This morning I went to the exhibition hall at UNCTAD. It was a sad little effort. I saw a man weaving a traditional basket while checking his smart phone, a woman doing an oil painting of a horse while checking her smart phone, and an array of food and handicrafts. There were booths from Qatar’s major banks, a steel company, a newly maritime construction company, and two or three oil companies.

My first thought was of irony. UNCTAD’s angry response to the harm done by globalization and international financial structures, accompanied by two banks, two oil companies, and a steel manufacturer?

My second thought was more complex. It’s pretty clearly that the multinationals who anchor the global economy – and are being blamed in this meeting – see no risk to their corporate futures from UNCTAD, or they wouldn’t have set up their shiny displays.

Maybe we broke this global economy, but we bought it first.

It makes me wonder if anyone is really big-picture thinking about how all of this fits together. UNCTAD delegates are calling for more government intervention into the economy, more taxation on investments, and more FDI, all at the same time. They want an explanation for what went wrong from the same hapless souls who steered us wrong in the first place. Do we really think suddenly everyone is smarter now?

Maybe there is an elephant in this room, and I am looking at a trunk and a tail and some wrinkly skin. But it seems more like a pile of limbs and eyeballs that don’t add up to any living beast.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

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Photo credit: CrankyPK

Day two began with the Inter-Agency Cluster on Trade and Productive Capacity.  This is an inter-agency meeting that only takes place at UNCTAD. Like so many inter-agency meetings, it consisted almost entirely of agency representatives reading prewritten statements and ignoring each other. Some of the prewritten statements were genuinely very interesting, though.

I made it to the meeting in time for the session on development-led globalization. Alan Kyeremartin of the ECA discussed the need to increase trade among African nations. He made the point that improving intra-African trade would also prepare the countries for global trade.

I also discovered a UN body I’d never heard of before, UNCITRAL. UNCITRAL works to harmonize trade regulations globally. It’s a consensus body, and sounds excruciatingly dull to work for. The UNCITRAL representative made a great point about the role of law in development, though. He said that development is grounded in a legal framework that supports free and equal legal dealings and transparency. Which, YES. In a big way. I did a little more thinking on the rule of law issue for UN Dispatch.

Next, I attended the saddest little press briefing you’ve ever seen. There were maybe six media members there, and that’s if you count me. I assume all the other media was watching from the media room, but still. I don’t even have notes from the briefing.

And then, we come to the big event. The opening ceremony. Welcoming speeches, an operetta about the global financial crisis. (you think I kid? I do not.) Finally, remarks from the nations attending. And that’s when you knew, for sure, you were at UNCTAD.

Because they people were mad. Just about every statement demanded accountability from the wealthy nations that had caused the world financial crisis, increased government intervention in national economies, and some kind of plan for making sure this doesn’t happen again.

The opening was really the high point of the day. After that, I attended the opening procedural plenary, but that’s only interesting if you’re a geek like me. (I love parliamentary procedure. It’s like elaborate dance.) It did feature Cuba throwing a monkeywrench into routine procedural matters, but that’s about it.

Buzzwords from Day two of UNCTAD:

• South-south cooperation
• Justice
• Fairness
• Equity
• Triangular cooperation
• First UN financial meeting since the crisis
• Finance vs “real economy”
• Inclusiveness
• Boom/bust

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.

So, today I went to UNCTAD. Well, not UNCTAD exactly. The pre-UNCTAD meetings. Mainly the World Civil Society Forum. Tomorrow UNCTAD officially opens, so today just had the sidecar meetings that take advantage of everyone’s presence in Doha.

The first meeting I went to was on the role of tourism in sustainable development. It was a series of speakers, followed by a panel discussion, and then question and answer at the end. Kind of a weird format, honestly. It made it hard for the audience to participate, and it didn’t have much of a flow.

There were a lot of generalities, but a few interesting ideas stuck out:

• One speaker suggested that hotel supplies and equipment get the same tax breaks that factories receive
• Most jobs in tourism are bad jobs, and we need to find a way to address that
• Small countries can use the web to promote tourism on a limited marketing budget

Next, I went to a session on developing new financial architecture. It started strong, with a stirring condemnation of the financial structures that led us into global financial crisis. It was genuinely exciting to watch someone strike out so hard against the existing financial establishment. I did some web research, though, and discovered this was not the first – or even the fifth – time this talk had been given. In its own heterodox way, it was old hat.

It also turned out that the session was about the need for new financial architecture, not possible systems for said architecture. I found that a little disappointing; I know we can’t just ignore the mistakes that led to global financial meltdown, but I also was hoping for a sense of what we can do in the future.

I closed the day by attending the press conference that preceded tomorrow’s opening plenary. The speakers were Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the sixty-sixth session of UNGA and Supachai Panitchpakdi, UNCTAD Secretary General. Panitchpakdi took the opportunity to lay out his defense for UNCTAD’s existence and special role. Al-Nasser was less clearly on the defense, but no less firm in his case for UNCTAD. I did my best to accurately transcribe what they have to say, and toss it out on twitter, because I just don’t have the economics background to analyze on the fly. I could tell this much, though: Panitchpakdi was clearly feeling pressured to sell UNCTAD and its role.

That’s all for today. I’ll be writing up the opening presser in more detail for UN Dispatch.

Disclosure: My trip to Doha was funded by APCO, which has been contracted by the Qatari Ministry of Trade to support UNCTAD. They don’t have editorial control over my writing, and they don’t pay me to post.  

Let’s talk about UNCTAD

UNCTAD is the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Its 13^th meeting starts on Saturday in Qatar, and I am here in Doha to report on it. I’ll be putting personal reflections here on this blog, and more serious reporting at UN Dispatch.

If you, like most of my friends, think that UNCTAD sounds incredibly boring, I’ll tell you the secret about this conference. It’s actually very controversial. UNCTAD tends to give economic advice that is radically different from the World Bank and the IMF.  Economists are divided: Dani Rodrik came out in support of UNCTAD, arguing that it is an important voice. Daniel Altman takes the opposite view, dinging UNCTAD for “sloppiness in basic economics and dubious personnel policy”.

UNCTAD xiii is especially controversial because right now G7 countries are trying to change the UNCTAD mandate. Either because UNCTAD had overstepped its competitive advantage and is giving bad advice to poor countries, or because the donor country alliance want to shut down the only heterorthodox voice in global economics.

Some tangents I cut out of an essay I provided for a very cool ebook project I’ll tell you about later:

Many – in fact, most – donors and activists have never been poor themselves. I haven’t. So when we try to picture poverty, we confuse the concept of poor with the concept of “broke.” Broke is a temporary state. You’re broke as a college student; it’s a phase you go through until you graduate and start to earn money. Maybe you’re broke while you pay down your student loans, or while you’re looking for a job. You have no money for luxuries, you live month to month. You might even think you’re poor.

But you’re not. You don’t have money right now, but that’s not going to last forever. Your life is not built around poverty. You’ll finish school, you’ll find a job. It’s a transitory stage, and it really is empty. It’s about waiting for something better to come. There is no point settling in, since it’s not real life. That life has room for poorly thought out aid projects. Poverty does not.

Another complexity in the lives of poor people: when you have very little money, the relative value of the rest of your possessions increases. These could be tangible objects like jewelry or appliances. If you’re poor and you lose your watch or your cellphone, you don’t get to go buy a new one right away. You save up, or you buy on credit. You also possess intangibles, like social capital. Or pride.

I like knowing my neighbors, but it’s not essential to me. If I need urgent babysitting, or an extra egg I call a sitter or walk to the corner store. If I was poor, the neighbors would be key to my survival.

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photo credit: GorillaSushi

In the US, you’re poor if you have to eat ramen. In Tajikistan you’re poor when you can’t afford ramen.

The other night I went to a bar, for the first time in Tajikistan. Context: this is a conservative country, and women don’t tend to go to bars. I’m not much of a drinker even when not breastfeeding, so bars aren’t something I tend to seek out. I’m not opposed either, though, so when some friends invited me out with them last weekend, I went.

I was there with four other Americans – one woman and three men. When we arrived, the other American woman and I were the only female customers in the bar.

And I totally froze up. I wasn’t scared exactly, but I felt wrong. It was exactly the kind of bar I liked back in DC, but here in Dushanbe it was all I could do not to twitch. It took me maybe thirty minutes to relax and begin to enjoy myself.

Overthinker that I am, I spent the next two days wondering why. Dushanbe is a pretty safe place, and nothing all that bad is going to happen in an upscale bar aimed at people who like soccer. Here’s what I came up with:

I’ve spent a decent amount of my life in situations where my physical safety depended on fitting in to local culture. In Cairo in particular, but also in Pakistan and the rest of the Middle East and rural Central Asia. When I don’t fit in, it is generally by deliberate choice. I don’t want it to happen by accident, and the bar was an accident. I hadn’t thought enough about it to make a choice.

All of that being said, deciding how I fit into the culture of the country hosting me isn’t a one-time decision for me. It’s a process, all the time. I can’t just pick a spot and stay with it. I choose over and over, every moment. Other people seem like they have this all worked out. They figure out how they want to approach it and then they do. But I don’t. I just make it up again every day.

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(photo credit: The Cable Show)

The actual bar was darker and more leather-y than this picture.

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PS – If you haven’t already, go check out my book!