Letters to the editor

The failure of the negotiations at Cancún on multilateral trade is another drawback in economic relations between developed and developing countries. The Singapore Issues in particular hamper domestic economic life in the developing countries. The developing countries, therefore, are uniting to press for their views.

I would like to thank the German Agriculture Minister Renate Künast for her generosity towards the poor countries like India. Germany has been consistently aiding and helping to alleviate poverty in India and elsewhere. Industrial countries can do more than just point to the tenets of the World Trade Organisation. They need to look at the realities in poor countries, what people eat and possess.

The breakdown of Cancún negotiations should not be considered as a blow to multilateralism. But it is a temporary setback to the WTO. The situation also triggers unity among the developing countries strengthens their negotiaton position on the table of the WTO.

G. R. Kishan Rao, Hyderabad, India

[ Transformation of war economies,
D+C 2003:12, p. 457 ]

On page 457 of your December issue, you make a misleading – and presumably unintended – statement which I find shocking, especially for a periodical on development cooperation. Alongside two photographs of farmers tending narcotic crops, you mount the caption: “Civil wars are often financed by trading in drugs: poppies in Afghanistan and coca in Colombia”. The connotation of photos and caption suggests that the farmers who plant the crops are the financiers of civil wars. This borders on defamation of largely impecunious farmers.

It is not the farmers who furnish the money for civil wars; it is drug users. As we all know, getting money to flow in a market invariably requires producers and consumers as well as a string of intermediaries. The merchandise goes from producers to consumers and the money flows from consumers to intermediaries and producers.

If you wish to point a finger at the financiers of civil wars fuelled by drugs trafficking, you first need to denounce those who hand over the money for the drugs: the substance abusers. Therefore, it would have been better to illustrate your caption with pictures of well-known drug-takers in German politics and sport – not drug farmers in developing countries. Generally these are themselves victims of the wars financed by affluent and thoughtless drug users.

Prof Dr Rolf A. E. Müller, Institute of Agrarian Economics,
Christian Albrechts University, Kiel




[ Development policy and development research,
D+C 2004:1, p. 12 ]

The round-table discussion on development policy advice and research also provides a platform for reviewing the situation in development-related educational research. This is an area that was once comparatively well organised. The German Educational Research Association’s “Commission on Educational Research with the Third World” managed for many years to get individuals and even small teams involved in debates and networks. There are plenty of examples showing how research results from those networks were communicated to policy-makers and implementing organisations. One real success story was the group led by my deceased colleague Wolfgang Karcher, which was concerned with education and poverty reduction.

The basic problems of development-related educational research today are twofold. First, the subject is not institutionalised at university level. Among academics, it is frequently regarded as an exotic hobby, especially as German educational research is still not very international. Networks exist but, because of the lack of institutionalised thematic continuity, they tend to be thinned out by new appointments to key positions. The few actual issue-related structures that evolved have fallen victim to financial cuts in recent years because development-related educational research has virtually no lobby.

The second problem is lack of ‘new blood’. During the last twenty years, numerous PhDs have been written on educational research with the Third World. But those writing them mostly go into organisations active in development cooperation or development-related education. They certainly do valuable work there but they are sorely missed in the world of research. If UNESCO or the World Bank wishes to commission universities to study the conditions for reducing poverty by education, for example, there are hardly any institutes they can approach in Germany. Only individuals conduct such research in their spare time. To provide policy advice is still considered somewhat disreputable. It is not the sort of rock on which an academic career can be built in Germany.

I fear education needs a good deal more than just interfaces between academia and politics, particularly since it is an area easily forgotten even in round-table discussions on the subject.
Dr Bernd Overwien,
Technical University Berlin