Caribbean | IndusLatin

Manipal Education buys out Antigua University

December 7th, 2008 Posted in Caribbean, Health and Pharma, India

In one of the biggest cross-border deals in the education space, Manipal Education has acquired the entire shareholding of American

from New York-based Greater Caribbean Learning Resources. Manipal Education confirmed the buyout, but did not disclose the transaction size. However, sources said the company has raised $115 million debt financing from ICICI Bank in recent weeks, which will be ploughed into the buyout as well as capex requirements for ramping up the campus.

ET first reported on the potential acquisition in its edition dated October 7. The Caribbean is a well-established market for medical students
from the US mainland, where the availability of seats far outstrips demand. “We have completed the buyout, giving us control over AUA, which is among the top five medical education campuses in the Caribbean islands along with St George’s University School of Medicine
and Ross University,” Anand Sudarshan, MD & CEO, Manipal Education, told ET.

Technorati Tags: education, nearshoring, med school, India, Caribbean

Collapsing Trade Finance and its Impact on Food Security; Urban Farming worth a look

November 15th, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, Banking and Finance, Caribbean

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Just-in-time supply chains are geared for efficiency not resiliency. With no slack built in, any disruption in international shipping, due to collapsing trade finance, can leave store shelves empty of essentials, especially food. A scary thought.

In times like these, the Cuban success with urban farming (forced upon the island by the end of the Soviet Union’s largesse after that country’s implosion) is worthy of emulation, at least partially, in many Indian and LatAm cities. For those who will not adopt any idea not originating in the United States, the Cuban urban farming model is in line with the Victory Gardens that U.S. Americans were asked to maintain during both World Wars. Book Alert: Food Not Lawns
RGE

The recent 93 percent collapse of the obscure Baltic Dry Index – an index of the cost of chartering bulk cargo vessels for goods like ore, cotton, grain or similar dry tonnage – has caused a bit of a stir among the financial cognoscenti. What is less discussed amidst the alarm is the reason for the collapse of the index – the collapse of trade credit based on the venerable letter of credit.

Letters of credit have financed trade for over 400 years. They are considered one of the more stable and secure means of finance as the cargo is secures the credit extended to import it. The letter of credit irrevocably advises an exporter and his bank that payment will be made by the importer’s issuing bank if the proper documentation confirming a shipment is presented. This was seen as low risk as the issuing bank could seize and sell the cargo if its client defaulted after payment was made. Like so much else in this topsy turvy financial crisis, however, the verities of the ages have been discarded in favour of new and unpleasant realities.

The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade.

Controlling access to trade finance determines who loses their jobs, whose children go hungry, who riots, which governments fall. Without dedicated focus on the issue of trade finance and liquidity from those in the emerging world most interested in sustaining the growth of recent years, little progress can be expected. Trade finance is rapidly communicating the stress on bank liquidity to the real economy. It presents a systemic risk much more frightening than the collapsing value of bits of paper traded electronically in London and New York. It could collapse the employment, the well being and the political stability of most of the world’s population.

Technorati Tags: trade, food security,

The Cost of a Long Life

November 12th, 2008 Posted in Caribbean, Health and Pharma, India, Latin America, Public Policy, Visualizations

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Compelling graphic that demonstrates that throwing more money at problems does not always ensure better outcomes.

Life Expectancy around the world

via UCSC

The chart highlights the sharp contrast between the US and Cuba. With a life expectancy of 76.9 years, Cuba ranks 28^th in the world, just behind the US. However, its spending per person on health care is one of the lowest in the world, at $186, or about 1/25 the spending of the United States. There are other cases where high life expectancies are achieved with low spending on health care.

Another reason some countries achieve high life expectancy with low health spending is that clean drinking water and preventive health care can be provided with little spending. If there is near universal clean water and preventive care, life expectancy rates can be high. In the US, however, nearly 40 million Americans lack basic health insurance, and are therefore less likely to receive preventive care. In contrast, Cuba has universal health care and one of the highest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world (See Physicians). Although Cuba has limited resources and many economic problems, it has made health care a priority. It is not alone. Sri Lanka, China and the Indian State of Kerala are considered “low-income, high well-being” countries, which have adopted policies that not only reduce inequality but also increase overall health and well-being.

Money spent at hospitals and doctors counts towards ‘economic growth’, by getting included in GDP stats, but is terrible as an indicator for human well-being.

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World Conservation Congress: “Latin America is not the problem but part of the solution

October 9th, 2008 Posted in Caribbean, Ecology/Environment, Latin America

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World Bank

Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will suffer greater than average effects of global warming, with devastating consequences for the environment and economy, and as a result are actively working to halt global warming and mitigate its effects, Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean, told the World Conservation Congress today.

Given the region’s central role in the global ecosystem, repercussions from these effects will be felt worldwide unless significant action is taken soon to reduce global warming and mitigate its effects, according to a preview presentation of the flagship report from the chief economist of the World Bank’s Latin America and Caribbean region.

“The region is only producing about six percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and just over 10 percent if we include deforestation. However, it is suffering already huge economic losses due to climate change,” Cox said. “Countries in the region and its citizens – and particularly the extreme poor – are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. It is cruel and ironic that those people who are the least responsible for causing the problem are also the most vulnerable and the ones with least resources to adapt,” she added.

Cox noted that the region includes five of the world’s ten most bio-diverse countries—Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru—and the single most biologically diverse area in the world—the eastern slope of the Andes. She added that more than 50 percent of the world’s tropical forests are in Latin America, along with 65 percent of tropical forest biomass.

Rum and Revolution – Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Book Review, Caribbean, history

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washingtonpost.com

Drinkers the world round know the name Bacardi means rum, but few non-Cubans know that this global enterprise was founded — and is still owned — by a Cuban family that played an important role in the island’s social, political and economic history. Emilio Bacardi was a prominent activist in Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain, suffering lengthy periods of imprisonment for the cause. Other members of the clan, based in Cuba’s eastern city of Santiago, also stepped forward to oppose the sad parade of corrupt and dictatorial rulers that the island has since known. Longtime NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten writes in this absorbing familial and political history that the Bacardis are still remembered for “their class and their character. While they lived in elegant homes, rode in chauffeured carriages, and sent their children to exclusive private schools, they were also known as good Santiago citizens, generous and warmhearted and fair.”

A Spanish immigrant by the name of Facundo Bacardi founded a mom-and-pop distillery in Santiago in 1862, when the island was the world’s richest colony, thanks to its vast sugarcane plantations and sugar mills. Bacardi realized that, unlike other sugar-producing islands, Cuba was not using the molasses byproduct to make and export rum. Pooling family funds to launch his business, Bacardi pioneered a new technique to produce a light, mixable rum that became a powerhouse in the worldwide spirits business.
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Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba (being published next week) is at once a colorful family saga and a carefully researched corrective to caricatures of decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba and the 50-year disaster of Fidel Castro’s rule.

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The Afterlife of American Clothes: Haitian entrepreneurs find value in castoffs

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Caribbean, entrepreneurship

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Reason Magazine

When thrifty shoppers in Boston and Miami pick through secondhand shirts at local Salvation Army outlets or estate sales, they are as likely to meet Haitians as hipsters. Some of the immigrants will simply be collecting clothes to mail back to family in Port-au-Prince, but others are part of a large global network trading in used American goods. Haiti’s enormous, informal, and largely unregulated market in pepe—used items imported from abroad—plays an important role in the least developed country in the Americas.

In 2002 The New York Times reported that of the approximately 2.5 billion pounds of clothes donated to charity in America each year, as much as 80 percent is shipped globally. The Times article inspired filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi to research the history of recycled clothing. From 2003 to 2007 they visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing.

In the United States, demand for secondhand goods spiked during the Great Depression, but after World War II peddlers found themselves with excess supply. So the business went global. Third World countries arranged deals with U.S. thrift shops for items that otherwise would end up in the trash.

Haiti started receiving shipments in the early 1960s. With the benefit of cheap items came the cost of serving as a dumping ground. Shell has described the city of Miragoane, which receives new pepe nearly every day, as “blanketed, literally, by a downy coat of secondhand clothing. It grows out of the ground and into the street, onto every surface, a sartorial network—buildings, barrows, man and machine-made structures, everywhere.”
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