MALNUTRITION: Cost of eating spikes for the Arab world

May 20 2011 : Olivia Ward
Let them eat bread. That refrain, from the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak, kept impoverished Egyptians from violent rebellion for decades. When food riots broke out in 2008, he contained them by promising to keep up the subsidies that were the barrier between malnutrition and starvation for one-third of the country’s 80 million people. The protests that brought down his regime were driven by hunger for democracy rather than bread. But as Egypt and other Arab countries remain volatile, there are fears that spiking grain prices could propel new discontent.
In the past week, wheat prices soared by 17 per cent, a worrying sign for those countries where it is a staple of the diet.
The Arab world buys about one-third of all the world’s traded wheat, says the World Bank, and that’s due to rise by 40 per cent over the next decade.

“In the U.S., people eat a lot of bread,” says Rami Zurayk of American University of Beirut, an expert in land and water resources. “But imagine a country where they eat about three times that much."
That would be Tunisia, where the Food and Agriculture Organization reports a total of 216 kilograms of wheat a year consumed by every person.
It is the world’s highest level of wheat consumption, and it far outstrips the U.S. and Canadian total of around 80 kilos a year.
But it isn’t unique in the Arab countries, where poverty is persistent, and bread and wheat products the cheapest way of filling a family’s stomachs.
Algeria’s per capita consumption is 210 kilos per year, and Egypt’s 185.
But Egypt is also the world’s leading importer of wheat, and the new transitional government must cope with escalating prices, along with pressure to continue the subsidies that Mubarak began. It’s a practice that other Arab leaders adopted in the hope of keeping their countries tranquil.
“In Egypt the poor aren’t starving, but they live on bread and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” says Bessma Momani, a senior fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation. “If you take that away, you will have mass starvation.”
A large number of Egyptians, and other Arab citizens, spend most of their income to feed their families, and those at the bottom of the economic food chain feel the pain the most.
The spiking wheat prices should be good news for producers like Canada — which supplies only a fraction of Egypt’s needs, but sends more than 2 million tonnes of wheat to the Arab region, with Iraq Canada’s biggest client.
The prices are a boon to “farmers with grain in their bins,” says the Canadian Wheat Board.
But it cautions, this year “extremely wet growing and harvest seasons across most of the Prairies resulted in below-average production and quality for wheat, durum and barley,” while production of six major grains dropped 20 per cent, with spring wheat grades the lowest since 2004.
For Arab countries that supply wheat to their people at subsidized prices, the picture is worse.
“The politics taking place today makes it hard for them to cut back or re-target their food subsidies,” says Julian Lampietti of World Bank, who led a 2009 study of Arab food security.
But he adds, although the impact on government budgets is significant in some countries, “it’s probably not unmanageable. The combination of high oil and food prices shows a different effect too.”
While oil-importing countries suffer most, producers may balance the books by taking in bigger oil profits. And, Lampietti says, “there is a lot that can be done to cut down the cost of food,” through better management, including a change in the way grain is procured, unloaded and distributed.
But he warns, “I think we are looking at a new normal in prices. They are more volatile and leveling off at higher levels than in the 1990s.”
“Food prices in the past haven’t gone up the way they have in the last two years,” says Evan Fraser of University of Guelph, author of Empires of Food. “We are experiencing an extraordinary series of shocks to the food system.”
Grain reserves were once believed to be the answer, but the expense of stockpiling, and the opposition of the International Monetary Fund — which pushed indebted countries to reduce reserves for “market efficiency” and import grain when needed — has frayed that safety net. So has real estate speculation that gobbled arable land for development.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/994961--cost-of-eating-spikes-for-the-arab-world

POVERTY: Poverty and joblessness fueling Mideast unrest

 BRIAN MURPHY : The Associated Press  1/30/2011

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Just days before fleeing Tunisia, the embattled leader went on national television to promise 300,000 new jobs over two years.

 Khalil Hamra / AP


Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak did much the same Saturday as riots gripped Cairo and other cities: offering more economic opportunities in a country where half the people live on less than $2 a day.
The pledges-under-siege have something else in common: an acknowledgment that the unprecedented anger on Arab streets is at its core a long-brewing rage against decades of economic imbalances that have rewarded the political elite and left many others on the margins.
With startling speed — less than two months since the first protests in Tunisia — underscored the wobbly condition of the systems used by some Arab regimes to hold power since the 1980s or earlier. The once formidable mix of economic cronyism and hard-line policing — which authorities sometime claim was needed to fight Islamic hard-liners or possible Israeli spies — now appears under serious strain from societies pushing back against the old matrix.
Mubarak and other Arab leaders have only to look to Cairo's streets: a population of 18 million with about half under 30 years old and no longer content to have a modest civil servant job as their top aspiration.
One protester in Cairo waved a hand-drawn copy of his university diploma amid clouds of tear gas and shouted what may best sum up the complexities of the domino-style unrest in a single word: Jobs.
"They are taking us lightly and they don't feel our frustration," said another protester, homemaker Sadat Abdel Salam. "This is an uprising of the people and we will not shut up again."

The narrative of economic injustice has surrounded the protests from the beginning.
"The regimes and the leaders are the ones under fire, but it's really about despair over the future," said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. "The faces of this include the young man with a university degree who cannot find work or the mother who has trouble feeding her family."
Tunisia's mutiny that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was touched off by a struggling 26-year-old university graduate who lit himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit and vegetable cart in December. Apparent copycat self-immolations quickly spread to Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere.
In Yemen, the poorest nation on the Arabian peninsula, sporadic riots have forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh into quick economic concessions, including slashing income taxes in half and ordering price controls on food and basic goods.
On Friday in Jordan, thousands of marchers clogged streets to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Samir Rifai and call for measures to control rising prices and unemployment. Many chanted: "Rifai go away, prices are on fire and so are the Jordanians."
King Abdullah II also has tried to dampen the fury by promising reforms, and the prime minister announced a $550 million package of new subsidies for fuel and staple products like rice, sugar, livestock and liquefied gas used for heating and cooking.
What feeds the flames is common across much of the Arab world: young populations, a growing middle class seeking more opportunities and access to websites and international cable channels, such as Al-Jazeera, which have eroded the state's hold on the media.

There are no clear signs on whether more protests could erupt.
Syria's authoritarian regime remains in firm control and has taken gradual steps to open up the economy. Rulers in the wealthy Gulf states have the luxuries of relatively small populations that often receive generous state benefits and other largesse. Kuwait's emir, for example, pledged this month 1,000 dinars ($3,559) and free food coupons for each citizen to mark several anniversaries, including the 1991 U.S.-led invasion that drove out Saddam Hussein's army.
But there have been stirrings of discontent in North Africa. Earlier this month, security forces in Algeria clashed with opposition activists staging a rally apparently inspired by neighboring Tunisia. In Mauritania, a businessman died after setting himself ablaze in a protest against the government.
A state-backed newspaper in Abu Dhabi, The National, ran interviews from four men from across the Middle East describing their trouble finding work. One 33-year-old Syrian, who has an English literature degree from Damascus University, complained he cannot find a teaching job or afford to get married.
"I feel as though I am in the Samuel Beckett play 'Waiting for Godot,' which I studied during my degree," Khaled Kapoun was quoted as saying. "I keep hoping that tomorrow a job will come along."
Even high Arab officials have expressed unusual candor following Tunisia's upheaval.
Earlier this month, the head of the Arab League warned that the "Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession."
"The Tunisian revolution is not far from us," Amr Moussa said in his opening address to the 20 Arab leaders and other representatives of Arab League members gathered in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. "The Arab citizen entered an unprecedented state of anger and frustration."
Moussa, who is Egyptian, called for an Arab "renaissance" aimed at creating jobs and addressing shortcomings in society.
But at the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, some experts said an education overhaul is needed in the region to shift from emphasis on state jobs to more dynamic private sector demands.
"Many people have degrees but they do not have the skill set," Masood Ahmed, director of the Middle East and Asia department of the International Monetary Fund, said earlier this week.
"The scarce resource is talent," agreed Omar Alghanim, a prominent Gulf businessman. The employment pool available in the region "is not at all what's needed in the global economy."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41338881/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/41325104

POVERTY: Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: 31 January 2011

Political risk has returned with a vengeance. The first food revolutions of our Malthusian era have exposed the weak grip of authoritarian regimes in poor countries that import grain, whether in North Africa today or parts of Asia tomorrow.


As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding. Photo: REUTERS


If you insist on joining the emerging market party at this stage of the agflation blow-off, avoid countries with an accelerating gap between rich and poor. Cairo’s EGX stock index has dropped 20pc in nine trading sessions.
Events have moved briskly since a Tunisian fruit vendor with a handcart set fire to himself six weeks ago, and in doing so lit the fuse that has detonated Egypt and threatens to topple the political order of the Maghreb, Yemen, and beyond.
As we sit glued to Al-Jazeera watching authority crumble in the cultural and political capital of the Arab world, exhilaration can turn quickly to foreboding.
This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations – known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.
In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf. The Brotherhood is of course a different kettle of fish from Iran’s Ayatollahs; and Turkey shows that an ‘Islamic leaning’ government can be part of the liberal world – though Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan once let slip that democracy was a tram “you ride until you arrive at your destination, then you step off."
It does not take a febrile imagination to guess what the Brotherhood’s ascendancy might mean for Israel, and for strategic stability in the Mid-East. Asia has as much to lose if this goes wrong as the West. China’s energy intensity per unit of GDP is double US levels, and triple the UK.
The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.
Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.
The FAO implored goverments to avoid panic responses that “aggravate the situation”. If you are Hosni Mubarak hanging on in Cairo’s presidential palace, do care about such niceties?
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy blames the commodity spike on hedge funds, speculators, and the derivatives market (largely in London). He vowed to use his G20 presidency to smash the racket, but then Mr Sarkozy has a penchant for witchhunts against easy targets.
The European Commission has been hunting for proof to support his claims, without success. Its draft report – to be released last Wednesday, but withdrawn under pressure from Paris – reached exactly the same conclusion as investigators from the IMF, and US and British regulators.
“There is little evidence that the price formation process on commodity markets has changed in recent years with the growing importance of derivatives markets”, it said.
As Jeff Currie from Goldman Sachs tirelessly points out, future contracts are neutral. For every trader making money by going long on wheat, sugar, pork bellies, zinc, or crude oil, there is a trader losing money on the other side. It is a paper transfer between financial players.
You have to buy and hoard the vast amounts of these bulk commodities to have much impact on the price, which is costly and difficult to do, though people do park crude on floating tankers sometimes, and Chinese firms allegedly stashed copper in warehouses last year.
But that is not what commodity index funds with $150bn are actually doing with food, base metals, and energy. Only governments have strategic petroleum and grain reserves big enough to make a difference.
The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest. Russia imposed an export ban on grains. This was compounded by late rains in Canada, Nina disruptions in Argentina, and a series of acreage downgrades in the US. The world’s stocks-to-use ratio for corn is nearing a 30-year low of 12.8pc, according to Rabobank.
The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.
Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable acquivers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.
Can the world head off mass famine? Yes, with leadership. The regions of the ex-Soviet Union farm 30m hectares less today than in the Khrushchev era, and yields are half western levels.
There are tapped hinterlands in Brazil, and in Africa where land titles and access to credit could unleash a great leap forward. The global reservoir of unforested cropland is 445m hectares, compared to 1.5 billion in production. But the low-lying fruit has already gone, and the vast investment needed will not come soon enough to avoid a menacing shift in the terms of trade between the land and the urban poor.
We are on a thinner margin of food security, as North Africa is discovering painfully, and China understands all too well. Perhaps it is a little too early to write off farm-rich Europe and America.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8291470/Egypt-and-Tunisia-usher-in-the-new-era-of-global-food-revolutions.html

POVERTY: Arab leaders warned of 'unprecedented anger'

Samer al-Atrush (AFP) – Jan 18, 2011
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — Arab League chief Amr Mussa warned Arab leaders on Wednesday that the hardships of ordinary Tunisians that sparked a popular uprising were linked to "unprecedented anger" in the region.
Mussa was addressing an economic summit of Arab leaders in Egypt's resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that closed with a vow to "move forward in the development of our societies in terms of human development, technology, economy and society."
"The developmental challenges are no less important than the political challenges facing the region," the leaders said in a final statement after their one-day summit.
It was the first gathering of Arab leaders since Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to step down and fled his country on Friday after 23 years in power.
"The revolution that happened in Tunisia is not far from the subject of this summit," Mussa said, amid fears of a spillover.
"The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession ... The political problems, the majority of which have not been fixed ... have driven the Arab citizen to a state of unprecedented anger and frustration."
The self-immolation of 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi that unleashed a wave of deadly street riots across Tunisia has set off a rash of copycat attempts in Algeria, Egypt and Mauritania.
Arab leaders, many of whom rule over populations with similar economic and political grievances as those of protesters in Tunisia, have denied any similarity with the North African country.
At a post-summit press conference, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit criticised drawing comparisons between Tunisia and other countries, saying there was progress in the Arab world.
"We always criticise ourselves and say there is failure but there is also success and progress. For example, in Egypt there are 60 million cell phone users. We can't say a society is failed and incapable and there are 60 million cell phone users," he said.
President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for three decades, made no reference to the Tunisian revolt in his Sharm el-Sheikh speech but acknowledged economic development and cooperation had become a national security priority.
"We have realised that the priority of economic cooperation and development is no longer just about progress for our people ... but a basic demand of Arab national security," he said.
At the last summit, held in Kuwait in 2009, the leaders agreed to set up a $2 billion fund to finance small- and medium-sized businesses.
Mussa told reporters after the summit that there were roughly $1.4 billion "in committed funds" for that project.
Wednesday's summit also came as partial preliminary results collated by AFP showed that south Sudan has achieved the simple majority needed to secede in its independence referendum, splitting Africa's largest nation.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who faces strident criticism from the opposition at home, saluted the Tunisians in his own address and urged them "and the government to work together to restore stability."
n a region where rulers often assume power through coups or inheritance, the Tunisian uprising was unprecedented in that a highly autocratic ruler was forced out by popular protests.
Tunisian Foreign Minister Kamel Morjane, who briefed his counterparts in Sharm el-Sheikh on developments in his country, told reporters on Tuesday that the protests were fuelled by political and economic grievances.
Morjane left the country on Wednesday without attending the summit, leaving Tunisia to be represented by its ambassador to Egypt.
One summit delegate, on condition of anonymity, said it was expected to produce empty pledges like previous gatherings of heads of state of the 22-member Arab League.
But the economic roots of the Tunisian uprising have added urgency to the adoption of measures to alleviate poverty in the Arab world, he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j0qA4KotunnmnxAGWw-j4p4qHt2w?docId=CNG.cf3f9df69d3ee50f7a0a62316dbb5b65.c1

POVERTY: The real terror eating away at the Arab world is socio-economic marginalisation.

Larbi Sadiki : 14 Jan 2011
Larbi Sadiki is a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, and author of Arab Democratisation: Elections without Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004), forthcoming Hamas and the Political Process (2011).





rom Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror is marginalisation [AFP]

Conventional wisdom has it that 'terror' in the Arab world is monopolised by al-Qaeda in its various incarnations. There may be some truth in this.
However, this is a limited viewpoint. Regimes in countries like Tunisia and Algeria have been arming and training security apparatuses to fight Osama bin Laden. But they were caught unawares by the 'bin Laden within': the terror of marginalisation for the millions of educated youth who make up a large portion of the region's population.
The winds of uncertainty blowing in the Arab west - the Maghreb - threaten to blow eastwards towards the Levant as the marginalised issue the fatalistic scream of despair to be given freedom and bread or death.

Whose terror?
The gurus of so-called 'radicalisation' who have turned Islam into a security issue have fixed the debate, making bin Laden a timeless, single and permanent pathology of all things Muslim.
It is no exaggeration to claim that since 9/11 so-called radicalisation has replaced new Orientalism as the prism through which Western security apparatuses view Middle Eastern youth and societies. Guantanamo Bay, profiling, extraordinary renditions, among others, are only the tip of the iceberg.
The policing, equipment, funding, expertise and anti-terror philosophy being fed to the likes of Algeria, Libya and Morocco are geared towards fighting the 'bearded, radical salafis' whose prophet is Osama bin Laden. But, the tangible bin Ladens bracing suicide in its entirety have emerged from the ranks of the educated middle classes whose prophet is Adam Smith.
Al-Qaeda, literally "the base", may today be the swelling armies of marginals in the Middle East, not the 'salafis'.
It is not the Quran or Sayyid Qutb - who is in absentia charged with perpetrating 9/11 despite being dead since 1966 - Western security experts should worry about. They should perhaps purchase Das Kapital and bond with Karl Marx to get a reality check, a rethink, a dose of sobriety in a post-9/11 world afflicted by over-securitisation.
From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage, including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.
The armies of 'khobzistes' (the unemployed of the Maghreb) - now marching for bread in the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman, Rabat, San'aa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirut - are not fighting the terror of unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology. The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are 'les misérables' of the modern world.

The 'bread compact'
The bread compacts which framed the political order in much of the Arab world came unstuck in the mid- to late-1980s.
In the 1960s, regimes committed to the distribution of bread (subsidised goods) in return for political passivity. In the 1980s, the new political fix shifted to giving the vote instead of bread.
Who can forget the 1988 bread riots that eventually brought the Islamists to the verge of parliamentary control of Algeria in 1991? The riots in Jordan at around the same time inspired state-led political liberalisation in 1989.
For Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Egypt, the impoverished Arab states, in need of the liquidity of Euro-American and International Misery Fund aid, infitah (open-door policy) was the only blueprint of forward economic management. Within its bosom are bred greed, land grab, corruption, monopoly and the new entrepreneurial classes who exchange loyalty and patronage with the political masters as well as the banknotes and concessions with which both fund flash lifestyles.
Thus the map of distribution was gerrymandered at the expense of the have-nots who are placated with insufficient micro credits or ill-managed national development funds. The crumbs - whatever subsidies are allowed by the new economic order built on the pillars of privatisation, the absence of social safety nets and economic protectionism - delay disaffection but never eliminate it.

Below the surface the pent-up anger of the marginals simmers.
'Tis the season of 'bread intifadas'
The 'khobzistes' have returned. At home they are marginals; abroad, they are largely persona non grata for being born in the wrong geography, inheriting the perfect genes for 'profiling' and being too culturally challenged for some European assimilationists. Their only added value is as objects of social dumping in capitalism's sweat shops.
Potentially, they are the fodder of chaos in the absence of social justice, culturally sensitive sustainable development and democratic mediating networks and civic channels of socio-political bargaining and
inclusion.
Bread uprisings have a plus and a minus. On the positive side, they act as elections, as plebiscites on performance, as an airing of public anger, they issue verdicts on failed policies and send stress messages to rulers.
The response comes swiftly: when initial oppression becomes too heavy and politically costly, bargains begin. They include promises of jobs and policy, reversals of hikes in food prices and even scapegoats in the form of ministerial dismissals.

This is where Algeria and Tunisia are today.
In Tunisia, in particular, the government has been clumsy, nervous and completely out of line for threatening the use of force and then employing it. Fatalities have been on the rise. The death toll is heavy and may already have produced irreversible tipping-point logic.

Bargains, but no democracy
On the negative side, there is no 'democratic spring' in Algeria. Bread riots come and go. But regimes stay on.
The absence of a critical mass that produces a tipping-point dynamic means that regimes know how to buy time, co-opt and fund themselves out of trouble when pushed. Genuine democratic bargains do not ensue. The states have not invested in social and political capital.
Oppositions and dissidents have not yet learned how to infiltrate governments and build strong political identities and power bases. This is one reason why the protests that produced 'Velvet revolutions' elsewhere seem to be absent in the Arab world.
The momentum created by the bread rioters is never translated into self-sustaining critical mass by opposition forces. Regimes wait until the last minute after use of force fails to kill off the momentum through the offer of concessionary and momentary welfare.
Tunisia will be the first Arab exception to this: Ben Ali is in no position to act Machiavellian and intransigent. He is weak, and the party following and army that has protected him for 24 years may be withdrawing loyalty as the crisis deepens.

The 'fishers of men'
The misery belts tightening around the pockets of affluence and opportunity from Algiers to Amman hint at the microcosm of the unevenness of global distribution.
Just as Sidi Bouzid, El-Kobba, Ma'an or Imbaba function internally in that belt of misery, so do the cities of Arab states globally. They are the periphery, literally the misery belts tightening around rich 'fortress Europe' - a Europe that is increasingly more interested in the technology of security, surveillance systems, 'radicalisation' theories, policing and the mental nets functioning as 'fishers of men' according to one study. Today the ClubMed geography is in rebellion mode.
Frontex is the EU agency that spearheads the task of constructing fortress Europe. It is at the front, fighting against the boat people that threaten the lifestyles and comfort of the EU. Its planes, frigates and patrols literally fish men from the tiny boats laden with Arab and African human cargo destined for EU shores.
These desperados weather the high seas knowing that their chance of survival is not more than 10 per cent. Many drown. Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi's act of insanity was not the only suicide. The 'harraqa', as North African boat people are called, seek exodus by stealth, and by death.
Those who do not drown are chased back to their shores of departure. Some are caught and returned to countries of transition such as Libya.
A 2009 EU agreement assigns maritime patrolling and policing to Libya so that boat people do not reach Italian ports, discarding the ethical implications of entrusting refugee protection to countries with dubious human rights records.
From Israel to Spain, fences are erected to keep non-Europeans out. They are allowed to dream of Europe ... but not of setting foot in it.
The time has come for the Arab Gulf labour markets to do more for the Arab marginals.
The 'geography of hunger'
In Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth one finds resonance with the misery engulfing Tunisia and Algeria today, where the have-nots, or the mahrumin, and the khobzistes strike back at the state and target its symbols. They fight back and thus "struggle ... and with their shrunken bellies [and humiliated egos] outline of the geography of hunger".
In this geography of hunger and marginalisation, the ruling native becomes the new coloniser. By contrast to the have-nots, the ruling natives and the economic 'mafias' are sheltered not only in mansions and villas, but also within 'a hard shell' that immures them from the "poverty that surrounds" them.
In The Wretched of the Earth one reads about the "poor, underdeveloped countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty".
To map out the "geography of hunger" is not complete without marking out the geography of authoritarianism. In both Algeria and Tunisia, the big interests and profiteers supporting Bouteflika and Ben Ali seem to fulfill Fanon's prophecy about corruption "sooner or later" making leaders "men of straw in the hands of the army ... immobilising and terrorising". It is the security forces and the army that run the show in both countries.
Fanon, the ideologue of the Algerian revolution, is probably turning in his grave at the thought that a country of "one million martyrs" sacrificed for independence is today battling for new freedoms from housing shortages, rising food prices, autocracy and overall marginalisation.
The figures construct on paper stories of growth and stability that are not matched by the reality of marginalisation.
For how long republics of paper and men of straw can withstand the hell-fire of the Algerian and Tunisian eruptions fuelled by marginalisation remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the beginnings of a 'Tunisian democratic spring' are in the offing.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/01/201111413424337867.html

POVERTY: How many poor Arabs are there? Call to create poverty map, update data in the region

29 August 2010
Nadim Kawac>
Arab nations need to create a common data network and a map for poverty in their region as part of a strategy intended to upgrade their socio-economic information and combat poverty, according to an official Arab group.
Despite widespread poverty in many regional countries, Arab governments still far lag behind in gathering accurate data on local poverty and need to change criteria used in measuring poverty and preparing indexes in this respect, the Khartoum-based Arab Organization for Agricultural Development (AOAD) said.
In a study released this week, AOAD said a poverty index should be based on family consumption data instead of GDP per capita income.
“To support efforts to fight poverty develop related indicators in the Arab world, regional countries should work on two fronts,” AOAD said.
“The first one should focus on upgrading the mechanisms used in poverty indexes…the second should be aimed at developing and improving the skills of Arab human resources in the field of poverty measurement.”
AOAD, an affiliate of the Cairo-based Arab League, proposed the holding of a regional conference on poverty indicators to pool expertise and exchange views, the creation of a regional poverty data network to be published on AOAD’s website and the preparation of a poverty map in all Arab nations.
“These should include regular publication of poverty indicators in the Arab countries and the preparation of a study on the distribution of wealth,” it said.
“They should also include measurement of poverty in the Arab world using data based on household consumption spending instead of income since this consumption is more associated with the living standards of the family…it also better and more accurately illustrates poverty.”
The study urged all regional funds as well as financial and development establishments to fund training programmes for Arab officials in poverty measurement and in chalking out strategies to combat poverty.
According to another Arab League institution, many regional nations are suffering from poverty because of high population increases and slow economic growth due to poor investment, low exports, flawed economic policies and other factors.
In 2008, poverty rate was above 30 per cent of the total population in such countries as Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania, Djibouti, Yemen, Palestine and Comoros, according to the Abu Dhabi-based Arab Monetary Fund (AMF).
The rate averaged around 19.6 per cent in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria. The AMF said it had no accurate data on poverty in Gulf oil producers but said the rate was relatively low.
Besides those factors, many Arab economies have remained dormant because of conflicts and high defence spending, which was at the expense of development expenditure, according to the Arab League.
Its figures showed defence and security allocation in all nations have averaged as high as 28 per cent of the current expenditure over the past eight years while economic affairs allocations have not exceeded eight per cent.
The figures showed current expenditure totalled around $309 billion in 2007 as it accounted for nearly 72 per cent of the total spending of $430 billion.
At 28 per cent of the current spending, defence and security allocations totalled nearly $86 billion. Economic affairs allocations stood at only $24.7 billion.
“Latest indications point to a decline in poverty rates in some Arab countries but an increase in others…despite the decline in those members, the poverty rates are still considered very high,” said the League’s joint Arab economic report.
The figures showed poverty has declined in Tunisia and Morocco over the past few years but sharply increased in Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Palestine.
“Poverty in the Arab countries is closely linked to economic growth rates and developments in wealth distribution…economic growth alone is not enough to reduce poverty as wealth re-distribution could not be to the advantage of the poor…Arab states should focus on even and fair distribution of wealth.”
While Arab economies have recorded high growth over the past eight years, it was nominal growth as real growth was relatively weak and much lower than the population growth in some Arab countries, the report said.
High nominal growth over the past few years was mainly a result of a surge in oil prices as the economies of many Arab nations, mainly the Gulf oil producers, recorded low performance and some of them declined during 1990s.
Besides worsening poverty, such developments have resulted in a deterioration of the long-standing joblessness problem in the Arab region, with the number of unemployed persons peaking at nearly 17 million at the end of 2008.
AMF wealth indicators showed Qatar and the UAE were the richest Arab nations in 2008 while Mauritania and Yemen maintained their position as the poorest.
Although it controls more than a fifth of the world’s recoverable oil deposits, Saudi Arabia was the sixth wealthiest Arab country and the least well off in terms of GDP per capita in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
The figures showed Qatar’s nominal GDP per capita stood at $70,651 and that of the UAE at $52,574. The report gave no data for 2009 but the per capita income is expected to have receded because of lower oil prices.
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