In 1993 France instituted the European Banana Regime placing quotas on banana imports from outside of their trade preference agreements with Europe's old colonial trading partners, the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. The big losers were Latin American farmers.
Germany, joining the European Union in 1987, and with no historical colonies to protect, was suddenly restricted from importing (to them) cheaper, tastier and larger bananas from Latin America in favour of the ACP imports. The case went to GATT (now the World Trade Organisation).
France declared that they were simply preventing toxic products from entering their market; citing evidence that Costa Rica used harmful pesticides and degraded the environment through their agricultural practices. That Costa Rica was improving its farming techniques, and that the ACP countries were even worse than Latin America was moot.
It was flagrant protectionism and resulted in years of jokes about France banning bananas based on their curvature.
Moral outrage is bigotry with a halo. And the moral citizens of our cities are whiffling about the high-streets breathing fire and brimstone, “Something! must be done!” And done quickly or there will be letter writing and waving of forefingers.
A simple symptom of poverty in any developing country is that labour, which is mobile, moves from areas where there are no jobs to other areas where there are still no jobs but there are lots of other people as well. This means that people turn up in our cities in droves doing anything they can to try and earn a living. When they can’t earn a living, some turn to crime.
I have had an ambivalent attitude to the One Laptop Per Child project ever since Nicholas Negroponte, stumped for an answer on the ultimate purpose of the computer, declared, "... there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home."
Now it turns out that the laptop won't, after all, cost US$ 100 . Before anyone leaps to the defence of Negroponte I will admit that the technology is nifty, innovative and exciting. I hope it gets incorporated into commercial devices. However, one has to ask oneself whether this is any less of a vanity project than Oprah Winfrey's US$ 14 million school in South Africa which only serves 152 kids?
It is astonishing the lengths that humanitarian and development organisations will go to avoid talking about business, or to businesses.
International Labour Organisation (ILO) Director-General Juan Somavia speaking at the XIth African Regional Meeting called for a new development approach in Africa which "puts people at the centre of development and judges the success of economic and social policy according to what happens to people at work ... autonomous and independent social partners and institutions of social dialogue are bedrocks of democratic governance."
I don't know what that means either. But he really laid down the importance of this when, stressing the need for action, he said, "Each and every day, another 10 000 African women and men are being added to those workers already living with their families on less than US$1 per day."
In March 2000 the original dotcom Bubble 1.0 burst. With hindsight there were lots of reasons that it happened: vastly overvalued stocks in companies that didn’t sell anything and lost cash in truckloads; massive oversupply of advertising space; and the relative naiveté of the incumbents.
In 2004 Tim O’Reilly declared the coming of Web 2.0, “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
Web 2.0 has more to do with the success of Google than with anything else. And Google’s success depends on Adwords.
The Internet is primarily used for two things: communicating with people, and finding people to communicate with. The former can be achieved via email and chat forums, and the latter through search. Right from the beginning, as the Internet grew phenomenally large, search became essential. Google’s approach has won.
Search is expected to be free. Google’s genius was in linking search terms, and user interests, via a dynamic algorithm that allows companies to reach you with relevant adverts. It is this, more than anything else, which has allowed Google to leap away from Yahoo. Google also cleverly shares their revenue with websites who host their ad-streams.
And it is this shared revenue model that has boosted Web 2.0. Websites with no conceivable revenue model now make money by hosting Google Adwords. Suddenly companies can offer user-created content in ever-expanding formats: video, music, chat, blogs, diaries, encyclopaedias, hobbies, socialising, favourite things … you name it, you got it. An ever-expanding network of social grooming allowing the world’s (mainly American) youth to connect. Like highly evolved chimpanzees doing the simian equivalent of picking flees out of each other’s fur; compassionate connection, social grooming, to keep the world safe.
But, you see, the Internet isn’t the thing. It’s just the package.
aloft: the whythawk blog 
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