Carlsbad, CALIFORNIA – The Carlsbad 5000, home of the current 5km World Bests, has announced the professional field for the elite invitational on Sunday, 5 April. Defending men’s champion Maregu Zewdie of Ethiopia will attempt to win back-to-back titles after a thrilling finish in last year’s race, in which only two seconds separated the top five finishing times. Zewdie, owner of two team Gold Medals from the World Cross Country Championships, will be challenged by a group of American runners led by Californian Scott Bauhs.
Bauhs, a two-time national champion and a participant in last summer’s U.S. Olympic Trials, won his pro racing debut at the Synaptics Elite Athlete 5-K in San Jose with an unofficial time of 13:37, the fastest for an American on the roads last year. He also finished sixth at the 2007 Rock ‘n’ Roll San Jose Half Marathon in 1:03:04, the top U.S. finisher in the race by over a minute.
“To say I’m fired up about running Carlsbad would be an understatement,” said Bauhs, who will wear an Adidas uniform for the first time at Carlsbad. “My training partners will tell you that I won’t quit talking about the event and I got even more excited when I found out who was running. Between the blazing fast Ethiopians, ‘Fam’ (Anthony Famiglietti) and the Aussies, it is going to be a great race and a perfect way to start the season.”
The men’s field features two Carlsbad champions including 2006 winner Abreham Cherkos of Ethiopia. Cherkos, the former world junior champion over 3000m, finished 5th in the Olympic 5000m final at Beijing last summer and owns a PR of 12:54 for the distance. Fellow Ethiopian Ali Abdosh comes to Carlsbad with PR of 13:01:44 and a successful 2008 season, including a 5000m victory at the Adidas Track Classic. Also expected to contend for the title is Shedrack Korir of Kenya, the 2007 world championship 1500m bronze medalist in Osaka. He has a PR of 13:09 over 5000m and was the 2006 Kenyan national 1500m champion.
The non-African international challenge will likely be led by former University of Arkansas star Alistair Cragg of Ireland. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Cragg competed in the 1500m and 5000m track events, his second Olympic 5000m final.
Australian Collis Birmingham comes to Carlsbad having set a 5000m PR of 13:16 in Melbourne earlier this year, which is the world’s fastest outdoor time in 2009. These athletes join previously announced U.S. Olympians Anthony Famiglietti and triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker in the stellar lineup of runners including 8 Americans.
Kiros leads the women’s field
The women’s field for Carlsbad is equally impressive. The international competition challenging U.S. Olympians Christin Wurth-Thomas and Shannon Rowbury will be led by Aheza Kiros of Ethiopia. Kiros was part of the Ethiopian national team who went to the 2007 World Championships in Osaka. She has a PR of 15:09 for 5000m and finished 3rd at Carlsbad in 2007.
U.S. 10,000m Champion Katie McGregor looks to be in good form after recently finishing second at the USA 15k Championships. A five-time qualifier for the U.S. World Cross Country team, McGregor is a national champion in the 25k, 10k road and 10,000m. She spent the second half of 2008 training for the ING New York City Marathon, recording a top-10 finish and personal best time of 2:31:14. Marisol Romero, the Mexican national champion over 1500m, rounds out the favorites in the international field.
Ethiopia, Africa’s largest coffee producer, will start exporting beans itself after closing the warehouses of six of the country’s largest exporters, which it claims are stockpiling coffee and contributing to a shortage of foreign currency.
A drop in export income, because of a poor coffee harvest, weak world prices and a ban on Ethiopian beans in Japan, is being exacerbated by stockpiling, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, chief executive officer of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, said on March 27.
Today, the Horn of Africa nation said it would start exporting coffee via the state-owned Ethiopian Grain Trade Enterprise in a bid to improve the situation.
“Ethiopian Grain Trade Enterprise knows that it has the capacity to do this and it has a very good opportunity to fill this export gap,” said Berhane Hailu, the company’s general manager, by phone from Addis Ababa today.
The company has started trading coffee on the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange and is in talks with foreign buyers about exports, he said.
Ethiopia suspended the licenses of six of the country’s largest exporters last week after accusing them of hoarding coffee and illegally selling export-grade beans on the country’s domestic market.
The country has experienced shortages of hard currency over the past year, with the nation’s reserves falling to as little as $850 million, enough to cover just one month of imports, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on March 19. The shortfall has led to rationing and shortages, including cement and medical supplies, because companies can’t import goods or raw materials.
Foreign Currency
Ethiopian Grain Trade Enterprise may use the foreign currency from coffee exports to purchase and deliver wheat to Ethiopia’s urban poor as part of a government program to subsidize food prices, Hailu said.
Ethiopian coffee shipments have dropped more than 10 percent to 76,674 tons during the first eight months of the country’s fiscal year, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the Trade Ministry.
The country has earned $221.7 million from coffee exports over the period, short of a government target of $446.7 million. Last year, the government also blamed rising food prices on hoarding by traders.
Hundreds of Ethiopians held a protest rally in London today (April 2) at the site of the G-20 meeting.
The protesters opposed the appearance of Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi at the meeting. They demanded the G-20 countries to stop financing the brutal dictatorship in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian peaceful protesters are the biggest and most visible outside the G20, according to Rajiv Joshi, a coordinator for Global Call to Action Against Poverty .
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants the G-20 (or Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the world’s largest economies) to help cash-strapped African countries manage their balance of payments (money going from one country to all others) as their incomes from foreign investments and aid, remittances and commodities prices vanish with the collapsing global economy. In mid-March, Brown invited a number of African leaders to meet with him in anticipation of the scheduled G-20 meeting in London on April 2. The hype preceding the G-20 meeting was full of hectoring moralism by the designated panhandler-for-Africa, the dictator in Ethiopia:
“Africa was beginning to stand up and now it is being knocked down again by this crisis, which is not of Africa’s making. That is one of the biggest tragedies. They [G-20] should care about Africa because it is in their interests. Some African countries could go under and that would mean total chaos and violence. In the end the cost of violence is going to be much higher than the cost of supporting Africa… We are talking about the range of money that is being spent on the mid-sized banks [in the U.S.]. Consider Africa as one of those banks… Any stimulus money spent in developed countries is going to have less global impact than if the same amount of money were to be spent in Africa… One of the problems at the moment is that the situation is so volatile… It keeps changing every week. It destabilises everything, including one’s thinking. If we knew where the bottom was we could start thinking as to how to get out of it….”
Not long ago the same dictator triumphantly proclaimed a 12.8 per cent annual growth rate in Ethiopia, and casually dismissed the effect of the global economic turmoil: “The crisis will more or less have little effect on the [Ethiopian] economy since our financial sector is not attached to the global system. Had it been the case, we would have suffered much.”
Others were parroting the same theme of impending African gloom and doom. Egyptian finance minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali mournfully warned, “In the case of Africa, people are going to die. We are talking about lives, not just somebody who will have to drive a smaller car.” Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete was quick to shift the blame: “This is a very unprecedented problem. Africa is a victim. We are not responsible for its genesis but all of us are suffering.” Even the sober Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga joined the verbal joust by invoking the specter of marching African hordes: “When there are problems in Africa, Africans will vote with their feet by coming to Europe.” It was like a chorus of African Chicken Littles clucking: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling! We must go and tell the king!”
Will Accept Cash, Check, Credit Card or Gold to Bailout Africa!
The G-20 claims to be “an informal forum that promotes open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability.” The G-20 money men and the chiefs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank will be discussing ways of helping the poorest counties in the world, while coordinating strategies to alleviate their own deepening economic crises. Pleading the African case for more money will be the dictator in Ethiopia. His message is a simple one: Africa needs more money. That money is readily available in the form of gold bars stashed at the IMF. Sell the gold stash and hand over the cash to African governments to cushion the effects of the global economic downturn. As of this past January, the IMF held 3,217 metric tons of gold (valued in excess of $43 billion), according to the World Gold Council. “Gold prices are doing well now so a slight correction to mobilise resources for Africa would not be that difficult,” suggested the dictator in Ethiopia. If the G-20 takes the bait, Africa’s “leaders” will be standing ready with pick and shovel in hand to dig into the IMF pot of gold and dig themselves out of economic trouble.
But in Ethiopia’s case there is something creepy — a weird feeling of de ja vu — about all of the gold talk and bailout metaphor of “considering Africa as one of the mid-sized banks”. Exactly a year ago we were shocked by the revelation that gold bars worth over 16 million dollars had simply walked out of the bank vaults in Ethiopia in broad daylight.[1] The official story was that unsuspecting Ethiopian bank “officials” were bamboozled by a gang of crooked international gold dealers who literally sold them spray-painted lumps of iron as 24-carat gold bars. The bank “officials” got ripped off because they made the common mistake of believing “all that glitters is gold.” According to the “Anti-Corruption Commission” of the ruling regime, some 26 suspects are in custody. No one has been prosecuted for this spectacular crime (and the matter has been quietly swept under the rug for the past year). Now they are talking about “mid-sized banks”, selling billions of dollars worth of IMF gold and sharing the loot among African dictators. It feels like a set up for another bank job.
In the Hole and on the Dole
African governments have been in the hole and on the dole for years. Since the 1970s, they have been sucking up massive amounts of economic aid and loans from the West and the international lending institutions. Much of that money has been lost to corruption. According to a 2008 World Bank study, it is estimated that “25 percent of GDP of African states is lost to corruption every year [in excess of one-half trillion dollars], with corrupt actions encompassing petty bribe taking done by low level government officials to inflated public procurement contracts, kickbacks, and raiding the public treasury as part of public asset theft by political leaders. Some $20 billion to $40 billion in assets acquired by corrupt leaders of poor countries, mostly in Africa, are kept overseas.” [2] Massive corruption has given rise to a parasitical ruling class in Africa – a “pluto-kleptocracy” (government of rich thieves). The World Bank and the IMF complain in their so-called confidential reports that specific African countries have used loans made available to them as “mechanisms for regime maintenance,” allowing the ruling parties to set up “slush funds” to pay for patronage and a military buildup. By 2005, Africa had a debt of $295 billion after repayments of $550 billion for loans it had received over the preceding three decades. Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, thirty-three African countries were eligible for debt relief of about $80 billion by 2006.
But the corruption situation in Ethiopia is more acute. In 2007, when Ethiopia’s auditor general, Lema Aregaw, reported $600 million in public funds missing form regional coffers, the dictator fired Aregaw and publicly defended the regional administrations’ “right to burn money.” When Gebru Asrat, a former top official and party member of the ruling regime made the accusation that “the people are sick of the corruption, about the lack of government services, and they only support Meles out of fear,” he was swiftly excommunicated from the regime’s officialdom. When the IMF, the World Bank and other donors demanded privatization, the regime leaders sold off some of the most profitable state enterprises to their friends, relatives, henchmen and cronies.
Bailing Out the People of Africa v. Bailing Out Toxic African Dictators
The basic argument African dictators are making for a G-20 bailout package is a moral one: Unless G-20 taxpayers assume the responsibility for Africa’s economic problems by selling IMF gold and increasing aid, Africans will die by the millions and violence will consume African societies. This is a manifestly false and self-serving moral dilemma manufactured by African dictators to save their own skins. They know that economic problems often trigger social upheavals which result in the sweeping away of corrupt dictatorships.
The G-20 have a superior moral counter-argument to make: It is immoral for G-20 taxpayers to finance African dictators who persecute their people, trample on their human rights and mismanage their economies while keeping themselves and their cronies filthy rich from stolen loan and aid money. If African governments want aid and loans from the G-20, they must agree to be held accountable for their acts and omissions in upholding the rule of law, protecting the human rights of their people, institutionalizing democratic practices and processes, releasing all political prisoners, allowing the free functioning of civic institutions and the independent media and ensuring judicial independence. Giving more money to morally, economically and politically bankrupt African dictators without the strings of democratization, human rights and accountability attached is like giving blood transfusions to a corpse whose blood has been sucked dry by vampiric brutes. African economies will remain on life support so long as the G-20 member countries blindly support African dictators and remain willful accomplices to their crimes and corruption.
Can’t Do Structural Adjustment When You are Shackled to Debt and Poverty
Multilateral lending institutions and Western donor governments providing aid need to re-think the way they do business in Africa. The IMF and World Bank must be transparent themselves in their loan programs. They must provide honest accounting of the success and failure of the programs they support in Africa. It is reprehensible for them to praise African dictatorships in public for their economic policies, and in their confidential reports rip these same governments for massive corruption, mismanagement, fraud, waste and abuse of “development funds”. The fact of the matter is that for many African dictatorships piling up billions in debt is like walking to the neighborhood kiosk and getting cigarettes on credit from the store keeper. They will pay it back in nickels and dimes if they get the money; if not, the store keeper will be stiffed. Their mentality is that IMF and World Bank loans are “free money”. Get as much free money as possible, and let someone else in the future worry about paying it back.
The G-20 and the multilateral lending institutions need to reform and fix what is a manifestly callous lending system. They need to re-examine the devastating consequences of their misguided policies that elevate organized greed over individual need. For decades, they have been preaching the gospel of “structural adjustment” (requiring loan recipients to privatize, deregulate, reduce trade barriers and adopt one-size-fits-all free market policies) which places a much higher premium on constructing shiny glass buildings, fancy urban highways and export-oriented industries than meeting the survival needs of ordinary people (food, medicine, clean drinking water, etc.). Millions of Africans die from starvation, preventable diseases, environmental contamination and abysmally poor governance as the international money lenders tether African economies to their structural adjustment policies.
Fleecing the Golden Twenty?
The whole IMF gold sale thing may be a touchy affair for Gordon “Golden” Brown, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer a decade ago sold well over 60 per cent of U.K.’s gold reserves at fire sale prices and earned his nickname. At the time, his actions were roundly criticized as a “disastrous foray into international asset management”. The simple message for Golden Brown and the G-20 financiers should be: “Give Africans a strong hand in establishing democracy and getting rid of dictatorships, and you will never have to worry about giving them handouts!”
The proposed quick sale of IMF gold as a magic elixir to fix Africa’s current economic troubles is snake oil gimmickry. Any such sale requires approval of 85 percent of the 185 IMF member countries. The U.S. alone has 17 percent of these voting rights (enough to veto any decision), and there is no realistic chance that President Obama or Congress will approve a daylight fleecing of the IMF to support dictatorships in Africa. As the U.S. faces a budget deficit forecast of $1.8 trillion in 2009 and $1.4 trillion in 2010, it is unlikely that the U.S. will provide significant direct bailout money (not even in the “range of money that is being spent on the mid-sized U.S. banks”) to African dictators. There are proposals currently floating around the G-20 to infuse the IMF with bailout money for developing economies in the range of one-half trillion dollars, but that may be a pipedream as the world’s largest economies struggle to manage their own problems. Against this background, the plea for deliverance on the G-20 stage, to paraphrase Shakespeare in King Lear, is a farcical demonstration of the excellent foppery of dictators who after plundering the riches of their nations, make guilty of their disasters the sun, the moon, and stars.
GONDAR, ETHIOPIA (JDC) – Azanaw Musaw Tegegne, an eighth grader, says that before JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) installed the fresh water tap in his village in Gondar, Ethiopia, most people drank water from a nearby stream. Like hundreds of villages around rural Ethiopia, Gondar’s Gabriel kebele (area similar to a neighborhood) had no access to potable water for drinking, bathing, or cooking during the region’s extended dry seasons and droughts.
Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. In rural parts of country, only 11 percent of the population has access to clean water while just 7 percent has access to adequate sanitation facilities. During the rainy season, the population’s water supply is procured from nearby springs, streams, and shallow wells. When the dry season comes, these water sources dry up, forcing villagers to collect water from sub-standard, often polluted, wells and streams.
The health hazards are enormous: 90 percent of all preventable diseases such as malaria, cholera, yellow fever, hepatitis, typhoid and diarrhea can be attributed to underdeveloped and ill-protected water supplies. Waterborne diseases claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians each year.
Limited access to safe drinking water not only results in poor health, but also causes serious developmental problems. Collecting water is back-breaking work that drains precious energy and restricts involvement in productive activities and community affairs for many women and children in every village. On average, rural villagers spend four to six hours per day collecting water from sources that can be as far as 10 kilometers from their homes.
Over the last 25 years, JDC has built dozens of potable water wells throughout Gondar and the surrounding countryside with guidance from the Ethiopian Water Works Construction Authority and the local government in Gondar. Funding for this effort has come from international NGOs, as well as private donors and foundations. The Ground Water Development program has produced hand dug wells, protected springs, taps, micro-dams, and latrines.
JDC originally built wells in areas that served large numbers of Jews (the Felas Mura population awaiting immigration to Israel) but also supplied water to the non-Jewish villagers. By 2008, as JDC constructed a dozen wells across Gondar through its International Development Program (JDC-IDP), new water projects served 100 percent non-Jewish populations.
As JDC-IDP’s larger goal is to provide assistance that will leave communities stronger and self-sustaining in the long run, each project engages and is facilitated by local village water committees, who solicit local manpower for some labor and materials used in the construction process. JDC-IDP also provides the villagers with training on the importance of drinking the clean water and encourages behavioral change to improve overall health. Whenever possible, in addition to building the wells, JDC-IDP constructs communal latrines to facilitate a safe, sanitary human waste disposal system (as open air toilets are widely known to contaminate the town’s clean drinking water). Community education and involvement contributes tremendously to the success and long-term sustainability of these projects.
With safe, fresh, local water sources for drinking, cooking and sanitation available in his village for the first time, Azanaw Musaw Tegegne no longer needs to travel great distances to collect water. Freed of this chore, he will now be able to finish eighth grade at the newly built JDC-IDP school in his hometown of Gabriel, Gondar—one of 10 schools JDC-IDP has built in the region in the past 18 months.
That last fact is important, as Ethiopia has an adult literacy rate of barely 36 percent. Azanaw will be one of the just 23 percent of teenage boys and 13 percent of teenage girls enrolled in secondary schools. (Only 55 percent of all boys and 47 percent of all girls are enrolled in primary schools; 38 percent will not reach the fifth grade.)
Committed to making a difference in the development of Ethiopia’s educational system and securing a future for some of the most vulnerable people on the globe, JDC-IDP has been repairing and building schools for some of the poorest Ethiopian children across the Northern Gondar region since 2000.
At a celebration in appreciation for JDC-IDP’s donation of a hand water pump to one local village, the Chairman of the Gondar City Council, Asmamaw Yosuf, said, “Really, you have reached at the [root] of the problem. The people have no words to appreciate your donation. [We have] seen the enthusiastic dances praising to your organization.”
The Ethiopia Commodity Exchange wants people to know that the country is still exporting coffee. When I declined to correct this blog post from last week, because it accurately says that the country’s six largest exporters — not all of its exporters — have been shut down, here’s the e-mail I got in return:
I find it difficult to believe that a title that starts “Ethiopia halts coffee exports..” can be in any way conceived as factually acceptable since it is blatantly false. Ethiopia has continued to export coffee every day since the legal actions taken by the regulators. There are more than 120 registered coffee exporters and this is an action concerning 6 companies. I also find it incredible that [another reporter] finds this to be a correct title since he knows firsthand that a statement that Ethiopia has halted coffee exports is patently untrue and extremely damaging to our industry. Unfortunately, neither you nor [the other reporter] are holding yourselves to the standards of truth that we hold you to as what should be responsible members of internationally recognized media. Please be assured that unless appropriate retractions and corrections are made, we will hold you accountable and pursue this matter in a more formal manner.
Best regards,
Eleni Gabre-Madhin
CEO
Ethiopia Commodity Exchange
The other reporter is from another news organization and for some reason was copied on the original request for a correction from me. He responded that he didn’t think my post needed a correction, saying “If a newspaper writes a headline: ‘Police Arrest Bank Robbers,’ it’s understood that the police may not necessarily have arrested all bank robbers, everywhere.”
The New York Times corrected a post I had linked to that incorrectly said no coffee is leaving Ethiopia.
Ethiopian agribusiness expert Bruck Fikru, who appears to work for Fintrac, correctly points out that I should do more research.
For example, Fikru wrote, I was wrong in saying that “U.S. importers can’t buy directly from the growers they prefer.”
Yet I’ve heard from Seattle roasters who say they got beans out of Ethiopia just in the nick of time.
So who’s getting coffee from Ethiopia these days, and how’s it going?
_.jpg "Maregu Zewdie")
Carlsbad, CALIFORNIA – The Carlsbad 5000, home of the current 5km World Bests, has announced the professional field for the elite invitational on Sunday, 5 April. Defending men’s champion Maregu Zewdie of Ethiopia will attempt to win back-to-back titles after a thrilling finish in last year’s race, in which only two seconds separated the top five finishing times. Zewdie, owner of two team Gold Medals from the World Cross Country Championships, will be challenged by a group of American runners led by Californian Scott Bauhs.
Ethiopia, Africa’s largest coffee producer, will start exporting beans itself after closing the warehouses of six of the country’s largest exporters, which it claims are stockpiling coffee and contributing to a shortage of foreign currency..jpg "Ethiopians in London hold protest rally at the G-20 summit venue, April 2, 2009")
GONDAR, ETHIOPIA (JDC) – Azanaw Musaw Tegegne, an eighth grader, says that before JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) installed the fresh water tap in his village in Gondar, Ethiopia, most people drank water from a nearby stream. Like hundreds of villages around rural Ethiopia, Gondar’s Gabriel kebele (area similar to a neighborhood) had no access to potable water for drinking, bathing, or cooking during the region’s extended dry seasons and droughts.