Talking about Development - an International Interview Series ------------------------------------------------------------- the interview below is part of the above project that can be found at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fiatlux/td/ ------------------------------------------------------------- I interviewed Nick Carter, during the symposium "Lifeline Media: Protecting Civilians in Conflict," sponsored by ICHR (International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting). Mr. Carter has a journalistic background on environmental issues and has been working with development and communications for many years. He is currently co-editor of the World's Disaster Report and we discussed a variety of issues concerning development and disasters. Main topics: development, disasters, refugees, end of the cold war and impact on development, aid/development agencies, North/South relations, non-profits, privatization and government. The interview has been divided into two parts for smaller file sizes. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Part 2/2 --------------------------------------------------------------------- VB) Do you see this as a result of the end of the cold war? How has the end of the cold war affected all of this? The first thing is that there is only one ideology, there's only one game in town. And it's taking people a little bit of time to realize that. In a sense, they have to live with it now. Nobody else is coming to the rescue. In the US, for example, people try to recreate the cold war in other forms, I keep reading things like "the coming war with China," "the clash with Islam." It's a bit like a security blanket. Like the drugs war... Why we need to keep having wars, I'm not quite sure, maybe it's something with the American personality, they want to go and kill people, but there won't be that kind of thing again. We're now beginning to perceive the complexity of the world we live in, it's not simply black/white, freedom/suppression, whatever, it's multi-hued. Even within a single ideology we're beginning to allow ourselves different views, you know, the guy is not all bad or all good. And it's taking us a long to time to understand that we can have a lot of horrible little wars, that can be fought street by street, rape by rape, anti-personnel by anti-personnel mine, and these wars will be locally driven. Aid is one product of that, because aid came out of these kind of things, it was one way of fighting that particular cold war, it was a bit like the virility symbol. You see this in every different way, the way governments begin to compete, because there is not any other way of doing it, governments are very stupid institutions. Among the changes that have happened, then, we have a new set of politics that we haven't fully understood yet. People are still clinging to the past, they want nice, big conflicts that are easy to understand, they want bogey men. We've also got a situation where aid agencies in particular are intervening directly in the heart of conflicts in a way that they would never have done before. It's a bit like the medium is the message, form takes content. The fact that you can go into a war zone and you'll probably survive, because people don't get killed very effectively in wars, makes people in aid agencies do it. So we've massively increased the opportunities for people to go and spend money. We're now beginning to learn that that's not very easy to do, that we don't understand conflict, we don't know how to intervene in conflict, that we may very well be provoking conflict or sustaining conflict or fueling through the physical goods that we are bringing in, or even our presence and the expectations they raise. So we zip in, we interfere, we rush in, and I think that now we are beginning to say, "well, hang on a second..." Maybe we'll never go back to the old days where we just waited for refugees to arrive, whoever survived the journey to come across the border. But I think that we are going to have a new realism about what is possible to do, what is cost- effective. If we haven't got the money, we can't go, no matter how desperate the situation may be. Another sort of change that's happening, it took the end of the cold war, for many countries to sort of wake to up the fact that it might be convenient to blame colonialism, it may even be right, but for example in Africa, Africa is going to have to sort it out for themselves. Even if they don't like it, they will probably have to trade their way into development, they may have no other option, so they will have to do it for themselves. So the end of the cold war has been useful in the sense of people realizing that they will not be rescued. I think the other thing that the cold war seems to have done is that, previously, we were very government oriented. I'm not necessarily in favor or against governments, they are one way of organizing things. What we are now seeing in a lot of countries is a whole growth in the third sector that we previously, when governments were *the* big thing, you know, bilateral aid, you put money into governments, governments did things with it, you supported government structures. Now we are seeing the whole undermining of government, the growth of privatization, the growth of structural adjustment, which is privatization by a different name, we are creating a privatized planet. In that sense, the end of the cold war allowed that to free up. In that situation it does become more complicated, if there's a government there and the government provides health care, education, whatever, it's very simple. If what you end up with is a patchwork quilt of charities, churches, aid agencies, consumer groups, trade unions, plus the whole of the commercial sector, that's a bit more complicated to deal with. That provides a whole new set of actors and agents. As I said yesterday, rather than worrying about China or Islam or whatever, I'm far more concerned with how far we let the state to wither. I don't think that we can allow capitalism to just reign triumphant. I think we have to look at how far we can allow the state to retreat, how far we want to advance with everything else. This is not ideological, I'm just trying to be practical. If on the whole, we do not want people to die for preventable reasons, then we have to create mechanisms to prevent that. If people cannot afford medical insurance, we have to have some element of a health net to catch people. If people cannot grow enough food to feed themselves, we'll have to find a way to deal with that. A simple example, in the Caribbean, probably we're shifting to a period of a lot of hurricanes. Even in the last 2 or 3 years, the insurance companies have waken up to this. they now won't cover a lot of hurricane risks. That therefore means that conventional economic development becomes much, much, more difficult. Not only regarding homes, but if you can't have businesses, you can't have jobs, you cannot have economic development. Maybe there needs to be at the end of the line a kind of backstop to this kind of thing. Otherwise governments will have to say, "we can't have development in this country, in this region, this patch." Bangladesh will not be allowed to develop because it's very vulnerable to cyclones. The Caribbean should be evacuated because there aren't many jobs left, nobody is going to come a hurricane zone for tourism, and nobody will set up a manufacturing plant or service industry or agriculture, when they have no idea if next year they will be wiped out. So where is government in this? Should it be in it? Well, probably. How is government going to be in that one? I don't know the answer to that one, but probably the government has to sit down with the insurance industry and say: what should we do? So the limits of government retreat, it's kind of interesting. The other purely practical side of this is that private companies don't want to take all of the functions of government, like ethical decision making, deciding who lives and dies, that's not what private companies do. We're also expecting a lot when governments rush away from their responsibilities and leave it up to charities. Charities are not necessarily able to do all the things that they would like to do, they don't have the funding, they may be cheaper, because they don't pay their people as well... So there may be limits to how far forward the third sector and the private sector can come. I don't know the American situation very well, but this welfare bill will probably leave a lot of people very vulnerable and there won't be the jobs. The fact that people have very little money will not mean that jobs will rush in, it takes time. We'll see a situation where after the event, we'll realize that we shouldn't have done something, that a lot of people have been harmed and undermined, and obviously in this process, people lose resources, they lose their capability to survive. I don't think it's a left/right or any other kind of split on it, it's a practical thing of saying given we live in a kind of mixed economy, probably government are still going to do some things, how far do we let it go? I think that's a very important discussion in which aid agencies, charities, churches, and so on, have a very important role to play, because they are part of the solution, but they also have to define their own limits. And this is a rather interesting area because there is this kind of free for all atmosphere. There's a great temptation for some people to say: Wow! we can go in and intervene in a war or Wow! we can become a major service provider. And charities are usually enormously enthusiastic as a whole, because you have to get people to believe and so on, and are motivated in different kind of ways. I think there are fewer responsibilities because there are different ways of testing if charities do good. They don't have bottom lines, they need to invent a few more bottom lines, they need to have a way of testing their standards, their quality, it comes right back to this evaluation issue, to know that they are doing good work, that they do it better than other people. If they don't have those tests, it then becomes very difficult to decide among the alternatives, of whether it should be commercial company, whether the charity should do it, who has the best comparable advantage. I think that creates even a greater burden upon charities to be absolutely honest about their skills, their abilities, their capacities, and so on, and where possible, to define their own limits. And this is difficult because everyone says: Wow! There's some money to do X, or to do Y, and this makes people very enthusiastic, and it makes people take on these commitments. And they may not be the best people to do it. But unlike businesses, charities do not go bust most of the time, charities just keep toddling on, we've got millions of the damn things now. In any other kind of market, they would be willowing out. In this world what happens is that charities become smaller and smaller until their overheads take over their income and then they go moribund. And that's the best scenario. And other charities go on doing terribly bad work and keep getting funded, wandering around, promoting themselves... You don't have any way of judging! The public doesn't have many ways of judging, because there's not enough information. People in charities start doing creative accounting... And the public is completely confused, it obviously has the least amount of information when it comes to overseas work. No matter the glitzy films and the fund raising appeals... You know, who is helping the public understand whether this charity or that charity is doing good work in Rwanda? Nobody! Journalists don't understand a lot of the time what charities do, that's why I keep appealing to charities, if charities want to have a better and more realistic understanding of their work, they are going to have to invest in helping journalists to understand it, you can't just assume that journalists are going to learn by osmosis the realities of your business. We need a more realistic interpretation of what's going on, what can and cannot happen. We need journalists to be the public's eyes and ears as they are in many other situations, which is very difficult in a Rwanda. So I keep saying to aid agencies: Why don't you have writers in residence, reporters in residence, photographers in residence, broadcasters in residence? So they understand the realities, the stresses and strains of the business you are in. Perfection is not possible, everybody loses bags of grain, everybody has problems, people do die because of mistakes that are made. But the journalists will gain out of that a bit of the appreciation of the reality of this and will be better able to do a job judging good work. In a local situation it's much easier to tell. Your local church does good work, you can see it, you can visit, you can talk to recipients! Internationally, how many visits did you make to Rwandan refugees? So we end up with a whole number of organizations that are founded on a good idea, on a couple of hundred bucks, and they never go out of business, no matter how terrible they become. We have no way of scrutinizing or observing them. As far as I'm aware, no aid agency has something like an ombudsman, that a refugee can go to and say, "I got bad service." We have no situation as far as I'm aware, in international terms, where you can say to people, "I don't want your development." It's hard. Everyone wants the money. You certainly don't have, as far as I'm aware, in refugee camps where refugee are offered a choice: would you prefer to be fed by Medecin Sans Frontiers or Red Cross? Well, why not? I have advocated, it doesn't happen, but I have advocated the idea that we move over to a situation where we give refugees credit cards. And that credit card could just be a cash credit card and they could buy what they want. We get out of this trucking food around the place, which is what trucking companies should do, not charities. Or charities should then have to hire trucking companies, that's the way it should work. You certainly could have a situation where you allocate people their food, their water, heat, and light, and shelter, with a credit card situation, and let them choose. In the UK, for example, welfare recipients get cash. Food stamps are an incredibly inefficient way of doing things, so I would prefer a cash method, but I can understand there are difficulties because on the whole, although we like to help refugees, we don't like to give them money. We're very nervous about this. Giving people food is one of the most inefficient ways of transferring wealth that I know. When we're giving food in a situation, we're doing two things, one is straightforward, we're trying to feed people, but the other one is, the only resource people receive from us will be the shelter materials, the food, and that's about it. Therefore food is a form of income. And, as we all know, if you give everybody food, that means the prices drop in the local markets, that means you are giving people something that's almost worthless, but that's the only thing they've got, so that's the only thing they can sell. So they all go out and sell the food. We reported in the World's Disasters Report in 1995, I think it was, that you could have people in Malawi refugee camps who had an allocation of about 400 grams of food a day. If you had given them 350 grams as food and the equivalent of what it costs you to move the other 50 grams in cash, you would have given that equivalent of that 50 grams as much value as the 350 combined. So with that "50 grams" in cash, they could have gone to their local market and bought 350 grams of food. You could have encouraged local markets, it would have been a very efficient transfer... You can do that with smart cards. So why aren't we doing that with smart cards? Well, we don't want refugees to choose... We kind of want them to be grateful recipients of our beneficence... Well, let's give people something of value! And even within that, if we are going to get smart about how we do these things, grain is not necessarily the best thing, oil and salt have the kind of value factor of: how much can you actually sell that good for in the local market? Does it bring you back what it was worth? Maize never makes back what it is worth, what it costs to buy and to ship in that situation. Oil is sometimes worth more than what it costs to bring it in. Leaving aside nutritional value for the moment... So I'm in favor of getting to a situation where we give people a great deal more responsibility, we let them sort out their own problems, we get away from the kind of food stamp idea. When you give poor people money in the UK, especially women, on the whole they don't go out and buy drugs with it. We give them so little anyway, they actually don't have a lot of choice, otherwise they are going to starve to death. VB) Wrapping up, is there anything you'd like to talk about that I haven't asked? Shift South, move the money South, let people be responsible, let people make mistakes, reward those that do things well, let them get on with it. Be realistic about what aid can achieve. Aid is marginal, therefore it has to be catalytic, it has to empower people. You do not empower people by doing it for them. You empower people by giving them the responsibility and standing well back and let them get on with it, and if they fall on their faces, they learn from that. In that sense, I'm hoping that we have a situation in the future where we have less white guys wandering off to hot countries, and perspiring a lot, and doing things for other people. We don't need more movements of semi-skilled labor across the world. If we were so good at development, we would now have a range of strategies that were automatic almost. But we're not. We go into a situation and each situation is different. So there isn't a magic cure. If there isn't a magic cure, so how come we're peddling it as if there is? At the same time there is a clear responsibility with people working in the North to keep an eye on what's happening, to report on it, to lobby about it, to advocate, to fund raise, and so on. But let's start focusing on that. I'm an advocate of knowledge, which is a two-way flow, not an one-way flow of information, but a two-way flow of evaluated information, of dialogue. And what that implies for people in the North is to focus upon the kind of skills that are going to be marketable in the South, which is knowledge, lobbying, advocacy, fund raising, and if we can avoid sending doctors, nurses, logisticians, PR people... We won't have that patronizing attitude of: Let's fly in with the grain shipment or let's fly in with our development knowledge people to help develop people. In that kind of a way, some of this thing will solve itself. Who knows? But we've done it the other way for a long time and it didn't work, so let's go and get smart. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Boston, MA - April 1997 - Original interview in English
