Oxfam Abandons Development, Goes for Corporate Lobbying

It is easy and sometimes even right to criticize NGOs, especially big, well funded ones, for spending a lot of money on dubious programmes, such as technical aid that may only benefit a handful of rich Western 'experts'. But when it turns out they are using their money to support one of the most destructive agricultural processes to date, genetically modified organisms (GMO), it's hard not to be very angry. Yet Oxfam America seems to have been nobbled by the biotechnology industry and its supporters, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Of course, Oxfam have pulled out the poverty and food security cards to make it look as if GMOs are just the solution they need. But production of GMOs requires industrial scale farming practices. Although these are found in developing countries, those involved are not poor farmers. Most farmers in developing countries are subsistence farmers. They cannot afford the sort of inputs required by GMO farming and where they have fallen for the lies and taken on GMOs, they have ended up in debt. In addition to the inputs being very expensive compared to non-GM inputs, yields at the subsistence level have not been higher, indeed, they have often been lower. So GMOs, despite claims to the contrary, do not scale down.

This is not to suggest that large scale GMO farming has been successful either. In the handful of countries where this has been practiced, the US, India, Australia, Canada, Argentina and a few others, yields may have increased for the first few years. But input costs have also risen, especially pesticides and fertilizer costs, and yields flatlined or decreased after that. US GMO farmers, especially, are finding out what it's like when superweeds take over, weeds that develop resistance to even huge applications of herbicide. And Indian farmers have found what it's like when pests develop resistance to the GMO industry's noxious sprays. Even Canada is realising what it's like to face blacklisting by many of the countries who have been buying their agricultural outputs because of contamination by an organism that has been banned there for years.

So what does Oxfam think they are doing, trying to trick the very people they are supposed to be helping? This may be related to funding they have received from Rockerfeller and Gates, who are wedded to the GMO industry till death do us part. Frankly, I think if Oxfam is willing to take funding from organisations that only have the interests of multinationals at heart, they should not be receiving public funding. They have, effectively, jumped ship. They should be treated accordingly. They should no more be considered to be independent or to be benefiting poor people in developing countries that they would be if they had decided to accept funding from the armaments industry. Of course, I don't know whether they already receive money from the armaments industry or not.

Farmers, especially those working small and medium sized farms in developing countries, need ecologically and economically sustainable farming practices. They certainly don't need expensive and highly damaging technologies that render the farmers slaves on land whose quality is fast diminishing. GMOs will increase food insecurity, dependency, poverty and low health. Ultimately, people will die as a result of embracing GMOs. And Oxfam, along with their friends in the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, will be responsible for the resulting poverty, death and destruction. The latter two were set up to wreak destruction, despite their stated ambitions. But I don't believe Oxfam was set up for this, I believe they have more recently been injudicious in their choice of funders. Perhaps there is time to rethink this and, if necessary, send back the blood money they have received. Alternatively, they can admit that they are no longer involved in development and concentrate on promoting and lobbying for the systematic destruction of whole societies, economies and ecosystems. And then they may as well accept money from the armaments industry, while they are at it. It could make the job quicker.

Incidentally, the experience of African countries so far with GM crops is not good. Millions have been spent over a long period in Kenya to produce a GM sweet potato but nothing has been delivered yet that can outperform conventionally bred versions. South Africa found that Monsanto had blundered somewhat by supplying them with 'free' genetically modified maize that didn't produce any grain. But the industry is still doing everything it can to force more GMOs on South African farmers. Attempts to introduce GM cotton in West Africa have met with the same problems as GM cotton everywhere and Monsanto has even admitted that it has failed in India. However, their solution to this problem is that farmers buy a new and more expensive version of the failed crop. I assume West African cotton growing countries will receive the same privilege.

None of the arguments that Monsanto and the rest of the GMO bunch use to defend the technology work. The evidence has always shown that conventional crops and farming practices are the only ones that work and that are sustainable. This is especially true for small farmers, those who are most likely to suffer from poverty, food security and environmental degradation problems. It is to be expected that Monsanto and other interested multinationals will lie, cheat and pay through the nose (also known as lobbying) to make us think otherwise. And why wouldn't they when they receive so much public money to do this. But we also have to be aware of the influence of the rich privately owned institutions, such as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, who are supporting GMO. And sadly, we have to add Oxfam into the equation, unless they suddenly remember who it is they are supposed to be working for.

Visiting With SAIPEH

Although I am only in Mumias on a short visit, I brought a couple of solar cookers with me, along with some black pots. I was hoping I would be asked to demonstrate the impressive, but very simple, trick of cooking food without any costly fuel. Sure enough, I was taken to SAIPEH's feeding centre, where volunteers feed 100 or more children who are orphans, in some way vulnerable or disabled. They get through a lot of fuel every day and the cost over the course of a year is in the region of $1000. This is a very sizable sum to an organisation like SAIPEH. Any way of reducing it or eliminating it would be very welcome.

There were only a few people when I got there as it was far too early for lunch. But we set up the cookers to prepare some rice, just to demonstrate. We also set up a cooker to demonstrate how you can pasteurize milk or water to make them safe to drink. Solar cookers heat things up to 80 or 85 degrees, which is hot enough to cook and to kill all bacteria. In order to show that the water had reached the required temperature, we used a WAPI (Water Purification Indicator). This is a plastic cylinder with a lump of wax inside which melts at a little over 80 degrees. The wax is at the top of the cylinder when you start, but as it melts, it slides to the bottom.

Both the demonstrations worked well, despite a lot of thin cloud. The sun was hot even though the cloud didn't shift the whole morning. The rice cooked faster than I expected, in about one and a half hours and the water was ready in about 45 minutes. People were appropriately impressed. Every time I demonstrate, I keep thinking, what if it doesn't work. But it always does, as long as it doesn't cloud over. But in addition to being impressed, I would like to think that people would adopt the technology. They always say they will, but people who have been demonstrating for a long time say most people never adopt it. So we have to wait. Given that SAIPEH pay for the fuel, perhaps they will make sure that the fuel bill is cut, substantially.

We also had the opportunity today to demonstrate cooking baskets, at least, to some extent. There were lots of banana trees growing nearby and there were deep, round baskets available. We weren't organised enough to cook anything in one, they were too small, but I think the point got across. These can really save a lot of fuel and you can use them whether it's night or day, sunny or raining. They can be made of easy to find materials, such as straw, hay, newspaper, leaves, old clothes, etc, along with a bit of sacking material if you don't have baskets of the right size.

A technology we didn't have the opportunity to demonstrate yet, we just described it, is that of fuel briquettes made from organic waste, such as kitchen waste. They are made of various kinds of waste, finely chopped and mixed so they bind into a cohesive lump. These can be dried or compressed with a simple press made of wood or metal. We haven't got a press yet but we are still hoping to get one made as a template. Then they can easily be produced by 'jua khali' workers (jua khali meaning 'hot sun', they work outside).

If you combine these three technologies and put the required amount of work in, and that's not a lot of work, you can reduce your fuel bills to almost zero. Perhaps you can eliminate them but I suspect there will always be unforeseen occasions when you will need wood and charcoal. But even a few hundred dollars a year could mean better food for existing children or more food for more children. Now that the idea is there, hopefully there will be those who want to use these intermediate technologies. I'll be checking up on them now.

SAIPEH support several hundred children and teenagers and this brings up many problems that children have when they are orphaned, disabled or in some way vulnerable. A meeting revealed that some girls are still unable to go to school when they are having their monthly periods. I felt so bad when I heard that there was even a girl who reported using leaves because she didn't have access to any alternative. But it is unthinkable that even some of them are unable to go to school because of something like this.

Some community development workers in Kenya and other African countries teach girls to make re-usable sanitary pads out of flannel or other appropriate materials that can be recovered from old clothes. They are easy to make, especially for SAIPEH, as they have a training and resource centre that teaches tailoring. Making sanitary pads would be a great thing for prospective tailors to start off with. You can start and finish several of them in a few hours. A perfect lesson plan! Again, I hope there are people willing to adopt this simple alternative to commercial disposable sanitary pads. They are very expensive and ultimately unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.

No matter how good these intermediate technologies are and no matter how appropriate they are, the main challenge is getting people to adopt them. Just being impressed is not enough. You may think that anything would be better than using leaves instead of proper sanitary pads, but these technologies have been promoted elsewhere and they haven't always taken off. For me, it's all very well doing the research and giving people the plans and diagrams, but I'd really like to crack the nut of why people seem unwilling to adopt things that seem so obviously good and how I can meet this challenge. If and when the scales drop from my eyes, I'll report back.

Rambling in Kenya

Yesterday, I made the fairly familiar journey from Nakuru in Rift Valley province to Mumias in Western Province. There are many beautiful sights on the way and the weather was good for travelling, sunny but not too hot. The roads for some of the journey have been improved, some are sill in the process of being improved and others are disintegrating and in a very dangerous condition.

Infrastructure conditions in Kenya have a lot to do with structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. These were first imposed in the early 1980s and they are still used, but they go under different names sometimes. Whereas, the road and other infrastructure improvements have a lot to do with Chinese development, which is carried out without the same level of conditionality.

Much of the fertile land in Nakuru is owned by a handful of very rich people, many of whom are members of political families, the Mois and the Kenyattas, for example. And like a lot of rich landowners, they don't feel the need to grow food crops or, at least, not food crops for Kenyans. You might think that wheat, sorghum and millet are food but the large scale producers, apparently, grow these crops to sell to breweries.

A few hours from Nakuru, the next big non-food product is tea, which dominates Kericho. Most of the industry is foreign owned or run and Kenyans make very little from this monoculture. It may be a world renowned product, but employees are paid very little, live in bad conditions and have few labour rights. That applies to those who have real jobs, rather than the far larger number, who have to take whatever bit of work that crops up, however rarely and however badly paid.

One of the big employers there is Unilever. You can read up on their level of corporate social responsibility on the Corporate Watch website. Suffice to say, they tick all the boxes that you'd expect of a multinational; monopolistic practices, unsustainable agriculture, exploiting cheap resources and labour, environmental degradation, appalling health conditions and a whole lot of other things. It's a long and depressing read.

Long before you reach Mumias you begin to see the sugar cane fields, sugar being another of Kenya's handful of monocultures that have played a big part in keeping Kenya poor for many decades. While sugar cane has long been grown in Mumias to be used as sugar, now there are plans to grow even more sugar cane destined for the biofuel market. Yet more land that could be used for food is being sacrificed for the blessed export market. The profits will go to a handful of rich people. Mumias Sugar Company does pay its employees well but the majority of people who work for the Sugar Company are not considered to be employees. They are casuals, contractors, outgrowers, etc. The majority of them make bugger all.

It probably sounds like I have a thoroughly miserable time travelling through Kenya, thinking about how much of the country is dedicated to exploitation. Well, there are still a lot of beautiful sights, if you are in a position to enjoy them. There's a good reason why tourists come to places like Kenya and even the trip to Kakamega Rainforest, Mount Elgon and Lake Turkana can be a great way of seeing the country. But even the tourist industry is another case in point; very few people make most of the money. The majority eke out a living somehow, but much of the tourist revenue doesn't even stay in the country.

Such conditions in developing countries may be, to some extent, influenced by their own governments. There are, indeed, many corrupt politicians and other parties and they have made themselves very rich. But governments, multinationals and other parties in rich countries have also made themselves rich by grabbing much of the wealth to be made in developing countries. And institutions like the IMF and the World Bank (and the World Trade Organisation) are simply some of the tools by which the rich and powerful extract huge amounts of wealth from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.

Poverty and underdevelopment are not remote phenomena, far from Western style homes and living conditions. The forces that create and exacerbate poverty also bring to those living in comfortable conditions many of the cheap products that make their lifestyle possible. Tea, chocolate, coffee and other things that come, primarily, from developing countries, are only affordable because of policies created by undemocratic institutions (who, ironically, constantly talk about improving democracy in developing countries). Even Ipods, Iphones and Macs, made by a company that likes to boast about how responsible they are, depend on (high value) materials extracted cheaply from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Much of Western democracy itself, and much Western wealth, depend on the terrible conditions that are created and maintained by undemocratic international financial institutions, multinationals and powerful governments in developing countres. It doesn't seem possible for every country in the world to end up with the same kind of democracy enjoyed by a handful of the world's people. I don't want to argue that democracy is impossible or that it is wrong. Perhaps, as Amartya Sen has argued, there is not enough democracy. Perhaps it is not widely enough distributed.

But if Sen is right and there were more democracy in the world, I think it would look a lot different. The small number of countries that have enough, too much in fact, use more resources per head of population than the world can provide. The level of choice that some people enjoy, the range of goods and services, necessary and unnecessary, the opportunities to overconsume with impunity, could not be offered to all peoples, equally. But I haven't gone deeply enough into political philosophy yet to figure out what sort of democracy would be sustainable democracy. Perhaps I'm just rambling.

I'm in Mumias to visit a very fine NGO called SAIPEH (Support Activities in Poverty Eradication and Health). Like the community based organisation I work for, Ribbon of Hope, Nakuru, they work with HIV positive people and their families, people suffering from hardship, orphans and vulnerable children. (Except that SAIPEH has been going for about 14 years, Ribbon of Hope is still small and young, not much over a year old.) Anyhow, they run all kinds of income generation schemes, such as growing food crops and livestock, teaching people trades, such as tailoring and computing and various other initiatives.

I'm hoping that SAIPEH will be interested in schemes that reduce spending too, such as solar cookers, cooking baskets and fuel briquettes made from organic waste materials. For lack of a convincing political philosophy, I'll stick to a more Aristotelian form of home economics in the hope that, although people will not end up rich, they may end up with a bit more cash than they had before. After all, for Aristotle, all economics was home economics.

Food Security Means Non-GM Food

Not content with contaminating their own country with genetically modified organisms (GMO), American GMO patent holders are busy getting politicians and other powerful people to help them in their quest to contaminate whole continents, such as Africa. African countries haven't proved to be the pushover that these GMO multinationals would like, but there are powerful people willing to give them a helping hand, such as Bills Clinton and Gates.

Despite spewing out the mantras about free markets and lowering barriers to trade, patenting is the ultimate form of protectionism. Owners of American GMO patents don't even need to grow their contaminants in America to reap vast profits. They can simply palm them off on poor farmers in far away developing countries, for whom GMOs are entirely inappropriate, and rake in the cash royalties.

The two Bills are supporting what is known as the Global Food Security Bill. Despite the name, this bill aims to foist GMOs on people in developing countries by dressing them up as aid. The idea is not a new one; public money is used to open up new markets for these thugs and they pocket the profits. Only the very rich and powerful will benefit from all this. But isn't that what aid is for?

For many years now, millions of dollars of 'aid' money has gone into developing a genetically modified sweet potato in Kenya. Strings have also been pulled to get some laws adjusted so that such crops can be commercialized. The problem is, this potato hasn't really taken off. Local varieties have performed far better in trials. To add insult to injury, breeders in Uganda have developed a virus resistant sweet potato using traditional methods while working on a shoestring.

GMOs of any kind would be a disaster for Kenya and for any other country. Just look at the problems the US, Canada, India, Argentina and Australia are having with their contaminants. But the organisms are particularly dangerous for developing countries. The last thing small farmers need is crops that cost a lot to grow (GM seeds are far more expensive than conventional ones), that develop serious yield and pest problems and that systematically destroy the ecosystem. But that pretty much sums up GMOs.

Anyone interested in reducing hunger should encourage sustainable agricultural practices that are appropriate for small farmers, because most farmers in developing countries are smallholders. They should steer clear of expensive and inappropriate technologies, such as GMOs. These were developed for rich, large scale farms, although they don't even seem to be benefiting them. For every advantage claimed for GMOs so far, conventional breeding practices have surpassed those claims. GMOs are not just unnecessary, they are highly undesirable.

Malawi Needs Good HIV Research, Not Bad HIV Laws

Malawi has this cunning plan to 'outlaw HIV transmission' by making it a crime to 'knowingly' transmit HIV. A spokesperson for the ministry involved said "The underlying factor is that if anybody knowingly infects somebody...that means he commits an offence." I haven't been able to find a copy of the bill but apparently it means that if a HIV positive sex worker fails to let partners or clients know their status, they will be liable to prosecution.

I wonder if their partners or clients will also be liable to prosecution for failing to reveal their status. After all, people availing of the services provided by sex workers should be equally aware of the danger of transmitting and of being infected with HIV, along with various other sexually transmitted infections (STI). The spokesperson was unable to say what would happen if both parties were HIV positive and referred to the bill as a challenge. He also said what they are doing is educating the populace. I assume he was trying to make a joke, however inappropriate.

I would also like to know where the law would stand with regard to non-sexual transmission of HIV. For example, where health services use shared needles, syringes or medicine vials or engage in other potentially hazardous practices, would they be liable to prosecution? Supposing they failed to take precautions specified under normal occupational procedures, how would the law stand? Could a HIV positive mother be accused of criminally infecting her child, either in the womb, during birth or through breastfeeding? Would a HIV positive intravenous drug user (IDU) be liable by sharing injecting equipment?

If you accept the received view of HIV transmission and believe that 75% of it is transmitted through heterosexual sex and only a very minor proportion through unsafe medical procedures, you may not worry about medical transmission (though this doesn't answer the questions about IDUs or transmission by mothers to their children). But if doubt were cast on that received view, if medical transmission were more common than previously supposed (admitted?), or if it were even more common than heterosexual transmission, you might consider the question more important, especially if you were a health professional.

The trouble with medical transmission of HIV is that it has received very little research. Figures you hear bandied about are mostly based on assumptions which should never have been allowed to stand untested, as they have been, for several decades. But among the few bodies of data that have been collected, medical transmission has been found to be a risk in almost all of them. This doesn't mean that medical transmission has been demonstrated, just that those receiving injections have a higher risk of subsequently being found to be HIV positive. Notable also is the fact that some of this research goes back to the mid 1980s.

Data from Malawi is the most shocking. 54% of HIV infections are found among those who have received injections in clinical settings. Other countries report lower percentages but the average is 21% and the mean is 19%. For me, the worst aspect of this is that none of these pieces of research are national in scale and only a handful of countries are involved (DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Malawi).

The Malawian spokesperson is right in saying that there no straightforward answers to questions that arise about this proposed bill, but not for the reasons he thinks. If medical transmission of HIV is higher than has been previously assumed, it would be more worthwhile, indeed, more straightforward, to investigate this and provide some remedies. That would certainly be more feasible than trying to create laws of dubious ethical standing to reduce HIV transmission.

On the whole, it would be a good thing if HIV was less likely to be transmitted sexually because it is difficult to influence the sexual behaviour of whole populations and efforts so far have failed. In contrast, it should be much easier to influence the practices of existing health personnel, increase the number of trained personnel, increase the resources available to them and increase access to health services. And improving health services will have benefits that far exceed those to HIV alone. As to how providers of medical services can regain the trust they will have lost, that will be no easy matter. But I don't think anyone would opt for continuing to transmit HIV through medical procedures, if this is actually happening.

The admission that medical transmission of HIV could be higher than previously thought, and even that sexual transmission could be lower, may be a hard one to make. Of course, it may not even be true that medical transmission is higher and sexual transmission is lower. But now that the possibility has been raised, we can not continue to fail to research this vital area of HIV knowledge. Let us stop lying about what we don't yet know.

The Biggest 'Omission' in Medical History?

Sometimes you come across a theory that can explain so much that you wonder why you have been flailing around hopelessly for so long. One time I was looking around one of those electronics shops that you find in every terminal in London's airports. I was marvelling at the things that can be made and even purchased at fairly reasonable prices. Because I was studying development at the time, I was trying to think why the sort of ingenuity that that goes into these products, which were hardly vital to humanity, didn't go into development. The proto-theory I came up with was that some people just don't matter.

I was horrified that this thought could go through my mind just then, because it is a value judgement, not a scientifically testable theory. Surely it has no place in development theory, especially in the specific area of HIV research, a field peopled by some of the most brilliant scientific minds alive? But the thought never left my mind because it seemed to explain so many things. How else could you explain the way people in rich countries treat people in poor countries? The more I studied, the more I realised that some people believe that (or behave as if) other people don't matter, either because they are far away, they are foreign, they are poor, they are sick and needy or are just not worth considering.

While studying HIV, I was unconvinced that the entire explanation for the rate of HIV transmission, in some countries only, could be explained purely by differences in sexual behaviour. I was equally unconvinced that so called HIV prevention programmes could possibly have any influence on sexual behaviour. And when countries boasted about how successful they were in reducing HIV transmission as a result of these prevention programmes, I thought they were unclear about why HIV prevalence had dropped and didn't really care why, they just used the circumstance for publicity.

I had to limit my study to make it manageable and did so by concentrating on heterosexual transmission of the virus, since it is the received view that this is the main mode of transmission in countries with a generalised epidemic, such as Kenya. And it turns out that that is one highly dangerous received view, for many reasons. Heterosexual transmission of HIV is definitely one mode of transmission, but the extent to which it drives generalised epidemics is completely unclear, and it always has been.

So my objection to the main players in the HIV industry is this: why has so much money and effort gone into programmes that assume the precedence of heterosexual transmission when this is just an assumption? The whole idea that there are some people who have more sex than others, or more sexual partners, or who are more likely to engage in unsafe sex, is a value judgement. But it is the value judgement that has launched a thousand careers for politicians, religious leaders, social and religious leaders, professionals of all kinds and who knows what else. It is a value judgement that drives global HIV prevention policy and spending.

There are many warning signs that heterosexual transmission of HIV does not explain extremely high rates of transmission in some countries. No credible correlation has ever been found between rates of transmission and levels of the kind of sexual behaviour that would be required to drive the sort of epidemics found in Kenya, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland and anywhere else. There are so many contradictions and non-correlations that many professionals in the HIV industry must have been asleep since some time in the 1980s, because there were obvious problems with the sexual behaviour paradigm even then.

Even back in the 1980s, not long after HIV was identified as the virus that caused AIDS, medical transmission was recognised as one of the possible modes of transmission. Small amounts of research went into establishing the extent of unsafe medical practices and the results suggested that these practices could transmit HIV to many people. But little further research was carried out. WHO, various UN agencies, leaders of all descriptions, professionals of all descriptions, various globally represented organisations, institutions, universities and others flew the flag for heterosexual transmission of HIV in developing countries (though not in developed countries). There were few exceptions and they were considered to be denialists or trouble makers. There are still few exceptions and they are still considered to be denialists or trouble makers.

Well, maybe medical transmission of HIV is not very high, maybe it is lower than heterosexual transmission. Maybe all the fuss is about nothing and maybe I'm just one more person poking his nose in where it doesn't belong. But that is the point: I want to know why medical transmission of HIV has not been properly investigated, why it is still dismissed as being almost non-existent. The recently published (though based on out of date data) Modes of Transmission Survey for Kenya suggests that medical transmission accounts for 0.6% of all transmission, based on an assumption that seems to have been pulled out of thin air. They also note a finding that puts the rate at 2%, over three times higher. But this is still dwarfed by most of the other modes of transmission, especially heterosexual transmission.

But those who are still being branded as mavericks for questioning the received view point to many bodies of data that have managed to investigate medical transmission rates of HIV. Those bodies of data show that medical transmission is very significant, perhaps even more significant than any other mode of transmission, including heterosexual transmission. All they are asking is that these results be taken seriously and subjected to rigorous testing. If medical transmission of HIV even stands at 5%, this would still account for millions of people currently living with HIV and hundreds of thousands of people who have died of HIV.

One of the most heartrending things about people dying of HIV, as opposed to other diseases, is that they are, because of the unexamined and long held value judgements of so many 'brilliant minds', vilified, ridiculed, shunned, persecuted, sneered at and humiliated just when they are in most need of sympathy, love and basic humanity. If it is even remotely possible that we as people are guilty of such terrible injustice to fellow human beings, surely that is in urgent need of investigation? Far from dying because they have engaged in what may or may not be risky sexual activity, people may be dying because they have followed the advice of well educated professionals.

It's almost unthinkable that much, or even any, recent cases of HIV have been transmitted by the very professionals that are supposed to be preventing and treating HIV. But it is even more unthinkable that we could suspect such a thing is happening and do nothing about it. Maybe there is a danger that people will stop going to health professionals and stop seeking medical treatment, even vital vaccinations and life saving treatment, because of a complete lack of confidence in the profession. But that is something the profession will have to deal with because they certainly don't deserve any confidence or respect until they have fulfilled obligations that have so long been outstanding. In fact, in some countries, going to the doctor may curently be a health hazard, carrying risks of infection with HIV and many other blood borne diseases.

In the field of HIV, nothing is more important right now than establishing the extent of HIV transmission through medical treatment.

European Protectionist Agreements

Recently, I expressed a sceptical view of the EU's proposed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with African countries. I suggested that while the EU pretends such agreements are for the benefit of Africans, this is just a sham and that they are unashamedly beneficial to rich countries and detrimental to the development of poorer countries. The former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, is in agreement with me, warning that EPAs are a form of neocolonialism. The EU have been quick, but unconvincing, in their denial of any underhand intentions.

Their response is unconvincing because they are effectively just offering more of the same. African countries will produce low value goods and raw materials, which the EU will buy for as little as possible. In return, the EU will sell African countries high value products that have been produced cheaply, in part, because of the low raw material costs. Sometimes, these high value goods will even be produced using badly paid Africans, which will further increase the profits for the EU. The EU assures African countries that they will be allowed to phase out some tariffs more slowly than others. But ultimately, the EPAs need to obey the strictures of the WTO (World Trade Organisation), where 'world' means 'rich countries, especially the US'.

While the EU is pumping out the woolly rhetoric about African countries removing barriers, they are piling up the barriers to make it more difficult for African products to reach the EU markets. It's the time honoured process of protecting their markets while accusing weaker economies of protecting theirs, a process particularly relished by the US and UK when it suits them, only to be replaced with a sanctimonious plea for free trade when the conditions are right.

Incidentally, a piece of particularly woolly rhetoric is the 'Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures', which you may need to read several times only to remain totally confused. The EU can insist on certain standards for food coming into the region that make exporting by African countries to the EU too expensive. According to these measures, that is not what is supposed to happen, but it effectively means that most African countries can't export to the EU. And the EU supports those exporting goods to African countries by methods that would be considered to be subsidies if they were implemented by Africans.

Even the private sector in Africa is suspicious of EPAs and they are the people who may be expected to have most interest in them. So if the private sector and other influential people are not about to be hoodwinked yet again by the protectionist West, perhaps there is hope that African countries will have some influence on other trade issues that have, so far, kept most of them underdeveloped.