The Globalist's Top Books of 2012
December 25, 2012
From the legacy of British colonialism and the possibility of Hitler's assassination to Turkey's role in the Arab Middle East and Afghanistan's cotton fields, The Globalist Bookshelf crisscrossed the world and spanned centuries of history in 2012. As a year-end special, we present ten of the best books featured on The Globalist this year (along with five others for good measure).
1. Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World
By Kwasi Kwarteng
Excerpt: How has the British and U.S. to desire to control Iraqi oil shaped the
country's recent history?
2. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
By Chrystia Freeland
Excerpt: Why have Americans been so tolerant of the rising gulf between rich and poor?
3. Who Stole the American Dream?
By Hedrick Smith
Excerpt: Why has the American Dream slipped out of the reach of more and more of the middle class?
4. Waging War on Corruption: Inside the Movement Fighting the Abuse of Power
By Frank Vogl
Excerpt: How can transparency help end the fleecing of resource-rich countries by their corrupt leaders?
5. Economics After the Crisis: Objectives and Means
By Adair Turner
Excerpt: Why do economists — and the policymakers who heed their advice — need to reconsider the conventional wisdoms of their profession?
6. Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
By Lester Brown
Excerpt: What can be done to help those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder cope with rising food prices?
7. The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters
By Diane Coyle
Excerpt: What policies should governments focus on to ensure that future generations live at least well as the current generation?
8. Borrow: The American Way of Debt
By Louis Hyman
Excerpt: What is "patriotic" about cutting taxes for the rich? And how is the middle class "empowered" by piling up mountains of debt?
9. The Revenge of Geography
By Robert D. Kaplan
Excerpt: Will water make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East in the 21st century than it was in the 20th?
10. Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power
By Andrew Nagorski
Excerpt: How did Hitler's relationship with a young American woman change history in the 20th century?
Honorable mention:
Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy
By William H. Janeway
Excerpt: Can the United States muster the will to step into the 21st century world of energy?
Bull by the Horns
By Sheila Bair
Excerpt: Mitt Romney badly lost the women's vote. But are Republicans the only party with a "woman problem?"
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Excerpt: Why would USAID not get behind an effort to turn Afghan farmers from poppy to cotton?
No One's World
By Charles A. Kupchan
Excerpt: Western dominance will wane in the 21st century, but what will take its place?
Exits from the Rat Race
By Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Excerpt: How did mid-century concerns about economic fairness give way to today's crisis-prone, Darwinian capitalism?
For a complete listing of books featured on The Globalist Bookshelf in 2012, click here.
Copyright © 2000-2012 The Globalist | 1100 17th Street, NW, Suite 605, Washington, DC 20036
terça-feira, 25 de dezembro de 2012
O calendario politico do Coronel: acima da Constituicao
Não importa o que diz a Constituição: importa só o que quer o coronel e seus acólitos políticos. A Constituição que se adapte a esses humores cambiantes no novo membro do Mercosul.
A propósito: a Unasul e o Mercosul não vão declarar "ruptura democrática" na Venezuela, ao não ter sido respeitada a Constituição?
Perguntar não ofende...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
A propósito: a Unasul e o Mercosul não vão declarar "ruptura democrática" na Venezuela, ao não ter sido respeitada a Constituição?
Perguntar não ofende...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Officials Push to Postpone Swearing-In of Chávez
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
The New York Times, December 24, 2012
CARACAS, Venezuela — Top officials in the government of President Hugo Chávez,
who is recuperating from cancer surgery in Cuba, say they will postpone
his inauguration, now set for Jan. 10, if he is too ill to return to
Venezuela to begin his new term.
Opposition politicians and commentators have said that if Mr. Chávez is
not in Venezuela to be sworn in on that date, a constitutional provision
would kick in requiring that a new election be held within 30 days.
But government officials loyal to Mr. Chávez have forcefully rejected that notion and said the swearing-in could take place at a later date.
“Jan. 10 is a date that the Constitution holds as a formality for the
swearing-in,” Attorney General Cilia Flores said Monday in televised
remarks to reporters after a church service during which top government
officials prayed for Mr. Chávez’s recovery. She said the Constitution
allowed the date to be postponed.
“What we have is a president who has been re-elected, and he will be
sworn in on that day or on another later date,” she said.
Information Minister Ernesto Villegas announced Monday that Mr. Chávez
had shown a “slight improvement” in his slow recovery from cancer
surgery and had sent a greeting wishing the nation a Merry Christmas.
Officials have released little specific information about the emergency
surgery Mr. Chávez underwent on Dec. 11 but have described it as complex
and difficult. They have said Mr. Chávez encountered complications arising from the surgery, including bleeding and a lung infection. More recently, they described his condition as stable but delicate.
Mr. Chávez was re-elected president on Oct. 7 with 55 percent of the
vote, compared with 44 percent for his rival, Henrique Capriles, a state
governor.
The Constitution calls for a newly elected president to take office on
Jan. 10 by being sworn in before the National Assembly. It goes on to
say that “if, for any unexpected reason, the president of the republic
cannot take possession before the National Assembly, he will do it
before the Supreme Court of Justice.”
Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly, said last week that
because the second clause did not contain a date or indicate a place,
the swearing-in could happen at any time.
On Monday, Vice President Nicolás Maduro also said there was room in the
Constitution to delay the swearing-in. The president had received
permission from the National Assembly to be out of the country
indefinitely for his cancer operation, and the permission could be
extended past Jan. 10, said Mr. Maduro, whom Mr. Chávez said he wanted
to succeed him if he could not continue in office. “The Constitution is
very clear,” Mr. Maduro said.
José Vicente Haro, a professor in constitutional law at Andrés Bello
Catholic University, had a different view. He said government officials
were trying to argue that because Mr. Chávez was re-elected, his old
term could simply be extended without a formal swearing-in. He called
that an incorrect interpretation and said that after Jan. 10 the cabinet
ministers appointed by Mr. Chávez in his current term could no longer
hold office.
Mr. Haro, who has served as a consultant to the political coalition
opposed to Mr. Chávez, said, “Without doubt there is a constitutional
crisis, and it is of such gravity that the legislative power, the
executive power and the Supreme Court have had to make statements trying
to clear up the doubts and uncertainty that they themselves have
created because they don’t want to follow the Constitution.”
Climate Change - Nicholas Stern at College de France (2010)
Gérer les changements climatiques. Climat, croissance, développement et équité - Nicholas Stern
Managing Climate Change and Promoting Growth, Development and Equity
Nicholas STERN
College de France
Chaires : Développement durable – Environnement Énergie et Société
Plan:
Scale and Risks
Policy and Opportunity
Towards a Global Agreement
1Monsieur l’Administrateur,
Chers collègues, chers amis,
Mesdames et Messieurs,
2The world, the planet, is at a crossroads. If we fail to act strongly now to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, if we continue with the pattern of high-carbon growth of the last century, we incur grave risks of a catastrophic destruction of the physical geography of the planet. The implications would likely be the re-drawing of where people could live and how they could live their lives: thus we risk movements of population on a massive scale, with the probable consequence of severe, extended and global conflict. Inaction is the most pernicious of policies. But it is all too easy a path in a world dominated by the politics of the short term, narrow self-interest and a suspicion of others.
3There is another, and very attractive route. If we act together as a world, strongly, collaboratively, creatively, justly, we can create a new era of low-carbon growth and development. It will be more energy-efficient, more energy-secure, more equitable, safer, quieter, cleaner and more bio-diverse. We can create a new definition of, criteria for, and approach to development that will be far more attractive than what has gone before. Further, the transition to low-carbon growth could be the most dynamic and innovative period in world history. On the other hand, high-carbon growth will kill itself: first on high prices for hydro-carbons and second, and more fundamentally, on the very hostile physical environment it would create.
4The choice is ours and it is urgent. We can identify the scale of action necessary – the topic of the next section –, the areas of action and the necessary technologies. We understand the basic economic policies to encourage the reduction of emissions – the topic of section 2. The challenge now is creating the political will. We saw in Copenhagen in December 2009 just how difficult that can be. We will not create, or deserve to create, the necessary political will and collaboration, unless we recognise that there are two defining problems of this century: managing climate change and overcoming world poverty. We will succeed or fail on these two together. Creating an international agreement will be the topic of section 3. The sequence of these sections reflects the structure of the course.
Scale and Risks
5Analysis and the making of policy on climate change must start with an examination of the consequences of various forms of action and indeed of inaction. The problem starts with the actions of people in their daily lives and their consequences influence directly the capability of people to live their lives. The chain of causation is the following. Step 1: through their activities, in production and consumption, people cause the emissions of greenhouse gases. The emissions have, for much of the last century or more, been above the level that the planet can absorb via “the carbon cycle”. Step 2: the flows therefore result in an increase in the stock or concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Step 3: the increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere imply that more heat radiating from the earth is trapped in the atmosphere and temperature rises. The magnitude of the increase is shaped by the “climate sensitivity”. This is global warming. Step 4: global warming causes climate change. This manifests itself in large measure through water in some shape or form: storms and hurricanes; floods and inundations; droughts and desertification; sea-level rise and changing flows and courses of rivers. Step 5: these climate changes have an impact on peoples’ lives and livelihoods to which they will have to adapt in some way or another. In many cases, the impacts will re-define where people can live and thus adaptation, for many, will involve dislocation and migration.
6The basics of this logic were understood by the end of the 19th century. In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier, the great French mathematician and physicist, calculated heat balances for the planet and realised, because the actual temperature of the planet was much higher than the equilibrium temperature, that something was trapping heat in the atmosphere. The British physicist John Tyndall identified, in 1861, the types of gases responsible for the effect and the Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, provided at the end of the 19th century the first calculations of the possible effects of doubling the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The physics of the effect are essentially that a gas can vibrate in a way which impedes the passage of infra-red radiation. The trapping of energy raises temperatures and results in climate change. Thus the basic physics of the story are well- and long-established.
7There are, however, major uncertainties in all of the five steps in the logic of human-generated climate change. Thus we cannot predict with certainty how large the effects will be. In recent times, the last two decades, the science and modelling have advanced to the point where it is now possible to place probabilities on some of the key effects, for example, the relationship between the concentrations of greenhouse gases and the likely temperature increases.
8We start in a difficult place, with concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) of around 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). We have added more than 150 ppm of CO2e since the mid-19th century –our usual benchmark– with the majority coming in the last 60 years of rapid high-carbon growth. We are adding at a rate of around 2.5 ppm a year and that rate is rising. Hence if we continue under BAU until the end of this century we would likely see concentration levels rise to around 750 ppm CO2e or more. The eventual (probably early in the next century) temperature increase would, with probability around 50%, be above 5oC relative to the mid-19th century. The planet has not witnessed such temperatures for more than 30 million years. Homo sapiens, who have been around for 200,000 years at most, have no experience of temperatures anything like this magnitude. Such an increase would likely result in massive movements of population, probably hundreds of millions. 3 or 4oC would also be unprecedented for humans and is likely to cause very severe and, for many areas, catastrophic effects. The story is one of risk and how much risk it is sensible to tolerate, given the options, and their cost, that are available to us.
9How far can risk be reduced? Is it possible to control temperatures to no more than a 2oC increase, the level many scientists, including the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have argued should be regarded as “dangerous”. Above 2oC the probability of “tipping points” starts to rise sharply. Examples of “tipping points” include the collapse of the Amazon forest, implying the loss of a major sink, or the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia and elsewhere, resulting in the emissions of massive quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Current emissions are now around 47 billion tonnes of CO2e per annum. There are a number of emissions paths, starting at current levels, that would give around a 50-50 chance of holding below 2oC (for short “2oC”). Crudely speaking, what matters is the cumulative emissions – it is concentrations that matter. Thus, paths which peak at higher levels or later will have to fall much more rapidly later than paths which peak at lower levels and sooner.
10The most plausible emissions path: emissions around 44 billion tonnes in 2020 and well below 35 in 2030, and well below 20 in 2050, means cutting totals for the world by at least 50%, 1990-2050 from the 1990 levels of around 40. The path would prevent concentrations from rising above 500 ppm. Then over a long period concentrations would have to move towards 450 or lower.
11We can see from this analysis the explanation of why, if 2oC is to be achieved, the world has to peak within the next ten years. Delay is dangerous and costly. It is dangerous because it undermines our chances of achieving 2oC and it is costly because we would have to take action later that would be very costly if we tried to “catch up”.
12The figures for 2050 carry strong lessons on where we must be headed in the medium to long-term. With around 9 billion people likely in the world in 2050, having well below 20 billion tonnes of emissions requires no more than 2 tonnes per person. Currently Europe is around 10-12 tonnes and the USA well over 20. There will not be many people below average emissions so there cannot be many above average. This explains why Europe (which must move from 10-12 tonnes per capita to around 2) must cut by at least 80%.
13This analysis explains therefore the commonly-quoted percentage levels for the cuts which are necessary for the world as a whole and for the rich countries. I prefer, however, to talk in terms of total flows, rather than percentages. With percentages it is all too attractive to fiddle with base years in order to provide “more room”. The physics of the problem works in terms of overall emissions.
14The top five emitters by country/region (China, USA, EU, Indonesia and Brazil) are responsible for more than 60% of the current emissions. This small group of key players must be centrally involved if emissions reductions are to take place on the scale required. For example, China’s emissions are already around 6 tonnes per capita and a country of that size must get down to around 2 tonnes per capita by 2050 if the overall world constraint is to be achieved. This will surely require a peaking of emissions in China within 10, or at most, 15 years.
15The arguments already described show the scale and intensity of some of the ethical challenges; issues of equity between communities and over time, and of responsibilities of different generations and countries. Let us turn briefly to some of these ethical issues.
16In much of formal economics discussion of ethics focuses on equity, within and across generations. A major mistake, committed by all-too-many economists, is trying to import observed market interest rates or rates of return directly, to the decisions affecting climate change. Such rates generally cover the near and medium-term, capital markets are very thin for more than 2 or 3 decades. Further, they are generally relevant for only small changes around a given near to medium-term path. When long-term future income levels depend in such a major way on current decisions, that is a hugely misleading analytical error; future generations may be much worse off than we are, undermining the case for strong discount rates, since additional resources have more value for poor people. I shall discuss in more detail in Lecture 2. There are, in fact, many more errors involved in the attempt to import, as I shall explain, but the one I have described is central to most of them. The first day of the symposium “Managing climate change” that will be organised with the chair (“Economic Theory and Social Organisation”) of my friend and colleague at the Collège de France, Roger Guesnerie, will be devoted to long-term discounting. The most distinguished scholars will discuss all the issues of the debate. And in the lectures I shall also explain that the ethical issues, including responsibility and sustainability, are broader and deeper than simply the distribution of income and wealth, notwithstanding the fundamental importance of those issues.
17The scale and nature of the risks and ethical issues they raise imply, in my view, that we should consider the problem as one of risk management rather than narrow cost-benefit analysis. The valuation of effects which are potentially immense, global, cover all aspects of life, and are very uncertain, strain the credibility of a formal cost-benefit analysis.
18Let me now comment briefly on the position of those who would deny the need for action. Broadly speaking, one can deny that the science tells us that there are serious risks; or one can argue that if change does come, we can adapt; or that if the problem occurs we can geo-engineer it away; or that the future is for others and matters little to us. The first, as I have argued, is absurd given the evidence. The second and third must be seen as reckless given the magnitude of the risks I have described. The fourth would be regarded by most of us as unethical.
19The science is 19th century well-tested science. The physics is not complex at its heart. The calibration of risks can be more complex and model-intensive but the recognition of the risks appeals only to the basics of the science. As risk management, the issues are surely simple: if we act as if the science is right but risks turn out to be less than anticipated, we will have discovered many useful technologies, have a cleaner, more energy-secure world and will have protected our forests. If we act as if the science is wrong, we will have put ourselves in an extremely dangerous position from which we are unlikely to be able to extricate ourselves.
20To rely on adaptation or geo-engineering is to fail to recognise the magnitude of the risk and the potential, and the rewards to emissions reductions. We will indeed have to adapt, but the potential scale of impacts is likely to be such that adaptation is limited. And we should research geo-engineering. But it would be reckless to rely on this to come up with answers that can reduce risks by acceptable magnitudes.
21Deniers have the right to speak and argue. But they do not have the right to have unsound and confused arguments, viewed as wise and reasonable.
Policy and Opportunity
22Policy must start with recognising that the emissions of GHGs constitute what we economists call an externality or market failure. Specifically, the emissions of GHGs damages others but emitters do not, unless policy intervenes, see the costs imposed on others in the market prices. They would expect to pay for labour, energy, raw materials, capital and so on used in production or consumption, but without policy on GHGs, market prices give the wrong signals. Because of its scale and involvement of all of us, I have called this the greatest market failure the world has seen. Correcting this market failure requires a price for greenhouse gases. This could be a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme.
23Policy, however, must go beyond this one market failure, fundamental though that is. There are other market failures. Technology will be key to a low-carbon future. Ideas are, in general a positive externality and policy should encourage them. This area is of such importance and urgency that policy on technology should be stronger here than elsewhere, with direct support for research and feed-in tariffs for key renewables.
24A third policy area, after carbon prices and technology, concerns regulation. The emissions from buildings is an important example. Builders and property developers often argue that it is difficult to recoup investments in energy efficiency or low-carbon innovations via rent, or reasons associated with a number of market failures. Also the refurbishment of older building may be much cheaper if done neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood rather than house-by-house. Thus standards and regulation for new buildings should be important elements for policy. Similar arguments apply to private and public transport.
25Finally, we should note that policy also concerns perceptions and attitudes. We learned that mixing alcohol and driving is dangerous and most of us would not feel it right to do so. Thus we desist because we see it as wrong and irresponsible. There are, of course, sanctions, i.e., incentives not to do this, but their effect is in addition to our own views of responsibility. Economics has, I think, paid too little attention to the role of public discussion of responsibility in the making of policy. And we should note that this is not a new idea in the explicit analysis of public policy, going back at least to the middle of the 19th century and John Stuart Mill.
26The policies we have described are not simply about limiting the costs and burdens of reducing emissions. Their purpose is to create the incentives that could spark a creative and dynamic process of radical change. Economic historians have shown both how some of our most important bursts of growth have been driven by investments embodying technical advance, such as the railways, electricity and information technology, and the crucial role of finance in allowing these to move forward. The green energy revolution has already begun. The combination of the new goods and equipment on the one hand and the finance on the other are illustrated all the way from very small-scale solar lanterns in villages in India to very large railway and power infrastructure.
27The fertility of ideas in this area is quite remarkable. Regarding energy efficiency for instance, insulation technology is changing rapidly, partly using technology developed in other areas such as aerospace. The capital cost of solar power is crashing down as new materials are exploited. New varieties of crops and equipment are being developed for low-till agriculture. The examples are legion and are increasing by the day. Long-term investors are realising that low-carbon growth is the growth of the future. The potential of entrepreneurship and the markets is immense if national and international policy is strong.
28A further and vital area for policy, and this moves us towards international issues, is stopping deforestation and degradation of forests and encouraging reforestation. The growth of trees captures carbon dioxide. There is a positive externality. Standing trees have value to us all and cutting and burning them damages us all. Thus there is a responsibility of and gain to us all to act to protect forests and to discourage deforestation.
29There will be a number of elements to deforestation policy, from influencing factors that determine the demand for land and wood products, to legal and governance structures and pricing for the protection and planting of forests. More generally, policies for development are required that empower and protect the rights and livelihoods of those who depend on forests and provide alternative activities for those who may otherwise have incentives to cut them down. This is an important example showing how policies on climate change and for development are inextricably intertwined.
30Policy must cover much more than emissions reductions; adaptation to the climate change that is occurring, and that is likely to occur, will be of great importance. It makes little sense to plan our building codes, thermostatic controls and standards, flood protection, transport, irrigation schemes and agriculture as if past patterns of weather, flooding, droughts and costal erosion will be similar in the future to those in the past, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
31Clearly, good information and anticipation will be vital to adaptation. We have to work to analyse and reappraise different kinds of risks. Current climate change modelling has progressed quite far in terms of possible overall and regional outcomes, but more precise local modelling and forecasting presents difficult challenges. The global structures and the local conditions are likely to interact in complex ways which put strong demands on information and modelling capabilities. And in some of the most sensitive and important areas, such as the Himalayas, a water source for billions, Africa, especially vulnerable and with a population soon to be around a billion, and the Amazon forests, key to the whole global system, observation and information are sparse.
32Policies and arguments concerning responsibilities which relate to mitigation, development and adaptation are distinct in many ways, but overlap in many others, building design and irrigation are important examples. And the actions which policies try to encourage will similarly have their distinctiveness and overlaps. The inter-connections and overlaps are, however, sufficiently strong that development policies and planning, and bilateral and multilateral institutions, should take great care to avoid structures which separate support for mitigation, for development, and for adaptation. In particular, any new funding institutions, or new windows in existing institutions, should be designed so that different sources of funding can be easily combined.
33There is no doubt that the problems of controlling emissions will be much more difficult with a population predicted to be around 9 billion in 2050. I am assuming (hopefully) that no sensible person would want to advocate increasing death rates. Studies of demography have pointed to the main influences on birth rates with some of the key determinants being family and individual incomes, opportunities for women in the labour force, education for women and girls, rights and status of women, access to reproductive healthcare, infant mortality rates. These are directly related to, or constitute, important development objectives and policies in their own right. That they will also influence climate change adds further to arguments in their support which were already very powerful.
34Looking back I think that the risks now look more worrying than I envisaged at the time we were working on the Stern Review four years ago. Emissions have been rising faster than we assumed, the absorptive capacity of the planet seems lower and some of the effects are coming through more quickly. I would now think that the stabilisation range suggested in the Review of 450-550 ppm CO2e should be changed to 450-500. That might increase a cost estimate for mitigation from 1% to 2% (approximately) of GDP p.a. for the next few decades. On the other hand, technological progress is moving so rapidly those costs may turn out to be much lower and we may see strong dynamic and other benefits from the new growth path. This reinforces the conclusion of the Stern Review: the cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action.
Towards a Global Agreement
35This brings us to the story of Copenhagen in December 2009 and the creation of an international agreement. Let us begin by asking what an international agreement should look like on the basis of: the risks identified by the science; the technologies present and future; the likely circumstances, future, present and past, of different countries and communities; some basic criteria; and the economics.
36A global deal should be effective (on the scale required), efficient (keeping costs down), and equitable (taking into account different circumstances, as I argued earlier in this lecture). Our earlier analysis has pointed to most of the key elements of such a deal. Let me assemble them in a simple way.
37First, we must, as a world, commit to an emissions path consistent with the goal of a 50-50 chance of holding temperature increases to 2oC. This means a path of emissions which is around 44 billion tonnes CO2e p.a. by 2020, and thus world emissions peaking before then, and emissions well below 35 and 20 in 2030 and 2050. Rich countries should aim to cut actual emissions by at least 80% 1990 to 2050, and there should be strong interim targets.
38Second, developing countries should now create strong climate change action plans, including indicative targets for emissions and programmes for adaptation. These should, taken together with rich country planned paths, be consistent with the aggregate constraints for the path of world emissions from 2010-2050. This implies that emissions per capita in the developing as well as in the developed world should not exceed 2 tonnes by 2050.
39Third, the arrangements for international emissions trading should be reformed and expanded. Whilst developing countries do not have binding constraints on emissions, a “trading scheme”, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is likely to be necessary, but its reform is urgent if trading is to move to the scale likely to be necessary. Looking further forward, the allocation of permits for global two-sided trading will raise strong equity issues: these permits are major financial assets.
40Fourth, there should be a strong programme to halt deforestation and encourage reforestation. Strong interim targets should be adopted, for example to halve deforestation within 5 or 10 years.
41Fifth, we must have a global programme on technology. Key elements should be first, co-ordination of standards and sharing technologies, and second, strong public funding for the development and deployment of new technologies. Part of investment in R&D should go to the investigation of risks associated with alternative energies. Most of them, whether they be nuclear, biofuels, wind, or solar, raise environmental and other development issues that should be examined carefully.
42Sixth, we have adaptation. UNDP calculations suggest that the extra costs to meet the Millennium Development Goals (and the successors extrapolated from 2015) are likely to approach $100 billion p.a. by 2020.
43These are the basic six elements of an effective, efficient and equitable global deal. How do outcomes in Copenhagen in December 2009 compare with this description and where do we go from here? The 15th meeting of the conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15 of the UNFCCC) was the deadline, agreed at COP13 in Bali, December 2007, for agreeing arrangements to follow the Kyoto Protocol (agreed at COP5 in 1997), which covers the period to 2012. The proceedings at Copenhagen were somewhat chaotic, but heads of government from more than 100 countries were there in the final days. Decisions require unanimity of the 192 countries, which is extremely difficult where strong action is required. In the end a “Copenhagen Accord” was drawn up by five countries, USA, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and it was “noted” by the Convention. It does, however, have the positive support of many countries.
44The Copenhagen Accord has just 12 paragraphs. The key elements are: (i) a 2oC target, with global and national emissions peaking as soon as possible; (ii) binding commitments by developed countries and mitigation action plans by developing countries to be submitted by 31 January 2010 (and many were); (iii) the immediate establishment of mechanisms to help finance reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (“REDD+”); (iv) shorter-term finance from developed countries of $10 billion p.a. for 2010-2012, and mobilising $100 billion p.a. by 2020, with a High-Level Panel to examine sources of revenue, including new sources, with some of the resources flowing through a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.
45All of these elements are of real value and consistent with the principles and actions I articulated. It was also valuable on the way to Copenhagen that, for the first time, key countries set out actions and targets for reductions and emissions. Also on the positive side was that the USA and China for the first time worked together to try to shape an agreement.
46There were, however, major disappointments. The participants were unable to agree or recognise the overall global reductions that would be consistent with 2oC, and which I described above. And there is nothing that would lead us to expect that when all individual country commitments are submitted that the totals for expected commitments would be consistent with levels necessary for 2oC. Further, whilst only a “political agreement” was expected, the form in which it arose (an Accord which was “noted”) involves weaker individual country commitments than might have been hoped, even from a “political agreement”.
47On balance, I would judge that whilst it is disappointing, it could have been much worse. There is a platform on which to build; perhaps we have to see Copenhagen as an “event” beginning in December 2009 and stretching to COP16 in Mexico at the end of 2010. On 2oC, on finance, on deforestation, on monitoring and reporting of emissions, there are practical avenues to follow. I will set out ways forward in my final lectures.
48Let us conclude, however, by asking about lessons for international collaboration. A sound scientific base has been essential, it has been established, and it has been key to progress. There are many uncertainties and more work to do but it is clear that the risks are very large. The sense of urgency it brings has enabled countries with difficult relationships to begin a genuinely serious dialogue on how to work practically together to manage the dangers. Analytical work on policy and a recognition of the importance of working together on technology and deforestation have also been major advances. There are, however, deep senses of injustice from the developing world, which are not only understandable but also a political reality. There is a double injustice in that rich countries are responsible for more than 60% of current concentrations in the atmosphere, yet poor countries will be hit earliest and hardest by the effects of climate change. Practical measures on strong targets for rich countries, and financial and technological support will be essential.
49The power of the example will be crucial. Some countries who embrace the argument early, such as Korea, some of the Scandinavian countries, and some parts of the developing world, such as Costa Rica, Guyana and Ethiopia are likely to demonstrate what can be done. But the developing world will expect strong progress in Europe generally, Japan and the USA if they are to find the low-carbon arguments convincing. And we have little time.
50Let us hope that the arguments of those who see low-carbon growth as exciting and dynamic will quickly come to broad recognition. This is the growth theory of the 21st century
51We must, however, do more than win intellectual arguments. We must also show as a world a new spirit of common humanity and interests. The world is more than ever facing problems which can be handled only on a global scale, and climate change, which is existential, is the most important. We require the greatest collaboration the world has ever seen.
52We will need new institutions. Indeed, I would argue that if John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were conducting a Bretton Woods Conference now instead of in 1944, they would have had three different institutions instead of World Bank, IMF, and WTO. We surely do need institutions for finance and for trade, but we now need one for the environment, a World Environmental Organisation.
53We are, however, at an intellectual gathering and must consider our own roles as academics and policy advisors. Our own responsibilities and opportunities have never been greater. We have to look ahead and anticipate. We cannot wait for bitter experience, as with two world wars and the great depression, that motivated Bretton Woods. Natural selection and experiments can reveal mistakes and ways forward when cities or regions follow paths which lead to destruction. People can migrate from a localised area of devastation or they may be able to rebuild. We have only one planet and we cannot wait for the severest impacts of climate change to show themselves before finally realising we have to act. It will be too late.
54Now is the time for reasoned argument and discussion involving all intellectual disciplines and we need to be reaching across to our colleagues across the world. This is the ultimate inter-disciplinary subject and the communication of the arguments and understanding is crucial to action. That is why it is such an honour for me to be delivering this inaugural lecture here at the Collège de France, one of the most pre-eminent and distinguished academic institutions of the world.
55Thank you.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Nicholas STERN, « Managing Climate Change and Promoting Growth, Development and Equity », in Gérer les changements climatiques. Climat, croissance, développement et équité, Paris, Collège de France / Fayard (« Leçons inaugurales », no 212), 2010, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 24 juin 2010, consulté le 25 décembre 2012. URL : http://lecons-cdf.revues.org/236
Auteur
Nicholas STERN
Professeur au Collège de France (2009-2010). Professeur à la London School of Economics
Droits d’auteur: © Collège de France
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Managing Climate Change and Promoting Growth, Development and Equity
Nicholas STERN
College de France
Chaires : Développement durable – Environnement Énergie et Société
Plan:
Scale and Risks
Policy and Opportunity
Towards a Global Agreement
1Monsieur l’Administrateur,
Chers collègues, chers amis,
Mesdames et Messieurs,
2The world, the planet, is at a crossroads. If we fail to act strongly now to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, if we continue with the pattern of high-carbon growth of the last century, we incur grave risks of a catastrophic destruction of the physical geography of the planet. The implications would likely be the re-drawing of where people could live and how they could live their lives: thus we risk movements of population on a massive scale, with the probable consequence of severe, extended and global conflict. Inaction is the most pernicious of policies. But it is all too easy a path in a world dominated by the politics of the short term, narrow self-interest and a suspicion of others.
3There is another, and very attractive route. If we act together as a world, strongly, collaboratively, creatively, justly, we can create a new era of low-carbon growth and development. It will be more energy-efficient, more energy-secure, more equitable, safer, quieter, cleaner and more bio-diverse. We can create a new definition of, criteria for, and approach to development that will be far more attractive than what has gone before. Further, the transition to low-carbon growth could be the most dynamic and innovative period in world history. On the other hand, high-carbon growth will kill itself: first on high prices for hydro-carbons and second, and more fundamentally, on the very hostile physical environment it would create.
4The choice is ours and it is urgent. We can identify the scale of action necessary – the topic of the next section –, the areas of action and the necessary technologies. We understand the basic economic policies to encourage the reduction of emissions – the topic of section 2. The challenge now is creating the political will. We saw in Copenhagen in December 2009 just how difficult that can be. We will not create, or deserve to create, the necessary political will and collaboration, unless we recognise that there are two defining problems of this century: managing climate change and overcoming world poverty. We will succeed or fail on these two together. Creating an international agreement will be the topic of section 3. The sequence of these sections reflects the structure of the course.
Scale and Risks
5Analysis and the making of policy on climate change must start with an examination of the consequences of various forms of action and indeed of inaction. The problem starts with the actions of people in their daily lives and their consequences influence directly the capability of people to live their lives. The chain of causation is the following. Step 1: through their activities, in production and consumption, people cause the emissions of greenhouse gases. The emissions have, for much of the last century or more, been above the level that the planet can absorb via “the carbon cycle”. Step 2: the flows therefore result in an increase in the stock or concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Step 3: the increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere imply that more heat radiating from the earth is trapped in the atmosphere and temperature rises. The magnitude of the increase is shaped by the “climate sensitivity”. This is global warming. Step 4: global warming causes climate change. This manifests itself in large measure through water in some shape or form: storms and hurricanes; floods and inundations; droughts and desertification; sea-level rise and changing flows and courses of rivers. Step 5: these climate changes have an impact on peoples’ lives and livelihoods to which they will have to adapt in some way or another. In many cases, the impacts will re-define where people can live and thus adaptation, for many, will involve dislocation and migration.
6The basics of this logic were understood by the end of the 19th century. In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier, the great French mathematician and physicist, calculated heat balances for the planet and realised, because the actual temperature of the planet was much higher than the equilibrium temperature, that something was trapping heat in the atmosphere. The British physicist John Tyndall identified, in 1861, the types of gases responsible for the effect and the Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, provided at the end of the 19th century the first calculations of the possible effects of doubling the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The physics of the effect are essentially that a gas can vibrate in a way which impedes the passage of infra-red radiation. The trapping of energy raises temperatures and results in climate change. Thus the basic physics of the story are well- and long-established.
7There are, however, major uncertainties in all of the five steps in the logic of human-generated climate change. Thus we cannot predict with certainty how large the effects will be. In recent times, the last two decades, the science and modelling have advanced to the point where it is now possible to place probabilities on some of the key effects, for example, the relationship between the concentrations of greenhouse gases and the likely temperature increases.
8We start in a difficult place, with concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) of around 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). We have added more than 150 ppm of CO2e since the mid-19th century –our usual benchmark– with the majority coming in the last 60 years of rapid high-carbon growth. We are adding at a rate of around 2.5 ppm a year and that rate is rising. Hence if we continue under BAU until the end of this century we would likely see concentration levels rise to around 750 ppm CO2e or more. The eventual (probably early in the next century) temperature increase would, with probability around 50%, be above 5oC relative to the mid-19th century. The planet has not witnessed such temperatures for more than 30 million years. Homo sapiens, who have been around for 200,000 years at most, have no experience of temperatures anything like this magnitude. Such an increase would likely result in massive movements of population, probably hundreds of millions. 3 or 4oC would also be unprecedented for humans and is likely to cause very severe and, for many areas, catastrophic effects. The story is one of risk and how much risk it is sensible to tolerate, given the options, and their cost, that are available to us.
9How far can risk be reduced? Is it possible to control temperatures to no more than a 2oC increase, the level many scientists, including the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have argued should be regarded as “dangerous”. Above 2oC the probability of “tipping points” starts to rise sharply. Examples of “tipping points” include the collapse of the Amazon forest, implying the loss of a major sink, or the thawing of the permafrost in Siberia and elsewhere, resulting in the emissions of massive quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Current emissions are now around 47 billion tonnes of CO2e per annum. There are a number of emissions paths, starting at current levels, that would give around a 50-50 chance of holding below 2oC (for short “2oC”). Crudely speaking, what matters is the cumulative emissions – it is concentrations that matter. Thus, paths which peak at higher levels or later will have to fall much more rapidly later than paths which peak at lower levels and sooner.
10The most plausible emissions path: emissions around 44 billion tonnes in 2020 and well below 35 in 2030, and well below 20 in 2050, means cutting totals for the world by at least 50%, 1990-2050 from the 1990 levels of around 40. The path would prevent concentrations from rising above 500 ppm. Then over a long period concentrations would have to move towards 450 or lower.
11We can see from this analysis the explanation of why, if 2oC is to be achieved, the world has to peak within the next ten years. Delay is dangerous and costly. It is dangerous because it undermines our chances of achieving 2oC and it is costly because we would have to take action later that would be very costly if we tried to “catch up”.
12The figures for 2050 carry strong lessons on where we must be headed in the medium to long-term. With around 9 billion people likely in the world in 2050, having well below 20 billion tonnes of emissions requires no more than 2 tonnes per person. Currently Europe is around 10-12 tonnes and the USA well over 20. There will not be many people below average emissions so there cannot be many above average. This explains why Europe (which must move from 10-12 tonnes per capita to around 2) must cut by at least 80%.
13This analysis explains therefore the commonly-quoted percentage levels for the cuts which are necessary for the world as a whole and for the rich countries. I prefer, however, to talk in terms of total flows, rather than percentages. With percentages it is all too attractive to fiddle with base years in order to provide “more room”. The physics of the problem works in terms of overall emissions.
14The top five emitters by country/region (China, USA, EU, Indonesia and Brazil) are responsible for more than 60% of the current emissions. This small group of key players must be centrally involved if emissions reductions are to take place on the scale required. For example, China’s emissions are already around 6 tonnes per capita and a country of that size must get down to around 2 tonnes per capita by 2050 if the overall world constraint is to be achieved. This will surely require a peaking of emissions in China within 10, or at most, 15 years.
15The arguments already described show the scale and intensity of some of the ethical challenges; issues of equity between communities and over time, and of responsibilities of different generations and countries. Let us turn briefly to some of these ethical issues.
16In much of formal economics discussion of ethics focuses on equity, within and across generations. A major mistake, committed by all-too-many economists, is trying to import observed market interest rates or rates of return directly, to the decisions affecting climate change. Such rates generally cover the near and medium-term, capital markets are very thin for more than 2 or 3 decades. Further, they are generally relevant for only small changes around a given near to medium-term path. When long-term future income levels depend in such a major way on current decisions, that is a hugely misleading analytical error; future generations may be much worse off than we are, undermining the case for strong discount rates, since additional resources have more value for poor people. I shall discuss in more detail in Lecture 2. There are, in fact, many more errors involved in the attempt to import, as I shall explain, but the one I have described is central to most of them. The first day of the symposium “Managing climate change” that will be organised with the chair (“Economic Theory and Social Organisation”) of my friend and colleague at the Collège de France, Roger Guesnerie, will be devoted to long-term discounting. The most distinguished scholars will discuss all the issues of the debate. And in the lectures I shall also explain that the ethical issues, including responsibility and sustainability, are broader and deeper than simply the distribution of income and wealth, notwithstanding the fundamental importance of those issues.
17The scale and nature of the risks and ethical issues they raise imply, in my view, that we should consider the problem as one of risk management rather than narrow cost-benefit analysis. The valuation of effects which are potentially immense, global, cover all aspects of life, and are very uncertain, strain the credibility of a formal cost-benefit analysis.
18Let me now comment briefly on the position of those who would deny the need for action. Broadly speaking, one can deny that the science tells us that there are serious risks; or one can argue that if change does come, we can adapt; or that if the problem occurs we can geo-engineer it away; or that the future is for others and matters little to us. The first, as I have argued, is absurd given the evidence. The second and third must be seen as reckless given the magnitude of the risks I have described. The fourth would be regarded by most of us as unethical.
19The science is 19th century well-tested science. The physics is not complex at its heart. The calibration of risks can be more complex and model-intensive but the recognition of the risks appeals only to the basics of the science. As risk management, the issues are surely simple: if we act as if the science is right but risks turn out to be less than anticipated, we will have discovered many useful technologies, have a cleaner, more energy-secure world and will have protected our forests. If we act as if the science is wrong, we will have put ourselves in an extremely dangerous position from which we are unlikely to be able to extricate ourselves.
20To rely on adaptation or geo-engineering is to fail to recognise the magnitude of the risk and the potential, and the rewards to emissions reductions. We will indeed have to adapt, but the potential scale of impacts is likely to be such that adaptation is limited. And we should research geo-engineering. But it would be reckless to rely on this to come up with answers that can reduce risks by acceptable magnitudes.
21Deniers have the right to speak and argue. But they do not have the right to have unsound and confused arguments, viewed as wise and reasonable.
Policy and Opportunity
22Policy must start with recognising that the emissions of GHGs constitute what we economists call an externality or market failure. Specifically, the emissions of GHGs damages others but emitters do not, unless policy intervenes, see the costs imposed on others in the market prices. They would expect to pay for labour, energy, raw materials, capital and so on used in production or consumption, but without policy on GHGs, market prices give the wrong signals. Because of its scale and involvement of all of us, I have called this the greatest market failure the world has seen. Correcting this market failure requires a price for greenhouse gases. This could be a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme.
23Policy, however, must go beyond this one market failure, fundamental though that is. There are other market failures. Technology will be key to a low-carbon future. Ideas are, in general a positive externality and policy should encourage them. This area is of such importance and urgency that policy on technology should be stronger here than elsewhere, with direct support for research and feed-in tariffs for key renewables.
24A third policy area, after carbon prices and technology, concerns regulation. The emissions from buildings is an important example. Builders and property developers often argue that it is difficult to recoup investments in energy efficiency or low-carbon innovations via rent, or reasons associated with a number of market failures. Also the refurbishment of older building may be much cheaper if done neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood rather than house-by-house. Thus standards and regulation for new buildings should be important elements for policy. Similar arguments apply to private and public transport.
25Finally, we should note that policy also concerns perceptions and attitudes. We learned that mixing alcohol and driving is dangerous and most of us would not feel it right to do so. Thus we desist because we see it as wrong and irresponsible. There are, of course, sanctions, i.e., incentives not to do this, but their effect is in addition to our own views of responsibility. Economics has, I think, paid too little attention to the role of public discussion of responsibility in the making of policy. And we should note that this is not a new idea in the explicit analysis of public policy, going back at least to the middle of the 19th century and John Stuart Mill.
26The policies we have described are not simply about limiting the costs and burdens of reducing emissions. Their purpose is to create the incentives that could spark a creative and dynamic process of radical change. Economic historians have shown both how some of our most important bursts of growth have been driven by investments embodying technical advance, such as the railways, electricity and information technology, and the crucial role of finance in allowing these to move forward. The green energy revolution has already begun. The combination of the new goods and equipment on the one hand and the finance on the other are illustrated all the way from very small-scale solar lanterns in villages in India to very large railway and power infrastructure.
27The fertility of ideas in this area is quite remarkable. Regarding energy efficiency for instance, insulation technology is changing rapidly, partly using technology developed in other areas such as aerospace. The capital cost of solar power is crashing down as new materials are exploited. New varieties of crops and equipment are being developed for low-till agriculture. The examples are legion and are increasing by the day. Long-term investors are realising that low-carbon growth is the growth of the future. The potential of entrepreneurship and the markets is immense if national and international policy is strong.
28A further and vital area for policy, and this moves us towards international issues, is stopping deforestation and degradation of forests and encouraging reforestation. The growth of trees captures carbon dioxide. There is a positive externality. Standing trees have value to us all and cutting and burning them damages us all. Thus there is a responsibility of and gain to us all to act to protect forests and to discourage deforestation.
29There will be a number of elements to deforestation policy, from influencing factors that determine the demand for land and wood products, to legal and governance structures and pricing for the protection and planting of forests. More generally, policies for development are required that empower and protect the rights and livelihoods of those who depend on forests and provide alternative activities for those who may otherwise have incentives to cut them down. This is an important example showing how policies on climate change and for development are inextricably intertwined.
30Policy must cover much more than emissions reductions; adaptation to the climate change that is occurring, and that is likely to occur, will be of great importance. It makes little sense to plan our building codes, thermostatic controls and standards, flood protection, transport, irrigation schemes and agriculture as if past patterns of weather, flooding, droughts and costal erosion will be similar in the future to those in the past, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
31Clearly, good information and anticipation will be vital to adaptation. We have to work to analyse and reappraise different kinds of risks. Current climate change modelling has progressed quite far in terms of possible overall and regional outcomes, but more precise local modelling and forecasting presents difficult challenges. The global structures and the local conditions are likely to interact in complex ways which put strong demands on information and modelling capabilities. And in some of the most sensitive and important areas, such as the Himalayas, a water source for billions, Africa, especially vulnerable and with a population soon to be around a billion, and the Amazon forests, key to the whole global system, observation and information are sparse.
32Policies and arguments concerning responsibilities which relate to mitigation, development and adaptation are distinct in many ways, but overlap in many others, building design and irrigation are important examples. And the actions which policies try to encourage will similarly have their distinctiveness and overlaps. The inter-connections and overlaps are, however, sufficiently strong that development policies and planning, and bilateral and multilateral institutions, should take great care to avoid structures which separate support for mitigation, for development, and for adaptation. In particular, any new funding institutions, or new windows in existing institutions, should be designed so that different sources of funding can be easily combined.
33There is no doubt that the problems of controlling emissions will be much more difficult with a population predicted to be around 9 billion in 2050. I am assuming (hopefully) that no sensible person would want to advocate increasing death rates. Studies of demography have pointed to the main influences on birth rates with some of the key determinants being family and individual incomes, opportunities for women in the labour force, education for women and girls, rights and status of women, access to reproductive healthcare, infant mortality rates. These are directly related to, or constitute, important development objectives and policies in their own right. That they will also influence climate change adds further to arguments in their support which were already very powerful.
34Looking back I think that the risks now look more worrying than I envisaged at the time we were working on the Stern Review four years ago. Emissions have been rising faster than we assumed, the absorptive capacity of the planet seems lower and some of the effects are coming through more quickly. I would now think that the stabilisation range suggested in the Review of 450-550 ppm CO2e should be changed to 450-500. That might increase a cost estimate for mitigation from 1% to 2% (approximately) of GDP p.a. for the next few decades. On the other hand, technological progress is moving so rapidly those costs may turn out to be much lower and we may see strong dynamic and other benefits from the new growth path. This reinforces the conclusion of the Stern Review: the cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action.
Towards a Global Agreement
35This brings us to the story of Copenhagen in December 2009 and the creation of an international agreement. Let us begin by asking what an international agreement should look like on the basis of: the risks identified by the science; the technologies present and future; the likely circumstances, future, present and past, of different countries and communities; some basic criteria; and the economics.
36A global deal should be effective (on the scale required), efficient (keeping costs down), and equitable (taking into account different circumstances, as I argued earlier in this lecture). Our earlier analysis has pointed to most of the key elements of such a deal. Let me assemble them in a simple way.
37First, we must, as a world, commit to an emissions path consistent with the goal of a 50-50 chance of holding temperature increases to 2oC. This means a path of emissions which is around 44 billion tonnes CO2e p.a. by 2020, and thus world emissions peaking before then, and emissions well below 35 and 20 in 2030 and 2050. Rich countries should aim to cut actual emissions by at least 80% 1990 to 2050, and there should be strong interim targets.
38Second, developing countries should now create strong climate change action plans, including indicative targets for emissions and programmes for adaptation. These should, taken together with rich country planned paths, be consistent with the aggregate constraints for the path of world emissions from 2010-2050. This implies that emissions per capita in the developing as well as in the developed world should not exceed 2 tonnes by 2050.
39Third, the arrangements for international emissions trading should be reformed and expanded. Whilst developing countries do not have binding constraints on emissions, a “trading scheme”, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is likely to be necessary, but its reform is urgent if trading is to move to the scale likely to be necessary. Looking further forward, the allocation of permits for global two-sided trading will raise strong equity issues: these permits are major financial assets.
40Fourth, there should be a strong programme to halt deforestation and encourage reforestation. Strong interim targets should be adopted, for example to halve deforestation within 5 or 10 years.
41Fifth, we must have a global programme on technology. Key elements should be first, co-ordination of standards and sharing technologies, and second, strong public funding for the development and deployment of new technologies. Part of investment in R&D should go to the investigation of risks associated with alternative energies. Most of them, whether they be nuclear, biofuels, wind, or solar, raise environmental and other development issues that should be examined carefully.
42Sixth, we have adaptation. UNDP calculations suggest that the extra costs to meet the Millennium Development Goals (and the successors extrapolated from 2015) are likely to approach $100 billion p.a. by 2020.
43These are the basic six elements of an effective, efficient and equitable global deal. How do outcomes in Copenhagen in December 2009 compare with this description and where do we go from here? The 15th meeting of the conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15 of the UNFCCC) was the deadline, agreed at COP13 in Bali, December 2007, for agreeing arrangements to follow the Kyoto Protocol (agreed at COP5 in 1997), which covers the period to 2012. The proceedings at Copenhagen were somewhat chaotic, but heads of government from more than 100 countries were there in the final days. Decisions require unanimity of the 192 countries, which is extremely difficult where strong action is required. In the end a “Copenhagen Accord” was drawn up by five countries, USA, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and it was “noted” by the Convention. It does, however, have the positive support of many countries.
44The Copenhagen Accord has just 12 paragraphs. The key elements are: (i) a 2oC target, with global and national emissions peaking as soon as possible; (ii) binding commitments by developed countries and mitigation action plans by developing countries to be submitted by 31 January 2010 (and many were); (iii) the immediate establishment of mechanisms to help finance reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (“REDD+”); (iv) shorter-term finance from developed countries of $10 billion p.a. for 2010-2012, and mobilising $100 billion p.a. by 2020, with a High-Level Panel to examine sources of revenue, including new sources, with some of the resources flowing through a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund.
45All of these elements are of real value and consistent with the principles and actions I articulated. It was also valuable on the way to Copenhagen that, for the first time, key countries set out actions and targets for reductions and emissions. Also on the positive side was that the USA and China for the first time worked together to try to shape an agreement.
46There were, however, major disappointments. The participants were unable to agree or recognise the overall global reductions that would be consistent with 2oC, and which I described above. And there is nothing that would lead us to expect that when all individual country commitments are submitted that the totals for expected commitments would be consistent with levels necessary for 2oC. Further, whilst only a “political agreement” was expected, the form in which it arose (an Accord which was “noted”) involves weaker individual country commitments than might have been hoped, even from a “political agreement”.
47On balance, I would judge that whilst it is disappointing, it could have been much worse. There is a platform on which to build; perhaps we have to see Copenhagen as an “event” beginning in December 2009 and stretching to COP16 in Mexico at the end of 2010. On 2oC, on finance, on deforestation, on monitoring and reporting of emissions, there are practical avenues to follow. I will set out ways forward in my final lectures.
48Let us conclude, however, by asking about lessons for international collaboration. A sound scientific base has been essential, it has been established, and it has been key to progress. There are many uncertainties and more work to do but it is clear that the risks are very large. The sense of urgency it brings has enabled countries with difficult relationships to begin a genuinely serious dialogue on how to work practically together to manage the dangers. Analytical work on policy and a recognition of the importance of working together on technology and deforestation have also been major advances. There are, however, deep senses of injustice from the developing world, which are not only understandable but also a political reality. There is a double injustice in that rich countries are responsible for more than 60% of current concentrations in the atmosphere, yet poor countries will be hit earliest and hardest by the effects of climate change. Practical measures on strong targets for rich countries, and financial and technological support will be essential.
49The power of the example will be crucial. Some countries who embrace the argument early, such as Korea, some of the Scandinavian countries, and some parts of the developing world, such as Costa Rica, Guyana and Ethiopia are likely to demonstrate what can be done. But the developing world will expect strong progress in Europe generally, Japan and the USA if they are to find the low-carbon arguments convincing. And we have little time.
50Let us hope that the arguments of those who see low-carbon growth as exciting and dynamic will quickly come to broad recognition. This is the growth theory of the 21st century
51We must, however, do more than win intellectual arguments. We must also show as a world a new spirit of common humanity and interests. The world is more than ever facing problems which can be handled only on a global scale, and climate change, which is existential, is the most important. We require the greatest collaboration the world has ever seen.
52We will need new institutions. Indeed, I would argue that if John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were conducting a Bretton Woods Conference now instead of in 1944, they would have had three different institutions instead of World Bank, IMF, and WTO. We surely do need institutions for finance and for trade, but we now need one for the environment, a World Environmental Organisation.
53We are, however, at an intellectual gathering and must consider our own roles as academics and policy advisors. Our own responsibilities and opportunities have never been greater. We have to look ahead and anticipate. We cannot wait for bitter experience, as with two world wars and the great depression, that motivated Bretton Woods. Natural selection and experiments can reveal mistakes and ways forward when cities or regions follow paths which lead to destruction. People can migrate from a localised area of devastation or they may be able to rebuild. We have only one planet and we cannot wait for the severest impacts of climate change to show themselves before finally realising we have to act. It will be too late.
54Now is the time for reasoned argument and discussion involving all intellectual disciplines and we need to be reaching across to our colleagues across the world. This is the ultimate inter-disciplinary subject and the communication of the arguments and understanding is crucial to action. That is why it is such an honour for me to be delivering this inaugural lecture here at the Collège de France, one of the most pre-eminent and distinguished academic institutions of the world.
55Thank you.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Nicholas STERN, « Managing Climate Change and Promoting Growth, Development and Equity », in Gérer les changements climatiques. Climat, croissance, développement et équité, Paris, Collège de France / Fayard (« Leçons inaugurales », no 212), 2010, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 24 juin 2010, consulté le 25 décembre 2012. URL : http://lecons-cdf.revues.org/236
Auteur
Nicholas STERN
Professeur au Collège de France (2009-2010). Professeur à la London School of Economics
Droits d’auteur: © Collège de France
Haut de page
SommaireDocument précédent
Decadencia educacional: nao, nao e' no Brasil...
Desta vez é na Italia, provavelmente o país europeu mais parecido com o Brasil (ou vice-versa), na corrupção política, na ineficiência estatal, na criminalidade institucional, em grupos mafiosos, no corporativismo sindical, na dificuldade de fazer reformas de fato, na ausência completa de estadistas, enfim, num conjunto de características, que ambos partilham, inclusive a má qualidade da educação e um mercado de trabalho mediocremente qualificado. O Brasil vai um pouco além: agora deu para seguir a Argentina no protecionismo e no dirigismo e intervencionismo estatais.
Pronto, depois de Belíndia, viramos uma Argentália...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Frenzy Over Teaching Test Is Symptom of Italy’s Myriad Woes
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
The New York Times, December 24, 2012
ROME — Luisa Ribolzi, an expert on education in Italy, likened a teaching job at a public school when the economy is bad to “a ship to jump on for everyone who is swimming in the sea.”
Now imagine seeing that ship after a 13-year absence.
When Italy held examinations to fill teaching positions in its public schools last week for the first time since 1999, it set off something of a nationwide frenzy among the country’s despairing, underemployed and unemployed educators. More than 321,000 people applied to take the tests, pursuing just 11,500 job openings.
The ratio said as much about the dim job prospects in Italy, where the unemployment rate is over 11 percent generally and nearly 14 percent for people ages 24 to 35, as it did about the rigidities and territorial mind-set of a public education system that has been dented for years by hiring freezes and budget cuts.
The exam is supposed to be held every three years, but the Education Ministry put it off repeatedly to save money, some critics say. In that time it filled vacancies with temporary hires, making aspiring teachers and unions furious.
Ministry officials say that this year’s exam is intended to right past wrongs and to introduce a new generation of teachers to a work force whose average age is now 50, one of the highest in Europe, after freezing out young applicants for so long. But it was a sign of how widely the country’s economic pain has spread that the average age of candidates taking the test this year was over 38.
Critics of the current system, with its distinction between permanent teachers and temporary hires working precariously for lower wages on contracts of a year or less, say it has become unworkable.
“It essentially kills young people, who are kept on a leash year after year,” said Marco Paolo Nigi, secretary general of the national teachers’ union, Snals-Confsal. “It’s shameful. And it’s a system we’re trying to change.”
The teaching exam last week, though it opened the way for prequalified job seekers to become teachers, became an occasion for new scrutiny of an education and hiring system that many, like Mr. Nigi, say is in need of revamping.
The test itself, the first to be administered on computers, is meant to measure logic, reading comprehension, and math and linguistic abilities. Questions included “What is a touch screen?” and choosing between “would” and “could” on the portion covering English language skills.
Some critics said the exam was a poor hiring tool because it could not measure attributes like a passion for learning and a love of children that are essential in a good teacher.
“There are better ways to determine merit,” said Romina De Cesaris, 37, a teacher of history and philosophy in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, who has been working for 10 years on temporary contracts. “This mega-quiz is offensive for those of us who have teaching backgrounds. You can pass a quiz and still not have the didactic competence to teach students.”
While Italy’s teacher-to-student ratio is among the highest in Europe, it does not necessarily translate into better education, according to Andreas Schleicher, who advises the head of the 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education matters.
“In terms of student performance, Italy is below the O.E.C.D. norm,” he said. “You have a large number of teachers, but they are poorly paid and have relatively low levels of training. Other systems prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of the classes.”
More than 260,000 candidates sat down to take the test last Monday and Tuesday, trying to answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. Thirty-five correct answers were required to pass and move on to the next phase in the lengthy hiring process; only about 34 percent of those taking the test passed.
Typical among those trying their hand was Valentina, 34, who would give only her first name out of concern for her privacy. She has been practicing law in Rome for the past eight years, but she has not managed to get a full-time job at a law firm. So she dusted off a high school certificate that allowed her to teach primary school to qualify to take the state test and perhaps change careers.
“Maybe this will work,” she said doubtfully as she waited at the gate of a high school in a middle-class neighborhood of Rome.
After the test last week, the next steps are written and oral exams early next year. If she gets through those, Valentina would enter the line for one of 118 nursery school teaching posts open in and around Rome, which pay about 1,200 euros (about $1,580) a month. “How sad,” she said of her overall employment prospects.
Competitions are increasingly rare as Italy’s public service shrinks though cutbacks, so the examination last week drew notable media attention.
“Because there is no regularity in the recruitment of teachers, a selection that in other countries takes place in the normal order of things in Italy assumes a ritual character,” said Ms. Ribolzi, who is vice president of the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes.
Complicating matters in the schools have been repeated budget cuts and several abortive attempts to improve teaching standards.
The Italian job market is so poor, and so infrequently open to competition, that there is “an avalanche of applications for every competition that arises, regardless of whether it is in the private or public sector,” said Arnaldo Agostini, editor in chief of Lavoro Facile, a magazine that lists job openings.
Many critics of the Education Ministry protested its holding the test for new applicants while thousands of qualified teachers were already languishing on lists of eligible candidates.
Massimo Gargiulo, a spokesman for the Schools of Rome Committee, one of several groups working on behalf of teachers on temporary contracts, said, “The education system in Italy has had no overall planning.”
Mr. Gargiulo said that there were already about 200,000 fully qualified teachers waiting to be hired, even before the exam last week. (The Education Ministry was unable to provide official statistics.)
“Right now, I have 50 people ahead of me to teach Greek in Rome, but the test will put tens of thousands of other contenders in the ranking,” Mr. Gargiulo said. “It’s not a competition, it’s a lottery.”
Pronto, depois de Belíndia, viramos uma Argentália...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Frenzy Over Teaching Test Is Symptom of Italy’s Myriad Woes
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
The New York Times, December 24, 2012
ROME — Luisa Ribolzi, an expert on education in Italy, likened a teaching job at a public school when the economy is bad to “a ship to jump on for everyone who is swimming in the sea.”
Now imagine seeing that ship after a 13-year absence.
When Italy held examinations to fill teaching positions in its public schools last week for the first time since 1999, it set off something of a nationwide frenzy among the country’s despairing, underemployed and unemployed educators. More than 321,000 people applied to take the tests, pursuing just 11,500 job openings.
The ratio said as much about the dim job prospects in Italy, where the unemployment rate is over 11 percent generally and nearly 14 percent for people ages 24 to 35, as it did about the rigidities and territorial mind-set of a public education system that has been dented for years by hiring freezes and budget cuts.
The exam is supposed to be held every three years, but the Education Ministry put it off repeatedly to save money, some critics say. In that time it filled vacancies with temporary hires, making aspiring teachers and unions furious.
Ministry officials say that this year’s exam is intended to right past wrongs and to introduce a new generation of teachers to a work force whose average age is now 50, one of the highest in Europe, after freezing out young applicants for so long. But it was a sign of how widely the country’s economic pain has spread that the average age of candidates taking the test this year was over 38.
Critics of the current system, with its distinction between permanent teachers and temporary hires working precariously for lower wages on contracts of a year or less, say it has become unworkable.
“It essentially kills young people, who are kept on a leash year after year,” said Marco Paolo Nigi, secretary general of the national teachers’ union, Snals-Confsal. “It’s shameful. And it’s a system we’re trying to change.”
The teaching exam last week, though it opened the way for prequalified job seekers to become teachers, became an occasion for new scrutiny of an education and hiring system that many, like Mr. Nigi, say is in need of revamping.
The test itself, the first to be administered on computers, is meant to measure logic, reading comprehension, and math and linguistic abilities. Questions included “What is a touch screen?” and choosing between “would” and “could” on the portion covering English language skills.
Some critics said the exam was a poor hiring tool because it could not measure attributes like a passion for learning and a love of children that are essential in a good teacher.
“There are better ways to determine merit,” said Romina De Cesaris, 37, a teacher of history and philosophy in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, who has been working for 10 years on temporary contracts. “This mega-quiz is offensive for those of us who have teaching backgrounds. You can pass a quiz and still not have the didactic competence to teach students.”
While Italy’s teacher-to-student ratio is among the highest in Europe, it does not necessarily translate into better education, according to Andreas Schleicher, who advises the head of the 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education matters.
“In terms of student performance, Italy is below the O.E.C.D. norm,” he said. “You have a large number of teachers, but they are poorly paid and have relatively low levels of training. Other systems prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of the classes.”
More than 260,000 candidates sat down to take the test last Monday and Tuesday, trying to answer 50 questions in 50 minutes. Thirty-five correct answers were required to pass and move on to the next phase in the lengthy hiring process; only about 34 percent of those taking the test passed.
Typical among those trying their hand was Valentina, 34, who would give only her first name out of concern for her privacy. She has been practicing law in Rome for the past eight years, but she has not managed to get a full-time job at a law firm. So she dusted off a high school certificate that allowed her to teach primary school to qualify to take the state test and perhaps change careers.
“Maybe this will work,” she said doubtfully as she waited at the gate of a high school in a middle-class neighborhood of Rome.
After the test last week, the next steps are written and oral exams early next year. If she gets through those, Valentina would enter the line for one of 118 nursery school teaching posts open in and around Rome, which pay about 1,200 euros (about $1,580) a month. “How sad,” she said of her overall employment prospects.
Competitions are increasingly rare as Italy’s public service shrinks though cutbacks, so the examination last week drew notable media attention.
“Because there is no regularity in the recruitment of teachers, a selection that in other countries takes place in the normal order of things in Italy assumes a ritual character,” said Ms. Ribolzi, who is vice president of the National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes.
Complicating matters in the schools have been repeated budget cuts and several abortive attempts to improve teaching standards.
The Italian job market is so poor, and so infrequently open to competition, that there is “an avalanche of applications for every competition that arises, regardless of whether it is in the private or public sector,” said Arnaldo Agostini, editor in chief of Lavoro Facile, a magazine that lists job openings.
Many critics of the Education Ministry protested its holding the test for new applicants while thousands of qualified teachers were already languishing on lists of eligible candidates.
Massimo Gargiulo, a spokesman for the Schools of Rome Committee, one of several groups working on behalf of teachers on temporary contracts, said, “The education system in Italy has had no overall planning.”
Mr. Gargiulo said that there were already about 200,000 fully qualified teachers waiting to be hired, even before the exam last week. (The Education Ministry was unable to provide official statistics.)
“Right now, I have 50 people ahead of me to teach Greek in Rome, but the test will put tens of thousands of other contenders in the ranking,” Mr. Gargiulo said. “It’s not a competition, it’s a lottery.”
segunda-feira, 24 de dezembro de 2012
Colombia: vai uma coca espresso ou ristretta?
Matières premières : le cacao cède sa place à la cocaïne en Colombie
Le Monde.fr | 21.12.2012
Par Mathilde Damgé
Il fut un temps, il y a un peu moins de deux ans, où les cours du café et du cacao touchèrent de tels sommets – à plus de 300 cents début 2011 sur le marché new-yorkais pour la livre d'arabica et plus de 2 500 livres sterling la tonne sur le Liffe londonien à la mi-2010 – que les cultivateurs colombiens de coca se laissèrent tenter par le retour à la production d'une denrée légale.
Regarder la vidéo : Colombie : le goût du café
Mais ce temps, à l'image des turbulences de la crise financière et des aléas boursiers des matières premières, est déjà révolu. Car si les prix du café se sont adjugés 75 % en 2010 et ont limité la baisse en 2011 (du moins, ceux de l'arabica, dont la Colombie est l'un des premiers producteurs), le cacao a affiché des variations moins alléchantes.
Les cours des fèves n'ont connu des sommets que pour en retomber aussi sec : ils ont perdu près de 40 % en deux ans, et cabotent aux environ de 1 500 livres livres aujourd'hui. Et pour la banque néerlandaise Rabobank, spécialisée dans les matières premières, les prix du cacao risquent d'être encore instables l'an prochain, écrit-elle dans ses perspectives.
De son côté, l'Organisation internationale du cacao (ICCO) anticipe un excédent de production sur la saison 2011-2012 (achevée en septembre), ce qui pourrait noyer le marché sous une offre trop abondante, alors qu'en face, la consommation ne fait pas preuve d'un appétit marqué. Une tendance confirmée par le recul persistant des concassages de fèves – baromètre de la demande – en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, ainsi que par la reprise des exportations en Côte d'Ivoire, premier fournisseur de la gourmandise.
Et encore, le prix des contrats futurs sur les marchés n'est pas celui que touchent les fermiers colombiens. D'après Bloomberg, les prix des baies cacaotées auraient reculé, répercutant un mouvement identique à celui des marchés, de 5 000 à 3 000 pesos (de 2 à 1,2 euro environ).
STABILITÉ DES PRIX DE LA COCA
De son côté, le prix de la coca est remarquablement stable, même s'il a connu une légère baisse en 2011 : le kilo de feuilles se négocie environ 2 400 pesos (environ 1 euro), tandis que le kilo de pâte de coca peut valoir jusqu'à près de 1,85 million de pesos (758 euros), selon les chiffres du dernier rapport de l'Office des Nations Unies contre la drogue et le crime (UNODC).
De quoi hésiter avec des cultures plus lucratives. Sans compter que la guérilla aide souvent les producteurs de coca à démarrer, leur prêtant semence et engrais. Assurant le transport et payant "cash". Pas de quoi s'étonner, donc, que le nombre d'hectares de coca ait augmenté de 3 % en 2011, soit plus rapidement que le rythme de plantations de cacao.
Lire : Pour les dealers colombiens, rien ne vaut un sous-marin (lien Abonnés)
Résultat, la coca fait son grand retour, sur des terres au climat chaud et humide où les deux cultures se font concurrence. A l'inverse, l'arabica qui pousse en Colombie ne tolère qu'une fourchette de températures restreinte, et s'épanouit davantage dans les hauteurs plutôt que dans les vallées, comme le cacao. Il a également besoin de lumière, alors que le cacao est un amateur d'ombre et peut coexister avec d'autres espèces (caoutchouc, palme...).
LUTTE CONTRE LA GUÉRILLA
La production de coca a certes reculé de 1,4 % à 345 tonnes l'an dernier, mais les sacs de cacao ont maigri de près de 7 % en 2011, après une chute de 20 % en 2010. D'après l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture, ils devraient perdre encore 3 % tous les ans. Et le nombre de familles cultivant l'arbre fruitier ne dépasse pas les 20 000, tandis que la plante interdite en nourrit près de trois fois plus.
Cette glissade des prix du cacao constitue une menace au moins aussi importante sur les dix ans de campagne des autorités pour éradiquer la production de drogue que les mouvements de la guérilla. Pour le gouvernement, la lutte contre la plantation de coca n'est pas une question symbolique, mais permet d'assécher directement les finances des rebelles et, gagnant en sécurité, d'attirer les investissements étrangers. Soit 13,2 milliards de dollars l'an dernier, selon Bloomberg.
Autre atout, la plantation de cacao correspond à une stratégie clé pour fournir un revenu aux agriculteurs. Les programmes de reconversion agricole sont même en partie dirigés par l'Etat. L'instabilité des prix, qui ont connu des épisodes de volatilité extrême depuis 2008, fait donc craindre le pire aux autorités.
AMBITION CACAOTIÈRE
La coca compromet aussi les projets des producteurs de monter en puissance : en termes de volume de production, les cabosses colombiennes se classent au 3e rang du continent sud-américain, mais seulement au 11e rang mondial. Or, la Colombie ambitionne de dépasser l'Equateur voisin : le président de la fédération des producteurs, Jose Omar Pinzon, vise 250 000 tonnes en 2018, alors qu'il n'en a produit que 37 000 en 2011.
Pour Cesar Guedes, de l'UNODC, "la hausse des prix a rendu la culture de la coca plus attractive, mais les paysans ont besoin d'alternatives durables si nous limitons sa culture illégale sur le long terme". D'autant que le marché local intéresse de plus en plus les narcos : ainsi, l'un des dérivés de la cocaïne, le bazuco, fabriqué avec des "restes", a été promu récemment.
La Colombie pèserait plus de 40 % dans la production mondiale de cocaïne. Quelque 8 milliards de dollars, soit l'équivalent de 3 % du PIB sont blanchis chaque année en Colombie en dépit du Plan Colombie de lutte contre la drogue, lancé fin 1999 par Bogota avec le soutien de Washington.
Alors que, dans l'un des pays les plus inégalitaires en matière de distribution des terres, 32 % des habitants vivent ou travaillent encore en zones rurales, la culture du cacao est, plus qu'une douceur dans un processus de paix encore chaotique avec les rebelles, un véritable enjeu pour la santé économique de la Colombie. Autosuffisant il y a encore vingt ans, le pays importe aujourd'hui près de la moitié de ses denrées alimentaires.
Lire : Petite histoire de la coca
Lire aussi : En Colombie, les paysans font échec à l'éradication des plants de coca
Mathilde Damgé
Le Monde.fr | 21.12.2012
Par Mathilde Damgé
Il fut un temps, il y a un peu moins de deux ans, où les cours du café et du cacao touchèrent de tels sommets – à plus de 300 cents début 2011 sur le marché new-yorkais pour la livre d'arabica et plus de 2 500 livres sterling la tonne sur le Liffe londonien à la mi-2010 – que les cultivateurs colombiens de coca se laissèrent tenter par le retour à la production d'une denrée légale.
Regarder la vidéo : Colombie : le goût du café
Mais ce temps, à l'image des turbulences de la crise financière et des aléas boursiers des matières premières, est déjà révolu. Car si les prix du café se sont adjugés 75 % en 2010 et ont limité la baisse en 2011 (du moins, ceux de l'arabica, dont la Colombie est l'un des premiers producteurs), le cacao a affiché des variations moins alléchantes.
Les cours des fèves n'ont connu des sommets que pour en retomber aussi sec : ils ont perdu près de 40 % en deux ans, et cabotent aux environ de 1 500 livres livres aujourd'hui. Et pour la banque néerlandaise Rabobank, spécialisée dans les matières premières, les prix du cacao risquent d'être encore instables l'an prochain, écrit-elle dans ses perspectives.
De son côté, l'Organisation internationale du cacao (ICCO) anticipe un excédent de production sur la saison 2011-2012 (achevée en septembre), ce qui pourrait noyer le marché sous une offre trop abondante, alors qu'en face, la consommation ne fait pas preuve d'un appétit marqué. Une tendance confirmée par le recul persistant des concassages de fèves – baromètre de la demande – en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, ainsi que par la reprise des exportations en Côte d'Ivoire, premier fournisseur de la gourmandise.
Et encore, le prix des contrats futurs sur les marchés n'est pas celui que touchent les fermiers colombiens. D'après Bloomberg, les prix des baies cacaotées auraient reculé, répercutant un mouvement identique à celui des marchés, de 5 000 à 3 000 pesos (de 2 à 1,2 euro environ).
STABILITÉ DES PRIX DE LA COCA
De son côté, le prix de la coca est remarquablement stable, même s'il a connu une légère baisse en 2011 : le kilo de feuilles se négocie environ 2 400 pesos (environ 1 euro), tandis que le kilo de pâte de coca peut valoir jusqu'à près de 1,85 million de pesos (758 euros), selon les chiffres du dernier rapport de l'Office des Nations Unies contre la drogue et le crime (UNODC).
De quoi hésiter avec des cultures plus lucratives. Sans compter que la guérilla aide souvent les producteurs de coca à démarrer, leur prêtant semence et engrais. Assurant le transport et payant "cash". Pas de quoi s'étonner, donc, que le nombre d'hectares de coca ait augmenté de 3 % en 2011, soit plus rapidement que le rythme de plantations de cacao.
Lire : Pour les dealers colombiens, rien ne vaut un sous-marin (lien Abonnés)
Résultat, la coca fait son grand retour, sur des terres au climat chaud et humide où les deux cultures se font concurrence. A l'inverse, l'arabica qui pousse en Colombie ne tolère qu'une fourchette de températures restreinte, et s'épanouit davantage dans les hauteurs plutôt que dans les vallées, comme le cacao. Il a également besoin de lumière, alors que le cacao est un amateur d'ombre et peut coexister avec d'autres espèces (caoutchouc, palme...).
LUTTE CONTRE LA GUÉRILLA
La production de coca a certes reculé de 1,4 % à 345 tonnes l'an dernier, mais les sacs de cacao ont maigri de près de 7 % en 2011, après une chute de 20 % en 2010. D'après l'Organisation des Nations Unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture, ils devraient perdre encore 3 % tous les ans. Et le nombre de familles cultivant l'arbre fruitier ne dépasse pas les 20 000, tandis que la plante interdite en nourrit près de trois fois plus.
Cette glissade des prix du cacao constitue une menace au moins aussi importante sur les dix ans de campagne des autorités pour éradiquer la production de drogue que les mouvements de la guérilla. Pour le gouvernement, la lutte contre la plantation de coca n'est pas une question symbolique, mais permet d'assécher directement les finances des rebelles et, gagnant en sécurité, d'attirer les investissements étrangers. Soit 13,2 milliards de dollars l'an dernier, selon Bloomberg.
Autre atout, la plantation de cacao correspond à une stratégie clé pour fournir un revenu aux agriculteurs. Les programmes de reconversion agricole sont même en partie dirigés par l'Etat. L'instabilité des prix, qui ont connu des épisodes de volatilité extrême depuis 2008, fait donc craindre le pire aux autorités.
AMBITION CACAOTIÈRE
La coca compromet aussi les projets des producteurs de monter en puissance : en termes de volume de production, les cabosses colombiennes se classent au 3e rang du continent sud-américain, mais seulement au 11e rang mondial. Or, la Colombie ambitionne de dépasser l'Equateur voisin : le président de la fédération des producteurs, Jose Omar Pinzon, vise 250 000 tonnes en 2018, alors qu'il n'en a produit que 37 000 en 2011.
Pour Cesar Guedes, de l'UNODC, "la hausse des prix a rendu la culture de la coca plus attractive, mais les paysans ont besoin d'alternatives durables si nous limitons sa culture illégale sur le long terme". D'autant que le marché local intéresse de plus en plus les narcos : ainsi, l'un des dérivés de la cocaïne, le bazuco, fabriqué avec des "restes", a été promu récemment.
La Colombie pèserait plus de 40 % dans la production mondiale de cocaïne. Quelque 8 milliards de dollars, soit l'équivalent de 3 % du PIB sont blanchis chaque année en Colombie en dépit du Plan Colombie de lutte contre la drogue, lancé fin 1999 par Bogota avec le soutien de Washington.
Alors que, dans l'un des pays les plus inégalitaires en matière de distribution des terres, 32 % des habitants vivent ou travaillent encore en zones rurales, la culture du cacao est, plus qu'une douceur dans un processus de paix encore chaotique avec les rebelles, un véritable enjeu pour la santé économique de la Colombie. Autosuffisant il y a encore vingt ans, le pays importe aujourd'hui près de la moitié de ses denrées alimentaires.
Lire : Petite histoire de la coca
Lire aussi : En Colombie, les paysans font échec à l'éradication des plants de coca
Mathilde Damgé
O que emperra a economia? Ora, e' o governo, CNI. Elementar, meu caro...
O que emperra a economia
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo
Nada parece justificar o otimismo da Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI) que prevê que a economia brasileira poderá crescer 4% em 2013, se a crise internacional não se agravar. Na mesma edição especial de seu boletim Informe Conjuntural, em que faz essa previsão, a CNI aponta vários obstáculos que prejudicam o desempenho do setor produtivo, já fazem o Brasil ficar atrás de outras economias emergentes em vários aspectos e poderão comprometer o futuro do País. Por isso, mais do que um estudo de conjuntura, o documento deve ser entendido como um alerta que precisa ser levado em conta pelos governantes e também pelos dirigentes de empresas. Há muito o que fazer para assegurar o crescimento futuro do País.
Ao considerar insustentável o modelo de crescimento baseado no consumo - que resultou no frustrante desempenho da economia em 2012, quando, em sua avaliação, deverá crescer apenas 0,9%, um terço da projeção que fazia no início do ano -, a CNI chama a atenção para a necessidade de buscar o equilíbrio entre o aumento dos investimentos e o do consumo das famílias. "Não se sustenta crescimento só com consumo", afirmou o presidente da entidade Robson Braga de Andrade.
O mau desempenho da economia brasileira em 2012 não se deve apenas - talvez nem se deva principalmente - à crise mundial. "Países emergentes, inclusive da América Latina, irão crescer mais do que o Brasil", diz o Informe da CNI. São países que investem mais do que o Brasil, o que explica parte da diferença de desempenho.
Pelo menos nos discursos, o tema parece preocupar também o governo federal. "Os investimentos públicos e privados são a chave para nosso crescimento sustentável, pois essa parceria entre público e privado amplia nossa capacidade de produzir, escoar, exportar, importar, traz inovação, eficiência, gera emprego, gera renda", disse a presidente Dilma Rousseff, há dias, ao participar de uma solenidade no Porto de Itaqui.
De fato, esses são alguns dos resultados positivos dos investimentos. Sem investimentos, acrescenta a CNI, são escassos os ganhos de produtividade. A produtividade, de sua parte, é essencial para assegurar maior competitividade, e, se não se tornar mais competitivo, o setor produtivo brasileiro, sobretudo o industrial, perderá espaços para a concorrência internacional, inclusive no mercado interno.
Por isso, a CNI considera a competitividade essencial para o crescimento vigoroso da economia brasileira. Além do aumento dos investimentos, a recuperação da produtividade e da competitividade da economia requer ambiente regulatório adequado, mais atenção à inovação, infraestrutura que atenda às necessidades do setor produtivo, redução da burocracia, reforma do sistema tributário e melhora do ensino, entre outros fatores.
Há problemas cujas soluções dependem exclusivamente do governo, outros que podem ser resolvidos apenas pelo setor privado, outros, ainda, cujas soluções dependem dos dois setores da economia. Cada vez mais determinante para a conquista e a preservação de mercados, a inovação, por exemplo, depende da decisão da empresa em investir. Mas essa decisão está condicionada à existência de ambiente adequado, de políticas públicas que estimulem e apoiem os investimentos privados e de disponibilidade de mão de obra qualificada, o que envolve a ação do governo.
A escassez de mão de obra preparada já é sentida em vários setores e resulta da ineficiência do sistema educacional. Para a CNI, a baixa qualidade do ensino - resultante de políticas do governo - dificulta a preparação da mão de obra e afeta a produtividade de dois modos. Com a contratação de profissionais não adequadamente qualificados, a produtividade cai imediatamente, pois os novos trabalhadores terão de aprender o ofício. Mas a baixa qualidade da educação dificulta o aprendizado, o que retarda ou impede a recuperação da produtividade perdida.
A criação de ambiente adequado para investimentos, sobretudo em inovação, requer mais do que discursos. Necessita de políticas públicas eficientes, algumas de longa maturação e que exigem, além de competência, perseverança do governo.
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo
Nada parece justificar o otimismo da Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI) que prevê que a economia brasileira poderá crescer 4% em 2013, se a crise internacional não se agravar. Na mesma edição especial de seu boletim Informe Conjuntural, em que faz essa previsão, a CNI aponta vários obstáculos que prejudicam o desempenho do setor produtivo, já fazem o Brasil ficar atrás de outras economias emergentes em vários aspectos e poderão comprometer o futuro do País. Por isso, mais do que um estudo de conjuntura, o documento deve ser entendido como um alerta que precisa ser levado em conta pelos governantes e também pelos dirigentes de empresas. Há muito o que fazer para assegurar o crescimento futuro do País.
Ao considerar insustentável o modelo de crescimento baseado no consumo - que resultou no frustrante desempenho da economia em 2012, quando, em sua avaliação, deverá crescer apenas 0,9%, um terço da projeção que fazia no início do ano -, a CNI chama a atenção para a necessidade de buscar o equilíbrio entre o aumento dos investimentos e o do consumo das famílias. "Não se sustenta crescimento só com consumo", afirmou o presidente da entidade Robson Braga de Andrade.
O mau desempenho da economia brasileira em 2012 não se deve apenas - talvez nem se deva principalmente - à crise mundial. "Países emergentes, inclusive da América Latina, irão crescer mais do que o Brasil", diz o Informe da CNI. São países que investem mais do que o Brasil, o que explica parte da diferença de desempenho.
Pelo menos nos discursos, o tema parece preocupar também o governo federal. "Os investimentos públicos e privados são a chave para nosso crescimento sustentável, pois essa parceria entre público e privado amplia nossa capacidade de produzir, escoar, exportar, importar, traz inovação, eficiência, gera emprego, gera renda", disse a presidente Dilma Rousseff, há dias, ao participar de uma solenidade no Porto de Itaqui.
De fato, esses são alguns dos resultados positivos dos investimentos. Sem investimentos, acrescenta a CNI, são escassos os ganhos de produtividade. A produtividade, de sua parte, é essencial para assegurar maior competitividade, e, se não se tornar mais competitivo, o setor produtivo brasileiro, sobretudo o industrial, perderá espaços para a concorrência internacional, inclusive no mercado interno.
Por isso, a CNI considera a competitividade essencial para o crescimento vigoroso da economia brasileira. Além do aumento dos investimentos, a recuperação da produtividade e da competitividade da economia requer ambiente regulatório adequado, mais atenção à inovação, infraestrutura que atenda às necessidades do setor produtivo, redução da burocracia, reforma do sistema tributário e melhora do ensino, entre outros fatores.
Há problemas cujas soluções dependem exclusivamente do governo, outros que podem ser resolvidos apenas pelo setor privado, outros, ainda, cujas soluções dependem dos dois setores da economia. Cada vez mais determinante para a conquista e a preservação de mercados, a inovação, por exemplo, depende da decisão da empresa em investir. Mas essa decisão está condicionada à existência de ambiente adequado, de políticas públicas que estimulem e apoiem os investimentos privados e de disponibilidade de mão de obra qualificada, o que envolve a ação do governo.
A escassez de mão de obra preparada já é sentida em vários setores e resulta da ineficiência do sistema educacional. Para a CNI, a baixa qualidade do ensino - resultante de políticas do governo - dificulta a preparação da mão de obra e afeta a produtividade de dois modos. Com a contratação de profissionais não adequadamente qualificados, a produtividade cai imediatamente, pois os novos trabalhadores terão de aprender o ofício. Mas a baixa qualidade da educação dificulta o aprendizado, o que retarda ou impede a recuperação da produtividade perdida.
A criação de ambiente adequado para investimentos, sobretudo em inovação, requer mais do que discursos. Necessita de políticas públicas eficientes, algumas de longa maturação e que exigem, além de competência, perseverança do governo.
Internet: governos (inclusive o brasileiro) restringem as liberdades individuais
Espiritos totalitarios estao sempre buscando restringir a liberdade de informacao.
Guerra fria digital
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo
Uma "cortina de ferro" pode estar sendo baixada para dividir a internet em duas - a aberta e a fechada. Essa perspectiva sombria, que lembra o cenário da guerra fria, inclusive com os mesmos protagonistas, surgiu como resultado da recém-encerrada conferência da União Internacional de Telecomunicações (UIT), órgão da ONU, realizada em Dubai.
Dos 144 países com direito a voto, 89 aprovaram um novo tratado sobre os ITRs, como são chamados, na sigla em inglês, os regulamentos internacionais de telecomunicação. Os Estados Unidos, seguidos de todos os países da Europa, além de Canadá e Japão, recusaram-se a assinar o documento, sob a alegação de que ele confere aos governos o poder de interferir no livre fluxo de informações na internet. Do lado dos que firmaram o texto estão Rússia e China, além do Irã e de países árabes, todos interessados em impor alguma limitação à web.
O Brasil alinhou-se a esse grupo, com a justificativa, segundo o ministro Paulo Bernardo (Comunicações), de que o novo acordo é uma forma de combater o "monopólio" dos Estados Unidos em relação à governança da internet.
É uma referência ao fato de que o governo americano integra as instâncias decisórias na Icann (Corporação da Internet para Atribuição de Nomes e Números), entidade privada sediada na Califórnia cuja função básica, desde 1998, é administrar os domínios da rede no mundo todo, algo essencial a seu funcionamento, mas que não exerce controle nenhum sobre o tráfego de dados na internet.
Já os acordos resultantes da conferência de Dubai, ao abrigarem uma resolução que cita a internet, na prática abrem caminho para que a UIT, uma organização intergovernamental, tenha condições de regulamentar a web.
Trata-se de uma distorção, porque a UIT é responsável por normatizar os serviços de telecomunicações, e a internet não é se não apenas um cliente desses serviços. Um exemplo desse problema é a parte da resolução que aborda o chamado "spam", isto é, a mensagem eletrônica não solicitada, enviada em massa. Para os opositores do acordo, a definição do que é um spam, se deixada aos governos, será sempre arbitrária e muito possivelmente contrária à liberdade de expressão. Além disso, uma UIT com mais poder sobre a internet seria muito útil para as grandes empresas de telecomunicações interessadas em participar das novas formas de ganhos com a web. Por outro lado, uma vez que deixem de ser apenas meio de transmissão e passem a ter influência sobre o tráfego de dados, essas empresas poderão romper a neutralidade da rede, impondo tarifas diferenciadas para cada tipo de serviço. Tais pedágios contrariam os princípios de igualdade da internet.
Não se discute que os governos devem agir para garantir a segurança, a proteção de dados e o respeito à propriedade intelectual na internet. No mais, a atuação deve ser indireta, tal como no sistema adotado pelo Brasil, em que o Comitê Gestor da internet, do qual o governo é apenas uma parte, serve como órgão consultivo sobre a web, sem ter qualquer poder executivo sobre ela. Além disso, desde 1995 a internet está formalmente fora da Lei Geral de Telecomunicações, sendo considerada apenas um "serviço de valor adicionado". É justamente a ausência de controles oficiais que torna a internet dinâmica, capaz de inovar continuamente, e o modelo brasileiro está entre os melhores do mundo para mantê-la assim.
Contudo, a título de tirar dos Estados Unidos o suposto controle político da internet, países com tradição autoritária tentam legitimar internacionalmente um controle do tráfego de informações na web. O resultado é que a própria UIT, entidade que interfere em questões básicas das telecomunicações, como a coordenação de recursos de telefonia e do uso do espectro de radiofrequência, sairá enfraquecida desse confronto, algo que não aconteceu nem durante a guerra fria propriamente dita. E o governo brasileiro, movido por seu eterno objetivo ideológico de se contrapor aos Estados Unidos, assinou o tratado e aprovou a resolução sobre a internet sem reservas, legitimando esse atentado.
Guerra fria digital
23 de dezembro de 2012
Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo
Uma "cortina de ferro" pode estar sendo baixada para dividir a internet em duas - a aberta e a fechada. Essa perspectiva sombria, que lembra o cenário da guerra fria, inclusive com os mesmos protagonistas, surgiu como resultado da recém-encerrada conferência da União Internacional de Telecomunicações (UIT), órgão da ONU, realizada em Dubai.
Dos 144 países com direito a voto, 89 aprovaram um novo tratado sobre os ITRs, como são chamados, na sigla em inglês, os regulamentos internacionais de telecomunicação. Os Estados Unidos, seguidos de todos os países da Europa, além de Canadá e Japão, recusaram-se a assinar o documento, sob a alegação de que ele confere aos governos o poder de interferir no livre fluxo de informações na internet. Do lado dos que firmaram o texto estão Rússia e China, além do Irã e de países árabes, todos interessados em impor alguma limitação à web.
O Brasil alinhou-se a esse grupo, com a justificativa, segundo o ministro Paulo Bernardo (Comunicações), de que o novo acordo é uma forma de combater o "monopólio" dos Estados Unidos em relação à governança da internet.
É uma referência ao fato de que o governo americano integra as instâncias decisórias na Icann (Corporação da Internet para Atribuição de Nomes e Números), entidade privada sediada na Califórnia cuja função básica, desde 1998, é administrar os domínios da rede no mundo todo, algo essencial a seu funcionamento, mas que não exerce controle nenhum sobre o tráfego de dados na internet.
Já os acordos resultantes da conferência de Dubai, ao abrigarem uma resolução que cita a internet, na prática abrem caminho para que a UIT, uma organização intergovernamental, tenha condições de regulamentar a web.
Trata-se de uma distorção, porque a UIT é responsável por normatizar os serviços de telecomunicações, e a internet não é se não apenas um cliente desses serviços. Um exemplo desse problema é a parte da resolução que aborda o chamado "spam", isto é, a mensagem eletrônica não solicitada, enviada em massa. Para os opositores do acordo, a definição do que é um spam, se deixada aos governos, será sempre arbitrária e muito possivelmente contrária à liberdade de expressão. Além disso, uma UIT com mais poder sobre a internet seria muito útil para as grandes empresas de telecomunicações interessadas em participar das novas formas de ganhos com a web. Por outro lado, uma vez que deixem de ser apenas meio de transmissão e passem a ter influência sobre o tráfego de dados, essas empresas poderão romper a neutralidade da rede, impondo tarifas diferenciadas para cada tipo de serviço. Tais pedágios contrariam os princípios de igualdade da internet.
Não se discute que os governos devem agir para garantir a segurança, a proteção de dados e o respeito à propriedade intelectual na internet. No mais, a atuação deve ser indireta, tal como no sistema adotado pelo Brasil, em que o Comitê Gestor da internet, do qual o governo é apenas uma parte, serve como órgão consultivo sobre a web, sem ter qualquer poder executivo sobre ela. Além disso, desde 1995 a internet está formalmente fora da Lei Geral de Telecomunicações, sendo considerada apenas um "serviço de valor adicionado". É justamente a ausência de controles oficiais que torna a internet dinâmica, capaz de inovar continuamente, e o modelo brasileiro está entre os melhores do mundo para mantê-la assim.
Contudo, a título de tirar dos Estados Unidos o suposto controle político da internet, países com tradição autoritária tentam legitimar internacionalmente um controle do tráfego de informações na web. O resultado é que a própria UIT, entidade que interfere em questões básicas das telecomunicações, como a coordenação de recursos de telefonia e do uso do espectro de radiofrequência, sairá enfraquecida desse confronto, algo que não aconteceu nem durante a guerra fria propriamente dita. E o governo brasileiro, movido por seu eterno objetivo ideológico de se contrapor aos Estados Unidos, assinou o tratado e aprovou a resolução sobre a internet sem reservas, legitimando esse atentado.
Nacionalismo: essa velha forca reacionaria e anti-democratica - Robert Kaplan (WSJ)
OPINION
The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2012
The Return of Toxic Nationalism
The spread of universal values is being rolled back on many fronts, from Russia to the Middle East.
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.
Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.
Take Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.
Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.
Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.
An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.
Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.
The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria's writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.
Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India's navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world's largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin's nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin's nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.
Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin's party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.
Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year's award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.
Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece's Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.
We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).
The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.
Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.
Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of "The Revenge of Geography" (Random House, 2012).
A version of this article appeared December 24, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Return of Toxic Nationalism.
The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2012
The Return of Toxic Nationalism
The spread of universal values is being rolled back on many fronts, from Russia to the Middle East.
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.
Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.
Take Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.
Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.
Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.
An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.
Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.
The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria's writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.
Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India's navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world's largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin's nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin's nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.
Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin's party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.
Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year's award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.
Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece's Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.
We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).
The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.
Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.
Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of "The Revenge of Geography" (Random House, 2012).
A version of this article appeared December 24, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Return of Toxic Nationalism.
Haiti: o fracasso da assistencia internacional ao desenvolvimento
O Haiti parece condenado a viver durante pelo menos 50 anos mais sob a tutela da assistencia publica, estrangeira, ao seu processo de (sub)desenvolvimento, com milhoes sendo desviados para outras coisas que a ajuda aos mais pobres. Assim sao os Estados falidos...
In Reviving Haiti, Lofty Hopes and Hard Truths
By DEBORAH SONTAG
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few days after the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods.
At the time, Dr. Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool.
This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.
“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money.”
An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far — helps explain why such a seeming bounty is not more palpable here in the eviscerated capital city, where the world’s chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble.
More than half of the money has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery but carries high costs and leaves no permanent footprint — tents shred; emergency food and water gets consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last.
Of the rest, only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau.
Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. By comparison, an estimated minimum of $1.2 billion has been eaten up by short-term solutions — the tent camps, temporary shelters and cash grants that pay a year’s rent.
“Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.
Benefactors and Dysfunction
Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors.
After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials were determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world’s ineffectual strategies for helping it.
Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”
But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman.
With no detailed financial plan ordering reconstruction priorities, donors invested most heavily in the sectors that they had favored before the earthquake — transportation, health, education, water and sanitation — and half their financing for those areas went to projects begun before 2010.
“One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.
Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down.
That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.
The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for this devastated city. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed.
“Building takes time; it’s destruction that’s rapid,” said President Michel Martelly at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for the new teaching hospital. But building is only half the battle; the gleaming white structure, erected by the nonprofit Partners for Health in the provincial city of Mirebalais, has not yet secured its first-year operating budget of $12.5 million to $13 million.
In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country’s largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Mrs. Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul. Like that hospital, many recovery projects have lingered on the drawing board or gotten delayed by land and ideological disputes, logistical and contracting problems, staffing shortages and even weather. The United States still has more than $1 billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500 million in its coffers.
“It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti.
Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it thus far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools but only one has been completed.
In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems.
The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall.
But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards.
How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted.
In the mountain town of Furcy, meanwhile, the children study in a couple of plywood structures without plumbing or electricity planted in the midst of one of the construction sites. Surrounded by half-built cinder-block walls, jutting rebar and piles of stone and sand, some 480 students cram into 10 makeshift classrooms illuminated only by the natural light that seeps through the gap between the partial walls and the tin roofs.
Then, no strangers to life’s setbacks, they trudge miles home over muddy, treacherous mountain roads as darkness descends.
Foreigners Take Over
In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign assistance. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break.
Coordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” Nigel Fisher, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, said. “Little by little, we brought them in.”
Still, many Haitians never shook the feeling that they were an afterthought and that their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by the far higher salaries offered by foreigners.
“We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time.
In retrospect, the numbers tell the story: Donors provided $2.2 billion of humanitarian aid in response to the earthquake. The United States Department of Defense got nearly a fifth of that aid to carry out its relief operation, which involved 22,000 troops. The Haitian government got less than 1 percent.
More of the recovery aid — 15 percent — has been channeled through the Haitian government, and the United States ambassador to Haiti, Pamela A. White, says that a shift in approach has led international donors to align “our investments with Haiti’s priorities in a truly country-led manner.”
But thus far almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract to others, with each layer in the process adding 7 to 10 percent in administrative costs, as noted in a paper published by the Center for Global Development.
“All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said.
In a sentiment that many Haitians share, Dr. Boulos said that foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.”
Dr. Boulos said he spent $780,000 to close Camp Boulos and 6 percent went to administrative costs — essentially the salary of a pastor who oversaw the resettlement. Following in his footsteps more than a year later, international groups have done things more carefully, inspecting apartments before handing out rental subsidies and conducting follow-up visits. But they are ringing up operational costs of about 35 percent.
It is difficult to ascertain precisely what the hundreds of nongovernment groups in Haiti spent on their response to the earthquake — at least $1.5 billion, probably much more — and how they spent it.
Among the more visible and transparent groups, Oxfam, its name emblazoned on thousands of latrines, provided water and sanitation to the camps and Doctors Without Borders ran field hospitals, mobile clinics and cholera treatment centers.
The services they provided were vital, but, as both groups make clear in their public reporting, they were costly, too. Oxfam spent $96 million over two years and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58 percent of its $135 million in 2010 on staff and transportation costs.
Not all costly foreign initiatives were equally valuable — or appreciated.
One American taxpayer-financed program, scrutinized by the Agency for International Development’s inspector general, was intended to provide short-term jobs for Haitians and to remove significant rubble. But the program, and in particular the work carried out by two Beltway-based firms, was less than successful on both fronts, the inspector general said: It generated only a third of the jobs anticipated and it appeared to demonstrate that using manual labor to clear debris was so inefficient as to slow the rebuilding effort.
One of the firms, Chemonics International, which was awarded $150 million in post-earthquake contracts, built a $1.9 million temporary home for the Haitian Parliament. The American ambassador presented it as a gift to Haitian democracy, but many legislators were more irked than thankful because the building was delivered devoid of interior walls and furnishings, as The Global Post reported, and it took almost half a year to scrounge together the money to finish it.
Occasionally toward the end of that first year after the earthquake, the Haitian government succeeded in pushing back against internationally imposed agendas it did not like.
The American Red Cross had pledged to spend $200 million of the nearly $500 million raised for Haiti by the first anniversary of the disaster. That presented a real challenge for an organization with limited experience in the country . So it operated primarily as a financier, issuing grants to other organizations with greater capacity here.
But a linchpin of its own programming was a plan to dispense $50 million in cash, no strings attached, to 400,000 household heads in the camps.
Other humanitarian leaders considered the idea of a broad, unconditional cash distribution misguided. But it was not until the Haitian government formalized its opposition in a letter — “It would unfortunately encourage a massive exodus from the provinces, thus increasing the number of people living in the camps and making conditions even worse” — that the Red Cross dropped the plan.
Dr. Boulos said he proposed an alternative. “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.” Shortly after the earthquake, international advisers proposed different ways that Haiti could manage its reconstruction, including a Haitian-owned recovery agency embedded in the government. But a United States proposal to establish a stand-alone commission jointly led by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort” won out.
Bill Clinton Steps In
In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it.
“As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”
Alexandre V. Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed. “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it,” he said. “It created a level of coordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.”
Given that so much time and money was invested in creating it, people did, in fact, expect that the commission would take charge of the reconstruction process and deliver tangible results. But by the end many believed it had been little more than an exercise in assembling and then dismantling what one United Nations official called a pseudo-institution. “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project,” said Priscilla Phelps, an American consultant who served as the commission’s housing expert.
“We never took a proactive role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing,” she said. “The way reconstruction money got spent was totally chaotic, and the I.H.R.C. was emblematic of that.”
From the start, the commission faced two major challenges. First, President René Préval did not really support it, seeing it as a usurpation of power, several former commission members said. Second, it had no money of its own to hand out — although the separate Haiti Reconstruction Fund, a pot containing 14 percent of the reconstruction dollars, could not make grants without its approval.
The commission’s secretariat worked out of a giant white inflatable tent on the grounds of the old United States Embassy compound, crisply air-conditioned and lined with banks of desktop computers. For a long while, the spacious tent was almost eerily empty because the commission, with a budget of $8.79 million its first year, got off to a slow start.
The commission did not engage an executive director until five months into its 18-month existence. The director, Gabriel Verret, moved haltingly to hire other key employees. The vacuum, meanwhile, was filled by William J. Clinton Foundation staff members and volunteer consultants from McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
As pro bono consultants to the commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers designed a performance and anticorruption office, and the firm subsequently won a $2.4 million contract to run it over the objections of France’s board member, who called it “a pure conflict of interest which damages the integrity of the office.”
Their first — and last — monitoring report was the only real record of the commission’s work. It summarized the 75 projects valued at over $3 billion that had been approved. The numbers themselves are not very meaningful because they included projects without any or enough money — a $1 billion “funding gap” existed, an international official said.
Still, the report indicated just how broadly recovery was being defined. At least $1.4 billion represented big-ticket, multiyear projects that were not directly related to the earthquake, among them improving the education system, developing agriculture in central Haiti and building roads all over the country
Katherine Gilbert, aid policy adviser in Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office, said, “The argument for those activities being recovery is that the whole country was affected economically and every initiative is in a sense helping the country rebuild.”
But, she added, “Another definition of recovery would be assisting those affected by the earthquake.” Although the commission’s bylaws called for it to “conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects,” its mode of operation was to respond, project by project, to those who sought the commission’s approval.
The large board consisted of foreign diplomats and representatives of the Haitian government and society. Early on, the Haitian members felt excluded when they learned about Mr. Verret’s appointment from the media. Their frustration deepened, culminating in a confrontation with Mr. Clinton and Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, at their December 2010 meeting.
An account was pieced together from the meeting’s minutes and interviews with participants.
When Mr. Clinton was delayed in arriving at the Santo Domingo Hilton, where the meeting was taking place because of post-electoral violence in Haiti, a dozen Haitian board members crowded into a hotel room to prepare a written statement.
Rising to read it at the meeting, Suze Percy Fillipini, an elegant former diplomat, described how the Haitian members felt like “bit players” and “tokens” who were called on to “rubber stamp” a hodgepodge of projects that “collectively do not respond to the urgency of the situation or provide the foundation for the sustainable rebuilding of Haiti.”
Attending by Skype, Mr. Bellerive appeared livid and said the board members were merely “individuals,” which, in a Haitian context, meant they were nobodies, according to several members. Ms. Fillipini, her eyes flashing with tears, defended herself and the other appointees. Another member, Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian-Canadian business professor, complained that the executive director and chairmen did not respond to e-mails, saying it was neither good manners nor good governance.
After the meeting, Professor Bourjolly recounted, Mr. Clinton approached him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You embarrassed me.”
“It was really tough,” said the professor, summarizing the commission’s work as “such a waste.”
Again, Dr. Abrantes disagreed. “They created a formal mechanism to receive proposals, and a vetting system that was important. Eventually, they developed sector strategies, some sketchy but others well-developed, that guide us to this day.”
When the recovery commission died, the Haiti Reconstruction Fund was paralyzed, unable to make new grants. The fund, created to set aside at least some money to support the Haitian government, had “ended up significantly focused on two areas where the donors don’t have standing expertise — debris removal and housing,” Ms. Gilbert said.
“No one wanted to do debris removal,” Mr. Leitmann, the fund’s manager, said. “It’s not sexy. There are no ribbons to cut. The results disappear. So we filled that niche. Housing is another example. Half our resources are going there.”
Though as much as $104 million remains available for allocation, it has taken the Haitian government more than a year to create and convene a successor entity to the commission. The group, in Mr. Martelly’s words, will “restore to Haiti its sovereignty in aid management and especially its priorities.”
By late last week, its priorities for the remaining funds had yet to be established.
In the summer of 2011, when President Martelly, a Haitian musical star with no political experience, was struggling to put together a government, he was also grappling with the unavoidable fact that a smattering of housing reconstruction projects existed only on paper while a humanitarian crisis lay at his doorstep in the form of a huge, wretched tent camp in the central Champ de Mars.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, then just released, contained a telling if understated aside: “The ‘build back better’ approach does not always align with the objective of quickly finding housing solutions for camp residents.”
A New Pragmatism
The new pragmatism was born. Mr. Martelly secured international assistance to close six highly visible tent camps and repair 16 neighborhoods and to shut down the Champ de Mars settlement. Some Haitians felt he was just trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — indeed the neighborhood repairs have lagged far behind the camp closings — but others expressed relief that he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all.
From the start, grand ambition had gotten in the way of tackling what was doable.
“Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighborhoods,” Ms. Phelps said. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.”
Idealistic discussions after the disaster were not just about building back better. President Préval expressed a keen interest in using the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently, and decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone.
“There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and chaotic as it is you don’t throw it out,” Mr. Leitmann of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund said. “Another fantasy was, ‘Oh, we’ll just invest in export processing zones and that will keep people from migrating back to Port-au-Prince.’ ”
That first year, the United States government and the Inter-American Development Bank set aside $220 million to finance the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is 175 miles north of the disaster area, and to build a power plant, port and housing development nearby.
Mr. Clinton, who joined Mrs. Clinton at the Caracol inaugural ceremony this fall in a rare public fusion of their diplomatic roles, has long emphasized Haiti’s need for jobs. Some here applaud his support for subsidies to private companies; others, though, question what they see as a trickle-down theory of development, pointing skeptically to decisions like those of the private Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund to make a $2 million equity investment in a new luxury hotel, the Royal Oasis.
Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing stock, and they were courting international firms to design innovative tract housing for tracts of land that never materialized.
One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 housing exposition held in Zoranje, where scores of colorful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets.
Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, the expo cost millions in public and private money. Competing firms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the hopes of winning sizable contracts. But by the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had already shifted and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead.
Adjacent to the expo site in Zoranje is the only large new housing project completed so far. With $8.3 million in financing, mostly from the Inter-American Development Bank, most of its 400 small pastel houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because the authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water. Eventually, the beneficiaries were allowed to move in anyway.
Fertilia Bien-Aimé, a wiry, scrappy, 65-year-old, said she won the keys to her house by accosting President Martelly during a public event in October. “I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m too old for a tent. What are you going to do for me?’ ”
Squatters had ripped out the electrical wiring, sinks and toilets, she said, and rain leaks into her house as into others. Some homes lost their roofs during Tropical Storm Isaac, and the complex has had unreliable electricity since Hurricane Sandy.
“But even with all the problems here,” she said, “it’s still so much better than being a displaced person.”
The largest new settlement under construction takes the same exurban approach. A $48 million Haitian government initiative, located about 10 miles east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri, the project’s thousands of houses are rising on a barren, isolated site. Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister, described it as looking like “little tombs in the desert.”
Critics have also questioned the location of the American-subsidized new housing settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house.
That includes site preparation, internal wiring, individual water hookups and flush toilets. But current thinking among humanitarian officials is that those are all extras. A small, simple one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000, they say, and more people can be helped.
Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by the end of November because of severe weather and logistical problems, an American aid official said.
Progress has been even slower on the other American-built settlement, which is on a large, flat swath of gravel in Cabaret. Only about a dozen of the 156 houses there had a completed structure, minus doors and windows, in early December.
“Lots of money, few results,” said the deputy mayor of Cabaret, Pierre Justinvil. “Look, I personally, with my own hands, have just built a whole school for less than the cost of one of those houses and more quickly. I think we Haitians need to take the wheel.”
In the earthquake-ravaged slum neighborhood of Campeche in Port-au-Prince, Dieudonne Zidor, an elected official, agreed. Gliding gracefully up a rocky pathway, she pointed out the anarchic jumble of condemned homes, makeshift shanties and corroding shelter boxes. “As you can see, conditions are calamitous,” she said. But it is not rocket science to figure out what is needed, she added: houses, streets, electricity, water, health clinics, schools, women’s centers.
Yet, though the local authorities have already approved an urban plan for the neighborhood, the American Red Cross has engaged in a lengthy process to determine how best to spend its $20 million budget to improve Campeche.
Sandrine Capelle Manuel, the organization’s representative in Haiti, said it had been a productive process. “We prioritized all the issues and created a consultative group that is representative of the community fabric,” she said. “We did a strong and deep assessment, and now we need to do a master plan with the community.”
But Ms. Zidor said: “All they do is hold meetings and hand out juice. In the end, they will have spent the whole $20 million giving juice to the people.”
Many other neighborhood reconstruction projects have gotten stuck in the planning stages, too. The reconstruction adviser to President Martelly, in fact, recently asked a World Bank official if millions of dollars could be diverted from that slow-moving $65 million reconstruction program to pay for additional return cash grants.
“He said, ‘Can you help us because we don’t want to go to the third anniversary with so many people still in camps?’ ” Dr. Abrantes said.
Although so much money allocated for reconstruction languishes in the bank, humanitarian financing for Haiti has all but dried up while needs remain acute, said Mr. Fisher, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator.
“The donors have made it clear that they feel the humanitarian crisis is over and that development is their focus,” Mr. Fisher said. “But it’s a false dichotomy. Of course, the country needs long-term solutions but until they are in place we still need resources to deal with the problems at hand.”
Current projections, he added, are that 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake.
André Paultre and Damon Winter contributed reporting.
In Reviving Haiti, Lofty Hopes and Hard Truths
By DEBORAH SONTAG
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few days after the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods.
At the time, Dr. Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool.
This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.
“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money.”
An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far — helps explain why such a seeming bounty is not more palpable here in the eviscerated capital city, where the world’s chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble.
More than half of the money has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery but carries high costs and leaves no permanent footprint — tents shred; emergency food and water gets consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last.
Of the rest, only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau.
Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. By comparison, an estimated minimum of $1.2 billion has been eaten up by short-term solutions — the tent camps, temporary shelters and cash grants that pay a year’s rent.
“Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.
Benefactors and Dysfunction
Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors.
After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials were determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world’s ineffectual strategies for helping it.
Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”
But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman.
With no detailed financial plan ordering reconstruction priorities, donors invested most heavily in the sectors that they had favored before the earthquake — transportation, health, education, water and sanitation — and half their financing for those areas went to projects begun before 2010.
“One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.
Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down.
That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.
The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for this devastated city. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed.
“Building takes time; it’s destruction that’s rapid,” said President Michel Martelly at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for the new teaching hospital. But building is only half the battle; the gleaming white structure, erected by the nonprofit Partners for Health in the provincial city of Mirebalais, has not yet secured its first-year operating budget of $12.5 million to $13 million.
In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country’s largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Mrs. Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul. Like that hospital, many recovery projects have lingered on the drawing board or gotten delayed by land and ideological disputes, logistical and contracting problems, staffing shortages and even weather. The United States still has more than $1 billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500 million in its coffers.
“It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti.
Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it thus far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools but only one has been completed.
In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems.
The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall.
But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards.
How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted.
In the mountain town of Furcy, meanwhile, the children study in a couple of plywood structures without plumbing or electricity planted in the midst of one of the construction sites. Surrounded by half-built cinder-block walls, jutting rebar and piles of stone and sand, some 480 students cram into 10 makeshift classrooms illuminated only by the natural light that seeps through the gap between the partial walls and the tin roofs.
Then, no strangers to life’s setbacks, they trudge miles home over muddy, treacherous mountain roads as darkness descends.
Foreigners Take Over
In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign assistance. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break.
Coordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” Nigel Fisher, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, said. “Little by little, we brought them in.”
Still, many Haitians never shook the feeling that they were an afterthought and that their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by the far higher salaries offered by foreigners.
“We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time.
In retrospect, the numbers tell the story: Donors provided $2.2 billion of humanitarian aid in response to the earthquake. The United States Department of Defense got nearly a fifth of that aid to carry out its relief operation, which involved 22,000 troops. The Haitian government got less than 1 percent.
More of the recovery aid — 15 percent — has been channeled through the Haitian government, and the United States ambassador to Haiti, Pamela A. White, says that a shift in approach has led international donors to align “our investments with Haiti’s priorities in a truly country-led manner.”
But thus far almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract to others, with each layer in the process adding 7 to 10 percent in administrative costs, as noted in a paper published by the Center for Global Development.
“All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said.
In a sentiment that many Haitians share, Dr. Boulos said that foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.”
Dr. Boulos said he spent $780,000 to close Camp Boulos and 6 percent went to administrative costs — essentially the salary of a pastor who oversaw the resettlement. Following in his footsteps more than a year later, international groups have done things more carefully, inspecting apartments before handing out rental subsidies and conducting follow-up visits. But they are ringing up operational costs of about 35 percent.
It is difficult to ascertain precisely what the hundreds of nongovernment groups in Haiti spent on their response to the earthquake — at least $1.5 billion, probably much more — and how they spent it.
Among the more visible and transparent groups, Oxfam, its name emblazoned on thousands of latrines, provided water and sanitation to the camps and Doctors Without Borders ran field hospitals, mobile clinics and cholera treatment centers.
The services they provided were vital, but, as both groups make clear in their public reporting, they were costly, too. Oxfam spent $96 million over two years and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58 percent of its $135 million in 2010 on staff and transportation costs.
Not all costly foreign initiatives were equally valuable — or appreciated.
One American taxpayer-financed program, scrutinized by the Agency for International Development’s inspector general, was intended to provide short-term jobs for Haitians and to remove significant rubble. But the program, and in particular the work carried out by two Beltway-based firms, was less than successful on both fronts, the inspector general said: It generated only a third of the jobs anticipated and it appeared to demonstrate that using manual labor to clear debris was so inefficient as to slow the rebuilding effort.
One of the firms, Chemonics International, which was awarded $150 million in post-earthquake contracts, built a $1.9 million temporary home for the Haitian Parliament. The American ambassador presented it as a gift to Haitian democracy, but many legislators were more irked than thankful because the building was delivered devoid of interior walls and furnishings, as The Global Post reported, and it took almost half a year to scrounge together the money to finish it.
Occasionally toward the end of that first year after the earthquake, the Haitian government succeeded in pushing back against internationally imposed agendas it did not like.
The American Red Cross had pledged to spend $200 million of the nearly $500 million raised for Haiti by the first anniversary of the disaster. That presented a real challenge for an organization with limited experience in the country . So it operated primarily as a financier, issuing grants to other organizations with greater capacity here.
But a linchpin of its own programming was a plan to dispense $50 million in cash, no strings attached, to 400,000 household heads in the camps.
Other humanitarian leaders considered the idea of a broad, unconditional cash distribution misguided. But it was not until the Haitian government formalized its opposition in a letter — “It would unfortunately encourage a massive exodus from the provinces, thus increasing the number of people living in the camps and making conditions even worse” — that the Red Cross dropped the plan.
Dr. Boulos said he proposed an alternative. “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.” Shortly after the earthquake, international advisers proposed different ways that Haiti could manage its reconstruction, including a Haitian-owned recovery agency embedded in the government. But a United States proposal to establish a stand-alone commission jointly led by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort” won out.
Bill Clinton Steps In
In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it.
“As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”
Alexandre V. Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed. “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it,” he said. “It created a level of coordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.”
Given that so much time and money was invested in creating it, people did, in fact, expect that the commission would take charge of the reconstruction process and deliver tangible results. But by the end many believed it had been little more than an exercise in assembling and then dismantling what one United Nations official called a pseudo-institution. “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project,” said Priscilla Phelps, an American consultant who served as the commission’s housing expert.
“We never took a proactive role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing,” she said. “The way reconstruction money got spent was totally chaotic, and the I.H.R.C. was emblematic of that.”
From the start, the commission faced two major challenges. First, President René Préval did not really support it, seeing it as a usurpation of power, several former commission members said. Second, it had no money of its own to hand out — although the separate Haiti Reconstruction Fund, a pot containing 14 percent of the reconstruction dollars, could not make grants without its approval.
The commission’s secretariat worked out of a giant white inflatable tent on the grounds of the old United States Embassy compound, crisply air-conditioned and lined with banks of desktop computers. For a long while, the spacious tent was almost eerily empty because the commission, with a budget of $8.79 million its first year, got off to a slow start.
The commission did not engage an executive director until five months into its 18-month existence. The director, Gabriel Verret, moved haltingly to hire other key employees. The vacuum, meanwhile, was filled by William J. Clinton Foundation staff members and volunteer consultants from McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
As pro bono consultants to the commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers designed a performance and anticorruption office, and the firm subsequently won a $2.4 million contract to run it over the objections of France’s board member, who called it “a pure conflict of interest which damages the integrity of the office.”
Their first — and last — monitoring report was the only real record of the commission’s work. It summarized the 75 projects valued at over $3 billion that had been approved. The numbers themselves are not very meaningful because they included projects without any or enough money — a $1 billion “funding gap” existed, an international official said.
Still, the report indicated just how broadly recovery was being defined. At least $1.4 billion represented big-ticket, multiyear projects that were not directly related to the earthquake, among them improving the education system, developing agriculture in central Haiti and building roads all over the country
Katherine Gilbert, aid policy adviser in Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office, said, “The argument for those activities being recovery is that the whole country was affected economically and every initiative is in a sense helping the country rebuild.”
But, she added, “Another definition of recovery would be assisting those affected by the earthquake.” Although the commission’s bylaws called for it to “conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects,” its mode of operation was to respond, project by project, to those who sought the commission’s approval.
The large board consisted of foreign diplomats and representatives of the Haitian government and society. Early on, the Haitian members felt excluded when they learned about Mr. Verret’s appointment from the media. Their frustration deepened, culminating in a confrontation with Mr. Clinton and Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, at their December 2010 meeting.
An account was pieced together from the meeting’s minutes and interviews with participants.
When Mr. Clinton was delayed in arriving at the Santo Domingo Hilton, where the meeting was taking place because of post-electoral violence in Haiti, a dozen Haitian board members crowded into a hotel room to prepare a written statement.
Rising to read it at the meeting, Suze Percy Fillipini, an elegant former diplomat, described how the Haitian members felt like “bit players” and “tokens” who were called on to “rubber stamp” a hodgepodge of projects that “collectively do not respond to the urgency of the situation or provide the foundation for the sustainable rebuilding of Haiti.”
Attending by Skype, Mr. Bellerive appeared livid and said the board members were merely “individuals,” which, in a Haitian context, meant they were nobodies, according to several members. Ms. Fillipini, her eyes flashing with tears, defended herself and the other appointees. Another member, Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian-Canadian business professor, complained that the executive director and chairmen did not respond to e-mails, saying it was neither good manners nor good governance.
After the meeting, Professor Bourjolly recounted, Mr. Clinton approached him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You embarrassed me.”
“It was really tough,” said the professor, summarizing the commission’s work as “such a waste.”
Again, Dr. Abrantes disagreed. “They created a formal mechanism to receive proposals, and a vetting system that was important. Eventually, they developed sector strategies, some sketchy but others well-developed, that guide us to this day.”
When the recovery commission died, the Haiti Reconstruction Fund was paralyzed, unable to make new grants. The fund, created to set aside at least some money to support the Haitian government, had “ended up significantly focused on two areas where the donors don’t have standing expertise — debris removal and housing,” Ms. Gilbert said.
“No one wanted to do debris removal,” Mr. Leitmann, the fund’s manager, said. “It’s not sexy. There are no ribbons to cut. The results disappear. So we filled that niche. Housing is another example. Half our resources are going there.”
Though as much as $104 million remains available for allocation, it has taken the Haitian government more than a year to create and convene a successor entity to the commission. The group, in Mr. Martelly’s words, will “restore to Haiti its sovereignty in aid management and especially its priorities.”
By late last week, its priorities for the remaining funds had yet to be established.
In the summer of 2011, when President Martelly, a Haitian musical star with no political experience, was struggling to put together a government, he was also grappling with the unavoidable fact that a smattering of housing reconstruction projects existed only on paper while a humanitarian crisis lay at his doorstep in the form of a huge, wretched tent camp in the central Champ de Mars.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, then just released, contained a telling if understated aside: “The ‘build back better’ approach does not always align with the objective of quickly finding housing solutions for camp residents.”
A New Pragmatism
The new pragmatism was born. Mr. Martelly secured international assistance to close six highly visible tent camps and repair 16 neighborhoods and to shut down the Champ de Mars settlement. Some Haitians felt he was just trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — indeed the neighborhood repairs have lagged far behind the camp closings — but others expressed relief that he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all.
From the start, grand ambition had gotten in the way of tackling what was doable.
“Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighborhoods,” Ms. Phelps said. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.”
Idealistic discussions after the disaster were not just about building back better. President Préval expressed a keen interest in using the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently, and decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone.
“There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and chaotic as it is you don’t throw it out,” Mr. Leitmann of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund said. “Another fantasy was, ‘Oh, we’ll just invest in export processing zones and that will keep people from migrating back to Port-au-Prince.’ ”
That first year, the United States government and the Inter-American Development Bank set aside $220 million to finance the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is 175 miles north of the disaster area, and to build a power plant, port and housing development nearby.
Mr. Clinton, who joined Mrs. Clinton at the Caracol inaugural ceremony this fall in a rare public fusion of their diplomatic roles, has long emphasized Haiti’s need for jobs. Some here applaud his support for subsidies to private companies; others, though, question what they see as a trickle-down theory of development, pointing skeptically to decisions like those of the private Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund to make a $2 million equity investment in a new luxury hotel, the Royal Oasis.
Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing stock, and they were courting international firms to design innovative tract housing for tracts of land that never materialized.
One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 housing exposition held in Zoranje, where scores of colorful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets.
Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, the expo cost millions in public and private money. Competing firms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the hopes of winning sizable contracts. But by the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had already shifted and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead.
Adjacent to the expo site in Zoranje is the only large new housing project completed so far. With $8.3 million in financing, mostly from the Inter-American Development Bank, most of its 400 small pastel houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because the authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water. Eventually, the beneficiaries were allowed to move in anyway.
Fertilia Bien-Aimé, a wiry, scrappy, 65-year-old, said she won the keys to her house by accosting President Martelly during a public event in October. “I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m too old for a tent. What are you going to do for me?’ ”
Squatters had ripped out the electrical wiring, sinks and toilets, she said, and rain leaks into her house as into others. Some homes lost their roofs during Tropical Storm Isaac, and the complex has had unreliable electricity since Hurricane Sandy.
“But even with all the problems here,” she said, “it’s still so much better than being a displaced person.”
The largest new settlement under construction takes the same exurban approach. A $48 million Haitian government initiative, located about 10 miles east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri, the project’s thousands of houses are rising on a barren, isolated site. Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister, described it as looking like “little tombs in the desert.”
Critics have also questioned the location of the American-subsidized new housing settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house.
That includes site preparation, internal wiring, individual water hookups and flush toilets. But current thinking among humanitarian officials is that those are all extras. A small, simple one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000, they say, and more people can be helped.
Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by the end of November because of severe weather and logistical problems, an American aid official said.
Progress has been even slower on the other American-built settlement, which is on a large, flat swath of gravel in Cabaret. Only about a dozen of the 156 houses there had a completed structure, minus doors and windows, in early December.
“Lots of money, few results,” said the deputy mayor of Cabaret, Pierre Justinvil. “Look, I personally, with my own hands, have just built a whole school for less than the cost of one of those houses and more quickly. I think we Haitians need to take the wheel.”
In the earthquake-ravaged slum neighborhood of Campeche in Port-au-Prince, Dieudonne Zidor, an elected official, agreed. Gliding gracefully up a rocky pathway, she pointed out the anarchic jumble of condemned homes, makeshift shanties and corroding shelter boxes. “As you can see, conditions are calamitous,” she said. But it is not rocket science to figure out what is needed, she added: houses, streets, electricity, water, health clinics, schools, women’s centers.
Yet, though the local authorities have already approved an urban plan for the neighborhood, the American Red Cross has engaged in a lengthy process to determine how best to spend its $20 million budget to improve Campeche.
Sandrine Capelle Manuel, the organization’s representative in Haiti, said it had been a productive process. “We prioritized all the issues and created a consultative group that is representative of the community fabric,” she said. “We did a strong and deep assessment, and now we need to do a master plan with the community.”
But Ms. Zidor said: “All they do is hold meetings and hand out juice. In the end, they will have spent the whole $20 million giving juice to the people.”
Many other neighborhood reconstruction projects have gotten stuck in the planning stages, too. The reconstruction adviser to President Martelly, in fact, recently asked a World Bank official if millions of dollars could be diverted from that slow-moving $65 million reconstruction program to pay for additional return cash grants.
“He said, ‘Can you help us because we don’t want to go to the third anniversary with so many people still in camps?’ ” Dr. Abrantes said.
Although so much money allocated for reconstruction languishes in the bank, humanitarian financing for Haiti has all but dried up while needs remain acute, said Mr. Fisher, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator.
“The donors have made it clear that they feel the humanitarian crisis is over and that development is their focus,” Mr. Fisher said. “But it’s a false dichotomy. Of course, the country needs long-term solutions but until they are in place we still need resources to deal with the problems at hand.”
Current projections, he added, are that 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake.
André Paultre and Damon Winter contributed reporting.
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