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  • From: PacificEdge <pacedge@magna.com.au>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Afghanistan redux
  • Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2002 14:34:08 +1000

On Saturday, September 21, 2002, at 12:57 AM, Mark wrote:

At 12:50 PM 9/19/02 -0700, you wrote:
Yes, the Pc ethics are good guidelines and we can rally around them without
all the endless political debate and labeling

My point is that getting shot puts a real damper on implementing anything, one needs to be realistic about where one can operate successfully.

Sustainable development cannot take place in a region where the rule of law is absent. This is because development requires stability - political stability so that towns, countryside and communications routes are safe and so that development personnel can move and operate with personal safety. This especially is the case when development personnel are from a country involved in the region politically or militarily. As for Americans (northern variety), militias and bandits are unlikely to distinguish whether you are development workers or military personnel - your treatment is likely to be the same.

Some development enthusiasts might like to think that they can work successfully in lawless areas - and in a few cases and on a small scale that can be the case. But, generally, development is likely to be disrupted and accomplish less than its potential where conflict prevails and where warlords reign. Even distributing humanitarian aid like food can be both chancy and limited in such circumstances - just cast your mind back to Somalia in 1992.

Complicating the issues is that for some time, to move around freely and incognito, military and intelligence people have used the alias of reporter/ news photographer/ aid and development worker as a disguise. Just because someone walks around with a camera bag over their shoulder and a notebook sticking out of the pocket of their photographers vest doesn't necessarily mean that they are a journalist. As a journalist I find this disturbing but it is not new. What it means is that, in a country such as Afghanistan, journalists and photographers are likely to encounter a great deal of suspicion among locals, and now this same suspicion adhears to aid and development workers. As the case of an Australian aid project manager in East Timor indicated, development workers do from time to time carry out intelligence gathering for their governments.

Please refger to my article in The Planet (Permaculture International Journal) for a round-up of current thinking on this issue (I can email the text if you cannot access the hard copy).

.........................
Russ Grayson
Pacific Edge Media; Sydney, Australia.
.........................



Mark P. Ludwig
Poultry Research Lab
University of Wisconsin -Madison
608-262-1730 WK
608-846-7125 HM

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