Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – IPS
Thursday, July 31, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 31 (IPS) – Oil from native tucuma, ouricurí and murumurú palm trees will be used to provide electricity to isolated communities in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon, which are too remote to supply with power by conventional means.

A research team is preparing to start producing biodiesel this year at a plant in Carauarí, a district of 25,000 people that can only be reached by a 1,600-kilometre river journey, or by a two-and-a-half hour flight from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state.

Roberto Figliuolo, an expert with the National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA), told IPS that there are ”10 promising palm species,” which are found in ”dense natural stands” and yield good quantities of oil. However, the team has worked most intensively with the tucuma palm because it is abundant and already has a partially developed production chain.
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Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – IPS
Thursday, July 31, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Tarjei Kidd Olsen

OSLO, Jul 31 (IPS) – Norway’s offers of cash and its promises of reintegration support to failed asylum seekers to return voluntarily to Afghanistan has mostly been a failure, a new study finds.

None of the Afghans interviewed cited the voluntary return programme’s roughly 2,900 dollars in payment, or reintegration assistance, as a motivation. Instead, most were anxious to avoid having to live illegally in Norway or being forcibly returned in humiliation.

The report by the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen in southern Norway finds that by March this year only 69 adults had returned to Afghanistan via the voluntary programme since its launch in April 2006. At least three times as many have been forcibly returned by police — an option which the report says is both ethically problematic and more expensive.

Afghan asylum seekers have become a contentious issue in Norwegian public life. All asylum seekers from Afghanistan were automatically granted asylum until 2003, when a peak in Afghan arrivals prompted the government to implement more restrictive policies.

By the launch of the programme in 2006 the asylum applications of almost 2,000 Afghans had been rejected on appeal. On the same day in May 2006 that Norway was to start the removals, a group of Afghans that were to be deported began a hunger strike in Norway’s capital Oslo.

The group, mushrooming to about 80 in a few days, called off the hunger strike 26 days later after receiving assurances that they would receive legal advice from an NGO, and that no one would be deported anywhere outside of Afghanistan’s capital Kabul before 2007, due to the unstable security situation.

Tensions flared again in May 2007, when around 70 Afghans with failed asylum applications went on a 649-kilometre protest march from the central city of Trondheim to Oslo in the face of renewed efforts by police to find and deport the Afghans living here illegally — estimated to number fewer than 1,000.

”The return programme has not been very successful as few Afghans have used it, and that is of course a result of the situation in Afghanistan. All such return programmes are completely dependent on developments in the home country,” Rolf A. Vestvik from the NGO Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) told IPS.

”It is just as much about the economic situation as the security situation, because people are not only dependent on an absence of conflict; they also need to believe that it is possible to get a job, that they can regain access to their agricultural land, and so on,” said Vestvik, who is the head of NRC’s information and advocacy department.

Convincing the Afghans to make use of the return programme has not been the only obstacle, according to the CMI report. The programme’s reintegration component, meant to offer alternative options of training, job referral or a small business start-up grant, has in reality only provided the business option, as the other options have not been institutionalised in the field.

In turn the business option, which provides returnees with a little under 2,000 dollars in goods or equipment for their start-up, has faced its own challenges. While a few businesses examined by the study had become ”moderately successful”, most ”seemed to exist only on paper, had been running for less than a couple of months, or had closed down shortly after being established.”

Many returnees simply sold the goods or equipment, as they did not consider the contribution large enough for a successful start-up, or said that they were too inexperienced to run a business.

However, one major benefit of the return programme seems to be that it allows the failed asylum seekers to return to Afghanistan in dignity, a point cited by many of those interviewed.

”This issue of humiliation, of honour, of being able to return home with your head raised high and so on, is a cultural phenomenon which it is particularly important to be aware of as part of the returns process,” Vestvik said.

”The families of the Afghans that come to Norway may have used large portions of their savings on sending them here in the hope that, for instance, the only son in the family will establish himself here and send home money. If he can’t, then it’s a greatly humiliating defeat. This cultural aspect is vital, and related to this we also think it is important to ensure that the returns programme is improved so that the Afghans have something positive to return to.”

The CMI report’s authors doubt that improvements to the programme will lead it to seem much more attractive to the failed asylum seekers. The report cautions that effectiveness ”cannot be the only criterion guiding policy,” as the human and ethical costs would be too great.

Project development director Roald Kristiansen at the Norwegian Directorate for Immigration (UDI), the government department that is responsible for considering asylum applications and that commissioned the CMI report, told IPS that the return programme is mainly relevant for Afghans that have had their asylum applications rejected.

”We actually think that it is quite generous of us to give reintegration support to people that have a duty to leave the country and that have refused to do so over a long period of time. That is how we see it, and it provides a different basis for considering the issue,” Kristiansen said.

”These are people who have completed the whole application process. In reality they have a duty to leave Norway by their own volition. However, in recognition of the fact that they are returning to a country with difficulties — even though we only return people to areas that we consider safe — we are giving them support to enable them to re-establish themselves in their home country.”

Kristiansen does not consider the return programme a failure.

”For me the report’s findings indicate that the programme has functioned reasonably well, as it was the first time that we tried something like this, and it has improved the lives of some returnees,” he said.

”Afghanistan is not the easiest country to make a return programme for either, and I’m sure you remember the context in which the programme was created, with a hunger strike, a protest march, and with powerful interest groups supporting the Afghans. Our new return programme for northern Iraq isn’t experiencing any of these problems,” Kristiansen noted.

”As for the cash and reintegration support, we were aware that this was insufficient before the release of the report, but it was the best we could do at the time. Again, remember that this was our very first such initiative, and the lessons learned have led to better integration support and a larger cash payment for our Iraq programme.”

This year has seen a new peak in Afghan asylum seekers arriving in Norway. Between January and June 330 Afghans applied for asylum, as compared to 122 during last year as a whole. The number of asylum arrivals from other countries has also increased, leading to a total that is higher than at any time since 2003 — a fact not lost on some of the media here.

Vestvik has little patience for calls for restrictions to be tightened further. ”Most refugees by far are internally displaced or go to neighbouring countries,” he told IPS. ”When you look at the numbers, when you look at the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that have fled to poor countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, then it is of course completely lacking in perspective to start panicking when asylum seekers arriving in Norway increase from a little under 10,000 a year to a little over 10,000 a year.”

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – IPS
Thursday, July 31, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Tarjei Kidd Olsen

OSLO, Jul 31 (IPS) – Norway’s ‘oil fund’ has risen to become the second largest fund in the world despite housing an ethical investments council which has kicked out major companies such as Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The ‘oil fund’, properly called the Government Pension Fund – Global, and worth an estimated 390 billion dollars, has become the world’s second largest sovereign wealth fund, now only trailing the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority after overtaking the Dutch fund for public employees.

The fund invests some of the huge profits from Norway’s oil and gas sector in companies worldwide to raise money in anticipation of increased pension costs and a future without oil exports.

Business is booming, perhaps partly explaining why the ethics councils of 20 non-Norwegian funds are said to be copying its ethical guidelines and recommendations, and in the process broadening its impact considerably, according to Norway’s finance ministry.

The unprecedented level of investment transparency practised by the oil fund may be another contributor to its success. The fund has been clear that its goals relate to financial sustainability as opposed to any secretive political agendas, and it scored no less than 100 percent for governance, accountability and transparency in a 2007 study by the U.S.-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (Abu Dhabi Investment Authority scored 2 percent).

The fund invests earnings from Norway’s oil and gas sector in companies outside of Norway in accordance with guidelines from the finance ministry. Some of these guidelines relate to ethics and are meant to ensure that the fund does not invest in companies that contribute to any of a series of specified abuses that finance minister Kristin Halvorsen has summarised as ”serious, systematic or gross violations of ethical norms.”

A total of 27 companies have been kicked out of the fund following the creation of the ethics council in 2004. Most of these were excluded for producing weapons that ”may violate fundamental humanitarian principles.” Among these were Lockheed Martin or EADS for producing components for cluster bombs, and Boeing for producing central components for nuclear weapons.

Wal-Mart got the boot for workers right abuses (including child labour, gender discrimination, and the blocking of unionisation attempts). The oil fund has also pulled out of companies that have engaged in abuses such as the forced displacement of tribal peoples or serious environmental destruction.

However, most of the time the fund engages in less dramatic action which, its proponents argue, may be more effective in the long run. This approach focuses on using the oil fund’s position as an investor to influence the ethical practices of offending companies, and is managed by Norway’s central bank instead of the finance ministry.

The central bank’s Anne Kvam, head of the corporate governance department, has an in-house team of 11 people working to influence the 7,000 stock market-listed companies in the oil fund’s investment portfolio. The team works with ‘traditional’ corporate governance issues, for instance shareholder voting rights, as well as social concerns — currently child labour and the environment.

”With 7,000 companies and a fairly broad set of international principles to take account of, there are quite a lot of different themes and areas that could be focused upon. Obviously we don’t have the resources or possibility to do that, so instead we focus on a few specific areas for each strategic period which we can delve into more deeply,” Kvam told IPS.

”We take a sector-wise approach to investigating abuses by the companies we invest in, and for child labour in Brazil that means the mining sector, in India it means the cotton industry, and so on.”

The effort involves voting at shareholder meetings, discussions and ongoing processes of engagement with the companies, networking with other investors, and government dialogue.

Even though the oil fund usually owns no more than one percent of stocks and bonds in any given company, Kvam feels that her team is being listened to.

”Social issues such as child labour are structural problems connected to poverty and many other themes that we don’t expect to solve in six months — it’s a long-term effort, and my team only began working with this in 2006. But we do feel that the companies are interested in talking to us, in that we are given the opportunity to engage in dialogue with receptive CEOs and boards,” she said.

Kvam’s team has already helped convince some companies to sign up to the United Nations Global Compact, a corporate responsibility initiative. ”It naturally helps that we are one of the largest funds in the world. They listen to us, and now it remains to be seen how our work will affect policy.”

The finance ministry’s exclusion of companies and the central bank’s investor approach are meant to complement each other. While the exclusion of companies garners attention and roots out the worst of the worst, the less dramatic central bank approach serves to influence a larger number of companies.

”The process that takes place with the finance ministry’s council of ethics is very thorough and very transparent. It makes people take notice; something which stock market-listed companies hardly enjoy. But this approach has a limited capacity — they have excluded 27 companies out of the total 7,000 — so it can never become the main instrument as it simply can’t investigate everyone,” Kvam pointed out.

Finance minister Kristin Halvorsen agrees that it is usually better to influence companies from the inside, rather than by kicking them out.

”If the finance ministry excludes a company it will garner attention, but we lose the ability to influence the company’s behaviour, and those that buy the stocks we sell may have a completely different agenda than we do when it comes to ethics,” she said in a press statement.

”Because of this it is important that the exclusion of companies should only be on the table in exceptional circumstances, although in certain cases the ministry has to forcefully demonstrate that we cannot contribute to the financing of gravely unethical activities.”