The New Nation - Internet Edition

Outmoded buses ply despite ban

AS reported in the media, at least 3,000 'outmoded and unfit' small buses ply in the country's capital city in total defiance of the ban even under the emergency rule. Showing disregard to the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority and the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, the bus owners 'managed' to put their unfit vehicles on the streets defying the ban that was enforced strictly with a view to improving city's chaotic transport system six years ago. The Communication Ministry in collaboration with the Traffic wing of DMP had imposed the ban on the plying of buses more than 20 years old in the capital to check environmental pollution.

After imposing the ban, the authorities kept constant watch and conducted drives occasionally for keeping city's transport system in order. Around 4,000 small buses having less than 36 seats, better known as minibuses, are plying in the city. Only last month, the interim government by issuing a handout announced that the15 to 20 year-old minibuses would be phased out from the city roads and replaced by 52-seat CNG-run buses. But how far the government decision would be effective in implementation is doubtful, as officials concerned appear to be lacking in seriousness.

The owners somehow 'managed' to ply their outdated and unfit buses on city routes like Sayedabad, Jurain, Postagola, Jatrabari, Demra, Shanir Akhra, Gulistan, Sadarghat, Rampura and Mirpur thus foiling the efforts made for improving the transport system and getting rid of pollution. Defiance of the laws continues despite claims made by BRTA and DMP officials of conducting occasional 'drives' by mobile courts and special teams against the rejected vehicles in the city. Strict implementation of laws and rules is a must for improving the situation.

Integrated pest management

FARMERS of eight upazilas of Rangpur district may not achieve the production target of Aman crops this season due to attack of pests which may not remain confined to these areas. Agronomists identify inadequate use of potash and phosphate fertilisers as the main reason behind the attack. Due to inadequate use of the fertilisers, which were costlier, plants did not gain enough strength and maturity necessary to resist pest attacks. The farmers have been advised to use insecticides to prevent pest attacks.

Recovery of losses caused to standing crops by floods in the area depends much on a successful harvest of the next crop. But achievement of the target seems difficult because of late cultivation. Further damage of crops will be disastrous for the farmers. Measures to ensure the supply of quality insecticides must be taken to protect crops and prevent the spread of pest attacks to other areas. Farmers alleged that insecticides available in the district are adulterated and, as such, ineffective.

Indiscriminate use of pesticides however leads to larger pest-related yield losses than even not applying pesticides at all. A 1993 survey found pesticide use in the Philippines to cut rice productivity instead of improving it. Excessive use of pesticides often leads pests developing resistance to those. According to a survey conducted in January 2007, more than 47 percent of farmers use more pesticides than needed while 92 percent do not take any protective measures while handling the chemicals. At least twenty thousand people around the world die annually from exposure to the toxic chemicals. To avoid these harmful effects, strategy for location-specific integrated pest management (IPM) comprising of selective pesticide use, quality control and licensing should be adopted.

The brighter side of global financial crisis

Tom Plate

One good way to counter depression (of the emotional and of the otherwise kind) is to emphasise the positive (of the imagined or otherwise kind).

What I have been doing sometimes these days for therapy and equanimity is recalling the Asian Financial Crisis of some ten years ago. Remember how the Clinton administration and the U.S. policy elite would publicly berate Asia (especially Japan and China) for all the things they were allegedly doing wrong?

Remember how often we made the point to them that in economic affairs they ought to restructure, deregulate and be more like us?

Well, that was then - and this is now. Right now China and Japan have more of our dollars than they can count and, their troubles notwithstanding, do not quite seem to be in as bad shape as the U.S.

Right now, in fact, no one is blaming Asia for the global financial turbulence but many people are coming down hard on us.

The pervasive poison that was contained in our pernicious financial products looks to be causing even more global misery than China's food and consumer products, which is saying something.

And right now, the world stands amazed to watch our incumbent President huddling in the White House as if simply counting the days left until he can hop into his escape helicopter for the grateful ride to exile in Texas, even as financial markets continue to roil, churn and burn. And (to be nonpartisan about it) "The One" - what we Americans call President-elect Barack Obama - also huddles in his Chicago bunker as if in fear of the raging economic storm outside. Chicagoans are used to bunkering down in terrible weather - but this is ridiculous!

Not only is Asia not so much in the negative spotlight these days, but the region can be proud that over the last ten years, the world has learned more helpful lessons from Asia than from the US about how to handle one's economy. Those lessons include:

1. Saving money is really not such a bad idea (Many Asians are famous savers), especially when those rainy days come, American Express keeps crunching your credit ceiling and the mortgage bankers are howling at the door.

2. Significant reform after a financial crisis will help cushion the pain of the next one. (Let's hope Congress and the Obama Administration will learn this lesson.)

3. Strong leadership is better than wishy-washy leadership. Indeed, it is the view in Asia that the government can and does play a positive role in helping make an economy dynamic, innovative, and resilient. Until very recently in America, this perspective was viewed as quasi-socialist!

4. A related lesson is that, for some really important, public-interest things - such as health care, public education and safety-nets like social security - national economic markets all by themselves do not produce the best public-interest value for the money.

In fact, it is the widely shared view in parts of Asia that the value of all the individual goods in society does not always trump the value of the same amount of money invested in the overall public good and general well being.

5. Worship public education and invest aggressively in it. Cutting it is to reduce the size of the promise of society's future (in California now, public education is starting to die due to thousands of cuts here and there).

6. Asians may generally not realise it, but those of us who visit Asia (and not just the tourist trap spots, either) often notice this difference in treatment of the consumer (though this is not yet widely the case in China): While it is true that in the US the customer is king, in Asia the customer is God. Which leads me to a final study point for us Americans:

7. Make better cars!! If we had made them better, the head of the Big Three US automakers (GM, Chrysler, Ford) wouldn't have brought their begging bowls to Congress this last week in search of a lifeline from - guess what? - Big Government. Isn't that rich?!

Conclusion: That which doesn't kill you - goes the old saying - makes you stronger. Assuming we manage to survive this horrific financial meltdown, we should emerge from it in better shape - especially if we observe the experience and lessons of Asia these past ten years.

Expansion of globalisation widens inequality

Tareq Hossain Khan

Globalisation - the growing integration of economics and societies around the world - has been one of the most hotly debated topics in informational economics over the past few years. Rapid growth and poverty reduction in China, India and other countries that were poor 20 years ago, has been a positive aspect of globalisation. But it is also true that globalisation increased inequality between and within nations. Some argues that the volume of world trade has increased 20 times since 1950 and just within two years from 1997 to 1999, flows of foreign investment nearly doubled, from $468 billion to $827 billion. But the reality claims about 70-80% of the FDI proved to be gainful for western countries (IMF: 2000). So, questions are there weather globalisation raised world inequality. This question can be split into two: what about income gaps between nations and what about income gaps within nations?

Globalisation has dramatically increased inequality between and within nations, in particular, has marginalized the poor of the developing countries and left behind the poorest countries. In the 1999 issue, the United Human Development Report (HDR) says 'poverty is everywhere. Gaps between the poorest and the richest people and countries have continued to widen. In 1960, 20% of the world's people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest. In 1977, it was 74 times as much. This continues the trend of nearly two centuries. Some have predicted convergence, but the past decade has shown increasing concentration of income among the people, corporations and countries. Despite unprecedented economic growth in recent years, the rich have become richer and the poor the poorer. Even wealthy nations like the United States, Canada and Britain have failed to escape this trend. While China and India mark considerable economic growth, the two largest Asian nations have also failed to address the issue of inequality. Similar patterns are found in the distribution of wealth elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Income disparities are widening within each country or at least within a large number of countries. The transition economics of Eastern Europe have also experienced faster rise in inequality. According to Cornia (2004, part1) 48 out of 73 countries experienced a deterioration of income distribution during the last decades. These 48 countries contain 87.5% of the population of the 73 sample countries. On the other hand, only nine countries, with 2.7% of the population, experienced a clear improvement in income distribution.

So, it is clear that inequality continued to increase, sometimes markedly, in some industrial countries in central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. Cornia and Kiiski (2001) review the changes in the within-country inequality over the last 20 years on the basis of an extensive review of the literature and an analysis of inequality trends in 73 countries accounting for over four-fifth of world population and GDP. They observed that inequality rose in two-thirds of these 73 countries over the last two decades, which marks a clear departure from the inequality trends recorded since the end of the second would war.

With regards to the impact of globalisation on income inequality, there is now a wide range of literature of more than 50 contributors, most of which comes to the conclusion that globalisation has widened income inequality within a country as well as across the countries. For example, Stiglitz argues that globalisation, as it was actually practised, tended to make poor societies more rather than less unequal. However, there is a trend of literature, which questions these findings, and argue that while higher growth has come with increased inequality, this has led to a decrease in poverty. Anne Krueger (1983) looked at trade opening moments in South Korea around 1960, Brazil and Colombia around 1965 and Tunisia around 1970. The situation of growth improved after liberalisation in all four countries. Recently, David Dollar and Aart Kraay (2000) examined the trade liberalisation of 16 countries in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings, once again, confirmed the positive correlation between free trade and faster growth. But they argue, that 'faster growth of economy' leads intra-state inequality .The evidence suggests that there has indeed been a trend towards increased inequality within many countries over the 1980s and 1990s - the period coinciding with the recent phase of globalisation. In a recent report, the United Nations noted that inequality has increased in 9 out of 16 developed countries; all of the former Soviet bloc countries; and most of Latin American countries (except Uruguay and Bolivia).

Both of the developed and developing countries have failed to control intra-state inequalities. In the USA, globalisation increased the income of riches but had a negative impact on the poor people. The rich are getting richer while the poor the poorer. A recent study surveyed the inequality of household income in the OECD since mid-1970 (Burniaux ET el.:1998). Up to the mid -1980s, the Americans and British were alone to have a clear rise in inequality. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, however, 20 out of 21 OECD countries had a noticeable rise in inequality. The four giants of China, India, Russia and Indonesia recorded widening income gaps after their economies went global. The widening did not start until after 1984, because the initial reforms were rural and agricultural and therefore had an egalitarian effect. When the reforms reached the urban industrial sector, China's income gaps began to widen (Griffin and Zhao: 1993, Atinc: 1997). India's inequality has risen since liberalisation started in the early 1990s.

Indonesian incomes became increasingly concentrated in the top from the 1970s to the 1990s. Russian inequalities soared after the collapse of the Soviet (Flemming and Micklewright: 2000).

In reality, the gap in income between the 20 percent of the world's population in the richest and poorest countries has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 82 to 1 in 1995 and the conditions of the third world have in many respects worsened.

Per capita incomes have fallen in more than 70 countries over the post 20 years; some 3 billion people, half of the world's population, live on fewer than two dollars a day; and 800 million suffer from malnutrition.

There is no doubt that income inequality between countries has increased significantly over the past half century; while globalisation has been accelerating. Indeed, according to the United Nations, the gap between the richest and poorest countries increased from 44 to 1 in 1973 to 72 to 1 in 1992 (UN:2006)

Inequality between the rich and poor countries increases essentially because the rich are getting richer faster than the poor. In Western Europe, income per capita trebled between 1950 and 1992. In contrast, GDP per capita has only increased by 70 percent in Latin America over the same period. Thus, GDP per capita in Western Europe now stands at $18,000, compared to $7,000 in Latin America. The picture in Africa is even worse. Per capita GDP has only increased 50 percent since 1950 and then from a very low base. Per capita GDP has actually fallen in many African countries since 1970.

Globalisation has dramatically increased inequality between and within nations (Mazur: 2000). The international economy displays a number of worrying trends. Most obviously, poverty and inequality have grown alongside the expansion of globalisation.

We hope for change, too

Yasser Abed Rabbo

The President-elect Barack Obama's defiantly positive campaign for change has inspired hope not only in the millions of Americans who voted for him, but also in the billions of others worldwide who could not. Across the Middle East, as elsewhere, expectations are building that his presidency will herald a new era for America's role in the world.

Palestinians identify strongly with the civil rights movement in the United States. Many recall the dark days when American society enforced racial segregation. That the same society elected an African-American president only a few decades later renews Palestinian hopes that, in our ongoing struggle for justice and freedom, we, too, shall overcome.

Obama's electoral triumph arrives at a symbolic moment in Palestinian history. This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Drafted by the poetic hand of my late friend, Mahmoud Darwish, the text is nothing short of visionary. Whereas previously the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had campaigned for a single, secular, and democratic state across the entirety of mandatory Palestine, our Declaration of Independence endorsed a two-state solution.

The depth of this compromise can be fully appreciated only in its historical context. In the war and violence that surrounded Israel's establishment in 1948, our losses were immense. Over 726,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims - the majority of the Arab population of mandatory Palestine - fled or were forced to leave their homes by Zionist militias. Over 400 Palestinian villages in what became Israel were destroyed or depopulated.

Endorsing a two-state solution meant recognising Israeli sovereignty over 78 per cent of our homeland and exercising our right to self-determination on only the remaining 22 per cent that Israel has occupied militarily since 1967: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Yet we made this historic compromise because we believed that doing so would bring us to the threshold of liberty.

Of course, that is not how things have turned out: Palestinians have been living under Israeli occupation for 41 years. As Obama prepares to enter the White House, we are confident that he will consider the constructive role America can play in the search for peace and security. In the year since Palestinians and Israelis renewed their commitment to their obligations under the "roadmap," we may have failed to reach a conclusive settlement to our conflict, but that does not mean that the efforts made were in vain. With the determination of both sides, I am confident that we can reach a final agreement in relatively short order.

The US can take four practical steps to help negotiations move forward immediately. The first step is early engagement. The Bush administration's efforts to assist our peace-making project faltered in part because our conflict was neglected during the early part of its tenure. Allowing this conflict to fester will only aggravate our peoples' insecurity and our region's instability.

Second, the US should establish a credible enforcement mechanism to ensure that the parties comply with their respective obligations, particularly an immediate freeze on Israeli settlement activity throughout the occupied Palestinian territory. Not only has Israel failed to halt its settlement activity since Annapolis - in violation of international law and its renewed roadmap commitments - but it has actually accelerated such activity.

Construction of settlement housing units is over 45 per cent higher now than in the nine months prior to Annapolis. Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes have also increased, particularly in occupied East Jerusalem. Nothing undermines Palestinian faith in the peace process like watching the homes of our families flattened, while the architecture of our oppression is strengthened.

Third, the new administration should encourage the re-engagement of its Quartet partners - the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia - in the mediation process. International cooperation is key to securing the legitimacy of negotiations, and it will be critical when the time comes for the enforcement and implementation of any agreement. The US cannot be expected to shoulder the post-conflict burdens of peacekeeping alone.

Fourth, the US should renew its respect for international law by recognising three principles: that the 1967 pre-occupation boundaries must be respected in any negotiations; that Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem must be safeguarded, with guaranteed access for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to their holy sites; and that the plight of Palestinian refugees, whose 60-year ordeal remains emblematic of the Palestinian predicament, must be acknowledged and fairly addressed.

Fortunately, a framework already exists that supports these concerns. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative offers Israel a unique opportunity: full normalization of relations with 57 Arab and Muslim states in return for a comprehensive peace agreement, including an end to Israel's occupation of Arab lands and a just and agreed upon solution for refugees.