(Photo: Etica e Coragem/Ethics and Courage, Cf.)

As I finish up my work in Manaus and thereabouts, some last thoughts on current flashpoints of conflict, the resolution of which may point the way to the Amazon’s future—for better or worse.

In an area this vast, there, of course, are many disputes simmering at once: the drug-running that bedevils badly-policed border areas, ensnaring indigenous people into their economies, such as at the tri-border frontier (Brazil-Colombia-Peru) around Tabatinga in the west; the soy distribution terminal built by multinational Cargill in Santarém that environmentalists argue will induce even greater destruction in the state of Para as more rainforest is cleared in favour of soy plantations (Greenpeace has pursued an injunction to halt operations at the terminal).

But the two that were most talked about during my stay were the ongoing legal battle to recognize a demarcated territory for the indigenous people at Raposa Serra do Sol in Roraima, adjacent to the border with Venezuela, and the rehabilitation of an old highway project that would connect Manaus with the rest of the country.

Raposa Serra do Sol was declared an indigenous reserve by former president Henrique Cardoso in 1998, but the necessary legislation wasn’t signed into law until Lula did so in 2005. The demarcation would force several major rice growing operations to leave the territory, but they’ve fought tooth and nail to resist their eviction despite provisions of compensation. There have been some violent episodes over the years between the politically-connected agri-businesses and Indians; while a Supreme Court challenge on behalf of the farmers was in the works, the general who commands the Brazilian army unit in Amazonia attacked the government’s Indian policy, suggesting he would refuse to order his troops remove the farmers if required to do so.

A couple weeks ago the Supreme Court upheld the demarcation and the farmers have run out of legal options. Many feared further violence, but according to one source who was just in the area, the plantation owners appear to be backing down; they’re negotiating with Indian leaders for an additional month to shut operations, and in some instances selling their equipment locally.

If the situation does wind down peacefully, it could be landmark moment. Brazil has a habit of passing laws and constitutional resolutions it has little ability, or sometimes enthusiasm, to enforce. Paulo Adario, director of the Greenpeace office in Manaus, joked to me that, “Brazil loves to have the biggest constitution in the world, but when it comes to enforcement or enactment there is no one to fucking do it.” There are several tribes awaiting resolution of demarcation disputes and the redistribution of land they invariably require. The Supreme Court ruling may finally bring some nascent semblance of law and order, and respect for Indian land claims, to the region.

The other development, the highway project, actually brought Lula to Manaus while I was there. The capital of Amazonas state is presently connected to the rest of the country only by river or air. In the 1970s the military government embarked on a series of grand highway building projects in Amazonia, among them the BR-319 linking Manaus with Porto Velho, about 800 kilometres to the south (from Porto Velho you can drive to Cuiabá, Brasilia and the rest of southern Brazil). But the highway was little used and the forest, as is its want, eventually took it back.

Most regular people in Manaus I surveyed were unreservedly in favour of the road, arguing it would make it easier for them to visit family in the south and leverage more development in the area. Adario at Greenpeace, along with other environmentalists, insist the road would have marginal economic impact (a point backed up by several studies) while opening up what remains one of Amazonia’s last pristine quadrants to logging and ranching. Of the six states considered part of the larger Amazon basin, Amazonas is the least deforested at about 3 percent (Para is as much as forty percent deforested according to some estimates). Adario points to Para state and the highway that runs south from Sanatarem to Cuiabá. On either side of that highway, for fifteen miles inland, the forest is mostly gone. He expects the same to happen should the BR-319 get the go-ahead.

Halting the BR-319 may be a losing battle. There’s a lot of popular support, and the revitalization of the highway is a pet project of Lula’s Minister of Transportation, who is from here and has ambitions to run for governor of Amazonas. Making the road happen would give him something to campaign on.

If there’s one thing I’ll miss about Manaus and Amazônia, it’s the fish—the best fresh water peixe I’ve enjoyed anywhere. Generally fatty but not rich, served lightly fried with little fuss with or sauces (a little lime or hot sauce suffices), they come in tastily exotic names like pirarucu, tambaqui, filhote. My favourite joint was a stall run by two busy ladies at the docks across from the wholesale food distribution market. Shipmen and dockworkers bench themselves here for overflowing plates of pirarucu, rice and beans, and salsa for about 5 Reais a pop ($3 CAD). I went almost everyday, sometimes treated by locals to bottles of guarana (a local fizzy pop derived from a berry with caffeine-like properties) just for showing up.

More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and in the case of France’s coddling of psychopathic tyrants, some very rotten fruit—why not grant the Chinese some goodwill as they expand Africa’s meek infrastructure and industrial capacity. Yes, China is presently helping shield and support genocidal leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. But these are early days yet. And no other power seems as willing or able to step up to the task as China is.

The comments echoed what I heard from many African activists at a conference on mining, environment and society in Accra last summer. They’d already witnessed enough of the bad from Western governments and corporations. China was Africa’s second opportunity. They were not blind to China’s abuses and put little stock in its rhetoric of developing nation brotherhood. But they liked some of what they heard so far about agreements China had signed with Zambia and Angola. China doesn’t impose conditionalities like the IMF. Meanwhile, it’s committing staggering amounts of money to build much needed roads and facilities. And there is also the sense that Africa can learn from China’s own economic take-off.

The success of these investments will depend on how well African governments do their job. How proactive they are at defending their own citizens’ interests, rather than their own bank accounts or China’s investments. They will need to demonstrate foresight, technocratic competence and savvy when negotiating deals. It’s questionable whether many governments on the continent have the capacity or honesty to do so.

On this, Howard French, the former New York Times bureau in both Africa and China, had an interesting proposal. He recounted a recent meeting with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and until January was a Director at Citigroup. Rubin, who is now “hiding out” at the Council on Foreign Relations, asked French what he thought was the most effective/least costly thing the U.S. could do for Africa.

French suggested initiatives to enhance civil society in Africa, such as university exchanges and training, anything that might equip its future leaders with the tools they need to challenge power. China tends to work government-to-government; strengthening the so called “Third Sector” in Africa is a means of creating accountability.

This, French said, is where China will likely bloody its nose eventually in Africa. When civil society in Africa challenges China to live up to its promises of development and rhetoric of brotherhood. “How will that encounter change the equation?” Will China just walk away if the engagement no longer serves its self-interest or is too troublesome? Will it play one neighbour against another for a better deal? Or will it affect an ethical component to its foreign policy?

French finished up with a potentially grim, dystopian scenario. It’s 2050. With 2 billion people, Africa’s population has doubled in 40 years and its mineral resource wealth is mostly depleted. Who knows what the impact of climate change will be then. What then if China’s efforts, this “second opportunity”, ultimately fail to help produce prosperous states?

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)

Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.

I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks laws in America, which I suppose makes it an apt place to host a symposium about China (where fireworks were invented). In 2006, the state legalized the home use of exploding firecrackers and rockets with minimal restrictions. A local newspaper complains that the new law has “turned almost every summer night into Independence Day.” I didn’t know this in advance, but figured something was up when we crossed the Michigan-Indiana state line and were welcomed by a half-dozen fireworks warehouse emporiums, and the exuberantly-phrased roadside billboards advertising their never-ending array of celebratory combustibles.

Beyond the state-line fireworks stores, the other first impression Indiana makes is that it smells like poo. There are lots of farms, at least in the flatter north end of the state.

As for the symposium: the most revealing and entertaining presentation thus far has come from Wenren Jiang, a political science professor from the University of Alberta. What sets Jiang’s research apart is that he focuses not only on the official, state-level engagements between China and African governments (often involving Chinese state-owned enterprises), but also the mostly overlooked small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs operating in Africa without state support.

Jiang’s presentation was based on research done in the Katanga region of southeastern Congo, paying particular attention to the sudden proliferation of copper smelters there 3-4 years ago, when copper was going for a handsome $9,000 US per tonne on world markets. The western media’s perception of China’s involvement in Africa, has mostly been a) skeptical, and b) focused on the state’s direct or indirect involvement. The story Jiang told was a “Wild West” scenario where independent Chinese investors went in, hastily threw together smelters, bought raw materials from freelancing locals (as opposed to establishing their own mines like Western companies in the area) and paid bribes to local bigwigs when necessary. Generally, they had little contact with Chinese officials in the country. The Chinese ambassador in Kinshasa told Jiang these dudes “only call when they’re in trouble.”

Relations between the entrepreneurs and local employees were strained. The smelters were frequently robbed, sometimes by their own staff. Safety and environmental regulations were either non-existent or unenforced. And the Chinese made little effort to understand the local culture or language. Not much after the would-be copper barons arrived, however, copper prices plummeted; first to $6,000 per tonne, and they’re now in the neighborhood of $3,000. Suffice it to say the Chinese are gone, and left little behind but unpaid wages, derelict smelter compounds, and a rising tide of crime. (But the region still has copper, plus cobalt, uranium, and diamonds—which is why some fear the resource wars currently happening in northeastern Congo, at the Ugandan frontier, could spread southward.)

Jiang’s point being that, contrary to the way we’ve framed our understanding of China’s involvement in Africa as  state managed, there’s a growing contingent of non-state, market-driven Chinese actors who are making their own deals, and in some cases, their own rules. For these players, diplomacy and south-south economic ties mean little. All that matters to them is the global market.

This article in the Asia Times by Jiang references his research around Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province.

[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child]

While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic opportunities and living standards of the third world poor. Some argue that phones will prove of greater use, as they’re easy to use and don’t require literacy, while others insist that inexpensive networked laptops will empower “collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

One of the main protagonists has been Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child project. The XO Laptop, created by OLPC, has been around for awhile now but the uptake has been disappointingly low. Evans reports why, attributing much of its failure to poor design.

My hunch, which Evans shares, is that the debate will turn out to be moot in the end, as mobile phones evolve into smarter, handheld computer devices more like the iPhone and BlackBerry. So attached are the West Africans I met to their cells, I can’t imagine them embracing laptops quite so avidly. Makes more sense they’ll simply keep up with the fast-changing mobile technology. Which is what those of us in rich countries are doing anyway.

On a related note, Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart’s in Accra posts on the potential for bottom-up, community-based open-source hardware innovation.

Technological interventions have often been held up as an almost panacea for meeting development challenges in poor countries. I have two magazine articles now nearing publication, both of them dealing with West Africa’s food security and how it’s being addressed by various competing development strategies. The material also figures in the book, especially the emergence of ’social entrepreneurship’ and the debate over our fetishization of novel, often high-tech solutions to seemingly intractable social and economic problems.

Looking to technology for dramatic fixes can be taken to costly and ill-advisedly utopian extremes, as best exemplified in the staggering array of programs prescribed by Millenium Development Goal advocates like economist Jeffrey Sachs. Technology is only part of the solution, as it cannot alone end the unfair land distribution policies, income disparity, social conflict and ethnic discrimination that are core contributors to poverty.

I’ve previously cited American economist William Easterly here, as I interviewed him for the book during a recent visit to New York. Easterly is best known for his criticism of  Sachs and celebrity-fronted campaigns such as Make Poverty History. He argues too much of what passes for development are futile top-down exercises driven not by local demand but by donors; they come with political strings attached, require too much capital and rely too heavily on foreign expertise, inputs and technology. Most importantly, the traditional aid model fails to recognize how economic growth and poverty reduction are best enabled.

Another important academic writing on the topic is 36-year-old French development economist Esther Duflo, currently a professor at MIT. Check out last week’s profile of Duflo in The Independent. Like Easterly she’s devoted her research to understanding why the trillions of dollars spent on development projects in poor countries have yielded so few demonstrable results, randomly and scrupulously testing the results of various anti-poverty iniatives.

The article reports on a speech Duflo recently gave in Paris:

“Despite billions thrown at “development”, she said, desperate poverty thrives. Two solutions are usually prescribed: give up and rely on the market; or throw in more billions. Mme Duflo believes in a “third way”: making anti-poverty programmes work better.

Instead of imposing abstract theories, she said, economists should believe in their “scientific” skills. But they should also be more “modest” and get out more. They should, she says, turn the “dismal science” into a human science, “generous” and determined to make a difference.

*

Ron Rivera, who died last August from malaria, was the rare social entrepreneur who understood the interaction of technology and social change. The Puerto-Rican born potter was living in Managua in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people and unleashed a bacterial disease in Nicaragua’s water supply. Rivera devised a clay pot that could filter out at least 98 percent of the bacteria in contaminated water, making it safe to drink. The techonology, inspired by a simple Ecuadorian terra cotta pot Rivera once encountered (the clay, when mixed with grist and moulded in a certain way, resulted in thousands of micropores) was cheap ($15 to produce a pot) and easy to duplicate. It was a bottom-up innovation.

Rivera set about establishing clay pot filter factories in Latin America, Africa and Asia that could mass-produce the purifiers locally. He refused to patent the technology, instead making it public domain by posting details of its design online. As the New York Times reports: “He often traveled in the wake of water-related disasters — following floods in Ghana or a tsunami in Sri Lanka — capitalizing on the rush of aid money to establish a locally owned enterprise that would sustain itself long after he left.”

Elements of the design community in Europe and North America have in recent years turned their attention to how it can better service poor populations with innovative solutions, a movement encapsulated by Bruce Mau’s Massive Change project. I have my reservations about the phenomenon, as it mimics so much of the hubris and rhetorical utopianism prevalent in other development ideologies, but it has yielded some imaginative and useful inventions.

A collection of such are on display at the OCAD Professional Gallery in Toronto until January 25. Design for the Other 90% gathers “design solutions addressing the basic needs of poor and marginalized populations not traditionally serviced by professional designers.”

My article on chieftaincy-related conflicts in Ghana appears today at the Globe and Mail online, coinciding with national elections there scheduled for tomorrow. The piece was assigned and written months ago, while I was in West Africa and the town of Bawku was still under a 6pm-6am curfew in the wake of some brutal attacks. The fighting there was over which tribe was entitled to the local chieftaincy and was unhelpfully fueled by national party politics.

Although Ghana is generally talked up as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Africa, there are a worrying number of disputes that happen at the nexus of chiefly and partisan political power. Bawku is but the most dramatic recent example.

The elections here and in the U.S. resulted in the piece getting bumped and bumped and bumped. Now that it is running it’s been bumped from the pages of the newspaper to the internet only. Something about a political/constitutional crisis in this country and declining page counts thanks to the economic downturn. Which is fair enough. But I can’t also help feeling that it reflects, once again, Africa’s low priority in our media—unless, of course, something particularly awful and newsworthy happens. Reporting on Ghana’s election has been sparse overall, BBC Online being the rare exception. If violence does occur post-election, and it threatens the region’s stability, it will make news then. But any analytic reporting that attempts to anticipate what might happen in advance too often doesn’t make it through the noise.

I updated the article in the past couple weeks and according to most reports pre-election violence in Ghana has abated. The picture at head is of Bawku’s almost deserted main intersection only minutes before the daily, army-enforced curfew was to take effect. The intersection is also the dividing line between rival Kusasi and Mamprusi neighborhoods. This is a snap of the current Bawku Naba (chief), Asigri Abugrago Azoka II of the Kusasi tribe, whose legitimacy has been challenged by Maprusis—a decades-old dispute that has frequently spilled over into bloodshed.

Violence in Bawku this past July resulted in the firebombing of several shops. Motorcycle taxis on the Mamprusi side of town complain that they can’t work certain parts of Bawku for fear of violent attacks and thefts.

And this is an entirely gratuitous shot of a Bawku man preparing goat for dinner.

Demographers have been avidly waiting for this moment—when a majority of the human species had finally traded in its farm implements for pocket protectors, its grubby overalls for fine slacks. According to the United Nations, May 23, 2007, marked the day when the earth’s population became predominantly urban. (This is really a “polite statistical fiction” as one writer described it, based on U.N. estimates of the rate of rural to urban migration worldwide.)

Most of the developing world’s rural poor, however, are merely trading one kind of poverty for another, joining the ranks of those scratching out a living on the city’s margins. Finding shelter in the peri-urban shantytowns and labouring in its informal economies. This mass migration to the cities is dramatically transforming the planet, but it is hardly talked about enough. It’s become an old story. Rio’s favelas are now a tourist attraction.

The community that has taken root around the Guatemala City municipal dump (picture above) is but one example of this global phenomenon. For over sixty years, Central America’s largest, most toxic landfill site, has drawn a steady influx of poor, displaced families that depend on the dump’s derelict bounty for their livelihood. It’s estimated that around 2,000 families work as pickers, most of them residing in the warren of jury-rigged shanty homes across the road from the dump’s entrance. Many of them were driven here during the civil war, fleeing warfare in the highlands.

The best place to acquire a broad mise-en-scène of the dump is from the city’s oldest cemetery. Driving past grand old colonial-style tombs and the ostentatious Mayan-cum-Egyptian temple that serves as the mausoleum for the founder of the country’s largest brewery, there’s rarely-visited corner of the cemetery inhabited by swarms of turkey vultures. From here the resting places of the city’s rich are only a small ravine away from the Brueghelian madness of the landfill.

Dump trucks, shadowed by expectant gangs of pickers, pull into clearings and eject their stash. The piles are swarmed over. The guajeros, keenly aware of the economic hierarchy of trash, generally know when which trucks arrive from what part of the city. Metals are highly prized (from aluminum cans to the scrap from appliances), but almost everything can have a value, from cardboard and bottles to nylon and plastic. Pickers typically earn between $2-$6 a day.

Tractors pile the leftover leftovers into terraces of dirt and multi-coloured refuse. Smouldering fires stinking of burning plastic, randomly arranged, send dark smoke signals into the bleached noon-day sky.

Until recently many of the children worked in this swamp of detritus alongside their parents. I spoke to a bright, fourteen-year-old girl named Olivia who used to pick alongside her mother (mom still works at the dump everyday); she now attends school and is enrolled in an inspiring support program called Camino Seguro.

“Before, when they let kids inside, I had to go with my mom to help. You have to be really careful where you step and I knew that as a child maybe you were risking your life there… My mom still collects plastic, nylon, aluminum, cardboard. I’m not embarrassed to say that because she works very hard and even though she doesn’t have a degree or a regular job, she’s struggling to help us.

Nothing bad has ever happened to us but our neighbour died once because a truck collapsed into the ground (the land is highly unstable) and took her with it. She was buried. They couldn’t even find her. My mom was at the dump at the time, near there, and I heard there was an accident so I was really scared. Everybody was talking about it in the neighborhood. The police wouldn’t let me go in to find my mother so I jumped the fence to go and see if she was okay. The police saw me and took me out again. But nothing had happened to my mother.”

I later spoke with a Dutch social worker who is involved with Camino Seguro and counsels many of the neighborhood’s children.

“The problems our kids cope with, they have a lot problems with anger management, they see a lot of violence in their neighborhood, they see a lot of violence between men and women. So they copy that. Besides there’s no time or skills to talk about emotions, empathy. People are surviving, they go every single day to that garbage dump and they fight to have a good piece of garbage, that’s the reality in that neighborhood. No, you’re not going to sit down and grieve about the husband who left you or the child who died, so it just goes on and on.”

The explosion in the world’s shadow cities is no great secret. Economists, politicians and NGOs have been examining a variety of measures for decades, but each shantytown appears to work according to its own internal logic. It has been proposed that these urban poor be given title to their land, thus providing them with collateral for loans—this is what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto means when he talks of “liberating dead capital.” But as I’m finding in my research shantytowns are now so well-established in many cities they require a raft of uniquely local solutions. Titling may work in Lima, but that doesn’t mean it will in Istanbul or Mumbai.

And neither is it the magic bullet its proponents often suggest.

Look here for a great photo essay on the Guate City dump by American photographer Misty Keasler.