For Global Witness this is all part of its core mission: uncovering the real life impacts of natural resources corruption.
LAWRENCE P. MARKOWITZ Glassboro, N.J., Feb. 2, 2013 The writer is an assistant professor of political science at Rowan University and the author of a forthcoming book on resources, corruption and organized violence in Central Asia.
"The traditional story of Africa about resources, corruption, development issues … I don't want to talk it down, it's an important story, it still exists and it needs to be told, but it is one-dimensional," he says.
"If you were to pick a country that involves high risk in developing a new mining sector, Afghanistan is it," said Eleanor Nichol, campaign leader at Global Witness, a group that tries to break the link between natural resources, corruption and conflict.
It is widely accepted that the United States' war to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11 faltered because of military hubris, a drain on resources, corruption, and provocation in the Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Successive post-colonial governments plundered the country's resources, corruption was widespread and poverty deeply entrenched, especially among the rural young.
But shipments of filthy and contaminated fish from China continue to be detained at U.S. ports, exposing holes in a food-safety system that analysts say is undermined by a lack of resources, corruption and unscrupulous businesses that will sometimes mislabel or reroute goods through other countries.
Rispel et al. found that inadequate administrative and implementation capacity, insufficient resources, corruption, and lack of involvement of civil servants beset the implementation of various social policies (17), while challenges of varying technical capacity at different government levels influenced the implementation of mental health policy (11).
As this diversity of settings for resource-related corruption shows, transparency should be the default setting for any transactions that allocate public resources.
