The Guarani Project

Many of the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia were given special forces-style training from Western firms, a special report by Al Jazeera has found.

Some security firms currently protecting shipping from the pirates had been engaged to train them a decade ago.

One company, Hart Group, coached trainees to be the “coastguard” of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region – providing protection from illegal fishing in the region.

In this exclusive report, Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan found that Western companies, involved at all levels of the business, can now expect to make up to half a million dollars from the avergage $2m “ransom and release” contracts they are awarded to solve.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/09/20099894242623358.html

A very interesting mini documentary. What makes it even more interesting is how kind it is to Hart Group..?

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Over the years, the World Bank’s policy of promoting water privatisation has been met with strong opposition. And today, the word privatisation is considered a bad word (in relation to public services).

But rather than changing tack and thinking up a new way to tackle the world’s water problems, the World Bank has merely renamed water privatisation “mulitple contract schemes” or sometimes, “private public partnership”, PPP for short.

In 2007, Mumbai’s residents fought against the World Bank’s plan to privatise Mumbai’s water supply. The privatisation scheme would have lead to higher tariffs and little improvement in the distribution of water to the city’s residents.

The World Bank and the French consultancy firm Castalia were accused by the local population and water activists of presenting a report based on inflated data in order to push through water privatization. “Castalia’s findings supported privatization, but were based on insufficient research, unreliable technology, inaccurate methodology and specious logic,” said Afsar Jafri, a research assistant with Focus on the Global South.

But Mumbai’s victory against the privatisation scheme has been short lived, and the World Bank has returned to Mumbai now advocating “multiple contract schemes” as a solution to Mumbai’s water problems. Currently only the pipe maintenance of Mumbai’s water system is looked after by multiple different contracts, and Afsar said that this scheme is costing Mumbai far more than when the system was maintained by the municipal government. Despite this evidence, the World Bank is pushing for other areas of Mumbai’s water system to be shared by multiple contracts.

Over the last five years, the World Bank has encouraged and supported the signing of 97 water utility contacts with 28 governments from developing countries. This brings the total number of people reliant on private water companies for their water and sanitation needs to 545 million.

Despite the World Bank’s push of water privatization schemes, there has been little improvement in water access in developing countries. Based on the World Bank’s current policy on water issues, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 will not be reached, according to research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The World Bank has advocated water privatization since the 1990s as a means of improving access to clean water and sanitation in developing countries. And despite overwhelming evidence exposing the failings of water privatization schemes, the World Bank continues to encourage privatization, often requiring government in developing countries to sign onto privatization schemes as a condition a loan.

In recent years, the number of water privatization schemes in developing countries has dropped as high profile cases, such as the Bolivian water wars, have sullied the general public’s opinion of the private sector. The World Bank’s response to this seems to be to just rename the policy and try again!