'No Logo' author Naomi Klein asks who's making money out of disasters, former child soldiers meet at a secret location in Winnipeg, children still dying in Angola, a low-tech solution for oil spills, and grim figures on rape in Haiti...

'Disaster capitalism'

Imagine the scenario. A major hurricane hits the United States in 2020. You live in the affected area and luckily you have money. How do you rescue yourself and your family?

Well, you get out your credit card, call a disaster response company and book yourself a ride out of town on a helicopter for a few thousand dollars. Or if that's a bit steep, you order water and ready-meals, or perhaps reserve a couple of beds in a shelter. All at a cost, you understand.

Will things really come to this? Author Naomi Klein, whose book No Logo focused global attention on how big brands operate, seems to think so.

This time she's gunning for what she dubs the "Disaster Capitalism Complex". Klein argues that corporations are making money from disaster relief - a trend she believes is likely to accelerate.

"Whatever you might need in a serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, watertanks, cots, port-a-potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters, medicine, men with guns," writes Klein in a column in the Guardian newspaper this week.

The anti-corporate globalisation guru says the privatisation of disaster response has been fuelled by the apparent lesson learned from the U.S. government's much-maligned response to Katrina: "businesses do disaster better".

Klein says that, in comparison with Washington's weak, bungled efforts to deal with Katrina, "the private sector looked modern and competent". But she slams corporations for using a good chunk of the public money they receive for their own capital expenditure.

According to Klein, the U.S. government is contracting out disaster response to private companies, which then use taxpayers' money to build up their own capacity (including technology and infrastructure).

This isn't so bad as long as their disaster-response services are free to the users, says Klein. But she argues that, given the U.S. government's huge debts, that's unlikely to remain the case.

Hence the vision of people digging deep to pay for their own rescue.

In practice this would mean the rich get saved while the poor are abandoned. Klein says Katrina gave a glimpse of this "disaster apartheid".

The growing involvement of the private sector in development and humanitarian relief is a fact. But the nightmare vision posited by Klein isn't inevitable. For starters, accountability and regulation could go some way to curbing profit-making from disasters.

Nonetheless, we had to chuckle at one comment posted on the Guardian website beneath the online version of Klein's column.

It points out that the opinion piece starts with the headline "Disaster capitalism: how to make money out of misery", and ends with: "Naomi Klein's book on disaster capitalism will be published in spring 2007".

"Says it all, really," observes the writer.

Megan Rowling
AlertNet journalist

More than child's play

The Canadian city of Winnipeg is a remote kind of place, known for its bone-chilling winters, wide open skies and proximity to polar bears. A world away from the sweltering war zones of Congo, Sudan or northern Uganda.

But Winnipeg has, for this week at least, become the epicentre of the global fight to stamp out the use of child soldiers in battlefields across Africa and elsewhere.

Experts - including military officials and former child combatants from around the world - have flown in for a high-security workshop at a secret location in the city, the Canadian Press news agency reports. The event is closed to the media and public to protect participants' anonymity.

Why Winnipeg? The Canadian Press says the workshop is part of a project by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general-turned-politician who headed the ill-fated U.N. peacekeeping force during the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The idea is to get candid input for a computer simulation Dallaire is devising to help peacekeepers, soldiers and aid workers know how to interact with child soldiers on the ground.

"Most of the simulation systems that are out there are for combat, or outright conflict," the Canadian Press quotes Dallaire as saying. "Not many of them have the softer dimensions like humanitarian dimensions, so we're going to have to articulate that and build that into it."

The simulation is due to be launched this winter. It's not clear exactly what format it will take, but it may just be the latest example of the "serious game" phenomenon we've reported on before. These games are didactic in intent and turn the traditional shoot-em-up template on its head. Many, like the U.N. World Food Programme's online Food Force, have production values rivalling those of Nintendo or Sony PlayStation.

Dallaire wants his simulation to be based on the actual experiences of workshop participants in protecting child soldiers and helping get them demobilised. As knowledge-sharing goes, it's a radical new approach that could potentially be applied to other areas. Watch this space for more.

'Normal' life and death in Angola

Four years after the end of Africa's longest-running civil war, Angola has a lot going for it.

The country is rich in gas and diamonds. It pumps 1.3 million barrels of oil per day, making it the continent's second-biggest crude producer. Economic growth reached 18 percent last year.

Try telling all that to Angola's children, who still suffer terribly despite the return of peace, according to medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). An MSF mortality study released this week shows an under-5 mortality rate of 2.8 deaths per 10,000 children per day in the municipality of Xa-Muteba.

Let's put these numbers in perspective. Experts define the threshold of a health emergency as being above two deaths per 10,000 people per day. But in Angola, there is no recognised health emergency. This is just "normal" life.

The MSF study found a crude mortality rate of 1.1 deaths per 10,000 people per day, which is twice as high as in countries defined as developing, and three times that of developed countries. Malaria is the biggest killer, while vaccination coverage remains "appallingly low".

"Even if the end of the war has allowed the government and international agencies to reach rural areas which were previously inaccessible, little improvement can be seen in terms of infrastructure, and availability of medical staff and supplies," MSF said in a statement. "As a result, conditions remain appalling".

Oily hair...

Sometimes it's the low-tech solutions that work best.

You may have heard that thousands of prisoners in the Philippines have been shaving their heads and chests to donate hair to help mop up the country's worst-ever oil spill.

No, it's not a spoof. The government has launched a nationwide drive to amass tonnes of hair to absorb more than 200,000 litres of industrial fuel that leaked from a sunken tanker earlier this month. The Coast Guard plans to put the hair in sacks tied to bamboo poles to act as barriers along the coastlines of affected villages.

Is there any scientific basis for using hair to soak up oil? In fact, there is. Flash back to 1989 when an Alabama hairdresser named Phil McCrory was watching TV coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. According to a 1998 CNN news report we dredged up from the Web, he had an epiphany when he saw footage of an otter caught up in the spill.

A few backyard experiments later, McCrory proved his theory, discovering that a pound of hair can mop up a gallon of oil in just two minutes, compared with 48 hours for existing products. Then you can wring out the hair, recover the oil, and start all over again.

It sounds crazy but apparently it works. The Philippines government is convinced, as are 15,000 inmates at a maximum security prison in southern Manila, including 1,000 on death row.

To what extent their hair donations were voluntary is not entirely clear, but the beauty of hair is it tends to grow back.

Tim Large
AlertNet deputy editor

Rape in Haiti

It's over six months since democratic elections in Haiti, but there was a spike in violence in July, and now medical journal The Lancet has published an in-depth survey that shows how endemic violence has plagued the troubled island's residents since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in 2004.

In the 22 months after Aristide was pushed out of office, an estimated 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 women were sexually assaulted. That's 12 deaths a day on an island with a population of under 8.5 million - about the size of London, or twice the population of Norway.

Girls were particularly targeted for rape, with half of the sex attacks reported to researchers being carried out on children under 18. The researchers were shocked to calculate that about one in 40 girls under 18 years of age was sexually assaulted each year in the Port-au-Prince area.

Household servants - known as "restaveks" and often viewed as near-slaves - were especially prone to abuse.

One in eight of the rapes were committed by police or other government officials.

Although most of the attackers were identified as criminals, people who responded to the survey accused foreign soldiers, including ones in U.N. uniform, of threatening them with death or sexual violence.

The Lancet editorial says: "Severely traumatised populations remain vulnerable, and... suffering does not stop when peacekeepers arrive. U.N. peacekeepers must no longer add to that suffering."

Ruth Gidley
AlertNet journalist

Any views expressed in this newsblog are those of the writers and not of Reuters.