TH!NK3: Developing World is the third round of the European Journalism Centre’s widely acclaimed international blogging competition series. Participants, or ‘TH!NKers’, are journalism students, academics and experts from the EU, neighbourhood countries and beyond. Their objective is to write and report about global cooperation and sustainable development in the lead up to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals Review Summit in September 2010. Every week, The Malta Independent on Sunday, in collaboration with EJC, will select a sample of the blog posts that appeared the previous week. Read more about TH!INK3 at www.thinkaboutit.eu.

How activists attract attention

Hieke Van der Vaart (student: Hamburg, Germany)

Two renowned civil rights activists died within days of each other. Benjamin L. Hooks (85), former leader of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), passed away on Thursday. On Tuesday, Dorothy Height, another leading activist who stood on the stage with Martin Luther King during his dream-speech, died at age 98. Her favourite saying: “If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.” This counts for all activists. They put things on the agenda. How does the contemporary activist generation do that?

Go Robin Hood

Catalan activist Enric Duran, aka Robin Bank, recalls the style of the oldest, fictitious but famous activist Robin Hood. Between 2006 and 2008, Duran took out 68 loans at 39 banks. No one asked him for a guarantee, and he managed to loan almost €500,000. On his weblog he explains this Robin Hood-ish revival: “When consumption financing and speculation are dominant in our society, what could be better than robbing the ones who rob us and distribute the money among the groups which are denouncing this situation and building alternatives?” After denouncing his action, he fled to South America. When he came back in March 2009, he was arrested, but released shortly after. He donated the money to activist groups, printed a newspaper and paid himself a modest salary. He announced not to pay back the debt. Clearly.

Get Naked

Nudity is a crowd puller – every editor-in-chief knows that, which is why the German tabloid Bild features a naked woman on its front page every day. Activists, in their search for publicity, are enthusiast nudists. Last month, people protested naked against bullfighting in Madrid. Animal rights group PETA announces an upcoming demonstration as if they were advertising a peep show: “Sexy PETA activists Mary-Ellen Power and Emily Lavender will cuddle up in a bed on a public sidewalk wearing nothing but their underwear and holding a sign reading “Fur-Out, Love-In”. Feminist activists might not appreciate this type of campaigning, but hey, you can only support one cause at a time, otherwise the message gets blurred. The picture on the header I took myself, in the centre of Amsterdam, one year ago. The protestors, part of the “Naked Bike Ride” collective, were cycling in the nude for a car-free city centre. For more hot, naked activists, click here.

Use Twitter

Even though protesting naked has been and will be successful, as long as mankind wears clothes, for the more prude protesters there is an excellent new media tool that can raise awareness AND money. Th!nk3 editor Guy Degen and blogger Bart Knols have elaborated on this before. The Huffington Post also has a post on “Twitter activists”: they mention Ashton Kutcher (more than 4.5 million followers), Doug Ulman (CEO of the Livestrong Foundation, one million) and actor Danny Glover (1.4 million). They are easy to find, since they are all famous. And maybe a bit boring.

So. Do you know any original activists, in real life or online? Famous, infamous? Naked, or properly dressed? Share please.

The sex industry in Thailand – a problem or a profession?

Liisa-Maija Leeve (journalism student, Helsinki, Finland)

Recently on a holiday to Thailand, a friend took us as a joke to see a ping pong show in Bangkok. Up until the moment we stepped into this seedy nightclub I really thought he was just joking about going.

No one in our group thought the experience was enjoyable or funny. As one of the guys said it was “one of the most disturbing experiences of my life”.

I was incredibly upset and appalled by the whole situation and the humiliating circumstances the women had to live in. As if all that wasn’t enough, one of the bar maids in a bikini top and miniskirt actually blurted out to a friend of mine that she was 14 – quickly correcting that she had made a mistake and is actually 18...

Needless to say we left the place quite quickly. This experience prompted me to do some digging on the Internet about the sex trade phenomenon in Thailand.

No real statistics exist

It seems that no one really knows how many people actually work in the sex trade, as the government is not willing to even recognise the existence of such a market in the country. This even though the sex industry is undoubtedly a massive market employing not only the sex workers themselves, but loads of support staff as well.

The only study I was able to find on the subject is an ILO report from the year 1998. That study estimates that the number of prostitutes in Thailand could be somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000. The same study says the sex sector could account for up to 14 per cent of the GDP in southeast Asian countries.

This must explain that while officials are reluctant to admit to the existence of such a sector, they are also not actively trying to do anything to reduce or eradicate it either.

A serious side effect of sex trade in the area is human trafficking. Girls and women from yet poorer neighbouring countries such as Burma are brought to Thailand to work in the industry. Child abuse is common as children are basically sold by debt-ridden parents to traffickers.

What is the truth?

But then there are those who claim that the sex industry is empowering women to make their own money and help the economy.

EMPOWER, an NGO representing the sex workers of Thailand state on their web page:

“We are sex workers. We are workers who use our brains and our skills to earn an income. We are proud to support ourselves and our extended families. We look after each other at work; we fight for safe & fair standards in our industry and equal rights within society. We are a major part of the Thai economy, bringing in lots of tourist dollars. We are active citizens on every issue... politics, economics environment, laws, rights etc...”

I found myself wondering if this is some kind of propaganda to justify prostitution as a profession in Thailand or are we just hypocritical to condemn the sex trade? While exceptions may very well exist, it would be ridiculous to claim that all the hundreds of thousands of women working as prostitutes in Southeast Asia are doing it because they want to.

Often women are driven to work in the sex industry because they cannot sustain themselves and their families on the salaries paid by factories, which produce clothes or food in substandard working conditions for foreign markets.

Women must have a real right to choose how they make money to feed their families. We in the consumerist western countries need to be at least ready to implement fair trade practices to enable women to make a decent living selling something other than their bodies.

No one goes hungry in Venezuela: true or false?

Marianne Diaz (writer, lawyer, activist – Venezuela)

Well, I’m sorry but I need to say it: This might be the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard in an official discourse. And that, my friends, is saying a lot.

Well, now it’s out of my system. Thank you for your patience.

Last march, President Chávez stated that. Literally. “No one goes hungry in Venezuela”, an affirmation that he might as well have taken from the official report “Venezuela accomplished the MDGs”, already quoted in a previous post. Government states that extreme poverty has reduced from 17.1 per cent in 1998, to 7.9 per cent in 2007, and that through implementation of what is called “Mission Feeding”, they’ve assured food to 13 million people (almost half the Venezuelan population).

That official programme involves the foundation of Feeding Houses for extremely poor people, and Popular Markets selling staples at subsidized prices.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, the monthly alimentary food basket costs about $268, while the minimum wage is $245 (those figures are calculated in basis of the official exchange rate, since we are under an exchange control). However, the Centre of Documentation and Analysis for Workers (CENDA, its Spanish acronym), doesn’t agree: they place the cost of the alimentary food basket in about $460. But beyond that, the basic basket (the one that includes public services and basic hygiene products) costs about $1000. Moreover, buying food has become more of a treasure hunt: several products cannot be found and the distribution is very irregular. Milk, flour, rice, oil, appear and disappear from the shelves. This month, corn flour can’ be found anywhere.

And guys, for us a life without arepas isn’t life at all.

That wouldn’t be so bad (well, except for the corn flour thing) if it weren’t because, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), 12 per cent of our population is undernourished, and 15 per cent of children suffer from stunted growth due to malnutrition.

Furthermore, we don’ know what (or who) to believe, since there is a poverty rate of 31.7 per cent of all population (that is, 8.648.255 people by 2009). And those are official numbers using the Poverty Threshold method, which is the minimum level of income deemed necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living in a given country. However, the government prefers to use the figures of extreme poverty when reporting on this, and they claim that extreme poverty is somewhere between seven and nine per cent in Venezuela.

I actually don’t know how the National Institute of Statistics measures extreme poverty. If they’re using the US$1.25 mark, that method is indeed flawed, since we’re under an exchange control that maintains an artificial pressure on inflation (which is already about 30 per cent every year). And if they’re using the definition under which extreme poverty embarks people whose per capita income isn’t enough to cover the cost of the food basket, well, let me say that the familiar hypothetical income (two minimum wages) only covers 47 per cent of the cost of the Venezuelan food basket.

I, as usual, feel that the statements made by my government are nothing else than its usual hypocrisy. The MDG Monitor indicates that the UN doesn’t have enough information on this matter to say that Venezuela has eradicated extreme poverty and hunger, but the government still says that the UN has, literally, “recognised our achievement of the Millennium Goals”.

We’re pretty much used to the fact by now that our government says that everything we see every day in the streets is a “sensation”. Insecurity, hunger, pollution. But I’ve never had the guts, whenever a kid in the streets comes to me and asks me for a coin that I actually don’t have any more to give, to tell him to his face that he’s a creation of my delusional mind.