Yesterday evening after flying in to Baku from Istanbul – where I had a good meeting during the day – I found some friends in the hotel and we had a dinner to catch-up.
With Mikhail Kashubsky & Dilavar Farzaliev
I have been many times in Azerbaijan. The Azeri people always offer outstanding world class hospitality.
It is always a pleasure to be here.
Today I gave a speech about ‘The role of Customs in the development of economy at the Baku Higher Oil School.
Great participation from professors and students. Also a lot of media coverage. You can find one of the articles below.
It was fun talking the students, future engineers in the oil iandustry, the most important business in the country.
I love doing this type of lectures and speeches.
Swedish Health & Statistics Profesor Hans Rosling, a world famous scientist working with health care improvement and poverty reduction has just launched a new set of statistics through his system Gapminder, showing his latest theories on global development. Rosling works with with world leaders, multinational institutions and philanthropists like e.g. Bill Gates on major global issues.
One of theories, proven by his unique collected and displayed Gapminder statistical facts, is that our view on extreme poverty is outdated and simply wrong. He is espcially angry with the common view, also among political leaders an media, that Africa is bot improving and that poverty is increasing. This is totally wrong. First of all, Africa is very diversified between the different countries. Secondly, seven out of the ten most dynamic and growing economies in the world is African. Thirdly, poverty has decreased tremendously in the wirld during the last decade, the world is also more stabile with better health, longer avarage life age and fewer wars than ever before. All proven by public statistics analysed and presented by Roslings team through Gapminder – a revolutionary non-profit statistical software instrument. Rosling is avgreat personality and charachter. When a Danish journalist on live-TV tried to argue against Roslings findings, he simply stated; “this is not a debate. It is about facts. I am right and you are wrong”. Touche!
Now Rosling is on mission to get world politicians to do something about what he considers to be the real global challange, namely so called ‘fragile states’. These are countries tormented by civil war and thus lawless land ruled by warlords and criminals. As Rosling comments, “it is in the fragile states we see an increasing extremism, growth of terrorism, contraband/smuggling and estblishment of organized crime. The international community needs to address this before it is too late. Fragile states are dangerous for all of us – and many different perspectives and dimensions”.
I couldn’t agree more. We are starting to see how these lawless zones are attracting all kinds of criminality, pirates and organized crime. Money talks and the warlords need money to finance and protect their own criminal activities and operations. This is becoming a global danger of unknown magnitude. From a global trade perspective this is a threat to the supply chain, and from a people movement perspective it is a disaster. The fragile states are the main producers of refugees, people moving to save their lives.
We need to address the topic of fragile states in a more comprehensive and systematic way. It is simply not acceptable the way it is. Rosling is right – the rest is wrong.
It will get worse before it gets better.
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