Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.

In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.

His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.

The fallout from those rows continued yesterday when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came under new pressure to step down after an independent review of the panel's work called for tighter term limits for its senior executives and greater transparency in its workings. The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming, provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel peace prize with former the US vice-president Al Gore. The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC's processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of world science bodies.

The IAC said the IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess.

Although Pachauri once compared Lomborg to Hitler, he has now given an unlikely endorsement to the new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. In a quote for the launch, Pachauri said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."

Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."

But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".

The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other "solutions" including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.

"If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?" was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes - of which Lomborg has long been critical - were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.

Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.

Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause "really bad stuff" to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an "obligation to at least look at it".

He added: "This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."

Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today's Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: "If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money."

• This article was amended on 31st August 2010 to remove an accidental duplication of the quote from Rajendra Pachauri.

Source - Guardian (UK)

How can we increase supply of capital to the third sector?

John Kingston

John Kingston looks at the role the Big Society Bank and other lenders can play

There are three types of capital that community groups, charities and social enterprises commonly need to meet three broad funding scenarios.

The first is capital to buy a building or another tangible asset. The second is working capital to assist cash flow, such as when a grant is paid in arrears and there is insufficient cash to cover wages before the grant is received. The third is risk capital, used when a charity has an ambitious growth plan that is likely to diversify and increase its income.

In the first situation, charities can usually get the money with a mortgage from a high-street bank. But in the second and third cases, charities are often unable to offer security, so are unlikely to receive finance from mainstream lenders; other sources need to be found.

Several organisations that have started to provide this sort of capital attended a round-table meeting held by Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, to talk about how this supply could be expanded.

One source of capital will be the Big Society Bank, intended as a wholesaler to front-line retail suppliers. The bank will be set up to build a long-term supply of capital for community groups, charities and social enterprises. It will do this by stimulating existing and new suppliers so that organisations' capital needs can be met.

Where else might this long-term supply come from? Commercial capital is one potential source - banks and other investors are more likely to lend to charities than before. But this can be only part of the story, otherwise social investment will focus entirely on financial return at the expense of social impact.

Another, tougher source to access is philanthropic investment, which will focus on social impact first and financial return second. Efforts should be directed not at cannibalising existing donations to the sector, but at increasing the total available funds.

In this latter field, some pioneers are already doing encouraging work, such as the 9,000 investors in Shared Interest - an ethical investment fund for the fair trade movement - the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation's Finance Fund and several community share issues, such as the successful project to build a wind turbine in Hockerton in Nottinghamshire.

The Office for Civil Society and the social investment movement must ramp up these varieties of capital supply over the next five years. But supply alone is not enough. To develop this new form of capital for the sector, we also need confident and informed demand from community groups, charities and social enterprises.

John Kingston is director of CAF Venturesome

Source - Third Sector

Transparency in Global Giving: See Where the Good Goes

Peggy Conlon

Global disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami are moments in time when Americans respond immediately, emotionally and generously. But fundraising to end global poverty over the decades has encountered many hurdles.

Global NGOs working to end poverty and disease have learned some important marketing lessons over the past few years. They now create an emotional connection by focusing on saving the life of one child rather than the millions of children in need. They have also learned how much more effective it is to use images of thriving children rather than ones with swollen bellies. The 21st century brand for ending poverty is personal, hopeful and empowering.

But there's one obstacle that is still difficult to overcome. That's answering the question, "Where is my money going?" Whether it's due to the perception of inefficiency or corruption, people worry that the money they contribute to solve poverty and disease in developing countries is not spent wisely.

The solution -complete transparency--and providing an answer to where the money goes can be quite compelling.

When the Ad Council engaged BBDO as the pro bono agency to develop a campaign addressing infant and child mortality on behalf of Save the Children, we knew not to focus solely on the nine million children under the age of five that die each year from preventable causes--as shocking as that is.

BBDO recognized the power of featuring the individual that delivers health care to mothers and infants in remote villages--the community health care worker. These men and women travel on foot from village to village dispensing health care where no medical facilities exist. The insight is that by helping fund the efforts of a health care worker, you are only one person away from the infants who can be saved.

The brilliance of the campaign BBDO created is that it explains where your money is going in an emotional and engaging way, inviting people to "see where the good goes." Beautiful film in television and online introduces people to these health care workers and tells the story of how they administer health care in remote villages. The messages that appear in donated media encourage people to visit www.goodgoes.org where they can be educated about the issue and learn how to get involved.

On the site, each health care worker has a blog and a video profiling them and the life-saving work they do. They tell their story--all the way from places like Bangladesh--and they become very real, close and inspiring. There are also videos showing the child survival tools that a health care worker uses, such as immunizations, offering even further transparency behind what exactly you are providing with your support.

Tackling global poverty and disease in the 21st Century is no longer being left to governments. Individuals know they have to play a role. As people demand accountability and transparency from organizations asking for their support, success lies in giving witness to your work on the ground. Thanks to programs like "good goes," saving children half a world away has a name and a face. And as one of the PSAs asks, "How beautiful is that?"

Source - Huffington Post

Brazil has revolutionised its own farms. Can it do the same for others?

Aug 26th 2010 | CREMAQ, PIAUÍ

In a remote corner of Bahia state, in north-eastern Brazil, a vast new farm is springing out of the dry bush. Thirty years ago eucalyptus and pine were planted in this part of the cerrado (Brazil’s savannah). Native shrubs later reclaimed some of it. Now every field tells the story of a transformation. Some have been cut to a litter of tree stumps and scrub; on others, charcoal-makers have moved in to reduce the rootballs to fuel; next, other fields have been levelled and prepared with lime and fertiliser; and some have already been turned into white oceans of cotton. Next season this farm at Jatobá will plant and harvest cotton, soyabeans and maize on 24,000 hectares, 200 times the size of an average farm in Iowa. It will transform a poverty-stricken part of Brazil’s backlands.

Three hundred miles north, in the state of Piauí, the transformation is already complete. Three years ago the Cremaq farm was a failed experiment in growing cashews. Its barns were falling down and the scrub was reasserting its grip. Now the farm—which, like Jatobá, is owned by BrasilAgro, a company that buys and modernises neglected fields—uses radio transmitters to keep track of the weather; runs SAP software; employs 300 people under a gaúcho from southern Brazil; has 200km (124 miles) of new roads criss-crossing the fields; and, at harvest time, resounds to the thunder of lorries which, day and night, carry maize and soya to distant ports. That all this is happening in Piauí—the Timbuktu of Brazil, a remote, somewhat lawless area where the nearest health clinic is half a day’s journey away and most people live off state welfare payments—is nothing short of miraculous.

These two farms on the frontier of Brazilian farming are microcosms of a national change with global implications. In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets (see chart 1). It is the first country to have caught up with the traditional “big five” grain exporters (America, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union). It is also the first tropical food-giant; the big five are all temperate producers.

The increase in Brazil’s farm production has been stunning. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais ($23 billion) to 108 billion reais, or 365%. Brazil increased its beef exports tenfold in a decade, overtaking Australia as the world’s largest exporter. It has the world’s largest cattle herd after India’s. It is also the world’s largest exporter of poultry, sugar cane and ethanol (see chart 2). Since 1990 its soyabean output has risen from barely 15m tonnes to over 60m. Brazil accounts for about a third of world soyabean exports, second only to America. In 1994 Brazil’s soyabean exports were one-seventh of America’s; now they are six-sevenths. Moreover, Brazil supplies a quarter of the world’s soyabean trade on just 6% of the country’s arable land.

No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union. And Brazil has done it without deforesting the Amazon (though that has happened for other reasons). The great expansion of farmland has taken place 1,000km from the jungle.

How did the country manage this astonishing transformation? The answer to that matters not only to Brazil but also to the rest of the world.

An attractive Brazilian model

Between now and 2050 the world’s population will rise from 7 billion to 9 billion. Its income is likely to rise by more than that and the total urban population will roughly double, changing diets as well as overall demand because city dwellers tend to eat more meat. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reckons grain output will have to rise by around half but meat output will have to double by 2050. This will be hard to achieve because, in the past decade, the growth in agricultural yields has stalled and water has become a greater constraint. By one estimate, only 40% of the increase in world grain output now comes from rises in yields and 60% comes from taking more land under cultivation. In the 1960s just a quarter came from more land and three-quarters came from higher yields.

So if you were asked to describe the sort of food producer that will matter most in the next 40 years, you would probably say something like this: one that has boosted output a lot and looks capable of continuing to do so; one with land and water in reserve; one able to sustain a large cattle herd (it does not necessarily have to be efficient, but capable of improvement); one that is productive without massive state subsidies; and maybe one with lots of savannah, since the biggest single agricultural failure in the world during past decades has been tropical Africa, and anything that might help Africans grow more food would be especially valuable. In other words, you would describe Brazil.

Brazil has more spare farmland than any other country (see chart 3). The FAO puts its total potential arable land at over 400m hectares; only 50m is being used. Brazilian official figures put the available land somewhat lower, at 300m hectares. Either way, it is a vast amount. On the FAO’s figures, Brazil has as much spare farmland as the next two countries together (Russia and America). It is often accused of levelling the rainforest to create its farms, but hardly any of this new land lies in Amazonia; most is cerrado.

Brazil also has more water. According to the UN’s World Water Assessment Report of 2009, Brazil has more than 8,000 billion cubic kilometres of renewable water each year, easily more than any other country. Brazil alone (population: 190m) has as much renewable water as the whole of Asia (population: 4 billion). And again, this is not mainly because of the Amazon. Piauí is one of the country’s driest areas but still gets a third more water than America’s corn belt.

Of course, having spare water and spare land is not much good if they are in different places (a problem in much of Africa). But according to BrasilAgro, Brazil has almost as much farmland with more than 975 millimetres of rain each year as the whole of Africa and more than a quarter of all such land in the world.

Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the amount of land under cultivation by a third, mostly in the cerrado. That is quite different from other big farm producers, whose amount of land under the plough has either been flat or (in Europe) falling. And it has increased production by ten times that amount. But the availability of farmland is in fact only a secondary reason for the extraordinary growth in Brazilian agriculture. If you want the primary reason in three words, they are Embrapa, Embrapa, Embrapa.

More food without deforestation

Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable. Mauro Lopes, who supervised the subsidy regime, says he urged the government to give $20 to Embrapa for every $50 it saved by cutting subsidies. It didn’t, but Embrapa did receive enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution. It does everything from breeding new seeds and cattle, to creating ultra-thin edible wrapping paper for foodstuffs that changes colour when the food goes off, to running a nanotechnology laboratory creating biodegradable ultra-strong fabrics and wound dressings. Its main achievement, however, has been to turn the cerrado green.

When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.

First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. In the late 1990s, 14m-16m tonnes of lime were being spread on Brazilian fields each year, rising to 25m tonnes in 2003 and 2004. This amounts to roughly five tonnes of lime a hectare, sometimes more. At the 20,000-hectare Cremaq farm, 5,000 hulking 30-tonne lorries have disgorged their contents on the fields in the past three years. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers.

So although it is true Brazil has a lot of spare farmland, it did not just have it hanging around, waiting to be ploughed. Embrapa had to create the land, in a sense, or make it fit for farming. Today the cerrado accounts for 70% of Brazil’s farm output and has become the new Midwest. “We changed the paradigm,” says Silvio Crestana, a former head of Embrapa, proudly.

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd. Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months.

That is not the end of the story. Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage. This alone will not transform the livestock sector, which remains rather inefficient. Around one-third of improvement to livestock production comes from better breeding of the animals; one-third comes from improved resistance to disease; and only one-third from better feed. But it will clearly help.

Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. Soyabeans are native to north-east Asia (Japan, the Korean peninsular and north-east China). They are a temperate-climate crop, sensitive to temperature changes and requiring four distinct seasons. All other big soyabean producers (notably America and Argentina) have temperate climates. Brazil itself still grows soya in its temperate southern states. But by old-fashioned crossbreeding, Embrapa worked out how to make it also grow in a tropical climate, on the rolling plains of Mato Grosso state and in Goiás on the baking cerrado. More recently, Brazil has also been importing genetically modified soya seeds and is now the world’s second-largest user of GM after the United States. This year Embrapa won approval for its first GM seed.

Embrapa also created varieties of soya that are more tolerant than usual of acid soils (even after the vast application of lime, the cerrado is still somewhat acidic). And it speeded up the plants’ growing period, cutting between eight and 12 weeks off the usual life cycle. These “short cycle” plants have made it possible to grow two crops a year, revolutionising the operation of farms. Farmers used to plant their main crop in September and reap in May or June. Now they can harvest in February instead, leaving enough time for a full second crop before the September planting. This means the “second” crop (once small) has become as large as the first, accounting for a lot of the increases in yields.

Such improvements are continuing. The Cremaq farm could hardly have existed until recently because soya would not grow on this hottest, most acidic of Brazilian backlands. The variety of soya now being planted there did not exist five years ago. Dr Crestana calls this “the genetic transformation of soya”.

Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.

Embrapa’s latest trick is something called forest, agriculture and livestock integration: the fields are used alternately for crops and livestock but threads of trees are also planted in between the fields, where cattle can forage. This, it turns out, is the best means yet devised for rescuing degraded pasture lands. Having spent years increasing production and acreage, Embrapa is now turning to ways of increasing the intensity of land use and of rotating crops and livestock so as to feed more people without cutting down the forest.

Farmers everywhere gripe all the time and Brazilians, needless to say, are no exception. Their biggest complaint concerns transport. The fields of Mato Grosso are 2,000km from the main soyabean port at Paranaguá, which cannot take the largest, most modern ships. So Brazil transports a relatively low-value commodity using the most expensive means, lorries, which are then forced to wait for ages because the docks are clogged.

Partly for that reason, Brazil is not the cheapest place in the world to grow soyabeans (Argentina is, followed by the American Midwest). But it is the cheapest place to plant the next acre. Expanding production in Argentina or America takes you into drier marginal lands which are much more expensive to farm. Expanding in Brazil, in contrast, takes you onto lands pretty much like the ones you just left.

Big is beautiful

Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms. According to Mauro and Ignez Lopes of the Fundacão Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, half the country’s 5m farms earn less than 10,000 reais a year and produce just 7% of total farm output; 1.6m are large commercial operations which produce 76% of output. Not all family farms are a drain on the economy: much of the poultry production is concentrated among them and they mop up a lot of rural underemployment. But the large farms are vastly more productive.

From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, these faults in Brazilian agriculture do not matter much. The bigger question for them is: can the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shrivelled and died?

There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).

Brazil imported some of its raw material from other tropical countries in the first place. Brachiaria grass came from Africa. The zebu that formed the basis of Brazil’s nelore cattle herd came from India. In both cases Embrapa’s know-how improved them dramatically. Could they be taken back and improved again? Embrapa has started to do that, though it is early days and so far it is unclear whether the technology retransfer will work.

A third reason for hope is that Embrapa has expertise which others in Africa simply do not have. It has research stations for cassava and sorghum, which are African staples. It also has experience not just in the cerrado but in more arid regions (called the sertão), in jungles and in the vast wetlands on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia. Africa also needs to make better use of similar lands. “Scientifically, it is not difficult to transfer the technology,” reckons Dr Crestana. And the technology transfer is happening at a time when African economies are starting to grow and massive Chinese aid is starting to improve the continent’s famously dire transport system.

Still, a word of caution is in order. Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further.

Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.” If we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050 will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now.

Source - Economist.com

How Mother Teresa's work spurred growth of 'voluntourism'

Mother Teresa's Nobel Prize winning mission in India has prompted many people to work short missions and 'voluntourism' into their lives.

Nuns of Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, and Roman Catholic priests say a prayer beside the Mother's monument in her native town of Skopje, during a ceremony to mark the centennial of her birth, on Thursday, Aug. 26.

Boris Grdanoski/AP

New Delhi

When Mother Teresa began her work with the poor of Calcutta, she also opened her doors to drop-in backpackers who wanted to volunteer. One of those was Susan Drees Kadota, an American, who spent 2-1/2 months bathing, feeding, and simply talking with disabled residents.

Ms. Kadota connected with one young woman, who, because of a physical deformity, had been turned out by her family. "You know," she told Kadota, "it’s really nice just to talk to people.”

Kadota took it as a life lesson: “Taking time out of your so-called busy life to be with people is important and useful.”

Mother Teresa may be remembered most today – her 100th birthday anniversary – for her lifelong work with the poor. But she also helped expand the modern notion of going on an overseas mission, encouraging ordinary people taking short breaks and volunteer on vacations.

The new volunteer model

As a young woman, Mother Teresa joined a Roman Catholic religious order that sent her on a mission from her homeland in what is now Macedonia to far-off India. She went on to found the organization Missionaries of Charity to offer palliative care to those cast away and dying on the streets of Calcutta.

She faced criticism over the years from those who said the work did little to address the root causes of grinding poverty.

But she mostly attracted international acclaim, eventually winning the Nobel Peace Prize. As her fame grew, she opened her work to the hundreds of annual volunteers of any – or no – faith often coming and going unannounced.

The model shares some similarities with a wave of modern missions abroad, including short-duration service or evangelism trips, Catholic lay missionaries, and even the secular trend of "voluntourism." While there is some unease about the sustainability of and what can be accomplished in shorter-term mission work abroad, proponents point out that it often leads to more substantial volunteerism and has cross-cultural benefits.

“Mother Teresa’s program was a precursor to VolunTourism,” says David Clemmons, founder of voluntourism.org, by e-mail. “There was no grand, long-term commitment. The program was crafted to allow for movement and flow of volunteers. And if individuals wished to volunteer for a day or two and then go sightseeing elsewhere in Calcutta … they were free to do so. In this way, Mother Teresa was ahead of her time.”

Voluntourism and short trips: modern missions?

Voluntourism became a buzzword in 2005, says Mr. Clemmons, and polling indicates significant interest. A 2008 poll by the University of California at San Diego found 40 percent of Americans willing to spend several weeks on vacations that involve volunteer service, and 13 percent willing to spend an entire year.

Christian missions, meanwhile, have grown over the past 100 years. Data from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity in South Hamilton, Mass., shows the number of missionaries sent in 2010 stands at 400,000, compared with 62,000 in 1910.

“There’s certainly a lot more people who are doing shorter-term missions,” says Bert Hickman, a research associate with the center. “People still go for a lifetime. [But] some people go intending to go for a lifetime, but for whatever reasons they decide to come back to their home country – where that wouldn’t have been an option 100 years ago.”

Within the Catholic Church, missionary work has expanded beyond the clergy to include more lay people. As ordained numbers decline in Western nations, lay missionaries have stepped in to carry forward the work of aging missionary orders

More than 1 in 5 US Catholic missionaries serving abroad are not ordained, according to the US Catholic Mission Association. Three quarters of these lay missionaries serve for less than a year, according to the Catholic Network of Volunteer Service.

The rise of short-term missions can be traced partly to the decline in lifelong careers generally, according to a 2006 address given by Robert Schreiter, a Catholic priest and academic. “If one starts to look at one’s life in segments of time, some period can be allotted work like mission.”

He notes criticism of short-term mission work, including the damage they may do to the “social ecology” of a place and the little that may be accomplished for the people there.

Gateway to lifetime of service

“The object of evangelization may not be ‘them’ – those whom ‘we’ visit. Perhaps one of the most significant features of short-term mission – even missions lasting up to two years – is how it can change the lives of those who experience it,” he writes. “The fact that so many of the short-term missioners choose the helping professions as their life’s work, rather than simply finding a job which leads to acquiring wealth, is indicative that something like this is going on.”

The stories of Mother Teresa’s drop-in volunteers suggest that short-term work indeed becomes a gateway to a lifetime of service.

Kadota said volunteers she met in Calcutta, including a doctor and nurse couple, sometimes struggled with how much good could be done given the basic facilities and supplies. The dilemma left her later in life seeking “to work for more systemic change.”

She went on to volunteer as a lay missionary for 2-1/2 years in El Salvador, then worked for Catholic Relief Services helping set up a pairing of parishes in the US with those in the developing world.

Paying it forward

Heather Huppert Schwegler, an American, was inspired to go to Calcutta in 1988 after watching a documentary about Mother Teresa. She spent a few weeks working in Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta before traveling to Hong Kong. Once there, she went to volunteer with the local Missionaries of Charity – it became something she tried to do wherever she traveled.

She was cleaning a toilet in the Hong Kong mission when she met Mother Teresa for the first time. “I see you are doing God’s work,” Mother Teresa said to her.

Ms. Schwegler grew up without religion, but at age 21 she felt drawn to Mother Teresa and drawn to Catholicism, so she went back to Calcutta. She spent more weeks volunteering, and then did a two-week “come and see” – a trial period living in the convent for those considering joining the order.

At one point, she thought she might have seriously exposed herself to disease and became very nervous.

That night, Mother Teresa told Schwegler that when she continued volunteering the next day she was to “look into the eyes, and you need to see Jesus in every single one of them.”

Schwegler went back. “I suddenly saw there was such great suffering and nobody was complaining,” she explains, choking up.

She went on to be baptized with Mother Teresa as her godparent, but she didn’t join the order. Her family in America wasn’t supportive.

She returned to New York, spent some volunteering with the sisters there, and eventually got married. She has worked as a nurse, and now runs a day care for children for troubled backgrounds.

“I still have a great passion to work with the poorest of the poor,” says Schwegler.

Source - Christian Science Monitor

It’s global population shrinkage we should really worry about

Summer 2010

by Joergen Oerstroem Moeller

The problems associated with a global population of perhaps 11bn by 2050 are already beginning to loom large, but Joergen Oerstroem Moeller warns that the real challenges will come when by mid-century populations begin to shrink and economic growth becomes constrained

Most policymakers are becoming aware that by 2050 the global population will be somewhere between 9bn to 11bn; but most are also uncertain as to the implications of this. Asia is set to account for 5.2bn of this, and at the other end of the scale there will be only some 664m people living in Europe. The big surprise, with strong repercussions for Europe, is that Africa with 1.9bn people will be the second most populous continent and the only one whose population will still be growing. European policy analysts tend to bemoan Europe’s shrinking weight in the world, yet when the global population begins to fall after 2050, the fact is that Europe will be exceptionally well placed to derive benefit from its long experience of managing within the constraints of low population growth and limited resources.

If the rise of Asia can be taken as the economic paradigm of today, the population trends for tomorrow augur a shift of much of the world’s low-cost, labour-intensive manufacturing from Asia to Africa, right on Europe’s doorstep. Recent history and contemporary developments have shown that since 1950 first Japan then several smaller Asian countries and then China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have profited from moving into the so-called demographic window that favours economic development when a large proportion of the population is aged between 15 and 64.

Assuming that basic economics will not change, this means the world’s engine of growth will move from south Asia to Africa from 2030 to 2040. Such a shift will not only favour Africa, but also neighbouring countries and notably Europe.

Africa’s rich resources will help its rise. For several years China has been buying raw materials from Africa, and recently Brazil began doing the same through its iron ore company Vale. These new investors are seeking either to dominate the global market or to secure supplies for their own manufacturing industries. So far this has brought mutual benefits, but when manufacturing starts to shift to Africa, stimulated by the demographics, Asia and perhaps Latin America too will not need so many raw materials, while Africa may be unhappy to have handed control of its resources to outsiders.

European countries will be well served by a panoply of treaties and partnerships with Africa, while present-day African scepticism, sometimes accompanied by resentment nourished by colonialism will hopefully have been consigned to history, opening the door to a fruitful European-African relationship.

But it is by no means certain that future economic development will follow the pattern we have become accustomed to. The era of plenty that has governed development over the last 200 years seems likely to be replaced by an era of shortages. Scarcities of food, commodities, energy, oil and water, and the world’s newfound awareness of the need to protect our environment, all impose constraints on economic growth. So far these have spilled over into rising prices, but in the future a much more determined effort to cope with scarcities will be needed. Broadly speaking, the world will move from a fairly smooth distribution of benefits, flowing from economic growth based upon cheap commodities, to the need to share the burden of coping with shortages.

This calls for a totally new economic paradigm, because today’s conventional growth and distribution theories all focus upon distributing more. The first case of what to expect on a global scale was seen at the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December, when the world’s national political leaders failed so abysmally to grasp the issue confronting them.

The impact of the new constraints will be felt differently across the globe, depending on population densities and population growth, industrial structures, infrastructure and social fabric. Europe has already experienced some of these problems because of its low population growth. Yet the interesting and encouraging fact is that Europe has nevertheless been doing well in the sense that its annual per capita economic growth over the last 20 years has at about 1.5% been about the same as the United States. The inescapable truth is that higher growth in the U.S. is not due to a more efficient economic structure but almost exclusively to its growing population.

European attitudes towards using resources – as exemplified by the EU’s Lisbon strategy for improving competitiveness and its policies on climate change – display a much stronger awareness of the problems of running an economy with little or no population growth, including Europe’s willingness to focus on quality of growth and the need to squeeze the highest amount of the available resources.

Europe’s social structure is much more close-knit than that of the United States and that makes it easier to implement burden-sharing. People will seldom be attracted by sharing the burden of living within constraints, but their willingness to accept it depends to a large extent upon whether or not they regard it as fair. The United States, with a highly segmented population, is far less suited to this than are European societies, and the growth of the U.S. population from around 300m now to some 400m by mid-century will not make it easier.

Infrastructure in the United States also poses barriers to restructuring the economy. Major U.S. cities are laid out on the assumption that people use their own cars to get to work, making it very difficult if not impossible to introduce taxes on petrol, however necessary they may be. If such taxes were to be introduced, employees would immediately demand higher wages to compensate for higher costs, which would erode U.S. competitiveness.

The shift from an era of plenty to an era of burden-sharing will favour Europe. In fact, the winners in the decades to come will be those countries accustomed to living with a stable population, modest growth and tight control over their use of resources. Europe is the only part of the world that currently fits that description.

This leads to a further observation. It is likely that not long after 2050 populations will start to fall in all major regions, including Africa. The world will then face for the first time face the imperative of managing economies and societies with shrinking rather than growing populations. History tells us that economic growth depends on populations rising, but this is precisely the condition we will no longer be able to count on. Add to this the need for burden-sharing in an era of scarcities and it is not difficult to see that a whole new economic model is waiting to be invented. A simple calculation shows that if consumers around the globe imitate the American and European mass consumption pattern over the next half-century, societies will implode. The resources are simply not there.

Many arguments would lead one to expect that this new economic and social model will be crafted in the large Asian countries under the incentive of strong population pressures. Yet Europe will still have some cards up its sleeve, because along with Japan it is already the first region that has learnt to come to grips with the constraints imposed by a stable population on economic development and social stability.

Many other countries are beginning to look at consequences of having a stable population and they do not like what they see. There are indications that China may abandon or modify its one child policy on the assumption that population growth is necessary for economic growth, but while this may postpone the quandary, it will not make the problem go away. Sooner or later, the global population will stabilise and then begin to fall. This will become the determining factor for mid-21st century society.

Whether we like such a situation or not is largely irrelevant. First, it seems certain to happen. Second, if we try to reverse the trend – supposing we can, which is doubtful – this would trigger a disastrous scramble for resources that will not be there.

Europe’s contribution to future global development, in keeping with its civilisation and cultural heritage, might be to help the world face the coming era of constraints by marshalling the intellectual power and political will be needed to shape an economic and social model that suits the world as it is going to be, rather than trying to force the world to conform to the outdated model of today.

Why the EU newcomers still don't make the best of membership

Summer 2010
by Pavel Telicka

Many of the EU’s newest member states are no longer the euro-enthusiasts of yesteryear, and they also complain they have less influence on policymaking than they had hoped. Pavel Telicka assesses the newcomers' track record so far

Shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, Vaclav Havel led the so-called “new democracies” in declaring that Prague’s goal was to join the European Union. Knowledge of the EU among Central Europeans was at that time superficial to say the least, yet that goal of EU accession was to become an indispensible part of post-communist Europe’s political and economic transition.

The real reasons why these countries should join the European Union would only become clearer once the enlargement process was under way, and in any case they would differ not just between countries but also between the different age groups, social strata and professional structures that made up their populations. They nevertheless had a number of reasons in common. In Vaclav Havel’s words, the enlargement process was to lead to a “return to Europe.”

And then, of course, the applicant countries were concerned to have a seat at the table and a voice that could exert some influence on political and economic developments in Europe and beyond; for decades they had been isolated and forced to accept decisions taken in Moscow. But the change was at first less than democratic. In the early years after democracy was restored, the countries of central and eastern Europe found themselves exposed to the stern regulatory environment of the EU’s internal market without any chance to influence the way it was shaped or implemented.

Almost 20 years on, it is worth looking at whether and how effectively these countries’ two principle accession aims have been achieved. President Havel has often been criticised by Czech politicians for "disputing" the idea that even during the years of Soviet domination these countries were still a part of Europe.

The reality is, though, that it was only during the 1990s that the formerly communist countries regained their European heritage; Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania and all the others are once again part of Europe, belonging beyond any question at all to the same family as Spain, Italy or Greece. The big question, then, is what influence do the new EU members of this family have on the EU’s political processes?

Influence in Brussels’ decision-making could come only with accession, and even then a say in directing EU affairs would only come gradually. But the key elements that would determine the new candidate countries' political weight included their democratisation record, their ability to comply with EU objectives, including external policies, and the maturity of their own political system.

The formerly communist candidate countries naturally had to undergo an unprecedented democratisation process after 40 years of rule from Moscow. For the rest of the EU this was a process that is not only hard to understand but also defies assessment. The majority of central and eastern European countries nevertheless achieved their transformation goals, even if some of these achievements have proved somewhat fragile. But they were in any case sufficient for accession to the EU to go ahead, while also giving these countries a solid and credible basis for building on.

It is also fair to point out these criteria were never met by some of the older member states, and in recent years we have also witnessed an erosion of EU solidarity and heightened levels of national self-interest. The crises in EU politics has become a reality, and so much so that some people in western Europe were looking to central and eastern Europe in the hopes that their own tired democracies would get fresh impetus from the lively new politics of the newcomers. Sadly, this was true of the 1990s and is no longer the case. The older member states have firmly established their influence in various parts of the Union’s decision-making process, whereas the newcomers have yet to establish themselves in a club that they do not know and did not build.

Once the "big bang" enlargement had become a fact, when in May 2004 the 10 new members increased the EU from 15 states to 25, with Bulgaria and Romania to bring that to 27 two years later, the question being asked by the EU’s top officials was what European policies might be expected from the newcomers, and which would integrate the most easily. My own country, the Czech Republic, despite the well-known euroscepticism of political leaders like Vaclav Klaus, was expected to perform well.

But although, along with the other candidates, we in the Czech Republic were eager to join the EU, very little had been decided as to the policies to adopt once we were a full member. There was a lack of clarity concerning the country’s vision, its major interests within the EU and on strategy and priorities. There had been little political or public discussion on these issues. So it came as no surprise that many Czech politicians had little connection with the EU and to this day still perceive the EU as being the “other side.” The warnings by Vaclav Klaus that “we cannot influence anything in the EU and we will melt like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee” have borne fruit of a sort, for we Czechs can still hardly claim to have a conceptually sound European policy, and in that we differ little from the other new member states. This absence of a European policy has worrying implications for the predictability and positioning of the country, and thus for its influence within the wider EU structure. And on top of this we as a nation share with the older member states a propensity to blame the EU for anything and everything.

The last few years have seen politics in Europe become more nationally focused and pragmatic, responding all too readily to the whims of public opinion as they ebb and flow. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that European politics are now in crisis, and that being the case in the old EU, it exacerbates the political fragility of the new member states.

At the same time, it is a sad truth that both the Czech Republic and the other new members failed to appoint their best people to EU-related jobs. And given that the majority of older member states still send their best negotiators to Brussels, this is a practice the new member states can’t afford.

The combination of factors limiting the newcomer countries’ influence in the EU is daunting but not disastrous. It spans a lack of carefully prepared policies, sometimes antagonistic attitudes towards the EU (not that the EU does not deserve constructive criticism from time to time), weakly defined national interests, the absence of a strategic approach and the lack of a truly European mindset.

Are all these factors reason for pessimism? Not so much pessimism, perhaps, but rather impatience. The new member states' potential is being wasted. It is probably fair to say that they have not met the expectations of many people, and that the heritage of 40 years of isolation is proving heavier than anticipated.

On the other hand, there is evidence that the new members are becoming better equipped to cope with challenges and that their performance is improving. The evidence for this was provided by the EU presidencies of Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Neither of them were failures if compared to the presidencies of older member states, and the Czechs found themselves in the chair at a particularly difficult time. Not everyone appreciated the Czechs’ style, and the controversial “Entropa” installation by Czech artist David Černý in the entrance hall of the Council of Ministers building certainly provoked irritation as well as public attention. But the presidency nevertheless delivered in a number of areas, particularly transport and energy.

Mistakes were made too, of course. Many of them had their roots in the silly so-called euroscepticism of certain Czech politicians that inevitably were aimed in an open and competitive environment. But in general the Czechs performed no worse than the EU Presidency average up until the moment when domestic political calculation gained the upper hand over national interests and the Presidency’s responsibilities. The downfall of the government during its EU presidency caused by opportunistic opposition politicians devalued many efforts of officials and even some of the ministers.

Sadly, the flavour that remains is bitter. Yet the Czech Republic’s EU Presidency provided the country and many of its senior politicians with an important learning experience. There is now a much better understanding of what the EU really is about, and what is needed for any member state to have a say and at least exert some influence. There is also a better sense of responsibility in EU matters. The views of Vaclav Klaus are now without doubt in the minority, and perhaps even an extreme minority at that. This became painfully clear during the final stages of the Lisbon treaty saga. Czechs have learned that although they may have had a disproportionatly large influence on EU matters during the presidency, if they had less short-sighted political leaders they might have generated even more political capitial to be spent advantageously at a later date.

Yet the whole experience clearly strengthened the country’s integration into the EU, and there can be no doubt that the influence of the Czech Republic and other new member states is significantly higher than before the accession. That said, they have yet to exploit their full potential, and that's to the detriment of themseves and the European Union as a whole.

Source - www.europesworld.org

Georgia's mental revolution

Seven years after the Rose revolution, Georgia has come a long way

Aug 19th 2010 | Tbilisi

FOUNTAINS dance, children play and families stroll along Batumi’s five-mile seafront boulevard, lined with palm trees, hammocks and playgrounds. Less than a decade ago, Ajaria, a verdant south-western corner of Georgia of which Batumi is the regional capital, was the personal fief of Aslan Abashidze, a strongman who seemed to own the place more than run it. He never appeared without an army of goons, and closed the streets when his son felt like racing his Lamborghini. Cut off from the rest of Georgia by checkpoints, the economy was stagnant.

Today this gently beguiling holiday resort is an exhibition of Georgia’s capitalist achievements, a showcase of its transition and an advertisement for what Abkhazia, a separatist region to the north, could have become had it not been, in effect, annexed by Russia following the short Russia-Georgia war two years ago.

Like any advertisement, Batumi does not reveal the full picture. Away from the seashore, there are striking signs of poverty and unemployment in Georgia. But the change here is real—not just in the five-star hotels springing up in Batumi, its restaurants or the casinos full of Turkish punters, but in the way Ajaria is administered. So real, in fact, that some Russian officials are starting to worry about the unflattering gap between Ajaria and unreconstructed Abkhazia.

Ajaria’s governor, 38-year-old Levan Varshalomidze, has done much for Ajaria and rather less for himself. As he walks through Batumi’s old city, clad in jeans and without a bodyguard in sight, locals come up to thank him—and there is nothing forced in the gesture. Mr Varshalomidze belongs to the cohort of Georgians that came into their own after the Rose revolution of 2003. For all its problems, Georgia is in the hands of a young, pragmatic generation which has thrown off the Soviet-era personality cults, privileges and paranoia.

Merab Mamardashvili, a Georgian philosopher, once wrote that “A Soviet man is a product of invisible changes, degradation and progressive deformation. Breaking the chain of those changes is hard. Perhaps they are irreversible.” No post-Soviet country is completely free from its legacy but Georgia has gone further than many in breaking the chain.

Gia Kancheli, a 75-year-old celebrated Georgian composer, says: “In the old days the decent people of my generation tried not to be Soviet. Today we are again trying not to be Soviet, but the new generation is different. They don’t have to try: they are simply free of that pressure and those lies.”

Georgia suffered gravely under Stalinist repression, but in the late Soviet period it learned to play by the rules and profit from the system. It became a playground of the Soviet empire, a source of wine, culture and entertainment. But when the empire collapsed, Georgia descended into a near-failed state: dysfunctional and disfigured by banditry and ethnic conflict. By 2003 the violence had largely stopped but the state remained weak and corrupt.

Today Georgia has reinvented itself as the star of the Caucasus. It is less corrupt than most former Soviet republics and one of the easiest places in the world to do business, according to the World Bank. Its liberalised economy has weathered Russian embargoes, and the state held together during the war with Russia. Its police do not take bribes and electricity is no longer a luxury. Most important, people are no longer surprised by such success. The biggest transformation is in their minds.

A playground no more

Georgia’s transition from a former Soviet republic into a non-Soviet one began with the Rose revolution of November 2003, in which the 36-year-old Mikhail Saakashvili and his friends pushed aside the 75-year-old Eduard Shevardnadze. This was not the move from dictatorship to freedom sometimes portrayed in the West; Mr Shevardnadze was no dictator, and some of the reformers were his protégés. Rather, as Levan Ramishvili, who runs the Liberty Institute, a Georgian think-tank, says, it was a social and generational shift, almost a cultural revolution.

It was certainly a change of elite. Some of the new guard, like Mr Saakashvili, a graduate of Columbia University, had studied and worked in the West. Others came from NGOs. Most were under 40. All were free from Soviet bureaucratic baggage and electrified by the promise of getting their country back and rebuilding it as a modern state.

The support base for this revolution was not the capital, Tbilisi, the traditional driver of Georgian politics, but villages and small towns, where family structures and individualism were stronger and Soviet rule was weaker. The new ruling class did not seek approval from Tbilisi’s intelligentsia, which had become enormously powerful in the late Soviet period. Piqued by Mr Saakashvili’s lack of reverence, many started to oppose his rule. Vano Merabishvili, Georgia’s interior minister, recalls that a few weeks after taking office he received a call from a famous theatre director pleading for the release of two of his actors, who had been arrested in a drunken brawl. Mr Merabishvili refused, violating the special relationship between the state and its cultural elite.

The reformers have also eschewed popular legends of Georgian exceptionalism, which the intelligentsia and their nationalist opponents fought to appropriate in the early years of independence (and which some opposition leaders are trying to revive). The young Western-educated elite cringed at the day-long banquets laced with toasts and songs, the celebrations of idleness. They promoted an alternative national story, of a hard-working, dynamic and European country: “Switzerland with elements of Singapore,” as Mr Saakashvili once put it.

Georgia’s modernisation was vigorous, even brutal. Gia Sulkhanishvili, a businessman and a former student of Mr Mamardashvili, says: “The government took an axe to the Soviet practices and destroyed the environment which bred nepotism, hypocrisy and idleness.” The change is all the more startling when Georgia’s fate is contrasted with that of other former Soviet republics, including Russia. “As in Russia, there were laws in Georgia, but then there were informal rules which trumped them,” says Mr Sulkhanishvili. “Those rules are largely gone.”

Overnight, the reformers abolished the corrupt 15,000-strong traffic police and replaced them with 2,300 American-style road patrollers. The new recruits were motivated not only by decent pay and new cars but by the fact that their new bosses did not take bribes. Entire ministries were culled, along with 30,000 bureaucrats. The government slashed red tape, privatised everything from hotels to hospitals and used the money to build new roads.

Much of this liberalisation was pushed forward by Kakha Bendukidze, a business magnate of libertarian temperament who had made his fortune in Russia before Vladimir Putin started to put pressure on business. Georgia, Mr Bendukidze argued, was so poor that only radical reform would do. But he also realised that economic reforms needed to be backed by humanities and education projects to engender a new national elite. In 2007 he founded the Free University in Tbilisi, which teaches law, business and languages. Each graduate undertakes to finance a new student, creating a sense of stakeholding in Georgian society.

A virtual democracy?

In 2003 the young, energetic, English-speaking Mr Saakashvili represented a visible change from the old Soviet-style nomenclature. Today an even younger generation has come of age. As liberal, patriotic and Westernised as the president, its members object to his obsession with power, his centralisation and his populism. They see the state not as a sacred cow but as a provider of basic services and security.

.The decisive moment, some of them say, came in November 2007, when Mr Saakashvili, faced with the prospect of losing power, sent riot police to crack down on a demonstration and to trash a television station. The government said it acted to avert a coup. But its decision shocked Georgia, and the outside world.

Shorena Shaverdashvili, an American-educated editor of the Liberal, a weekly magazine, says this was the point at which Mr Saakashvili became more interested in retaining power than in pushing through reforms. “He alienated and then turned against the part of Georgian society which was most willing to catalyse the transformation,” she says. Several of Mr Saakashvili’s former allies have now turned into opponents.

On paper Georgia has all the institutions proper to a democracy. In practice few of them enjoy real power. Parliament, dominated by Mr Saakashvili’s United National Movement party, has become little more than a rubber stamp. The police and judiciary are beholden to politicians. Key decisions are taken by a circle of insiders whose influence often extends far beyond their job titles. Democratic procedure is often sacrificed to expediency—catastrophically so in the case of Mr Saakashvili’s decision two years ago to attack South Ossetia with heavy artillery fire, giving Russia the excuse it needed to invade.

The situation is not helped by the motley state of Georgia’s opposition, which often does a better job at discrediting itself than the government, or by the weakness of civil society. Yet, as Ms Shaverdashvili puts it, “The government makes sure that we don’t get strong fast.” Businessmen are wary of financing the opposition or advertising in Georgia’s critical media for fear of incurring the government’s displeasure.

Mr Saakashvili is more a moderniser than a democrat. Yet in order for his reforms to become irreversible, Georgia needs strong democratic institutions; above all an independent judiciary and the rule of law. Mr Merabishvili argues that these cannot be simply decreed; they need to become entrenched tradition, recognised by Georgian society as a whole. So for the time being, he believes, it is the government that is best equipped to administer justice. This argument is all the more dangerous for being persuasive.

Too much personal power is concentrated in the hands of Mr Saakashvili and Mr Merabishvili, his feared interior minister. That is ominous for a country where power has not been transferred peacefully since independence. A set of proposed constitutional changes would shift more power to parliament and its nominated prime minister. But Mr Saakashvili’s critics say that discussion of the proposed reforms has been limited. They fear that the president will follow the example of Vladimir Putin and stay on as prime minister when his term expires in 2013. If he does, he risks destroying his own legacy.

After the collapse

Despite all the progress, Georgia’s future is fragile. Two years after the war, relations with Russia have not yet normalised. Russia’s heavy military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia remains a threat to Georgia’s security. There is also a risk that Mr Saakashvili will exploit this threat to consolidate his own power. Earlier this year a television channel controlled by a friend of the president broadcast a spoof documentary about another Russian invasion, sparking panic among Georgians. The film, allegedly made with Mr Saakashvili’s approval (although the channel denies it), was meant to mobilise the population. Instead, it infuriated it.

And yet the mental shift which has occurred in Georgia will make it hard to turn the country backwards. On June 25th police cordoned off the central square in Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, and, in the dead of night, toppled a statue of the former dictator that had survived the Soviet collapse and Russian bombardment in 2008. Yet there was neither celebration nor protest. Georgians had moved on.

Source - Economist.com

The end of Eastern Europe

Platform's comment on the article "The end of Eastern Europe" at Ukrainian magazine "Tyjden"

http://www.ut.net.ua/art/165/0/4224/

Any geopolitical constructions are affected with simplified patterns. Europe's division by regions isn't an exclusion. Ukraine is a part of Eastern Europe as it is Bosnia with its triple identity. All these countries are tied up by joint communist past as, for example, Latin American nations are intertwined through their colonial past. Geopolitics is more concerned with history, and to a lesser extent with economics. No secret that Europe is moving to prosperity and open society with various speeds. Unfortunately, we are in Europe's slow lane and on the same level as Macedonia, Albania or Bosnia. P.S. Some Ukrainian journalist of this magazine has already brought up the issue of geopolitical division in the centre and east of Europe. We'd like to read any conceptually new research articles from such trustworthy expert as Mr. Edward Lucas.

Turkey and its rebel Kurds

Turkey’s long-running battle with Kurdish separatists is intensifying, again

SHOULD the Turks and Kurds live together? The answer from many of Turkey’s restive Kurds has long been no. A vicious separatist campaign launched by rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been raging since 1984. In recent months the PKK has stepped up its attacks, killing dozens of Turkish soldiers in and beyond the predominantly Kurdish south-east. Most recently, on July 20th, a Kurdish raid near the town of Cukurca killed six Turkish troops and injured at least 15.

But now a growing number of Turks are questioning the merits of cohabiting with the country’s estimated 14m Kurds. Never mind that Istanbul is the world’s largest Kurdish city, or that few of the provinces claimed by the Kurds are ethnically homogenous. In television debates and across the blogosphere support for the idea that the Kurds should go their own way is growing. Onur Sahin, who heads the Chamber of Agriculture in the Black Sea province of Ordu, says his fellow producers no longer want seasonal migrant Kurds to harvest their hazelnut crops.

Meanwhile, the military campaign against the PKK is intensifying. The mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party, which has governed Turkey since 2002, plans to deploy a new professional army along the border with Iraq, where the PKK has havens. Some fear a return to the excesses of the 1990s, when over 3,000 Kurdish villages were forcibly evacuated and thousands of Kurds were imprisoned, murdered or disappeared.

Over the border, Turkish air raids on the PKK’s mountain bases in northern Iraq are increasing. America is helping by providing intelligence and broadening the air corridor used by Turkish fighter jets. Yet the Americans are worried by Turkey’s increasingly strident calls for the Iraqi Kurds to hand over some 200 rebels, including their own leaders. The last thing the Americans want to see, as they pull out of Iraq, is a war between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds.

All of this is a far cry from last year when AK heralded its so-called Kurdish “opening”. It made peace with the Iraqi Kurds and opened a consulate in Erbil, their capital. At home, a set of political and cultural reforms was meant to coax the PKK into laying down its arms, in the wake of a unilateral PKK ceasefire that was declared in April but that never took full effect. But the opening ground to a halt following the return last October of 34 PKK fighters to Turkey from Iraq. More were meant to follow. But the group prompted a public outcry by touring the south-east in guerrilla outfits, declaring victory. In response the government stepped up its arrests of members of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), accusing them of PKK membership. Half of the returnees have been put on trial for refusing to repent; ten are in prison. Last month the PKK hit back by calling off its truce.

Some voices plead for a return to peace. A group of Turkish intellectuals has petitioned the government to change a controversial article of the constitution that deems all Turkish citizens to be Turks. One AK mayor has suggested that Turkish men take Kurdish women as second wives. Others say that AK must talk to the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Despite 11 years of solitary confinement in an island prison off Istanbul, Mr Ocalan retains the loyalty of his fighters and the affection of millions of Kurds.

In fact, secret talks with Mr Ocalan, supposedly conducted by security and intelligence operatives, have reportedly been going on for some time. Murat Karayilan, the PKK’s commander in northern Iraq, says his group wants to talk to politicians, not spooks, and this week proposed a bilateral ceasefire. But as next July’s parliamentary elections draw nearer, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is unlikely to risk nationalist ire by openly talking to a group deemed by Turkey and its Western allies to be terrorists. On the other hand, as Mr Erdogan knows, abandoning reform in favour of war will only strengthen the hand of his opponents within the army. He is, as an old Turkish saying goes, holding a stick with shit at both ends.

Source - www.economist.com