Will he, won’t he? Climate change and the romantic fiction of global politics

It’s spring again, which in recent years seems to bring rapid extremes of temperature, from snow in Hyde Park to apple blossom in Snowdonia almost within a twenty-four hour period. And like the weather, our so-called world leaders are blowing hot and cold on fundamental issues such as human rights, freedom and the environment.

Looking forward to the summer, the Olympic Games in Beijing provide a classic opportunity for each to parade their own moral barometer. At the end of March, France’s president was reported as the first premier who “hinted that he may boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games as Britain and France increased the pressure on China over Tibet”. France, of course, made the same threat last year when China’s role in the Sudanese oil business was condemned and China disregarded calls from G8 countries to exert influence on the Sudanese government over the conflict in Darfur.

So far, Bush is going, Merkel is not. Brown is apparently able to do both (boycott the beginning but attend at the end: a Scottish jig he used for the opening of the European Parliament). And the European Parliament, through a ‘non-binding resolution’ has urged EU leaders not to attend.

They may dance the soft shoe shuffle or attempt the more flamboyant tango: after all, they’re just games. But when the G8 summit meet on the banks of Lake Toya on the island of Hikkaido in northern Japan at the beginning of July, we can be sure that China will be there, invited as one of the ‘G8 plus 5 group’ because of her emerging role in the global economy - and there’ll be plenty of other rationalisations at the last minute to justify her inclusion.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has identified the environment as a key topic of discussion in Toyako. Climate change was also highlighted by the German government for Heiligendamm in 2007 - resulting in some vague pledges to agree to consider a time to discuss the topic again. As GRIST argues, 'since the safe bet is on continued US interference with specific emissions reduction goals, there's little to lose by aiming for the same shot-down target as last year'.

Before last year’s summit, there was some fear that strained relations between the US and Russia – caused by Putin’s cheeky little rocket launch - would blight reasonable debate. However, an unexpected thaw occurred, leading Merkel to pull off a great public relations victory, claiming success on climate change negotiations when in fact nothing concrete had been agreed.

See Robert Amsterdam's blogpost: A Valentine for Putin


Since then, Merkel has pushed forward carbon emission reduction regulations at home – excluding, of course, the heavy industries because of their importance to the German economy. In contrast, Brown and Sarkozy plan together to save the world’s energy crisis by developing the use of nuclear power; the UK plans to count its clean power projects overseas towards the EU mandated renewables targets; and the West’s stampede on bio-fuels has triggered a global food crisis, as predicted last year by social movements.

And one of the downsides of China’s economic boom is the astounding environmental devastation that has come with it at home, not to mention the environment damage also associated with China’s march across Africa.

Downloadable from http://www.g-8.de/

Back in Hokkaido, Governor Harumi Takahashi has said she hopes the G8 will help resolve the longstanding territorial dispute with Russia over sovereignty of the Northern Territories: in fact president Putin and prime minister Yasua Fukuda have been meeting to discuss this.

Group composition moves on: last year Sarkozy was the new kid on the block, this year will be the first G8 summit for Gordon Brown and the recently elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

But I don’t imagine that this continual flux of cosying-up and the subsequent cold shoulder among our world leaders will ever be subject to real climate change. How can we ever believe what they say? Why do we even care any more? When we turn to the press, it so often seems as if there is in fact no real news, rather we’re caught up in a fictionalised narrative, which plays out in the present tense with no sense of historicity, nor cause and effect, although events continue to repeat and repeat themselves.

As with romantic fiction, this approach has become almost entirely formulaic : but instead of dismissing it, we as readers also play an important role in perpetuating the genre.

One little known fact is that in 1983 I won third prize in the Women’s Hour / Woman’s Weekly Quest for a Romantic Novelist. So here’s another take on the news. It’s a little flight of fancy I jotted down last year in Berlin when I was covering the 2007 G8 summit from a women's perspective:

"Georgie came in with her natural flounce, bold, bumptious and brazen. She knew she was irresistible, but still there were those who resisted her. Vladimir stood at the window looking out into the night. There was something virile and aggressive in his slender frame and his arrogant stance.

‘Why don’t we settle this matter here and now?’ asked Georgie, taking his arm.

For an instant, Vladimir’s dark slavic face softened. He was, in fact, incredibly attractive when he smiled. Georgie’s heart flipped over. Even as she succumbed, she knew that tomorrow things would look different. Another crisis, another man: she was incorrigible.

‘I’ll see you later,’ she drawled...”

Malcolm turned the page, dreamily reaching out for one of the tea-time sandwiches that nurse had left him. It was such stirring stuff. And now a new twist in the plot…

"...Nicole smiled across at Abe, their gaze entangling. ‘I think we may be quite similar in lots of ways,’ she murmured in her attractive French accent.

Abe watched her slink away. He was definitely interested. But he couldn't help wondering if Nicole was only making up to him to make someone else jealous…"

Suddenly the door opened and Sister Theresa came into the room, creating a through-draft, which made the candles flicker. It was too late for Malcolm to hide what he was doing. He shrank back into his chair, clutching the book to his chest.

“Malcolm,” she said incensed, “Why are you doing this?” She swept an authoritative arm around to indicate the well-stacked feminist bookshelves. “After all the effort
I put in to provide improving literature for you, I still find you involved with this kind of …”

Malcolm tried to defend his position, but nurse was too strong for him. Wrenching the offending volume from his grasp, she threw it out of the open window.

“I’ve told you before,” said Theresa. “Too much of that can make you go blind!”

Don’t read more, Take action
Anti-G8 action in Japan

http://gipfelsoli.org/


Read a little more: The temperature in Berlin blog

Here below is another piece about the environment from this time last year, which I omitted to post. Plus cela change…

My New Berlin Blog

When I got back from covering the World Social Forum from a women’s perspective in Nairobi, I was asked to write a monthly column for www.openDemocracy.net and you can check out some of my recent pieces here

Now we are working on a new project to provide a women’s perspective on the G8 summit - which is happening in Germany 6th to 8th June 2007. So I’m here in Berlin partly because of that and partly because, well, everyone’s got to be somewhere.

Wherever I go, there’s a different kind of stimulation – although the issues may still be the same. The first two pieces below are the beginning of my personal Berlin blog. The other two are earlier pieces, related to women in Africa. I try to put a different spin on everything I write. But none of these topics are going to be resolved so easily.

Incompatible objectives: Gender and the World Bank

The film Bamako puts international finance institutions on trial for crimes against humanity. Set in a family courtyard in Mali, it provides a forum for African voices to be heard. They bear testimony against the World Bank’s simplistic understanding of the causes of poverty – and the disastrous effects of its programmes on African society.

But is the World Bank truly evil or merely incompetent?

Let’s explore this through the bank’s new action plan entitled ‘gender equality as smart economics’ which was presented at the Commission for the Status of Women (CSW) at the beginning of March.

Prior to this, as part of the same initiative, the German Ministry for Development Co-operation hosted a World Bank seminar on women’s economic empowerment in Berlin (22nd-23rd February) at the same time as Bamako was being premiered in London. The event, one of Germany’s
programme of meetings in the run-up to the G8 summit, profiled female politicians, public servants and private entrepreneurs from north and south.

On the surface this looks like a promising development. However, for over two decades, feminist economists like Diane Elson have criticised the bank’s approach to economic development, in particular the specific adverse impacts on women. ‘Capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy are interlinked. Markets are not abstract cash nexuses - they are inevitably social institutions in which buying and selling is structured assymetrically to the advantage of some participants rather than others.’ (Male bias in the development process, 1990)

'An estimated 70% of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women’ Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development)

And women’s organisations are not impressed with the new plan. Christa Wichterich of WIDE (Network Women in Development Europe)
suggests that the WB plan is not concerned with gender equality at all but with continuing to exploit female human resources to avoid market failure and distortion of competition. ‘What impresses most about the action plan is the one-dimensional thinking which places markets at the centre and not human beings - or the economic rights and potentials of women.’ Things, she says, haven’t changed in the last thirty years.


A historical perspective

To go back to basics, the WB is the largest and most powerful agency in the UN family, disposing of a programme of $20 billion a year. G8 countries are the largest contributors and size of contribution is related to voting power on the board. The bank gives loans not assistance, and the shareholders naturally expect to get their money back.

In comparison, other UN agencies such as UNDP have an annual budget of $4 billion or less and are increasingly chasing corporations for ‘public-private partnerships’ to support their work.

The World Bank’s gender action plan has a budget of US$25 million. To the ordinary woman on the street in Bamako, or even Birmingham, it may sound initially like a generous amount. But you don’t need to be a development specialist to see that on a global scale – over four years – this barely amounts to pocket money

Budgets: World Bank $20 billion; United Nations Development Programme $4.4. billion; UNICEF $2 billion; UNESCO $600 million; UNIFEM $50 million

The bank is not in fact a development agency but - because it ties the purse strings - it has a stranglehold on development policy.

From the 1980s, in an attempt to stimulate economic growth and enable developing countries to repay outstanding debts from the 60s, the WB introduced the so-called ‘hard loans’. These loans were dependent on countries in the south adopting structural adjustment programmes (SAPs): notably cutting public expenditure in education and health and privatisation of essential services. These particularly impact on women because of their primary responsibility for the entire household.

‘The concept of structural adjustment is based on women’s capacity to cope, to continue in increasingly adverse conditions and to deny their own needs and interests for the survival of their families and communities. In other words, structural adjustment relies on women providing those service previously provided by the State.’ (NAWO, Women’s strategies to deal with SAPs, 1990)

Opening up foreign investment opportunities and establishing free trade zones to attract external companies provided employment for women in the form of low-paid, insecure jobs with poor working conditions and without labour rights. (Angela Hale, Trade myths and gender reality, 1994)

In particular the slashing of education budgets impacted on succeeding generations of women, since girls’ schooling always takes second place in times of hardship. As Benedicta Egbo points out, women’s economic activity is closely linked with literacy (and numeracy) since, as well as increasing confidence, this facilitates access to information, financial credit, training and opportunities for further support.

In other words, it can be argued that the current lack of economic empowerment for so many women in the south is a direct result of previous World Bank programmes.

Nevertheless, SAPs had the opposite effect to that intended: countries were still not able to repay debts (by now incrementally higher). Therefore, at the World Summit on Social Development at Copenhagen in 1995, the World Bank economists pushed for a new approach – ‘soft loans’ related to multi-year national development plans – and so the current era of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) began.

Each PRSP is developed ‘in agreement’ between government and donors, who ‘align’ themselves and ‘harmonise’ with each other behind the national plan, following the Monterrey conference in 2002 (OECD) ). In fact, PRSPs tend to be donor-driven - even though individual donor representatives on the ground in different countries around the world have privately expressed serious reservations about the one-size-fits-all solution.

In order to qualify for PRSP related loans or any other grants and financing, the IMF must approve a country’s economic programme – and may also apply ‘conditionalities’ (unsurprisingly, more cutting of public expenditure…). As a result of the current system, 40% of the national budget of African countries like Mali is still being used to repay old debts - compared with 6% for social services.

As the authors demonstrate in the recent Gender Action report on the IFIs, this ‘new’ model not only continues in the same direction as the ‘old’ one but imposes even more conditions than before.

Their report, based on analysis of PRSPs in eleven countries, identifies the following conditions as having the greatest impact on women’s livelihoods:

Privatisation
Cuts in government spending
Trade and labour reforms
Financial sector reforms

In summary:
‘Standard World Bank and IMF policy-based loans that require public health expenditure cutbacks increase women’s home care for sick family members and reduce their time available for paid work; public sector and enterprise restructuring eliminates many jobs and benefits—women are often the first to lose jobs and last to be rehired because they are assumed to be secondary breadwinners; developing country tariff reductions threaten the livelihood of manufacturing and agricultural workers, the majority of whom are women in the poorest countries; financial sector reforms decrease women’s access to financial services while increasing their risk of financial crisis.’


Some concrete examples

One of the aspects under discussion by the WB and its partners in Berlin was the need to facilitate women’s access to infrastructure (transport) water and electricity.

Clearly no-one is going to argue with access to basic services for either women or men. The provision of piped water and electric power immeasurably lightens the load of women’s daily chores, freeing up their time and energy for other activities. So why isn’t that already a reality?

Could it have something to do with the fact that the privatisation of water, electricity, transport, is a normal requirement in the poverty reduction strategies papers? Privatisation benefits the north rather than the south since it is multinational companies that pick up the contracts, the most infamous being the British-German-Tanzanian company City Water that was eventually kicked out of Tanzania. But there are many more…

In the meantime, the poorest citizens of the south, most of them women, find it difficult to pay for basic services even when they are available. This is one of the key issues around which the social movements rallied at the World Social Forum in Nairobi. They see that their own governments, in collaboration with multinationals, continue to deprive them of a basic human right.

In the film one woman witness claims: ‘ A country which does not control its own basic services can barely be said to be a sovereign state.’

Enterprise

Another aspect on the WB’s gender agenda is supporting women’s economic activity through finance and private sector development, in particular increasing women’s agricultural productivity and their contribution to rural development.

But fluctuating prices on the world market have an adverse effect on the prices women can get for their own produce and what they can afford to buy. Women and men both work in the cotton industry in Mali, which has been developed as the foremost in West Africa. Cotton farmers and their families are currently living in penury because cotton prices have been pushed right down by US subsidies to their own farmers - subsidies which amount to $4 billion a year. Meanwhile, China is flooding African countries with cheap cotton products. And, while the WB is still promoting the micro-credit model for women, banking sector reforms have decreased access to loans especially for small-scale women farmers in rural areas.

In Mali, Kané Nana Sanou, president of the coalition for women’s human rights organisations (Groupe Pivot Droit et Citoyenneté des Femmes) has expressed concern to me about the number of women victims of a vicious cycle of debt due to similar schemes, with many having recourse to loan sharks to get more money to repay original loans: an unfortunately neat microcosm of the WB scenario at macro level.

And in the field, I have spoken to women’s associations who have gone through the process of constitutionalisation - in order to become eligible for funding - only to find that there is no financial support available.

The women’s collective at Bandiagara told me they had spent several seasons growing and selling green beans together so they could afford the legal expenses involved in the drawing up of the constitution (in a language they don’t read well). Now they are ready to start up in business, I asked them why they don’t arrange a bank loan. Their answer was simply ‘we are reluctant to start off already in debt.’ For women and families who do not have a reliable regular income, this seems to be a responsible viewpoint.

Even the WB’s own research has indicated that the poorest of the poor prefer to rely on informal credit and social capital rather than formal loans. There’s no lack of enterprise among women, it’s real money that’s missing! Why not give each association $200 and let them show what they are capable of?

Market women in Ghana are grateful for World Bank loans, despite the fact they are paying an unbelievable 36% interest rate.

Such examples are an attempt to engage with the WB on its own terms. But one of the worst impacts as described by Aminata Traoré in Bamako (there are real Malians giving testimony) is the effect of the WB top-down approach on the self-image of Africans. ‘The WB holds up a mirror showing us as poverty-stricken, conflict-ridden, lacking in capacity and needing direction.’

In contrast, the reality is that, like other countries in Africa, Mali has untold wealth – her traditional social capital now being eroded; her music; her gold mines (controlled by Anglo Gold); her beautiful women of all ages who always find some work to get by, her eloquence whatever language is used, her traditional skills such as hand-dyeing of cotton cloth with the richest colours and patterns under the sun… the film reflects these better than I can.

Incompatible objectives

As regards the effectiveness of gender equality policies, independent evaluations of the very same institutions involved in the Berlin conference (Norad, OECD, DFID, SIDA, the EC and the World Bank itself) raise serious questions. A survey of these evaluations emphasises one of the main causes for lack of progress: ‘insufficient resources have been provided to implement strategies at operational (field) level’.

But the problem is clearly more fundamental than that. The World Bank drives the development agenda and the promotion of gender equality is in direct contradiction to the bank’s approach.

The bank in fact works in opposition to other UN agencies. In South Africa UNDP and UNIFEM concerns have led them to develop a checklist for carrying out detailed gender analysis of PRSPs. In addition, UNDP’s latest human development report highlights the fact that inequality in general is increasing within and between countries because of IFI conditions. And UNRISD is now developing research on the additional impact on policy and social development of the new relationships between governments and trans-national companies.

As well as now driving forward MDG3 ‘gender equality’, the WB has also been given the lead for MDG2 ‘universal primary education’ which is of utmost importance for the future generation of women’s empowerment. My research on this in 2005 highlighted similar contradictions.

For example in the case of Burkina Faso the WB economists calculated that if all children were in school, there wouldn’t be enough money to pay the teaching force required. The solution was to reduce teachers’ salaries, bring in temporary staff (who could be laid off at short notice) and recruit volunteers. This didn’t go down well with the teaching union and education plans were put on hold until this could be resolved.

This scenario was explained to me by a couple of very charming and completely straight-faced World Bank economists as an example of ‘incompatible objectives.’ I understand this to mean setting an international target for developing countries while at the same time requiring them to operate in a way which makes it impossible to actually achieve the target. I think that about sums up their approach.

When one woman testifying in Bamako claims she can read a balance sheet, the WB’s defence counsel calls her an ‘upstart’. Women across the world are experienced in managing the household budget and, whether using a computer or counting out cups of rice, we all know when things don’t add up

In summary, the WB is clearly guilty. But the witnesses in Bamako plead only for the bank to respect its original mandate, which should be to support national development ‘in a spirit of humanity’. Instead of which it has simply become the worst kind of debt collector on behalf of the G8 - whose hypocrisy and cynicism in promoting women’s economic empowerment within the current system cannot adequately be described.

The solution, according to feminist economists and activists in both south and north is for the WB and other donors to put an end to policy-based lending and provide space for governments to address gender equality and social justice in more appropriate, locally-driven ways.

So, World Bank, $25 million for gender equality is not smart economics – when no-one seems to be benefiting from the rest of the $20 billion budget except multinational companies, corrupt officials and, of course, G8 countries.

Readers who wish to raise their own voice against World Bank iniquity and incompetence can sign the online petition organised by Christian Aid, to put pressure on the UK government’s position in the upcoming WB and IMF spring meetings.

Patricia Daniel
March 2007

Africa: Responsible Parenting

My good friend Mary tells me the story of how she once went into a posh hotel in Bamako and saw five or six white women sitting in a line, each with a cute black baby on her knee, ‘for all the world as if they’d just been on a shopping spree and were showing off their purchases.’

Adoption of African babies by white families in the West is an ongoing practice and may be done from the best of intentions. Yet Mary, who has been in Mali for twenty years and has her own Malian family, explains how the practice of African-Western adoption highlights fundamental cross-cultural misunderstandings.

It is, in fact, common for African parents to let family or friends look after one of their children, give them a good education or a better start in life. But this is quite different from giving up their child for good: the child is always part of their natural family and will always return to take up their adult role there.

‘However carefully the process is explained to an African family, they simply don’t grasp the concept of adoption as we understand it in the West, because for them, the idea of giving up a child for good is simply inconceivable. So, when African parents enter into such an adoption agreement, they do not realise the full consequences of what they are doing.’

In addition, there is plenty of evidence from personal testimony that, however loving white adoptive parents may be, black children taken out of their natural environment – no matter how disadvantaged - will grow up to resent this and even say: ‘I wish it had never happened.’
You can take the child out of Africa, but you can’t take Africa out of the child.

Although some of this evidence is now contested there has been, in the UK, since the early 1980s, serious opposition to ‘transracial adoption’ - which makes it extremely difficult for a white British family to adopt a black child who has been born to parents in the UK. But, somehow, this restriction doesn’t apply to adoptions from overseas.

Adopt a country

We’ve had the sponsor a child concept - which means providing extra support for a child in their own environment. That’s been criticised for setting the child apart, creating inequality in the community. There followed the ‘sponsor a community’ concept, but this attracts the same criticisms. You can’t solve Africa’s problems by focussing on individual needs, without addressing the system in which these needs arise, as Malawian child rights activists have tried to point out to Madonna.


Good intentions are simply not enough. There’s inevitably a power and wealth differential in these arrangements which has to be recognised. So when I read that Angela Merkel is proposing that each of the G8 countries adopt an African country as part of her G8 presidency platform, my blood runs cold. Although this won’t mean taking children out of Africa, there are a number of possible consequences worth considering.

My first reaction is that this is a 21st century return to the original carve-up of the African continent between colonial powers, the impact of which is still being suffered by individual African countries. This seems to smack of the same kind of paternalism: ‘we can do things better, we know what you need.’ Haven’t we learned anything?

But there’s always more than one perspective. When I mention the idea to the president of one of the leading African women’s organisations, she’s surprisingly enthusiastic. ‘What a great idea! Just think, if Germany was really concentrating on Mali, all our problems would be sorted within 12 months!’

Maybe it’s something to do with who is going to do the parenting. Because, in fact, though Germany’s contribution to development aid is rather thrifty, it’s always money wisely spent, her technical assistance is widely recognised as excellent and, in Mali, very much appreciated.

Despite this, German representatives here privately admit to grave doubts about the longer-term sustainability of their projects, given the lack of real commitment of central government to the decentralisation process and the related lack of effective social mobilisation at the grassroots.

One of the reasons Mali may welcome greater involvement from Germany is their strongly felt need to escape from the psychological influence of ageing France – whose continuing stranglehold on the education system in francophone West Africa deliberately, according to education workers, impedes the development of locally appropriate skills and attitudes for both young men and women.

What kind of partnership?

Are African countries now going to have the choice over who will adopt them? Will there be a squabble in the nursery? ‘No, I want Germany to be our new dad!’ or ‘Yes, we want China to be our new mum!’

For each G8 country is going to do parenting differently. Does this mean we will see new paradigms of development, and, for example, competition between the latest German and Japanese models?

I’m not seriously worried about the proposal, because I don’t believe the G8 countries will buy into it. Whatever their relative levels of altruism as regards development aid, they all want to have a footprint in every African country, for reasons of future political influence and their own economic benefit.

But I want to run with the metaphor because it can be both entertaining and informative. What’s going to happen if Germany is doing a good parenting job with characteristic Zuverläßigkeit and China comes along, like a flamboyant rich auntie, saying: ‘That’s OK, bruv, take the weekend off, I’ll give her a treat.’ Then proceeds to subvert little Mali with a diet of takeaway pizza, coca cola and adult-rated movies?

China is willing to adopt any of the children. You can already see the marks of her high-heels across Africa, from Algeria to Angola, most recently in Accra (Ghana). She now rivals the US in trade relations. But Africans are beginning to ask: ‘what does our Chinese friend really want? She’s not applying any political conditions to economic engagement. Is she a new partner or just a neo-colonial?’ (Afrique Magazine No. 254 November 2006)

In contrast, the German proposal specifies that only certain countries are going to be adopted. Like those respectable white ladies in the Hotel Salaam, G8 is mainly interested in cute well-behaved babies. After all, who but China would want to invest in rebellious, abused, conflicted children like the Sudan or D R Congo, when you can’t trust them to play nicely at parties?

Rwanda has successfully managed to grow out of her bad-girl image. (Far be it from me to suggest this success is due to the fact that, after the 1994 genocide, the majority of the population were women.) The country’s also thrown off the influence of France, whose neglect in the 1990s had such unimaginable consequences. Now Rwanda has her own vision for her future, she is able to stand up to France and say: ‘We are equals.’

Her government’s had a lot of help through much-needed budget support from the UK. But people from both East and West Africa have also raised issues with me about commercially motivated UK support for Rwanda playing dirty games across the fence with neighbouring DR Congo…

Readers may argue that I’m being unfair. Merkel’s proposal is about G8 countries ‘picking a partnership’. She is suggesting a summit with (male) African leaders to discuss the proposal. In fact, as other reports highlight, this is not about giving more money in development aid, but (what a surprise) developing private sector investment. So, without checking the small print or talking to their (female) partners in country, are African governments going to sign up yet again to an agreement of which the consequences may be unexpectedly negative?


Good parenting

I am very lucky that I was brought up where I belonged, in Yorkshire, by my natural parents, both poor but proud working class socialists. This tough love upbringing consisted of the Brian Daniel Methodist-based morality (‘Well, you should have been sorry before you did it’) and Victorian work ethic (‘If anything’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right’) combined with the Mildred Baxter school of counselling (‘It’s time you pulled your socks up, love’).

This resulted in me working hard, taking responsibility for my own actions, never being a victim or wearing wrinkled stockings. I grew up with self-respect, because I was always treated as an intelligent equal.

Good parenting also works by example. Despite their humble origins, my parents were both loved and respected members of society. They didn’t lie, cheat or steal; never countenanced violence; they gave their services to the community for free after work in the evenings (because that’s what you do) and didn’t feel the need to advertise their achievements.

It’s not enough to have good intentions - you also need to live out your principles.

Adoption procedures in the UK continue to be stringent, and rightly so, because parenting is a big responsibility, not everyone can hack it. So, all you G8 countries, please line up behind Germany: I’d like to inspect your credentials. Africa is still experiencing growing pains because of colonialism - and which one among you, in the meantime, has become a fit parent?

December 2006