Month of July, 2008

Workers scale one of the skyscrapers under construction in Cambodia.

Last Sunday, more than 8 millions Cambodians were called to vote. This is already the fourth general elections since the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement. Many – including me before I moved to our Phnom Penh office last summer – still connect Cambodia first to what we learned in history classes. The splendor of the Angkor civilization and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime probably come on top of the list. And there is some truth to that. Angkor Wat and its neighboring temples remain magnificent. The Khmer Rouge regime has left deep stigma for the people and for the society. The Khmer Rouge tribunal is attracting a lot of international attention as well. Most landmine fields have been cleared, although there remain some in more remote areas.

But, for all this, this connection more and more misses a key fact: over the last couple of years, Cambodia has achieved a relative peace that has enabled dramatic social and economic change.

After seven years of fitful trade negotiations, the WTO’s Doha Round has collapsed, and the post mortems have already hit the newsstands.  Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Keith Bradsher points to a new alliance between China and India, both pushing for so-called “safeguard” rules for agriculture, translating into uncapped tariffs on food imports from rich countries, ostensibly to support farmers in developing countries. 

Image credit: CPI at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

I thought the most innovative way to detect land mines was, to date,  the use of sniffing rats (light enough not to set off the explosive). But scientists in South Africa (a team set up by the University of Stellenbosch and the Danish biotechnology firm Aresa) are now turning to vegetables.

According to EcoWorldly, they have developed the "Red-Detect" bio-sensor technology in a weed that changes color from green to red when when it detects the nitrogen dioxide that leads from buried mines. The weed, Thales Cress, is too small to be seen from a safe distance, however, so the scientists are now betting on using the tobacco plant instead, which has large leaves and grows easily in most parts of the world.

I'm getting a lot of satisfaction lately from this blog, and here is the very last example: in response to a rather light posting simply calling attention to an ingenious awareness campaign, I received this comment from reader S.Y. which provides actual data, links to recent, relevant reports, and makes a solid connection between food waste, development, and the East Asia & Pacific region:

"Despite its personal perspective style, your article on food waste awareness is very relevant to both the food crises recently making the headlines and the Bank's EAP region.

(Found at divinecaroline.com)

Here's an eye-catching way of raising awareness about food waste. The Instituto Akatu, a Brazilian organization aimed at making consumers more conscious about their choices, participated a few months ago in a campaign about food waste. It came up with a brochure that imitated the style of those used by supermarkets to advertise their weekly offers, but shows the food all rotten (in their estimation, 1/3 of all food purchased goes bad before being eaten --I guess this figure applies to Brazil). A group of actors posing as supermarket employees handed these out outside the supermarket, raising a good number of eyebrows, I bet.

GDLN Indonesia covers more than 220 public and private universities across the archipelago, opening up opportunities to share knowledge both within Indonesia and with other countries.

Earlier this month in Jakarta I participated in the inauguration of the expanded Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) Indonesia.  GDLN, for those who may not be familiar with the network, is a World Bank initiated partnership dedicated to the use of information and communications technology to facilitate learning and knowledge sharing for people working in the development field.  Its programs include formal courses as well as multi-country dialogues and virtual conferences, delivered via a blend of videoconference, web, and other modes of distance learning. 

Red-eared Sliders, one of the invasive alien species in Lake Dianchi. See full photogallery.

Another notable achievement of the ‘Restoration of Freshwater Biodiversity in Lake Dianchi’ project (see previous entries--part 1 and part 2) was the discovery and action taken against a number of invasive alien species which had not been recorded from the lake before the surveys initiated by the project. These include the Golden Apple Snail, Louisiana Crayfish, Red-eared Slider (the turtle or terrapin commonly found in pet shops the world over), and Muskrat. Their introduction to the area, as with many alien invasives, “seemed a good idea at the time” but they all have – or likely will have – serious negative economic and ecological impacts. The Golden Apple Snail has a predilection for young rice plants, the Louisiana Crayfish burrows into bunds, and the Red-eared Slider predates on fish.

The Government of Myanmar, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United Nations have released the first comprehensive report covering the impact of Cyclone Nargis on the people in the Ayeyarwady Delta and Yangon. Among the highlights:

- It estimates the cyclone killed over 84,530 people, with a further 53,836 still reported missing.

- The assessment of damage and losses confirms a similar scale of impact to that of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, especially at the household and community severely damaged, together with around 4,000 schools.

- The cyclone wiped out the livelihoods of families overnight, flooding over 600,000 hectares of agricultural land, killing up to 50 per cent of draught animals, destroying fishing boats and sweeping away food stocks and agricultural implements.

- This has left households extremely vulnerable – in mid-June, 55 per cent reported having only one day of food stocks or less, and have relied in part on the steady flow of relief supplies.

- The total economic losses amount to about 2.7% of the projected 2008 GDP, with the effects of the cyclone concentrated on a region important for agriculture and fishing in Myanmar.

Black Dragon Spring. See full photogallery.

A remarkable feature of the distribution of Lake Dianchi’s endemic fish fauna (see previous entry ) is that some of the species are essentially confined to ponds protected by Buddhist temples.  These ponds are fed by freshwater springs coming out of the karst hills which surround parts of the Dianchi Basin. The water is beautifully clear and it is a very special feeling to see such excruciatingly rare and restricted species in such special surroundings.

Last year was marked by the breeding of Little Grebes in Xialiangwang, one of the ‘Restoration of Freshwater Biodiversity in Lake Dianchi’ project's restoration sites. See more photos.

Today I paid my final visit to the office of the ‘Restoration of Freshwater Biodiversity in Lake Dianchi’ project. It’s been part of my life for over a decade and I have come to feel very avuncular towards it. I expected to feel quite sad when the final reporting was completed, but in fact there is still so much going on, capitalizing on the gains they have made over the years, that I am actually full of hope for continued positive outcomes as it comes of age without the support of the Bank and the GEF.

The Asia- Pacific internet audience grew last year 14 percent to 319 million visitors by April 2008, according to a recent report by one of the leading companies in measuring the digital world.

While the strongest proportional growth occurred in India with a 27 percent surge, that equals 28 million more internet users. China, following with a 14 percent growth, added however a total of 102 million users.

Also interesting is the forecast by comScore, the company behind the report, which predicts that in less than two more years, Asia Pacific will take up 42 percent of the regional distribution of worldwide online population, with North America behind carrying 20 percent.

There are other findings available in a presentation and video posted at the comScore site (see “State of the Global Internet – With a Focus on Asia” in this page).

Some months ago Michael posted a short note about donating rice through an internet game: get the meaning of an English word right and you’ve donated 20 grains of rice to the UN's World Food Program. Keep playing and you can actually fill a bowl in a few minutes.

Here’s another way to help others while doing something you already do everyday: search the Web. A number of search engines commit to donate some percentage of their ad revenue (often as high as 50%) to charity --same principle as the WFP’s word game--, only in this case you’re not even setting aside a few minutes to play, but just doing what you normally do. Also, you can choose which charity you want to help.

China is emerging as a major financer of infrastructure projects in Africa, as documented in Building Bridges, a report released this week by the World Bank.  This is a very welcome development because Africa has an infrastructure deficit and China has both the financial resources and the construction industry capacity to help meet the demands.

Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other developing regions on most standard indicators of infrastructure development, prompting African leaders to call for greater international support in this sphere. By far the largest gaps arise in the power sector, with generation capacity and household access in Africa at around half the levels observed in South Asia and about a third of the levels observed in East Asia and Pacific. Unreliable power supply leads to losses in industrial production valued at 6 percent of turnover. In China’s coastal cities, similar losses are typically less than 1 percent. The result of poor infrastructure is that many business services are much costlier than those available in other regions. For example, road freight costs in Africa are two to four times as high per kilometer as those in the United States, and travel times along key export corridors are two to three times as high as those in Asia.

Two weeks ago a World Bank team visited Sichuan, including some of the most devastated areas such as Beichuan county.  My colleagues, Mara Warwick and John Scales, took photos and produced a slideshow --see it below in video version:

Both being engineers, they took a lot of photos of the rubble to illuminate some points about the construction and the effect of the quake.  The slideshow first examines devastation of houses and communities, then moves on to document the destruction at a leading cultural site, the Er'wang temple in Dujiangyan.  It then moves to some of the substantial temporary housing that is going up quickly, as well as the large tent cities where many people will be living throughout the next few months.  Finally, it looks at the relocated Beichuan middle school.  At the same time we are launching our earthquake reconstruction website, where we will update progress with reconstruction over the next few years.  The World Bank will be involved in various phases of the reconstruction and we will report on our involvement as well as the larger reconstruction effort.

G8 countries are discussing climate change this week, and I just came across a cool site from NASA and the California Institute of Technology: a very simple, visual "Climate Time Machine" website that shows changes in some of the key indicators of climate change (average temperatures, CO2 emissions, or sea levels) over time.
(A not-so-recent visualization tool, the Sea Level Viewer, focuses on specific events over the last decade, including the Dec. 2004 Asian tsunami).

When we visited a poor village in Qingxing county of north Guangdong a few weeks ago to work on a study of inequality,  I was struck by the severity of poverty in places only a few hours away from the most dynamic and prosperous Pearl River Delta. One family that we visited had almost no furniture. Another only lived on 90 yuan (US$13) per month from the social assistance program.

The common features of those families that we visited seem to be that they do not have any family members who are physically able to work, or that they have family members who are chronically ill. The government hopes that the rural social assistance programs can help them survive.  For those who can work, the government thinks that encouraging them to migrate to urban areas would be the best bet for them to escape such sad state of deprivation.

David Dollar and I have both posted recently about lessons from China for Africa.  Here is one more view, from Joe Remenyi who recently served a stint as Research Director for the International Poverty Reduction Center in China (IPRCC).  IPRCC was one of the main organizers of the Experience Sharing Program on Development between China and Africa which David and I wrote about last month.

I pretty much agree with Joe’s observations and conclusions.  On the poverty reduction front, I would only add that if one uses a “cost-of-basic needs poverty line”, the reduction in incidence of poverty in China is even more dramatic, dropping from 64% of the population in 1981 to 6%-7% in 2007.  We’ll be featuring this in the new World Bank Poverty Assessment that will be released soon. 

The new site www.fightingcorruption.org, is a collaboration of a number of stakeholders from the NGO sector, the business community and other stakeholders: the World Bank, the UN Global Compact, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Global Advice Network, Grant Thornton, Siemens, and Transparency International.  The site includes a guidebook for businesses that are interested in working to fight corruption, particularly through collective action with other stakeholders.  In addition, the site offers country-specific resources on anticorruption, case studies and a business case for addressing corruption.  Scroll down on the “resources” page to find sector-specific anticorruption

It’s been a while since I’ve contributed anything to this blog – many thanks to Nanda for holding the fort. Over the last 6 weeks I’ve done five trips to various parts of the NT2 project, and am starting to feel in need of salt – more on that later.

One of the trips was a joint mission by managers from the various international financial institutions (IFIs) that are supporting the project. Joint missions help ensure that all the IFIs have a shared understanding of project progress, as well as avoiding the burden of multiple missions on the government and NTPC officials who are supposed to be focused on getting the job done. Overall it went well, as measured by the fact that I have not yet been moved to another project.

Regular bloggers David Dollar and Louis Kuijs participated earlier today in a live online discussion on the World Bank site about the latest edition of the China Quarterly Update. If you didn't have a chance to join it, you can find the transcript here. The questions covered topics like the sustainability of China's growth rate, the governmental response to the Sichuan earthquake, the environmental "growing pains", employment and labor matters, health, macroeconomy and a lot more.