the US, but they’re a hot-button topic in Costa Rica. As soon as some savvy North American NGO discovers the issue and starts making recordings, these communities could be the people who will contribute to campaigns.

There is an interesting divide between the senior-most leadership and the slightly lower level management. Personnel from the head office have been receptive to human rights arguments, but a lot of the project-level management show indifference to public welfare. On the decimation of local education, on said, “there are always losers in progress.” Persuading the company that it has responsibility for the misery in San Jorge will be difficult – airtight logic will have to include the ways the government, too, fails these people.

Speaking of government failures – government assumed that Dole’s private security would look after towns, so they removed police. Now theft is reportedly on the rise because poor migrants watch houses, learn when people are at work, and rob them. The people of San Jorge and the surroundings say there have been 3-4 break-ins in the past 6 months. It’s a rough approximation, but it still suggests the problem is real.

The communities also blame pineapples for community deterioration, family deterioration, and kids running amok (ditching school, getting bad grades, collaborating with thieves, because both parents work and they’re unsupervised). I’m not persuaded that this is Dole’s fault, but the district education minister, the teacher, and the community leaders all are. Pineapple production has been, to some extent, equated with the Dole name, despite the fact that Dole is the most responsible producer in the area.

Stuff about the mine

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There are 67 of those buckets on the new dredge, which, despite being massive and new, is still producing less than the old dredge. This is a problem, because the company, the Sierra Leonean government, the EU, and the company owner have each poured millions into making this mine profitable by increasing production with a fancy new dredge, thus far to no avail. All the same, as it stands, SRL accounts for 65% of Sierra Leone’s economy (I have no idea how this figure could possibly be true), which says a great deal more about the economy than the company.

Production is low, courtesy of power outages and glitches in tacking new technology onto really old equipment. Theft is widespread — about $1million a year in diesel fuel alone, which is to say nothing of the generators that get stolen every month or two, or the motors pulled out of vehicles. The company hemorrhages cash. As mine managers describe it, for the amount of money SRL spends replacing stolen stuff, they could actually do pretty impressive community service work (as it stands, their “community service foundation” has about $200,000 in it). Instead, they triple their security guards’ salaries (to very little effect, they say) hoping to stem the thefts.

EU assessors are here monitoring the state of their 25 million euro loan to the company — they’re supposed to be determining what social projects should be funded by loan repayments, but they told me they’re not totally confident the mine will be able to start making those payments by June when they start to come due.

So SRL builds schools (and begs the government to send teachers) and hospitals (and crosses their fingers that government will send supplies) and pays salaries to local officials to keep the power structure content with the company. Nary a community leader sings the company’s praises, though everyone is gladder than glad that it’s back in operation. It’s a complex situation. The rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” are definitively not interesting around here. I asked. People value their right to education, security (an odd one worth explaining more), water, electricity, and health care. Lacking these things, and lacking confidence in the government to provide them, they see it as the company’s responsibility to provide. The company, meanwhile, figures that since they’re paying local government, central government, and performing odd jobs around town (building roads, providing sand, leveling ground for new houses, etc), they’re doing all they can. Maybe they are. But maybe they don’t need a chartered jet flying down here three times a week. At this point I’m in no position to judge.

A long one on Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

A long one on Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
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(My words and opinions. Not Nomogaia’s in any way, shape or form.)

Reinford is 31 and looks 24 – a surprise in Malawi, where most people look twice their age and everyone thinks I’m 18. His English is impeccable, since he spent 4 years in St. Louis for undergrad and another year in Australia for grad studies. He was raised in Karonga, loves his country, and is trying to shutter the Kayelekera mine, backed by all the force of European, Australian and American funding.

Rein works with an NGO (non-government organization) funded by Friends of the Earth, which operates globally, sponsoring small local nonprofits and then training them what issues to present to the press, how to do it, and what to do to make inroads in villages that might otherwise support or turn a blind eye to capital projects in their communities.

I’ve come across Friends of the Earth repeatedly. The first time was in 2006 in Indonesia, when FotE was supporting an anti-mining campaign claiming a company was causing methyl-mercury poisoning among the local population. The charges were bogus, and FotE ultimately backed down a bit, but not before spreading a global rumor that ultimately resulted in jailings, a multi-year lawsuit and misguided public skepticism still persists to this day (flatter me by asking for my Master’s Thesis on the topic).

What do you do with the rights groups that, in protecting communities from postcolonial oppression (and environmental degradation) actually create a postcolonial imposition of their own (forestalling the ‘right to development’)? FotE has pet causes (anti-gold mining, anti-nuclear, anti-logging, etc). To advance these, it sends personnel to remote locations where such projects exist, who tell communities that their rights are being violated before even asking whether people have any thoughts, feelings, aspirations or fears about the project in question. Then, often, the disgruntled people who surface are coached on activism – they’re told what issues to present as their main concerns (“my cows are falling ill ever since operations began – I can tell the rivers have become polluted” or whatever) and then they’re provided travel funds to tell their stories to broader audiences.

This is extremely effective and SO valuable when real problems exist. However, the organization does not have a strong research arm to validate all of the claims it makes. To FotE’s credit, they’ve actually started environmental monitoring on the Kayelekera project, and the baseline quality of the local rivers is pretty terrible (soaring e. Coli and fecal colyform, plus a wealth of metals and minerals that occur naturally in the geology around the Project), so this time around maybe they really WILL wait for environmental degradation before crying foul.

I don’t get that sense, though. I get the sense that a lawsuit is brewing, if not on environmental issues than on corruption charges. If not on corruption than on health issues – HIV would be an easy bet.

Don’t get me wrong – I am adamant that the company needs to take steps to safeguard the rights to a clean environment, right to health, right to housing, labor rights, etc. But the solution is not a campaign to shut down the project before it has begun, and FotE really wants to see this mine close up and go away.

The people all around the mine are THRILLED at its arrival. The north of Malawi is still referred to as “the dead north” by southerners. It has for so long been stigmatized as a place of nothingness that local communities are avidly defining themselves by the presence of this Project. Plus, towns that previously couldn’t imagine quality health care or electricity are on the verge of having both, plus a clean water supply and an enriched economy. Even the 5 relocated families were happy to have new land and a year’s worth of food, until FotE showed up and told them they were being shortchanged. Maybe they *are* being shortchanged. In 3 hours of searching the Lands Ministry, I couldn’t find a soul who knew what Malawi’s resettlement policy was, let alone who carried it out in Kayelekera.

On “Development”

On “Development”
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I had dinner last night with my hosts a couple of doctors that have been here over thirty years.

It’s a remarkable group of people that tend to assemble when expatriates throw dinner parties in the foreign countries they’ve made their shared home. A third-generation South African of Indian descent talked about being “black” during apartheid (which surprised me, because in Sierra Leone even if you’re black but American, you’re still “white”), and Elizabeth, the former head of pediatrics in Malawi, is the Indian-born offspring of British and American parents, who raised her largely in Congo (before it was DRC AND before it was Zaire… back when it was Belgian Congo). The host is Dutch but raised his family in a whole variety of developing countries.

Talking “development” with these people who have been on the ground as development theory has changed over the decades left me feeling a little … little. The theories change but the practices rarely do (with the exception of structural adjustment*), I’m told – money is thrown at “Africa” but never reaches the people to a meaningful extent. The way our host told it, my work is a throwback to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the theory was that globalization and business would save Africa.

I never paint my work that way – I just think that transnational businesses are often more efficient than most governments, and that by being beholden to shareholders and activists and the western public/press, they are a position to care about the wellbeing of people (and human rights) where their operations are located.

These people all work in a hospital where two-year-olds die daily. If the uranium mine up north improves human conditions for northerners, here in Blantyre that change will be invisible. People have joked with my host that if he really wants to see improvement in mental health care in Malawi he needs to run for the Malawian presidency in the May elections. Problems are so sweeping, vast and entrenched that on the ground (and in the hospital halls and on the village roads) it’s impossible to make a broad enough impact.

It pains me to think that my confidence in a socially responsible private sector might just be a pretty theory. I might get to see it become more than that with this Kayelekera uranium mine, though. More on that later.

*structural adjustment, oversimplified, was a Reagan-era development policy adopted by international financial institutions that theorized that low-income countries would only generate economic growth by balancing their budgets. To qualify for aid, countries had to reduce their debt. To reduce their debt, they eliminated social programs. That meant that road and electrical infrastructure, education, health care, policing, etc all fell by the wayside so that governments could get foreign aid… with which they could do /did nothing productive (from a social welfare standpoint).