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March 14, 2006
Economists for Sweatshops
Henry and I are reading Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty this week. The gist of his argument is that it’s unjustifiable to have a sixth of the global population in such desperate poverty that they must struggle for day to day survival; that the key is for well off countries to lower “the ladder of development” into these countries to allow them to climb up on their own. “The ladder of development” means aid, it means debt cancellation, it means international pressure for responsible governing.
In his introduction, Sachs lays out some examples of countries as reference points along the ladder’s development continuum. Malawi doesn’t have a ladder, he says. The picture Sachs paints is a country of small farmers, a country ravaged by malaria and AIDS, a country without the funds to afford preventative medicines and without the infrastructure to deliver them. No ladder.
One rung above Malawi is Bangladesh, with a thriving economy of “apparel firms” (read: sweatshops). Raised as I was to be label-conscious of the manufacturer’s labor practices, it turns my stomach a bit to think that sweatshops can be one rung above anything. But I suppose that’s a function of my swanky American passport, too.
I lived with a group of Bushmen just outside Tsumkwe, Namibia for a little while a few years ago. Bigwig anthropologist John Marshall was staying in the same place, and after a few drinks we would get into some lively debates. It’s near impossible to legislate fair land use policies to help maintain “the hunter gatherer lifestyle.” Most of the Bushmen themselves would rather herd cattle and dig boreholes (wells) and go to school than to try to survive within the traditional means, especially when land has been roped and barbed-wired off so that they’re expected to live on a tiny fraction of the land they once traveled across. The lifestyle is unsustainable. Still, our romantic notions of The Gods Must Be Crazy’s “simpler way of life are hard to rid ourselves of.
The same could be said of Malawi and Bangladesh—it seems antithetical to my every hippie romantic notion that sweatshop work could be preferable to subsistence farming. My friends at Students against Sweatshops would loathe to hear him say it, but it’s hard to argue with Jeff Sachs when he says that to demand these “apparel firms” raise wages would be “a ticket back to rural misery.”
He also brings up remittances as an important step on the way to economic self sufficiency. Henry and I are thinking of putting a show together on this topic.
Counterpoint: This American Life did a piece a while back about the Cambodian government trying to institute their own fair labor practices in the garment industry as a country: search the TAL archives for “David and Goliath” and take a listen.
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Blog Search by Location
Often for ROS web features we try to find bloggers who can speak authoritatively about the place where they live (or hail from originally).
Unfortunately, none of the blog searches I know of allow you to restrict your search by location tag. Type in “Dubai blogger” into Technorati a few days after a major news peg like the ports deal, and you’re likely to get a bunch of Americans and Brits pontificating, and no man-on-the-ground perspective from Dubai.
Tricks I use to circumnavigate blogspace and find those regional bloggers:
-If the city I’m looking for has a MetroBlogging community, that can be a great way to find a cluster of folks who want to talk about their town.
- If I can find one site that uses Google’s Blogger interface, the tags for location are linked to other blogs with the same location tag. Unfortunately though, if one person enters their location as “Dubai” and one as “UAE” and one as “United Arab Emirates,” they won’t help you find each other.
-In Technorati and Google BlogSearch and the other engines, I find the best way to find the locals is to enter specific search strings: “life in Karachi” rather than ”Pakistan,” etc.
But those are really all I’m working with thus far. (If you’ve got tips and tricks or search engines that can restrict for location, please do send them along).
For now, since the ROS guys have been making valiant efforts to synchronize their rolodexes, I’ve been trying to keep a record of my favorite regional bloggers who group their blogrolls by location.
Selections:
Iraqi and Afghan blogs:
Dave Shuler edits Carnival of the Liberated, a digest of Iraqi and Afghan blogs. He posted a “greatest hits 2005” back in September at his own blog, The Glittering Eye .
Israeli blogs:
Lisa Goldman (a great friend to Open Source, also the regional Global Voices editor), On the Face
EB, OneJerusalem.com
Imshin, Not a Fish
Palestinian blogs:
Haitham Sabbah, Sabbah’s blog
Laila El-Haddad, A Mother from Gaza
Much much more to come.
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dubai?
If Congress’ reaction to the ports mess was any indication, we were blind-sided by Dubai. But while Congress was tearing their hair out over national security and xenophobia, the real story takes place on their shores, not ours.
Dubai is the fastest growing city on the planet. It’s not vast oil reserves that allows Dubai to bust out all over. Compared to brother-emirate Abu Dhabi, the oil reserves are actually running pretty low. The source is tourism and investment money that used to come to us.
Not finding the U.S. or our economy particularly inviting since the war on terror, many Arab investors have turned to Dubai, and the proof is in the skyline. The riviera is a cluster of cranes and scaffolding, punctuated by skyscrapers that cut impossible streaks into the sky. An indoor ski slope. An underwater hotel. The tallest building in the world, shaped like a giant lighting rod. No more room on the beachfront? No problem. They simply manufacture more.
You might have heard about Palm Island, the man made archipelago of islands that reaches out from the coastline in the shape of (you guessed it) a palm tree, its "leaves" reaching out like grabby fingers. It looks laughable from above until you realize that Mama evolution has been churning out prototypes of the Palm Island blueprint for millennia-- whenever you need a major surface area bang for your volume buck, branching is the way to go. Leaves get more contact with the air to pull water up and out, bronchioles in lungs get more of a shot to leech out more poisons from the air you take in, Palm Island realtors get 78 MILES of brand new coastline within the swanky Dubai zipcode to develop.
The Guardian’s Adam Nicolson says Dubai is “Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”
Is Dubai the next London, the next New York? Is this the face of the empire that will succeed us?
[Check out the resultant show here]
Posted by Greta Pemberton at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack