Category Archives: The world to day.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S RECENT EVENTS IN PARIS SHOWS ITS TIME TO FOCUS ON THE BIG PICTURE.

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Climate Change., Paris Climate Change Conference 2015, Paris terrorist attack., Politics., The world to day., War, Where's the Global Outrage.

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We must focused on the “big picture” exploring all avenues for influencing humans everywhere.

How societies have developed through all of human history – from Neanderthals to i Phones.

At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings.

The question is why a pretty small group of nations around the shores of the North Atlantic had come to dominate the planet in the last 200 years in a way that the world’s never really seen before is now rapidly becoming irrelevant.

Since no CLARITY is being provided by any of our World Organisations or Political leaders regarding a solution I will offer in this post the reasons why this is true and a solution that is achievable in our life time.

We have four primary issues that must be addressed for us to live in harmony with nature: Overpopulation, Over consumption, dependence on fossil fuels and our harmful and wasteful typical western consumerism.

We have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.”

They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.

The urgency now is driven by the fact that we simply don’t have the necessary time to address the first three. They will take many decades (if not centuries) to resolve and we may be down to just a few years as the experts agree that we’re rapidly approaching or passing certain tipping points, beyond which there is no possibility of avoiding the worst effects of crossing all these planetary boundaries.

In the end of all of this mess amounts to simple massive transfers of wealth from the middle classes and the poor to the rich.

Because whatever you’re fighting for: Racism, Poverty, Feminism, Gay Rights, or any type of Equality. It won’t matter in the least, because if we don’t all work together to save the environment, we will be equally extinct.

It has brought us to a situation of the greatest schism between rich and poor in history. The utter breakdown of democratic government in favour of the new technological driven Feudalism.

As our social development continues to accelerate, we continue to change the meaning of the word poor.

We are not apart from nature, we are a part of nature.

I’m sorry that we paid so much attention to ISIS, and very little how fast the ice is melting in the arctic.

It is imperative now than ever that France in honor its recent unnecessary lost of innocent lives insures that the Climate Change Conference is not effected.

Unfortunately we must tried to see beyond the horrific events in Paris – into the misery beyond.

If we cannot see something, it is difficult to know how we can possibly begin to devise ways to avoid it.

It is time to attend to this generation’s apocalypse, and to do so we must recover both the fear and the hope of early ’80s politics.

There has to be another way, and this time it must include all of humanity, and all of our planet.

So far, few works have managed to put the unthinkable in front of our eyes –

The Internet, is the public face of globalization.  Corruption is not only thriving online, but winning. The digital revolution has degenerated into an underworld of organized crime, dirty tactics, black ops and terrorism.

There is no such thing as “national cyberspace.” International cooperation will be needed, but be warned that the Internet will not go away in any place it touches.

“Lets just say that today’s Internet is a dirty mess waiting to be cleaned up.”

I am sure that there is no need to give a history lesson but here is one that tells the truth and which I admire.

Written by Roberto Savio.

It out lines why we are in the current mess and if you want to understand why it is so it is compulsory reading.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News, offers ten explanations of how the current mess in which the world finds itself came about.

1)  ” The world, as it now exists, was largely shaped by the colonial powers, which divided the world among themselves, carving out states without any consideration for existing ethnic, religious or cultural realities. This was especially true of Africa and the Arab world, where the concept of state was imposed on systems of tribes and clans.

2)  After the end of the colonial era, it was inevitable that to keep these artificial countries alive, and avoid their disintegration, strong men would be needed to cover the void left by the colonial powers. The rules of democracy were used only to reach power, with very few exceptions. The Arab Spring did indeed get rid of dictators and autocrats, just to replace them with chaos and warring factions (as in Libya) or with a new autocrat, as in Egypt.

The case of Yugoslavia is instructive. After the Second World War, Marshal Tito dismantled the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and created the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. But we all know that Yugoslavia did not survive the death of its strongman.

The lesson is that without creating a really participatory and unifying process of citizens, with a strong civil society, local identities will always play the most decisive role. So it will take some before many of the new countries will be considered real countries devoid of internal conflicts.

3)  Since the Second World War, the meddling of the colonial and super powers in the process of consolidation of new countries has been a very good example of man-made disaster.

Take the case of Iraq. When the United States took over administration of the country in 2003 after its invasion, General Jay Garner was appointed and lasted just a month, because he was considered too open to local views.

Garner was replaced by a diplomat, Jan Bremmer, who took up his post after a two-hour briefing by the then Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice. Bremmer immediately proceeded to dissolve the army (creating 250,000 unemployed) and firing anyone in the administration who was a member of the Ba’ath party, the party of Saddam Hussein. This destabilised the country, and today’s mess is a direct result of this decision.

The current Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, whom Washington is trying to remove as the cause of polarisation between Shiites and Sunnis, was the preferred American candidate. So was the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who is now virulently anti-American. This is a tradition that goes back to the first U.S. intervention in Vietnam, where Washington put in place Ngo Dihn Dien, who turned against its views, until he was assassinated.

There is no space here to give example of similar mistakes (albeit less important) by other Western powers. The point is that all leaders installed from outside do not last long and bring instability.

4)  We are all witnessing religious fighting and Islam extremism as a growing and disturbing threat. Few make any effort to understand why thousands of young people are willing to blow themselves up. There is a striking correlation between lack of development/employment and religious unrest. In the Muslim countries of Asia (Arab Muslims account for less than 20 percent of the world’s Muslim populations), extremism hardly exists.

And few realise that the fight between Shiites and Sunnis is funded by countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran.

Those religions have been living side by side for centuries, and now they are fighting a proxy war, for example in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been funding Salafists (the puritan form of Islam) everywhere, and it has provided nearly two billion dollars to the new Egyptian autocrat, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, because he is fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, which predicates the end of kings and sheiks and power for the people. Iraq is also becoming a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, defender of the Sunnis, and Iran, defender of the Shiites.

So, when looking at these wars of religion, always look at who is behind them. Religions usually become belligerent only if they are used. Just look at European history, where wars of religion were invented by kings and fought by people. Of course, once the genie is out of the bottle, it will take a long time to put it back. So this issue will be with us for quite some time.

5)  The end of the Cold War unfroze the world, which had been kept in stability by the balance between the two superpowers.

Attempts to create regional or international alliances to bring stability have always been stymied by national interests. The best example is Europe. While everybody was talking about Crimea, Ukraine and Vladimir Putin (who had been made paranoiac about Western encirclement, from the George Bush Jr. administration onwards) and how to bring him to listen to the United States and Europe, European companies continued trade in spite of a much talked about embargo. And now, Austria has quietly signed an agreement with Russia to join the South Stream, a pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Europe – so much for the unity of a Europe which has been clamouring about the need to reduce its energy dependence on Russia.

A multipolar world is in the making, but it has to be seen how stable it will be.

In Asia, China and Japan are increasing their military investments, as are surrounding countries. And while local conflicts, like Syria, Iraq and Sudan, are not going to escalate into a larger conflict, this would certainly be the case in Asia.

6)  In a world more and more divided by a resurgence of national interests, the very idea of shared governance is losing its strength, and not only in Europe.

The United Nations has lost its significance as the arena in which to reach consensus and legitimacy. The two engines of globalisation – trade and finance – are not part of the United Nations, which is stuck with the themes of development, peace, human rights, environment, education and so on. While these issues are crucial for a viable world, they are not seen as such by those in power. Conclusion: the United Nations is sliding into irrelevance.

7)  At the same time, values and ideas which were considered universal, such as cooperation, mutual aid, international social justice and peace as an encompassing paradigm are also becoming irrelevant.

French President Francois Hollande meets U.S. President Barack Obama, not to discuss how to stop the genocide in Sudan, or the kidnapping of children in Nigeria, but to ask him to intervene with his Minister of Justice to reduce a giant fine on a French bank, the BNP-Parisbas, for fraudulent activities. The outstanding problem of climate control was largely absent in the last  G7 meeting, not to talk of nuclear disarmament … and yet these are the two main threats to the planet!

8)  After colonialism and totalitarian regimes, the key phrase after the Second World War was “implementation of democracy”. But after the end of the Cold War, democracy was taken for granted. In fact, in the last twenty years, the formula of representative democracy has been losing its glamour. Pragmatism has led to the loss of long-term vision, and politics have become more and more mere administration.

Citizens feel less and less related to parties, which have basically become self-centred and self-reliant.  International affairs are not considered tools of power by parties, and decisions are taken without participation. This leads to choices which often do not represent the feelings and priorities of citizens.

The way in which the bailout of Cyprus from its financial crisis a few years ago was treated in the European Commission was widely recognised as a blatant example of lack of transparency. Few people certainly make more mistakes than many …

9)  A very important element of the mess has been the growth of what its proponents, especially in the financial world, call the “new economy” – an economy that contemplates permanent unemployment, lack of social investments, reduced taxation for large capital, the marginalisation of trade unions, and a reduction of the role of the State as the regulator and guarantor of social justice.

Inequalities are reaching unprecedented levels. The world’s 85 richest individuals possess the same wealth as 2.5 billion people.

10)  All this brings its corollary. It is not by chance that all mainstream media worldwide have the same reading of the world.

Information today has basically eliminated analysis and process, to concentrate on events. Their ability to follow the world mess is minimal, and they just repeat what those in power say. It is very instructive to see media which are very analytical about national affairs and very superficial about international issues. The media depend largely on three international news agencies, which represent the Western world and its interests. Have you read anywhere about the gas agreement between Austria and Russia?

So, a final point: never be satisfied with what you read in the newspapers, always try to get additional and opposite viewpoints through the net. This will help you to look at the world with your eyes, and not with the eyes of somebody else who is probably part of the system which has created this mess. Do not go with the tide … search for the other face of the moon. And if they tell you that they know, well, just look at the results. So, be yourself and, if you make a mistake, at least it will be your mistake. “

I thank him and I could not agree more with his advise in his summing up. He states what I have being advocating in post after post.

Many factors influenced the civil war in Syria, including long-standing political, religious, and ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and the consequences of water shortages influenced by drought, ineffective watershed management, and the growing influence of climate variability and change.

Here is my solution. 

Greed is the real terrorist operating under the banner of Profit for Profit sake.

Make Profit for Profit Sake Pay;

By placing a World Aid Commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions (over $20,000) on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all new drilling and mining Licences.

A commission rate ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year, of which a substantial amount could be allocated to promote international peace and development and resolving Climate Change.

This would create a perpetual Funded Fund to contributed to rectifying the very thing that caused the problems in the first place.   Greed. 

And as we look forward into a world increasingly dominated by technology, what will geography mean in the 21st century?
Dead Iraq children

A new report claiming the numbers killed by ‘the war on terror’ globally may be as high as 2 million has been met with almost total silence.

What will all the deaths achieve? Every death is a tragedy.

This is a good starting point for a wider debate about the justifications and rationalisations for the great swathe of global violence unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks.

The under reporting by the media of this human toll attributable to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate, or through self-censorship, has been key to removing the “fingerprints” of responsibility.’

The new age of humanitarian war which suggests that war is not as bad as it used to be, or at least that it’s not so bad that the costs outweigh the gains. Is totally naive.

High-tech precision weapons, precision targeting enabled by lawyers, new ethical norms, population-centric counterinsurgency – all this has made it possible to vaporise the bad guys is not true as we all saw up close yesterday in Paris.

Mr Hollands declaration of war is understandable, as was Americas after 9/11. But it should not be the first choice rather than a last resort.

The first choice should be to convince their populations that war will not only be cost-free for them, but that its effects on the countries on the receiving end of it will also be minimal and ultimately beneficial.

This is what we have been told ever since the US invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War and throughout the last fourteen years of the ‘war on terror,’ whenever the US and its allies are considering who next to bomb or hit with a drone.

War used to be a way to learn Geography – Fool me once.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S : WE HAVE NEVER HAD FREEDOM AND WHAT WE HAVE NOW IS AN ILLUSION.

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Humanity., Life., Social Media., The world to day., Unanswered Questions.

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These days our Freedoms (which so many died for) are being eroded to the point where there is no such thing as Freedom in our Lifetime.In this post I am going to try to express what exactly personal Freedom is these days.

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I am not going to exam the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which has over 30 Articles, or what is left of free speech, or the Black freedom struggle, or woman’s struggle for freedom.  Or the idea of free speech which is a view of freedom that is inseparable from the
political arena, flawed in theory and politicised in practice.

⌈ Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.

Universal human rights are often expressed and guaranteed by law, in the forms of treaties, customary international law, general principles and other sources of international law. International human rights law lays down obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups.⌉

All of which are impossible to implement, and has never been implemented anywhere historically – not even today, in liberal societies.

The freedoms that we once had are now dissolving because of the Internet, and the need for blanket surveillance due to fear mongering politics over terrorists plots ever since 9/11.

Our every move is tracked, we are under surveillance around the clock, our buying habits are logged, our preferences are hacked, and most of us don’t raise an eyebrow.

It is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries they can set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline. All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see.

Our background and our relationships are becoming inescapable features of our human existence.

So what is freedom.

In the modern sense freedom is achieved by one’s individual nature, or inner voice.  A sovereign self – a monological consciousness that fundamentally excludes the other.

However one can still be imprisoned by an oppressive internal forced liberation from an interior force.

So how can one reconcile two seemingly opposed senses of freedom?

One sense views freedom as bound and situated, while the other sense views freedom as liberation from such bonds.

What is required is a notion of self hood that recognizes and embraces both senses of freedom –  to see the self not as an isolated and detached entity from the social world, but one that is deeply enculturated and dialogical while simultaneously liberated.

These are the limits, the boundaries, of what allow us to be free and for things to be meaningful.

So instead of viewing boundaries as something that disables our freedom, we should recognize that boundaries are what might actually enable our freedom.

The received ideas of our present-day institutions are composed of the religious, philosophical, economic, and political status quo.

The goal for each of us is to break free of these ideologies and re describe our world as a whole. This sense of freedom, which I referred to earlier as freedom-within-boundaries, is what ultimately makes possible a freedom-from-oppression.

If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.

As Charles Taylor puts it, this sovereign and self-determining freedom characteristic of the modern individual “demands that I break the hold of all such external impositions, and decide for myself alone.

In this view, individuals could exercise their gifts and powers only by
participating in the common life.

That is to say, our freedom is contingent upon the greater public world.

Modern thought (especially evident in the political philosophy of Rousseau) externalized the source of oppression onto authoritative forces such as society, church, law, and government.

This is no longer true due to the indebtedness of the world.

At the expense of eliminating fundamental characteristics that make us human we are now confronting a world with unlimited new possibilities but having no meaningful boundaries.

Modern Social media come to see others as a part of – Us/Selfies.

Unfortunately this unchecked freedom is leading us to a void in which nothing would be worth doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything.

Life is dialogical by its very nature.

To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree, to return to your own position, enriched. We need to identify with others in order to open ourselves up to new ways of being without forgetting where we come from to achieve any freedom.

In the past our background was essential to our identity. These days one’s uniqueness is maintained through continuous exposure to novelty  in a consumer culture that thrives on the latest fad.

Is it this quantity of novelties that appears to take precedent over quality of relationships. So where do we turn for redescription of Freedom, to open us up to new and fresh ways of being human?

That can enable us to break free from our own pasts and increase our level of sensitivity and sympathy to those without freedom?

Is it severance from the status quo.

I fear that if you were to ignore you background, and try to break from your own past, “You would be crippled as a person, because you would be repudiating an essential part out of which you evaluate and determine the meanings of things. Our background, often times inarticulate and unformulated, carries the values and traditions that constitute who we are. This background is no longer not just our personal past and memories, but it may also be the lineage, tradition, and culture from which we have emerged.

Instead of dropping our historicity, we should be interested in owning up to the background and tradition that gives significance to our identity.

Meaningful freedom can only be achieved through enculturation.

Therefore, our freedom is bound in a sense, or situated in the environment that has shaped us, because that is likely to be the most meaningful environment to us.

Perhaps it is only in a bounded space that we can move about freely.

Fusion of horizons’ between ourselves and others..we must always have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation.

Background is what initially provides persons with the possibility for understanding anything at all. Our background, or tacit knowledge of the world, is the horizon out of which things have meaning for us. It gives us our “referential context of significance.” A liberating freedom, which occurs when our world is enlarged not downloaded on to a data base.

Our identity is formed by the web of relationships that surround us.  Therefore, it is precisely ourselves, which implies our background, that we must bring into the other’s situation.

The fundamental significance of language and conversation, and its ability to bring us closer to understanding one another is now rapidly diluted by technology.

We are not born precocial and fully hard-wired creatures.

Instead, we are born as incomplete beings, needing enculturation and society for healthy maturation.

Our biological need for one another requires certain physiological signals, that are not possible on the Web. Through facial expressions, infants learn to not only replicate another’s face, but to empathically feel what the face exhibits.

Biologists consider this skill of emotional matching to have been “crucial for escape from predation, foraging, hunting, and mass migrations” before spoken language entered our evolutionary history.

In spite of the modern liberating sense of freedom which may encourage isolation and detachment, we should also note that it can promote a healthy release from oppressive external forces. These forces can manifest in a variety of forms, everything from an abusive relationship to a manipulative religious group.

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Emphasis on a socially dependent self can lead to passivity in daily life or submission to totalitarian regimes.

By being sympathetic we are capable of being liberated from ourselves.

On the other hand egocentrism shouldn’t be overcome at the expense of forgetting ourselves. So freedom is one that respects the boundaries of selfhood, instead of annihilating it.

Although we may be transported into the sandals of the Buddha, we still need to come back to our point of departure in order to be enriched.

Because in recognizing the necessity of one’s interpersonal relationships, social and moral commitments, culture, tradition, memories, and of course, biology as constitutive of one’s experience of liberation.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean fleeing to a new land. It can also mean discovering the oceanic depth of a single, bounded situation. And this entails having new eyes. Remember, “Life is immense!”

We are free to become authentic only after we accept our boundary, which is our finitude.

Death is the ultimate boundary of human existence, it is only by facing up to this limit that we are capable of becoming truly authentic Free.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake.

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–Guru Rabindranath Tagore
National Poet, Freedom Fighter

Modern day freedom-is freedom within boundaries.

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT FOOD WASTE IN THE WORLD.

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Humanity., Life., Politics., Sustaniability, The Future, The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, WORLD POVERTY WHERE'S THE GLOBAL OUTRAGE

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Our routine practices, unfortunately, make it difficult for us to conceptualize the magnitude of global food waste.

Everyday we hear appeals and yet there are one billion starving people in the world.

40% of all the food produced in the United States is never eaten.

In Europe, we throw away 100 million tonnes of food every year.

These are shamefully shocking facts  in their own right. In a world full of hunger, volatile food prices , and social unrest, these statistics are more than just shocking when half the world’s population goes to sleep each night malnourished they are obscene.

They are environmentally, morally and economically outrageous.

Add to this that fact that obesity is rapidly growing in the western world, particularly among children, while 6 million children in the developing world die annually from undernourishment and it is a damning indictment of capitalism – the dominant ideology and economic system that has governed much of the world for the last two centuries.

The rampage of globalisation has given monopoly buying power to a few massive western multinational enterprises, who trample all over the globe sourcing farm supplies from the lowest bidders of impoverished nations.

Prices of farm produce are squeezed to such an extent that it’s more profitable to leave ‘inadequate’ quality crops in the ground to rot or to throw away than to pay the price for its air transport, storage and quality packaging to bring to western supermarkets with discerning consumers.

Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach.

Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands.

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Here are some hard facts to swallow.

Wasting food means losing not only life-supporting nutrition but also precious resources, including land, water and energy. As a global society therefore, tackling food waste will help contribute towards addressing a number of key resource issues:

About one-third of all food produced worldwide, worth around US$1 trillion, gets lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems.

Every year, consumers in industrialized countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (222 million vs. 230 million tons)

1.4 billion hectares of land – 28 percent of the world’s agricultural area – is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.

The direct economic consequences of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually.

The amount of food lost and wasted every year is equal to more than half of the world’s annual cereals crops (2.3 billion tons in 2009/10)

In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions.

In the USA, 30-40% of the food supply is wasted, equaling more than 20 pounds of food per person per month.

The Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.

Much of it ends up in landfills, and represents a large part of municipal solid waste.

The water used to irrigate wasted crops would be enough for the daily needs of nine million people.

Wasted production contributes 10% to the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries.

One hectare of land can, for example, produce rice or potatoes for 19–22 people per annum. The same area will produce enough lamb or beef for only one or two people.

The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.

Over the past century, fresh water abstraction for human use has increased at more than double the rate of population growth. Currently about 3.8 trillion m3 of water is used by humans per annum. About 70% of this is consumed by the global agriculture sector,

Indeed, depending on how food is produced and the validity of forecasts for demographic trends, the demand for water in food production could reach 10–13 trillion m3 annually by mid-century. This is 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the total human use of fresh water today.

Considerable tensions are likely to emerge, as the need for food competes with demands for ecosystem preservation and biomass production as a renewable energy source.

Agriculture is responsible for a majority of threats to at-risk plant and animal species.

A low percentage of all food wastage is composted:

What can be done about it?

Part of the problem is poor shopping habits, but the confusion many consumers have with “use by” and “best before” food labels is also a factor. “Use by” refers to food that becomes unsafe to eat after the date, while “best before” is less stringent and refers more to deteriorating quality.

Consumer households need to be informed and change the behavior which causes the current high levels of food waste. Instead of buying packets of vegetables buy loose veg.

Boycott Supermarkets that don’t accept imperfections and nicks. There’s nothing wrong with a deformed Veg. It’s fine to eat.

Support redistribution urban food programmes.

UK supermarket chain Waitrose is attacking food waste in all parts of its business. The upmarket grocery chain cuts prices in order to sell goods that are close to their “sell by” date, donates leftovers to charity and sends other food waste to bio-plants for electricity generation.

The idea is for Waitrose to earn “zero landfill” status.

Home composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection authorities.

Buy local produced food items not those produced, transformed and consumed in very different parts of the world.

Considering that food security is a major concern in large parts of the developing world. Conflicts around the world mean there is “donor fatigue.

Food crises don’t just affect the countries where people go hungry. It’s a global challenge. Recent data shows the number of hungry in the world has fallen but still stands at 842 million people.

World Food Programme WFP operations in and around Syria are costing around $31 million a week.

Hidden Hunger is a weapon of mass destruction.

Hidden hunger weakens the immune system, stunts physical and intellectual growth, and can lead to death. It wreaks economic havoc as well, locking countries into cycles of poor nutrition, lost productivity, poverty, and reduced economic growth.

Investing in nutrition is one of the smartest development investments we can make.

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT THE VALUE OF GOLD.

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in The world to day., Wealth.

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Just what is the value of Gold.?

Humans have been decorating themselves with gold since at least 4000 B.C.

According to a 2011 paper in the Journal Nature: meteor bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago brought 20 billion tons of a gold-and-precious-metal-rich space rock to Earth.

Tracing gold’s origin back even further takes us into deep space.

A 2013 study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that all of the gold in the universe was likely birthed during the collisions of dead stars known as neutron stars.

Where ever it came from here are some hard facts.

Gold, the 79th element on the Periodic Table of the Elements, one of the more recognizable of the bunch.

Two-thirds of the world’s gold use to be mined in South Africa. It is now ranked sixth amongst gold producing countries.

Seventy-eight percent of the world’s yearly supply of gold is used in jewelry. The rest goes to electronics and dental and medical uses.

  • The atomic symbol of gold, Au, comes from the Latin word for gold, aurum.
  • Astronaut helmets come equipped with a visor coated with a thin layer of gold. The gold blocks harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.
  • The world’s largest gold crystal is the size of a golf ball and comes from Venezuela. The 7.7-ounce (217.78 grams) crystal is worth about $1.5 million.
  • In Tutankhamen’s tomb alone they found that his coffin was made from 1.5 tonnes of gold.
  • Earthquakes can create gold.
  • The first purely gold coins were manufactured in the Asia Minor kingdom of Lydia in 560 B.C.
  • You can eat gold.
  • Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and is very non-reactive with air, water and most other substances, meaning it won’t corrode or tarnish.
  • Gold nano particles are the only way some drug can work.
  • Gold is in our every day language.
  • If we emptied our bank vaults and jewelry boxes, we’d find no less than 2.5 million tonnes of gold in the world.
  • The US Geological Surveyestimates there are 52,000 tonnes of minable gold still in the ground and more is likely to be discovered.

She’s been as good as gold. He or she is a gold mine of information.

All that glistens is not gold.Bullion dropped last month by the most since September as investors expected the Federal Reserve would soon move to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006. Photographer: Lisi Niesner/Bloomberg

He or she has a heart of gold. Sitting on a goldmine. You’re worth your weight in gold. He or she scored some Columbian Gold. He or She is a “gold digger.” He or he has a heart of gold. Go for the gold. Tickets are like gold dust. Strike gold. 

User-friendly software is worth its weight in gold.

From 3600 BC to the present day, from deep underground to outer space, gold has been a major factor in the world’s development and economy.

When thinking about the historical progress of technology, we consider the development of iron and copper-working as the greatest contributions to our species’ economic and cultural progress – but gold came first.

Its association with the gods, with immortality, and with wealth itself are common to many cultures throughout the world.

But how did gold come to be a commodity, a measurable unit of value?

Gold, measured out, became money. Gold gave rise to the concept of money itself: portable, private, and permanent.

Gold (and silver) in standardized coins came to replace barter arrangements. The concept of money, (i.e., gold and silver in standard weight and fineness coins) allowed the World’s economies to expand and prosper.

A lot of people think about gold as a percentage of a country’s total reserves.

Between January 2000 and March 2009, central banks reduced their reserve holdings of gold by more than 114 million troy ounces.

You might be surprised to learn that the United States has 70 percent of its reserves in gold. Today, the US has about 8,000 tons.

The Bank of England  held 5,485 tonnes of customer gold at the end of February 2014, and 6,240 tonnes of customer gold at the end of February 2013. This meant that between the two-year end dates, end of February 2013 to end of February 2014, the amount of gold in custody at the Bank of England fell by 755 tonnes.

Now only 500,000 bars in the entire London vaults system,500,000 bars = 6,250 tonnes. Gordon Brown sold more than half of Britain’s precious gold bullion at the bottom of the market just before the price of gold started a decade of almost uninterrupted growth.

It was invested in foreign currency interest-bearing assets, 40% in dollars, 40% in euros and 20% in yen.

Meanwhile, China only has about 1 percent of its reserves in gold.

The reason is that a country’s reserves are a mixture of gold and hard currencies, and the currencies can be in bonds or other assets.

The United States doesn’t need other currencies. They print dollars, so why would we hold euros and yen? The U.S. doesn’t need them, so it makes sense that the country would have a very large percentage of its reserves in gold.

China, on the other hand, has greater need for other currencies.

In a money economy, however, you can say that the country’s gold holdings are the real money.

The IMF officially demonetized gold in 1975. The U.S. ended the convertibility of gold in 1971. Gold disappeared “officially” in stages in the mid-1970s. But the physical gold never went away.

Russia has one-eighth the gold of the United States.

Once China gets the right amount of gold, then the cap on gold’s price can come off. At that point, it doesn’t matter where gold goes because all the major countries will be in the same boat. As of right now, however, they’re not, so China has though to catch-up.

So one of my questions for central bankers is, if gold is such a ridiculous thing to have, why are we hanging onto it?

Gold serves as political chips on the world’s financial stage. It doesn’t mean that you automatically have a gold standard, but that the gold you have will give you a voice among major national players sitting at the table.

China feels extremely vulnerable to the dollar.  If we devalue the dollar, that’s an enormous loss to them.

China is saying, in effect,  “We’re not comfortable holding all these dollars unless we can have gold. it’s going to be a mad scramble to get gold.

China, along with India, leads the world in gold demand.

1999 – First Central Bank Gold Agreement.

The First Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) is agreed. 15 European central banks declare that gold will remain an important element of their reserves and collectively cap gold sales at 400 tonnes per year over next five years.

2004 – Launch of SPDR Gold Shares

The market is transformed by an innovative, secure and easy way to access the gold market. Seven years later SPDR exceeds $55bn in assets under management.

New York Gold Spot Price (24hrs)Oct 26, 2015 at 12:35 EST

Gold Price Per Ounce $ 1,168.54 ∧   2.09
Gold Price Per Gram $ 37.57  ∧    0.07
Gold Price Per Kilo $ 37,569.43   ∧ 67.2

The annual worldwide production of gold is something like 50 million troy ounces per year. In other words, all of the gold produced worldwide in one year could just about fit in the average person’s living room!

That means that if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument.

When deciding on a gold jewelry item there are always many different terms that come up.  The most popular are Solid Gold, Gold Filled, and Gold Plated. Solid gold is of course an exquisite piece of jewelry.  Gold filled is the next level and is an amazing, quality alternative to solid gold.  Gold plating is the lower level and these items tend to tarnish and can often times turn the skin green.

Pure gold is so soft, however, that it is rarely ever used to make jewelry. Most jewelry is made from a “gold alloy”.

24K gold is gold in its purest form without any other metal added (though even most 24K gold usually has minute traces of other metals in it. That’s why even fine gold bullion is labeled 99.999% Gold instead of 100% Gold).

Gold can be tested in several different ways. Acid Testing and X-Ray Fluorescence. They both have advantages and disadvantages.

Gold is an elemental metal. This means that pure gold is made up of nothing but gold atoms.

There’s just one problem with humanity’s continued love affair with gold: Getting it out of the ground. About 83 percent of the 2,700 tons of gold mined each year is extracted using a process called gold cyanidation, said Zhichang Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at Northwestern University in Illinois. This process uses cyanide to leach gold out of the rock that holds it. Unfortunately, cyanide is toxic, and the process is anything but environmentally friendly.

In 2013 a bloke named Liu and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature Communications that they’d stumbled upon a way to extract gold from ore with benign starch rather than toxic cyanide.

There is about $130 billion in gold in Fort Knox.

The entire stockpile now weighs 147.3 million troy ounces, which is worth about $130 billion at today’s prices.

The bad news is that the way we use gold is starting to change.

Up to now it has never gone away. It has always been recycled.

“All the gold that has been mined throughout history is still in existence in the above-ground stock. That means that if you have a gold watch, some of the gold in that watch could have been mined by the Romans 2,000 years ago.” The way gold is being used in the technology industry, however, is different. About 12% of current world gold production finds its way to this sector, where it is often used in such small quantities, in each individual product, that it may no longer be economical to recycle it.

In short, gold may be being “consumed” for the first time.

Platinum is even more scarce than gold. Only 3.6 million troy ounces are produced per year.

WE LEFT WITH THE QUESTION WHY DO CENTRAL BANKS HAVE GOLD BARS IN THE VAULT?

It did sweet fanny Adam to stop the financial crash.

It’s a holdover from the old Gold Standards. Gold standard regulation required all banks, including the central bank to hold gold as a regulatory asset.

In the last gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, the US in particular had to hold gold to back the dollar. The requirement went away with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973, but the gold didn’t.

These days there isn’t any requirement to hold gold. Gold on the Federal Reserve’s book isn’t even held at market prices, it’s marked to a notional statutory value of ~$42.

By the same token, there isn’t any requirement not to hold it.

“So why does anyone hold gold?”

It is expected to retain its value through cataclysmic events. The value of any currency, on the other hand, is dependent of the faith of the government or authority that backs it. The argument is that for some reason foreign markets become suddenly very adverse to take your currency, you should have some other medium of exchange that allow you to finance imports or serve short-term external debt.

All fiat currency is constantly competing with gold for value.

If everyone stopped creating money, and started hoarding gold, the central banks would, by definition be useless and powerless.

The trade-off between holding and selling the gold is different for “anyone” and countries.

Here a few Videos that are Gold.

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THE BEADY EYE DRAWS ITS CONCLUSION ON WORLD ORGANISATIONS.

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Climate Change., Humanity., Sustaniability, The world to day., World Organisations.

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Over many centuries, human societies across the globe have established progressively closer contacts.

Recently, the pace of global integration has dramatically increased.

Unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new impetus and made the world more interdependent than ever.

All giving rise to the question:

Why is our world in such a mess and our World Organisations so helpless to do anything about it.

The Answer is simple and can be summed up in one Paragraph.

Self Interest, no long-term planning, greed, unsustainable consumption, religion beliefs, drugs, guns, inequality and our out of date reactionary World Organisations which are not funded and have zero power to do anything about it.

At the turn of the Millennium, the atmosphere of optimism at the end of the Cold War and the confidence that globalization would “lift all boats” led to the belief that extreme deprivation could be overcome without any major change in global economic governance.

Now, after two decades of increasing inequalities and having reached or surpassed many of the planetary boundaries identified by science, it is extremely difficult to argue that the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) can be achieved without affecting some privileges of the rich and powerful.

This won’t happen without social and political struggle.

The good news is that the emerging global consensus is not any more on the side of plutocracies.

The Globalization of Politics, of Culture and of Law sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics, just as the consolidation of the nation-state swept away local economies, dialects, cultures and political forms.

Globalization may well create new markets and wealth, but it is a source of repression and a catalyst for global movements of social justice and emancipation.

Even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest and now threatens the very atmosphere that we all rely on we carry on regardless of its consequences.

It is beyond comprehension, that we all sit in front of our TV, walk about with our Smart phones and worry about personnel satisfaction when the very world we live in is going to rack and ruin.

In the global partnership for development the focus has shifted towards private sector involvement while minimizing the goals for fair trade, debt relief and neglecting the regulation and control of capital movement.

Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely.

As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level are woven together in a complex manner, making it difficult to summarize positive or negative effects.

For example, giving the business sector the key role, being a contributor to job-generating growth. This comes before the adoption of “business-binding human rights standards.

However, it also reflects a new concept for “international partnership for development,” which has been based on the following:

(1) promoting fair trade to help developing nations improve their economic performance and revenues; (2) reconsidering foreign debts, which are consuming large public budget revenues; (3) increasing development aid in quantity and quality (the aid effectiveness track was launched in 2003); (4) speeding up technology transfer to help developing nations overcome the challenges of improving development tools; and (5) addressing the issue of medicines for dangerous illnesses, which is part of commitments by rich nations towards developing ones.

However there is little point to the above if there is no funds to effect the reforms. Why adopt goals at all?

Any systematic effort to answer this seemingly elementary conceptual question has been disturbingly absent in all our World Organisations.flag_2_access

UN reform is endlessly discussed, but there is sharp disagreement on what kind of reform is needed and for what purpose.

UN ‘fit for purpose’, but it is important to ask, ‘whose purpose will it be fit for’?

Funding of all UN system-wide activities is around US$40 billion per year.

While this may seem to be a substantial sum, in reality it is smaller than the budget of New York City, less than a quarter of the budget of the European Union, and only 2.3 per cent of the world’s military expenditures.

We needs to move from ‘Billions’ to ‘Trillions.

Member States have failed to provide reliable funding to the UN system at a level sufficient to enable it to fulfill the mandates they have given it.

With the ongoing financial constraints, it has opened the space for corporate sector engagement.

Increasingly the UN is promoting market-based approaches and multi-stakeholder partnerships as the business model for solving global problems.

Driven by a belief that engaging the more economically powerful is essential to maintaining the relevance of the UN.  This practice has harmful consequences for democratic governance and general public support, as it aligns more with power centers and away from the less powerful.

Donors’ priorities are limited to humanitarian intervention to help refugees and victims of wars and conflicts and to dealing with security concerns in countries torn by wars and conflicts.

The UN working methods reflect a bygone era.

The question of how a fair sharing of costs, responsibilities and opportunities among and within countries can be achieved in formulating and implementing a Post-2015 Sustainability Agenda is overlooked.

The goal to reduce inequality within and among countries, the goal to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, and the goal to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for development are all unattainable without funding.

The Post-2015 Agenda will only succeed if these goals include specific and time-bound targets and commitments for the rich that trigger the necessary regulatory and fiscal policy changes.

This will never happen.

The five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States) enjoy the privilege of veto power. This power has been intensely controversial since the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945.

Without the veto privilege. Fifty years later, the debate on the existence and use of the veto continues, reinvigorated by many cases of veto-threat as well as actual veto use.

The UN cannot perform effectively as long as its budget remains tightly constrained.

For all the talk about auditors and oversight bodies, the UN mainly needs cash. Financial reforms must consider new ways to raise funds, including “alternative financing” such as a global system of revenue-raising must be put in place to fund genuinely international initiatives.

There is only one way to achieve this. 

By placing a world Aid Commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $20,000, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds acquisitions and on all New Drilling licences Gas/Oil.

The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with an estimated $4 trillion of foreign exchange traded per day (2011).

This means that in less than one year, currency worth 25 times the global GDP is traded.

Of this massive amount, international trade in goods and services, which requires foreign exchange, accounts for only a small percentage ($9 trillion per year) of the total trading.

A commission rate ranging from 0.005 to 0.25 percent would generate between $15 and $300 billion per year, of which a substantial amount could be allocated to promote international peace and development.

Add High Frequency Trading and SWFs not forgetting Oil and Gas Drilling and you have a perpetual funded UN.

Apart from the potential to tackle inequalities and injustices worldwide, it would trigger decisive action to protect the integrity of our planet, to combat climate change, and put an end to the overuse of resources and ecosystems by acknowledging planetary boundaries and promoting the respect for nature.

This is the only real solution.

Meanwhile exchange rate speculation accounts for at least 80 percent of the global currency market. These speculative movements, which can take place rapidly and unpredictably, threaten to empty central banks’ currency reserves and trigger financial crises such as those in Mexico (1994), East Asia (1997-98), Russia (1998), Brazil (1999), Turkey (2000) and Argentina (2001).

These crises have had far-reaching socio-economic consequences, throwing millions of people into poverty and unemployment.

Unfortunately, social achievements in reality are often fragile particularly for the socially excluded and can easily be rolled back as a result of conflict (as in the case of Ukraine/Syria/ Middle East), of capitalism in crisis (in many countries after 2008) or as a result of wrong-headed, economically foolish and socially destructive policies, as in the case of austerity policies in many regions, from Latin America to Asia to Southern Europe.

In the name of debt reduction and improved competitiveness, these policies brought about large-scale unemployment and widespread impoverishment, often coupled with the loss of basic income support or access to basic primary health care.

More often than not, this perversely increased sovereign debt instead of decreasing it.

In the United States poverty increased steadily in the last two decades and currently affects some 50 million people, measured by the official threshold of US$23,850 a year for a family of four. In Germany, 20.3 percent of the population – a total of 16.2 million people – were affected by poverty or social exclusion in 2013. In the European Union as a whole, the proportion of poor or socially excluded people was 24.5 percent.

Last, but not least, rich countries tend to be more powerful in terms of their influence on international and global policy making and standard setting. Actions by international institutions like the IMF or World Bank are shaped by their governing bodies, whose composition is directly linked to the affluence of member countries.

Similar patterns exist in donor-recipient relationships or in the dynamics of international and/or inter-state negotiations.

The results can be very tangible, as in the case of the creditor-debtor-relationship between Greece and EU and IMF, or rather subtle as sometimes in the voting behavior of smaller actors in the UN Security Council.

If we are to have a global transformation, it would require not only the mobilization of the international community but also a fair sharing of costs, responsibilities and opportunities among and within the countries of the World. Include fair trade and investment regimes and migration policies, and international financial system reforms; more specifically they include the revision of bilateral and international investment agreements, the creation of a global regulatory framework for transnational corporations, greater flexibility in intellectual property rights protection for developing countries, genuine efforts to combat tax evasion and profit shifting, the creation of a debt workout mechanism for highly indebted countries as well as the reform of existing global economic governance institutions.

Not secret Trade Agreements like the TTP and the TTIP

All countries have responsibilities in this regard, but the rich have a greater responsibility given their capacity, resources and influence in international institutions and economic governance.

A UN study has estimated that about $150 billion per year is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, ensuring primary schooling for all children, and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.

 

The richest 85 people in the world own more wealth than the bottom half of the entire global population.

Yes, that equation works out to: 85 > 3,000,000,000.

By the end of 2016 the wealthiest 1% to own more than 50% of the world’s wealth

People everywhere want to be free to determine their own future so we must take the profit out of war and profit for profit sake.

The Conclusion can only be:  

That unless we the citizens of the Planet demand change nothing or any reform will be possible. We must make profit for profit sake provide the Funds. Take the current Climate Change Conference in Paris. With no funds any agreements to tackle the problem will be worthless.   

If you agree: Join me. Get off your rear end and get involved. ( see previous posts.)

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WORLD ORGANISATIONS. PART SEVEN. WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Life., The Future, The world to day., World Organisations.

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Following the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the organization was heavily criticized for its bureaucracy, insufficient financing, regional structure, and staffing profile.

OBTAINING AN INSIGHT INTO THIS ORGANISATION REQUIRES AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE COMPLICATIONS OF NOT ONLY OF WORLD HEALTH AND ALL THAT ENCOMPASSES. BUT THE OVERLAPPING OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE WORLD BANK/ IMF AND DRUGS.

It is impossible to objectively and fairly assess the functioning of WHO as a whole.

It may in fact be impossible to assess WHO’s functioning in individual policy areas in a manner that is objective, fair and just.

Another words since the World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948, the development of many new institutions in the field of health challenges its original vision as the ‘directing and coordinating body on international health work.

In a world with increasing isolation, tension and recourse to violence, it is clear that the Red Cross Red Crescent must champion the individual and community values which encourage respect for other human beings and a willingness to work together to find solutions to community problems.The Movement’s seven Fundamental Principles as they stand today were unanimously adopted in 1965 by the 20th International Conference of the Red Cross.

Its purpose is to protect life and health and to ensure respect for the human being. It endeavors to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.

Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe.

Health is vitally important for every human being in the world. Global health matters to everyone, not just to those living in developing countries. The Movement is independent.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Since 15 June 2007, the world has been implementing the International Health Regulations (IHR).

WHO evolved from a body principally aimed at the control of infectious diseases to a more holistic approach to the improvement of health characterized in the 1970s by the slogan ‘Health for All.

The International Health Regulations are a legally binding international agreement that govern the roles of the World Health Organization and its Member States around the globe in identifying, sharing information about, and responding to public health events that may have international consequences.
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Under Director-General Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland in the 1990s a serious attempt was made to refocus WHO and raise its status as a player in the development policy arena, but with mixed success and limited sustainability.

More recently WHO’s chronic financial problems, characterized by excessive dependence on voluntary short-term funding by donors, have precipitated another round of reform.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the body of the United Nations (UN) responsible for directing and coordinating health.

The United Nations’ system is comprised of the UN itself and more than 30 affiliated organizations — known as programs, funds, and specialized agencies — with their own membership, leadership, and budget processes. Many of these Programs and funds overlap each other.

For example.

UNICEF, United Nations Children’s Fund provides long-term humanitarian and development assistance to children and mothers. Recent UNICEF initiatives have included polio immunization for 5.5 million children in Angola when WHO is supposed to be responsible for global vaccination campaigns.

A WORTHY  FUND that is giving today’s children a chance to grow into useful and happier citizens, it contributes to removing some of the seeds of world tension and future conflicts.

 UNFPA, United Nations Population Fund– UNFPA works on the ground in 140 nations to “ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS is co-sponsored by 10 UN system agencies: UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, UNODC, the ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank and has ten goals related to stopping and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

As such WHO has come to play a vital role as an actor in the field of international public health and international public health policy. Since its inception in 1947 WHO has been at the forefront of many breakthroughs in the field including, most notably, what has come to be described as one of the greatest humanitarian achievements of the 20th century, the elimination of Smallpox in 1979.

However WHO’s inability to control the spread of  HIV/AIDS, particularly in Africa has cast doubt on its effectiveness.

Though much of the media attention given to WHO concentrates on its role in controlling and ultimately eliminating infectious disease, WHO’s mandate as you can see from the above is far broader.

The constitution of the World Health Organization entered into force on the 7th April 1948; however the idea of an international (or at least transnational) approach to dealing with matters of health had existed since the middle of the 19th century with efforts centered on combating infectious disease.

As the 20th century progressed, the focus of international health policy broadened.Afficher l'image d'origine

The constitution of WHO indicates that, by the middle of the 20th century nations were willing to cooperate in a broad range of health-related policy matters. Chapter II, Article 2 of WHO’s constitution lists the twenty-two functions of WHO.

The top six functions are:

  1. Providing leadership on matters critical to health and engaging in partnerships where joint action is needed;
  2. Shaping the research agenda and stimulating the generation, translation and dissemination of valuable knowledge;
  3. setting norms and standards and promoting and monitoring their implementation;
  4. Articulating ethical and evidence-based policy options;
  5. Providing technical support, catalysing change, and building sustainable institutional capacity;
  6. Monitoring the health situation and addressing health trends.

The constitution of the World Health Organization also addresses its structures.

These structures are complex, with three levels of organization at an international level, the World Health Assembly (WHA), comprising representatives of every WHO member state, The Executive board, which comprises members elected by the WHA and The Secretariat composed of WHO’s Director-General and technical and administrative staff.

The constitution also specifies provisions to create regional organizations and “committees considered desirable to serve any purpose within the competence of the organization.

In addition to a continuing focus on infectious disease there are also functions that specifically deal with areas including research, assistance to government and addressing non-infectious disease that had previously been given little attention on the international health policy stage.

The focus of WHO’s work has shifted over time. This is not surprising, considering the broad scope of WHO’s mandate that the organization tends to focus its work around only some of its functions at any given time.

The question is whether WHO member states and its secretariat are asking sufficiently searching questions about WHO’s place in the international system and what might need to be done to put its future on a more secure footing.

WHO is acutely aware of the challenges it faces if it is to remain a relevant actor in international health and second, the direction of WHO’s work for is geared towards meeting the health related Millennium Development Goals.

Before examining WHO’s role in maternal health it is important to understand how the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have come to play such a prominent role in shaping WHO’s work.

The MDGs came out of the United Nations Millennium Declaration which was endorsed by 189 countries in September 2000 and resolves to work towards combating poverty, ill-health, discrimination and inequality, lack of education and environmental degradation.

The MDGs are eight specific goals that the 191 United Nations (UN) states have committed themselves to achieving by 2015.

The MDGs goals are:

1.     to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;

2.     to achieve universal primary education;

3.     to promote gender equality and empower women;

4.     to reduce child mortality;

5.     to improve maternal health;

6.     to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;

7.     to ensure environmental sustainability;

8.     and to develop a global partnership for development.

These goals are interdependent, progress or lack thereof in achieving one goal will have effects on progress towards achieving the others.

Likewise it is acknowledged that in order to achieve the MDGs goals all sections of the UN system will be required to work together and, more importantly, that the UN alone cannot achieve the MDGs goals.

The MDGs are unique in that they have broad support across the international system. The constituent bodies of the UN and all 191 UN member states are committed to achieving the MDGs.

Achieving the MDGs goals will require the cooperation and action of UN member states and of other international, regional and local governmental and non-governmental organizations.

WHO in particular accepts this to be the case.

WHO’s need to work closely with other UN bodies, states and other actors in the international system is a major theme of WHO’s Eleventh General Programme of Work 2006-2015.

0NCE AGAIN both of these points indicate that WHO is aware of the fact that it cannot function as an independent actor in the international system.

Any action WHO takes must be informed by the actions of other actors in the international system and likewise WHO’s actions impact upon the actions of other actors in the international system.

Enter the World Bank. Who’s major health funder in the 1980s and a proponent of market-based health policies challenged WHO’s pre-eminent position in the field.

Along with regional organizations including the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations(ASEAN) frame, to varying extents, their policies in a variety of areas around the achievement of the MDGs.

Many major international charities such as the Red Cross and OXFAM are focusing their work, again to varying degrees, on achieving the MDGs.

There are also many civil society organizations, operating at local, national, regional and international levels that are engaged with the MDGs.

Considering this broad support it is little wonder that WHO have chosen to focus so heavily on the achievement of the MDGs in the Eleventh General Programme of Work 2006-2015

The 2014/2015 proposed budget of the WHO is about US$4 billion. 

About US$930 million are to be provided by member states with a further US$3 billion to be from voluntary contributions.

( As of 2012, the largest annual assessed contributions from member states came from the United States ($110 million), Japan ($58 million), Germany ($37 million), United Kingdom ($31 million) and France ($31 million). The combined 2012–2013 budget has proposed a total expenditure of $3,959 million, of which $944 million (24%) will come from assessed contributions. This represented a significant fall in outlay compared to the previous 2009–2010 budget, adjusting to take account of previous under spends. Assessed contributions were kept the same. Voluntary contributions will account for $3,015 million (76%), of which $800 million is regarded as highly or moderately flexible funding, with the remainder tied to particular programmes or objectives.)

When you consider the value of the Drugs market.

As a result of the pressure to maintain sales,  there is now, in WHO’s words, “an inherent conflict of interest between the legitimate business goals of manufacturers and the social, medical and economic needs of providers and the public to select and use drugs in the most rational way”.

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The global pharmaceuticals market is worth US$300 billion a year, a figure expected to rise to US$400 billion within three years. The 10 largest drugs companies control over one-third of this market, several with sales of more than US$10 billion a year and profit margins of about 30%. Six are based in the United States and four in Europe.

A similar conflict of interests exists in the area of drug research and development (R&D) particularly in the area of neglected diseases.

The private sector dominates R&D, spending millions of dollars each year developing new drugs for the mass market. The profit imperative ensures that the drugs chosen for development are those most likely to provide a high return on the company’s investment. As a result, drugs for use in the industrialized world are prioritized over ones for use in the South, where many patients would be unable to pay for them.

In a number of cases, international corporations and foundations have contributed drugs or products free of charge to help in disease eradication.

Smith Kline Beecham has made a US$500 million commitment to WHO of its drug albendazole, used to treat lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis).

American Home Products has provided a non-toxic larvicide and the DuPont Company has contributed free cloth water filters for the eradication of guinea-worm disease (dracunculiasis).

The Japanese Nippon Foundation has enabled WHO to supply blister packs containing the drugs needed for multi-drug therapy (MDT) of TB in sufficient quantities to treat about 800 000 patients a year in some 35 countries.

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Tomorrow, the World Health Organization (WHO) is expected to officially certify that south-east Asia, formerly one of the regions with the worst levels of polio, has eradicated the disease, after India found new no cases in the previous three years. (The WHO counts India as part of south-east Asia.)

The cost of achieving this has stretched past $10 billion, much of it fronted by donors from wealthy countries that have already eliminated the disease, as the US did in 1979.

For comparison, eliminating smallpox cost $500 million in 2008 dollars.

In 1998, researchers forecast that the eradication of measles in the US by 2010 would save $45 million a year.

Despite official “eradication” in 2000, cases of the measles are growing again thanks to the anti-vaccine movement’s push against immunization.

The World Health Organisation (WHO), the health body of the United Nations (UN), has released a new report stating the huge leaps made in the global fight against malaria. In the space of only 15 years, between 2000 and 2015, the rate of new malaria infections has dropped by approximately 37 per cent, with the global death rate falling by a dramatic 60 per cent during the same period. This means over six million deaths have been prevented since 2000.

“In the last decade of the previous century, malaria was rampant, killing more than one million people every year,” “Today, global malaria control ranks as one of the most successful stories in public health, since the start of the century.” However “Malaria still causes one in ten child deaths in Africa and costs the continent’s economies around £8bn every year.”

There is no doubting that this World Organisation and the work it does is essential to us all.

Being a humanitarian organisation which is much more than just giving people medicine it must recognize that everybody is an individual with a story, with a life, with a right to a future.

It is incapable of achieving this because it has to rely on ( like the United Nations, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations Children’s Fund) insecure sourcing of financing.  

A 0.05% World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions ( over $20,000) on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions would create a perpetual fund  that would transform all them.    

There seems little point in begging for funds when thinks go wrong.

There has never been a more pressing time for our out of date world organisation to function. Order has broken down in numerous countries. Armed groups and individuals explicitly target girls and women for rape, trafficking, and forced “marriage.” Smugglers sell desperate refugees into slavery. Predators attack the displaced, exploiting their vulnerability. And the consequences, both immediate and long-term, are profound.

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THE BEADY EYETHE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WORLD ORGANISATIONS . PART SIX – THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND (WWF)

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

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This is the first World Organisation in the series of posts that can hold its head up high, because we cannot separate the well-being of people from the well-being of the ecosystems where they live.

World Wildlife Fund was conceived in April, 1961, and set up shop in September, 1961, at IUCN’s headquarters in Morges, Switzerland. H.R.H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands became the organization’s first president.

In its first year, the Board approves five projects totaling $33,500.

TO DAY IT is one of the largest environmental and conservation groups with worldwide affiliates. The panda drawn for the first time in 1961 by Sir Peter Scott, artist and co-founder of WWF, remains until today the organization’s symbol.

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Its mission is to use scientific knowledge and advance that knowledge; to “work to preserve the diversity and abundance of life and the health of ecological systems by protecting natural areas and wild populations of plants and animals, including endangered species”; to promote “sustainable approaches to the use of renewable natural resources”; and to promote “efficient use of resources and energy and the maximum reduction of pollution.”

In 1973 WWF grants $38,000 to the Smithsonian Institution to study the tiger population of the Chitwan Sanctuary in Nepal.

WWF begins awarding the annual $50,000 Getty Prize for outstanding contributions to wildlife conservation in 1974. The Prize increases to $100,000 in 1999, and now focuses on the education of future conservationists.

During the first three years of its existence, “WWF raised and donated almost US$1.9 million to conservation projects.”

HUMANITY’S FOOTPRINT IS OUTSTRIPPING EARTH’S ABILITY TO PROVIDE

Already, 60% of ecosystem services—things like water supplies, fish stocks and fertile soil— are in decline because of human impacts on the environment.

Already, we need the equivalent of 1½ Earths to meet the demands people make on nature. We are eating into our natural capital, making it more and more difficult to sustain what will be needed by those who come after us.

THE PLANET IS CHANGING. WE ARE TOO. EVERY DAY, THE THREATS FACING THE PLANET BECOME MORE STARK.

TARGETING SPECIFIC PLACES AND SPECIES IS NO LONGER ENOUGH.

Fortunately, making connections—between the health of the planet and the health of humanity, between sustainability and a strong bottom line, between the sources of energy we choose and the water we drink—is one of WWF’s greatest talents.

Today, the WWF International is focused on six global issues, each critical to the health of our world and its inhabitants. The organization’s Web site lists the focus and need for each of the six programs.

The challenge comes in establishing that connectivity in a way that inspires action from people everywhere, on all levels.

ONE IN NINE PEOPLE ON THE PLANET SUFFERS FROM HUNGER.

90% OF THE OCEAN’S FISH STOCKS ARE OVER FISHED OR BEING FISHED TO THEIR LIMITS. AMERICANS CONSUME NEARLY 5 BILLION POUNDS OF SEAFOOD A YEAR NOT TO MENTION JAPAN, SPAIN. OCEANS FEED MORE THAN 1 BILLION PEOPLE. THEY GUIDE US TO ADVENTURE AND CONTEMPLATION, ABSORB CO² , AND HOLD THE PLANET’S GREATEST DIVERSITY OF LIFE.

GLOBALLY, OVER FISHING IS HAVING A DEVASTATING IMPACT ON THE SEA.

WILDLIFE POPULATIONS AROUND THE WORLD HAVE DECLINED BY AN AVERAGE OF 52% OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.

BY 2030, GLOBAL DEMAND FOR FRESH WATER IS PROJECTED TO EXCEED CURRENT SUPPLY BY MORE THAN 40%.

573 MILLION ACRES OF FOREST WILL BE GONE BY 2050 IF WE DO NOTHING TO STOP DEFORESTATION.

THE CONCENTRATION OF CO² IN THE ATMOSPHERE IN 2013 WAS HIGHER THAN IT HAD BEEN IN AT LEAST 800 THOUSAND YEARS.

FORESTS ARE AT THE HEART OF LIFE ON EARTH. BILLIONS OF ANIMALS, PLANTS AND PEOPLE DEPEND ON THEM. THEY PROTECT OUR WATERSHEDS AND SUPPLY THE OXYGEN WE BREATHE. BETWEEN 46,000 AND 58,000 SQUARE MILES OF FOREST ARE LOST EACH YEAR ROUGHLY EQUIVALENT TO 36 FOOTBALL FIELDS EVERY MINUTE.

FRESH WATER IS CENTRAL TO OUR SURVIVAL. RIVERS, WETLANDS, LAKES AND STREAMS SUPPORT MORE THAN 10% OF ALL KNOWN SPECIES. WATER IS A CONDUIT FOR HEALTH, ENERGY AND FOOD. VIRTUALLY NO FRESHWATER SYSTEM REMAINS UNAFFECTED BY HUMAN ACTIVITIES.

WILDLIFE INSPIRES US. ANIMAL POPULATIONS ANCHOR A WEB OF LIFE THAT IS INTEGRAL TO EVERY HEALTHY ECOSYSTEM ON EARTH. IN THE SPAN OF JUST TWO HUMAN GENERATIONS, HALF OF EARTH’S WILDLIFE HAS DISAPPEARED.

FOOD SUSTAINS AND RENEWS US. ITS CREATION, PRODUCTION, PACKAGING AND TRANSPORT ENCROACH ON NATURE IN HARMFUL WAYS.

IF CURRENT TRENDS CONTINUE,WE WON’T BE ABLE TO REPLENISH THE WORLD’S FOOD SUPPLY FAST ENOUGH TO KEEP UP WITH DEMAND.

A HEALTHY CLIMATE IS A PRECARIOUS GIFT. CLIMATE CHANGE IS UPSETTING THE BALANCE THAT PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE NEED TO THRIVE.

The UN Climate Change Conference in Paris is fast approaching—and with it, our best chance to secure meaningful global climate change action. But the decisions that define our day-to-day lives have a huge impact as well.

Now, the 21st century and social media have ushered in a new set of trends. Younger generations respond less to formal affiliation and gravitate to supporting stand-alone causes and initiatives to get things done. The same is true of some sectors of philanthropy. Increasingly, successful individuals, along with foundations and corporations, see giving as a tool to confront and mitigate some of the biggest problems of our day.

Taking into account the above conditions that are currently prevalent  to our plants and the consequences to all living creatures, included us, you would think that our World Governments and Large Multinational Corporations would be funding the WWF work and projects.

You would be wrong. It has to beg, steal and borrow.

84% of WWF’s spending is directed to worldwide conservation activities.

(32% of its Funding comes from Individual Contributions, 19% from Government grants & contracts, 19% from in-kind and other revenues, 10% from other/non operating contributions, 9% foundation contributions,7% WWF network revenues and last 4% from corporate contributions.)

There is a lot of room for some corporation like Apple, Microsoft, or Banks to step up to the plate or it could be funded by the establishment of a World Aid Commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions (over $20,000) and on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, and Drilling Licences. (see previous posts)

(WWF’s FY14 financial performance remained steady, with total revenues and support at $266.3 million. WWF’s programmatic spending represented 84% of total expenses, with management and administration costs accounting for a modest 5% of total expenses. Total net assets of $357.9 million represented a 12% increase over FY13.)

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WORLD ORGANISATIONS . PART FIVE – THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION.

19 Monday Oct 2015

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The UN Development Program reports that the richest 20 percent of the world’s population consume 86 percent of the world’s resources while the poorest 80 percent consume just 14 percent.

The WTO began life on 1 January 1995, but its trading system is half a century older.Afficher l'image d'origine

Since 1948, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had provided the rules for the system. (The second WTO ministerial meeting, held in Geneva in May 1998, included a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the system.)

The last and largest GATT round, was the Uruguay Round which lasted from 1986 to 1994 and led to the WTO’s creation.

Whereas GATT had mainly dealt with trade in goods, the WTO and its agreements now cover trade in services, and in traded inventions, creations and designs (intellectual property).

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization of 161 members that deals with the rules of trade between nations. With Russia’s accession in August 2012, the WTO encompasses all major trading economies.Afficher l'image d'origine

The work of the IMF and the WTO is complementary.

The WTO Agreements require that it consult the IMF when it deals with issues concerning monetary reserves, balance of payments, and foreign exchange arrangement.

The policies of the WTO impact all aspects of society and the planet, but it is not a democratic, transparent institution.

The WTO rules are written by and for corporations with inside access to the negotiations.  The WTO would like you to believe that creating a world of “free trade” will promote global understanding and peace. On the contrary, the domination of international trade by rich countries for the benefit of their individual interests fuels anger and resentment that make us less safe.

WTO rules put the “rights” of corporations to profit over human and labor rights.

It is time that trade was put firmly in its place, so that it is viewed not as a goal in itself but as a means to achieving broader social, environmental and development goals.

At the very least, the world’s richest countries must honour their commitment to tackling their own damaging practices, particularly subsidies that drive down prices and increase poverty for farmers across the world.

Multilateral trade negotiations need fundamental reform, to be based on fair negotiations, not power play, so that developing countries have an equal place at the table. Genuine consultation with civil society in both the global north and south would no doubt produce other proposals for improvement.

If agreement can’t be reached on a small package of measures to help developing countries, as part of development agenda, then the relevance of the WTO and the multilateral trading system must be questioned.

The sad reality is that very often it is not in a business’s financial interests to act ethically. And no amount of persuasion will change that.The point, then, is not so much to persuade businesses that it is in their interests to act ethically and sustainably – they will work that out for themselves – but to make sure that it is.

Which means two things in practice: raising the benefits of acting ethically and sustainably, and raising the costs of not doing so. There are two principal ways, in a democratic capitalist society, of ensuring that the right incentives are in place for a business to act ethically: via the consumer and via the regulator (indirectly influenced by the citizen).

When humans get into big organisations it can be hard to apply moral values, and the incentives of the business context tend to hold sway. Especially when the boardroom is often far from a particular initiative that may be many thousands of miles away.

The big problem is the lack of global level regulation to match our now thoroughly globalised financial system. Such an international regulatory system is very far from being a reality, but if it is needed to guide, enable and sometimes restrict the activities of the financial sector, it is equally needed in other international sectors, from the extractive industries to manufacturing to agricultural trade.

Attempts at getting companies to sign up to voluntary measures (such as the UN Global Compact) are fine, but they are regarded as quaint by the majority of business people.

For every CEO who has a damascene conversion and transforms or builds their business along ethical lines (think Anita Roddick of the Body Shop) there are thousands who don’t. Lip service is paid, the odd children’s playground is built, the business of business goes on.

The point is to change incentives, and voluntary measures don’t do that. Only legal sanction or consumer action is strong enough, and consumer action is too erratic to rely upon.

In a globalised world, national level laws are clearly inadequate. People say international law is impossible, but they say that about everything worth doing. It is not only possible, it is vital, and is the major project of the 21st century. Without it, the global public cannot expect a private sector that works for people, not just for profit.

If you wanted clear evidence of the above just look at the Two trade Agreements recently negotiated The TTIP and TTP.

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WORLD ORGANISATIONS . PART FOUR- THE THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF)

18 Sunday Oct 2015

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It would be foolish to assume that the world has entered an “end of crises” stage in its history.

Today, with the Web we should all beware of the challenges facing our existence, but are our World Organisations up to speed.

This series of post examines the biggest and there is none more powerful than this one. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) — yet few know how it works.

It’s the must powerful because the economic and financial linkages which bind us together have brought substantial benefits to people around the world, but they have also had destabilizing effects.

The IMF works actively with the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and other international bodies that share an interest in international trade.

Because we live in an increasingly globalized world and the expansion of the role of markets and their increasing globalization will continue to transform the international economy.

As the Second World War ends, the job of rebuilding national economies begins.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded in 1945 on multilateral principles, which stood in sharp contrast to the unilateralism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies of the 1930s.

Also known as the Fund, it was conceived at a United Nations conference convened in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, in July 1944.

The 44 governments represented at that conference sought to build a framework for economic cooperation that would avoid a repetition of the vicious circle of competitive devaluations that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To Day the IMF’s primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with each other.

Also to serve three related purposes.

First, it would operate as a forum for multilateral economic cooperation, in recognition of the fact that one country’s policies affect other countries. Second, it would help countries to identify and adopt the macroeconomic policies that would help them to achieve and maintain high levels of employment and real income. Third, the Fund would provide temporary financial support, under appropriate safeguards, to help members address balance of payments difficulties without resorting to measures that could damage national or international prosperity.

The primary source of the IMF’s financial resources is its members’ quotas, which broadly reflect members’ relative position in the world economy.

Currently, total quota resources amount to about SDR 238 billion (about $334 billion).

With its near-global membership of 188 countries, the IMF is uniquely placed to help member governments take advantage of the opportunities—and manage the challenges—posed by globalization and economic development more generally.

The IMF tracks global economic trends and performance, alerts its member countries when it sees problems on the horizon, provides a forum for policy dialogue, and passes on know-how to governments on how to tackle economic difficulties.

However it has difficulty conforming to the new global power balance.

The US holds 16.7 percent of the voting power in the Fund, which gives it an effective veto over any major changes in its structure and activities. China meanwhile has a 3.8 percent voting share, not far from Italy’s, which has an economy one-fifth the size.

Its Managing Director Christine Lagarde is one of the few woman in the world of power.Afficher l'image d'origine

  • Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
  • Executive Board: 24 Directors representing countries or groups of countries
  • Staff: Approximately 2,630 from 147 countries
  • Total quotas: US$334 billion (as of 9/4/15)
  • Additional pledged or committed resources: US $903 billion
  • Committed amounts under current lending arrangements (as of 8/27/15): US$164 billion, of which US$145 billion have not been drawn (seetable).
  • Biggest borrowers (amount outstanding as of 9/3/15): Portugal, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland
  • Biggest precautionary loans (amount agreed as of 9/3/15): Mexico, Poland, Colombia, Morocco

Since the debt crisis of the 1980’s, the IMF has assumed the role of bailing out countries during financial crises (caused in large part by currency speculation in the global casino economy) with emergency loan packages tied to certain conditions, often referred to as structural adjustment policies (SAPs). It now acts like a global loan shark, exerting enormous leverage over the economies of more than 60 countries.

These countries have to follow the IMF’s policies to get loans, international assistance, and even debt relief. Thus, the IMF decides how much debtor countries can spend on education, health care, and environmental protection.

Unlike a democratic system in which each member country would have an equal vote, rich countries dominate decision-making in the IMF because voting power is determined by the amount of money that each country pays into the IMF’s quota system.

It’s a system of one dollar, one vote.

The U.S. is the largest shareholder with a quota of 18 percent. Germany, Japan, France, Great Britain, and the US combined control about 38 percent.

The disproportionate amount of power held by wealthy countries means that the interests of bankers, investors and corporations from industrialized countries are put above the needs of the world’s poor majority.

The IMF is funded with taxpayer money, yet it operates behind a veil of secrecy.

Members of affected communities do not participate in designing loan packages. The IMF works with a select group of central bankers and finance ministers to make polices without input from other government agencies such as health, education and environment departments.

The institution has resisted calls for public scrutiny and independent evaluation.

IMF loans and bailout packages are paving the way for natural resource exploitation on a staggering scale. It does not consider the environmental impacts of lending policies, and environmental ministries and groups are not included in policy making.

The focus on export growth to earn hard currency to pay back loans has led to an unsustainable liquidation of natural resources. For example, the Ivory Coast’s increased reliance on cocoa exports has led to a loss of two-thirds of the country’s forests.

The IMF routinely pushes countries to deregulate financial systems.

The removal of regulations that might limit speculation has greatly increased capital investment in developing country financial markets. More than $1.5 trillion crosses borders every day. Most of this capital is invested short-term, putting countries at the whim of financial speculators. The Mexican 1995 peso crisis was partly a result of these IMF policies.

When the bubble popped, the IMF and US government stepped in to prop up interest and exchange rates, using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street bankers. Such bailouts encourage investors to continue making risky, speculative bets, thereby increasing the instability of national economies.

During the bailout of Asian countries, the IMF required governments to assume the bad debts of private banks, thus making the public pay the costs and draining yet more resources away from social programs.

Is the IMF Obsolete?. Several years ago, even asking such a question would have seemed absurd.

Yet today, with the narrowing of risk spreads in an era of increasingly interconnected markets and more efficient risk management, is the IMF’s role still relevant? Has the rise of Asia, with its reliance on self-insurance by reserve accumulation since 1998, shown the Fund the door?

So is it time for it to consolidate merging with the World Bank. But that might make for conflicting irrelevant missions.

The IMF has thrived over the years by constantly reinventing itself to meet the evolving needs of global financial governance.

The United States, European Union, Japan, and China can do pretty much as they please—in terms of fiscal stance, interest rates, or exchange rates—either cooperating or not as suits their tastes.

For the big boys, the IMF can be no better than a scholarly scold.

A useful role, to be sure, but not a task that justifies a staff of thousands.

The IMF has lost a clear sense of mission and purpose, and it has lost the support of many members. Members have built reserves and made other arrangements to avoid borrowing from the IMF.

The new world order needs a credible, independent global institution to guide it, and make all the other entities—such as a revamped (and constantly reforming) G8 and G20—effective.

The IMF should be a natural to lead this new world order, but unfortunately there is no sign they are really seizing the moment.

Never in the history of the world has a bureaucracy on its own shut itself down. Could this be the first time? Should it be?

On the one hand, globalization and the rapid growth of emerging markets allow prosperity to be shared more broadly. On the other, many countries remain mired in poverty. There are also moves worldwide toward stronger regionalism in political, monetary and trade relations. Global trends toward democracy, broader participation in decision-making, and a growing prominence of civil society groups within and across borders have highlighted the importance of participatory process and outreach in decision-making.

With its near universal membership, it is the only organization that maintains regular discussions on economic policies with almost all countries. It has the capacity to conduct comprehensive economic policy analysis at the global, regional and country levels. And its members are committed to providing information and engaging in peer review.

The IMF is the only global multilateral institution that brings officials with monetary and financial responsibilities together to monitor international developments and to respond when problems arise.

It was taken for granted that one of the world’s largest international institutions, and certainly one of its most important, would forever be part of the economic and political landscape.

Now, this isn’t the case.

In the USA Congress has refused thus far to approve the Administration’s request for $18 billion to help replenish the IMF’s resources, which have been severely depleted by the various Asian rescue packages the Fund arranged earlier this year.

A shortage of resources is one reason (but certainly not the only one) why the Fund didn’t offer to provide Russia more money during late summer (after arranging a package in July).

Even if the US Congress eventually approves the $18 billion the acrimonius debate over the IMF’s funding and future this time does not augur well for approval of additional funding in the future.

In 2014, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was established as a rival to the IMF and World Bank.

In July 2014 the BRICS nations (Brazil,Russia,India,China,and South Africa) announced the BRICS CONTINGENT RESERVE ARRANGEMENT (CRA) with an initial size of US$100 billion. A framework to provide liquidity through currency swaps in response to actual or potential short-term balance-of-payments pressures.

Some experts voiced concern that the IMF was not representative, and that the IMF proposals to generate only US$200 billion a year by 2020 with the SDRs as seed funds, did not go far enough to undo the general incentive to pursue destructive projects inherent in the world commodity trading and banking systems—criticisms often levelled at the World Trade Organisation  and large global banking institutions.

The greatest amount currently on loan is to Mexico, and then Greece. But when you look at the loan as a percentage of GDP, Liberia then Iceland are the highest with 8.5% and 7.4% respectively.

The greatest amount to be paid back per member of the population is Iceland ($2,828.67 per person) and Ireland ($2,619.14 per person).

The IMF has made €2.5 billion of profit out of its loans to Greece since 2010. If Greece does repay the IMF in full this will rise to €4.3 billion by 2024.

Out of its lending to all countries in debt crisis between 2010 and 2014 the IMF has made a total profit of €8.4 billion, over a quarter of which is effectively from Greece.

All of this money has been added to the Fund’s reserves, which now total €19 billion. These reserves would be used to meet the costs from a country defaulting on repayments. Greece’s total debt to the IMF is currently €24 billion.

The International Monetary Fund is meant to be the firefighter of the world economy. Recently, though, it is China that has responded to the ringing of alarms. First, it lent Argentina cash to replenish its dwindling foreign-exchange reserves. Next, with the rouble crashing, China offered credit to Russia. Then Venezuela begged for funds to stave off a default. Strategic interests dictate where China points its financial hose: these countries supply it with oil and food.

 If a government anywhere goes bust, it now has an alternative to the IMF.

Whether the IMF truly benefits the international economy is the subject of considerable debate. Much of the criticism centers on the IMF’s requirements to adopt certain economic policies in order to receive IMF loans, which may encourage poor countries to neglect social concerns in order to comply.

The IMF’s role grows more controversial. It gets a reputation – as a rich bully – bursting into emerging market economies, telling them how to live their life.

If you don’t pay back the IMF, the lender of the last resort to the world, then no one will lend you money. I mean really, no one. Ultimately they paid the IMF in full. Everyone pays. If you want to play in the international economy, if you want to have credit, if you want to have any kind of normal relationship with the outside world, you need to have a normal relationship with the IMF.

Through its notorious structural adjustment programs (SAPs), it has imposed harsh economic reforms in over 100 countries in the developing and former communist worlds, throwing hundreds of millions of people deeper into poverty.

Its fingers and those of the World Bank are all over the (The Trans-Pacific Partnerhsip and The EU trade and investment deal with the US – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – or TTIP.) both of which are quickly becoming the subject of increased interest and criticism. These two trade deals – the former being discussed between the US and Europe, and the latter between the US and Asian nations including Japan and South Korea – stand to change the face of global trade.

This agreement includes Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam to start. Eventually, its advocates hope, it will include every nation on the Pacific rim, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and China.

The TPP is also a profoundly anti-democratic agreement which signs away our right to govern our own economy. Taken to its logical conclusion, this all ultimately amounts to the idea that the profitability of investments must be the supreme priority of state policy–overriding health, safety, human rights, labor law, fiscal policy, macroeconomic stability, industrial policy, national security, cultural autonomy, the environment, and everything else.

Who would fall for a brazen scheme that strengthens protection under the guise of free trade?

You’ve probably heard the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.

It is the holy grail, the fundamental principle that underpins much of modern economic thinking.

It may be too late to stop the TPP but we need to think beyond the narrow circle of its signatories.

Just to add to the mind-boggling complexity, ask yourself this: If you own a business and want to trade with Japan, should you access the recently inked Australia Japan deal? Or should you go with the TPP?

The TPP is being driven by America. Like most of these deals, it is politically driven. Fearful of China’s rise, America wants to corral its allies under a trade umbrella. In the process, it also wants to further the interests of American corporations and American workers.

It wants copyright laws and patents tightened and extended. These are agreements that offer protection to corporations and investors, usually justified on the grounds that innovation requires a reward not us the people.

When it comes to economic benefits, both of these Agreements can be and will be downright harmful.

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT OUR WORLD ORGANISATIONS. PART THREE- THE WORLD BANK.

16 Friday Oct 2015

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The World Bank system was created as an integral element of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system of international and multilateral institutions. The Bank was designed to avoid future world wars by ensuring an open international trading system and global financial stability.

The same as the Nato and the United Nations it is another World Organisation that should be either shutdown, reinvented or amalgamated.   Afficher l'image d'origine

Like the IMF the World Bank is empowered by the governments which control it (led by the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy — the “Group of 8,” which holds over 40% of the votes on their boards) with imposing economic austerity policies in the countries of the so-called “Third World” or “global South.”

Company Images ™World Bank ® is a regeistered trademark © all rights reserved. In partenership with the Holy Spirit and ™Crown Interntional © all rights reservedThe World Bank, the IMF and central banks such as the Federal Reserve literally control the creation and the flow of money worldwide.

They want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns.

According to the World Bank Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of capital investment. Here is a dated example.

The first country to receive a World Bank loan was France. The French loan was for US$250 million, half the amount requested, and it came with strict conditions.

France had to agree to produce a balanced budget and give priority of debt repayment to the World Bank over other governments. Before the loan was approved, the United States State Department told the French government that its members associated with the Communist Party would first have to be removed. The French government complied with this diktat and removed the Communist coalition government.  Within hours, the loan to France was approved.

When the Marshall Plan went into effect in 1947, many European countries began receiving aid from other sources. Faced with this competition, the World Bank shifted its focus to non-European countries.

The size and number of loans to borrowers was greatly increased as loan targets expanded from infrastructure into social services and other sectors mostly for the personal interest of larger world nations ignoring the like Vietnam because they were communist who were fighting for their lives to reject democracy from running over their country.

To finance more loans, the Bank used the global bond market to increase the capital available to the bank.

One consequence of the period of poverty alleviation lending was the rapid rise of third world debt.

From 1976 to 1980 developing world debt rose at an average annual rate of 20%.

During the 1980s, the bank emphasized lending to service Third-World debt, and structural adjustment policies designed to streamline the economies of developing nations.

UNICEF reported in the late 1980s that the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank had been responsible for “reduced health, nutritional and educational levels for tens of millions of children in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.”

And it left millions of families poor and children unprotected subject to Mason sponsored Child Sex trafficking.

Beginning in 1989, in response to harsh criticism from many groups, the bank began including environmental groups and NGOs in its loans to mitigate the past effects of its development policies that had prompted the criticism.

It also formed an implementing agency, in accordance with the Montreal Protocols to stop ozone-depletion damage to the Earth’s atmosphere by phasing out the use of 95% of ozone-depleting chemicals, with a target date of 2015.

Less recently, a project in Seychelles to promote local tourism by the name of project MAGIC was launched in 2010. Its successor project TIME was scheduled to be launched in 2012.  Nothing more of it was heard of it since and was a project that at least to me makes no sense in its disclosure.

Traditionally, based on a tacit understanding between the United States and Europe, the president of the World Bank has always been selected from candidates nominated by the United States. In 2012, for the first time, two non-US citizens were nominated.

In 1991, the bank announced that to protect against intentional deforestation, especially in the Amazon, it would not finance any commercial logging or infrastructure projects that harm the environment.

About that time, in order to promote global public goods and free trade commercial market, the World Bank tried to control communicable disease created by laboratories in Intelligence agencies around the world, but could not stop the tragic effects of Ebola.

Since then, in accordance with its so-called “Six Strategic Themes,” the bank has put various additional policies into effect to preserve the environment while promoting development.

The World Bank is best known for financing big projects like dams, roads, and power plants, supposedly designed to assist in economic development, but which have often been associated with monumental environmental devastation and social dislocation.

In recent years, about half of its lending has gone to programs indistinguishable from the IMF’s: austerity plans that “reform” economic policies by suffocating the poor and inviting corporate exploitation.

The World Bank Group is the second largest public development institution in the world. Reform is long overdue. However, the most influential players are the finance ministers of the G8 countries, above all the US Treasury which sees no need for reform.

In 1992, an internal World bank review found that more than a third of all Bank loans did not meet the institution’s own lending criteria.

Unlike the United Nations, where each member nation has an equal vote, voting power at the World Bank and IMF is determined by the level of a nation’s financial contribution. Therefore, the United States has roughly 17% of the vote, with the seven largest industrialized countries (G-8) holding a total of 45%.

Because of the scale of its contribution, the United States has always had a dominant voice and has at all times exercised an effective veto. At the same time, developing countries have relatively little power within the institution, which, through the programs and policies they decide to finance, have tremendous impact throughout local economies and societies.

The global rise in prosperity and personal freedoms over the past 65 years has been an immense human achievement despite a string of horrible regional conflicts and pockets of terrible suffering.

However we are now facing the latest “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” — climate change, food security, infectious disease and urban youth unemployment — are rapidly approaching. It is hard to believe that the seven billion people living in 200 nations on earth today will be successful in holding them off without strong truly global institutions.

Its time to make our global institutions look and feel more global.

If we ask the question are these institutions ready to meet the challenge? The answer from most analysts is “No.”

While the WTO is based in Geneva, Switzerland, both the IMF and the World Bank are headquartered in Washington, D.C. The time has come to move at least one of them out of the United States.

The almost universal perception that there is no significant difference between the IMF and the World Bank. They work so closely together and have so many overlapping activities that they look like conjoined twins.

Their missions, however, are fundamentally different. Separation could make each one more effective.

Because the World Bank’s operations are overwhelmingly in developing countries, a case can be made for moving the World Bank to Africa, Asia or Latin America.

The biggest obstacle to moving the World Bank out of Washington is the veto power that only the United States wields.  So re-locating the World Bank is a political non-starter.

By enhancing the Bank’s legitimacy, it would help to make the World Bank more effective in meeting the global challenges that are likely to become more difficult in the years to come.

The huge gap between the world’s richest and poorest countries remains one of the great moral dilemmas for the west. It also presents one of the greatest challenges for development economics. Do we really know how to help countries overcome poverty?

At least a billion people on the planet live in desperate circumstances resembling conditions that prevailed hundreds of years ago. Our failure to alleviate their plight is morally reprehensible. But where, exactly, are the greatest concentrations of poor people? Data is hard to come by and even harder to interpret. How can one compare cost-of-living indices in different periods when new goods are constantly upending traditional consumption models?

Consider the impact of cell phones in Africa, for example, or the internet in India.

The World Bank investment policy consolidates the position of the corrupt, inefficient and undemocratic regimes of many developing countries.

The Bank has evinced willingness to deal directly with almost any government without sensitivity to their human rights record.

Given that developing countries are both shareholders and clients in the Bank, the agencies are unlikely to admit that loans to a particular regime will not achieve any benefit until a reformed government achieves power.

The negotiation process between the Bank and the regime is invariably closed and the circulation of Bank reports restricted to the participants.

The poor are disenfranchised from the very institution supposed to support their development.

It is not necessary to deny that some of the infrastructure projects supported by the IBRD, from the road-building schemes in the 1980s to the dam construction programmes of the 1990s, failed to reduce poverty and caused a degree of environmental damage.

Only 3% of the Bank portfolio is set aside to protect against the loss of revenue from defaulting debtors.

Faced with mounting attacks from all sides, the IMF and World Bank are scrambling to assuage critics. On Apr. 10, the IMF set up an independent review board to evaluate its policies. The World Bank is pushing an initiative to combat the global scourge of AIDS. And both are working on a new strategy for fighting global poverty. But in the end, more radical reforms may be needed to get the demonstrators off the streets and the politicians off the two agencies’ backs.

The IMF — along with the WTO and the World Bank — has put the global economy on a path of greater inequality and environmental destruction.

Over the past decade an estimated 3.4 million people have been displaced by bank-funded projects.

There’s always a price tag for development. But the question is: Who should pay the price?

Should poor people be the ones who sacrifice when the government tries to do a big project? Even the World Bank says the budget for a project should include money to cover people’s losses.Afficher l'image d'origine

The World Bank’s role in the global climate change finance architecture has also caused much controversy. Civil society groups see the Bank as unfit for a role in climate finance because of the conditionalities and advisory services usually attached to its loans.

The Bank’s undemocratic governance structure – which is dominated by industrialised countries – its privileging of the private sector and the controversy over the performance of World Bank-housed Climate Investment Funds

The World Bank working in partnership with the private sector may undermine the role of the state as the primary provider of essential goods and services, such as healthcare and education, resulting in the shortfall of such services in countries badly in need of them.

As an increasing shift from public to private funding in development finance has been observed recently, the Bank’s private sector lending arm – the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – has also been criticised for its business model, the increasing use of financial intermediaries such as private equity funds and funding of companies associated with tax havens.

As the World Bank and the IMF are regarded as experts in the field of financial regulation and economic development, their views and prescriptions may undermine or eliminate alternative perspectives on development.

There are also criticisms against the World Bank and IMF governance structures which are dominated by industrialised countries.

The World Bank hasn’t even adopted specific human rights policies, and doesn’t recognize that it has organizational responsibilities to abide by international human rights law.

Before I sign off on this post I should mention the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) established on 17 May 1930, is the world’s oldest international financial organisation. The BIS has 60 member central banks, representing countries from around the world that together make up about 95% of world GDP.

The BIS was created out of the Hague Agreements of 1930 and took over the job of the Agent General for Repatriation in Berlin. When established, the BIS was responsible for the collection, administration and distribution of reparations from Germany – as agreed upon in the Treaty of Versailles – following World War I. The BIS was also the trustee for Dawes and Young Loans, which were internationally issued loans used to finance these reparations.

After World War II, the BIS turned its focus to the defense and implementation of the World Bank’s Bretton Woods System. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the BIS monitored cross-border capital flows in the wake of the oil and debt crises, which in turn led to the development of regulatory supervision of internationally active banks.

The BIS has also emerged as an emergency “funder” to nations in trouble, coming to the aid of countries such as Mexico and Brazil during their debt crises in 1982 and 1998, respectively. In cases like these, where the International Monetary Fund is already in the country, emergency funding is provided through the IMF structured program.

The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

Its head office is in Basel, Switzerland and there are two representative offices: in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and in Mexico City.

The mission of the BIS is to serve central banks in their pursuit of monetary and financial stability, to foster international cooperation in those areas and to act as a bank for central banks.

Given the continuously changing global economic structure, the BIS has had to adapt to many different financial challenges. However, by focusing on providing traditional banking services to member central banks, the BIS essentially gives the “lender of last resort” a shoulder to lean on. In its aim to support global financial and monetary stability, the BIS is an integral part of the international economy.

The BIS is a global center for financial and economic interests. As such, it has been a principal architect in the development of the global financial market. Given the dynamic nature of social, political and economic situations around the world, the BIS can be seen as a stabilizing force, encouraging financial stability and international prosperity in the face of global change.

In the old days World Bank and maybe in the future will act as a lender of last resort to the banking sector during times of bank insolvency or financial crisis.

As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address.

The Wealth of Nations and the inheritance for humankind and all forms of life rest with World Organisation that are out of date  – this should explain to many as to the disappearance of an equal World.

Money Talks as is evident with the latest Trade deal TTPI.

However, in today’s modern economy we are witnessing a rapidly expanding array of services with mobile technologies as their backbone, but what a World we are making. Our priorities are driving by growth at all costs, and a media owned by our Capitalist culture. We produces 1.3 billion metric tons of garbage each year, and that number is expected to double by 2025.

Is it not time that we the guardians of the Planet got together to shut some doors by tabling a peoples UN resolution to place a World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions (over $20,000) and on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions ( See previous posts)

The chances of this ever happening are minuscule as self-interest is deep rooted.

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