The Hijacking of the Development Debate: How Friedman and Sachs Got It Wrong, by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

It opens thus: 

Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs — articulate, learned globetrotting pundits– would seem an unlikely duo to hijack the development debate. Yet, through their best-selling books — Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Sachs’s The End of Poverty — their prominent exposure in the U.S. media, and endorsements by celebrities like Bono, the superstar lead singer of the rock group U2, they have done precisely that.

It closes with the following summing up:

Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Friedman must be given some credit for embracing the idea ofending poverty and spreading prosperity, and for bringing these issues to wider public notice. Yet by basing their arguments on simplistic myths, they have hijacked the development debate. The well-meaning rock stars, government leaders, billionaires, and civil society organizations that have jumped on the Sachs/Friedman aid-and-trade band-wagon would do well to embrace the development alternatives that are being put forward by the alter-globalization movement. If they do so, the goal of “ending poverty” may actually be achievable.

I found this paper food for thought. Full text accessible at: http://www.ifg.org/pdf/Broad%20Cavanagh.pdf

Robin Broad is professor in the International Development Program of the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy. John Cavanagh is director of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, and board chair of the International Forum on Globalization. He is the co-editor (with Jerry Mander) of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible.

In an op ed essay published in SciDev.Net in September 2005 titled ‘Simpler words are needed to get MDG message across’, I had referred to the communications value of both Bono and Sachs. Excerpt:

All development workers and UN officials should take a simple test: explain to the least technical person in your office the core message and relevance of your work. Many jargon-using, data-wielding, acronym-loving development workers would probably fail this test. But unless development-speak is translated into simpler language, the MDGs will remain a buzzword confined to development experts and activists.

Unless, that is, we find a quick and cheap way of cloning musicians such as Bob Geldof and Bono. With some help from fellow entertainers, these two celebrities have, though the recent Live Aid concerts, managed to generate mass attention to banishing poverty in a way that poverty studies experts could never accomplish. The main reason: they spoke the universal language of music.

The world needs both the hair-splitting technical experts who study problems in depth and detail, and good communicators who take on headline concerns and turn them into popular campaigns. Jeffrey Sachs and Bono make a good pair.

Full essay archived at: http://www.scidev.net/Editorials/index.cfm?fuseaction=readEditorials&itemid=170&language=1

This story has been published by One World South Asia. It is reproduced here with more weblinks to original sources and references.   

Close to a thousand people from all over the world converged in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for a few days in mid December 2006. They discussed and debated one of Asia’s biggest development challenges: how to clean up its fouled air.  

The historic city -– close to the World Heritage Borobudur temple — had been badly shaken by an earthquake only a few months earlier, in May 2006. And as Better Air Quality 2006, Asia’s leading event on the subject, got underway, results of the December 11 election in Aceh Province dominated the local media headlines. 

The mention of earthquakes and Aceh inevitably triggered memories of the Asian Tsunami two years ago. Of the 230,000 people who perished in that disaster, more than two thirds were in Indonesia. Aceh was the worst hit -– ‘ground zero’ of Nature’s fury. 

In Yogyakarta, the world’s leading public health and environmental experts again issued dire warnings about the mounting toll of air pollution in Asia. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reiterated its estimate that at least 800,000 people die prematurely due to health complications triggered or worsened by bad air. Three quarters -– or approximately 600,000 people -– are in Asia. 

That is more than twice the combined death toll of the Tsunami.    

Death toll probably higher 

“Polluted air is silently and slowly killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. Yet no one has declared war on this mass killer,” said Dieter Schwela, Senior Scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute’s centre in York, UK. He couldn’t resist adding: “Yet America under Mr Bush went to war in Iraq over a few thousand lives that were tragically lost in 9/11.” 

Schwela, who earlier worked with WHO, told a media training workshop that the agency’s estimate was too conservative; the actual figure is ‘probably much higher’.  He is the principal author of Urban Air Pollution in Asia Cities, a new assessment of 22 selected metropolitan areas in Asia. The 4-year study found that while air quality has improved in some cities, air pollution remains a threat to health and quality of life in many others.

Transport is the major contributor. One particular challenge: although vehicle emissions are improving in most countries, the number of vehicles is growing rapidly everywhere. The Asian fleet is set to double in the next five to seven years. 

As Asia rises economically, so does the pall of fumes and smoke that emanates from the world’s largest region. Greenhouse gases among tem will worsen global climate change for decades. In the short to medium terms, meanwhile, certain pollutants make us sick and kill us, slowly. Air pollution can sicken economies too.

A recent study by the Asian Development Bank and the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities estimated that the economic costs of urban air pollution ranged from 2 to 4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Asian countries.   In September, the Chinese government acknowledged for the first time that economic losses caused by environmental pollution totalled 511.8 billion yuan (US$ 65.6 billion approx.) -– or 3 per cent of China’s GDP in 2004. Air pollution accounted for slightly less than half of this staggering number, bigger than the entire GDP of many smaller countries.

The first ever Green GDP Accounting Study Report 2004 also calculated that the cost of treating pollution would total 287.4 billion yuan (US$ 36.7 billion approx.), or 1.8 per cent of China’s GDP. Although the report was cushioned in the usual caveats of statisticians, the message was clear: Asia’s air pollution has now become a matter of life and death for individuals, societies and economies.

Communicating billions to billions

Now that the experts and officials seem to agree on impacts and costs, we have to get the word out. Millions and billions might impress -– or, in this case, alarm -– specialists and activists. But how can the rest of us get a grip on the story, relating the macro with micro, and linking sulphur dioxide or particulate matter with the loss of a loved one? 

As Joseph Stalin infamously remarked, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths become a mere statistic. During our media training workshop on cleaner air, experts admitted that scientific data, technical analysis and statistics alone cannot engage the public’s attention on air pollution. To be effective, media coverage and public discussion need a human dimension.  

That’s nothing new to journalists: we try to personalise our stories. And we look for metaphors. 

In the wake of the Asian Tsunami, some development and humanitarian groups used the phrase ‘silent tsunami’ to describe slowly unfolding emergencies that rarely attract much media coverage or global compassion. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan made frequent, passionate references to the ‘daily tsunami of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation.’ It’s easy to call Asia’s air pollution induced sickness and death another silent tsunami.

Except that there is nothing silence about it: the lung-corroding, heart-threatening, cancer-causing and blood-poisoning pollutants are released with a thunderous roar from the region’s cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and other motorised vehicles. Anyone who has stood in a busy intersection in an Asian megacity knows exactly what I mean.

Slow murder – or mass suicide?

For the want of a phrase, we might call this Asia’s ‘tsunami of the air’. And this one is very much of our own making — let’s acknowledge now and here that we are all part of the problem, some more than others. It makes us culpable for what India’s Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) once termed ‘slow murder’ by dirty air.

Particularly polluting is the two-stroke engine that drives vehicles of popular choice in South and Southeast Asia. Before his own untimely death, CSE’s founder and journalist-activist Anil Agarwal publicly asked a leading Indian manufacturer of such vehicles: “Surely Mr Bajaj, you do not want to make money in a way that occasions mass murder?”   

That made headlines, but it’s not only Mr Bajaj and his ilk who engage in mass murder in slow motion. We all do.   Each time I step inside a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw or ‘tuk tuk’ on the streets of Bangkok, Colombo, Dhaka or elsewhere, I am personally responsible for emitting partially burnt exhausts.  

And I am already paying the price. As I reach out to my inhaler several times a week, I often think of my friend Saneeya Hussain — journalist, women’s rights advocate and environmental activist from Pakistan. She and I shared a lot more than asthma, but it was this chronic ailment that finally drove her away from Kathmandu, Nepal, where she headed the non-profit Panos South Asia for three years.  

Saneeya relocated to Sao Paulo, Brazil, but as it turned out, she couldn’t outrun the bad air. While there she suffered an acute asthma attack on 7 April last year.  Husband Luis rushed her to hospital as fast as the rush hour traffic would allow him. It took him 20 minutes to cover 2 kilometres — she stopped breathing half way, and never regained consciousness. She was only 50 at the time of her death.  

Not all victims of air pollution may have such rapid or widely reported exists. But the same story plays out at different speeds for millions of Asians, and no one –- rich or poor, good or bad -– is immune.  

Every time I see my 10-year-old daughter’s growing dependence on her inhaler, I realise that the demon we collectively unleashed has literally come home. 

Nalaka Gunawardene co-organised the media training workshop during BAQ 2006, and campaigns for cleaner air out of self interest. 

This is what I said in a recent op ed essay, originally published in MediaHelpingMedia website 

And now there are three, neatly arranged in English alphabetical order too: Al Jazeera International (AJI), BBC World and CNN International. 

On November 15, the decade-old Arabic channel’s entered the highly competitive 24/7 news and current affairs TV market in English. It was preceded by months of speculation and anticipation by those who adore the controversial channel -– and those who love to hate it. 

If you believe that any publicity is better than no publicity, the new channel has had a head start that neither of its global rivals did. When CNN (US) was launched in 1980, few people believed there would be a demand for round the clock news coverage. Some ridiculed it as the ‘Chicken Noodle Network’. Yet its success inspired other such channels to emerge at global, regional and national levels. Its influence prompted a former UN Secretary General to suggest that CNN International — the global version started in 1985 -– should be considered the 16th member of the UN Security Council. 

The new kid on the block isn’t exactly new -– it just acquired a new tongue. Described as the only political independent TV station in the Middle East, Al Jazeera has been broadcasting from Doha, Qatar, since 1996. Although reliable audience figures are hard to come by, estimates suggest that its global satellite transmission in Arabic has at least 50 million viewers -– rivalling BBC World’s estimated 59 million, according to the Wikipedia.  AJI will no doubt build on this brand recognition, but their sights are set much higher. The channel wants to ‘balance the information flow from South to North, providing accurate, impartial and objective news for a global audience from a grass roots level, giving voice to different perspectives from under-reported regions around the world.’ 

It wants to revolutionise English language TV in the same way it turned Arabic TV upside down, ending the monopoly of the airwaves by state broadcasters and governments. Noble ideals, indeed — and we fervently hope they succeed. In recent years, the self righteous arrogance and the not-so-subtle biases of BBC and CNN have become increasingly intolerable.  

But unless it’s very careful and thoughtful, AJI runs the risk of falling into the same cultural and commercial traps that its two rivals are completely mired in.  While CNN can’t get out of its US-centric analysis even in its international broadcasts, BBC news team is more like a hopelessly mixed up teenager: one moment they are deeply British or at least western European; the next moment they are more passionate about Africa than Africans themselves.   

Desperately seeking legitimacy and acceptance in wide and varied circles, these two global channels have sometimes traded in their journalistic integrity for privileged access, exclusives or -– dare we say it? – to be embedded.  They have increasingly come to epitomise a disturbing trend in international news and current affairs journalism: the end justifies the means. 

Take, for example, a major news story that broke in my part of the world two years ago: the Asian Tsunami of December 2004.  In a few dreadful hours, the disaster killed, injured or otherwise shattered the lives of millions. The ‘media tsunami’ that followed added insult to injury by turning the plight of affected people into a global circus. The right to privacy and dignity of thousands of affected people was repeatedly violated. The visual media, in particular, had no qualms about showing the dead, injured and orphaned: the story was gory.   

One CNN reporter later wrote a whole book recounting those few momentous days, when his team apparently managed to get stories before anyone else. Seemingly because they threw more money, equipment and diplomatic clout than others. The ‘gung-ho’ tone in that book is revolting yet revealing.  Such journalists’ only operating guideline seems to be: get the story, no matter what — or who gets hurt in that process. 

Of course, the rest of the world had a right to know -– and in that instance, it was the combined media coverage that spurred donations of US$ 13 billion to the affected countries.  But did that justify the affected people’s most vulnerable moments becoming Canon-fodder, beamed around the world at light speed to the accompanying chatter of visiting reporters? I’m not so sure. 

One year ago during an international media conference in New Delhi, India, I moderated a wide ranging discussion involving film makers, television journalists, media researchers and environmental activists. A key concern was the conduct of film and TV crews from the North who regularly roam the South, looking for images of poverty, decay and suffering for various news channels or documentaries.  

One activist cited examples of foreign film crews bribing officials to obtain filming permits and access restricted areas such as wildlife sanctuaries and heritage sites.  A senior editor recalled how, years ago, a visiting Canadian film crew had asked if they could film the intentional breaking of a poor child’s leg — a brutal practice that was believed to exist so that maimed children could be employed as beggars.  

“It’s going to happen anyway,” was how the film crew rationalised their bizarre request.These and worse experiences are certainly not confined to India. While media exposure can trigger much needed aid, reform or public outcry on certain issues, that is not a justification for getting the story by any means.

If products of child labour and blood diamonds are no longer internationally acceptable, neither should the world tolerate moving images whose origins are ethically suspect. So that’s the real challenge to Al Jazeera: to usher in real change, it needs to transform not just how television news is presented and analysed, but also how it is gathered.  

To accomplish this, it has to move well beyond the outdated UNESCO rhetoric of reordering the world’s information flows. That call might have had some validity in the 1970s and 1980s, but where does the global North end and the South begin these days?  There are bits of North across the South –- and vice versa. Migrant workers and diaspora populations have remixed our once neatly demarcated world beyond recognition.  

It’s this complex, nuanced Bigger Picture that Al Jazeera must cover in an authentic, credible and ethical manner. 

We will be watching. And not just what’s shown on AJI, but how those pictures get there. 

Read my earlier essay, ‘Communication Rights and Communication Wrongs’ on SciDev.Net: Nov 2005