Leaves caution behind

… this is the prime minister of Lesotho, Pakalitha Mosisili, testing publicly for HIV, in January 2004.

Lesotho is a tiny, impoverished, mountainous country, entirely landlocked by South Africa. It’s arguably extremely under-developed when compared to its racing leviathan of a neighbour. But it seems that in some respects it’s far more developed than South Africa. Will South Africans have to wait till our HIV prevalence, now around 20%, hits Lesotho’s 30% before our politicians rediscover sense and courage? Or will they remain cowed by our culpably homicidal president?

Not only have Lesotho’s politicians tested publicly, they have also made Lesotho only the second country in the world (first was Brazil) to have introduced Universal Voluntary Counselling and Testing. In other words, they aim to specifically and deliberately give every last soul in Lesotho the opportunity to test for HIV. Yet South Africa, with all its supposed wealth, resources and gee-whizzbang constitution/Bill of Rights, does not do the same.

The Economist deems South Africa to be the world’s 29th most democratic country, and puts us at the top of its list of “flawed” democracies, in its latest “Democracy Index”.

I think the rankings themselves may be a touch flawed. No, I’m not rushing to defend South Africa. If anything, I think the rankings over-estimate our democratic credentials.

A couple of points:

• Respect for human life: Ours is not a country that sets great store by the value of human life. This manifests itself in crime, in the high numbers of people who support the restoration of the death penalty, and in the government’s apparently limitless contempt for the rights and lives of those who are HIV positive.
• One of the five areas in which different countries are ranked is “functioning of government”. We score 7.86 – the same as Japan. I would not argue that our bureaucracy is abysmal overall (the quality varies wildly from department to department, and area to area) – but I do find it extremely hard to believe that it’s anywhere near as effective as that of the Japanese.

The index ranks Sweden most democratic, and North Korea least democratic. The US and UK make it to positions 17 and 23. Both are considered to have problematic and declining rankings in respect of civil liberties. Other notable flawed democracies include South Korea, Italy, Israel and Brazil.

Buying fish in Europe can contribute to other people starving, drowning or ending up in prison.

The connections and lines of cause and effect established by globalisation can be either fortunate or unfortunate. We do not often enough ask ourselves: what are the connections between western consumer lifestyles and environmental exploitation, economic failure and hunger (in countries which we like to assume are just screwing up because they happen to be African), economic migration; intolerance; and imprisonment and human rights abuse?

Stumbling into a press photo exhibition in London ten days ago, while writing about the plundering of the seas, has helped me join some dots in one area; fishing and African-European migration.

According to the WWF, fish supplies a huge portion of food for West African countries, up to 75% in the case of Senegal:

By depleting marine resources, EU and other foreign fleets are already threatening food security in the region. Guinea, for example, already has a problem feeding its people. The country has a specific objective to improve food security by increasing the fish consumption of the population. But the main obstacle preventing this is IUU fishing, primarily shrimp trawling for European markets.

In Guinea-Bissau, the government requested that instead of throwing away locally consumed species caught as bycatch, EU fleets instead land the fish for local consumption. The EU rejected the request as to do so would take too much time.

In Senegal, depleted fish stocks caused by foreign fleets and foreign demand have had a serious impact on local food supplies. According to one Senegalese NGO, it now takes local fishermen a month to catch the same amount of fish that could once be caught in just four days.

So what happens to the people whose livelihoods are – directly or indirectly –affected this way? Well, it appears that at least some of them become economic migrants. They want to go somewhere where they can be sure to eat themselves, and from where they can, hopefully, send money back to those they have left behind. They get into small boats, and head out to sea. Many are lost there, dying in unknown numbers. Some find land, though, hitting the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession in the Atlantic, a few hundred kilometres west of the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara.

For a snapshot on this vast human tragedy, have a look at this gallery of pictures, by Arturo Rodrigues, part of the World Press Photo exhibition, which I saw last Friday at the South Bank Centre in London. Showing migrants on the brink of death landing on a beach amidst tourists, they are extraordinary photographs: shocking for the state of the refugees, striking for the contrasts between the refugees and the tourists (many of whom have probably eaten the fish that might once have been eaten by the refugees); heartening for the clear display of compassion by those on the beach caring for the desperate people who have just washed up; fascinating for embodying the injustice and complexity of the collision between global haves and have-nots.

So how many people are landing up in the Canaries? Tens of thousands. I can’t find up-to-date figures, but for 2006, by September, 23,000 migrants from Africa had landed there, according to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur report.

The DPA report, however, makes no mention of the forces driving the migrants to undertake such desperate and dangerous journeys. Spain has accommodated many of them, but is now beginning forced repatriations. The Europeans have stepped up patrols, stopping many of the refugees en route, and bringing down the flow of refugees by 60%. One shudders to imagine what scenes may be unfolding at sea, far from the eyes of the world.

Not content with turning back the refugees, Spain has put pressure on Senegal to stop the flow of refugees at source. Senegal has now adopted a policy of charging and imprisoning refugees.

How might one summarise this situation? “We’re taking your food because we can and raping the oceans into a state of plundered devastation in the process, but don’t expect us to provide jobs or accommodation when you turn up starving on our doorsteps. Go away, or expect to be thrown into jail for being poor and desperate.”

The Europeans, of course, like to distinguish between “bona fide, political” migrants “fleeing persecution”, and “economic migrants”.

“When you’re being politically persecuted by your own countrymen, we’ll let you in, because it makes us feel virtuous, but when we’re persecuting you economically, just stay away: we owe you nothing. We really, really don’t like being reminded that we’re stealing your fish.”

Paella, anyone?

You can do something! Buy fish differently. Only buy fish which is marked with the symbol of the globally recognised Marine Stewardship Council, used across Europe and in South Africa. When you buy in restaurants or outlets, ask whether what you’re being served is sustainably fished. If you’re South African, text/sms 0794998795 with a query in the format “tuna?” or “red roman?” to find out the status of particular fish.

(Creative Commons pic of Senegalese fishermen by Tagon)

Naomi Klein has just written a book called The Shock Doctrine: The Age of Disaster Capitalism. It charts the latest developments in US capitalism, which seems to thrive most furiously on war, fear, suspicion and hatred, as these three eras of military/security spending suggest:

1. WWII
2. The Cold War
3. The ‘War on Terror’

(Just imagine how marvellous it would be if all this energy and ingenuity were turned towards creating an egalitarian and sustainable society …)

Among Naomi’s revelations:

• The new Homeland Security Agency is a ‘hollow shell’ which outsources most of its functions to a rapidly growing army of private contractors.
• The CIA has outsourced the ‘rendition’ of prisoners to Boeing.
• ‘Security’ lobby firms in Washington, which promise to link security companies with politicians, have grown in number from two in 2001 to over 500.
• Interrogations and torture are now outsourced, by the CIA, to private contractors, who of course have to ‘get results’ in order to hold onto their contracts
• The US pays informants huge amounts of money, creating a huge incentive to lie about others: a US flyer handed out in Afghanistan read: “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces … This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information, but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

There have been and are debates, of course – about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition – but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors – rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.

Klein, together with director Alfonso Cuarón, has produced a short video promoting the book, available on YOUTube, which you can convert to something downloadable here.