EZa1G - Entwicklungszusammenarbeit aus einem Guss

The details of the fusion and reform of Germany’s aid organizations GTZ, DED, InWent, and KfW are still discussed, though there’s a draft on the table already. The new organization is due to begin work in January 2011. A lot of people fear that the new organization will favour larger financial projects over small ones. There is also fear that German industry lobbyists will edge their way into development plans and influence BMZ (German Federal Ministry for Development Cooperation) agenda in developing countries. What role will development assistance then have, I wonder? Some people say it has already become an instrument of “soft power”?

Pace

Foreign troops are still stationed in Germany. Since WWII we have Americans, French and British. The Russians have all pulled out. Elvis Presley was stationed in Germany and serenaded to soldiers and Germans alike. I believe also James Blunt’s family lived in Germany.

The American military bases in Germany are said to be of strategic importance. In the movie “Taking Chance” you can see one such air-base, Ramstein. A lot of American military planes go through there. Apparently detained suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists were also flown around the world via Germany.

The problem for Germany is that these were unregistered flights. The American forces have until now also not disclosed details on the flights. As part of Bush’s “war on terror” most of these suspected terrorists were subsequently held without trial, indefinitely, and later tortured in secret prisons in Eastern Europe or Guantanamo. Germany does not support the torture of prisoners. But, indirectly, has given the Bush administration a hand in it.

I’ve only recently heard that foreign nuclear arms are also stationed in Germany, and, not safely at that. German politicians have no real influence over this question (neither does the German people) but NATO does. Germany does not have any nuclear arms of its own and is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

As a sad last news for this blog entry: Germany’s arms industry is thriving. 60 years after the end of WWII and only 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is the third largest arms exporter in the world after the US and Russia. Our defence budget is also much larger than I thought: in 2008, at $ 46.8 billion, we have the sixth largest defence budget in the world, just behind Russia.

How different

I have a bit of a sore throat this week and bought myself some Ricola. It tastes just the same as in Europe, as it was actually manufactured in Laufen, Switzerland. Some people insist that Coca-Cola tastes different in every country. Is it just the local water, or does the company really provide a different syrup formula for every country? Do Moroccans really want to drink different Cola from Indonesians, says who?

About the remorse of two men

Recently I read an article by Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, who had encountered a great white in the Bahamas (!) while diving for a shipwreck. These were his thoughts after the encounter:

“Back on the boat, when my pulse had dropped below 250 and my skin color had lost its necrotic gray, I began to wonder if the accepted facts about sharks were not facts at all, and I've been reappraising ever since. The process is ongoing and endless, and if I've been able to draw a single, solid conclusion, it is this: The more we know about sharks, the more we realize how much there still is to be learned.

Today there is a Peter Benchley Shark Conservation Award, and shark conservation is actually on the UN agenda, even if, as in a recent UN meeting, a US-backed proposal for shark conservation was defeated by Russia, China and Japan.

Yesterday I watched “The Cove” (a must-see film), which features Ric O’Barry, capturer and trainer of Flipper, and I thought that in a way these two men, Penchley and O’Barry, share a similar fate.

I say this because Penchley, author of Jaws, is probably responsible for our modern-day trauma of shark attacks. He is of course not responsible for the shark-fin industry which is the prime cause for shark populations’ decline. But he has helped to create a monster, a myth. Nobody cares about sharks, they aren’t cute or big-eyed. And that’s why sharks aren’t protected until now.

In turn, Ric O’Barry, as one of the first and once most sought after dolphin trainers in the world, started the anthropomorphic mania for dolphins. Obviously this mania went in the reverse direction than that for sharks but it was similar in size. He was among the first humans to interact with dolphins at that level, to teach them tricks, a pioneer you could say. But a remorseful one at that.

So these two men who are chiefly responsible for putting these animals onto TV and cinema screens, and if you like, are to be blamed for ingraining these animals so deeply in our western society's psyche - the inventors of Jaws and Flipper – are remorseful of what they have done.

Of course, our fear of sharks is latent and much older than Jaws, as is our admiration of dolphins much older than Flipper. Maybe our feelings about these animals go way back, back to the sailor accounts of being shipwrecked at sea and either attacked by sharks or saved by dolphins.

But we also know now that the many gruesome tales of large sea-monsters attacking ships are folklore. And we have erased all these monsters from our fear of swimming in the ocean. And yet the shark remains.

But that's not the point I want to pursue anyways. This blog entry is really about these two men.

O’Barry’s life took a radical turn when one of the female bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper (her real name was Cathy) died in his arms, in captivity. As O’Barry says in the movie, “The Cove”, "I spent ten years building that industry up, and I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down."

There is somehow a very very deep tragic irony to both these men’s lives. It is almost like O’Barry is working tirelessly for redemption now. Both of these men have tried to rectify the image they have helped create, the shark as a ferocious beast and the dolphin as a joyous, ever-happy animal.

Penchley writes: “When I wrote "Jaws" more than 20 years ago, we lived in a different age. Richard Nixon was President, there was no cable television, no such thing as a VCR, Steven Spielberg was an unknown wunderkind in his twenties, and our knowledge of sharks (science's and the general public's) was still in its infancy. My research for the book was thorough and good, for the time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions.”

To see O’Barry in action, go see the film “The Cove”. It is a fascinating though ghastly documentary about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, that O’Barry along with friends has worked to uncover and now caught, for the first time, on camera.

Software Piracy - when did it start?

I have just watched „Pirates of Silicon Valley“ and I am flabbergasted. We all steal ideas from each other. We have for ages and generations. I knew this. But that Bill Gates, formerly richest man in the world (a Mexican industrialist has just surpassed him), has built his entire empire on stolen ideas was new to me. Apparently, Bill Gates didn't come up with the early Microsoft codes. In fact, he went into an IBM meeting empty-handed and re-emerged a rich man. That was his big coup. He only promised IBM that he had the software they needed, then bought the codes from another software developer (the same day?) and made some tweaks and mods. He also stole (borrowed?) ideas from Apple, who seemed happy enough to share them with him, possibly because they had stolen the ideas from Xerox themselves. Why does everyone say he is the ideal son-in-law type? This man is the biggest poker-face in the history of the planet.

Cashew farmers and Fairtrade certification ambitions

We started this year with high hopes for launching a Fairtrade certification program for Cashew Nut farmers in the south. Fairtrade (FT) gears towards smallholders more than any other producer scheme, hence it was our first choice for the farmers. We had also read a lot of success stories about Fairtrade certification from around the world.

At this point, the smallholders in the south sell their "in-shell" cashews to middlemen, who transport them to a warehouse in Sekotong or to the port in Lembar, West-Lombok. Only a fraction of the cashews grown in Lombok are actually consumed here on the island. From Lembar-port, the cashews get shipped to larger processing centers in Surabaya or overseas such as India (where they are shelled, salted & roasted etc.). There is very little cashew processing industry left in Indonesia. India is the big regional player for cashew nuts, really.

In talking to potential buyers for FT cashews in Europe, North-America and Japan, it became clear to us that most FT importers/buyers like to see a double certification in both Fairtrade and organic standards. That is, if a farmer group goes for Fairtrade certification, they ought to probably also go for organic certification. (Fairtrade products are not automatically organic, though the regulation specifies that producers should gradually phase out use of chemical inputs.)

Fairtrade-traded products that are also organic will always receive a higher price than conventional FT products. So: conventional FT cashew kernels attain a price of US $ 3.30 per pound, while organic FT kernels will score US $ 3.50. These prices are FOB (freight on board), so once the shipping agent and exporter deduct their fees, the farmers will see only a portion of this FOB price. In any case, it is significantly more than they can get at the moment. Which is why the Fairtrade scheme is so popular with smallholders around the world: it actually guarantees fair prices above and beyond the meagre living producers can scratch from their harvests currently.

It turns out that the many "success stories" related to certification need to be read with a pinch of salt, however. The certification process is long and pretty expensive. That's acceptable: the standards shouldn't be lax and compliance strictly enforced. The problem is this: for cashew nuts, producers go through the whole certification process, essentially altering most of their production and organization to meet the standrads, and then they wait for a buyer. That's because demand for certified cashews globally is still too low to make certification profitable for all cashew farmers who sought certification in the last one or two years.

I have written up pretty much all of the buyers/importers of Fairtrade cashews on behalf of the farmer group, to gauge the interest for FT certified cashews from Lombok, Indonesia. There have been no positive responses so far. This current market situation is also reflected in reports from projects/farmers in Sulawesi (who were the first cashew farmers in the world to attain FT certification!) and Flores. That means that we cannot, at this point at least, recommend a certification scheme to the farmers.

This also means that it will be harder to motivate the farmers to revamp their producer organizations, which are institutionally weak and fragmented. For example, the farmer groups are made up of about one-third women but they don't really have a voice. As part of a Fairtrade cerification scheme, it would have been easier to promote the status of women within the group by, for example, writing out a gender policy. Similarly, the democratic process is not entirely transparent to us. For example, is there an annual General Assembly; are there elections for the governing board; does the group hold the leaders accountable? A Fairtrade scheme would have been a perfect "hook" to get the farmers to bear on institutional and technical changes. We were all really excited about the Fairtrade prospects. But for now we need to look around for alternatives. Maybe Fairtrade demand will grow in the next years and our farmers can join in as well.

Appreciating depreciation

It feels like the Euro is in free fall these past weeks since the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) announced fiscal troubles. Italy might be part of the group too. Conversely, the Indonesian Rp. is appreciating. Which is good news for anyone on Lombok who wants to buy BMWs. When I arrived here in October 2009, 1 Euro was at about Rp. 15000. Now it's down to Rp. 12,500. Of course that's still more than enough purchasing power for my fellow Europeans and me. And I guess if the Euro keeps falling to Rp. 10,000, the upside is it's an easier conversion rate for all of us.

Aarrrgh!

The humidity from the rainy season here did in one of my passport-sized external hard drives. It's officially marketed as 'passport'. It had a lot of valuable stuff from 2008 on it, including most of the files and documents from my stint in Ethiopia. All my pics are lost. It's come to this, that every backup drive needs its own backup. It thusly expired. Just like a passport.

A new scoop on cockroaches

One can smell a passing cockroach. This is official. You can even smell its trail. I didn't believe this at first, but it's true. I will even go as far and say that cockroaches are somehow embedded in our limbic system.

This puts the cockroach in a distinguished group of to-us-nasally-discernible animals with the skunk, and cats after fish dinner. And the fish themselves too. (Though I have heard that a healthy fresh fish doesn't smell like fish at all but more like ocean. This could be a ruse.)

You can smell when a cockroach has sat on your newspaper. When it lingers under the toilet seat (they do linger there, my Auntie knows). And if it has just scurried across your plate. I now know that I have eaten from countless such smelling plates. Which would explain the occasional bout of gastro-malaise. I may have also sat on aforementioned toilet seats, in houses or bars where they had European toilet seats. Indonesian traditional toilets have no seats, so no way cockroaches can dupe anyone here.

Why does insecticide spray kill cockroaches almost instantaneously? I am so intrigued by this question because these are the same creatures rumoured to outlive a nuclear war, if there was one. You'd wonder why they can't stand a bit of spray that, according to directions of use, doesn't even require the person handling it to wear a face mask? I find this puzzling.

Isaac Brock has a notorious penchant for insects, and „doin' the cockroach“ has a new meaning to it now. These are vulnerable animals. But I bet he doesn't know they smell.