IRP Blog

  • Louise Lief
    The Law of Unintended Consequences

    Sichuan earthquake damage
    photo: Peter Thomson

    The Chinese state excels at keeping tabs on its population, stifling dissent and imposing its will. But as became clear throughout our visit, millions of Chinese are also remarkably inventive at subverting the many regulations that govern their lives. “The policies come from above, the way around them comes from below,” goes an old Chinese saying still very much in use today. Because so many laws are imposed from above, applicable to some but not the well connected, many people have no compunction about trying to circumvent them. Says June Mei, our interpreter, “You have 500 million people trying to game the system.”

    The Chinese government’s efforts to implement policies, even laudable ones like pollution controls and mine safety, continually bump up against this reality. When the government issued a ruling that provincial officials would also be judged on their ability to improve

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  • Louise Lief
    Lying with Statistics

    Photo: Peter Thomson, BBC/PRI's "The World"

    One of the major challenges in China is figuring out what is actually going on. A key problem is that the vast majority of Chinese statistics are suspect.

    Take, for example, China’s poverty rate. How many poor people are there in China?

    Depending on how you look at it, China’s poverty rate is either 36.3 percent (those earning less than $2 a day), 15.9 percent (those earning less than $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s official definition of poverty) or 2.8 percent, China’s national poverty line. The first two statistics are from the World Bank. The last is the Chinese government’s figure.

    The Chinese government’s definition of poverty is earning 48 cents a day or less. The theory is that 48 cents buys more in China than elsewhere in the world. In contrast, 13.2 percent of Americans live in poverty according to the US poverty line. 468 million of China’s 1.3 billion people earn

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  • Louise Lief
    The “Other China”

    We’ve recently returned from the May 8-22, 2010 IRP gatekeeper trip to China. The gatekeeper editors who accompanied us met with a number of senior Chinese officials and organizations in Beijing, and then explored health, development and environmental issues in Sichuan and Yunnan, two provinces in southwest China far from the capital.

    If there was a theme to this trip, it was the “Other China.” We chose to forego visiting the more prosperous eastern coastal cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou in favor of China’s hinterland, the less developed western provinces that lag behind development on the coast and furnish many of the migrant laborers that power China’s factories and its economic juggernaut.

    China’s central government has been so concerned by the economic disparity between western China and the coastal provinces and the resulting potential for unrest that for the last ten years it has launched a national development campaign called “Open Up the

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  • Louise Lief
    Peru Journal - Part 4: The Peruvian Amazon

    November 14, 2009

    Going to Hell

    We’ve flown from Cusco, the ancient Incan capital situated at 11,000 feet surrounded by the Andes and dry, thin air to Puerto Maldonado, the low-lying tropical capital of Madre de Dios (“Mother of God”) province in Peru’s southern Amazon.

    Although the Peruvian Amazon is the size of California and covers two-thirds of the country, few Peruvians, who mostly live in cities along the coast, know or visit this region. A little over a million people live here, a quarter of those from the Peruvian Amazon’s 59 indigenous tribes. There are few roads, so travel is mostly by motorized canoes along the Amazon’s vast network of rivers.

    Madre de Dios has come to be known as Peru’s “biodiversity capital.” It contains some of the last pristine tropical rainforests in the entire Amazon. There are 15,000 plant species here, more tree and bird species in a 100 square mile radius than in all of North America, and more varieties of orchids,

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  • Louise Lief
    Peru Journal - Part 3: Five Thousand Kinds of Potato

    November 11, 2009

    This morning we visit the International Potato Center (CIP), one of 15 international agricultural research centers around the world dedicated to improving food production for the poor. Each center has its specialty. In Peru’s case it is potatoes, roots and tubers and rightly so. Potatoes were first domesticated here 8000 years ago near Lake Titicaca. Of the world’s five thousand potato varieties, at least 3000 are found in Peru.

    We are here to learn about food security and climate change, and how the humble potato is poised to play a starring role in a world that will soon have nine billion mouths to feed.

    Our speaker is Pamela Anderson, CIP’s Director General, an expert on emerging plant diseases and an entomologist. An unabashed potato booster, she and other scientists here clearly feel spuds (and their root and tuber relatives) have not been given the respect they deserve.

    Pamela Anderson, director general of the International Potato

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  • Louise Lief
    Peru Journal - Part 2: Diseases of the Poor

    November 10, 2009

    Today we are exploring Lima’s other reality, far from the lovely parks and fabulous seaside restaurants near our hotel in Miraflores. Of the city’s 9.5 million inhabitants, some estimate that as many as half live in slums and shantytowns ringing the city. We will visit Carabayllo, one of the poorest of these growing pueblos jovenes (“young towns”) on the northern outskirts of Lima. In 1994, Carabayllo had a population of 124,000. Peasants fleeing violence in the countryside and more recently, poverty and unemployment in the Andes have caused its population to more than double since then. Slums like these are now so populous they have become major voting blocs in the country’s elections.

    Many of Carabayllo’s residents spend hours each day commuting to work in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods. As we travel north past the crush of aging minibuses idling in traffic as they head downtown, the vegetation diminishes and gradually ceases.

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  • Louise Lief
    Peru Journal - Part 1: Gold, Silver and Economic Growth

    Peru has 28 of the world’s 32 types of climate. The Incan fortress of Machu Picchu is located in a subtropical cloud forest, between the Andes and the Amazon.
    photo: John Schidlovsky

    Dear Reader,

    This blog (more of a journal, really) you are about to read is, I confess, written after the fact. As organizer of the Peru gatekeeper trip, it’s only now that I have the time to write about some of the many issues we explored there during our November 8-20, 2009 trip there and to share some of our experiences with you.

    For those of you who are not familiar with IRP gatekeeper trips for senior editors at US media organizations, they are a kind of immersion course on countries like Peru that are not often covered in the US media. We explore a wide variety of topics, though we tend to focus on health, development, the environment and agriculture, subjects that help us better understand the basic survival concerns that preoccupy most people in these places.

    While our

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  • John Schidlovsky
    Greetings from Peru

    David Baron, health and science editor, PRI/BBC’s “The World” conducting an interview during the Peru trip.

    Lima, Peru -- The latest IRP Gatekeeper Editors trip is finishing up in this fascinating country of 28 million people, nearly a third of whom live here in this sprawling coastal capital. A number of our Gatekeepers have been blogging regularly as we’ve moved around the country, from the coast to the Andes and into the Amazon. For many of us the highlight of the trip was the three days we spent reporting in the Amazon, which covers about two-thirds of Peru. We’ve seen firsthand the deforestation that has taken place, the result of a combination of large-scale mining and logging operations, along with individual, illegal but widespread, gold mining operations. Peru has a host of organizations working to try to find the right blend of environmental protection and economic development. Indigenous groups are the poorest of Peru’s citizens and the government

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  • John Schidlovsky
    Stories . . . stories . . . and more stories

    Talk about hitting the ground running.

    Barely hours after getting off the plane in Pakistan, IRP Fellow Amna Nawaz sent us a video blog of how Islamabad had changed from the time Amna, an NBC producer based in Washington DC, grew up there. She’ll be sending us lots more blogs and stories that she’s working on.

    Also check out IRP Fellow Perry Beeman, a prize-winning environmental reporter for the Des Moines Register. Perry is using his IRP reporting grant to send us some amazing stories from Rwanda. He’ll be blogging for both the Register and IRP during his five-week reporting trip and will produce some in-depth stories on his return.

    The IRP has transformed itself into one of the most dynamic story-generating programs in the country. We’re using non-profit funding from our generous donors to create powerful new stories that likely never would have gotten done otherwise. Ten journalists left Washington this week on IRP grants to spend five weeks reporting

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  • John Schidlovsky
    The Death of Kim Dae-jung

    Journalists don’t usually applaud when politicians enter a room. If you watch the scene on the IRP website of the IRP Gatekeeper Editors’ meeting with Kim Dae-jung in November 2007, you’ll hear a smattering of applause as the octogenarian former South Korean president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, cane in hand, slowly walks into the room. In reality, most of the clapping you’ll hear was by Kim’s own staff people at his presidential library. But some of the Gatekeepers joined in too. Kim, who died today, was a legend. The hour-long IRP interview with him was one of the most memorable moments in our trip.

    We had just come from meeting some of South Korea’s best and brightest college students, some of whom had told us they didn’t particularly care about “unification” between the two Koreas, a long-standing political dream of Kim’s. What these students said they wanted were jobs and ensuring that South Korea’s remarkably successful growth would continue

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