The Land Matrix is an online public database of large-scale land deals. It provides a visualization of records documenting land deals since 2000. The data you can explore represent about 50% of the entire data base. The remaining deals are being crosschecked and added, together with new data provided, on an on-going basis. The visualizations offer overview of the data as well as giving full access to the public database down to the level of an individual deal.

The public interface provides factual information in a systematic, clear, visual and accessible format. It facilitates the collection and representation of data; encourages citizens, researchers, governments, and companies to provide data and improve the quality of and access to data; as well as provide a regular and accessible analysis of the phenomenon.

You can explore data through different entry points, ranging from summaries that give insights to the content of the database, to direct access to the data for more in-depth exploration and analysis.

Dynamics of transnational deals

This interactive graph (click the link below) shows how much land is being acquired by investors from countries on the left, in target countries on the right. Clicking on a single country shows its threads in the global pattern.

Top 10 Investor Countries

USA*	4,136,973 hectares
INDIA	3,420,209 hectares
MALAYSIA	3,397,607 hectares
UK*	3,008,472 hectares
REPUBLIC OF KOREA	2,696,297 hectares
CHINA	2,554,502 hectares
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES	2,277,856 hectares
SAUDI ARABIA	2,204,132 hectares
AUSTRALIA	1,547,616 hectares
SWEDEN	1,434,700 hectares

Country names marked with * have been shortened to improve legibility.

via landportal.info

cc P A L

Dr Nawal al Saadawi’s continued hope, after decades of persecution by the Egyptian political and religious authorities, and the as yet unfilled promise of Tahrir, offers inspiration to everyone challenging the violence and abuses of patriarchy and capitalism.

There are some metaphors that are so striking and so unusual that they instantly transform one’s way of thinking about the subject matter. Consider, for example, this saying from China: The women of the world hold up half the sky.

This sentence conveys a unique picture of the human female condition, one that is miles away from the legend of Adam’s spare rib or from the Freudian cry of exasperation and impatience : ‘What do women really want?’. In China itself, the saying would have made no sense in traditional, pre-revolutionary times when foot-binding was imposed for purely aesthetic reasons on women of a certain class, making it virtually impossible for them to walk.

The metaphor does not question or suggest; it merely tells the whole story about where and what a woman is. It places her not in the male’s shadow but in the world; it refers to her status in the universe, not in the home or the kitchen or the field. Above all, it does not define women by their body or their biological functions but shows them expressing their purpose on Earth, which is to use their strength to hold up half the sky…which otherwise could come crashing down on all below.

The questions then follow: Who holds up the other half of the sky? Is it held up at all? If so, is it held up by the men of the world? If so, is it the same sky that both women and men are holding up, over the same planet , for the same purpose , the same dharma?

Nawal al Saadawi, Egyptian writer, doctor, psychiatrist, political analyst and fighter for the human rights of women, was born in rural Egypt in 1931. At the age of 6, she underwent an experience which most women readers of this article will never know but which was - and still is - commonplace in Egypt, namely, the ritual genital mutilation of little girls.

This is how she described the experience in a Guardian interview: ‘The daya (midwife) came along holding a razor, pulled out my clitoris from between my thighs and cut it off. She said it was the will of God and she had done his will’. The ordeal left its mark; apart from the bleeding and the unimaginable pain, she was left wondering, at the age of 6, ‘what other parts of my body there were that might need to be cut off in the same way’ (Guardian interview with Homa Khaleeli, 15/04/2010).

This happened to Nawal in 1937. According to Unicef’s Global Data figures for 2008, female genital mutilation (FGM) was performed on 95% of girls in rural Egypt and this despite the introductionin 2007 of laws against the practice. The World Health Organisation has also found that legislation in itself has made no impact; what is needed is a nationwide campaign specially designed to negate the cultural and psychological legitimacy that this form of violence and abuse has obtained in Egyptian society since time immemorial. The practice is a pre-Islamic ritual and is nowhere mentioned in the Koran.

In April 1997, the WHO, Unicef and UNIFEM made a joint appeal against this custom which affects 140 million women worldwide. The appeal said FGM constitutes ‘violence against womens’ rights and against their physical and psycho-sexual integrity’. The procedure is ‘dangerous and potentially life-threatening’ and its physical and psychological effects impact on ‘womens’ health and well-being for the rest of their lives’.

The entire network of UN agencies regularly draws attention to this problem measured with reference to the various specialised fields of competence (health, education, labour, etc). The UN has even instituted 6 February as the annual International Day of Zero Tolerance of FGM. But the practice continues, on a massive scale in Egypt, Sudan (89%) and Somalia (98%).

It can be safely predicted that this hideous and criminal custom will continue to be practiced for centuries to come unless the public health, educational and religious authorities of Egypt take responsibility for its elimination. Legal instruments cannot, on their own, wipe out such deeply held and tradition-bound aberrations, especially in societies where 44% of the female population is illiterate, and where nearly half the population lives on two dollars or less a day, as is the case in present-day Egypt (UNESCO/World Bank country profiles).

The young Nawal survived this abuse and went on to fight another pernicious custom prevalent in her village in rural Egypt at that time, childhood marriage. It was normal for families to marry off their daughters at the age of 10 or 11 but Nawal refused and fought to continue studying. Her ardent desire was to study medicine and this she was finally permitted to do so by her parents. She went on to do further studies in public health and psychiatry, in Cairo and at Columbia University, New York.

She joined the ministry of health and rose to become its Director of Public Health in Cairo where she concentrated on the task of freeing her fellow-citizens from the tyranny of FGM, the ravages of which she saw on a huge scale among rural and urban girls and women. Given her medical training and her own first-hand experience, it was only natural that she also considered the social, cultural and essentially patriarchal context for this ancient, barbaric custom. These and other considerations she put down in a book, Women and Sex, the first such work in Arabic on the subject, published in 1969.

In any halfway self-respecting country of the developing world, such a person would have been given all the support of the state,even in those early days, in order to solve a major public health problem affecting half the total population. Not so in Egypt where the narrow-minded establishment considered the book to be so scandalous that she was dismissed from her post as Director of Public Health in 1972. The military and religious authorities were so outraged by the very mention of FGM in the book and the links she made between female sexuality, male-domination and economic and political oppression that they banned the book and also the magazine Health which she had founded and edited for three years. They in effect banned her from working in public service altogether.

From this event onwards, Egypt’s religious-military ruling circles have heaped their outrage and anger not on obscurantist and harmful customs such as FGM, but on Dr.Nawal as a woman who uses her training, her brains and her pen to denounce this and other violations against women. According to the distorted logic of patriarchy, it is the messenger of change who must be attacked, especially if she is a woman, for daring to suggest that things need to be changed. The fact that generation after generation, millions of little girls are forced by their mothers to have their private parts butchered by adult women for no good reason seems to be of no consequence whatsoever...in a man’s world.

After the first book,she continued to write on the situation of women from different angles, publishing titles such as Woman is the Origin ( 1971), Men and Sex (1973), Women and Neurosis (1975) , The Hidden Face of Eve. She also wrote novels, including a most important one on the effects of FGM, Woman at Point Zero (1973), which has become a classic and has been translated into some 30 languages.

In the 40 years since 1972, Dr. al Saadawi and her homeland have existed in two separate and parallel planes. Her own career and life have been marked by a relentless programme of persecution, harrassment and exile at the hands of Egypt’s military authorities and fellow-male citizens, some of them religious fanatics. In patriarchal structures, the military and the religious constitute two faces of the same mysogynist, anti-women coin.

At the beginning of the Sadat regime, in 1972, she was kicked out of her post at the health ministry and towards the end of his disastrous rule, in 1981, she was imprisoned for three months together with 1,500 other intellectuals by the paranoid Sadat for ‘crimes against the State’. In the end, it was not an intellectual but one of his own soldiers who assassinated Sadat, on the parade ground in October 1981.

After their release in November, many of the fellow-intellectuals kept silent, but not Dr. Nawal who founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982 and co-founded the Arab Association for Human Rights in 1983. And she began to write, book after book after book, fiction and non-fiction.By now she has written some 50 books , translated into over 30 languages.

Her books on and about women in Egypt and the Arab world so disturbed the religious circles that her name began appearing on the death list of several fundamentalist organisations in 1988. In 1991, the government authorities forcibly closed down the Arab Womens Solidarity Association and handed over its funds to one of its own creations called Women In Islam. In 1993, fearing for her safety, she left to live in the US where she taught at several universities.

On her return, she found the country even more in the grip of religious fundamentalist attitudes encouraged by Saudi and Gulf influences and further mired in poverty, especially in the countryside. In both these circumstances, it was the women, as usual, who were the worst hit; here, as elsewhere, poverty and religious extremism work hand in hand to victimise women and their children. She continued to write and to criticise this situation and in June 2001 made some factual comments about so-called religious customs in a newspaper interview which once more made the Cairo mullahs furious.

The comments concerned the sharia rules of inheritance under which women are accorded only half of what men inherit. She said this rule was unjust and should be abolished (as has happened in Tunisia, for example). Secondly, she said there was nothing in the Koran requiring women to wear the veil and thirdly, that the pilgrimage to Mecca is a ritual dating from pre-Islamic times. These last statements are concrete facts, not mere opinion.

The Mufti, however, condemned her for breaking Islamic laws, a ‘fault’ which allows any private citizen to start legal proceedings against a person so condemned on behalf of the community. So a lawyer duly brought a case against her for apostasy, a medieval notion about wrongfully ‘abandoning religion’.The punishment demanded for this so-called crime was equally medieval- forcible divorce from her husband! Her husband of 45 years, Dr Sharif Hatata, declared he would do no such thing! She fought the case and won.

In 2007, it was her daughter, Mona Helmi, writer and poet, who faced trouble for writing about her mother on Mother’s Day. She wrote a poetic piece about choosing a gift for her mother on this day. ‘What shall I give her, shoes , a dress? No, I will give her the gift of bearing her name’. And she signed herself Mona Nawal Helmi. For this she was taken to court for ‘heresy’ because ‘it was written in the Koran that a woman takes the name of the father, not the mother’.

Both Mona and her mother were interrogated by the General Prosecutor in Cairo but in the end they won the case. This case also led to change in the law in Egypt; children born out of wedlock now have the right to be named after the mother. Soon afterwards, Dr. Nawal left the country once more, to live in exile in the US.

In the same year, 2008, another case was brought by a lawyer who wanted the courts to deprive her of her nationality because of her ‘controversial ideas and thoughts’. This charge was too ridiculous even for the Egyptian justice system which rejected the case.

In another incident, a fundamentalist lawyer was so upset at her play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, that he brought two cases against her. In the first case, he demanded that her nationality be revoked and that she be refused entry back to the country; in the second case, he wanted all her books to be banned by the culture ministry. These cases were also rejected by the Higher Administrative Court in 2009.

Dr. Nawal returned home to Cairo to her husband and her family in 2010 and in January 2011, she was in Tahrir Square with thousands of citizens, old and young, women and men, to see the fall of Mubarak. ‘I have been dreaming about this revolution since I was a child of 10 years’ she said (Guardian, July 2011). She is now over 80. It may be that she will now be able to live in peace in her own country for Egyptian society, in some ways and in some quarters, has finally caught up with her and is able to understand what she has been saying and writing about since 1970.

She is called a feminist writer, but in writing about Egypt’s women in over 50 books, fiction and non-fiction, she has also been describing the mental states of the men who have ruled over them and the political choices these rulers have made over the past 40 years. The denigration of women, starting with FGM practices against the vast majority of girls, does not take place in isolation; the violence done to women is a reflection of the violence that prevails in the society in general. It reflects above all what men think of women and of themselves in a society built on patriarchal and phallocratic ‘religious’ notions, some of them passed down from the dark ages.

Similarly, the persecution and harassment aimed at women like Dr.Nawal did not occur by chance; the context was the military regime’s suffocating control over Egyptian society for over 40 years. The country’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and the death of Nasser three years later in 1970 delivered devastating blows to the morale of the army leadership from which the ruling clique has never quite recovered. As a result of this defeat and humiliation, Sadat chose to capitulate completely at the American led talks at Camp David in 1979. Many Egyptians felt betrayed by the Camp David Acccords with Israel signed by a servile Sadat, as did many Arabs. Mubarak chose to go even further by collaborating in the promotion of American-Israeli interests and objectives in the region at the cost of neglecting the political, economic and social needs of millions of Egyptians.

In return for two billion dollars a year of US aid, Egypt’s dictatorial military rulers handed the country’s sovereignty over to the paymasters and their allies in the region. Egypt, once the the cultural and progressive centre of the Arab, African and Non-Aligned worlds, retreated into purdah and,with astonishing speed, became the headquarters of US interests and strategies for control over the entire Arab oil producing region.

As Samir Amin, the Egyptian political thinker puts it :

This period of retreat lasted almost another half-century. Egypt, submissive to the demands of globalised liberalism and to US strategy, simply ceased to exist as an active factor in regional and global politics. In its region the major US allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, occupied the foreground. Israel was then able to pursue the course of expanding its colonisation of occupied Palestine with the tacit complicity of Egypt and the Gulf countries (Pambazuka News, Issue 534).

In 2009, Wikileaks found a cable sent from the US embassy in Cairo which put it this way: ‘President Mubarak and other military leaders view our military assistance program as a cornerstone of our military relations and consider the 1.3 billion dollars annual aid as ‘untouchable compensation’ for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits are clear; Egypt remains at peace with Israel and the US enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and to Egyptian airspace’ (quoted in Wikipedia).

Looking back, the period under Nasser (1952-1970) was a short parenthesis, a brief period - after independence - of nation-building, social development through mass education and health programmes and basic strategies for industrialisation and employment. It was followed by a complete policy turn-about in internal and external affairs under Sadat and by the gradual collapse, over three decades, of the national and nationalist projects under Mubarak.

As regards the education of girls, it is instructive to consider the statisticsthat prevailed before and after 1952 when the Free Officers took over. The illiteracy rate among girls was 90% at that point. Soon after the officers’ coup, free education for all was introduced by the state; the budget of the ministry for education doubled between 1952-1962, spending on secondary school construction increased by 1,000% and doubled in the case of primary school construction between 1952-1976. The rate of women in pre-university education increased by 300% and the rate for women in universities increased by nearly 600%. (Source : Library of US Congress as quoted in Wikipedia).

However, since 1976, the situation has regressed dramatically; state education for girls has been abandoned and responsibility for the entire education sector has been given to the religious authorities. Thanks to this and to the introduction of the policies of privatisation , 80% of the ministry of education budget is now spent on salaries. Today, the illiteracy rate for girls is 45% and there is an acute and a chronic shortage of teachers, especially in the rural regions.

The Sadat-Mubarak military regimes opened the door to so-called free market economic ideas and the results have been catastrophic for the general public. The stability of the country much praised by the US and the World Bank is based, to quote Samir Amin again, ‘on a monstrous police apparatus amounting to 1.2 million men (the army numbering a mere 500,000) free to carry out daily acts of criminal abuse’ under a regime of emergency rule.

The Western powers claim they supported army rule because it was ‘protecting’ Egypt from the threat of Islamism, but in reality, reactionary political Islam, of the local homegrown variety and of the imported wahabi school, was incorporated very early into the central power structure by the army. The soldiers gave the mullahs control over education, the justice system and the information media, especially television. The regime’s ‘de facto support of political Islam has destroyed the capacity of Egyptian society to confront the challenges of the modern world’ (Samir Amin, Pambazuka News Issue 534).

Political islam not only believes that women be subjugated to men in the social order by being under the authority of fathers, brothers and husbands, but that this subjugation is of divine origin. Sharia is universally considered to be the law of Allah, unchanging and unchangable, and thus providing men with the unquestionable power to oppress women and to deny them their human rights.

This ideology, however, must be placed in its historic and cultural context, says Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist: ‘The assumptions behind the Muslim social structure such as male dominance, the ‘dangerous‘ nature of female sexuality, and so on, were embodied in specific laws which have regulated male-female relations in Muslim countries for fourteen centuries’ (Fatima Mernissi, Beyond The Veil).

It is unlikely that, after 14 centuries of unchallenged rule, the mindsets of such men can change during the course of a single Arab spring. Besides, the oppression of women has had its impact on the men who oppress them as is shown by their hysterical and violent reactions when faced with women who question their ideas. Such is the emotional disturbance caused to their core identity that they resort to violence rather than coherent argument.

As Dr Nawal herself explains, ‘We live in a very religious, patriarchal and capitalist world. They burned my book in Egypt; the publisher himself burnt it (under police pressure). But if I said everything I wanted to say, it would be me they would burn at the stake’ (Guardian Weekly, 06/03/2009).

The same damage can be seen in the military mind. The men who have ruled Egypt during the last 40 years have taken the veil, to use another metaphor. The military regimes are headed by soldiers in drag; in reality, they have over the years become faithful handmaidens of US-Saudi-Israeli interests while pretending to be strong and powerful at home. While they and their religious counterparts have been punishing Dr. Nawal for writing her books, which they do not comprehend, they have systematically humiliated their own populations and ignored their economic, social and educational needs. With champions such as these, the dayas (midwives) in the countryside can continue to sharpen their razors as ever.

The women who were in the forefront of the Tahrir Square events last year are furious, understandably, at having been side-lined since then by the powers that are in charge. They should not be surprised at this development; it is a classic pattern in all such revolts. But here, two factors are to be considered. Firstly, the army ruling clique can be counted on to make a mess of the election process which it is manipulating and distorting quite transparently. The aim of the military authorities is to preserve their financial and elitist privileges in the new political structures being negotiated during the current period of transition. In this effort their main partners are the religious factions and parties, not the young women and men who led and who suffered in the mass mobilisation for change last year.

Secondly, despite the contributions of the women in driving Mubarak and his family from power, they are and will remain invisible to the soldiers and to the religious parties; in a man’s world , men only talk to men. This is a universal truth. The only way to become visible is for women to take the intiative in identifying the main agenda for change in the social order.

The main priorities of the social order during the last four decades have centred on an obsession with womens’ bodies, their hair, their ankles, their faces, their skirts; which bit of fabric to cover which bit of the female body is the main existential dilemma in Egypt and in other Muslim societies. In this process of regression, Muslim women bear full responsibilty for they have internalised and made their own the contempt of the male for the female. If women want to change this state of affairs, they will have to take on the task of defining the isues and then fighting for them. They could start with a concrete strategy for the eradication of FGM from their society, for example, instead of waiting for the failed state to ‘do something.’

They could also try reading Dr. Nawal’s books. ‘My books are relevant today ; they deal with issues of gender, class, colonialism, FGM, Male GM, capitalism, sexual rape, economic rape...’ (Guardian Weekly). Her aims for women are not about achieving equality with men; given the current order of values, it is hardly worth having. Hers are higher goals which women must set for themsleves and for their men if they are to free their societies from all forms of subjugation, starting with the sexual.

She is not an easy read; her books come from a source of searing lucidity, born of rage and unshakeable dignity, the result of personal experience, struggle and survival. She writes from an inner core which cannot be touched by brain-dead machos stuck in the past. Her creativity is what preserves her and gives her the strength and the desire to continue. She describes herself as ‘like a horse, jumping obstacles, obstacle after obstacle. But I am a winning horse; I insist on this; winning brings me energy’ (Guardian Weekly, 06/03/2009).

If her books are now read all over the world, it is because they make sense to women and men of many different cultures who see beyond ‘feminism’, and ‘radicalism ‘, who understand that the violence and abuse aimed at one half of the human race demeans and degrades the other half in equal measure.

Nawal al Saadawi’s voice is recognised all over the world, but not yet in her own country, there she is still censored in the official media; she still cannot teach in its universities, even after Tahrir. A new political map is being negotiated by the army for itself and the religious blocks, with a little help from their respective foreign friends. Those who brought down Mubarak are not consulted. But we will win, she says, ‘because we are millions and we have hope and hope is power’.

And where there is hope, the sky is the limit.

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• Annar Cassam, a Tanzanian, is a former consultant at UNESCO/PEER Nairobi and former director of the UNESCO Office, Geneva.
• Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

via pambazuka.org

Recent research has found that varieties of GM wheat are outcrossing to other plants at a rate six times higher than conventional varieties. [1]

These findings, along with other data showing wheat can outcross from commercial fields to crops over 2.75 kilometres away, are reviewed in a new briefing published today by GM Freeze. [2]

Although wheat is largely self-pollinating the new data show the difficulties of preventing contamination if GM wheat is ever grown commercially.

Further difficulties in keeping GM and non-GM wheat seed and grain separate throughout the food web are also highlighted. Comingling of the two crops even at low level due to carelessness, poor standards or human error would cause considerable problems for any farmer or producer committed to producing non-GM bakery products or animal feed.

The costs of cleaning up any GM contamination in wheat would fall on farmers, seed merchants, millers, feed merchants, bakers and retailers because the GM industry refused to accept liability for it’s products. This has been seen in earlier examples of contamination incidents of long-grain rice in the US and flax in Canada. [3]

Commenting Pete Riley Campaign Director said:

“If GM wheat is ever grown on a commercial scale contamination will be inevitable either through outcrossing or mixing of seeds and grains. Even pro-GM sources now admit this, but they say it doesn’t matter.

“Experience from the US and Canada shows that even small experimental plots can cause widespread contamination and disruption of the food chain, with considerable costs to food companies and farmers, including widespread loss of export markets.

“Biotech companies have so far been very reluctant to compensate farmers and companies in the food chain without court action compelling them to pay up. The clean up costs of any GM contamination in wheat products like flour or bread will fall on anyone but the biotech companies.

“The presence of GM wheat in fields will immediately impose additional costs to trace and monitor all wheat crops from field to plate to ensure that no contamination has taken place.

“EU consumers have made it clear that they don’t want GM food, and the simple way to ensure markets are protected is to stay well away from GM wheat in the first place. This is why bakers and food businesses like the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union and Chef Raymond Blanc support our call to halt the GM wheat trial in Hertfordshire,”

ENDs

Calls to Pete Riley 07903 341 065

Notes

[1] Rieben S, Kalinina O, Schmid B and Zeller SL, 2011. “Gene Flow in Genetically Modified Wheat”. PLoS ONE 6(12): e29730. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029730

[2] GM Freeze, 2012. GM wheat: Cross pollination and contamination

[3] GM Freeze, 2010. GM in The Dock: US Courts step in where regulators fail. Briefing III: Bayer brought to book for contaminating rice

And

GM Freeze, 2009. GM Flax Containation from Canada

via gmfreeze.org

Modern government could be interpreted as a device for projecting corporate power. Since the 1980s, in Britain, the US and other nations, the primary mission of governments has been to grant their sponsors in the private sector ever greater access to public money and public life.

There are several means by which they do so: the privatisation and outsourcing of public services; the stuffing of public committees with corporate executives; and the reshaping of laws and regulations to favour big business. In the UK, the Health and Social Care Act extends the corporate domain in ways unimaginable even five years ago.

With these increasing powers come diminishing obligations. Through repeated cycles of deregulation, governments release big business from its duty of care towards both people and the planet. While citizens are subject to ever more control – as the state extends surveillance and restricts our freedom to protest and assemble – companies are subject to ever less.

In this column I will make a proposal that sounds – at first – monstrous, but I hope to persuade you is both reasonable and necessary: that freedom of information laws should be extended to the private sector.

The very idea of a corporation is made possible only by a blurring of the distinction between private and public. Limited liability socialises risks that would otherwise be carried by a company's owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause. The bailouts introduced us to an extreme form of this exemption: men like Fred Goodwin and Matt Ridley are left in peace to count their money while everyone else must pay for their mistakes.

So I am asking only for the exercise of that long-standing Conservative maxim – no rights without responsibilities. If you benefit from limited liability, the public should be permitted to scrutinise your business.

Companies already have certain obligations towards transparency, such as the publication of financial statements and annual reports. But these tell us only a little of what we need to know. In News International's annual report, you will find none of the information disclosed at the Leveson inquiry, though it is of pressing public interest. In fact it is only due to a combination of the Guardian's persistence and pure chance (the discovery that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked) that we know anything about the wide-ranging assault on democracy engineered by that company.

Privatisation and outsourcing ensure that private business is, or should be, everyone's business. Private companies now provide services we are in no position to refuse, yet, unlike the state bodies they replace, they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The results can be catastrophic for public accounts.

Just as the Blair government did while imposing the disastrous private finance initiative, the Bullingdon boys now shield their schemes from public scrutiny behind the corporate information wall. Companies are once again striking remarkable deals, hatched in secret, at the expense of taxpayers, pupils and patients. Last week, for example, we learned that Circle Healthcare will be able to extract millions of pounds a year from a public hospital, Hinchingbrooke, which is in deep financial trouble. Crucial information about the deal remains secret on the grounds of Circle's "commercial confidentiality".

The principle of corporate transparency is already established in English law. The Freedom of Information Act has a clause enabling the government to extend it to companies with public contracts. Unsurprisingly, it has not been exercised. The environmental information rules of 2004 define a public authority as any body providing public services, which includes corporations. Why should this not apply universally?

The Campaign for Freedom of Information points out that the Scottish government almost adopted this idea: it proposed extending the transparency laws to major government contractors. But though this plan was overwhelmingly popular, it was dropped last year on the grounds that the contractors were opposed to it. (Who would have guessed?) South Africa, by contrast, provides a general right of access to the records of private bodies. The ANC, aware of how corporations assisted apartheid, recognises that the state is not the only threat to democracy.

Freedom of information is never absolute, nor should it be. Companies should retain the right, as they do in South Africa, to protect material that is of genuine commercial confidentiality; though they should not be allowed to use that as an excuse to withhold everything that might embarrass them. The information commissioner should decide where the line falls, just as he does for public bodies today.

The purpose of this monstrous proposal is not just to shine a light into the rattling cupboards of private companies, but to change the way in which they behave. A body that acts as if the world is watching presents less of a threat to the public interest than a body that knows it won't get caught. Would News International have acted as it did if its emails could have been revealed as a matter of course rather than a matter of chance? If it is true that "governments don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world", should we not be entitled to know what Goldman Sachs is up to? Is that not the only means we have of preventing its unelected power from becoming tyrannical?

I realise that it is not a good time to be making this request: far from extending our transparency laws, Cameron hints that he wants to roll them back. But unless we decide what we want and how we mean to obtain it – however remote it might now seem – we have no means of making social progress. If we are to reclaim power from the corporations that have seized it, first we need to know what that power looks like.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com
• Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot

As a boy growing up in Sierra Leone, Kemoh Bah prized his Michael Jackson T-shirt. "I was the only one who had this kind of T-shirt in my village, and I felt like I was part of American culture," said Bah, dressed head-to-toe in clothes emblazoned with logos outside his roadside secondhand clothes shack in the capital, Freetown.

Nicknamed "junks" in Sierra Leone, hand-me-downs account for the majority of outfits in a country where seven out of 10 people live on less than $2 a day. The industry has ballooned to $1bn in Africa since 1990. And yet the combination of western charity and African brand enthusiasm is not always a force for good. Quite apart from the ethical issue of donated goods becoming tradeable commodities on which middlemen can turn a profit, there is the threat to local textile markets to consider.

About a third of globally donated clothes make their way via wholesale rag houses to sub-Saharan Africa, where they end up lining the streets or filling small boutiques. Hawkers say Christmas time, when westerners flock to offload clothes to charity shops, brings in the biggest bales. The lucrative industry has even spawned fake charity clothes collectors in the west.

But critics say the billion-dollar trade risks swamping fragile domestic textiles markets, and 12 countries in Africa are among 31 globally that have now banned their import.

"The only way I survived was to start making Muslim women's clothes," said tailor Bema Sidibe from Ivory Coast, where around 20 tonnes of secondhand clothes flooded the country last year. In neighbouring Ghana, 10 times that amount arrive in an average year. "Muslim women don't go for these western-influenced clothes and around traditional feast days you are guaranteed a few new outfits will be ordered," Sidibe said.

The influx of cheap clothes has heaped pressure on an industry already struggling to adapt to changing fashions amid patchy infrastructure. During his presidency in Ghana, John Kufuor introduced national "Friday wear day" to encourage citizens to wear traditional clothes made using the jewel-coloured wax fabrics associated with African garments.

For many though, the trade allows clothes to be bought and sold cheaply and provides desperately needed jobs.

Increasingly, taste as well as necessity has come into play. Picking through Kemoh's roadside cabin jammed between crumbling colonial buildings and corrugated-zinc shacks, bargain-hunter Fatima rifles through Gucci castoffs. "You can buy even cheaper Chinese ready-mades, but then you look like everybody else. Here I can find designer clothes no one else has," she said, sporting a rainbow-coloured mohican haircut.

A roaring trade continues across Africa, from Ghana's thriving "faux" markets to Nigeria's "bend down" boutiques.

Each month, using shipping containers supposedly full of cars, a network of traffickers, including Chidi Ugwe, smuggles around 1.5 tonnes of clothes to Nigeria's sprawling Katangua market, the largest flea market in the country.

"Most of the clothes land in smaller countries like Togo and Benin and then we get them to Nigeria. We call them flying goods, because they fly into the country without being seen," Ugwe, a former customs officer, said, while thousands of shoppers thronged through the narrow market streets.

The clothes mostly come from Europe, although relatively affluent countries in Asia also provide a steady trickle. So popular are the clothes in Katangua market that thousands of small-time traders also bribe border officials to bring in their own bales.

"We call our shops 'bend down' boutiques because we have so many clothes we just pour them on the floor and you just bend down and select," explained Mercy Azbuike, surrounded by piles of clothes overflowing from her wooden shack and piled into wheelbarrows outside.

"Even those selling clothes in boutiques [proper stores] are buying from us," said Azbuike, who also travels to neighbouring Benin twice a month to replenish her stock.

"It's the same boutique but you don't have to bend down so it's more expensive," she said, emptying out a Disney rucksack stuffed with children's pyjamas. Mothers with children elbowed past teenagers. "I cover myself but under my abaya [Muslim dress] I still want to wear nice, modern clothes," said Fatoumata, 18, as she paid $13 for sequinned Levi's jeans.

Not every seller is so successful. Emmanuel Odaibanga, who sells ski suits and jackets in a stifling shack, said business was slow. "It's easy to buy jackets [from smugglers], hard to sell them," he shrugged.

via guardian.co.uk

For this reason, the celebration in Tunis represents a truly symbolic event. The Ceremony of the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize 2012, hosted by the Tunisian Government, will be followed by a two-day conference that will hold a plenary session on Tunisia and discuss how to improve the safety of journalists, decriminalization of defamation, development of public service broadcasting, professional and ethical standards, access to quality information and the issue of media ownership in a changing media landscape. Other events will be organized by professional and non-governmental organizations. Some three hundred journalists and editors from all over the world, as well as international and regional non-governmental organizations, will attend this conference.

How will you celebrate WPFD 2012? Submit your celebration on the WPFD Celebrations around the World Platform.

“Ushahidi”, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was a website initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the word "Ushahidi" has come to represent the people behind the Ushahidi Platform, which has grown from an ad hoc group of volunteers to a focused organization composed of individuals with experience ranging from human rights work to software development, primarily in Africa, but also in Europe, South America and the United States.

It is not original to remark that there is a modern-day scramble for Africa taking place. Economic growth averaging around 5% on the continent for the past decade is certainly good news compared with two decades of increasing poverty. But on the other side of the coin are the reasons for that growth: the large-scale export of commodities with no clear industrial or institutional benefits. "Jobless growth", the source of the uprisings in north Africa, is the norm in Africa, and although manufacturing exports quadrupled to over $100bn in the last decade, manufacturing is actually declining as a proportion of GDP from a fairly stable 17% between 1965 and 1990 to 13% today.

Clearly African countries need to think hard about their development strategies and how best to take advantage of the changing global context. Is the ever-growing interest in Africa's land and resources its route out of poverty, or are we seeing dependency theory in action, with resources being extracted with little resembling sustainable development left behind? A recent article on the impact of oil wealth in Chad bears out this complex picture.

Although trade and investment will ultimately be far more important, a changing African aidscape will also play a part in the continent's future. What is the role of aid in this context? What are its motives? And are some aid partners better than others?

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, certainly seems to think so, urging poor countries at an aid conference in Busan, South Korea, to "be wary of donors who are more interested in extracting your resources than in building your capacity". It is hard to imagine a more absurd statement from a US official, given the country's leading role in previous scrambles for Africa – not to mention its weak record (with other donors) of "building capacity" over more than 50 years of aid-giving. From the cold war to aid conditionality supporting its own interests, to the pouring of money into the Horn of Africa after the 9/11 attacks, the US pretty much wrote the book on how to use aid to ensure strategic interests. Clinton should remember John Kennedy's assertion in 1962: "Aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world … I put it right at the top of the essential programmes in protecting the security of the free world."

While Clinton tries to deny reality, the Brics countries are engaged in their own propaganda, claiming their "south-south co-operation", which often explicitly links aid with trade, places a new emphasis on mutual benefit, solidarity and self-reliance. Are they right? Many African leaders appear to think so. According to Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi: "China, its amazing re-emergence and its commitment for a win-win partnership with Africa, is one of the reasons for the beginning of the African renaissance."

Brazil, another Brics country, is at the forefront of the south-south rhetoric, insisting that far from eschewing capacity building, as Clinton claims, its co-operation is entirely focused on it. But Brazil's trade with Africa, which grew five-fold between 2002 and 2009, follows distinctly colonial patterns, as Padraig Carmody says in his book The New Scramble for Africa – Brazil exports manufactured goods and food to Africa, while Africa provides Brazil with oil and coal.

So where does the truth lie?

First, the OECD's development assistance committee (DAC) and Brics categories are not necessarily that useful – neither is a homogenous group. Brazilian aid has little in common with Chinese aid: it is relatively miniscule and focuses on technology and capacity, while China's huge aid budget funds infrastructure. Russia is totally different again, and South Africa is still close to irrelevant in aid terms, with a budget of under $100m. Nor does Norwegian aid resemble US aid in any significant way, despite signing up to the same DAC ways of working.

In some important ways it can be more useful to separate western (US and Europe) style aid from eastern (Korean, Japanese and Chinese). The latter are generally less interested in policy conditionality and more focused on infrastructure, while the former have a strong tendency to conditionalise aid, while focusing, at least in the MDG era, on social sectors. Of western donors, only Germany spent more than 15% of its aid on infrastructure in 2009-10, while South Korea and Japan both spent over 40%, and China 60%.

The appearance of China, India and Brazil on the scene, coupled with the dire problems in western economies, has transformed the political landscape. These three countries, along with South Africa, are steeped in an anti-imperialist tradition and ideology that promotes self-reliance and partnership over the faux charity of colonial powers, which give with one hand and crush with the other. They also have a greater familiarity with the political and economic conditions of developing countries, probably an advantage both commercially and in terms of promoting development.

Their growing prominence is a welcome balance to the deeply ingrained arrogance of western donors. However, this difference can easily be exaggerated. India and China are clearly using aid money to achieve political interests and economic advantage, in similar ways to traditional donors. China insists its partners ditch recognition of Taiwan, and its spending in Africa is heavily focused on resource-rich countries such as Sudan. India uses credit lines to promote its exports and focuses on the energy sector, as the world's fifth-largest energy consumer. Even South Africa, once the cause celebre of anti-imperialism, has become something of an imperial presence in many less powerful countries in Africa. According to Unctad, over 50% of foreign investment in Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland comes from South Africa. As it grows in power, it is more than likely that its new aid programme will come to the service of such strategic investments.

Is foreign investment vital for growth, or a tool for resource extraction? Is aid solidarity or bribery? All donors, DAC or Brics, old or new, have mixed motives – part goodwill, part strategic interest. African countries would be foolish to believe the rhetoric of traditional or emerging partners, and should base their aid management strategies on a realistic assessment of the incentives and intentions of all entities that arrive at their airports bearing gifts.

via guardian.co.uk

Almost 5% of Africa's agricultural land has been bought or leased by investors since 2000, according to an international coalition of researchers and NGOs that has released the world's largest public database of international land deals.

The database, launched on Thursday, lifts the lid on a decade of secretive deals struck by governments, investors and speculators seeking large tracts of fertile land in developing countries around the world.

The past five years have seen a flood of reports of investors snapping up land at rock-bottom prices in some of the world's poorest countries. But, despite growing concern about the local impacts of so-called "land grabs", the lack of reliable data has made it difficult to pin down the real extent and nature of the global rush for land.

Researchers estimate that more than 200m hectares (495m acres) of land – roughly eight times the size of the UK – were sold or leased between 2000 and 2010. Details of 1,006 deals covering 70.2m hectares mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America were published by the Land Matrix project, an international partnership involving five major European research centres and 40 civil society and research groups from around the world.

It is the first time a comprehensive list of international land deals has been collected and made public. The database relies on a wide variety of sources – including media reports, academic research and field-based investigations – to add detail to a global phenomenon notoriously shrouded in secrecy.

In a report published alongside the database, which analysed 1,217 agricultural deals covering 83.2m hectares of land, the researchers said the data confirms suspicions that wealthy food-importing countries have been targeting farmland in poorer countries with high rates of hunger and weak land governance. However, the report also reveals the growing role of emerging economies.

The report describes the rise of a "new intra-regionalism" characterised by growing south-south investment. Overall, researchers found more than 30% of documented agricultural deals involve investors coming from the same region as their "target" country. Expanding agribusiness companies from Brazil and Argentina seem to prefer to invest in other Latin American countries, they said, while South African investors appear particularly involved in projects in nearby east, central and southern African countries.

The majority of documented deals are in Africa. Researchers say 754 deals have been identified on the continent, covering 56.2m hectares – or roughly the size of Kenya.

Little evidence of job creation or other benefits to local communities could be found among the hundreds of largely export-oriented projects, said the report. In some cases, it adds, investors have secured hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime farmland at little to no cost. One deal in South Sudan, for example, has reportedly granted a Norwegian investor a 99-year lease for 179,000 hectares at an annual cost of just $0.07 a hectare.

Governments eager for foreign investment have often gone to great lengths to advertise vast tracts of available "vacant" land in their countries. But the report says almost half of the agricultural deals studied showed the areas concerned were already being farmed before investors moved in. Competition between powerful foreign investors and local farming communities seems "inevitable", it said.

But, so far, few large-scale projects have been established on the millions of hectares bought or leased for agricultural activities, according to the report, which says less than 30% of documented deals are thought to be in production. It suggests that some investors may have underestimated the challenges associated with their projects, while other deals are likely to be purely strategic and speculative investments.

A separate report published on Wednesday by the International Land Coalition, the NGO Global Witness, and the US-based Oakland Institute, denounced the "secretive culture" around large-scale land deals, and demanded governments and businesses disclose contracts and detailed information about potential risks and impacts of land-based investments.

"Far too many people are being kept in the dark about massive land deals that could destroy their homes and livelihoods," says Megan MacInnes, senior land campaigner at Global Witness. "Companies should have to prove they are doing no harm, rather than communities with little information or power having to prove that a land deal is negatively affecting them."

via guardian.co.uk

What do chocolate pumps have to do with solving world hunger? Quite a bit, if you ask the Akshaya Patra Foundation. The Balgdon Pump, initially designed to pump liquid chocolate, helps complete the herculean task of preparing fresh nutritious meals for over 1.3 million impoverished children daily in government-run schools across ten Indian states. For many children, this is their only complete meal of the day, which gives them an incentive to come to school, stay in school, and focus on learning.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a public-private partnership, is the largest NGO-run midday meal program in the world. It utilizes innovative technology, smart engineering and good management to reach and continue to grow its current levels of service delivery and keep costs low. It costs them just $15 to feed each child for an entire academic school year.

Madhu Pandit, a graduate of the premier Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, founded Akshaya Patra with a group of dedicated social entrepreneurs who were also leaders in the Indian IT, engineering and business communities. This group of individuals recognized the seemingly insurmountable problem of childhood hunger and its effects on access to education, and on India's -- and ultimately the world's -- economic and social development. Fortunately, the founders possessed the engineering skills needed to design equipment and layout for a mechanized kitchen which can efficiently cook nutritious meals for large numbers of children at a low-cost.

Their school meal program started modestly, feeding 1,500 underprivileged children in five government schools in Bangalore. A month after the program began, teachers started to report increased attendance by students, and letters started pouring in from neighboring schools asking to be included. This was a defining moment for Pandit as he realized just what one complete meal a day means to children and their families. He saw this as an important strategic intervention in education that unlocks the vicious and perpetual cycle of poverty.

Technical Innovation in a Commercial Kitchen

While the Balgdon chocolate pump is now far removed from the chocolate industry, its function -- to move very viscous fluid -- remains the same. Akshaya Patra ingeniously uses it to pump the "ganji" (excess water from cooking rice) out of the rice cauldrons, where it is then recycled for use in bio-culture or vehicle washing water. This is not the only piece of innovative technology they have become to be known for.

The hallmark of Akshaya Patra's program is its centralized kitchen facilities, which have been designed and engineered to optimize quality and minimize cost, time and labor. These fully automated kitchens can prepare 185,000 meals in less than five hours by utilizing gravity flow mechanisms to minimize human handling of food, mechanized high-speed cutting of vegetables and conveyor belts for easy transportation. Large stainless steel cauldrons with easy-tilt mechanisms prepare 1,200 liters of lentils in two hours and a specially designed roti-making machine cooks up 40,000 rotis (flat whole wheat bread) in one hour. Steam is used as a source of cooking, which accelerates the cooking process, retains nutrients, and is cost-effective and clean. To date, six of the Akshaya Patra kitchens have received FSMS ISO 22000:2005 certification -- a first of its kind achievement for an NGO.

Total Efficiency from Kitchen to School

After the food leaves the kitchen, the Akshaya Patra meal delivery system involves well-coordinated precision logistics using custom designed vehicles that quickly and safely deliver cooked food to schools according to a strict schedule, with optimal storage and minimal spillage. In an effort to minimize fuel consumption and cost, they have developed route simulation software. A pilot run of this tool reduced the number of routes in the Bangalore South kitchen by 10 percent, and experts estimate that an optimization opportunity of up to 15 percent exists if the tool is implemented across all units. Efficiencies in logistics operations were improved by making use of GPS technology in meal delivery vehicles and automating attendance data collection from the schools using IVRS hand-held devices.

Given the size of Akshaya Patra's operation, a strain exists on the local natural resources. India, having 18 percent of the world's population on 2.4 percent of the world's total area, has experienced environmental degradation such as water shortages, soil exhaustion and erosion, deforestation, and air and water pollution. In a bid to reverse this trend, Akshaya Patra has adopted several environmentally friendly practices. Six of the twenty one kitchen locations use Briquette run boilers, fueled by groundnut husk or rice bran instead of diesel. Rain water is harvested and re-routed into a pond, recharging bore-wells and reducing dependency on corporation water. Smokeless stoves are being piloted in their Bangalore location. A mini-fan, powered by rechargeable batteries and controlled by a regulator, blows air to fan the flames. This has helped to reduce fuel cost by 50 percent.

Despite India's booming economic growth, the country is still home to hundreds of millions of people suffering from the dual tragedies of malnutrition and a lack of education. UNICEF estimates that 57 million Indian children are malnourished, impairing their cognitive and social development. The 2011 Global Hunger Index, a report published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, placed India at 67 out of 81 developing countries in hunger. Unless these serious problems are addressed, large numbers of India's children will remain unhealthy and uneducated. This poses a serious obstacle to India's ability to participate effectively in the world economy. It is estimated that child malnutrition is responsible for 22 percent of the country's burden of disease, affecting productivity, income and consumption. Reduced productivity costs India's economy approximately $2.5 billion annually. With a potential labor and consumer force of one billion people, this can have serious implications for the global economy.

A wholesome mid-day meal, served in schools, helps break the cycle of poverty and helps children to become productive global citizens. India's expanding economy, in this global environment, presents extraordinary opportunities for large numbers of young people, but those who remain uneducated, unskilled and unhealthy will have poor prospects. Akshaya Patra's technology applications benefit humanity by liberating children from hunger and a lack of education. They are investing in a better world by protecting our future. This is a cause I can get behind.

For more information please visit www.foodforeducation.org

• Jesse Seaver is the President of Curry Without Worry

via huffingtonpost.com

An old rule states that you are a mere six degrees of separation away from anyone else on the planet. For some people, however, the world is even smaller. So let me propose an amendment: you are only one relative, friend or acquaintance away from one of the late Steve Jobs's creations.

You may be browsing this on a new iPad, one of the 30m Apple sold last year. Or perhaps you're viewing it on an iPhone screen – which would be unsurprising, since the market analysts at Mintel say that the iPhone 4 is the most popular handset in Britain today. Maybe your children are reluctantly putting away their iPods, of which Apple sells 5m worldwide every three months (a remarkable figure, but half the 10m Jobs and his colleagues were shifting each quarter in 2008 and 2009).

And if you've really never done any of those things, rest assured your prime minister has. "The cool thing is that I now control my iMac from the iPad, to play out through the speaker," David Cameron boasted to the Telegraph a few months after moving into No 10. It was one of those canny-to-the-point-of-irritating references the Old Etonian used to specialise in; a flash of his real-world accreditation.

As Cameron knows, Apple is a byword of everyday sleekness. Yet there is another way of viewing the company. Focus instead on the way it does business, and all those iPhones, iPods and iPads aren't just exemplars of design and user-friendliness: they are devices that destroy western jobs. And they do so needlessly, because if the California-based giant manufactured its goods in America rather than China, it could still make profits that would be the envy of every other US business.

This is, I know, an unorthodox position. When journalists or politicians discuss the way that western companies make goods in China, or anywhere else in Asia, they almost always start from the premise that this is how business is done nowadays. This is the commonly accepted logic of globalisation, which enables companies to keep their costs down, which allows the ordinary American or Briton to spend less money shopping, and which also offers poorer nations in the east to develop their economies. Expensive shirts might still be made in Italy; high-end kitchens might be assembled in Germany – but the future of mass production inevitably lies in China.

Apple has both made and benefitted from that argument. In January, the New York Times ran a lengthy investigation of the technology firm's manufacturing processes, which began by disclosing a conversation in 2011 between Jobs and Barack Obama. The president asked why Apple products could not be made in the US. The most admired man in Silicon Valley was reportedly blunt: "Those jobs aren't coming back."

Very few people argued with that assessment. In other ways excellent, the New York Times' piece had an elegiac tone, conveyed by the headline How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work. And the following commentary went on in this it's-not-you-it's-me vein. It wasn't Apple's fault it didn't hire Americans to make its goods: it was America's. US workers weren't skilled enough; not enough of them were trained in engineering.

All this should be familiar to anyone who's followed the Westminster debate on globalisation, where prime ministers from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron have agreed that if Britain is to attract employers, its workers need to shape up. Students need to brain up and get degrees, adults need to retrain or sharpen up their attitudes. Even then, the British have to prepare for a post-industrial future, where they do the design and marketing and the Chinese (or the Indians, or the Vietnamese) make the goods.

Such national self-abasement has the merit of at least feeling like a policy; but it's debatable whether on its own it really will pull in big employers. Apple, after all, used to base its manufacturing in the US. Jobs used to boast about how the Mac was "a machine that is made in America". And according to new research given exclusively to the Guardian by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), it's clear that it would not only be affordable for Apple still to make its goods in America, it would remain hugely profitable.

Using a mix of Apple's own filings and industry data, the academics broke down the cost of making one product in particular: the wildly popular 4G iPhone. Assembled in China, the total cost of putting together just one phone was $178.45. Compare that with a sale price (including downloads) of $630 and Apple makes $452 on each phone: a whacking gross margin of 72%.

Chinese labour accounts for a tiny proportion of the company's costs: $7.10 for each phone, which accounts for about eight hours of assembly. So what would it cost to make the same iPhone in America? The Cresc team took the average wage in the US electronics industry of $21 per hour and calculated that the total production cost would increase to $337.01. That is a big jump – but it still leaves Apple with a gross margin of 46.5% on each iPhone – a level that Cresc's Sukhdev Johal estimates would probably still make it the most profitable phone in the world.

So: two models of making one of Apple's most popular products, and two models for distributing the profits. The made-in-America model still leaves the California giant with a profit margin that most companies can only dream of, but would create hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US to boot. That may strike you as laughably naive, but it's more akin to enlightened self-interest: just think of the way Henry Ford raised wages so Ford workers could buy his cars.

The made-in-China model, on the other hand, has carried no such social benefits, either in Apple's home country or in the People's Republic. Last year, Apple built up cash reserves of $100bn – more than the US government. Indeed, it was so much money that the company was stumped how to dispose of it. Tim Cook, who is now CEO of Apple, announced a few weeks ago that he would begin buying back shares and paying dividends to investors. Among other people who benefited from this arrangement was Cook himself, who was awarded $376.3m in Apple stock when he took over last year. That pile of shares is now valued at around $634m. The people who win from the made-in-China model are big investors and top executives.

In the case of Apple, outsourcing manufacturing is not about keeping costs to customers down – they are still paying huge prices for the latest handset or tablet computer. Nor is it about the company's survival: it would still do tremendously well were it to bring those factories back home. No, in the case of Apple, moving jobs offshore has become a way of directing ever more money to those at the top of American society.

This is not just my conclusion, or that of the Cresc team; it is backed up by the Asian Development Bank. In a 2010 study of an earlier model of the iPhone, ADB researchers concluded: "It is the profit maximisation behaviour of Apple rather than competition that pushes Apple to have all iPhones assembled in the PRC."

This division of labour has certainly not helped China very much. Foxconn, which makes those iPhones, has to work to an incredibly tough contract with Apple that forces it to keep all costs to a minimum. This surely helps account for why Foxconn, whose client list is almost a Who's Who of the smartphone sector, has had repeated troubles with its workforce, including at least 18 suicide attempts by workers in 2010 alone. After that, and the terrible publicity that followed, Apple put pressure on its subcontractor to raise workers' pay and improve conditions. But it didn't take the most obvious route of doing so, which would be: pay more to Foxconn, and direct it to use that surplus to increase wages.

The reason for concentrating on Apple in this fashion is not because it's a terrible company, but because it's an exemplary one. It has become the business success story of our age: the firm others want to emulate, and prime ministers want to name check. And yet there is a paradox here. For all the stylishness and sleekness of its products, the Apple business model is an unattractive and, over the long term, possibly an unsustainable one. It subcontracts work that offers the Chinese little prospect of economic development, while at the same time selling to Americans and others products they want but increasingly don't have the jobs or incomes to buy so readily.

Apple's rise to primus inter pares in the business world has coincided with a wider social trend: a general anxiety about the decline of the west. Some of the reasons for why America, Britain and others are on the slide are large and abstract. But some of the factors are smaller and closer to hand, like the iPhone in your pocket or the Mac waiting for you at home.

• Cresc is holding a workshop on the "Apple Business Model" at Senate House, University of London on Wednesday

via guardian.co.uk

The openness of the web needs to be protected and "digital handcuffs" need to be removed, Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for Europe's digital agenda, has said.

Speaking at the World Wide Web (WWW2012) conference in Lyon on Thursday, Kroes examined the idea of an open web and spoke of its benefits. "With a truly open, universal platform, we can deliver choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability," she said.

Holding up a pair of handcuffs sent to her the previous day by the Free Software Foundation along with a letter asking if she was "with them on openness", she said: "Let me show you, these handcuffs are not closed, not locked. I can open them if and when I want. That's what I mean by being open online, what it means to me to get rid of 'digital handcuffs'."

In her keynote speech, she stressed the value of an open web, adding that Europe was "only beginning to discover what openness means". The benefits, she said would affect consumers and help boost the economy as well as informing voters. Privacy was another key thought on Kroes' mind, believing that openness should not come at the price of privacy or safety, "When you go online, you aren't stripped of your fundamental right to privacy," she said.

The commissioner also spoke strongly about copyrighted material and the complex licensing systems, explaining that "these guarantee that Europeans miss out on great content, they discourage business innovation, and they fail to serve the creative people in whose name they were established."

Kroes stressed that people should become more open to online models, allowing creators to make their work accessible but also recognising the price of a product or a service, "Whatever you're producing, whether it's a scientific experiment or a new video mash-up, making it isn't free. It is legitimate and right to reward and recognise creation and innovation."

"If we are too rigid or too constraining in our approach, we will put artificial limits on innovation and discovery. And that's not being open." Kroes echoes comments made by web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee who delivered his speech at the event on Wednesday.

"Human discourse depends on an open internet" said Berners-Lee. "I want you thinking about what you're leaving behind for the next generation after this." He was also present at the panel that followed Kroes's speech and expressed once again his concerns over surveillance of the internet.

The WWW2012 event srun until Friday at the Lyon Convention Centre in France and is aimed at bringing together developers, business, media and analysts.

via guardian.co.uk

(Manila) – Labor ministers from 19 Asian and Middle Eastern countries should endorse protections for migrant workers and increase dialogue with civil society, Migrant Forum Asia and Human Rights Watch said today. The ministers are meeting in Manila from April 17 to 19, 2012, as part of the second round of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, an inter-regional consultation between labor-sending countries and labor-receiving countries on contractual migrant workers.

The theme of the meeting is, “Sustaining Regional Cooperation Toward Improved Management of Labor Mobility in Asia.” Last week, organizers extended a few invitations to civil society representatives to observe some sessions but they will not be allowed to speak. Civil society will hold a parallel consultation process to discuss their recommendations for governments.

“Increased regional cooperation is essential for improving protection of migrant workers’ rights,” said William Gois, regional coordinator of Migrant Forum in Asia, a regional network of more than 200 migrants’ rights groups in Asia.“But as civil society, we want to know what is going on, we want to be part of the process, and we demand opportunities for genuine participation.”

The governments will discuss the draft for a “2012 Framework of Regional Collaboration of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue,” which would commit them to taking domestic, bilateral, and multilateral measures to increase the benefits of international labor migration. The draft is based on the input from the first dialogue and a meeting of senior officials in January. Preparatory documents for the conference include examples of best practices and recommendations on government oversight of four stages of migration: recruitment, employment abroad, preparation for return, and reintegration.

The current draft framework contains provisions that will help prevent abuse and foster greater benefits from migration. These include reducing recruitment costs, developing standard employment contracts, and making recruiting agencies responsible for the activities of local-level labor brokers. The draft also recommends pre-departure and post-arrival information seminars for migrant workers and government action to inspect workplaces and enforce labor laws.

The draft framework also calls on governments to enhance workers’ skills and certifications, improve mechanisms for balancing labor supply and demand, and recognize the value of experience gained abroad. Finally, it recommends provision of safe, affordable transit home and research on helping migrant workers to save money.

“The draft framework contains many positive elements that could help reduce recruitment-related exploitation and workplace abuse of contractual migrant workers,” said Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But it should also call on governments to revise labor laws and immigration policies that contribute to abuse, especially the exclusion of domestic workers from labor codes and sponsorship systems that link a worker’s residency to his or her employer.”

Civil society groups representing migrants’ organizations, nongovernmental organizations, faith-based-groups, and trade unions across Asia will hold a parallel process. They will discuss recommendations for reforms to the sponsorship system, standardized contracts with comprehensive labor protections for migrant domestic workers, and proposals for a reference wage as an alternative to a minimum wage. They will also discuss the draft framework for regional cooperation.

Migrant workers play a key economic role. They fill labor demands in host countries and provide much-needed income for their own countries. In 2011, the World Bank estimates, Asian migrants sent home US$191 billion in remittances. Gulf countries in particular rely heavily on Asian contract labor; for example, there is approximately one migrant domestic worker for every two Kuwaiti citizens. Migrants from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have provided the labor for construction booms in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

But many migrants are at high risk of abuse, the groups said. Domestic workers are excluded from basic labor protections such as a weekly rest day and limits to working hours. Many migrants have limited information about their rights and face abuses such as deception about their jobs, heavy debt burdens from excessive recruitment fees, unpaid wages, and hazardous work conditions. Limited access to redress means that some get trapped in situations of forced labor and trafficking.

“Governments in the Abu Dhabi Dialogue should ensure that the framework for regional cooperation incorporates full protection of migrant workers’ human rights,” said Ellene Sana, executive director of the Center for Migrant Advocacy, a Philippine-based migrants’ rights group.  “They should also develop a concrete action plan with benchmarks to monitor their progress.”

The groups called on participating governments to ratify and implement international labor and human rights standards such as ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

Labor-sending countries in the Abu Dhabi Dialogue include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Labor-receiving countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Japan, Malaysia, and South Korea will participate as observers. The first round of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue was hosted by the United Arab Emirates in 2008 and was an offshoot from the Colombo Process, a regional meeting of labor-sending countries.

The government's controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state's surveillance powers would be a "destruction of human rights" and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

"You get to know every detail, you get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find their way through medical websites … or as an adolescent finds their way through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether they should talk to people about it."

Tim Berners-Lee warns against web snooping bill

The British computer engineer, who devised the system that allows the creation of websites and links, said that of all the recent developments on the internet, it was moves by governments to control or spy on the internet that "keep me up most at night".

The government ran into a storm of criticism earlier this month when it emerged that it was planning to allow GCHQ to monitor all communication on social media, Skype calls and email communication as well as logging every site visited by internet users in Britain.

Berners-Lee said: "The idea that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused."

He said that if the government believed it was essential to collect this kind of sensitive data about individuals, it would have to establish a "very strong independent body" which would be able to investigate every use of the surveillance powers to establish whether the target did pose a threat, and whether the intrusion had produced valuable evidence.

But he said that since the coalition had not spelled out an oversight regime, or how the data could be safely stored, "the most important thing to do is to stop the bill as it is at the moment".

The intervention of the highly respected internet pioneer creates a headache for Theresa May, the home secretary, who has said she plans to press on with introducing the new measures after the Queen's speech next month, despite concerns raised by senior Liberal Democrats. It will add to the woes of ministers mired in damaging battles over unpopular policy proposals on several fronts.

Berners-Lee was speaking to the Guardian as part of a week-long series on the battle for control of the internet, examining how states, companies and technological developments are challenging the principles of openness and universal access on which the net was built.

Berners-Lee has been an outspoken defender of the "open internet", warning in 2010 that web freedom was under threat from the rise of social network "silos" such as Facebook, "closed world" apps such as those released by Apple, and governments' attempts to monitor people's online behaviour.

He said he remained concerned about the creation of "strong monopolies" but believed it was unlikely that internet giants such as Facebook and Google would enjoy their dominance indefinitely. "The battle lines are being drawn and things are in a huge state of flux, so it's very difficult to tell, when you look at the world now, what it's going to look like in a few months' time."

He said that throughout the history of the internet, people had been concerned about the emergence of apparently dominant giants, but they were vulnerable to smaller companies that could innovate more effectively.

In a coded reference to predictions that Facebook could in soon become, in effect, for most people, the internet, he recalled a "wise" colleague who pointed out more than 20 years ago: "It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it."

Acknowledging growing concerns about online privacy, he said computer users received significant benefits from the vast amount of data that big web companies accumulate about them, but that increasingly they would seek to apply limits to how the data could be used, as well as demanding access to the data themselves.

Although Google now allows users to obtain all the data it holds about them and Facebook provides a similar, slower service, individual users were not yet being allowed to exploit all the information relating to them to make their lives easier. Armed with the information that social networks and other web giants hold about us, he said, computers will be able to "help me run my life, to guess what I need next, to guess what I should read in the morning, because it will know not only what's happening out there but also what I've read already, and also what my mood is, and who I'm meeting later on".

Berners-Lee said big web companies would come under more pressure to make personal data more available, and that users might insist that the information was not held by the companies themselves. "Perhaps what you'd want in the future is to have this piece of cloud storage and to say to somebody like ... Google: 'Look, don't store it on your site, store it here. I will control who gets access to it.' That would turn the tables and leave me in control of the data."

He was worried by the rise of so-called "native apps" such as those produced for the iPhone and iPad, because they were not searchable. "Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn't put it on to a web app [a form of open software], we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can't link to it, so I can't tweet it, I can't discuss it, I can't like it, I can't hate it."

But he said the rapid improvement of web apps, and their ability to offer functionality and slickness previously only available from Apple or Android apps, would return more information to the open internet.

In a clear dig at Apple's highly restrictive ecosystem, he said: "I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices."

Berners-Lee, who is speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon on Wednesday, also warned people against assuming that major websites and social networks would be around for ever. "I think we need to be more conscious that places that seem very secure may in the future disappear. The long-time persistence of all this data … is an issue for all of us if we think that maybe our grandchildren, depending on which website we use, may or may not be able to see our photos."

Tim Berners-Lee on internet data and privacy - audio

 

Tim Berners-Lee on the rise of walled gardens - audio

 

Explore the seven-day special series on the Battle for the internet

via guardian.co.uk

Just a few months ago I was feeling some hope about Europe. You may recall that late last fall Europe appeared to be on the verge of financial meltdown; but the European Central Bank, Europe’s counterpart to the Fed, came to the Continent’s rescue. It offered Europe’s banks open-ended credit lines as long as they put up the bonds of European governments as collateral; this directly supported the banks and indirectly supported the governments, and put an end to the panic.

The question then was whether this brave and effective action would be the start of a broader rethink, whether European leaders would use the breathing space the bank had created to reconsider the policies that brought matters to a head in the first place.

But they didn’t. Instead, they doubled down on their failed policies and ideas. And it’s getting harder and harder to believe that anything will get them to change course.

Consider the state of affairs in Spain, which is now the epicenter of the crisis. Never mind talk of recession; Spain is in full-on depression, with the overall unemployment rate at 23.6 percent, comparable to America at the depths of the Great Depression, and the youth unemployment rate over 50 percent. This can’t go on — and the realization that it can’t go on is what is sending Spanish borrowing costs ever higher.

In a way, it doesn’t really matter how Spain got to this point — but for what it’s worth, the Spanish story bears no resemblance to the morality tales so popular among European officials, especially in Germany. Spain wasn’t fiscally profligate — on the eve of the crisis it had low debt and a budget surplus. Unfortunately, it also had an enormous housing bubble, a bubble made possible in large part by huge loans from German banks to their Spanish counterparts. When the bubble burst, the Spanish economy was left high and dry; Spain’s fiscal problems are a consequence of its depression, not its cause.

Nonetheless, the prescription coming from Berlin and Frankfurt is, you guessed it, even more fiscal austerity.

This is, not to mince words, just insane. Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. And because investors look at the state of a nation’s economy when assessing its ability to repay debt, austerity programs haven’t even worked as a way to reduce borrowing costs.

What is the alternative? Well, in the 1930s — an era that modern Europe is starting to replicate in ever more faithful detail — the essential condition for recovery was exit from the gold standard. The equivalent move now would be exit from the euro, and restoration of national currencies. You may say that this is inconceivable, and it would indeed be a hugely disruptive event both economically and politically. But continuing on the present course, imposing ever-harsher austerity on countries that are already suffering Depression-era unemployment, is what’s truly inconceivable.

So if European leaders really wanted to save the euro they would be looking for an alternative course. And the shape of such an alternative is actually fairly clear. The Continent needs more expansionary monetary policies, in the form of a willingness — an announced willingness — on the part of the European Central Bank to accept somewhat higher inflation; it needs more expansionary fiscal policies, in the form of budgets in Germany that offset austerity in Spain and other troubled nations around the Continent’s periphery, rather than reinforcing it. Even with such policies, the peripheral nations would face years of hard times. But at least there would be some hope of recovery.

What we’re actually seeing, however, is complete inflexibility. In March, European leaders signed a fiscal pact that in effect locks in fiscal austerity as the response to any and all problems. Meanwhile, key officials at the central bank are making a point of emphasizing the bank’s willingness to raise rates at the slightest hint of higher inflation.

So it’s hard to avoid a sense of despair. Rather than admit that they’ve been wrong, European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff. And the whole world will pay the price.

via nytimes.com

Some years ago, Werner Herzog was on an internal flight somewhere in Colorado and the plane's landing gear wouldn't come down. They would have to make an emergency landing. The runway was covered in foam and flanked by scores of fire engines. "We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our legs," says Herzog, "and I refused to do it." The stewardess was very upset, the co-pilot came out from the cabin and ordered him to do as he was told. "I said, 'If we perish I want to see what's coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well. I'm not posing a danger to anyone by not being in this shitty, undignified position.'" In the end, the plane landed normally. Herzog was banned from the airline for life but, he laughs, it went bust two years later anyway.Herzog tells this story to illustrate how he'll face anything that's thrown at him, as if that was ever in any doubt. Now approaching his 70th birthday, the German film-maker has assumed legendary status for facing things others wouldn't. He's lived a life packed with intrepid movie shoots, far-flung locations and general high-stakes film-making. He has a biography too dense to summarise. But his tale also confirms the suspicion that he's helplessly drawn to danger and death. Or vice versa.

Herzog's fictional features often entertain notions of civilisation fallen apart – from the mini-revolution in Even Dwarfs Started Small to the semi-abstract deserts of Fata Morgana to the psychotic barbarism of Aguirre, Wrath Of God. His documentaries, too, frequently focus on characters who've come close enough to the final curtain to almost peep behind it. There was Dieter Dengler, the shot-down pilot who nearly starved to death in Laos in Little Dieter Needs To Fly. There was Juliane Koepcke in Wings Of Hope, sole survivor of a plane that crashed into the Peruvian jungle – a plane that Herzog himself was supposed to be on. In Grizzly Man, Herzog even listens on headphones as the movie's subject is mauled to death by the wild bears he so foolishly venerated. Even when he's off duty, danger seems to seek out Herzog – as when he was randomly shot with an air rifle halfway through a television interview, or the time he rescued Joaquin Phoenix from a car crash outside his house. The grim reaper seems to follow him like a groupie.

In his latest documentary, Herzog faces death more squarely than ever. The full title of the film is Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life, and its subject matter is a grisly triple homicide that's rendered even more tragic by its pointlessness. Herzog covers all bases, talking to the perpetrators (one of whom was subsequently executed), their families, the victims' family, the authorities, and so on. He dispenses with his trademark Bavarian-accented voiceover here, though his gently forthright questioning and nose for everyday surrealism prove remarkably effective. When he asks the prison chaplain, "Please describe an encounter with a squirrel," for example, he gets an emotional outpouring on the beauty of life and the horror of watching another human being die.

Into The Abyss is not overtly about capital punishment. Herzog describes it more as "an American Gothic" – a survey of a Texan landscape of poverty, intoxication, incarceration and death. But he's explicit about his opposition to the death penalty: "I was born when Nazi Germany was still around, and simply because of all the atrocities and the genocide and euthanasia, I just can't be an advocate of capital punishment. There's something fundamentally wrong in my opinion, but I would be the last one to tell the American people how to handle criminal justice."

As well as the documentary, he made another four 50-minute documentaries interviewing other death row inmates. "Not interviewing," he corrects me. "I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. I had a discourse, an encounter with these people but I never had a list of questions."

What was it that drew him to these "discourses" then? "We do not know how we are going to die and when we are going to die," he replies, "but they know it exactly. They know that in eight days, at 6pm, they will be strapped down, and at 6.01 they'll have 30 seconds for a last statement, then a lethal injection. They know every single protocol. I was fascinated, not so much how do they see death but how they see life. So when you ask me about death, yes, I accept the question, but it always bounces back to how do I see life?"

He points to the fact that one of the convicts in Into The Abyss somehow impregnated a sympathetic helper who fell in love with him, despite being behind bars. "A few months after filming, a baby boy was born and I do believe that this child will be outside this vicious circle of violence and drugs and crime and imprisonment. So it's not just about death, it's also about the intensity of life."

But did proximity to their own death change these people? As an example, he cites one of the inmates who was granted a reprieve 23 minutes before his execution was due. The 40-mile drive to the execution chamber was the first time he'd been outside in 17 years. "He describes his last trip. He sees trees, cows in the field, an abandoned gas station, and he says: 'It was like Israel. It was like the holy land.' And that alerted me. After our discourse I instantly grabbed my camera and I drove the same route. I was looking out, where's the holy land? And it's a godforsaken rural area of Texas, yet all of a sudden everything looks like the holy land."

When I suggest that Herzog himself has come closer to death than most people, he denies it. "There is always this kind of distant echo as If I were endangering everyone and always dragging them into near-death experiences. That's all baloney," he says. "My proof is that in more than 60 films not a single actor ever got hurt. Not one."

Not even you? "Sometimes, yes, but that doesn't count."

Michael Perry in Into The Abyss. Photograph: Allstar

The myth of Herzog is something he can't control, he says. Any more than he can stop people imitating his accent on YouTube or pretending to be him on Facebook. Those tales about getting shot or rescuing Joaquin Phoenix take on a life of their own. "Completely insignificant incidents about me appear everywhere. Nothing you ever try to do will ever take them away."

Herzog wouldn't even classify himself as adventurous: "I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure. The last thing that would be on my agenda is to have experience of myself and my boundaries." He puts a disdainful emphasis on the final word. "I'm really not into that business. It's abominable. There's a simple attitude: when there is a clear vision and there is a great story I would do it and I would accept certain risks."

Can he think of the time he was closest to death?

"There were … quite a few," he says, and pauses for a long time, raising his hooded eyes to the ceiling.

Is he thinking about the inflight near-miss he described earlier? "No, that was just an arabesque," he laughs. Is he thinking of the bomb that nearly destroyed his home in Munich when he was just a baby? Or the time he almost got frostbite in his toes from sleeping in his car in New York while his leg was in plaster? Or the visit to a volcano that was about to explode to make a documentary? Who knows?

"It's of no significance," he decides. "Everyone has come close, sometimes very close. It has no significance on how I conduct my life. I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour."

As for what happens after death, Herzog went through what he describes as "an intensive religious phase" in his teens, but he's no longer a believer. "Frankly speaking, I couldn't care less," he says. "And it doesn't make me nervous." Having said that, his prognosis for the future of humanity is not optimistic. "By the way," he continues, "when you look at human life on this planet, we are not sustainable. Trilobites died out, dinosaurs died out. Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart."

Doesn't he feel a need to help save the world?

"Saving the world is a very suspicious concept," he replies. "I'm as responsible as it gets in my situation. I drive my car less than 10% of what I used to drive 20 years ago. I'm not into consumerism. But when it comes to the end of the human race, there are certain suspects. Microbes can come and wipe us out. It can happen fast. Avian virus or mad cow disease, you name it. Microbes are really after us. Or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption which would darken the skies for 10 years – that's gonna be real trouble. Or a meteorite hitting us, or something man-made. I don't believe we'll see a nuclear holocaust but there are quite a few scenarios out there."

What about a good-old fashioned breakdown of society? "You mean anarchy and cannibalism? Yes but there would be survivors. Maybe 10% would survive, enough to replenish the species. I'm talking about total extinction. We are not sustainable."

Isn't that a bit nihilistic?

"Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, 'I would plant an apple tree today.' This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie."

Into The Abyss is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 30 Apr