Dispatches

The real dark side

I wanted to write a short story about “Almayer's Folly”. Conrad's book and René Magritte's painting. But I got overwhelmed by all the “cultural” connections and coincidences that seemed to lead back to the disillusions of life. So I decided to drop it. It sounded too forced: the narcissism of the shadows. I have set it all to one side for now.
Then I read something that made me understand that, often, the real mistake lies in relating everything to ourselves. Like looking at your finger while pointing at the moon. The real shadows are the hidden crimes around us. The dark matter.
What I read was the Global Slavery Index 2013. Produced by the Walk Free Foundation (WFF), it analyses the global situation of modern slavery. This includes slavery, slavery-like practices (such as debt bondage, forced marriage and sale or exploitation of children), human trafficking and forced labour, and other practices.
Thirty million people live under these conditions in the world today. Most are in Africa and Asia. The highest number is in the two countries that should represent the planet's future: India and China.
From this perspective, Magritte's painting becomes a kind of symbol.
almayer-s-folly-1951(1).jpg!Blog

To download the report click here
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The rules of catastrophe

The risk of conflict in the South China Sea is increasing exponentially by the hour. Not a global but a local conflict. Or rather, glocal, a global conflict played out locally. Between the Philippines and China, for example, as the latest episodes indicate. It may end rapidly or else unfold into something else.
In the meantime, a body of analysis stating everything and the opposite of everything is building around this scenario. Of these, one worthy of mention is the report by Bonnie S. Glaser, from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Pasted Graphic
Full Text of Memorandum (with permission from the Council on Foreign Relations).
Robert D. Kaplan’s article, America's Pacific Logic, is also interesting.
In fact, more than providing an understanding of what is really going on, these pieces are useful for getting an idea of how our world is governed by new laws of complexity, which can increasingly be represented as a chaotic system. And from this perspective it’s wise to remember that the chaos theory can also be defined as the catastrophe theory.
In the meantime, we wait for the butterfly to flap its wings and trigger a ripple across the China Sea that could turn into a global tsunami.
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Poop

Funny, interesting or just plain unpleasant? Take a look at these drawings and statistics. They were created for the World Toilet Organization, which aims to improve water quality for the planet’s poorest people. Those who, literally, live in poop.
These are the projects that make real, concrete and actual sense. Much more than all that rambling about globalisation or loss of cultural identity that we hear repeated too often. For many, cultural identity also means a lack of sanitation, disease and death.
Lack of Sanitation
Created by: OnlineNursingPrograms.com
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The Greatest Game

The setting for a new, much broader and complex version of The Great Game is the China Sea. The term Great Game – reused in a recent book by Peter Hopkirk – referred originally to the drawn-out conflict, involving mainly diplomacy and secret services, which pitched Great Britain against Russia in Central Asia in the XIX century.
The current game is much larger: 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean, which many analysts have called the theatre, real or virtual, of the third world war. The main players are China and the United States, with the varying participation of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, as well as Japan, Taiwan and Korea. The stakes could not be higher: strategic control of the area, its mineral resources and communication routes. Those waters are criss-crossed by the so-called Sea Lines of Communication, on which Beijing depends for its supplies of crude oil and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East.
For complexity and number of players alone, this situation is more appropriately dubbed not The Great Game but rather the name the Russians used: the Tournament of Shadows.
P1030052b

A multitude of news reports, novels, essays and strategic treatises have been written on the subject. One of the most recent is Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy, by James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara.
But one of the most interesting documents, even in its apparent simplicity, is the article published in the US Naval War College Review by Andrew Erickson, Abraham Denmark and Gabriel Collins: Beijing’s ‘Starter Carrier’ and Future Steps: Alternatives and Implications.

Andrew Erickson, who originally published it on his website, has kindly agreed to my including the first part (and the map shown here) in this post.
mappa

"At 5:40 AM local time on Wednesday, 10 August 2011, more than eighty years after the idea was originally proposed, China’s first carrier disappeared into the fog under tight security from Dalian harbor’s Xianglujiao Port, in northeast Liaoning Province, to begin sea trials in the Bohai and northern Yellow Seas. This was yet another coming-out party for China as a great power on the rise. Upon its launch, the nation burst with patriotic pride over the achievement.
Major General Luo Yuan, deputy secretary-general of the China Society of Military Sciences, declared, “Well begun is half done. . . . [T]he effect of having something is completely different from the effect of having nothing.”
Plans are under way to commemorate this new era of Chinese sea power, and to boost the economy further in the process. Tianjin, one of the country’s four municipalities, plans to do its part in October 2011 by opening China’s first aircraft carrier–themed hotel, based on Kiev, once the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s flagship and now the centerpiece of the
Tianjin Binhai Aircraft Carrier Theme Park. A Chinese flagship as capable as Kiev once was remains far away, but Beijing has taken the first step and is already reaping added influence at home and abroad.
Before foreign strategists start hyperventilating about the “beginning of the end,” however, a deep breath is needed. China’s initial carrier foray followed a six-year refit and lasted only four days. China’s starter carrier—a vessel originally purchased incomplete from Ukraine in 1998—is of very limited military utility; it will serve primarily to confer prestige on a rising great power, help the Chinese military master basic procedures of naval airpower, and project a bit of military power—perhaps especially against the smaller neighbors on the periphery of the South China Sea. This is not the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.
To realize its ambitions for the future, China had to start somewhere. Late in 2010, Admiral Liu Huaqing, the father of China’s modern navy, passed away. Liu had sought to build China’s navy first into a “green water” force and thereafter, eventually, into a “blue water” navy capable of projecting power regionally, though not globally. He insisted that he was not China’s
Alfred Thayer Mahan, but his concept of “Near Seas defense” was roughly comparable to Mahan’s views on U.S. naval strategic requirements (i.e., dominance of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Panama, and Hawaii). The key to the realization of Liu’s vision was an aircraft carrier, and Liu reportedly vowed in 1987, “I will not die with my eyes closed if I do not see a Chinese aircraft carrier in front of me.” Admiral
Liu’s eyes can close now.
Much of the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the Asia-watching strategic community in the United States, is hotly debating the implications of Chinese aircraftcarrier development. Admiral Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, said in April 2011 that he was “not concerned” about China’s first carrier going to sea, but allowed, “Based on the feedback that we received from our partners and allies in the Pacific, I think the change in perception by the region will be significant.” Australian brigadier general John Frewen contends, “The unintended consequences of Chinese carriers pose the greatest threat to regional harmony in the decades ahead.” Former director of Defense Intelligence Headquarters in the Japan Defense Agency Admiral Fumio Ota, JMSDF (Ret.), asserts, “The trials of China’s first aircraft carrier . . . mark the beginning of a major transition in naval doctrine. . . . Aircraft carriers will provide Beijing with tremendous capabilities and flexibility. . . . [A] Chinese carrier could pose a serious threat to Japanese territorial integrity. . . . China’s new aircraft carrier increases its tactical abilities and the chances of a strategic overreach. Other countries in the region should be
worried.”
Yet while the Asia-Pacific region is hotly debating the implications of China’s aircraft carrier, there should be little surprise that a Chinese aircraft carrier has finally set sail. Indeed, what is most surprising about China’s aircraft carrier program is that it took this long to come to fruition. Given the discussions about an aircraft carrier that have percolated in China’s strategic community for decades, it should have been clear to the entire region that this was a long time coming.


Update: a few days ago the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, announced that Chinese naval personnel must “intensify preparations for warfare”. In other translations the word “warfare” is replaced by “combat” or “military struggle”. These words are directed against anyone who threatens the national sovereignty of the China Sea.
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The Banality of Evil

Old, ugly and bad. That’s how I describe the four defendants in the second trial of the Extraordinary Chambers set up by the UN at the Cambodian Tribunals to pass judgement on the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
They are the surviving leaders of the Angkar, “the organisation” that between 1975 and 1979 turned Cambodia into hell on earth. In “those 3 years, 8 months and 20 days”, as that period is defined, roughly two million people died in Cambodia, either from starvation or exhaustion, or directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. About three million were forced to leave the cities to work in the fields. Tens of thousands simply disappeared into death camps.
These old men are: Khieu Samphan, 79, still the official head of the Democratic Kampuchea; Nuon Chea, 84, Khmer Rouge’s ideologist; Ieng Sary, 85, the foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, 79, the social affairs minister.
The list of charges they face is chilling: crimes against humanity, genocide, execution, slavery, deportation, racial and religious persecution, torture…as well as “other inhumane acts”.
All have entered not guilty pleas. Sary, because he was granted a pardon by King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996. Samphan and Thirith, because they affirm that in their position they were not able to properly understand what was happening. Nuon Chea is mounting a defence on the basis that you cannot judge those events outside of their historical context: American bombings, threats from Vietnam. Also known as “Brother Number Two”, he maintains “I was pursuing the dream of an egalitarian agricultural society. It is the Empire that should stand accused, not me”. In pursuit of that dream, Sary admitted, although in secret, that the Khmer Rouge aimed to cut the Cambodian population from 7 million to 1, to attain perfect equilibrium. That was the theory worked out years earlier by Khieu Samphan. That dream came about in the project hatched by Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot, or “Brother Number One” of the Khmer Rouge: an extreme hybrid of Marxism, Maoism and archaic ultra-nationalism. “Individual rights were not sacrificed for the common good; they were simply abolished. All expression of human individuality was condemned. Individual conscience was systematically demolished”, writes historian Philip Short in his book Pol Pot.
The preliminary hearings were held last week, but the trial will only begin in earnest in a few months’ time and may go on for years: there are almost 4000 plaintiffs and legal processes amount to over 450,000 pages. In this trial old age is an advantage: it doesn’t absolve you, but it may get you off serving the sentence.
One man who will perhaps outlive his sentence is the man found guilty at the first trial of the Extraordinary Chambers of Cambodia, which concluded last year. Kaing Guek Eav, 68, known as “Comrade Duch”, was first deputy and then director of Tuol Sleng, the prison and interrogation centre of S-21, the Angkar security service. Twelve thousand three hundred and eighty people were imprisoned there. Fifteen survived. Duch was sentenced to 35 years, subsequently reduced to 19.
I saw him in the flesh during the trial. I observed him to see if he had the tell-tale signs of moral yellowness (in italian only, sorry), a sign of evil. I didn’t spot anything, or only in my imagination. Now I continue to look at the photos and videos of these four old men. In the end, they don’t look all that ugly, they don’t seem to give off any malign vibrations. But I am beginning to understand the meaning of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil". The German philosopher claimed that evil meted out in the name of politics is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself. There are no laws in history or in nature that can justify it. It nourishes itself like a cancer. That’s the best response, if any were needed, to Nuon Chea’s “defence”.
“Totalitarian regimes have discovered, without knowing it, that there are crimes that men can neither punish nor pardon. When the impossible has been made possible, it has become absolute evil, unpunishable and unforgivable", wrote Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. However, unpunishable does not mean that it must not be punished; rather that no worthy punishment exists.

A video of the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor. It features the reactions of citizens to a proposal to release the defendants on bail ahead of sentencing. Watch it: it is an exercise in human nature. At the beginning you can see those four old men and judge them for yourself. Signs of evil can be seen, as well as many of indifference or stupidity. There is also a nice old man who, in my view, stands on the side of the Good.

Cambodian Citizens React to ECCC Hearing on Application for Release of Indicted Khmer Rouge Officials from Cambodia Tribunal Monitor on Vimeo.


For details and updates on the trial, click here and here.
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If you’re a father

The UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, has issued the World Drug Report 2011.
The global situation is largely stable: “opiates on a downward trend, increases in the use of cocaine and synthetic drugs” it writes, just like a financial statement.
South East Asia is bucking the trend, however. In Burma opium growing and production have risen (580 metric tonnes in 2010).
“A toxic mix of problems” is how Gary Lewis, UNODC representative for East Asia and the Pacific, puts it. “In Myanmar many people live in a war zone. The problem is getting money. Either to survive or to fight...The situation with food shortages in the Shan states is terrible. If you’re a father you do what you can for your family".
Aside from any consideration about the results and the efficacy of the UN agencies, men like him provide some hope. Because they don’t speak in abstract terms, they don’t judge; they try to act. In spite of everything. “We can’t talk of eradication”, he said, referring both to plantations and to the issue in general. “We are trying to work towards containment”. That’s a lesson in reality and in moral honesty.
WDR11_Posters_Main-drugs_thumbnail(Click here to download the summary of the report)



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Cities of the Apocalypse

Traumatized cities, blighted by war, terrorism, demolished and bombed out buildings, tsunamis, tornados, typhoons, earthquakes, and floods feature increasingly often in our daily news. These urban spaces bear the marks and scars of the disasters that have befallen them. How can the effects of trauma be understood in urban terms? What can architecture do for a planet at war with itself? A new book analyses the consequences of trauma on cities, communities and cultures. Post-Traumatic Urbanism – published in the Profiles series of Architectural Design Magazine by the University of Technology Sydney, and edited by Adrian Lahoud, Charles Rice and Anthony Burke – explores the response of architects and urban planners to these catastrophic events.
post traumatic book cover
As essential as the emergency operations and reconstruction are, architects must have a more in-depth understanding of the effects of trauma on cities and their inhabitants. Should they restore and retrieve what has been lost or should they see post-traumatic cities as a blank slate from which a new city can emerge?
Post-trauma is no longer the exception to the rule. It is the way of the world today.

In the Stories section you will find an excerpt from the introduction by Adrian Lahoud, architect, urban planner and researcher. It’s a brief, complex and abstract text. But it is from this cool and clinical distance that the aftermath of trauma can be seen more clearly. The assumption being that observation implies a consequent action.
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This is not a film

“This is not a film, it is reality”, says Burmese monk Ashin Sopaka. It’s true that, to us, what happens in Burma is too often seen as a film or TV news.
That reality is now revealed in a short documentary made by the Burma Partnership in collaboration with Kestrel Media. Entitled “This is Not Democracy”, it explains why the Burmese people do not believe that the upcoming elections are a first step towards democracy, but rather a way to reinforce the military regime under a civilian facade. In addition to the accounts given by Ashin Sopaka, the documentary also features interviews with Naw Htoo Paw of the Karen Women’s Organization and U Win Hlaing of the National League for Democracy.
There is much to see and hear, including many disturbing scenes. Especially if we remember that this is not just a film. It is reality.

Burma's 2010 Election: This is NOT Democracy from Kestrel Media on Vimeo.

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The Toilet Man

“I’m interested in the bottom of humanity, in human waste”, laughs Jack. But he isn't joking, he means every word. Jack Sim, nicknamed The Toilet Man, is the founder of the World Toilet Organisation, a non-profit organisation focused on the technologies, development, design and everything else required to provide sanitation facilities where they are insufficient or non-existent. “Often the most difficult thing is overcoming the taboo surrounding this issue”, says Jack. “I usually manage it by saying ‘Would you want other people to see your mother, your wife or your daughter while she's on the toilet?'".
Jack Sim
Jack Sim was one of the main speakers at a conference held in Singapore organised by the think-tank Qi, where new social, cultural and economic eco-systems were studied. All of which are sustainable, environmentally friendly and fair-trade. Some of the most creative intellectuals now working in Asia took part in the conference. But Jack’s presentation was one of the most fun, interesting and, above all, informative in the programme. Perhaps because the toilet is a taboo and embarrassing subject to us too. Perhaps because we can’t imagine what it would be like to live without a bathroom. No shower, washbasin or bath tub. No toilet. But this is what hundreds of millions of people living in the slums and rural areas of under-developed or developing countries put up with. Many of these make up what economists succinctly call the BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid). They are the largest and poorest socio-economic group on the planet. Around 2 and a half billion human beings (according to optimistic estimates) living on less than 2 dollars 50 a day.
Of course, the Qi Global conference presented a number of projects tackling poverty, from IIX Asia (Impact Investment Exchange Asia), a grant raising capital for businesses with social objectives, to rubanisation, i.e. the creation of a new way of living in rural cities, called rubans, which are self-sufficient settlements where individuals, the family and society are integrated, the villages of the next century, where community values are recreated.
In the same vein as these projects, the latest report by Unctad (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) alleges that ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can be a formula for producing wealth in countries with poor schooling and economies (click here to download the full report). If we put together rubans and ICT, for example, we can foresee delocalized micro-enterprises using the Internet to generate business.
Before all of that, though, living conditions have to improve. Perhaps with the help of Jack, The Toilet Man.
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The bowl is empty

Many see the bowl as full, even overflowing. A kind of magical chalice from which new treasures will spring. This according to financial analysts studying the emerging markets, the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and beyond, to Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.
To the layman their analyses sound as esoteric as they do reliable. The Asian bowl seems to be a source of extraordinary wealth. It’s a shame that, in most cases, geopolitics is not taken into account, often passed off with a quick reference to the risk of instability and corruption. In a recent article entitled The Last Great Hope, The Economist warns that emerging markets may turn out to be the next economic bubble.
But they are not looking at the big picture. The anthropological view is entirely missing. “The image we have of China and of many other countries is that brought back by managing directors and politicians who fly to Shanghai and Beijing and don’t realise what the deeper reality is”, says professor Gordon Mathews of the department of anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The same cultural dystonia is also seen in political analysis. Take the upcoming Burmese elections, for example. According to Human Rights Watch researcher, David Mathieson, “In the EU there is a strange perception that elections are a real step towards democracy”. This has happened because
''EU bureaucrats prefer going to Rangoon to consult with urbane, emerging political elites, and then marginalise and ignore ethnic communities along the borders because it’s too uncomfortable, complex, and 'old hat'.''
This calls for a revolution on the scale of the indetermination principle and the incompleteness theorem, which destroyed our scientific certainties. In a certain sense this is what risk engineering Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb has done in his book The Black Swan. According to Taleb, we act as if we were able to foresee events, we continue to concentrate on what is known. Instead, the world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown and the very unlikely: The Black Swan.
New global analyses, then, require a higher, more subtle vision that can encompass economic, political and philosophical models. A sort of meta-analysis. This idea was taken up a few years ago by Pietro Citati in his book Le scintille di Dio (The Sparks of God): “Once, wise politicians were accompanied by theology experts or were themselves theology experts. Now theology is despised or practised by no-hopers. For the good of the universe, it’s to be hoped it re-emerges as soon as possible”.
If that should happen, if metaphysics became an evaluation tool, we would realise that, more often than not, the bowl is empty.
It is for the billion or so people suffering from chronic hunger, two thirds of which are in Asia. This is stated in a report by the Asia Society in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute: Never an Empty Bowl.
Other research presented by the Asia Society and carried out by Doctors Without Borders documents the plight of 195 million children suffering from malnutrition. The Terrifying Normalcy video made by documentary maker Ron Haviv presents their tragic circumstances in Bangladesh.

Of course, this is Bangladesh, a country that no analyst would dare to define as an emerging economy (at least not yet). But scenes of this kind, and often worse ones, are common throughout the region. If only you could venture out of that skyscraper in the financial district and go to the surrounding countryside and villages, or even the slums often found at the feet of these skyscrapers.
Sze Ma Chien, the Chinese historian from the 1st century BC, wrote: “The world rushes where money calls. The world flocks to where earnings are highest”.
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The spider’s web

Once upon a time there were the Drug-Lords of the Shan states, a Burmese territory wedged between Thailand, Laos and China, where the land favours opium cultivation. Some of them, such as Khun Sa, took on almost epic proportions. They were characters with shadowy hearts. They often set themselves up as champions of an ethnic cause. They justified their drug trafficking with the need to finance an army to defend their people from attack from the Burmese army. Then tribal rivalries took hold among the various groups competing for control of the market in opium, heroin and ya baa, the so-called madness drug, a terrible methamphetamine that inundated Asia and boosted its development, enabling men to work as hard as a horse (the original name, ya ma, literally meant horse drug, implying extraordinary power). The Burmese saw their chance, and in perfect “divide and rule” style, proposed a truce to the groups. Many accepted, thinking they could concentrate on more direct adversaries and increase their profits from drugs. As did the ex-headhunters Wa (of Chinese origin), sworn enemies of the Shan (of Thai ethnicity), who, according to a CIA report, became the largest army of drug producers and distributors in the world. But then the Burmese government raised the stakes, asking the militias who had accepted the truce to join the Border Guard Force, which reports directly to the national army. When they refused, attacks against rebel states resumed with even greater violence, the justification being that the state was fighting the war on drugs. “We are fighting for you (westerners). Drugs are not a problem for us”, declared Colonel Hla Min, spokesperson for the SPDC (the State Peace and Development Council, the official name of the organism with which the Burmese military regime governs).
A report by the Shan press agency states that, on the contrary, the aim of this move is not to fight the production and trafficking of drugs, but to try to replace who is controlling them. Taking advantage of the pressure exerted on ethnic groups, the junta has set up local militias (as many as 400 in northern Shan states alone). The militias share the drug profits with the military and help them in the fight against armed ethnic groups. In exchange they are given protection, impunity and business subsidies. Many of their commanders are even standing in the upcoming elections for the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which is being used by the junta to create a new democratic image for itself. They have been dubbed “politically correct drug-lords”.
The story told in the Shan Drug Watch report is only the latest thread of an infinite web woven by spiders of all kinds: tribal groups, communist and anti-communist guerrillas, CIA, mafia, former Kuomintang militants, the Chinese nationalist party, and ethnic separatists. It’s a web that has actually been thousands of years in the making. If it weren’t for the tragedy of victims around the world, it may even be a fascinating story. Leading expert on drug trafficking, Pierre Arnaud-Chouvy, of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique, told the story in his book entitled Opium.
Today the spider is the Burmese army: through local militias it attempts to control the national territory and, as drug use rises among young people in ethnic separatist groups, operate a subtle form of genocide. But perhaps, in the light of the story told in Opium, in which opium is almost an alchemic element that eludes anyone who wishes to control it, even future Burmese governors will also fall into the same web.

Click here to see the Shan Drug Watch report
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I Saw It with My Own Eyes

“The first thing I saw was a lot of soldiers and police officers beating the crowd with electric batons and then arresting demonstrators and loading them onto trucks”.
“I saw that they were firing straight at people”.
“I saw up to 30 people crowded into 30-40 square foot cells. There was no space to sit down so detainees had to stand most of the day and night. The cells had no toilets but prisoners were not taken out and had to relieve themselves inside the cell. They were given one bowl of rice congee a day. Many were subjected to beatings”.
These excerpts were taken from three of the 203 eyewitness statements recounting the abuse inflicted by Chinese security forces and paramilitary groups (all belonging to the Han ethnic group) during protests staged in Tibet in 2008 and over the last two years.
Independent organisation Human Rights Watch has compiled these statements in a report denouncing acts of violence inflicted on the women, children, monks and nuns who assembled in Lhasa in March 2008 and which very few people know about. According to its authors “the human rights violations that took place were much more severe than anyone might have imagined.” The report also states that “dissenters and their families are still going missing and continue to be the victims of violence, imprisonment and persecution.”

Click here to download the full report
tibet0710
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Aspirasians

A street kid from Mumbai who escapes the reformatory and rescues a child from a vicious dog. He then begins a search for the boy’s mother. The problems faced by a young Japanese divorcee who returns to her hometown with her daughter. The lives of three Beijing taxi drivers, between memories of the Cultural Revolution and aspirations of entrepreneurial success. The strange journey of a Palestinian man who washes dishes in a Japanese restaurant while attempting to become a sumo wrestler. The tale of how music and dance can help a group of Filipinos address anger issues. These are the protagonists and stories of the films presented in Hong Kong at the latest edition of the Asia Society Summer Film Series. These are the stories of the Aspirasians, of those attempting to enter or living on the margins of the new Asia, which is widely expected to control the future of our planet. In order to do that, however, it will first have to deal with hundreds of millions of people such as these.
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Drug use on the rise

Drug use in the richest countries of the world is stable, but is on the up in developing countries, where methamphetamine is increasingly widespread. This from the 2010 World Drug Report, produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The standout factor that emerges from the report is that the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs are now almost indistinguishable, in both marketing and financial terms, from those of other basic commodities. Drugs seem to be becoming a metaphor for the global market.
The other factor is the rise in the use of methamphetamine in developing countries. Speak to a taxi driver in Jakarta, a bricklayer in Shanghai or a factory worker in the textile factories all over Asia and they will tell you exactly why: stimulants are crucial to sustaining heavy workloads.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:14.6MB) .
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The Wretched of the Earth

The U.S. Department of State has published the 2010 report on human trafficking.
According to the report, 12.3 million men, women and children around the world are forced into work or prostitution, with the traffickers earning up to 32 thousand million dollars per year. In some cases the victims are literally kidnapped or reduced to slavery. In the majority of cases they are forced to sell themselves to escape ethnic persecution, war and subhuman living conditions.
All of this means that that initial figure could be increased ten-fold to give a more realistic idea of the numbers of people that are The Wretched of the Earth.
Click here to download the full report (PDF:22MB).



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