How the Poor Get Washed Away

WHEN Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November, killing more than 6,000 people and leaving more than four million homeless, one group was particularly hard hit: the landless poor. More than a thousand of the dead lived in a single squatter camp.

While natural disasters may seem like equal-opportunity destroyers, they are not.

The developing world’s landless poor routinely bear the brunt of these disasters. Families without secure rights to land (and that is a majority of rural residents in many developing countries) often remain in their homes when it is dangerous to do so, fearing they won’t be allowed to return. And without the security of ownership and access to collateral, their homes are often not built to withstand earthquakes, typhoons and other disasters.

This has profound consequences that extend far beyond the squatter camps and plantations with their legions of impoverished laborers.

Landlessness and the lack of secure property rights among the poor not only hurt a country’s resiliency and slow post-disaster recovery. Those inequities also hold back economic development, perpetuate poverty and fan social tensions. Fixing this problem is not easy. But many countries, including South Korea, Vietnam and Rwanda, have reformed their laws and institutions to provide the rural poor with enforceable rights to the lands they live on and farm.

Those success stories are important because the vulnerability of the world’s landless — squatters, indigenous people, farm laborers and tenant farmers — cannot be overstated.

Consider the case of the cyclone that struck the Indian state of Orissa in 1999, killing an estimated 10,000 people. One-third of the dead were poor fishermen and their families who refused to evacuate their coastal villages, believing it was a ploy to evict them from the government land where they had built their huts. Those communities were washed away.

Fears of displacement by government officials and developers are not unfounded. In the Philippine city of Tacloban, which was ravaged by Typhoon Haiyan, government officials are considering buying a six-acre parcel that was a squatter camp and preventing reconstruction. This is just one of many reported cases of efforts to seize valuable land vacated by occupants who fled Haiyan and lacked legal title.

Likewise, consider the situation in Haiti. Almost four years after a powerful earthquake struck the island nation, more than 100,000 people, the majority of them poor and landless, remain in tents or other temporary shelters, and many others have moved in with relatives.

A key factor hampering rebuilding efforts is the lack of secure land rights among the displaced. A 2012 report by the London-based Overseas Development Institute described a “chaotic” and “almost Kafka-esque” land tenure system in Haiti in which “it is almost impossible to know definitely who owns what.”

Time and again, those who have the least lose the most. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In the Indonesian province of Aceh, devastated by a tsunami in 2004, the government relief effort initially fell short. Displaced renters and squatters received only small cash payments to buy building materials or to pay rent, while landowners received new homes.

Years later, tens of thousands of squatters and renters were still living in squalor in temporary barracks. Protests ensued, and government officials agreed to provide them with new homes built either at the sites of their old homes or in new locations — all with secure title to the land.

Aceh has since made a remarkable recovery. The region is at peace, the economy is growing, life expectancy is increasing and poverty is falling. While providing the poor with secure land rights was not solely responsible for the progress, the recovery could not have been achieved until the fundamental issue of land rights was addressed.

The recent disaster in the Philippines could provide the opportunity for the country to sweep away the biggest roadblock to growth and stability there — the widespread lack of landownership among the poor.

The international community should seize this moment, as aid continues to pour in, to press for enforcement of the country’s long-ignored land tenure reform laws. These laws call for government distribution to the poor of large swaths of public land, and for purchase and distribution of certain private land (including idle or abandoned property and bankrupt plantations). The landowning elite has resisted these reforms, but implementing them will help the country and its landless poor recover and prosper.


This article originally appeared in the New York times and was written by TIM HANSTAD and ROY PROSTERMANJAN.

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If it had happened anywhere else, this would be the world's biggest story

If it had happened anywhere else, this would be the world's biggest story.

More than 230 girls disappeared, captured by members of a brutal terrorist group in the dead of night. Their parents are desperate and anguished, angry that their government is not doing enough. The rest of the world is paying little attention.

The tragedy is unfolding in Nigeria, where members of the ultra-radical Islamist group Boko Haram grabbed the girls, most believed to be between 16 and 18, from their dormitories in the middle of the night in mid-April and took them deep into the jungle. A few dozen of the students managed to escape and tell their story. The others have vanished. (Roughly 200 girls remain missing.)

The latest reports from people living in the forest say Boko Haram fighters are sharing the girls, conducting mass marriages, selling them each for $12. One community elder explained the practice as "a medieval kind of slavery."

While much of the world has been consumed with other stories, notably the missing Malaysian plane, the relatives of the kidnapped girls in the small town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria have struggled for weeks with no resources to help them. The Nigerian government allayed international concerns when it reported -- incorrectly -- that it had rescued most of the girls. But the girls were still in captivity. Their parents raised money to arrange private expeditions into the jungle. They found villagers who had seen the hostages with heavily armed men.

Relatives are holding street protests to demand more help from the government. With a social media push, including a Twitter#BringBackOurGirls campaign, they are seeking help anywhere they can find it.

Nigerians demand government do more to save abducted girls

It's hard to imagine a more compelling, dramatic, heartbreaking story. And this is not a one-off event. This tragedy is driven by forces that will grow stronger and deadlier if the captors manage to succeed.

I think of these girls as trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building. Their mothers and fathers try to dig them out with their bare hands, while the men who brought down the building vow to blow up others. Everyone else walks by, with barely a second glance.

Perhaps this story sounds remote. But at its heart it is a version of the same conflict that drives the fighting in other parts of the world. These young girls, eager for an education, are caught in the crossfire of the war between Islamic radicalism and modernity. It's the Nigerian version of the same dispute that brought 9/11 to the United States; that brought killings to European, Asian and Middle Eastern cities; the same ideological battle that destroyed the lives of millions of people in Afghanistan; that drives many of the fighters in Syria and elsewhere.

In Nigeria, the dispute includes uniquely local factors, but the objectives of Boko Haram sound eerily familiar.

Boko Haram wants to impose its strict interpretation of Sharia -- Islamic law. It operates mostly in the northern part of Nigeria, a country divided between a Muslim-majority north and a Christian-majority south. Islamic rule is its larger objective, but its top priority, judging from the group's name, explains why it has gone after girls going to school.

Boko Haram, in the local Hausa language, means roughly "Western education is sin."

But women are just the beginning, and Boko Haram goes about its goals not only by kidnapping, but also by slaughtering men and women of all ages and of any religion.

These militants view a modern education as an affront, no matter who receives it. In February, they burst into a student dormitory in the northern state of Yobe, where teenage boys were sleeping after a day of classes. They killed about 30 boys, shooting some, hacking others in their beds, slitting the throats of the ones trying to flee. In July, also in Yobe state, they shot 20 students and their teacher.

The gruesome attacks are not restricted to remote areas. A few weeks ago, a bus bombing in the capital of Abuja killed more than 75 people. Boko Haram took responsibility. It was the deadliest terrorist act in the city's history.

Boko Haram has killed thousands of people since 2009 and has caused a humanitarian crisis with a "devastating impact," causing nearly 300,000 to flee their homes, according to Human Rights Watch.

Nigeria is a resource-rich nation whose people live in grinding poverty. It is also plagued with endemic corruption. That triple combination -- poverty, corruption and resource-wealth -- creates fertile ground for strife and extremism. And the instability in Nigeria sends tremors through a fragile region. Boko Haram keeps hideouts and bases along the border with neighboring countries Cameroon and Chad.

This is an international crisis that requires international help. Is there anything anyone can do? Most definitely.

First, it is urgent that the plight of these girls and their families gain the prominence it so clearly deserves.

Global attention will lead to offers for help, to press for action. Just as the intense focus on the missing Malaysian plane and the lost South Korean ferry prompted other nations to extend a hand, a focus on this ongoing tragedy would have the same effect.

Nigeria's government, with a decidedly mixed record on its response to Boko Haram, will find it difficult to look away if world leaders offer assistance in finding and rescuing the kidnapped girls from Chibok, and another 25 girls also kidnapped by Boko Haram in the town of Konduga a few weeks earlier.

This is an important story, a wrenching human drama, even if it happened in a part of the world where news coverage is very difficult compared with places such as Malaysia, South Korea or Australia. The plight of the Nigerian girls should remain in our thoughts, at the forefront of news coverage and on the agenda of world leaders.

This article originally appeared in CNN And written by Frida Ghitis

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Show us the money - transparency and resource wealth in Africa

BARELY a month goes by without a new oil discovery in Africa. Only five of the continent’s 55 countries are neither producing nor exploring for oil. Most places are also extracting lots of lucrative minerals. A resource bonanza is in train across the continent, generating big government revenues and real benefits for Africans. Road networks are expanding, public services are improving. But most of this happens behind a veil of secrecy. Money sloshes out of public scrutiny at the insistence of officials and politicians who prefer it

that way.

Even if squeaky-clean Western multinationals are involved, transparency over payments for resources is minimal. Ordinary people can rarely find out how much goes into government kitties. That makes it easier for insiders to line their pockets. Monitoring groups say corruption has been rising. Ministerial car parks are filled with the fanciest limousines. A lot of money still reaches public budgets, but without oversight it is often badly spent. Many new roads go nowhere or are barely used; shiny new hospitals are often understaffed.

The resulting frustration can trigger violence. In Angola, Africa’s second-biggest oil producer, activists have been demanding a fairer distribution of revenues; the government has responded with a bloody crackdown (see article). South Africa has just seen the worst disturbances since the apartheid era, with 34 platinum miners shot dead during a wildcat strike. Resources can also fuel international conflicts. The two Sudans went to the brink of war earlier this year over oil.

African governments have become more democratic and better at delivering services. Yet the combination of rising mineral wealth and continuing poverty is explosive. After decades of misrule, even the most competent officials are often suspected of pinching funds. More transparency is what is needed to ensure that resource wealth is used better and distributed more fairly. Much of Angola’s income is managed by a national oil company that is shielded from oversight by commercial secrecy. The oil revenues of Equatorial Guinea, where three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line, are a state secret. This is both wrong and dangerous.

The challenge for Western firms and governments is how to help African citizens wheedle data out of their governments so as to hold them more to account. A decade ago Britain’s Tony Blair had a go, promoting the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. As many as three dozen countries, in Africa and elsewhere, agreed to publish details of payments from oil and mining companies. But the scheme was voluntary; the worst offenders either refused to join or dragged their feet.

Follow America’s lead

America’s Securities and Exchange Commission has now come up with a set of rules. The 1,100 resource companies listed on American stock exchanges, which make up half the global industry by value, will be required to publish all payments to foreign governments above $100,000. The European Union is talking of introducing similar requirements. It should do so.

Some Western investors say such rules involve costly red tape. Without some hidden payments to officials, business will be lost, they add. Divulging the details of every deal will give secrets away to competitors. Moreover, non-Western companies, especially Chinese ones, will gain an advantage because they will escape such scrutiny.

The bureaucratic cost will not be large, since companies will merely have to make public figures that are currently held privately. And some Chinese firms will find themselves subject to similar requirements, because many are, or plan to be, listed in America. Moreover, if the West changes its behaviour, China may too. After years of claiming that, unlike Western imperialists, it supports Africa’s people, not its dictators, it may feel it has to back the publication of data about payments.

But there is no guarantee that China will see the light; and, in the meantime, Western companies are likely to find themselves at a disadvantage. So be it. Western countries already spend money and political capital on trying to promote democracy, encourage development and discourage corruption in Africa. Helping Africa 
use its mineral wealth to achieve those ends is worth paying a price for

This article originally appeared in The Economist

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