New Internationalist articles from March 2004

New Internationalist archives from March 2004

From this month's editors.
March 1, 2004... THE 60th anniversary of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this year is a birthday most of the world will feel disinclined to celebrate. But it is one we felt we had to mark, if only as a token of our determination not to...

Hidden sugar.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... Thanks for bringing the sugar trap (NI 363) to light. About six months ago, I was put on an anti-Candida diet for chronic tiredness. I have had to cut all forms of refined sugar, and some fruit sugars, out of my diet completely. Initially, it...

New norm.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I recently asked my 12-year-old daughter which girls in her basketball team were fat. She told me none. I consider that at least four of the girls in her team are overweight for their height and age. The new fat body shape is becoming the norm....

Soft on fluoride.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... In your article 'Dirty Business' (NI 363), you present two sides of a story about fluorine toxicity in the workers (and their families) employed by a Dutch sugar company, HVA, in Ethiopia. The crux of the story is that the townspeople were...

Free from compulsion.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... The article on Overeaters Anonymous ('Hungry Ghosts', The Sugar Trap, NI 363) is quite welcome. We are an organization based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous that have provided for many a recovery from compulsive eating. ...

Cheap show.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... John F Schumacher's 'Starstruck' (Essay, NI 363) offered a classic rehearsal of the intellectual Left's inability seriously to grasp and engage with popular culture. It is surely a mistake in a 'media-saturated' world to confuse visibility...

Psychotherapy industry.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... The cult of celebrity ('Starstruck', NI 363) is a sad reflection of a cultural void affecting some societies throughout the world. Sociologists and political commentators rightly point out that this pervasive insistence on the triviality of...

Apt apology.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I was disappointed and shocked that NI put 'Cannibals apologize to the eaten' (NI 363) in your Seriously... column. What is so absurd about a group of people apologizing for the 'sins of their fathers'? In fact Australian politicians could...

Pharma's reach.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... As a fifth-year medical student I read your Big Pharma (NI 362) issue with much interest. I feel that health professionals need to be careful in our choice of prescriptions and to be aware of the impact that pharmaceutical marketing has upon...

What's in a name.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... Even the NI can't resist the power of Big Pharma's brand names (NI 362)! All drugs invented since 1951 have an International Nonproprietary Name (INN) approved by the World Health Organization and used throughout the world. Regulators,...

Different take.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... I was surprised to find out in 'Pipelines to Power' (Keynote, NI 361) that Israel was shunned by the Middle East for its position on Palestine. I had been under the impression that it was being shunned because of its unusually high...

The fast track: Reem Haddad witnesses a computer-assisted end to bureaucracy.(Letter from Lebanon)
March 1, 2004... THE elderly man couldn't believe it at first. 'You mean,' he said, incredulously, 'I just ask for what I want and you give it to me now?' The woman behind the desk nodded, looking a little bored. I was curious myself and waited to see if...

Highlighting the work of photographers from the majority world.(Southern Exposure)
March 1, 2004... The dancer While trying to do an assignment of my own at an artists' camp I spotted the dancer. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A fellow artist doing his own performance near the Kandalama Lake at Dambulla. I stood there for a while...

Artists of pain and hope.(View from the South)
March 1, 2004... IN societies going through tremendous suffering, how does a writer delve deeply into the pain all around them but not be overwhelmed by it? How does an artist hold a mirror to the lives of people tormented by poverty and social dislocation...

Pain and freedom: 200th anniversary of slave uprising casts light on troubled present.(Haiti)
March 1, 2004... Two hundred years ago, following a slave uprising, Haiti threw off the yoke of bondage to become a free black state and a haven for escaped African slaves. This was a decisive moment in the eventual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade....

Sudanese truth and reconciliation.(Currents)
March 1, 2004... Sudan's fledgling civil society is demanding a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)--along the lines of South Africa's after apartheid--to ensure peace in a country that has witnessed Africa's longest-running conflict. The Government...

Pharaohs-in-waiting?(Currents)
March 1, 2004... At 75 he is the longest-serving President in Egypt's history, but after 22 years of rule President Hosni Mubarak is increasingly isolated and ailing. Popular anger is rising in the face of his resistance to introducing democratic reform, while...

Good to talk: mobile phones reinforce oral traditions and create new opportunities in Africa.(Communications)
March 1, 2004... THE cellphone has brought the past into the future by reinforcing Africans' oral traditions. Their insatiable appetite for mobiles has made the continent a profitable market for the high-tech gadgets, which were introduced only a decade ago....

In the bag.(Currents)
March 1, 2004... The Irish call it the 'national flag'; in South Africa it is known as the 'national flower'. The plastic bag is surely the most ubiquitous consumer item on earth. Between four and five trillion (million million) were produced in 2002, most...

Speechmarks.(Currents)
March 1, 2004... "It takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law." Albert Einstein (1879-1955) on his own religious belief.

Brothel.(Word Corner)
March 1, 2004... Brothel is from breothan, an Old English word meaning to go to ruin, or degenerate. A brothel first meant a wretch or scoundrel, and later a prostitute; it acquired its modern meaning because of confusion with the completely separate word...

Time bombs: the legacy of cluster bombs is as lethal as landmines.(Arms)
March 1, 2004... FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Teng was working in the fields when his hoe hit what he thought was a stone. It exploded on impact, leaving Teng blinded in both eyes and with most of his left hand blown away. Teng was not the victim of one of the...

Militias active in West Papua.(Currents)
March 1, 2004... Human-rights observers fear that violence in the easterly Indonesian province of West Papua is set to spiral as the indefinite detention and arbitrary killing of West Papuan independence advocates increases (see NI 344, West Papua: 'We Will Be...

Situations vacant: 'assistant planters'.(Seriously ...)
March 1, 2004... When campaigners hit hard against unethical industries, the perpetrators often turn to spin. And it's been going on longer than you might imagine. In a fascinating history of the early 18th century anti-slavery movement Adam Hochschild...

No such thing as a ...(Currents)
March 1, 2004... Clutching a dodgy biro? No, we don't mean a leaky one--we mean the logo your pen may be sporting. If you read our recent issue on Big Pharma (NI 362) you'll know just how many freebies drug sales reps give doctors--and the evidence shows their...

The power and the folly: unelected, unapproachable, indefensible. Chris Brazier introduces the IMF and the World Bank.(Keynote)
March 1, 2004... THE closest thing we have had to a world government over the last two-and-a-half decades is not the United States, despite its own tendency to behave as if that were the case. Nor is it the United Nations, still flailing around trying to assert...

States of Unrest.(Resistance)
March 1, 2004... Although 'anti-globalization' events in the North command press attention, a far deeper and more wide-ranging movement which has been developing for years in the global South has been largely ignored by the media. The World Development Movement...

The hospital that makes you sicker: Joseph Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. He was chief economist of the World Bank between 1997 and 2000. So when he says that the IMF are 'free-market fundamentalists' working in the interests of Wall Street, the world ought to sit up and listen. The NI interviewed him in London.(IMF Failure)
March 1, 2004... You say you have been forced to the conclusion that the IMF works in the interests of Western capital. This seems a remarkable view for a former chief economist of the World Bank. I watched carefully what the IMF had done, the mistakes that...

Wild West goes East: when communism collapsed, the World Bank marched into the Former Soviet Union with privatization agenda in hand. Peter Griffiths, one of the consultants employed, witnessed the ensuing horrors.(Russia)
March 1, 2004... IN the 1980s the World Bank developed an extreme free-market solution to be applied everywhere, regardless of the problem. Privatize everything, remove government controls, remove all subsidies, let the markets set prices, have free-market...

IMF/World Bank the facts.
March 1, 2004... Origins The World Bank and the IMF were formed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, called to establish a new global economic order at the end of World War Two. The influential economist John Maynard Keynes proposed a stable, fair...

Globalizing greenwash: after a string of environmental disasters associated with its projects and years of criticism, the World Bank promised in the early 1990s to clean up its act and become a lean green funding machine. Pamela Foster inspects the Bank's track record over the last 10 years and isn't convinced.(Environment)
March 1, 2004... FOR 15 days in 1991, Medha Patkar, social scientist and community leader, was effectively left to starve by those backing the construction of the giant Sardar Sarovar dam project in the Narmada valley in India. This slight woman was on a hunger...

IMF and the environment.(Environment)
March 1, 2004... Only sustainable economic growth--a central aim of the IMF's policy advice--can generate the additional resources needed to address environmental problems. Ideally, the environment benefits from virtuous circles in which sustainable economic...

No prescription needed: work with us, don't just criticize, said the World Bank President. But when his joint review with the SAPRIN network showed the failure of Bank-imposed policies, he bailed out, as Mark Engler reports.(Constructive Engagement)
March 1, 2004... THE World Bank has long been confronted with studies documenting the harmful impact of its policies. Normally Bank officials dismiss these critical reports out of hand. But they find it more difficult to challenge the validity of the Structural...

Structurally adjust this ...: you might think that we don't approve of the Bank and Fund's policy prescriptions--but you'd be wrong. Adam Ma'anit argues that such 'reforms' are perfectly capable of lifting the world out of poverty--if only they were applied to the World Bank and IMF instead.(Satire)
March 1, 2004... HERE'S a prescription to be liberally applied as needed. Downsize and economize The World Bank and the IMF together employ approximately 13,000 staff worldwide. This is almost the same number as the whole of the UN. Meanwhile the Bank...

... imagine that! Alternatives to corporate-led globalization abound. Adam Ma'anit sees the beginnings of a post-IMF/World Bank world emerging.(Alternatives)
March 1, 2004... If we take as a starting point the goal of any economy to be one that serves the needs of people rather than the other way around, then imagining a post-IMF/World Bank future really isn't that much of a stretch. It's a vision thing. The...

Resistance is fertile!
March 1, 2004... Join the movements and campaigns challenging the IMF and World Bank's economic reign during their 60th anniversary year... INTERNATIONAL Focus on the Global South c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand tel: +66...

Worldbeaters ...: taking aim at the rich and powerful.(Worldbeaters)
March 1, 2004... Isaias Afwerki Status: President of Eritrea Reputation: National Liberator, Humble Comrade, Promising Pragmatist, Part of the 'New Generation' of African Leaders WHO is Isaias Afwerki? No-one really knows. Even those who fought...

Osama.
March 1, 2004... Osama directed by Siddiq Barmak We never learn her real name but she lives with her mother and her grandmother. Her father is dead, a casualty of war. The Taliban--this is the late 1990s--ban women from working and even from leaving...

BourgieBohoPostPomoAfroHomo.
March 1, 2004... BourgieBohoPostPomoAfroHomo by Deepdickollective (Sugartruck Recordings 025) The album with the title of the century so far has the beats and the smarts to tune ears and turn heads. Recorded in 2002 by the Deepdickollective, 'seven...

Unearthed.
March 1, 2004... Unearthed by Johnny Cash (Lost Highway B0001679-02 5CDs) 'If I feel like my song's sung, I don't care if it's short,' growls Johnny Cash in the wonderfully laconic out-takes that stud this boxed set. Alas, Cash's song is well and...

The Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire.
March 1, 2004... The Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire by Arundhati Roy (Flamingo, ISBN 0 00 718163 9) While those who enjoyed Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things will bemoan the continuing lack of a fictional follow-up, there is no faulting...

North Korea/South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis.
March 1, 2004... North Korea/South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis by John Feffer (Seven Stories Press, ISBN 1 58322 603 6) As the hawks in the US administration gaze with satisfaction at what they have wrought in Iraq, the world waits to see who...

Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.
March 1, 2004... Stevenson Under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel (Canongate, ISBN 1 84195 449 7) Alberto Manguel's novella takes its title from Goethe's aphorism 'No-one wanders under palm trees unpunished'. Set on the hazy interface between reality...

Interview with Danilo Rueda & Abilio Pena.(Making Waves)
March 1, 2004... THE two Colombians arrived on my doorstep one rainy night last November like two lost puppies. I offered them food, which they accepted reluctantly and then gobbled down as if they were starved. I showed them their bedroom, where I had lit a...

Together but not scrambled: a black English man, Rotimi Ogedengbe, visits Cuba and discovers that the island is not the racism-free paradise it claims to, be.(Essay)
March 1, 2004... I couldn't wait to get to Cuba. Like many a left-leaning, independent traveller, I'd had a long-held ambition to get there 'before Castro dies and corporate America ushers in the age of McCuba'. But as a black English man what really drew me to...

Yemen.(Country Profile)
March 1, 2004... PEOPLE, it seems, are everywhere. The narrow streets of Sana'a teem with them--mostly men, of course. Nearly all the men carry a janbiya, a large curved dagger in their belt. And almost all of them either owns or has ready access to a gun in...