In today’s regional and municipal elections in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s PSUV has won at least 17 of the 23 state governorships contested while the opposition has so far won three with three as yet undecided. Over 300 municipal elections were also being held across the country. Few of these results have been revealed by the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) but Antonio Ledezma of the Venezuelan opposition coalition Unidad Opositora has won the Alcaldia Mayor de Caracas. The Unidad Opositora has also won the governorship of Miranda, the state that surrounds Caracas. The state of Zulia (home to Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city and center of its oil industry) was also won by the Unidad Opositora.
Electoral observers in Venezuela reported that the turnout was heavier than normal but they were concerned that the reporting of the results were delayed by over seven hours from the time the polls closed. A report from Reuters below the fold: (more…)
In the New York Times profile of Valerie Jarrett, the mentor and now a senior adviser to President-elect Obama who willing be serving in the Administration as a White House Senior Adviser and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison, I was struck by this:
In January, Ms. Jarrett will go to the White House as a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, where she will be “one of the four or five people in the room with him when decisions get made,” as Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist close to Mr. Obama, put it. Ms. Jarrett, who is a co-chairwoman of Mr. Obama’s transition effort, will also serve as the White House contact for local and state officials across the nation and the point person for Mr. Obama’s effort to build a channel between his White House and ordinary Americans.
One of four or five people in the room when decisions get made. That’s quite a powerful place to be. I was pleased to learned that she is a Stanford grad from the class of 1978 and has a JD from the University of Michigan. Born in Iran where her father ran a hospital in the 1950s, Ms. Jarrett worked for Chicago Mayor Harold Washington as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development and then she became Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard Daley in 1991, when she hired Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, away from a private law firm. She has remained a powerful force in their lives and introduced the Obamas to movers and shakers in Chicago politics.
Having not cared for Bert Lance, Ed Meese or Karen Hughes, I have so far come away with a favourable impression of Ms. Jarrett. I suspect that we will be hearing and learning much about Valerie Jarrett.
“We are of the view that yoga, which originates in Hinduism, combines a physical exercise, religious elements, chanting and worshipping for the purpose of achieving inner peace and ultimately to be at one with god. For us, yoga destroys a Muslim’s faith. There are other ways to get exercise. You can go cycling, swimming and eat less fatty food.” — Abdul Shukor Husim of the National Fatwa Council of Malaysia
The latest edict from Malaysia’s government sponsored National Fatwa Council bans the practice of yoga. This is on the heels of declaring that women wearing trousers might become sexually aroused or worse become lesbians. Ah the insanity of religious beliefs.
” If the initial stages of yoga practice lead to advanced ones which involve a change in psychological religious views of the practitioner, then it becomes forbidden because it jeopardizes the beliefs of the Muslim ” — Sheikh Fawzi al-Zifzaf, al-Azhar
Islam is the official religion of Malaysia, where more than 60% of the population of 27 million are Muslim Malays who practice a conservative version of the faith. Rulings by the National Fatwa Council are not legally binding on the country’s Muslims, and there are no laws to punish those who ignore Council decisions — but it is an enormously influential body. No word if they are in therapy however.
First it was the insidious habit of young women wearing trousers. Now Malaysia’s Muslims have been warned off the perils of practising yoga. The country’s leading Islamic council has issued an edict prohibiting people indulging in the exercise, fearing its Hindu roots could corrupt them.
The national fatwa council’s latest decision again reflects a tilt toward an increasingly conservative strain of Islam in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. It is causing consternation among the country’s other ethnic groups that make up a third of the 27-million population.
The fatwa, or decision, prompted sneering remarks from liberal commentators who urged people not to be cowed by the “robed and the turbaned” who made such rulings.
But Abdul Shukor Husim, the council’s chairman, said: “We are of the view that yoga, which originates in Hinduism, combines a physical exercise, religious elements, chanting and worshipping for the purpose of achieving inner peace and ultimately to be at one with god. For us, yoga destroys a Muslim’s faith. There are other ways to get exercise. You can go cycling, swimming and eat less fatty food.”
The ruling comes after the council said young Muslim women who wore trousers risked becoming sexually active or “turning” to lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.
The government recently had to back away from a proposal to restrict women traveling abroad alone, after derision from women’s activists across the country.
But it has banned the use of the word Allah by other religions. An influential Christian group claimed Bibles were also being seized at border entry points.
Of Malaysia’s non-Muslim population, 25% are ethnic Chinese and 8% are ethnic Indian, mainly Hindu. The council’s ruling does not apply to them and is not legally binding. But most of the country’s Muslims heed the edicts out of deference.
Marina Mahathir, a prominent columnist and daughter of the former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, wondered where it would all stop.
“What next? Gym? Most gyms have men and women together,” she wrote on her blog. “Will that not be allowed any more? What endangers a society more … corrupt citizens and leaders, or yoga practitioners and females who dress in a masculine fashion?”
“We want to plant corn there (in Madagascar) to ensure our food security. Food can be a weapon in this world. We can either export the harvests to other countries or ship them back to Korea in case of a food crisis.” — Hong Jong-wan of Daewoo Logistics
I find this development worrisome on many levels because it suggests an evolution of corporations outside the nation-state system. It is as if I am seeing the Dutch East India (VOC) and the mercantile system reborn where countries exist for the benefit of corporations. Daewoo Logistics Corporation of South Korea this week announced it had negotiated a 99-year lease on some 3.2 million acres of farmland on the impoverished island of Madagascar, off southern Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, that forms the Malagsy Republic. That’s nearly half of Madagascar’s arable land, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and Daewoo Logisitics plans to use about three quarters of of the land to grow corn. The remainder will be used to produce palm oil – a key commodity for the global bio-fuels market all destined for the South Korean market.
A Daewoo manager, Hong Jong-wan, told the Financial Times that the crops would “ensure our food security,” and would use “totally undeveloped land which had been left untouched.” Land is scarce and expensive in South Korea, which is the world’s third-largest importer of corn. Daewoo says the Madagascar land will be leased for a price of around $12 an acre, which is a fraction of the price for farmland in Korea. Totally undeveloped land? In Madagascar? Somehow I get the feeling this means extinction for countless species. But this project isn’t the first for Daewoo Logistics, which was spun off the industrial giant Daewoo Corporation, the company has another project in Indonesia and is considering another in Russia’s Far East.
Daewoo Logistics plans to bring in agricultural experts from South America and South Africa to work on the project. Labourers will mostly come from Madagascar, with a few from South Africa, he said. The project could end up creating more than 70,000 jobs on the island which is why I am guessing that free-market government of President Mark Ravalomanana agreed to the project.
Meanwhile, a European diplomat in Southern Africa commented that “there will be very little direct benefits [for Madagascar]“, adding that “extractive projects have very little spill-over to a broader industrialization”. “The deal Daewoo is negotiating with the Madagascan government looks positively neo-colonial and the Madagascan people stand to lose half their arable land. Environmentally it is bound to be an unmitigated disaster.
The U.N.’s World Food Program runs school-feeding schemes for children in Madagascar, where about 70% of the country’s 20 million people live below the poverty line. The island’s residents also rely on WFP emergency food relief programs because of the frequency with which they’re struck by cyclones and droughts. Given those hardships, the prospect of a corporate giant growing hundreds of tons of food to be consumed by people and animals in Korea raises “ethical concerns,” says David Hallam, head of the FAO’S Trade Policy Service in Rome. “If we have another world food crisis, and you have a poor country where food is produced by foreign investors, and then repatriated, that is ethically and political tricky,” Hallam warns. I’ll go one step further and say it is morally reprehensible.
Those ethical quandaries have not prompted restraint on the part of other outside investors moving into Africa to exploit its agricultural potential. Several European companies have leased land during the past two years to grow crops for food and bio-fuels (although on a far smaller scale than Daewoo plans in Madagascar) including the British company Sun Biofuels, which is planting biofuel crops in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania.
Daewoo Logistics, set up in 1999 after being spun off from Daewoo Corp., is engaged in logistics, shipping and resource development. The company has also established a branch in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and a producer of metals and agricultural commodities.
The leased area in Madagascar, including the regions of Menabe and Melaky, may produce 4 million metric tons of corn and 500,000 tons of palm oil a year, Shin said on Nov. 18. The company was contacting Nonghyup Feed Inc., South Korea’s biggest single buyer of feed grains, and some Chinese firms as potential partners in the venture, he said then.
Still, Nonghyup Feed hasn’t considered joining the project, Yang Sang No, the leader of Nonghyup Feed’s business development team, said today by phone in Seoul.
“We are aware of the project, but we’ve not started any review,” Yang said. “In principle, we are interested in overseas farming projects because, as you know, we have to diversify import sources.”
Indonesian Venture
The Korean grain buyer said in July it made an initial agreement with Daewoo Logistics to jointly farm corn on 20,000 hectares of farmland in Indonesia starting next year.
South Korea’s government said the nation needs to “farm grains overseas in the longer term in order to secure sources for stable food supplies,” according to a June 2 statement.
The country, the world’s third-largest corn importer, has targeted production of half the grain it needs either at home or from overseas farmland that it controls by 2030 compared with about 27 percent at present, the statement said.
President Lee Myung Bak said in April the country may seek to farm rice and other grain overseas, possibly signing 50-year leases for agricultural land in Russia’s Far East.
Meanwhile, the Malagsy starve.
Poverty in Madagascar
Mark Ravalomanana, the President of Madagascar, came to power six years ago on the promise that he would cut poverty by 50 per cent by opening the country up to the free market. But most Malagsy still live on less than $1 a day and many of the poor are getting poorer.
In the first of three reports, Al Jazeera’s Jane Dutton talks to the Malagsy who say the president’s business mind is costing them dearly.