Bush orders Schwab to kick-start Doha Round; Get Putin crowd mad that Putin enjoyed himself hugely this weekend

Pundita is tuckered from a weekend keeping up with the news from St. Petersburg and the Middle East. Four posts up yesterday; this will be the only one for today.

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab will fly on Monday to the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva to seek progress in talks on the Doha round of free trade talks, her spokesman said.

"President (George W. Bush) made it clear he wanted a robust Doha round and Ambassador Schwab is going to meet with some of her counterparts to work on a breakthrough," spokesman Sean Spicer said in an e-mail sent to Reuters.

"We hope other nations will match the bold offer that the U.S. has on the table."

Pundita thinks the Bush team can continue to hope unless they grapple with the fundamental issues driving the Hong Kong 100 revolt.

In other news related to the G8 summit, AP put out a report on the energy statement that emerged from the meeting which was prominently featured on AOL business news yesterday and today. The slant is typical of mainstream reporting on Russia. The writer barely waits one paragraph before using the G8 statement to bash Putin's government. Here's a representative passage:

Concerns over Russia's reliability as an energy supplier were highlighted after an ugly New Year price fight with Ukraine saw supplies to Europe disrupted when Moscow temporarily switched off the gas to its ex-Soviet neighbor.

That led to criticism that Russia had destabilized European energy supplies by using its vast energy clout to punish Ukraine's western-leaning government, and highlighted Europe's dependance [sic] on Russia for a quarter of its oil and gas.

The report does not mention that the WTO ordered Russia to end their big energy subsidy for Ukraine as a precondition for the US dropping objections to Russia's joining the WTO.

Russia's attempt to suspend the subsidy predictably ticked off Ukraine's government, which created a backlash against Russia in Ukraine and Western Europe, which is just what the Get Putin factions wanted.

The kicker is that the US wasn't even interested in the economic benefits of ending the subsidy. They saw the subsidy as a means by which Russia maintained influence in Ukraine and they wanted to block that avenue.

If you ask what that has to do with trade -- Washington has politicized the WTO to such an extent that the poorer countries finally rebelled, which by many twists and turns is how we find Bush calling for a last-ditch effort to save the Doha Round.

If you have a hard time believing that grown men and women in our government could act in such fashion -- I believe situations like that caused Stephen Cohen to charge that Washington has launched a cold war against Russia.

Those grownups in Washington are puppets for US and Euro lobbies that want a big piece of Russia's energy sector, and/or their strings are pulled by China lobbies, which want to keep Russia off balance. Or they live in fear that the Soviet Union will rise again. If they keep trying to destroy Russia their fear will come to pass.

What really ticks me off is having to defend Putin, who is a sarcastic cuss. His remark about not wanting Iraqi-style democracy in Russia was below the belt but as usual he thought he made a bon mot. There is not much worse than a Russian technocrat who fancies himself a wit.

Oh wait I can think of something worse. Front organizations for Russian gangsters that advertise themselves as democracy advocates.

UN Security Council's Arf! Arf! resolution on North Korea missile tests

[. . .] the failure to achieve Chapter 7 status for the resolution -- the use of military force to make sure it is obeyed -- leaves the door open for a debate about whether its provisions have real teeth or are just a bark.

It was notable yesterday that Russia and China were staying silent on claims by the US, Japan and Britain that the resolution was "legally binding".

The answer to the latter question is probably nothing. The absence of an official sanctions committee to monitor compliance with the resolution and report on any breaches is a significant weakness that leaves the measure prone to abuse.

US ambassador John Bolton tried to put a positive face on this yesterday when he said: "You can have this kind of resolution without going through the normal sanctions kind of regime."

Yes, you can -- but it won't do you much good when it comes to a multilateral response against those prepared to assist rogue states such as North Korea to spread their weapons of mass destruction.
-- David Nason, The Australian

Let's face it. Paris Hilton's Chihuahua has more teeth than this resolution and frankly Ms. Hilton is more skilled at striking deals than Christopher Hill, the lead US envoy to the North Korea non-talks.

All I can add is that we need to find a way to stop Robert Zoellick from frolicking with a panda again the next time he visits China.

We need a deputy secretary of state who is aware that no amount of trade with China will change the nature of their government or loose their hold on North Korea -- and who advises the secretary of state accordingly.

Moderate Arab states chastize Hezbollah: "There hasn't been so profound a shift ... since the tearing down of the Berlin Wall"

The quote is from Dan Riehl, who writes with wonderful common sense about the strides toward lasting peace that have been made in the Middle East since the US put a big footprint there.

Iran sacrifices Hezbollah pawn

"Pundita:
Sam is asking if you've noticed a war has broken out in the Middle East.
Not Born Yesterday in New York"

Dear NBY:
Well, this is not so much war as bailing water. By now the leaders in Hezbollah and Iran's military know President Bush well enough to be certain that there is a certain inexorable quality about statements in his Axis of Evil speech. Iran thought they could simply wait out Bush's presidency.

Then Israel disengaged from Gaza; that, in combination with the erection of a wall meant that it was very hard to attack Israel except by the means of rockets. And disengagement left Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah and countless drug runners and smuggling gangs in a struggle for power. It's not been lost on the world that the stuggle is not helping the Palestinian masses one bit.

In short, Hezbollah was useful to Iran before Israel's disengagement from Gaza; now they are a liability. We've recently seen how Iran sacrificed another pawn -- Zarqawi, who at least had the sense to know when he was targeted by Iran. But Sheikh Nasrallah looks like one of those guys who believes in following his paymaster's instructions all the way to the bottom. In any case Hezbollah is going out with a bang -- shooting off as much of their arsenal as they can before Israel's military kills them.

Pundita does not live in a cave. It's just that I remember to look over my shoulder when taking in the day's war news. Iraq is mostly peaceful. Afghanistan is mostly peaceful. Arafat is dead. Saddam Hussein is behind bars. Syria's Assad is on the ropes. Al Qaeda is on the ropes.

And the Iranian military were forced by the successes of the US in Iraq to promote a hardliner for their national leader. So they finally revealed to the world the true face of Iran's government. What's more, Iran's support of Hezbollah, a Shia organization, has now made them very unpopular wih their Sunni neighbors. In case you've forgotten, the Shia are an island in an ocean of Sunnis.

In fact, the US-led war against the terror masters is going swimmingly well. Yet the Iraq stock market index will have to rival the Dow Jones, and Israel and Iran will have to dance together at each other's weddings, before Bush detractors abandon the Baghdad Bob routine.

US-Russia WTO talks: not much of a beef

Russia is the largest economy outside the WTO, and the United States remains the only country with which it has not yet reached a deal on accession to the 149-nation organization

It still looks as if the talks will be sewed up with three months. As for the mention of March as the accession date -- I'll take Minister Lavrov's word on how long it will take to wrap up the rest of the red tape but I would like to see things move as quickly as possible. It's really insulting to the Russian people that the WTO entry process has been dragged out by Russia hawks in Washington. But I see that Lavrov is putting a diplomatic face on the matter.

Russian FM Lavrov denies stalling of WTO talks with US
STRELNA (near St. Petersburg), July 16 (RIA Novosti) - Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday denied reports that the latest round of bilateral negotiations with the United States on Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization had been a failure.

The talks, held near St. Petersburg Friday ahead of this weekend's Group of Eight summit, produced no final deal on Russia's admission to the world's largest trade body, primarily over disagreements over Russia's barriers to U.S. beef and pork. But substantial progress was reportedly made on other contentious issues, including copyright law and sales of manufactured goods.

Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the current G8 summit, Lavrov said: "It was decided to continue the talks, to complete them in October, so that the issue of Russia's WTO accession can be resolved by March."

"We have more than once found ourselves in a situation where our American partners are not ready to make a definitive decision. The U.S. government is a complex mechanism. So I would not over-dramatize the matter," the minister said. "Of course, it would be good [for Russia] to join the WTO, [thereby] securing an advantage for some of our economic sectors. But we have other opportunities to develop our economy."

Lavrov also said Russia was ready to discuss additional requirements for accession to the WTO, but only on the condition of reciprocity.

"We will not take on additional commitments, outside WTO standards. We will discuss broader, non-standard, requirements, if our partners reciprocate."

Russia's economics minister, German Gref, on Saturday called U.S. meat imports "the main stumbling block" in the WTO accession talks. He said Russian negotiators had refused a U.S. demand for an immediate increase in beef and pork imports before a review of the American veterinary control system, due to be finished in October. But the protection of intellectual property rights was no longer an issue in the talks, he said.

Russia is the largest economy outside the WTO, and the United States remains the only country with which it has not yet reached a deal on accession to the 149-nation organization.

Russia WTO entry sewed up in three months

Bush will get the deal through Congress. Price for Russia? High.

Bush, Putin unveil nuclear plans at G8

[. . .] The goodwill exuded by Bush offset Russia's disappointment at failing to get a deal with Washington that would pave the way for Russian entry into the World Trade Organisation.

That fell through after negotiations that went early into the morning failed. "There is more work to be done," Bush said. But the two sides subsequently agreed to set a deadline to wrap up talks within three months. [. . .]

G8 summit: Pundita has more advice for President Putin

Well, it's that time of year again. I see things are off to a rollicking start:

Bush snubs Putin by meeting opposition groups first According to the (London) Times Online, "President Bush reinforced his concerns about his Russian counterpart's record on democracy today when he went straight to meetings with local activists on his arrival in St Petersburg for this weekend's G8 summit."

So now the only suspense about this year's G8 meeting is whether:

> President Bush's speechwriters will give into temptation and insert nasty comments about Russia's government into his speech at the summit, and

> The arrival of the lead US trade negotiator in St. Petersburg signals that the USA is finally withdrawing objections to Russia's entry to WTO.

We might even see a breakthrough announcement at the summit about Russia's bid to enter WTO. That's provided President Putin heeds Pundita's earlier advice to speak in Chinese-accented Pidgin English while in the presence of American journalists, President Bush and other American statespeople.

For readers who can't quite aurally visualize -- I don't do this well without a couple beers in me but it goes something like, "We try hard to make like America wish for WTO. We work hard make you proud and make you a lot of money."

None of the intellectual crap that Putin and his ministers tend to haul out. (E.g., "Do you understand you're practicing a double standard with our entry requirements?")

And no more Russian folk sayings. The one Putin let fly about an eating wolf not listening is silly. How many wolves has Vice President Cheney or anyone in Washington for that matter actually met with in the wilds? So how would they understand the metaphor?

Just suck it up and try to sound as Chinese as possible so we can finally see an end to the charade about WTO requirements for Russia.

I interject that I want no more letters expressing irritation at Pundita for insulting the Chinese people. I'm not insulting them; I'm paying tribute to shrewdness.

Chinese who speak Oxfordian English have learned to revert to Pidgin while in negotiations with the US Department of State and answering US congressionals who are angry about China's record on human rights.

Why do Chinese with excellent English do such a thing? Because they've learned to communicate in the results-oriented style so dear to the hearts of US diplomats and elected representatives.

Just think how much misunderstanding President Putin could have avoided if he hadn't tried to explain when President Bush asked him last year why he'd suspended elections for Russia's governors.

Instead of giving a history lesson Putin should have replied, "We make elections again when Russia governors no longer make their own foreign policy and rig elections. This will be soon after I finish making examples of the worst cases."

And if Putin must explain, follow the advice that a Pundita reader offered last year: Keep to a metaphor that Americans can emotionally connect with; e.g., "Russia today is like Chicago in the 1930s."

Now, with regard to reporting on the G8 summit: Peter Lavelle left Moscow earlier this week for St. Petersburg but it seems his television commitment and other reporting duties are taking priority over his Untimely Thoughts blog. So you might have an easier time finding his G8 summit commentary and interviews by watching his TV show.

The show ("IMHO") airs every Sunday during the last 15 minutes of every 'even' hour. You can watch the show on the Web at russistoday.ru (click Watch RT now). The site is free.

Also, John Batchelor announced that Steve Cohen will guest next week to comment on US-Russia relations at the G8 meeting. This is a good place to mention that if you have not yet read Dr. Cohen's June 21 essay on Washington's undeclared cold war I urge you to read it, if only as a guide to the shark-infested undercurrents at the summit.

My only quibble with Cohen's observations is that he is another one who tries to explain. Granted, because he's a good professor he can break things down so even an idiot can understand. But after all these years of speaking God's Truth about Russia and not being heard by Washington and their lackeys in media, he should rethink. The problem is not so much political or even traced to greed for control of Russia's energy sector. The problem is epistemological.

For that reason Pundita stood and applauded the other night when Steve simply said to John Batchelor's audience: Russia is holding all the cards in this new cold war.

That's right. Russia is no longer jockeying with the US on NATO terms; they're cozy at home in their own turf, Central Asia. Germany won't hesitate to fold on this one. So Washington should act like smart big boss. Not play pair of twos against full house. Do the same two-faced thing we did with regard to China; first admit Russia to WTO then make stringent demands on Russia's government. Pass the soy sauce.

Export Credit Agencies: crony capitalism on steroids

"An export credit agency is an agency of--or backed by--a government. Usually overseen by the finance, trade, or economics ministry, an ECA uses taxpayer money to make it cheaper and less risky for domestic corporations to export or invest overseas. Almost all industrialized nations have at least one ECA.*

Pundita, [re post on crony capitalism]. You asked what the government could do to help countries move toward genuinely competitive capitalism. For starters the US and other G8 governments could deal with the worst excesses of their export credit agencies.
Mark in Long Island

Dear Mark:
You are opening a big subject. If Noam Chomsky is right in his assessment that ECAs are de facto welfare for corporations, I doubt our elected officials and representatives will want to rein them in -- not unless enormous pressure is applied from the voter. However, Pundita is not knowledgeable enough about the subject to say whether I agree with Chomsky.

In any case, ECAs influence a government's foreign policy and this is done outside the spotlight of public scrutiny. And they are on record for financing highly questionable and even discredited development projects in the world's poorest countries.

So let's introduce the other readers to the arcane world of export credit agencies. Wikipedia flatly states that their very short article on the topic needs to be expanded by an "expert." So far there have been no takers.

I include a link to the Wiki article because it contains a handy reference list of the world's most well known export credit agencies. But let's start our journey of understanding with a dramatic story from a highly informative (although clearly biased) article on ECAs written for the layperson. It’s titled Worse Than the World Bank? Export Credit Agencies -- The Secret Engine of Globalization from the Winter 2003 issue of The Backgrounder.

“ . . .one of the most important benefits that corporations are receiving from ECAs is not financial backing at all--but rather political backing. Corporations prize the political power that comes with an ECA loan, guarantee, or insurance policy-- power that can be exerted on developing countries.

For example, after the electricity board of the Indian state of Maharashtra cancelled its agreement to purchase overpriced power from Enron's Dabhol power plant, the U.S. government exerted extreme pressure on the Indian government to pay, in a strategy coordinated at the highest levels of the U.S. government (the National Security Council) and involving even Vice-President Richard Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The U.S. did not do this just to assist Enron, but also to protect the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer loans and insurance that had been supplied by U.S. ECAs.22 According to the Associated Press, U.S. government threats have even included cutting off aid to India.”

That should be enough to whet your interest. Pundita suggests reading through the entire Backgrounder article, which contains some eye-popping pie charts. And don't miss the part about the ECAs leaving behind mountains of debt. But to get down to brass tacks:

[. . .] Indeed, the increasing role of ECAs in the global economy--directly backing hundreds of billions of dollars of international trade and investment and leveraging much more in purely private flows--raises the question of the extent to which government intervention through ECAs has actually driven the process of economic globalization.

Why ECAs Are Troubling
Not only are ECAs by far the single largest part of public financial flows from North to South, but as we will see, they are also the least examined, the least transparent, the least accountable, and, in some ways, the most harmful. Among the issues critics of ECAs raise are that they:

· Support destructive projects that even the World Bank will not touch
· Lack basic environmental, human rights, corruption, and other safeguards
· Undercut their governments' own developmental and environmental policies and multilateral agreements
· Contribute heavily to developing countries' debt burdens
· Have little or no transparency or accountability
· Provide corporate welfare by passing business' risks and losses on to unwitting taxpayers
· Contribute significantly to the arms trade, the expansion of nuclear power, and global warming.

The Beginnings of Change
Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to grapple with export credit agencies after discovering that they had become the principal financiers of the projects local communities in developing countries were battling because of environmental or social impacts, corruption, or other ills. A loose international network of NGOs and trade unions has grown rapidly over just the last three to five years, working on many of the issues discussed in this paper.

In 2000, 347 NGOs from 45 countries documented their calls for reform with a platform statement known as the Jakarta Declaration. NGOs have successfully campaigned to stop or delay certain ECA projects, such as the Maheshwar dam in India and the Ilisu dam in Turkey. And NGOs have forced a few countries to adopt some significant ECA reforms, at least on the issues of transparency or the environment.36

Moreover, every G8 communique' between 1997 and 2001 included language encouraging or mandating international negotiations towards multilateral environmental reforms for ECAs.

However, after nearly five years of these international discussions and negotiations (which take place at the OECD), governments have failed, and most countries have decided to implement a proposal that NGOs rightly regard as a total sham.37 (Negotiations are set to re-open later [in 2003].)

Moreover, attempts to address nonenvironmental issues surrounding ECAs--such as debt, corruption, and human rights, have either been similarly weak or simply nonexistent.

How Are ECAs to Be Dealt With? The Policy Debate
Many people favor eliminating ECAs, seeing them as socially harmful trade subsidies that benefit neither the ECAs' home countries nor the recipient countries. But if ECAs are going to exist, clear reforms should be the minimum price of their continued existence. At the very least, ECAs must abide by strict rules in order to prevent the crushing debt, human rights abuses, corruption, environmental damage, and other impacts that now frequently accompany ECA activities.

These rules would fall into three categories:

· Screens, assessments, and binding standards to ensure that ECAs do not support transactions causing environmental or social harm, labor or human rights abuses, and/or unjustifiable debt.

· Measures to prevent ECA support for transactions involving corruption.38

· Transparency, including consultations with potentially affected communities and other stakeholders and the public release of project information before a project's approval,and the release of data on the nature and extent of the ECAs' activities.

Governments should not support projects that devastate local communities and the environment and leave little behind besides a few well-lined pockets and mountains of debt. If they continue to do so through their ECAs, the most destructive chapters in the history of development are sure to be repeated.

What Can You Do?
Like other previously anonymous institutions (the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc.), ECAs will never change unless and until their impacts and their role in the global economic system are exposed and publicized. Otherwise, they will continue to operate in near-anonymity and obstruct any efforts for change. The time has come for ECAs to be dragged into the public light--and for us to demand change from governments, legislatures, the G8 and OECD, and ECAs themselves. ECAs must become accountable to the world.

1. To contact organizations working on ECAs. Visit eca-watch.org to find lists of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in over 30 countries working on ECAs.

2. For more information. Visit environmentaldefense.org/go/eca or eca-watch.org. Also, this backgrounder is drawn from a larger paper that you may wish to read to delve deeper into the subject. It is entitled "Globalization's Most Perverse Secret: The Role of Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agencies," and it's available at environmentaldefense.org or new-rules.org.39

A word of caution about the author's use of the World Bank as a comparison: The Bank is one among many development banks. So to attempt to view the perceived sins of the EFAs against those of the World Bank doesn't convey an accurate picture of the damage that 'bad' development bank projects and programs have done.

*From the Backgrounder report.

Interpreting Africa news: neither sing nor cry

Africa usually makes it into US headlines on the strength of bad news so Pundita yearns to leap for joy when a ray of good news on Africa escapes to the front page. But after a few years of Africa watching, one learns: Africa is Africa. Drought, blights, tribal wars, vast wealth up for grabs, a rigid pecking order, ruthless contempt for those at the bottom of the rung. Yet if all that provides the warp of Africa's weave the irrepressible creativity, entrepreneurship, and pluck of Africa’s people is the woof.

I thought of the weave while reading this week's Sunday Washington Post's front page (early edition, I think) story In War-Torn Congo, Going Wireless to Reach Home -- For Poor, Cellphones Bridge Digital Divide by Kevin Sullivan. The article is quite long but because I am reluctant to inflict the Post's registration process on Pundita readers I republish the entire report in a Pundita post all its own.

If you are interested in bringing democracy to rural areas of the world, the impact of cell phone technology on the lives of the poorest, or just hungry for good news about Congo during their post-war era, you will be riveted by Sullivan's well-written article.

But there is a problem with the report: Sullivan's description of the World Bank-led $200 million program to buy back guns and retrain the Congolese warriors who laid down arms. It is too hopeful and in stark contrast to the UK Guardian Observer’s July 2 on-site report, Congo's jungle terrorists disband by Rony Carroll. The report is a typical mixture of good and bad news from Africa: The brutal mayi-mayi militia has disbanded but now faces the wrath of the civilian population they ravaged for a decade. Carroll passes along short words for the vaunted Bank-led program that Kevin Sullivan found hopeful:

In recent weeks other [former mayi-mayi] commanders have led barefoot bands to demobilisation centres which are supposed to distribute clothes, blankets, a radio and $110 (£60) to each combatant, the prelude to vocational training and transition to civilian life. Despite $200m of World Bank funding, the demobilisation is a shambles, say UN officials. Kits and cash are being delivered late or not at all and few of the promised courses in baking, tailoring, farming and mechanics have materialised. Many of those who surrendered, in effect, have been abandoned.

I think the truth of the situation is somewhere in between a shambles and a positive development, but I present the other side to underscore the care needed while interpreting news from Africa. Here is part of Kevin Sullivan’s account about the same program::

. . .[cell phone] technology is also being used to create peace, as with a program to disarm more than 150,000 men and women who fought in Congo's gruesome war.

One recent morning in downtown Kinshasa, Fiston Disundi walked up to a little white Celpay cash point booth and handed over his government ID.

The woman in the booth entered his ID number into her cellphone and sent a text message to Celpay's computer database. Ten seconds later the response came back. Disundi, 27, was a former soldier who had turned in his AK-47 rifle in January. That meant he was entitled to a monthly $25 cash payment, which she promptly handed over to him.

The World Bank, Britain, France and other big donors have put up $200 million for the year-old program, designed to turn Congo's warriors into wage earners. So far more than 75,000 people have handed over their guns in exchange for job training and a cash incentive: an initial $110 payment, followed by monthly $25 payments for a year.

Initially, clerks using thick account books with handwritten entries were having trouble making the thousands of payments efficiently. So, in February the program contracted with Celpay to modernize the process.

Disundi said when he received his first two $25 payments, he waited nearly six hours in long lines while clerks dug through record books to find his details. But when he went to the Celpay booth recently, the transaction took less than a minute. The system also confirmed that Disundi was where he was supposed to be: Ex-combatants must agree to stay in their home regions rather than gathering with others in hotspots. [. . .]

So it would seem that at least the buyback portion of the program is having success in areas where ex-combatants have access to Celpay (Sullivan describes the company in the article). This leaves the job training aspect of the program up in the air.

The warp is not so easy to spot in a report that Dymphna at Gates of Vienna blog found a few weeks back at the Acton Institute’s Power Blog. She sent the article with the careful observation that the news looked “interesting.” On the surface, the report seems good news:

Ecumenical News International (ENI) relates the launch last month of a new initiative in Africa, designed to “to mobilise a strong African voice in development.” The effort is called African Monitor and is led by the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, Njongonkulu Ndungane.

Anyone who spends much time at all looking at the economic development situation in Africa quickly realizes the lack of independent, nongovernmental, native voices. As African Monitor states, “This African civil society voice can thus be seen as the too often missing ‘fourth piece of the jigsaw’ alongside existing stakeholders of donor governments and institutions; their African counterparts; and donor-based NGOs and civil society.”

African Monitor’s mission is to begin to fill this need: “African Monitor is an independent body, acting as a catalyst within Africa’s civil society, to bring a strong African voice to the development debate, and to raise key questions from an African perspective.” The initiative represents a truly unique and much needed enterprise, since before the creation of African Monitor “there was no existing pan-African network that can provide such a catalyst across the sub-Saharan region, and taking a perspective across aid, trade, development and financial flows.”

In his address before the opening of the group, titled, “Let African Voices speak out for effective action on Africa’s development,” Archbishop Ndungane emphasized the need for accountability and true follow-through on the part of donors and developed nations: “We saw that Africa’s grassroots voices, currently marginalised and fragmented, could be harnessed to pursue these ends, and that faith communities, the most extensive civil society bodies on the continent, could provide the backbone of networks to bring these voices into the public arena.” [. . .]

All very hopeful, to be sure, but there is a slightly different cast to the Africa Monitor’s reason for existence when we turn the keynote speech at the May launch of the first African Monitor workshop. From the wording, it sure doesn’t look like they’re trying for independence. It looks to Pundita as if the African Monitor was set up to monitor programs that the United Nations has approved as part of their Millennium Development goals.

In other words Pundita suspects the African Monitor is another front for the scoundrels at the United Nations. Of course that is prejudging but through bitter experience Pundita has learned to assign guilt at the beginning so she can be pleasantly surprised if a minor miracle occurs.

I will be happy to apologize profusely if I'm wrong on this one. But burned in my memory is a photograph of a plump, richly dressed African regional official beaming and accepting a UN-related award for a village development project. Behind her stood a group of unsmiling, skeletal-looking village women wrapped in rags.

This is a good time to remind Pundita readers of the Africa blogs by the courageous and hard-working Ingrid Jones. Ingrid is one of the 2005 winners of the prestigious Pundita Weblog Awards, which was given for her Sudan Watch blog (see sidebar). But Ingrid covers more than the situation in Sudan. If you also want to keep abreast of human rights-related events in Congo, Ethopia, Niger, and Uganda, stop first at Ingrid's blog by that country's name, which I will be listing on the sidebar when I snatch a moment.

Congo Watch
Ethopia Watch
Niger Watch
Uganda Watch

Why don’t we end on a hopeful note by taking a gander at pictures of the first working model of the $100 laptop for the “One Laptop Per Child” program, which Ingrid posted at her Niger blog here.

Cell phones remaking Africa: Congo's emerging airtime economy

This post is a companion piece to the other Pundita post today, Interpreting Africa news: neither sing nor cry. Here I republish Kevin Sullivan’s article in its entirety, I consider it that important. An armload of roses to the Washington Post editor who featured Sullivan's eport on the Sunday Post’s (early edition?) front page.

In War-Torn Congo, Going Wireless to Reach Home --
For Poor, Cellphones Bridge Digital Divide
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 9, 2006; Page A01

["]KINSHASA, Congo -- Until not long ago, if Zadhe Iyombe wanted to talk to his mother, he had to make the eight-day boat trip up the Congo River to the jungle town where he was raised. In a country with almost no roads, mail or telephone system and a grisly guerrilla war raging, making that exhausting and dangerous trip was about the only way he could find out if his 59-year-old mother was still alive.

Then he got a cellphone.

Now he talks to his mother every day. And once a week, with a simple new feature in African cellphones, he uses a text message to transfer five minutes of airtime to her phone to make sure she can always call him.

"Now I know immediately how she is doing," said Iyombe, who lives here in the capital, 400 miles southwest of his mother's home. "These phones make everything easier. It has totally changed life in Congo."

As surely as the light bulb and the automobile before them, the cellphone and text messaging are radically changing the way people live in the developing world. In widespread use for about five years in much of Africa, technology long taken for granted by the world's rich has made life easier, safer and more prosperous for the world's poor.

For the first time, millions of Africans are able to communicate easily with people who are beyond shouting distance. Farmers and fishermen, for example, use text messaging to check market prices, eliminating middlemen and increasing profits -- and preventing long trips to the market on days it is canceled.

In cities, cellphones are becoming a basic tool of electronic commerce, allowing consumers to transfer money to merchants with a few presses on the keypad.

Restaurant owners now can advertise by sending bulk texts to their customers, promising something delicious for lunch. People call a doctor, mechanic or police officer instead of walking miles to find one. News of births, deaths and illnesses instantly reaches the farthest corners of the jungle, where mothers like Iyombe's struggle with the concept of their children's voices emerging from a little plastic box with buttons.

"Before, if you had a sick baby in the middle of the night, he could easily die," Iyombe said, holding the Nokia phone that has raised his ambitions and expectations of life. "Now you can call somebody to help."

Worldwide, there are more than 2.4 billion cellphone users, with more than 1,000 new customers added every minute, according to industry analysts. About 59 percent of users are in developing countries, making cellphones the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world.

Cellphone usage in Africa is growing faster than in any other region and jumped from 63 million users two years ago to about 152 million today, according to David Pringle, a spokesman for the GSM Association, a trade group that represents cellular companies whose customers account for 80 percent of the global total.

Few places are seeing faster growth than Congo, which has 3.2 million cellphone customers and just 20,000 conventional land lines. At least 8,000 new cellphone customers sign up each day here; the number of users has increased more than tenfold in the past five years.

When one of Congo's first cellphone networks opened in 1999, it had capacity for 4,000 customers, but 30,000 people lined up outside the office demanding a phone, said Gilbert Nkuli, of Vodacom Congo, the largest of the five cellphone companies competing in the country's booming market.

Africa has attracted multimillion-dollar investments from many of the world's major cellphone companies, including Finland-based Nokia and U.K.-based Vodafone. Vodacom Congo is co-owned by Vodafone and a South Africa-based company, while Celtel, the second-largest provider in Congo, is owned by a Netherlands-based company that has operations in 14 African countries.

The two operators have built about 700 cellphone towers across Congo. Vodacom's Nkuli estimated that 70 percent of the country's 60 million people now live in areas with cellphone coverage.

"People would rather be without a shirt and trousers," Nkuli said, "and they'd rather go for days without food, instead of not having a phone."

Dealing in Minutes
Down a rutted dirt road on the tattered outskirts of Kinshasa, Iyombe, 36, sat in the tiny two-room house he shares with his wife. He had been hoping for a career as an electrician, but when he finished his training in 2001, he couldn't find a job. The Congolese economy had been run into the ground by three decades of corrupt dictatorial rule by Mobuto Sese Seko. Then, after Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, the country dissolved into a war that has left 4 million people dead.

Amid all the despair, Iyombe spotted something new and promising: people carrying cellphones. The more he looked, the more he saw his future in the little gadgets. So he saved and borrowed, spending $500 for his first phone (the average price has since come down to about $40), and started charging people to make calls.

Now he's at the heart of Kinshasa's new airtime economy, in which minutes on a cellphone are a commodity that can be used, bartered or sold for cash.

In Kinshasa's noisy street markets, thousands of people sit at little wooden benches with signs that say appel , French for "call." They keep one or two -- sometimes four -- cellphones in their laps. They buy airtime in bulk from phone companies, then charge customers a small premium to make calls.

Amid the exhaust-choked chaos, airtime dealers sit patiently under colorful umbrellas or in wobbly plastic chairs offering exactly the same service as perhaps 30 or 40 other dealers working the same corner. They're all busy all the time.

At his little stand, which was the first one in his neighborhood, Iyombe said, he sells hundreds of calls a week and makes a profit of about $20 -- a fantastic weekly wage in a country where most people live on $1 a day. Iyombe supports his wife and pays rent for an aunt and school fees for two nephews. "I love my work," he said, wearing the bright red T-shirt of Celtel.

A large part of Iyombe's business is transferring airtime for his customers. They give him cash, and he transfers the minutes from his phone to wherever the customer wants them sent -- a friend, a relative or a business partner, often in some distant corner of this country the size of Western Europe.

The transfer takes only a few seconds: Iyombe needs only to enter the amount of airtime and the phone number of the person receiving it. Cellphone companies have added that function to phones in the past year.

Iyombe said many of his customers transfer airtime so that family members in the countryside can resell it. Customers in Kinshasa send airtime to a brother or parent in a distant village, who then sets up under a shady tree and acts as a human phone booth. They sell calls on their phone and earn enough cash to feed their families. In many Congolese villages, cellphone ownership marks the divide between haves and have-nots.

Iyombe said text messaging has been slowed by widespread illiteracy but has started taking off in recent months as people learn key words to text, such as "Call me." He said it is becoming more popular largely because a text message costs five cents, compared with 26 cents for a one-minute voice call. When his mother wants to talk to him, he said, she sends a text telling him to call.

"It was a little difficult getting her to use texts, but now she's very good at it," he said, smiling at the thought.

The demand for cellphone calls has sprouted several offshoot industries. For a fee, people type text messages for the illiterate. In places where there is little or no electricity -- which means most of Congo -- entrepreneurs set up small diesel-powered generators and connect plug boards with 30 sockets. People plug in their phones to charge for a couple of hours for about 30 cents.

Iyombe keeps his own small generator to make sure he's never without battery power.
"Without these cellphones, we wouldn't be able to move forward," he said.

Mobile Accounts
Iyombe spoke while sitting in the larger room of his house, which is just big enough for a bed -- and a television he bought in a cellphone transaction.

Last year he walked into an electronics shop in the city center and picked out the 20-inch TV. To pay, he punched a few buttons on his cellphone and transferred a down payment of $150 into the shop's bank account. The shopkeeper received a text message confirmation that the money had been transferred successfully, and Iyombe walked out with his new TV. Iyombe settled his bill with three more $50 payments via his cellphone.

"I went in empty-handed, but I could still buy something because I had my phone," he said.

Conveniences such as laptops, Internet access, ATMs and credit cards are rare or nonexistent in Congo, so entrepreneurs are devising ways to use cellphones to serve the same functions.

Iyombe is one of about 25,000 Congolese subscribers to Celpay, a company that offers Internet banking through cellphones. Celpay customers make cash deposits into their Celpay accounts and can access their accounts, transfer money or pay bills with their phones.

Dozens of businesses, including gas stations and grocery stores, now allow customers to pay for goods through Celpay. The company that distributes Coca-Cola and Heineken beer also uses the system to collect payment, which means drivers no longer have to carry a safe full of cash on their trucks and constantly worry about bandits.

When Iyombe wants to make a deposit to his account, he can go to one of more than 100 "cash points" set up across the country. Most are small booths with a person sitting inside with a cellphone and a cash box, known here as "human teller machines." Iyombe gives cash to the clerk, who sends a text message to Celpay noting the deposit. Iyombe then receives a text message confirmation that the money has been credited to his account.

Lazarus Muchenje, chief executive of Celpay, said his company is trying to capitalize on the Congolese embrace of cellphone technology: "We are using the credibility of the cellphone network." Celpay is owned by FirstRand Banking Group, a major South African financial institution.

At a busy gas station in Kinshasa, manager Tharcisse Tshimanga said he gets six or eight customers a day paying with their phones.

"People trust this," he said. "It's made everything easier."

Tool of Corruption, Peace
Cellphones have also created a new kind of corruption in a country rife with it: People here tell of government officials demanding bribes in the form of airtime transferred to their cellphones. Local officials said they believe armed rebel groups use cellphones and texts to coordinate their operations in the country's eastern provinces, where they fight regularly with 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers, the largest U.N. force in the world.

But the technology is also being used to create peace, as with a program to disarm more than 150,000 men and women who fought in Congo's gruesome war.

One recent morning in downtown Kinshasa, Fiston Disundi walked up to a little white Celpay cash point booth and handed over his government ID.

The woman in the booth entered his ID number into her cellphone and sent a text message to Celpay's computer database. Ten seconds later the response came back. Disundi, 27, was a former soldier who had turned in his AK-47 rifle in January. That meant he was entitled to a monthly $25 cash payment, which she promptly handed over to him.

The World Bank, Britain, France and other big donors have put up $200 million for the year-old program, designed to turn Congo's warriors into wage earners. So far more than 75,000 people have handed over their guns in exchange for job training and a cash incentive: an initial $110 payment, followed by monthly $25 payments for a year.

Initially, clerks using thick account books with handwritten entries were having trouble making the thousands of payments efficiently. So, in February the program contracted with Celpay to modernize the process.

Disundi said when he received his first two $25 payments, he waited nearly six hours in long lines while clerks dug through record books to find his details. But when he went to the Celpay booth recently, the transaction took less than a minute. The system also confirmed that Disundi was where he was supposed to be: Ex-combatants must agree to stay in their home regions rather than gathering with others in hotspots.

Sitting in the shade in the intense morning heat, Disundi, a thin man with a scruffy beard, said he'd been carrying a gun since 1997, when his parents were killed by a mortar shell that fell on their house. "I saw so many terrible things," he said. "I felt nothing anymore. I was just waiting to die."

He said he's relieved not to be carrying a weapon. He wants to become a mechanic so he can support his two children.

"I don't want them to go through what I've been through," he said.

He has no job and almost no money. But he has a cellphone, which rang over and over as he talked. [”]

Copyright The Washington Post 2006

Crony capitalism, phony democracies, and anti-Americanism go hand in hand

Particularly upsetting to defenders of free markets is that crony capitalism gives capitalism a black eye wherever it goes....

One of the irritating habits of the American mainstream media is their insistence that President Vladimir Putin has been rolling back democracy in Russia. There never was democracy in Russia; there were crony capitalists managing a democracy stage show with the complicity of the USA and some EU governments. That has also been the case for much of the developing world.

I think you could graph the extent of US-backed crony capitalism in a developing country with the extent of anti-Americanism there. I'd say the same holds true for the connection between European-backed crony capitalism and anti-EU feelings. There is also a connection between anti-globalism and crony capitalism's worst excesses in the developing world.

Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.
--Jorge G. Castañeda
Latin America’s Left Turn
Foreign Affairs
May/June 2006

Okay, now we're ready to bone up on the meaning of crony capitalism:

[...] One legitimate reason for the opposition to capitalism in Latin America is that it frequently has been "crony capitalism" as opposed to the competitive capitalism that produces desirable social outcomes. Crony capitalism is a system where companies with close connections to the government gain economic power not by competing better, but by using the government to get favored and protected positions. These favors include monopolies over telecommunications, exclusive licenses to import different goods, and other sizable economic advantages. Some cronyism is found in all countries, but Mexico and other Latin countries have often taken the influence of political connections to extremes. [. . .] The excesses of cronyism have provided ammunition to parties of the left that are openly hostile to capitalism and neo-liberal policies. [...]
--Gary Becker
Moving Left in South America (*)
The Becker-Posner Blog
May/June 2006

There is more than one reason for Latin America’s leftward turn, and once you’ve read the essays by Castañeda and Becker in their entirety you'll be well positioned to grasp the scope of the trend.

What, if anything, can the US government do to help the most affected countries move toward ‘competitive’ capitalism?

I would prefer to see the Office of Business and Commercial Affairs removed from the US Department of State but at the least Congress could closely monitor it. The office puts US businesses in a position to influence US foreign policy outside the glare of the American public’s attention.

But I think the government is very limited in what they can do until more US voters get clear on the connection between anti-American sentiment and the neocolonialist outlook and actions of many globalized US companies.

Yet the worst offenders wrap their plundering in the language of free markets, globalization, and patriotism. Hey it isn't patriotic to rip off the world’s poorest with the help of their oppressive governments; it is damn stupid, in these days of portable nukes.

Ayn Rand would roll in her grave at such a distortion of capitalism's intention, which of course is free competition, not state control of the marketplace.

* Hat tip to the World Bank Group's Private Sector Development (PSD) blog for alerting me to Becker’s analysis.

China to prosecute blind farmer who resisted One-Child policy

"Everything that has happened runs counter to Hu Jintao's talk of democracy and governing by law. We live in a nation without law, a nation without morality."

While reading of the draconian official response to Chen’s whistleblowing I found myself recalling Thomas Pentagon’s New Map Barnett’s inane comment about China in his latest book: "China . . .is not really a threat to anyone except small island nations off its coast . . ."

I think there must be a special hell for China's American apologists.

Chinese to Prosecute Peasant Who Resisted One-Child Policy
Decision Reveals Growing Clout of Beijing Hard-Liners
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 8, 2006; Page A12

BEIJING, July 7 -- The Chinese government is preparing to prosecute a blind peasant who exposed excesses by authorities in enforcing the one-child policy in eastern China, where local officials were accused by residents of forcing thousands of people to undergo sterilization or to abort pregnancies. The decision, disclosed by court officials Friday, follows a prolonged bureaucratic stalemate in the ruling Communist Party over how to handle the allegations in the city of Linyi, and it highlights the growing clout of hard-liners in the party since President Hu Jintao took office three years ago.

Chen Guangcheng, 34, the blind rural activist who drew international attention to a violent crackdown on unauthorized births in Linyi last year, is scheduled to be tried July 17 on charges of destruction of property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic, according to his attorney, Li Jinsong.

The charges stem from an incident in March in which Chen is accused of leading a protest against local officials who had illegally confined him to his house and who were beating villagers who tried to help him, Li and residents of Chen's village said.

Chen's trial could renew international scrutiny of China's population-control practices, and it represents a major setback for reformers in the government who have been trying to soften the one-child policy and eliminate the abuses long associated with it.

"There isn't much hope," said Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, by telephone from the family farmhouse, where she has been detained. "Everything that has happened runs counter to Hu Jintao's talk of democracy and governing by law. We live in a nation without law, a nation without morality."

The U.N. Population Fund, which has a significant presence in China, has repeatedly raised Chen's case with the Chinese government, and senior U.S. officials have also pressed the government to release him.

In late May, two U.S. diplomats who tried to visit Yuan were physically removed from the village by local officials, she said.

Nearly a dozen lawyers from Beijing have also attempted to visit the village in recent months without success, and several have reported being threatened, detained or beaten by officials or thugs hired by them.

Li said police allowed him and a colleague to meet with Chen last month, but said they prevented them from discussing his defense. When they tried to visit Chen's village to interview his wife and gather evidence, thugs assaulted them and overturned their car, he said.

"They're afraid of information getting out," said Li, who recorded a death threat he received in Linyi, located 500 miles southeast of Beijing. "They don't want the leadership in Beijing to know the truth about what's happening there."

Before he was detained in September, Chen had tried to organize a class-action lawsuit against Linyi officials, alleging they were illegally forcing parents with two children to be sterilized and women pregnant with a third child to have abortions. Residents also accused officials of detaining and torturing relatives of people who fled the crackdown.

Chen's cause drew support from lawyers, scholars and civic activists across the country, and the government agency responsible for population policies in China, the National Family Planning and Population Commission, launched an investigation in August. At the time, a senior commission official, Yu Xuejun, said he supported the efforts of "ordinary people" in Linyi to assert their rights in the courts, and even offered to help them find lawyers.

A month later, the commission announced it had uncovered evidence of the abuses in Linyi and said some officials there had been fired and detained.

But local authorities fought back, placing Chen under house arrest and launching an aggressive campaign to damage his reputation and deny his allegations. Party sources said Linyi officials distributed a report in Beijing that portrayed Chen as a tool of "foreign anti-China forces," accused him of violating the one-child policy and made much of the fact that he had received overseas funding for his work as an activist on behalf of the disabled.

Linyi officials also lobbied the Foreign Ministry and the powerful Propaganda Department, which agreed to ban any discussion of Chen in the state media and the Internet, the sources said.

For months, the party appeared torn about how to proceed, but the decision to prosecute Chen suggests that the Linyi officials have outmaneuvered others in the government who wanted to use the case to send a strong signal to local officials that forced sterilization and abortion would not be tolerated.

The government has declined to say how many officials were punished in Linyi or to identify any of them, but a Beijing official said "very, very few" were disciplined and a journalist said he was told the total was no more than five. Li Qun, the party chief in Linyi, and other local officials also declined repeated requests for comment.

By linking Chen to hostile foreign forces, party sources said, the Linyi officials made it politically risky for anyone to intervene on his behalf. The national population commission, for example, rebuked Linyi officials and singled them out for criticism, but refrained from defending Chen or bringing the case to top party leaders, the sources said.

"In the current political environment, in this political system, no official has any incentive to help him," said one Chinese scholar involved in the case who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The risks to your career are great, and there's little to be gained . . . . So the conservatives have a big advantage."

Chen's case was also complicated by an internal party debate over the future of the one-child policy. Some party officials and scholars have urged the government to relax the policy, arguing that it now causes more harm than good and that China faces a retirement crisis as its working-age population shrinks. But provincial leaders and others in the party have resisted.

A party official involved in the debate said Hu and others on the ruling Politburo Standing Committee are unwilling to take a position on the issue ahead of a leadership conference next year. As a result, he said, many in the party are not sure whether they should support Chen or condemn the Linyi officials.

Mexico’s Presidential Election: Cucarachas win

REVISED SATURDAY morning

A map of how Mexico voted on Sunday is even more striking than those red-blue maps showing [the US] electoral divide. Relatively wealthy northern states that have prospered from business ties spanning the nearby US border went heavily for [Felipe] Calderon. The poor, distant, left-out southern states went for AMLO [Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador], as did metropolitan Mexico City, where AMLO has served as mayor.
--Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, July 7

Felipe Calderon, who campaigned on the pledge, ‘Let’s have six more years of hoping free-market reforms trickle down to Mexico’s poor,' has been declared the official winner.

Amlo is hotly contesting the tally, of course. It will be settled in the court by September 6 or maybe sooner if Amlo calms down and puts on his thinking cap. The narrowness of Calderon's victory (he won by 35.88%, Amlo won by 35.31%) puts Amlo in a great position to wring concessions out of Mexico’s hopelessly corrupt ruling party.

Already Calderon has felt constrained to offer Amlo a position in the new Cabinet, which underscores Calderon's weak victory. And even after the court rubberstamps the official tally, Mexico’s Congress will still be sharply divided. That observation cuts both ways; there is no question that the majority of Mexico’s middle- and upper class prefer six more years of the known rather than Amlo’s left-leaning populist reforms. So there are advantages for Amlo in being the narrow loser.

All this begs the question: Who is the clearest winner in Mexico’s election? To be kind, one might say “Democracy,” because this presidential election is a big improvement over the last and an impressive 59% Mexicans voted.

But the biggest winners are the banks and companies that charge fees for handling remittance payments from Mexicans working in the USA.

Yet many workers, who send money to relatives back home who've not seen the benefits of Fox's free market reforms, were unable to vote in Mexico’s presidential election. That's because the border-town polls were overwhelmed by the large number of US-based Mexicans who tried to vote.

From anecdotal accounts, the poorest Mexican workers who descended on the border-town polls were voting for Amlo or trying to. Or to be more precise, they were voting to throw out Calderon’s corrupt political party.

If all the US-based Mexicans who tried to vote for Amlo could have done so, would that have given Amlo the quarter million votes he needed to tie or beat Calderon? It certainly would have made Calderon’s victory even narrower.

But then we have to remember that this is Mexico we’re talking about. The ruling class there is still firmly in charge. So, not surprisingly, PAN picked up more congressional seats in the election:

Fox's Party Gains in Mexico Congress, Universal Reports
July 4 - (Bloomberg) -- Mexican President Vicente Fox's National Action Party overtook the Institutional Revolutionary Party as the biggest seat-holder in Congress in the July 2 elections, Universal reported.

Fox's party gained 62 seats in the 500-seat lower house for a total of 210 and six seats in the 128-member Senate, for a total of 53. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades before Fox's 2000 election win, lost 90 seats in the lower house for a total of 113 and 21 seats in the Senate for a total of 37, Universal said.

The figures indicate the National Action Party has the most seats in the both houses of Congress. The Party of The Democratic Revolution has the second-most seats in the lower house and the same number of seats as the Institutional Revolutionary Party in the Senate, Universal said. [...]

More on stalled WTO Doha round of talks

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye responds to Monday's Pundita post on the WTO Doha round, which calls for a Pundita response:

"Dear Pundita:
I've already posted my thoughts on the incipient collapse of the [WTO Geneva] talks here.

Frankly, I have reservations about Robert Wade's analysis. First, consider this lead-off quote:

"Forcing through very low tariffs on industry will not lead to a more even global distribution of income and wealth"

Is that objective a legitimate one? There's a simple way of creating a "more even global distribution of income and wealth": make America poorer. That won't make a single child in Zambia (for example) healthier or prevent him or her from starving. Perhaps it will assuage the guilt of a few European intellectuals.

"This will give you better market access for your agricultural exports, in line with your comparative advantage"

That isn't what Lopez Obrador has been saying in his campaign for the Mexican presidency. What he's been saying is that America's comparative advantage in agriculture is so overwhelming that protections are needed to prevent economic disruption in Mexico.

Well, economic disruption is exactly what's needed. Without it poor people will just stay poor. [Regarding Wade's observation:]

"A recent study of 50 developing countries [with] substantially liberalised trade during 1980-2000 found that only 20% (mostly in east Asia) experienced a significant increase in exports and in value-added manufacturing; half the countries experienced de-industrialisation."

I wish the actual study had been cited in the article. How did they disaggregate the effects of trade liberalization from the effects of China's and India's abandoning their policies of autarky or European countries exporting their industries to China? Or the shell game that those signatories who've actually lived up to their obligations under
the Kyoto Protocol have used to do so?

This strikes me as post hoc propter hoc.

As I noted in my own post I think we ought to abolish agricultural subsidies. But anybody who thinks that abolishing our subsidies will suddenly make Mexican corn (for example) competitive is fantasizing. The numbers just aren't there.

The Europeans and Americans aren't the only ones with market-distorting agricultural subsidies. North Vietnam's (!) enormous subsidies for coffee production have thrown the world coffee market into a cocked hat.
Dave Schuler"

Dear Dave:
I have no quarrel with the observations in your post nor with the criticism you expressed about Wade’s views. However, Pundita is intent on frying bigger fish than agricultural subsidies, which are red herring in the context of analyzing the Doha agenda. To repeat the question I stated in the Monday post: Is the Doha agenda workable under any conditions?

Perhaps I should have made it clearer that I highlighted Professor Wade’s Guardian piece because it specifically addresses the rationale for the Doha round and outlines the ‘counterinsurgent’ Nama agenda. No other article I found on the collapse of the WTO Geneva talks does this.

In short, whatever one might think of Wade’s specific arguments and conclusions, he unerringly goes to the heart of the matter – “trade aid” vs. Nama -- and from there pronounces Doha unworkable. He is right in that regard.

Many Americans (indeed, many outside the trade negotiations!) don’t understand that the Doha round rests on the concept of using trade concessions to aid the development of the poorest countries (which contribute only 1% or less to global trade).

Is fashioning development aid out of laws pertaining to global trade a helpful, let alone rational, approach to aiding the LDCs? The approach certainly plays havoc with the concept of free trade and undercuts the rationale for a trading organization, which of course has the objective of trade and not global development aid!

And of course it sweeps development aid issues under the rug of trade deals. It is also patently unfair to the most productive developing countries, which, after climbing out of LDC status, are expected by the Doha round to make trade concessions to the LDCs in a manner that even the richest developed country can balk at!

Indeed, the concept behind the Doha round is so screwy that one has to look at the historical context to understand how it came about: The round was launched in November 2001 –- two months after it was brought home to the world’s most productive nations that the least productive countries make a great breeding ground for terrorism.

And even as early as 2001 Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and others in the EU were viewing with concern the massive debt that several African nations had incurred. At that time they were casting around for ways to reduce the debt without actually writing it off. (A debt write-off was out of the question from the US side.) They saw in the idea of using trade deals to fashion development aid a means to offset the debt payment burden for the poorest countries.

Also, by 2001, the multilateralism espoused by the Chirac School of foreign policy, and which underpinned the creation of the World Trade Organization, was running afoul of the harshest realities of unrestricted globalized free markets for the poorest nations. Here’s a representative sample of the criticism of WTO and globalization that had built by early 2001:

As for the so-called positive relationship between free trade and growth, the emerging consensus is laid out by Harvard Professor Dani Rodrik:

"Do lower trade barriers spur greater economic progress? The available studies reveal no systematic relationship between a country's average level of tariff and non-tariff barriers and its subsequent economic growth. If anything, the evidence for the 1990's indicates a positive relationship between import tariffs and economic growth.

“The only clear pattern is that countries dismantle their trade restrictions as they grow richer. This finding explains why today's rich countries, with few exceptions, embarked on modern economic growth behind protective barriers but now display low trade barriers."

In the face of such evidence, C. Fred Bergsten, the head of Washington's Institute of International Economics (IIE), a noted partisan of free trade and the WTO, now says that there "has to be an honest recognition and admission that [free market globalization] has costs and losers," [that] "globalization does increase income and social disparities within countries" and "does leave some countries and groups behind."
--March 2001, Walden Bello, Bangkok Post

Whether or not you agree with Bergsten’s conclusion, it represented the climate of opinion in 2001, which set the stage for the first Doha round.

However, the grand idea behind Doha did not go swimmingly well in actual practice. In fact, it went virtually nowhere except to generate a lot of paperwork and meetings and generally irritate everyone at the subsequent negotiation rounds. By the time of the Hong Kong Doha round in December 2005, the developing countries were in full-scale revolt.

At the conference they formed a coalition of the poorer countries (the Hong Kong 100, by now grown to 110) to demand the impossible: that the rich countries live up to the principle on which the Doha round was founded. The revolt was led by the more developed countries; specifically, India and Brazil, with China quietly egging them on.(1)

Now watch carefully; don’t blink: Because the Doha principle is unworkable, why go to war over it? Well, do we honestly expect India and China to sit up nights worrying about the plight of African governments that are so corrupt and inept that giving them more aid in any form is pouring money into a black hole?

And do we expect the trade ministers in the up-and-coming countries to go along with trade concessions to the LDCs that they didn’t receive when they joined the WTO?

To put it bluntly, staging a revolt was the only way to grind Doha to a halt and thus, hold onto trading advantages for the most productive developing countries. That is why the collapse of the next round of talks (last week in Geneva) was a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, India’s trade minister pronounced the talks a bust before they got underway. He even refused to be on time for the opening of the conference on the insulting excuse that he wanted to watch a World Cup game between Germany and Argentina. (Argentina’s trade rep showed up on time for the conference.)

Through such actions India’s government is saying that if the WTO is going to create laws that strong-arm the poorer countries into charity under the rubric of trade, India declares the trade talks –- and WTO -- a farce.

Here Pundita must pause to remind the naïve among our readers that of course India and the other productive developing countries do not come right out and say all that. How can they, without being perceived as – er, not terribly concerned about the world’s poorest? In lieu of bluntness they mounted a storm of protest that they knew would break against the iron will of the richest countries, thereby neatly collapsing Doha.

Professor Wade’s view clearly does not question the rationality of the Doha round; he seems to believe that what we really need is a round of talks with more teeth than Doha. So he does not question the concept on which Doha is founded, whereas Pundita does – and which I argue any reasonable person without a degree in economics should.

If one is tempted to laugh at the thought that trade laws could really be used as outright aid: realize that the same scoundrels dug in and around the United Nations are not playing when they call for the rich to completely turn out their pockets to the poor.

Calls are mounting to make the WTO more “democratic” in its decision-making process by establishing a parliamentary system of voting; indeed, the idea has had trouble getting off the ground only because of arguments that the rich countries at WTO would still have means to circumvent a parliamentary system of voting. (1)

The Jeffrey Sachs contingent wants the world’s poorest nations, which again I stress contribute 1% or less to world trade, to have as much say on trade matters as the world’s most productive nations.

That’s where things are heading; perhaps all that has saved us to this point from such madness is the common sense of the most productive developing countries. They don’t like being on a decision-making par with nations that are a bottomless pit for aid; neither should any sensible government negotiating trade deals.

1) For a very clear primer on the issues cited by the Hong Kong 100, see two articles at the BBC website; they're a 'must' read if you're trying to understand the current impasse at the trade talks and the larger issues pertaining to the Doha round:

POOR NATIONS UNITE AT TRADE TALKS and Key issues at the Hong Kong talks.

2) From Wikipedia:

While most international organisations operate on a one country, one vote or even a weighted voting basis, many WTO decisions, such as adopting agreements (and revisions to them) are officially determined by consensus of all member states. The advantage of consensus decision-making is that it encourages efforts to find the most widely acceptable decision.

Main disadvantages include large time requirements and many rounds of negotiation to develop a consensus decision, and the tendency for final agreements to use ambiguous language on contentious points that makes future interpretation of treaties difficult.

In reality, WTO negotiations proceed not by consensus of all members, but by a process of informal negotiations between small groups of countries. Such negotiations are often called "Green Room" negotiations (after the colour of the WTO Director-General's Office in Geneva), or "Mini-Ministerials", when they occur in other countries. These processes have been regularly criticised by many of the WTO's developing country members which are often totally excluded from the negotiations.

WTO Doha Round: Trade Aid vs Nama Agenda

I've bumped today's post on crony capitalism until after the 4th. I want to start plowing into the debacle at the WTO trade talks. The stalemate at Geneva this past weekend gives signs of ringing down the curtain on the Doha round of trade talks, which started in November 2001. (For a look at various points of view on the failed talks see the next post.)

Pundita’s question is whether the Doha agenda is workable under any conditions. The agenda rests on the concept of using trade concessions to aid the development of the poorest countries (which contribute 1% or less to global trade).

Is this approach to aiding the LDCs a rational basis for trade deals between virtually all the world's countries? Today, only 15 small nations have no involvement with the World Trade Organization; all the rest belong to WTO, or have observer status there and/or are working on entry to the WTO).

Anger about perceived US and EU obstructionism over the issues of agricultural subsidies and tariffs diverts attention from the bald fact that the 'advanced' developing countries are not happy with WTO trade aid (which amounts to trade concessions) to the least developed countries. The concessions give the LDCs a big edge over the ADCs in trade with the most developed countries.

Those who see in the stalled WTO talks a further challenge to multilateralism are looking at things from 11 years ago, when the WTO evolved out of the old boy’s club called the International Trade Organization. Today, so many countries belong to WTO – each country representing for their own interests – that the sheer volume and complexity of trade issues forces many countries into bilateral agreements and regionalized trading blocs.

So where does this leave the Little Guys? Well, right now they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. One hundred of the world’s developing nations staged a revolution at the WTO talks in Hong Kong in December. They refused to make any more tariff and subsidy compromises with the developed nations until the intention of the Doha round (trade aid) was honored.

The HK 100 again stuck to their guns at the Geneva talks this weekend; India’s lead trade negotiator walked out of the meeting and pronounced it a bust even before the conference got under way.

Robert Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics and author of Governing the Market, hopes the Doha round is dead. He argues in today’s UK Guardian that the Nama agenda (which he explains in the following piece) has overrun the Doha agenda.

He’s right. But again, we need to look at the big picture of today’s trade negotiations before hoping a new, improved round of talks will rise from the ashes of the Doha round. First, though, we’ll look at where things stand from the professor’s point of view:

The Doha talks must fail for the sake of the world's poor
By Robert Wade
The Guardian
Monday July 3, 2006

"Forcing through very low tariffs on industry will not lead to a more even global distribution of income and wealth

"Among those who care about multilateral trade negotiations the air is thick with talk of crisis in the Doha trade round. Should we be crossing our fingers that agreement is reached around the sort of deal that the parties are negotiating? Pascal Lamy, the World Trade Organisation's director general, says that the price of "failure" would be high.

"The question is: high to whom? The price of failure to agree a deal within the current parameters would certainly be high for the developed countries; but it is not clear that it would be high for most developing countries. To simplify: developed countries have low tariffs on industrial and service imports and high tariffs (or other forms of protection) on agricultural imports. Developing countries have substantial tariffs on industrial and service imports and on some agricultural imports.

"In the Doha round, developed countries are saying to developing ones: "You must make cuts in industrial, service and agricultural tariffs, and then we will make cuts in our agricultural tariffs and other agricultural supports. This will give you better market access for your agricultural exports, in line with your comparative advantage; and we will get better market access for our industrial, service and agricultural exports."

"The developed countries are insistent that developing countries make big cuts in protection on non-agricultural imports, so much so as to yield the acronym Nama (non-agricultural market access). The developed countries are making a big push to get developing countries to accept Nama proposals.

"Most developing countries face serious dangers of de-industrialisation if they accept the basic terms of this negotiation. They risk becoming more specialised than at present in the production of primary commodities and simple, labour-intensive products, and even less diversified in the production of more complex, rich country goods.

"This may suit the collective interest of developed countries quite well, but it would be a bad result for the world. I take it as given that the world interest (at least of the human species) favours a more equal distribution of income and wealth. My argument is that faster, catch-up economic growth and industrialisation in developing countries is unlikely in conditions of free trade, for at least three reasons.

"First, virtually no country has managed to industrialise and become "advanced" without going through a stage of protecting new basic industries. As the domestic industrial sector became deeper the now-advanced countries liberalised their trade selectively and gradually.

"The colonies of these countries were forced to liberalise quickly and unselectively, and experienced rapid de-industrialisation. It is a general law of industrialisation that more advanced countries try to open the markets of less advanced ones to their products, claiming that doing so is good for all.

"Second, industrialisation in today's developing countries is unlikely in conditions of free trade because they will then tend to specialise in exports from their existing efficient industries and agricultures. Their further development depends on diversifying into higher value-added activities in which they are not presently efficient. Their diversification into new activities is unlikely without the use of industrial policy, including both tariffs and other forms of support.

"A recent study of 50 developing countries which substantially liberalised trade during 1980-2000 found that only 20% (mostly in east Asia) experienced a significant increase in exports and in value-added manufacturing; half the countries experienced de-industrialisation.

"Third, the developed countries have tightened their protection of new technologies through the WTO's trade-related intellectual property (Trips) agreement, making it more difficult for developing countries to obtain advanced technologies than in the more permissive regime when today's advanced countries were developing.

"So the developing countries should strenuously resist the Nama agenda. They should push for rules that allow developing countries more latitude to set tariff levels in line with the maturity of their industries, and with variation rather than uniformity in tariffs across industries in line with differences in the time needed for upgrading. And they should push for relaxation of Trips.

"No one is saying that such trade rules guarantee success. Trade protection, like any powerful instrument, can be used well or it can be used badly as it has been in Latin America, India, New Zealand and elsewhere. On the other hand, we can be fairly sure that by forcing developing countries to move quickly to very low tariffs on industry, the Doha round, if it "succeeds", will push many developing countries towards de-industrialisation.

"In which case, better that it "fails". Then the newly assertive bloc of leading developing countries could take the initiative for a new trade round within more sensible parameters. So no crossed-fingers for the "success" of the Doha round."
R.Wade@lse.ac.uk

Six news reports on stalled WTO talks

US alone can lead the WTO salvage mission
Seetha
DNA India
Sunday, July 02, 2006
"[ . . .] US trade representative Susan Schwab came to Geneva, say sources in the Indian [WTO] delegation, with no mandate to move forward on agricultural subsidies. The huge subsidies the US gives to its farmers enable them to sell their products cheap in the world market, making it difficult for other countries to compete, they add. The last US offer was a 53% cut in these subsidies. In return, it wanted very substantial cuts in agricultural tariffs globally.

"The US’ rigid position stood out from that of the EU, which expressed its willingness to extend tariff cuts from 39% to 50%, provided the former climb down on the agricultural subsidies front. WTO director-general Pascal Lamy, who has the responsibility of salvaging the round lies, will have his work cut out in persuading the US to yield ground. But even assuming he gets some concessions from the US on agriculture, the question of industrial tariffs still remains. The battle for the developing countries will be tougher here, because the US and the EU — at daggers drawn on agriculture — stand together on this. They want a tariff cut formula that will mean developing countries will undertake big cuts, something the latter are not ready to concede.

"If the US makes improved offers on agriculture, it will demand its pound of flesh on industrial tariffs. That will clearly put Nath in a cleft stick, caught between the need to protect agriculture and industry.

"Nath has been making the point that the Doha Round is a development round and is all about increasing trade flows from developing countries to the developed countries, and not the other way around. But it’s not clear if the developed bloc will pay much heed to this."

http://www.dnaindia.com/
report.asp?NewsID=1039153

India expects new talks to break WTO deadlock
Mumbai Mirror Bureau

"[India's Commerce and Industry Minister] Kamal Nath wanted to come back from Geneva two days before the meeting ended as there was no negotiating space at WTO

"New Delhi: “I cannot be in a meet that does not recognise Indian farmers’ need. I had gone to Geneva to see what Indian farmers can get and not what they can give,” Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said on his arrival here on Sunday after he pulled out of the WTO Mini Ministerial meet as Indian farmers’ interests were not being protected at the meet.

"He, however, hoped for new talks by July-end to break an impasse in World Trade Organisation negotiations which collapsed in Geneva on the weekend. The December 2006 deadline for completing Doha round now seems quite difficult with the Geneva talks collapsing.

"The Minister disclosed that he had decided to return from Geneva two days before the meeting was scheduled to end as there was no point of continuing as the major trade powers failed to make any breakthrough.

“I came to the conclusion that there is just not any negotiating space, because there is really a difference of perception. We could not have been part of any agreement that does not address the development concerns of developing nations,” Kamal Nath told Mumbai Mirror.

"On the US charge that the developing countries were seeking protection for 98 per cent of their products, Nath noted that they were in fact seeking 100 per cent protection for their agriculture and infant industries. It is a period of reflection for developed countries as they could provide leadership to strengthen a multilateral trading system.

"India’s stand has been endorsed by 110 developing countries, which feel that developed countries should give something for the betterment of the developing nations. Nath added, “We want a pact at WTO which increases our economic growth from 8-9 per cent to 10-11 per cent and it cannot subscribe to an agreement that brings it down to four-five per cent.”

"At WTO, the developing countries are demanding greater access to the agricultural markets of developed countries while the industrialised nations want the developing countries to open up their markets for services and industrial goods.

"The talks are stuck because no agreement is in sight on cut in agriculture tariffs and domestic subsidies that developed countries should make so that products from developing countries could enter their markets and compete.

“We could not have been part of any agreement that does not address the development concerns of developing nations”

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/nmirror/
mmpaper.asp?sectid=13&articleid=
7220062275043772200622719796

Poor states ‘let down’ as WTO talks falter
by Mathabo Le Roux
Business Day
"[ . . .] South Africa's chief trade negotiator, Xavier Carim, called the line taken by the US and the European Union (EU) “anti-developmental” and out of touch with the agreement reached at Doha that poorer countries should benefit from the round. “We’re really running out of time,” Carim said. There was, however, a sharper understanding of the critical issues that needed to be breached.

"The key issues that remain are the extent to which the US is prepared to reduce agricultural subsidies and the EU’s standing on the reduction of agricultural tariffs.

“With the EU it is a matter that they say they are prepared to do more, but there is no indication of what that means. It is a very nebulous offer,” Carim said.
The other issue that remains, from a developed world viewpoint, is developing countries’ failure to move on a reduction on industrial tariffs.

"Developing countries are, however, exasperated at the extent of reductions in industrial tariffs demanded by developed countries, with one commentator from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) calling it “a joke”.

"The industrial tariffs were a different dynamic, with developed countries proposing tariff cuts which could be damaging to industrial development in the developing world, Carim said.

"On the table is a demand for tariff cuts of up to 70% on industrial goods, which he called extremely severe.

“It does not compare with what they are prepared to give on agriculture, and in terms of industrial discussions they are offering reductions of 23%. There is complete imbalance.”

"South African trade union representatives who attended the Geneva talks said a commitment on industrial tariffs could have severe implications, preventing SA from formulating and implementing “decent industrial policy” aimed at economic growth and job creation.

“Above all, we feel this must be a real development round, without new demands for concessions from us,” said Cosatu economist Neva Makgetla. “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

"Not all developing countries would lose if the demand on industrial policies was pushed though, said a Cosatu spokesman."

http://www.businessday.co.za/
articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A225713

[Australia] PM blames Europe over WTO talks
By Shane Wright
Australia Finance News
July 03, 2006

"PRIME Minister John Howard today blamed Europe for the near collapse of world trade talks, saying it had to go further to slash farm protection levels.

"Mr Howard, who may be dragged into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks directly, said it was European intransigence on agricultural protection that was putting the negotiations at risk.

"The leaders of the G6 grouping - Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, European Union (EU) and the United States - may have to involve their leaders in a summit to break the deadlock on the trade talks.

"It follows the failure of world trade ministers to come to an agreement on a framework that would pave the way for cuts in farm subsidies and tariffs, and greatly increase quotas for agricultural goods.

"WTO Director-general Pascal Lamy has been given the job of talking directly to major players during the next four weeks to hammer out some type of agreement. Failure on his part could have the talks, that have already been going for five years, drag on indefinitely.

"Mr Howard said Europe and Japan had so far failed to match the more ambitious proposals put up by the US that would go some way to opening trade in agricultural products across the globe.

"The Americans, to their credit, got the ball rolling, and unless there's an adequate response from the Europeans it won't happen," he told Macquarie radio.

"So I still believe that the big stumbling block is the intransigence of the European Union."

"A recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report found the EU paid its farmers more than $180 billion worth of protection during 2005 - the most by any developed nation bloc.

"But Mr Howard remained upbeat that despite the major setbacks facing the WTO, the negotiations had not completely collapsed.

"It is critical that we don't allow these talks to fall over, but they'll fall over unless the countries that practice the highly protectionist agricultural policies - and that's the Americans, the European Union and the Japanese - agree to reduce their protection," he said.

"Australian farmers were not so upbeat, with the National Farmers' Federation expressing fears there may not be a deal for some time.

"Federation president David Crombie said that unless the international community worked together, any chance to slash agricultural protection could be lost.

"Because of the lack of movement from the European Union on agricultural-market access and, as a result, no further movement from the United States on agricultural domestic support, precious little has been achieved this week," Mr Crombie said.
"It now looks most unlikely that agreement on a final Doha deal will be reached any time soon - this will be a severe blow to Australian farmers."

"Trade Minister Mark Vaile, who took part in the Geneva talks, said the failure so far to reach a deal could be a wake-up call for the WTO and its 149 member nations.

"You need to have a near death experience to sort of, crack open the door, if you like, to move to the next stage," he told ABC radio.

"The events of the last couple of days and this impasse is what could be loosely called a near death experience."

http://finance.news.com.au/story/
0,10166,19668571-462,00.html

Call for Lamy to step in after talks stalemate
By Alan Beattie and Frances Williams in Geneva
Financial Times
July 3 2006 03:00

"Leading countries in the Doha round of trade talks have asked Pascal Lamy, head of the World Trade Organisation, to broker a deal between them after a meeting of ministers this weekend was deadlocked from the start.

"The Geneva-based talks, involving several dozen ministers, stalled as soon as they opened on Friday. The US again demanded bigger cuts in farm tariffs while most other countries once more said Washington should first cut farm subsidies, a stand-off that Mr Lamy said would lead to crisis. The talks, planned to continue until today, petered out on Saturday.

"With an end-July deadline for agreeing the size of tariff and subsidy cuts looming, the Group of Six - the US, EU, Japan, Brazil, Australia and India - asked Mr Lamy to mediate between them. Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, scotched rumours that Mr Lamy would produce his own proposed text, saying: "Pascal Lamy should act as the catalyst, but not the author of an agreement."

"Mr Lamy will report back in two weeks on whether a G6 deal is possible. Mr Mandelson said heads of government could also be asked to break the logjam.

"At the weekend Washington was often a lone voice calling for much biggercuts in farm tariffs. Brazil, a prodigious agricultural exporter and usually aUS ally in farm talks, this time put pragmatism and solidarity first, lining up with other developing countries to say that US stubbornness was preventing progress.

"The EU is trying further to isolate the US by reaching an accord on farm tariffs with the influential Group of 20 developing countries, led by Brazil.

"Brussels is privately talking about a 51 per cent average cut in tariffs; its first offer of 39 per cent was widely derided as inadequate.

"The new figure would be close to the G20's proposal, which by most calculations is a 54 per cent average cut but which the EU reckons is 52 per cent. Both are well below the US's call for an average 67 per cent reduction.

"The theatre of combat this weekend involved proposals to let governments protect farm products from across-the-board cuts in agricultural tariffs. Susan Schwab, US trade representative, said the problem was the "three Ss" - the "sensitive" and "special" products on which cuts can be reduced or eliminated, and the "special safeguard mechanism" that allows poor countries to block sudden surges in farm imports.

"A group of more than 40 developing countries, led by Indonesia, want to be able to protect at least 20 per cent of all types of farm products to help their small farmers and rural communities. The US cited a recent calculation by WTO staff that some developing countries with farming concentrated in a few products could protect more than 90 per cent of their actual production. Washington wants them restricted to 1-2 per cent of all types of farm products.

"Mike Johanns, US agriculture secretary, said: "Tariff cuts cannot be undermined by open-ended loopholes."

"Mari Pangestu, the Indonesian trade minister who wants to protect rice growers, said WTO members had already agreed that countries could designate "special products" based on agreed criteria.

"The US cannot tell us what is and is not eligible," she said. "We agreed to an appropriate number of special products, not a limited one."

"The US and EU also continued an arcane squabble about how much the US plan for cutting subsidies would actually constrain American farm spending.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/
14c287da-0a30-11db-ac3b-
0000779e2340.html