Month: March 2017

The Humanitarian Fallout from Cameroon’s Struggle Against Boko Haram

1.6 million people in the Far North of Cameroon are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. The government is focusing military efforts on fighting Boko Haram and offering little support to the impoverished population and refugees affected by the conflict. Several international institutions and agencies have stepped up to help provide aid to thousands of refugees displaced by Boko Haram, including 60,000 Nigerian refugees at the Minawao camp. Minawao camp, which was visited by the former head of the UNHCR, benefits the most from international aid.

A lack of government experience and support as well as insufficient funding present the biggest challenges to providing humanitarian aid to both refugees and inhabitants in the Far North. Three million residents in the Far North lived below the poverty line prior to the crisis and a recent influx of refugees to the region has greatly increased the need for help.

The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, signed a mayoral decree which bans refugee charities from handing out meals to migrants in the town. Bouchart argued that it poses a security threat, but it is also part of a larger effort to prevent refugees from building camps in Calais after the destruction of the “Jungle” refugee camp in late 2016. Despite the ban, several charities said that they will continue to provide food and other aid to refugees who continue to flee to Calais.

The UN supported the demolition of the “Jungle” and relocation of migrants living in the Calais camp due to poor living conditions and concerns over safety. It will be interesting to hear the UN’s response to Bouchart’s ban as European leaders struggle with how to handle the refugee crisis.

China was seen as taking a hard stance against North Korea when it said it would ban coal imports from the hermit kingdom. According to an unpublished UN report, North Korea “is flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication. The North Korean schemes are ‘combining to significantly negate the impact’ of international sanctions.” 

China has served as front for North Korea’s illicit trades which undermines the U.N. sanctions that China has voiced support for. However, there is no direct evidence of China directly helping North Korea. North Korea has entities that operate in China  and the U.N. report has a long running list of Chinese companies that have help North Korea evade the sanctions.

For example, North Korea would buy cheap electronics in Hong Kong and turn them into military grade radios.

“The global network consisted of individuals, companies and bank accounts in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East,” the report stated.

Is there an organization that can monitor the trade or complex networks of trade and financing? The closest one is probably the WTO but are they suppose to monitor and enforce the financial restrictions when the U.N. Security council imposes sanctions? These sanctions have no effect whatsoever when one of the big powers, China in this case, is actually enabling North Korea to counteract the sanctions.

Intel Security, in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has just released Hacking the Skills Shortage, a global report outlining the talent shortage crisis impacting the cybersecurity industry across both companies and nations.

Global organizations are more confident than ever that they can predict and resist a sophisticated cyber attack, but are falling short of investments and plans to recover from a breach in today’s expanding threat landscape, according to the annual EY Global Information Security Survey (GISS), Path to cyber resilience: Sense, resist, react.

57% of respondents rate business continuity and disaster recovery as a high priority, but only 39% are planning to invest more in it in the coming year

Sorry, But China Won’t Replace America As The Leader Of Free Trade Any Time Soon

This article explains why China won’t replace the US as the leader of free trade. I found it interesting that it’s less about how powerful China is and more about its transparency. The following point demonstrates how important foreign diplomacy is and that acting out of self-interest isn’t always really in a country’s self-interest.

“China’s exclusion from the TPP was not based on the West’s desire to thwart its rise as an economic power or to hold back its cross-border trade. The issue was, and still is, China’s objective of promoting its own self-interest at the expense of its trading partners and the greater rules-based trading system.”

For now, no one country will be the leader of free trade.

“Trump’s threatened tariffs and other trade barriers could violate WTO rules and bring blowback from other countries in the trade organization. But the agenda signals the Trump administration could simply ignore those complaints.”

As expected, Trump is threatening to pull back from international trade agreements, and has gone further in saying it might ignore the WTO. Choosing not to abide by WTO resolutions or accept its findings in disputes signals a major departure from American trade policy and could have far reaching effects. For example, other countries could decide to walk away also, or directly retaliate against US manufacturers. This seems to me like total arrogance – the Administration assumes that no global organization actually helps the US and the US is always treated unfairly on the world stage. But the WTO has ruled in favor of the US in previous disputes, and the US has used the WTO to register complaints against other countries. Ignoring the TWO could decrease our influence in the world and hurt US businesses.