Starving in Brussels

The past months many angry workers voiced their discontent with workers from other European countries ‘stealing’ their jobs. The economic crisis is taking its toll on employment and public opinion. However understandable this opinion is, policy makers should not give in to impulsive reactions. The migrant worker is also a human being, also adds economic value and migrants have become citizens, part of, and contributing to, Europe’s societies. A report from Brussels ‘down-under’, a city flooded with European migrant workers but benefiting the most from them.

11 ‘o clock in the evening, Brussels, capital of Europe. I am in my local night shop buying some fruit when a shabby-looking man enters. He says in a loud voice that he wants to buy an apple, putting it on the counter, but that the orange in his other hand was already his. However, via the security camera, the shopkeeper had seen him taking the orange from the shop’s outside shelves. The poor man initially denied the theft, but eventually admitted: he had stolen to eat.

Brussels – migration and poverty

It is a tragic story in Europe’s capital, where this January 19,9 percent of the workforce was unemployed, 1.2 percent higher than in December. The economic crisis stings. Paradoxically, Brussels is the third richest region of the EU, with a BBP/person of €53.381, twice the European average. It is also home to one of the largest foreign born populations in Europe. About 46 percent of its one million large population is foreign-born, 55 percent of which is European.

The map below provides you with real insight in the human map of Brussels. Similar data on rent prices, residence place of foreigners, age,… can be downloaded here, more info on Belgeoblog.be. The next map singles out unemployment. The red areas have about 37-56 percent unemployed, while the hazy white are better off.

White, rich, regions coincide with the residence place of the migrants from North-West Europe, United States, Japan and Oceania; while the red, poorer, areas are almost a watermark of the living place of migrants coming from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey and Morocco. It is clear that migration is interlinked with poverty and other socio-economic indicators.

Migration in the European Union

Looking at the more global picture, Europe’s migrating population amounts to 42 millions of which one third, or 14 millions of which are EU citizens migrating to another member state. On country level the foreign-born population thus represents between 7 and 15 per cent of the total population in most western European countries. Click here for data on your country.

Although protests against migrant workers are more frequent, European migrants were very valued by the host countries up until recently. A Commission report demonstrates that migration from new to old member states has had “a clearly positive impact on economic growth” with Eastern European migrant workers hailed to boost EU GDP by 0.28%. With European economies facing a dip, some are tempted to limit the free movement of workers in the EU. However, this would be a counterproductive, destructive and immoral decision

I am a migrant, you are a migrant, we are all migrants

Let us look at European mobility in practice. In my neighbourhood a new snack bar recently opened up. Not just any snack bar, it brings something new to us: falafels. Mr Shawkat exchanged Amsterdam for Brussels as he noticed that we in Brussels barely know or eat falafels. This migrating European brought something new with him. There are many other stories like this.

Europeans on the move do not only add economic value, they have more to offer. A migrant is a human being looking for a better life, changing homes to chase his or her dreams. He can be Romanian looking for a chance to work, an electro fan from Portugal keen on Berlin dancing or a rich British hedge fund manager longing for the simple life in an Italian vineyard. Migrants also bring a lot to our societies as citizens. They compensate for demographic deficits, pay taxes,will help in subsidizing our elderly in a few years and enrich our diverse societies. It is also not a coincidence that one of the icons of our time, Barack Obama, is born from a migrant family. Our 21st century world is a new world; people are becoming nomads again on a constant quest for happiness or freedom.

But… there is a big but. In Europe we believe that success and happiness of individuals depends on an enabling society. Emile Durkheim noticed already in 1897 that the number of suicides depends on an individual’s integration in society. Europe believes in social cohesion and also has to give that to migrating Europeans. In these hard economic times, they need a hand or they will fall, and only few benefit from that.

Providing opportunities to fellow Europeans

2009 is shaping up as a year of recession and retreat of the global economy. However, not everybody will be hit as bad. Success stories are found where there is a solid social security system, proactive government policies and when an individual scores high on skills, education and relations. This last point will make 2009 hard for our migrating fellow Europeans. First of all they will lose employment faster as they work in sectors hit harder by the economic downturn, on average have lower skills and education and have less of a social network in the host country to fall back on. Secondly the growth of informal economies in times of crisis will fuel exploitation of migrants. And finally, the public perception of migrants is likely to worsen.

However, in the Brussels area f.e., 1000s of businesses still need new workers. The Transatlantic Council on Migration rightly notes that “the global economic contraction has not put a pause on the competitive pressures unleashed in an ever-more globalized world”.

Labour law

The tide of public sentiment is rising against welcoming policies. The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) blames Europe by saying that the principle of equal labour rights and equal pay for equal work has been damaged by European Court of Justice rulings in recent years.

Has the European social model really been damaged and, if so, is Europe to blame for it? Social policy in this field is a national competence according to the European Commission, as there is no uniform ‘European social model’. The European posted workers directive provides that European migrants have to abide by the host country’s labour laws. If Member States find that foreign European workers are working too cheaply, they should lift minimum wage and improve controls on existing labour laws.

Hey you! What do you think?

Do you think too many migrants work for too little in even worse working conditions in your country? Blame your country’s politicians. Demand more government controls of labour sites and their respect for labour law, and higher minimum wages for all workers. However, be careful in uttering slogans such as “British jobs for British workers”, because you might be hit first with higher prices for garbage collection, difficulties in planning business trips abroad or troubles in finding a job in your own country as your Romanian boss or French customers are no longer there.

Poverty will strike Europe, unemployment will rise and emotions will probably turn against migrants. Policy makers should be open to the grievances, but act rational, non-protectionist and provide sufficient social protection in these economic grim times. European migrants are here to stay, mobility in Europe is a fact and we all benefit from it. The only question that remains is how you welcome them. Do you make the life of our fellow Europeans difficult, thus increasing poverty, criminality and misery? Or do you enable their dreams, facilitating their integration as citizens, workers and human beings?

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This article represents my opinion only. I cannot be quoted in any other qualification or function but my name.

First published in Babelblogs Brussels
Photo credits: belgeoblog.be; OCDE; Kwatoko/Flickr

Starved by the rich : the cult of organic food imposed on Africa

Last week I met up with a friend who is passionate about organic food. No pesticides for her, no large industrial farms and certainly no Frankenstein food. She is not alone in this, the movement for the promotion of the so called organic food gains more and more supporters. Their ideal world consists of locally grown food on small family farms instead of the current large factory farms with a large carbon footprint. They strive to abandon the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified organisms and wish to eat crops who are grown organically instead. Animals should be able to range freely instead of being locked in small cabins. Greenpeace, Oxfam and others, including my friend, wish to see “slow” food rather than fast food.

After listening to her commercial I was left wondering what the desirability was of organic agriculture for the peasant trying to make ends meet. Is organic agriculture really the best option for the impoverished of this world? Are we in fact not imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people? Are the rich starving the poor?

Robert Paalberg makes in his book “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa” a strong case that this is indeed the case. Wealthy countries are blocking biotechnological progress from deprived regions like Africa by giving adverse incentives while the African peasants are the ones who most need it. In former times numerous countries had to deal with famines as the weather didn’t cooperate, population growth was too high or crops were contaminated by diseases or insects. Several green revolutions during history have put an end to this, recent examples being Mexico, India and other parts of Asia. Africa however has not been able to put an end to the medieval situations of crop shortages and famines, they are stuck in organic agriculture.

Africa’s organic farms

Oxfam, greanpeace, friends of the earth and my friend advocate a generalized organic agriculture, but how might such an idealized food system actually look like? Robert Paalberg points to Africa. The post-materialist fantasy described earlier is an actual reality for most African peasants. This might look good at first glance but a second look makes you think twice. The drive up to the farm is exhilarating with red soil underneath, the blue beauty of the sky above and arid vistas at the sides. As at the end of the road the two-lane tarmac makes place for rutted dirt, one eventually comes to meet the people. The fields at that end of the road are populated with hardworking people yet they are obviously poor. They do not use chemical fertilizers, have no knowledge of irrigation, improved seeds are absent and with their meagre crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Two third of the African population still depends on this kind of farming that may be organic yet provides them little income and little nourishment.

In the coming decades, Africa will have to feed a population that is expected to increase from around 850 million today to more than 1.8 billion in 2050. But at the current pace, it is estimated that Africa will be able to feed less than half of its population by 2015. A major increase in agricultural productivity is absolutely essential. If we look to the feasibility of this, one has to conclude that technology is the only answer. In the last four decades in Africa, less than 40 percent of the gains in cereal production came from increased yields. The rest was from expansion of the land devoted to arable agriculture. The problem of this expansion is that it comes at the expense of forests, soil fertility and water.

Increasing production by increasing yield on existing areas, employing methods such as improved plant varieties, mineral fertilizers and irrigation in dry areas has proven necessary yet problematic in Africa. Power machinery is almost absent with only two tractors for every thousand agricultural workers, irrigation is used with only 4 percent of the crops, traditional crop varieties are still used on more than two thirds of all cropland instead of the scientifically improved varieties and animals still have to look for their own food instead of being fed, what would give better results. The use of chemical fertilizer per hectare is only one tenth of the industrial world average, insecticides and herbicides are unaffordable, weeding is done by children who should be at school and genetically engineered crops are not grown because African governments follow Europe and have not approved such crops for use.

All this makes African farms very organic which makes the post-modern dreamers very happy. That these kind of farms are therefore also poor and non productive is not thought of by the defenders and propagators of this ideal post-modern world of slow food. But they should think of this. Population growth this year is close to 15 percent while the agricultural production per capita has fallen 19 percent below the level of 1970. Unless African agriculture will reform it’s current organic agriculture and start apply modern agricultural science, it comes to depend more and more on imported food aid.

Are the rich countries imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people?

The post-modern dreamers of the North are the reason for the harsh reality of the African peasant. However oversimplified this can be, there is a core of truth in it. As the organic dreamers of the rich countries in the north gained the momentum and all the more adherence, the support for science-based farming in the 1980s sharply diminished. This resulted in catastrophic neglect for the modernization of farming. When the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming at the end of the 80s, it is merely one percent today. The statistics for the World Bank aren’t any better with a drop from almost 30 percent to the current 8 percent.

Agricultural modernization is the way out of poverty and Europeans should know that. For the agricultural revolution has once enabled the European farmers to escape poverty with the British agricultural revolution in the 18^th an 19^th century spreading across Europe and eventually facilitating the industrial revolution. But some official donors and nongovernmental agencies are non the less still trying to block farm modernization in Africa. And then we don’t even speak of the European governments and NGOs who promote regulatory systems that block the use of genetically engineered crops, including crops capable of resisting insects without pesticide sprays.

In Europe only 4 percent of cropland is currently being farmed organically (and less than 1 percent in America), but Africa, so does the West seem to demand, has to be 100 percent organic. By this approach, perhaps unknowingly, the affluent countries are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people. This way the African peasant stays organic but poor. This way the rich are starving the poor.

edit:

Acknowledging the merits of organic farming, some points in this article require revision. However, I do reaffirm the core point:  industrial farming is superior when attention is paid to sustainability factors and science-based farming deserves more support, certainly  in the developing world.

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References

Starved for Science
How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa
Robert Paarlberg
Foreword by Norman Borlaug and Jimmy Carter
Harvard University Press
Amazon.com

Robert Paarlberg is the Betty F. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College.
Norman Borlaug is Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M University and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Jimmy Carter is Former President of the United States and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

• Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa
• Will Africa cotton to bioengineering?
• GM Comes to sub-Saharan Africa (sort of)
• Out of Africa: is the cult of organic keeping people poor?
• Africa’s organic farms
  
• What is organic food?