Daily Press Cuttings

 

Friday 1st December 2000

Financial Times: AIDS: FT leader says that the statistics are horrifying, the consequences devastating and the worst is yet to come. For Africa the paper maintains that the priorities are ensuring effective delivery, overhauling crumbling health systems and naming and shaming political leaders who do not lead the anti-Aids campaign. AIDS/Nigeria: Nigeria's HIV infection rates are lower than the worst-hit countries in south and east Africa. But at 5.4 per cent of the sexually active population, they have crossed the threshold above which the disease develops at an exponential rate. Coffee: The Association of Coffee Producing Countries has urged members to unite behind a global retention plan, aimed at reversing falling prices. Global coffee prices have fallen to 30-year lows in a market hit by oversupply. Pakistan: The IMF announced it had agreed to lend $596 million under a 10-month standby loan deal, helping to stave off a possible default on repayments on Pakistan's foreign debt of $38 billion.

IHT: Mexico: Washington Post leader says that the inauguration of Vicente Fox as Mexican president is a historic breakthrough for Mexico. He is the first for 71 years to take office not as a quasi-imperial ruler from the Institutional Revolutionary Party but as a more earthbound, democratically elected executive. He has the advantage that Mexico's economy is thriving as never before. But the country is an example of globalisation-driven growth in more than one way. Inequality, already great, has grown worse in the past decade, both between the richest and poorest families and the export-fueled north and the agricultural south. Drug-trafficking, corruption and violence continue to afflict almost every aspect of civic life, and the abject poverty that spawned the Zapatista rebel movement six year ago remains largely unrelieved. Nigeria: A leaking gasoline pipeline burst into flames on Thursday killing more than 60 people near Lagos. Haiti: Former President Aristide has officially been declared the winner of elections in Haiti. Major opposition parties boycotted the elections. Zimbabwe: Nigerian President Obasanjo and South African president Mbeki have sharply reprimanded Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe for his violent land seizures.

The Economist: World Bank: Article says that the World Bank is in trouble over its own budget, despite the fact that it is full of bureaucrats who lecture developing countries how to manage theirs.

The Guardian: Laos: Journalist Matthew Engel takes a look at Laos, the world's most obscure communist state. The capital Vientiane has been bombed 12 times in seven months, but no one seems to know why. AIDS: Breast-feeding may be the best way for mothers who are HIV positive to safeguard their babies from the infection, especially in the developing world, says new research from studies in South Africa. AIDS/South Africa: Letter from Ben Jackson of Action for Southern Africa, who says that when the South African government tried to change the law to allow importing or local production of cheaper versions of AIDS drugs, it received trade threats from the US and EU, and law suits from the big drug companies.

 

Thursday 30th November 2000 (Summary by Colin Ellesmere and John Garrett)

Financial Times: Environment: Article looks at how it will be developing countries that bear the worst effects of the failure to act on global warming. The desert advancing across West Africa, the ravaging of Latin America's forests, and the rising wters threatening coastal and island nations, are stark signs of the environmental crisis facing developing countries. Zambia: Letter from Bill Linton says that Africa will need considerable outside help to haul itself out of of poverty. Zambia needs urgent support for the 13 million Aids orphans. Doctors, nurses and teachers are dying morequickly than they can be replaced, while two-thirds of Zambian families now include orphans from relatives or neighbours. No society can withstand pressures such as these without the hand of friendship from outside.

The Guardian: Africa/UK : A Tony Blair-established government committee, headed by Clare Short, is to come up with recommendations before Christmas for a bigger British role in peace keeping, and in military and police training in Africa. The committee's proposals are meant to find new roles for Britain after the Jubilee 2000 campaign. Haiti: The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has called for the withdrawal of the five year UN mission to Haiti, accusing in a report the dominant political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and its leader, the former President Aristide, of drifting towards international isolation and violating democracy. WTO: The world's biggest trading powers appear to be further apart than ever, and developing countries still feel excluded from the WTO. In addition, prospects for future WTO meetings are in doubt with no city willing at present to risk a week of violent demonstrations. Recent European proposals to provide duty and tariff-free access to the world's poorest 48 countries have been dismissed by development lobby groups as a sop with the north, described by Cafod's Duncan Green, `'intent on ramming its agenda down the throats of the developing world.''. South Africa - Aids: With the highest number of HIV cases in the world ( 4.2million) a situation coined `'Aids Apartheid'' is said to prevail in South Africa with the public health service not distributing anti-retroviral drugs available because the government say it cannot afford them. Instead South Africa restricts itself to seeking deals on drugs that confront the symptoms of Aids, but not HIV itself.

The Independent: Peru: Vladimir Montesinos, te intellignece mastermind and most feared man in Peru is still very much on the run. A televised tour of his former accommodation has left Peruvians stunned by the level of luxury and the number of secret escape routes.

IHT: US Banks: A US congressional inquiry has found that more than $1.4 billion of laundered funds from a number of unknown Russians and East Europeans has moved through accounts at Citibank in New York, and Commercial Bank of San Francisco since 1991. US Economy: GDP growth for the third quarter fell to 2.4%, the lowest rate for four years, indicating that the slow down in US economic growth is now faster than expected. Economic forecasts now predict a hard-landing for the US economy next year with the risk of outright recession rising to 40%. Philippines: Thousands of people demonstrated in 43 cities to call for the resignation of President Estrada over corruption charges. The previous day the Senate rejected an attempt to prevent the presidents forthcoming impeachment trial. Indonesia: Following the independence of East Timor in 1999, and the continued religious war between Christians and Muslims on the Maluku Islands, Irian Jaya's (Papua) new drive for independence since May's demonstration threatens new turmoil with expectations that the province will declare independence on Friday. Last month over 30 non-Papuan's were killed after Indonesian soldiers tore down some Papuan flags, whilst yesterday the Irian Jayan chief of police described action calling for independence as a `criminal act''.

The Times: World Trade/UK: UK Trade Minister Stephen Byers argues for the importance of free trade. The path of open trade and capital markets ha brought unprecedented growth, greater opportunity and a better life for millions of people across the world. The challenge a year on from Seattle is to build on this future. Africa/Trade: Following the meeting of trade ministers from 53 African countries met in Gabon this month for a session co-hosted by the World Trade Organisation, journalist Michael Dynes looks at the barrier to trade posed to the southern African region by Angola's civil war.

 

 

Wednesday 29th November 2000 (Summary by Nigel Harris)

Financial Times: AIDS:The UN's Aids agency called for a $3bn campaign to combat the disease in sub-Saharan Africa and warned that an apparent stabilisation in new Aids infections in the area did not signal an end to the crisis. Unaids said an estimated 25m people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected with the Aids virus, nearly a million more then in 1999 and 70% of the global total of 36.1m. The report said few countries in Africa had prevention programmes on the scale needed, and they were facing an enormous economic burden in caring for sufferers. Mexico: Mexico's incoming finance minister, Francisco Gil Diaz, has promised a crackdown on large corporate tax evaders and a partial amnesty for smaller companies as part of a plan to bolster the government's feeble tax revenues. Tax revenues in Mexico, excluding oil, are among the lowest in Latin America at 11% of GDP. Nigeria: Thieves and vandals have placed Nigeria's electricity supply network in danger of total collapse, Jerry Gana, the government spokesman said yesterday. Whole cities and towns including the commercial capital Lagos have been blacked out. Nigeria's power industry supplies less then half the population of 120m. It produces less than 1200mw and has dropped in recent weeks to levels below that of nearby Ghana with a population and economy six times smaller. Indonesia: Indonesia's parliament approved a plan to withdraw government bonds supporting the nation's banks, swapping them for some of the problem loans it has taken from the banks since 1997. The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency said part of the £30bn in problem loans managed by the agency would be returned to banks and the recapitalisation bonds taken in return would be retired.

Guardian: Uganda: The death toll from the Ebola virus in Uganda rose to 149 yesterday, with four deaths reported in Gulu, north of Kampala,where the outbreak started nearly three months ago. Haiti: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former slum priest now preparing to return as president of Haiti, said yesterday his priority would be to bring about national reconciliation. Mr Aristide did not declare victory, but spoke as if he were president-elect. Opposition groups alleged that ballot boxes had been stuffed with false votes and that the turnout was very low.

Independent: AIDS: Unaids warned that although the Aids epidemic in some African countries has “stabilised”, this is largely the result of new infections being matched by the number of people dying of Aids. In the eight African countries where at least 15% of adults are infected, estimates suggest Aids will kill one-third of today's 15-year-olds. In South Africa, economists predict that the epidemic will reduce economic growth by between 0.3 and 0.4% a year, leading to a 17% lower GDP in 2010. Sudan: Supportes of Sadeq el-Mahdi, the last democratically elected prime minister of Sudan, have celebrated the return of the man they see as the saviour of their state. In 1989, General Bashir overthrew Mr el-Mahdi and held him under house arrest until he fled in 1996. Last year, Mr el-Mahdi struck an agreeement with President Bashir that paved the way for his homecoming. Sudan's Foreign Minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, is candid about such Sudanese-style “perestroika”, saying the government wants to exploit newly discovered oil fields but needs Western help.

IHT: Chad: In court cases unprecedented in Africa, Chadians are pursuing the former dictator Hissene Habre and his collaborators, many of whom still hold powerful positions. Human rights activists say the legal action was inspired by the campaign to prosecute Augusto Pinochet. The US backed former dictator was indicted for torture by a court in Senegal, where he has lived in luxurious exile since his overthrow in 1990.

 

 

Tuesday 28th November 2000 (Summary by David Chapkin and Sophia Mahmud)

FT: Peru/Debt: Peru's newly appointed economy minister, Javier Silva, warned the country's creditors that it lacks the cash to meet the $2.1bn bill needed to service its foreign debts in 2001. To raise that amount of money, Peru “would have to make an economic adjustment that would be intolerable for ordinary Peruvians, many of whom live below the poverty line.” Mr Silva has pledged that Peru would change the “profile” of some of its $19bn of debt (which constitutes 35% of GDP of which $8.4bn is owed to the Paris Club, $5.6bn to multilateral organisations and $3.9bn to commercial banks) so as to meet its obligations “rigorously”. Colombia: Colombia is to privatise one third of its nationally owned electricity company ISA to meet the deficit targets agreed with the IMF. The offer price of 1,000 pesos is less than half the book value of the shares with individual buyers being offered a further 15% discount. There will also be a guaranteed dividend payment to new shareholders over the next two year. Left-wing guerrillas opposed to the electricity privatisation have frequently blown up power lines, causing huge ruptures in the national power grid. Africa/Trade: The editiorial “Help Africa help itself” suggests that donors can help make African investments pay, not least by ensuring wider access to their markets for agricultural products. Farm subsidies in member countries of the OECD currently total some $300bn, equal to Africa's entire GDP. Mexico/NAFTA: A dispute-settlement panel under NAFTA is expected to rule soon that the US must open its borders freely to Mexican commercial trucks. Under pressure from the powerful Teamsters union which represents US truckers, the US have refused to open its border to Mexican trucks. Botswana/Diamonds: De Beers, which has now ceased trying to control the world diamond market, has renewed its sales agreement with Botswana, the world's largest diamond producer. Half of Botswana's diamond production is owned by De Beers which accounts for nearly 90% of the country's exports.

Guardian: Jubilee 2000: (yesterday's paper) In dismay at the failure of the Climate Summit talks in the Hague, Madeleine Bunting in her article “The hot air balloon” suggests that what's now need is the kind of global protest movement which Jublilee 2000 developed over debt relief. “That movement spawned a mass economics lesson on the global finance system, so now we can start on another bit of the curriculum: geography. Human Rights: The US is to tell a UN conference that it will only sign the treaty to create an international criminal court if it was given guarantees that no American would ever be put on trial before it. Initially, Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, opposed the US position but human rights activists claim that the UK has tried to block an effort by the EU to take a firm common stand this week against continuing US demands for exemption. Nigeria: At the weekend, a harsher, compulsory set of sharia laws was imposed in Kano, the most populous and wealthiest state in northern Nigeria at the behest of the people in the street as opposed to the religious or polical establishment. “It is the one issue that has united people in northern Nigeria...which is [due] partly to rebelling against a non-functioning system.”

The Times: An Indian cease-fire in the divided Himalayan state of Kashmir, to coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, began last night. It is the latest in a series of initiatives by governments, Kashmir politicians and militant separatists to seize the moral high ground.

Wall Street Journal: World Poverty: Bill Clinton this month signed a foreign-aid spending bill that contains $30m to promote biotechnology overseas which Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, who sought the money, said “will help liberate millions the world over from the tyranny of hunger and malnutrition.” Mr Bond's state is home to several biotechnology firms, in particular, Monsanto, who in their campaign “to fight hunger” has developed “golden rice” engineered to elevate levels of vitamin A. Environment: As expected the Journal in its op-ed by Richard Minter “The Case against Green Things” has come down in favour of carbon sinks and emissions trading measures. And in an apology for global warming has stated that there is “ample scientific evidence that the Earth has enjoyed much higher levels of carbon dioxide than we have now, without suffering catastrophe.”

 

 

Monday 27^th November 2000 (Summary by David Chapkin and Sophia Mahmud)

Guardian: Jubilee 2000: Larry Elliott in his article “Candle lit for debt relief's unfinished business” gives a good overview of the current state of the debt issue and what Jubilee 2000 has achieved. Elliott states that there has been certain limited success e.g. Uganda, Bolivia and Mozambique, but the admitted goal of wiping out the unpayable debts of the world's poorest countries has not been achieved. The article mentions that the campaign will continue through `Jubilee's offspring' Drop the Debt which will aim to put pressure on the G8 summit in Genoa next year. The article highlights the case of Zambia who will end up paying more to creditors next year, even after receiving HIPC relief, than it does this year although he warns that front-end loaded debt relief to cover the extra payments will merely forestall repayment and thus give the country only the scantiest hopes that it will be able to use the short breathing space to turn round its moribund economy. Nonetheless, he sees some improvement in the debtor countries with the likes of Uganda, that corruption can be rooted out. He also lays some of the fault for the state of these countries at the door of the donor countries and the IMF and World Bank for their imposition of user fees for education and health care along with their unbending insistence on `fiscal retrenchment'. But he concludes that at some point, there will be a call for a third HIPC initiative, then a fourth, before eventually the inevitable will happen and all the unpayable debts will be written off. Environment/The Climate Summit: It was felt by Europe and most of the developing world according to Paul Brown's article that the collapse of the summit over the weekend was due to the unacceptable demands made by the US to create loopholes in the treaty. Tony Juniper, campaign director of Friends of the Earth said: “Since the US has taken no domestic action to combat climate change, there is nothing to lose by excluding them altogether.” Nonetheless, everyone accepts that cutting the huge US pollution tally is vital. If the US did not eventually sign up to the treaty, it would be banned from international trading on carbon credits, from technology transfer trading deals with developing world and from the new technologies to deal with global warming that would be developed in Europe and Japan, not in the US. A number of calls were already going out on the internet to boycott US goods. Sugar: An effort by Pascal Lamy, the EC's trade commissioner to scrap tariffs into the EU for the 48 least-developed nations was in danger of being killed off by Europe's powerful multinational sugar firms and forces of protectionism across the continent, according to Clare Short. Mozambique, a competitive sugar producer presently has no access to the EU sugar market. Oil: Although oil prices were beyond the upper limit of the cartel's target, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said OPEC should wait before increasing production. He claimed that current prices did not reflect low supplies but instead were the result of speculation and the inability of refineries to produce enough for the market. Bangladesh: A fire in a garment factory killed at least 45 people, most of them in the stampede to flee the four-storey building. Most of the dead were women and children.

FT: Africa: Spearheaded by Thabo Mbeki, African leaders were reported to be preparing a “Millenium Africa Recovery Plan” to promote development and stability in Africa. The plan will aim to co-ordinate the various efforts to assist fragile African economies, primarily in the areas of debt relief which has been “too slow and miserly”, foreign investment promotion, trade concessions and further flows of foreign aid. Peru: Valentin Paniagua, Peru's interim president, has fired a dozen generals in an attempt to purge the armed forces of the influence of Vladimiro Montesinos, the former head of the secret services. Mr Paniagua also appointed Javier Silva who was Peru's representative to the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank as finance minister. Food: (Saturday's paper) Basmati rice has been patented by a US company - just another example of western companies attempting to strip the poor of their natural inheritance.

IHT: El Salvador: The US Treasury Department and the IMF yesterday welcomed El Salvador's decision to adopt the US dollar as its currency. Although some economists say dollarisation enhances fanancial stability, eliminates ineffective policies of local bankers and helps attract investment (by allowing capital flight without risk of foreign exchange loss), critics felt it merely turned over an important macroeconomic management tool to the US Federal Reserve Board whose concern was limited to what was considered best for the US economy. Japan: (Saturday's paper) In Japan, a recalculation using newer international standards showed the economy grew 1.4% last year, nearly three times the 0.5% announced previously, the government said on Friday. Asia: Asia's economies have performed a sort of levitating act, growing by double digit rates month after month even as economists predict they will fall to earth. However, the IMF warns that oil prices and political unrest pose serious threats. Bank Ltd. Found that East Asia's economic centre of gravity has shifted markedly toward the Northeast Asian economies of China South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and away from Southeast Asia's previously dynamic economies since the Financial crisis struck the region in 1997. Globalisation: It has been difficult for economic organisations to hold international meetings without attracting large crowds of protesters railing against globalisation, as evidenced by clashes over the last year in Seattle, Washington and Prague.

Voice: Haiti: All of Haiti's main opposition parties have boycotted the November elections raising accusations amidst violence, allegations of unfairness and voter apathy that the election, which will almost certainly vote in Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president, will lack legitimacy.