Steve Hutcheson

Of recent times, I have decided to scale back my thankless pursuit of money and opt to establish a more balanced set of objectives before me for the future. Now if you read my posts you will have established I am generally a liberal sort of person. For the past ten years I have been engaged in the humanitarian business, another thankless task. I have worked for non-government organizations in war torn high risk countries for the pittance they pay, I have been a UN volunteer living on a ridiculously small stipend, more recently I have worked for one of the beltway bandits sucking up US taxpayer money faster than the new hoover it has bought for our maid.  But things have changed, for my next exercise  I am looking not so much to how much I can make, but to how much I can do.

The beltway income has been sufficient to lay down a sizable deposit on a small house in Penang in Malaysia where we are currently setting down some roots and it will also pay to undertake a major renovation of the building before we finally decide if we will live in it or rent it out. The building however happens to be within the boundaries of a newly conscripted UNESCO World Heritage site which draws me into the reasons to do what I am doing. The idea that I can spend time on a project that will with some degree of personal satisfaction, recover some aspect of a history that has been allowed to degrade appeals to me. What I need to be conscious of is the possibility of over gentrification of the region and even in my own little project I am in since it is the cultural and ethnic inhabitants that form the heritage significance as much as it is the architecture.

What I am now also engaged in is putting together a proposal that will enable me to take on bigger projects that are not just for the moment, I will be able to create projects that, like buying art, are done as much for the sake that the end result can be enjoyed and is a sound investment.

I am reading a column by George Monbiot in the Guardian where  he is lamenting the fact that a TESCO is coming to his small Welsh village. The people who live in the village do so because they are satisfied with the slower pace it offers them and would seem to be universally driven to ward off the TESCO if they can however the inevitability of big business succeeding is ever present. The same can be said about my new project in Penang although not for the same reasons.

Penang is very busy. It has a multicultural community that over the years have bought in a diversity from all over Asia. Yet it is slowly dying. Over the past few years there have been local developers wanting to pul down part of the decayed buildings and construct multi storied hotels and office blocks. Thankfully they have been resisted. This small segment of the city should be enabled to retain its historic outlook, it will nto make one iota of difference to the world at large if these rich developers do not have their way.

The city blocks do however need developing and undertaken on a larger scale than private investment can manage before they totally disappear into a rotting mess. Money nees to be provided to preserve the cultural backdrop against which we measure our progress, money should be invested simply because the outcome provides us with pleasure. Not every thing we do has to be for a profit.

When I finish my tour in Afghanistan at the end of this month, I already have interested some major financiers in my proposition that there is investment potential in conserving Penang’s heritage. In it I am appealing to individual investors who care not just about the next tenth of a percent, but that they are contributing to worthwhile projects that will also repay due to the fact that their projects have greater interest than the availability of a new t-shirt. it may not be for everyone but then it doesn’t require everyone, just enough.

In this months Quadrant, an Australian  journal that tends to push a conservative line on most things has published an article that includes comments by a number of scientists and commentators on what they see as the fallacy of the climatic change occurring due to mans presence on earth.  Maybe they are right but then again, maybe they are wrong.

In another article perhaps not as scientific but more related to the financial impact of climate change, that impact is being calculated. It would seem that if we can believe the likes of the National Oceanographic Data Center, a division of the National Oceanic and  Atmospheric Administration, both US organizations whom are tasked with collating information around the world, the average heat content of the worlds oceans are heating up. The following is their graph showing the rise in the contained heat over the years.

It would seem however that the rise in the sea water temperature also has a deleterious effect on the ocean’s coral reefs, and none more so than the Great Barrier Reef along the north eastern coastline of Australia. In a recent report commissioned by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a business-backed body investing in science, estimates half the tourists drawn to see reef coral will stay away if projections of permanent bleaching prove correct.

Their estimate is that the it will cost Australia almost 38 billion dollars if the bleaching of the reef takes place, which is the value placed on the tourism and eco-industries that rely upon it remaining as it is.

I am not particularly swayed one way or the other by the various arguments. I liken it to the dispute between the Christians and the atheists, in that case neither can substantiate their position. In the case of weather however, there seems to be a lot of supporting information to suggest that there is a shift in climatic conditions. Whether it is merely nature taking its course or it is in fact, the result of man pumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere over the last century is a matter of conjecture.

In one instance, there is not a lot we can do about it, in the other however, there is. Much is made by those who argue against the rise being man made about the high cost we are going to be faced with if we are obliged to trade carbon dioxide production or for industry to invest in new technologies to take over the existing ones. Theirs seems to be a an extremely self interested motivation to do nothing, “am I going to have to pay more for my transport” sort of argument? While on the other hand, those that are arguing for change to take place also often have a self interest in securing funding in research or promotion of green technologies. Yet it is advances in technology that the world requires sooner rather than later. The idea that fossil fuels are endless is to disregard reality.

On the other hand, we can live with research into new processes for the production of power or ways that we go about our business. Five hundred years ago all they had was fire, now we have electricity that can be created from the sun. My first cell phone cost me one hundred times what I can pick one up for in a market now. It is not cheap however these new technologies are getting cheaper and will continue to do so as usage increases. As I am writing this, advances in the production of solar cell material, increased output of this material in new factories in China, a saturation of the solar market has caused the price of solar power to drop by some 40% in the past year alone.

There is also the criticism that imposing taxes on dirty production will cause job loss yet those that argue this fail to acknowledge that the recent financial crisis has caused more job loss world wide than would be possible though these new measure introductions. That argument is puerile and lacking substance in the long term.

What we can’t live with is the consequence of doing nothing until we leave it go until we reach the point where it is all too late.

I was reading an article this morning in the British Guardian Online. It was about an isolated tribe of Jarawa natives who were starting to come out of the jungle in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for the first time and how they are beginning to interface with the tourists and recent arrivals. The writer, quite rightly alluded to the difficulties the tribes faces in the future in terms of integration, adapting to diseases, alcoholism, materialism etc as they become more and more integrated into the western notion of development. Necessarily these are traditionally poor people who have survived for centuries by their instinct and what the jungle can provide for them, the thing for the moment is that, they do not know they are poor, nor do they appear to care or are in any particular need of what the west can provide for them. Unfortunately that will progressively change as well meaning, but poorly advised “assistants” help them adapt to the western world. The richness of their present simple life will eventually become the symbols  of their future poverty.

Jarawa women of the Andaman Islands

It got me to thinking however about the general notion that we see indigenous peoples need to reach levels in their lifestyles that are consistent with western norms that may be askew. The Jarawa seem to have an idylic lifestyle. They are not constrained by any moral conventions that constrain the outside world, they live a semi nomadic existence where there appears no need for anything other than what their surroundings can provide for them. Ecologically and environmentally, the Jarawa appear to leave a negligible footprint on their surroundings yet seem happy with that even to the extent of repelling intruders with spears and arrows until quite recently. However, as they start to integrate as they are now doing, their lives will become irreversibly changed and it needs to be decided soon if that is for the better or should they be protected.

Their future is perhaps written for them as development takes hold of their tiny island. Inevitably they will through contact establish needs they previously did not have or could not obtain from the jungle.  Sweets, clothing, housing, liquor, medicine, education, money, communications, transport and a host of other symbols of development and advanced society. Through bitter experience of how other indigenous people have fared in the past, they will not fare well. They will lose their skills at living with nature, they will contract diseases, they will become indolent, always living around the edges of society eventually becoming a serial pest as that society loses its tolerance with their slow adaptation to western expectation. They will live in hastily constructed shanties at the edge of civilization instead of in their organized jungle village.

Going by the conventions set down by agencies such as the United Nations Human Development Reports, the Jarawa people will be included in deserving the minimum standards laid out for their existence yet what that fails to acknowledge is that these standards would generally exceed their current expectations and what is more, it needs to be asked if in fact they are needed or should what we be doing is to maintain the status quo.

Is development only a western perception that would enable them to live in a developing western world with western needs. Poverty world wide is measured against an immeasurable standard if say compared to the Jarawa people. The same, to some extent can be said for peoples all over the world in different locations and different sets of ideals. We tend to presume that what we can offer is what is best and fail to understand that sometimes what they have might well be what is in fact best after all.

For several years I have worked in Afghanistan. When I first arrived I had the opportunity to travel to remote regions of Nangahar province where I met with villagers whom I considered had an almost idyllic if not austere life, similar to that of the Jarawa however with a greater degree of development you might say. They had little to be sure however they had enough to live a lifestyle that was free of material needs. They live in mud houses with a mud floor and rarely a window. They grow and eat their own simple foods. They do not own cars and they do not travel far. They are uneducated but they can live under extreme weather conditions as they have done for centuries. It is rich in its simplicity. There were growing issues of education of which they had little and medical resources of which they had none and much of the issues of maternal and natal health were frequent problems that needed resolutions. Much of it compared to others who had only recently acquired these services.

Yet there is resistance. In the far reaches of Nuristan province to the east of the country, the local people are resisting all comers. That includes the US military and the Taliban as well as the development community. Their villages are only accessible by foot tracks in the mountains that even the donkeys find difficult to traverse. They don’t want change and will fight to prevent its arrival.

In terms of their material wealth however, apart from the land beneath their feet, they have little to show of wealth. Most Afghans live in harsh inhospitable environments where an austere religious lifestyle and work at subsistence levels of farm production that regulates their daily lives yet, for the most part, provides a sense of order and a level of social security within each tiny hamlet.  Many never venturing out even to the next village but remain within the family compound. It is only when change takes place that dislocations to these tiny communities begin to eventuate. They are poor however their poverty is relative to a system that they are being introduced to that advocates development.

A question that needs to be asked, is do they really need it until they decide for them self? Is development aiding in the destruction of societies? Well meaning but often self serving aid agencies who set an agenda that is rarely based on what these communities actually need as opposed to what they might say they want or promote ideas the aid groups can sell to them and proceed to offer a change to their lifestyles. A move towards one that emulates their own along with their own particular set of values, changing social structures, material wealth and complete with vague notions of democracy and the inherent politics of gender, education and health care.

Development at peoples own pace can be good. Development at paces they cannot maintain is not good. For the Jarawa people, development will most likely only bring them poverty and hardship that they otherwise would never have known.

I am engaged in a discussion on  whether aid agencies should be regulated. I am not necessarily in favor since I don’t really see that as the problem. This is in part what I have added to the discussion. What is more at stake is the way we do business.

Takes building schools for instance. We do a lot. I must have built 30 schools in the ten years I have been working in this business but I have to say, I am happy enough if I see a group of kids sitting under a tree and the teacher has a simple blackboard propped against it. It was good enough for Socrates. Schools are not just buildings, it is about what the kids are learning. Looking back at a situation I was faced with in Jalalabad in 2002. We wanted to build schools and clinics. The difficulty was for both there was a problem with staffing with health professionals or qualified teachers in some of these remote locations. The teachers and the nurses need to be trained before we start worrying about constructing the buildings.

That brings me to probably the most serious constraints we have in the aid industry. One of the things see all the time however is this fear of profit, particularly by the NGOs but also by the UN and for the most part the donors. I was in Aceh just after the tsunami and I along with several INGOs were in a meeting about the need for ice factories. Since they started making ice, it had been in the hands of private enterprise however no one wanted to fund the owner and figured that a cooperative would have been a better idea. I am sure that in a truly socialist environment it might have but this was not a socialist environment. What was necessary was that the owner needed funding to get his business back on track as much as they needed new schools. Without ice, the fishermen could not preserve their catch so the whole community was suffering because of this issue of support to an individual making a profit.

I come from Australia. The whole economy is profit-centric yet in crisis locations people argue for socialism and the development of a welfare economy.

USAID are the funniest in this regard. America has been built on small government, small welfare and the advancement of big thinking entrepreneurs however where ever they apply funds, Afghanistan for instance, it is big government, big welfare and prohibition of profit, all managed by government workers.

Rearrange that thinking and then we might start to get somewhere in solving poverty instead of simply supporting it while we hold their hands.

So do we need to regulate. I don’t think so. If the donors who are the providers of the funds are to change their thinking and recognise that supplying a country with donation wheat is not as good idea as getting a regional marketing organisation functioning then we might see progress. Too often we look at the small picture instead of the big picture and the small picture is certainly not working.