Thanks to a friend of our local StopArmut group I read today’s interview of Mathias Binswanger in the Migros Magazin. As he wrote in the unfortunately nowadays dicredited Weltwoche or claimed in Arena, usually multinational development aid wouldn’t help anything. Such polemic statements make me raging so I wrote (a not much less polemical ;) letter to the magazine:

Guten Abend

Interessiert habe ich im heutigen Migros-Magazin das vierseitige Interview mit Mathias Binswanger zum Thema Entwicklungshilfe gelesen. Ich war jedoch sehr erstaunt, dass nach so vielen polemischen Äusserungen zur Wirkungslosigkeit öffentlicher Entwicklungshilfe keine Gegendarstellung beispielsweise von einem DEZA- oder NGO-Mitarbeiter präsentiert wurde. Aber vielleicht erwartet uns dies ja nächste Woche, zB von Peter Niggli der Alliance Sud! Nötig wäre es sehr, denn im aktuellen Interview sind erneut zahlreiche Irrtümer über multinationale Entwicklungshilfe verbreitet worden. Kurz drei Kommentare:

- Afrika wird immer wieder hinzugezogen um zu zeigen, dass in den letzten 30 Jahren viele öffentliche Entwicklungsmilliarden versandet sind. Vergessen geht dabei meist, dass es sich nur selten um altruistisch motivierte Hilfe gehandelt hat, sondern dass die Zahlungen meist geopolitische Ziele der Geberländer verfolgten. Dadurch konnten Diktaturen am Leben erhalten bleiben (Bspw Mobutu) und vom Überschwenken in den Kommunismus abgehalten werden. Und nicht wie im Text angedeutet hat Südkorea sehr wohl hohe Entwicklungsbeiträge erhalten; von den USA zwischen 1946 und 2000 rund 30 Mrd. Dollar! [1]

- Auf die Äusserung zu multinationaler Hilfe, die bspw im Kampf gegen Aids notwendig ist, geht Herr Binswanger verständlicherweise nicht ein. Wie sonst sollten dringend benötigte Grossprojekte wie auch der Infrastrukturausbau im afrikanischen Energiesektor finanziert werden? Logischerweise gibt bei solchen mutigen Projekten ein kleiner Staat wie die Schweiz etwas an Kontrolle ab. Aber das ist nicht anders als wenn der Bürger Steuern zahlt und darauf hofft, dass der Kanton dafür qualitativ hochstehende Bildung anbietet - beispielsweise über die Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, wo Herr Binswanger doziert.

- Daneben leidet das angeblich von einem Akademiker stammende Interview stark an subjektiven Meinungsäusserungen, die ein sehr einfaches Weltbild skizzieren. Einzelinitiativen ja weil personifizierbar und rasche Resultate, multilaterale Hilfe nein weil komplex und intransparent - so einfach funktioniert Entwicklungszusammenarbeit leider nicht. Zudem gehören sich solche pauschalisierende, unbelegte Aussagen wie “So wie die Entwicklungshilfe momentan betrieben wird, ist sie grösstenteils wirkungslos.” nicht für einen seriösen Wissenschaftler - auch wenn er sich sonst nicht mit Entwicklungsökonomie sondern mit Geld- und Glücksforschung auseinandersetzt.

Freundliche Grüsse,

Matthias Stürmer

[1] Quelle: Peter Niggli, Geschäftsleiter Alliance Sud, Einleitung “Leidet Afrika an zuviel Hilfe?”

Update 2007-05-23: The Migros Magazin actually printed most of this letter in its current issue! Unfortunately, they missed the part pointing out the importance of large-scaled development aid projects such as electrification, sanitation, road construction etc.

This and related questions are treated in the upcoming event of ChristNet and StopArmut 2015 on April 21st, 2007 in Bern. Samuel Ninck and I invited Peter Weidman of teartrade.ch to talk about Fairtrade, Karl Johannes Rechsteiner as director of the microfinance initiative Oikocredit explaining the concept of microcredits and Markus Meury, coordinator of StopArmut 2015, reporting on international trade rules. Special guest in the follow-up discussion round is EDU National Councillor Christian Waber representing the critical position on the panel. Well, an attractive Saturday afternoon is guaranted and if printing of my OpenOffice.org Draw flyer at printzessin.ch works out fine we’ll soon start inviting 5000 people ;)

Update April 23rd, 2007: All the presentations including MP3 recordings, many photos and summary of the event are now available on the StopArmut website.

This simple question was the start of the so called ‘banana women‘ in the 1970s, the start of the fairtrade movement in Switzerland. Yesterday, the last of these brave women, Ursula Brunner, co-organized a conference on fairtrade labels in Bern (documentation) and I was one of the about 300 attendees (newspaper article in “Der Bund”). Stimulus of the event were the emerging labelling efforts of multinationals - also called ‘greenwashing‘ in NGO terminology. Indeed, the numerous speakers during the day confirmed this allegation to a certain point. Especially the obvious dispute of labor union representatives from Costa Rica and a Chiquita spokesperson demonstrated that the company’s labelling effort with the Rainforest Alliance was not yet sufficient to satisfy the needs of the workers. For me, particularly this label seems highly doubtful due to the statements of the speakers and also because of its representative at the conference showing a quite unsensitive way on how to communicate with the labor force. Besides some insights I gained on the ‘label industry’ - whose two competing goals are credibility and efficiency as Prof. Guido Palazzo explained well - I realized the need of fairtrade going even more mass market as Martin Rohner of Max Havelaar envisioned.

With great disappointment regarding the quality of the argumentation I read two current articles, “Good food?” and “Voting with your trolley”, in the Economist. I really wonder what’s the point of the authors: Do they really want to tell us that ethical food is bad? Or do they rather want to give us a clean conscience if we don’t buy it? Although there are also several logical flaws in the critique on organic and local food, I concentrate on Fairtrade issues and wrote the following letter to the Economist:

Sir - Critically reviewing systems that circumvent free trade is fine, but yours on Fairtrade (“Good food?” and “Voting with your trolley”, December 9th) is too simplistic. Applying the standard economic argument that Fairtrade directly encourages overproduction assumes perfect market situation which in reality is never the case, especially not in coffee trade. In this $20 billion industry, Fairtrade certified coffee has a share of about 1 percent. However, six trade firms (Nestlé, Volcafe, Taloca, Intercafé, Decotrade and Ecom) control over 70% of the market volume (source: “Kaffeehandelsplatz Schweiz”, BILANZ #16, 2006) thus controlling much of the market mechanisms. And those are harsh in this particular industry: Highest world market price of the Arabica blend was 317 cent per pound in 1977, the lowest ranged at 56 cent in 2001. Today, the price remains highly volatile because of intense financial market enmeshment applying instruments such as hedge funds on coffee. Meanwhile, according to the report in BILANZ, the price of coffee in consuming countries does not correlate with the producing costs at all. While the world market price sank, the power of the traders rose and the sales price of coffee in retail increased - not exactly the prediction of free trade systems with perfect competition.
I believe your suggestion “Proper free trade would be by far the best way to help poor farmers.” is just wrong, since producers will forever be the weak ones when negotiating terms of trade with a multinational. As you pointed out correctly efficiency of help is always improvable. But buying Fairtrade is definitively better than doing nothing or in your case bashing on ethical food and laughing at people who conduct praiseworthy and pay a bit more to purchase Fairtrade products. Obviously, political action is necessary to improve the position of developing countries in world trade on a global level. Nevertheless, do the one and don’t stop the other - because they don’t harm each other.
Matthias Stuermer, Zurich, Switzerland

Update: I just called the Max Havelaar foundation (Switzerland), our national Fairtrade Labelling Organization. Spokesperson Regula Weber referred to their annual report where they deliberately explain what the farmers actually receive by producing Fairtrade certified goods - it’s definitively more than 10% as the Economist generally claims.

Last Friday I visited the for me revealing conference “Is Africa suffering from too much development aid?” of Alliance Sud in Bern. With 300 participants it was completely booked out since there is currently a heated discussion going on about efficiency of development cooperation and particularly the one in Africa. The article “Sehnsucht nach der Kolonialzeit” (strange, the text is instead of most of the Weltwoche articles available for free…) shows the populistic arguments of the critics, based on Easterly’s book oversimplifying the matter. The speech by Peter Niggli on the African blues describes for instance the historically complex background of the issue so the weakness of general critique on African development aid becomes obvious. And if someone still prefers fighting on the lower levels, have a look at last weeks Arena discussion on the exact same topic (also available as video stream).

The article doesn’t provide any breaking news on Ubuntu, but it shows that even traditional media as Reuters is now taking up the topic of Linux in developing countries.

After finally finishing the illustrations and layout of the annual report of AELL, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Evangelisches Lehrerseminar Lima, I played around with some PDF/PS tools this morning. Getting from Sebastian’s post on how to create a booklet to his source, I finally reached a great PDF/PS hacks page of Pro-Linux. There, just recently Michael Roessler postet a short bash script to create a A5 booklet from an A4 PDF which I then used to finally create this nice booklet, covered by the following nice picture ;)

BTW, if you’re braver than I and intend to write your own PDF/PS conversion scripts I suggest using PSUtils, for PostScript file manipulations like rearranging pages, PDFjam, a tool to paste several pages on one page or to rotate a PDF, or pdftk, a great way on how to merge, split, extract etc. PDF files and pages. So the only thing missing is now a GUI integration of these tools and scripts into Evince…

This weekend is full of interesting events on development cooperation: On Friday, I visited the DEZA annual conference, this year on “partnership”. Unfortunately time in the workshop didn’t allow asking the Nestlé representative why they don’t keep Max Havelaar labelled products yet… Then yesterday, there was the second StopArmut 2015 volunteer meeting where we discussed the coming-up activities. Also, we planned a media-attractive launch (together with parliamentary Heiner Studer) of Fairteilen on October 17th, the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Today there is a ChristNet event (film on asylum situation in Switzerland) which I’ll probably skip because of recreation need ;) And tomorrow, the local StopArmut team is meeting for the 4th time, planning its activities of October 15th.

Tanja Köppel from TearFund Switzerland just informed me that Swiss national television will show a short documentation of the StopArmut 2015 campaign in the Fenster zum Sonntag on September 23rd, 2006.
PS: Don’t forget to send some brainy statements on fair trade to participate in the Fairteilen contest of StopArmut.

Today we published a press release of the StopArmut 2015 campaign for the new fair trade promotion activity called “Fairteilen”. It starts with a contest finding the most creative slogans for fair trade demand cards like “Ich bin fairliebt!”. Have a try and win a CHF 200 check for shopping at Coop or a nice fair trade hammock from claro fair trade!