Can Petroleum Aid development?

Regularly tumbling into appalling metaphor and analogy, Clarke nevertheless concludes: ‘North and south Sudan may be bound by the umbilical cords of a chequered politics and oil history, but as with Siamese twins these links can also be severed.’

Parts three and four provide the reader with 140 pages of comprehensive information on corporate oil operations in Africa and the global scramble for the big prize. Leaving aside his irritating penchant for metamorphosis – lions becoming countries, rhinos turning into multinationals – Clarke offers readers the chance to delve into his vast wealth of knowledge. Together with a comprehensive index, these two sections make it easy to find out which company is drilling what wells, where and with whom. Our expert guide also leads us around the world explaining how different nations are capturing Africa's oil and gas potential. All fascinating stuff.

The perpetuation of the petroleum age might make the current crop of oil executives and certain political leaders happy, but it is dangerously optimistic to suggest that the future well-being of African people depends primarily on drilling oil.

Ghana has a good track record, after cutting hunger by 75 percent between 1990 and 2004 and maintaining one of Africa’s most stable democracies in the past 20 years. Buoyed by a burgeoning financial sector and record prices for cocoa and gold, its two largest exports, growth has averaged more than 5.5 percent over the past decade.

There is more: before the middle of 2011, the State Department will suddenly discover an old memo recommending the construction of a bigger and more functional American embassy in Accra that will rival the embassies in Baghdad and Kabul in size; before the end of 2011, AFRICOM commanders will recommend the establishment of a major Accra substation and Green Zone to pre-emptorily break the linkages between Ghanaian terrorists and their newly-discovered Ashanti relatives in the rugged regions of Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan; China, as usual, will do her job more quietly and effectively than the noisy Americans to make sure that your black gold comes under the red flag and not the star-spangled banner.

In other words, you own that oil the way a child in Africa is said to own a goat that he feeds and cares for only to discover the true owner of the goat the day it is slaughtered and he gets the entrails while the elders in the compound feast on the real meat.

The fumes of oil are worse than the fumes of alcohol. Oil inebriates in a far more lethal fashion. Your citizens may start using words, phrases, and sentences hitherto unknown in Ghanaian English. Monitor and police them closely. When regular Joes, sorry, regular Mensahs, suddenly begin to gather in Kwame Nkrumah Circle or Labadi beach in Accra to talk about “resource control”, that is bad news.

Now that there is oil, parliamentary discourse in Accra may suddenly be exclusively reduced to the following keywords: estacode, upward budget review, upward contract review, supplementary appropriation, constituency projects, hardship allowances, newspaper allowances, furniture allowances, recharge card allowances, convoy allowances, renovation allowances, anticipatory approvals.

Let's see if Chevron and its high-flying CEO Watson and General Counsel Pate -- who recently received a 75% pay raise for his work on the Ecuador case after losing the largest environmental judgment in history -- have the guts to let a jury hear all the evidence of the company’s corrupt activities in Ecuador coordinated from company headquarters in San Ramon, California. We predict that like most bullies, Watson and Pate will cower in fear and order their “rescue team” at Gibson Dunn to do all they can to convince Judge Kaplan to keep the truth contained in Donziger’s counterclaims from coming to light.

Oil laws are still written without a national consensus on the role of the oil sector in the country's development. Detailed regulations are unwritten or unenforced. Lack of information and knowledge leave MPs with formal power but no means to actually hold government to account.

Foreign oil companies and their contractors effectively regulate themselves in places like Ghana and Sierra Leone. The lack of explicit regulations gives too much leeway for officials' discretion in approving activity, and too much risk of their making personal gain from their official position.

Most Ugandans I met assumed that they had been sold short by either their government or the oil companies. In fact, in my review of the contracts the Ugandan government negotiated, the agreements were tough and compared favourably with other countries.

Critics also point to Ghana’s long history of extractive activities and primary commodity exports: Ghana produces gold, bauxite, manganese, diamonds, timber and cocoa, none of which have generated appreciable benefits for the majority of Ghanaians.

Ghana has chosen to accept so-called ‘stabilisation clauses’ in its contracts with companies that lock in current laws and regulations. If the country should decide to strengthen its regulatory framework, companies with existing contracts could claim that the new laws do not apply to them, or require the government to provide financial compensation for the cost of compliance.[13] As foreign companies reap handsome rewards, and Ghana gains uncertain benefits (much of the content of these contracts remains secret), coastal communities are sure to pay the highest cost. At a recent Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) workshop held in the coastal town of Takoradi, representatives of six districts located closest to the oil find responded angrily to refusals to commit part of the petroleum royalties to an environmental mitigation or compensation fund, as is legally required in the mining sector.[24] No such provision has thus far been established for the oil and gas industry.

corporate interests are often recast as national security concerns. It was President Jimmy Carter who cemented the connection in his 1980 State of the Union address by stating that any foreign attempt to gain control of Middle Eastern oil would be regarded as ‘an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.’ The policy, now known as the Carter Doctrine, set a dangerous precedent of using military might to secure ‘strategically important’ resources throughout the world.

In another case, the European Commission on Oil in Sudan (ECOS) has accused oil companies of complicity in crimes against humanity in a Southern oil field known as Block 5A. ECOS charges companies with pressuring armed groups to ‘clear the ground’, leading to a wave of repression in which 12,000 people were killed and another 20,000 displaced.

Farming accounts for as much as 32 per cent of total emissions, a significant portion of which are created by industrial agriculture through the use of petroleum-based fertilisers, pesticides and forest clearing.[38] The issue of ‘food miles’ – the distance our food travels from farm to table[39] – has been well documented, while new data shows that the production phase accounts for as much as 83 per cent of the average US household’s carbon footprint for food.[40] Changing the way we produce food, therefore, constitutes a necessary step towards reducing oil dependence, its enormous carbon footprint and its human toll.

Food sovereignty, the political project put forward by the international peasant movement Via Campesina, offers a promising road map.

Industrial agriculture may be more ‘efficient’ in terms of labour (output per worker), but its productivity is achieved through massive applications of fossil fuel-based inputs such as tractor fuel and agrochemicals. Small organic farms, however, are generally more efficient in terms of land (output per acre), since they grow a variety of plants and animals, taking full advantage of each ecological niche.