Peter Brock, a good friend of Globalhood, just sent us a letter:  

I am pleased to announce that my new film on poverty, development and western assistance, entitled They Come In The Name of Helping, is now available to view at www.BaiBureh.org. This film attempts to highlight the need for respect and humility on the part of the West by exploring the issues of poverty and development from the perspective of the poor themselves. Through the voices of young, educated Sierra Leoneans, this film offers valuable insights into how we can participate in the development process without reenforcing the dehumanizing legacy of colonialism. To view the film or read a more complete description, visit www.BaiBureh.org. Since the film is meant to provoke debate and critical thought about issues that affect billions of people worldwide, please share it with as many people as possible.

Wonderful! Shortlisted for the first annual Globalhood film awards.

I hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday break, or, at the very least, avoiding major familial acrymony. I’m in San Francisco right now, and I just got an email from a friend about the website Gap Minder. This is quite possibly the most fascinating website I’ve seen in a long time (sorry, Stuff On My Cat). Basically, it’s devoted to development data and statistics, but the major selling point is this graphing program that allows the user to compare development markers across time, space and nationality. It’s exceptionally informative (thanks, Descartes) and, perhaps more importantly, it’s immediate and beautiful. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a dynamic, multivariable, online graphing application worth?

I’m still crunching numbers; I’ll get back to you soon.

Doing a lot of reading about water issues in China. Three articles caught my eye today. First, there’s a recent piece from the New York Review of Books by Dai Qing. Qing focuses on Beijing’s miserable water infrastructure and the (very temporary) glut of clean and abundant water being readied for the upcoming olympics. She writes that, normally, “people [in Beijing] have only three hundred cubic meters of water resources per capita, one eighth of the Chinese average—which is 2,200 cubic meters—and one thirtieth of the world average.” The full text of the article can be found here.

Then,from the IHT comes this about human displacement and the Three Gorges Dam:  

In his 2007 work report to the National People’s Congress, Prime Minister Wen noted that dam building, over many years, has displaced 23 million people in China.      

Full text here.

And finally there’s the latest form the Times Choking on Growth series which covers dwindling water resources throughout the country. 

I may be the only person in the world who missed this article in the Sunday New York Times. It was on the cover, so I’ve got no excuse. A friend mentioned it to me yesterday, and it’s wonderful. The article covers the recent turn-around in food supplies in Malawi, and I think very clearly recommends a reconfiguration if not a total dismantling of certain dogmas of international development.    

In Malawi…the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

Full article here.