Saving Africa’s rhinos As anti-poaching efforts fail, legalising the trade of rhino horn may be a solution The history of rhino conservation was, until recently, one of marked (and market) success. Fewer than 1,000 southern white rhinos existed in Africa in 1960. The rise of private game farms started in that decade, and by 1991 there were nearly 6,000 specimens, mostly in South Africa. Traffic International, the wildlife trade-monitoring network, declared in a 1992 report that the animals were “well conserved”. South Africa’s 1991 Theft of Game Act changed the legal status of game. For the first time, wildlife ownership…
Ivo Vegter
Scare tactics Conservation hyperbole leads to poor public policy Most professions demand formal qualifications of their practitioners. Often, the law prescribes these, but even if not, few customers would do business with unqualified accountants, engineers or lawyers. In today’s world, there are three notable exceptions: activists, journalists and politicians. While some in these lines of work have relevant qualifications, many do not, and justify their lay status by invoking the rights afforded people in free democracies. This however makes them uniquely susceptible to making wrong risk assessments, seeking out sensational stories and basing public policy on the strength of lobby…
Growing entrepreneurs: not government’s business Ambitious bureaucrats think they can replicate Silicon Valley, but history proves otherwise Historians credit Frederick Terman, the former provost of Stanford University and dean of its engineering department, as one of the major founders of Silicon Valley in northern California. In the mid-1960s, a consortium of high-tech companies in the US state of New Jersey hired Mr Terman to replicate this hugely successful strip of innovation and entrepreneurship. The attempt failed. The culture of cooperation that Mr Terman had established between the science and engineering departments at Stanford in California and the industries nearby simply…
The very word sounds scary, but “fracking” holds tremendous promise for Algeria, Libya, Morocco and South Africa, which possess large reserves of natural gas in deep shale rock layers. Environmentalists warn that it will poison the water and ruin the landscape. Some even call it “worse than coal”. Do they exaggerate or are the environmental risks small and the economic benefits too great to sacrifice? Ivo Vegter examines the research and cracks apart the opposition’s claims. Natural gas is projected to be the fastest-growing component of world energy consumption, more than doubling between 1997 and 2020, according to the United…
Microcredit: the tarnished Nobel medal Grameen Bank’s microcredit model has earned prestigious plaudits. But did it reduce poverty and create profitable businesses? “Poverty will be eradicated in a generation. Our children will have to go to a ‘poverty museum’ to see what all the fuss was about.” Thus declared Muhammad Yunus, a professor in rural economics at Chittagong University in south-eastern Bangladesh, when he pioneered a new credit model for the poor in a nearby village, Jobra, in the late 1970s. He called it the Grameen Bank Project, a name derived from the Bengali word for “rural village”. Thirty years…
Funding health and development A new finance plan hopes to improve incentives and accountability in aid projects by Ivo Vegter Critics often condemn development aid for being ineffective and wasteful. A new breed of funding models—social impact bonds and development impact bonds— seeks to remedy these failings by providing incentives to funders, donors and aid recipients. To see how these models differ from existing practice, we need to review development financing and its shortcomings. Two main funding models exist. In the first, investors lend government money with the expectation that this money is returned with interest in the future. This…
Economic freedom trumps political freedom By GGA Reporter Ivo Vegter was a finalist for the 2011 Bastiat Prize for Journalism, awarded by the International Policy Network, a non-governmental charity committed to eliminating barriers to enterprise and trade. The prize recognises writing that explains, promotes and defends the principles of a free society. It celebrates journalists whose writing emulates the great 19th century French classical liberal philosopher and politician, Frédéric Bastiat. Researchers at Good Governance Africa decided to challenge Mr Vegter’s free market faith. What countries have unilaterally opened their markets to trade, and what were the results? The classic case…
Vaccines: a Western plot to make Africans sterile? Cultural resistance to vaccines wreaks havoc in developing nations by Ivo Vegter Nigeria is on the verge of being declared polio-free. Jean Gough, the UN’s children’s agency (UNICEF) representative in Nigeria made this optimistic assessment to journalists in early September 2013. It comes at a time when only three countries remain endemic hosts to the poliomyelitis virus: Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most other countries in which it occurs, known as “importation countries” (because outbreaks are brought in by travellers from endemic countries), are in Africa. Last year, fewer than 250 polio cases…
Rape: the South African scourge by Ivo Vegter South Africa has a reputation for the world’s worst sexual violence rates against women, men and children. Amid confusing data and complex causes, what is it that makes South Africa unique? Pinning down the statistics is hard. They often come in an inconsistent and context-free form: one person is raped every 17 seconds, or 26 seconds, or 36 seconds, or 65 seconds, depending on whom you believe. Such formulations are good for sloganeering, but say little about the reasons behind this cruel crime and even less about how to solve the problem.…
Erasing trade tariffs, subsidies and customs agreements between countries by Ivo Vegter The Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations, an initiative of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), has been deadlocked for more years than negotiators have spent making progress. Launched in late 2001 in the Qatari capital, the Doha round was especially aimed at including the developing world in the process of liberalising trade across the world. By 2006, with almost no progress made in gaining better trade terms for developing countries, it had foundered on intractable disagreements about agricultural subsidies in developed nations such as Japan, the United States…
