Moving stories: the UN’s refugee report

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The Democratic Republic of Congo is suffering the second largest outbreak of Ebola in history. Internal conflict is driving people from their homes and complicating efforts to control the virus spread. So why has the World Health Organization declined to declare an international emergency? And Thailand is notorious for the grave punishments it hands out to drug users, which makes you wonder why it's getting into the weed business. First up, though, Around the world, people are fleeing danger and conflict in ever growing numbers.

The global trends once again unfortunately go in what I would say is the wrong direction.

Filippo Grandi is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This week he announced annual figures on the number of forcibly displaced people.

Last year we reported 68.5 approximately million people. Refugees displaced people, meaning refugees in their own country, asylum seekers. And this year the figure has increased by almost close to 71 million people.

That in turn is a big increase from 43 million 10 years ago. The causes are many, but security is a huge factor.

The conflicts that are producing refugees or the situations of violence tend to be longer and longer, which is closely linked to something that I have said many times, but I think we must say on this occasion, we have become almost unable to make peace.

The big drivers are the continuing war in Syria, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, and the total implosion of the state in Venezuela.

Robert Guest is the Economist's foreign editor.

Ethiopia's a startling and interesting example. What's happened there is generally thought to be a good political development, that an authoritarian government has chosen a reformist prime minister who's taken over and he's promising free and Fair elections in 2020. Problem is that a bunch of parts of the country have thought if there's going to be free and fair elections, it really matters who controls the area that we're in. So you've seen quite large scale ethnic cleansing of More than a million people driven out of the areas where they're in a minority by the groups that are in the majority. Another place that looms large in the report is Venezuela. It's stunning the degree to which a once prosperous country has reversed course under the Chavista regime, now run by Nicolas Maduro. And so whole parts of the country who were used to prosperity and maybe had some savings and, you know, maybe a car or a bicycle or something that would help them get out, found that they could barely feed themselves anymore. And so you've seen a big exodus of people into neighboring countries, but it's absolutely huge. I mean, it's more than a tenth of the population of the country have fled.

And these kinds of floods of people largely into neighboring countries must have quite some effect on the neighboring countries.

Yes. Well, in the west, people tend to think of the refugees who make it to the west, which is a tiny proportion of the total and which looks incredibly dramatic on our TV screens, but hasn't had a very big effect on lives in those countries. The vast majority of refugees go to neighboring countries because they're closer, and these are quite often poor people who do not have the means to go much further. And for those neighboring countries, the effect has been mixed. Colombia is a really interesting case in point. They have a very long and barely policed border with Venezuela. They know that these people are desperate. They know that many of them are of Colombian origin, and so they haven't tried to stop them getting in. In fact, we had dinner with the president of Colombia, Ivan Duquet, a couple of days ago and asked him, you know, why haven't you tried to stop them getting in? And he gave a very interesting response. It was not just that they figured they couldn't stop them. It was that they didn't want to stop them. Said these are, you know, we need to have a fraternal attitude to these people. They're our brothers. They come in. If they come in legally, we can count them. It makes it easier to register them, help them, make sure that when they work, they work legally and don't undercut locals. But also, he said, and this is very interesting, you know, someday these people are quite likely to go back, and if they remember that they have been treated very well in Colombia, that will be extremely good for Thais, not just political ties, but also economic ties between Venezuela and Colombia. So it's an investment for the future.

Presumably, that kind of fraternal long view is relatively rare when there are floods and floods of refugees coming across borders.

It'S almost unheard of in the west, because in the west it's usually assumed that if we open our borders, virtually the entire population of poor countries will move to the West. It's actually much more common than you think in poorer countries. I mean, Tanzania, for example, has been taking refugees from Congo, Burundi for a time, from Rwanda for decades. And there's very large numbers of them living in the western part of the country really without very much problem.

The perception that there has been an absolute flood of refugees into Western countries to Europe in particular, has caused great consternation, has great political polarization in Europe. How do you see that playing out if the number of refugees continues to rise?

Well, the number of forcibly displaced people is going up in the world, but it's not going up in Europe. It's fallen dramatically from the peak in 2015-16 because the borders have been closed. It's incredibly difficult to get across the Mediterranean into places like Italy and Greece now, and people are being turned away. So what we've seen in the past year is an increase in other parts of the world. And there's no reason why that would have an effect on Western politics, because what caused anti immigrant sentiment to bubble up and polarized politics in the west was television pictures of people from poor countries coming into visibly European places. But when you see refugees going from South Sudan into Uganda, that doesn't look anything like anyone coming into Europe. And that's not going to have any effect on politics in Europe at all.

But in the meantime, there are still quite a few governments hosting quite a few refugees. What sort of policy recommendations would you make for a government hosting a large number of refugees?

The most important thing you can do with refugees is to let them work. If you don't let them work, then they become a drain on the public purse and then people start to resent them and then that can lead to all manner of conflict. But if you let them work, they support themselves and you know you're doing them a huge favour and they won't forget it. It's much easier for refugees in Turkey to work than it is for refugees in Sweden. And that's why Turkey has been able to absorb a spectacularly larger number of refugees from Syria without major social unrest caused by that.

Robert, thanks very much for coming in.

Thank you.

It's not just the number of refugees crossing borders that's on the rise. Conflict is causing more and more people to relocate within their own countries. That too can have profound effects, especially for public health crises. The Democratic Republic of Congo is suffering the second largest Ebola outbreak in history. More than 1,400 people have died. Yesterday, the United nations reported that this month alone, violence in the northeast of the country had driven more than 300,000 people from their homes. Tarek Yasarevic of the World Health Organization said that makes containing Ebola that much harder.

Every time you have people moving in high numbers, it's more complicated to do the follow, the work on follow ups, contact tracing, follow up on people who are supposed basically to be observed on a daily basis for 21 days.

Last week, reports that people carrying the virus had crossed the border into neighbouring Uganda alarmed the international community.

On June 10, 14 members of a family arrived at the border town of Kisindi and drc.

Natasha Loder is our health policy editor.

And the checkpoint there picked up on the fact that they had symptoms of Ebola and they were sent to a nearby isolation Center. About 6 of the members of that family later that evening fled across the border into Uganda.

And last week, the World Health Organization refrained from declaring a public health emergency.

The World Health Organization met last Friday to decide whether the outbreak of Ebola in DRC qualifies as a public health emergency of international concern, also known as a fake. So the committee would have been considering whether that this is an extraordinary event, that is a public health crisis of potentially global reach. And it has to be sudden, serious, un, not expected, and it may necessitate immediate international action. And the committee came to the conclusion that that wasn't the case.

So why would they take that decision? How is that not an emergency?

I think a lot of people misunderstand the meaning of declaring a public health emergency. You might imagine that a lot happens when you do this. You know, health SWAT teams are launched, gnarly, heroic doctors are pressed into action, red buttons are pushed and the sort of international health infrastructure all swings into action. None of that actually happens. Calling a public health emergency is essentially a tool used to alert countries to the fact that there is this potential sort of serious event happening, health event happening. And it also obliges the World Health Organization, who to issue formal recommendations as to what countries should do so. It's a sort of technical tool. In calling a public health emergency. You certainly draw attention to a crisis and it's certainly the case that you might be able to attract additional interest in your public health cause. But those are not great reasons for declaring a public health emergency. As for the issue of its threat to other countries, yes, certainly it could spread to neighbouring countries, but those neighbouring countries are Ready. And I think as we've seen in the case where Ebola cases traveled across the border, the patients were picked up really quickly by a health system that's been preparing for a long time for just sort of an event. Uganda's a sort of pretty well prepared and well organized place. Contrast that to what's happening in drc, which is in a particularly difficult area to work in.

So what's the downside then of declaring an emergency? Why wouldn't you?

What we saw in the previous Ebola outbreak is that flight crews refused to fly to countries and flights were cancelled. Multinational organizations pulled out their staff and foreign workers were repatriated. Borders were closed, visitor numbers were down. So there were a really wide range of impacts, economic impacts on the countries and also impact on the ability of the country to respond. If you need to access equipment to deal with an Ebola outbreak, you need flights. And if, you know, routine flights are not able to come through because the crews won't come because they're worried that there's a public health emergency, then that causes problems. There's also another factor which doesn't get much discussion, which is that, you know, the outbreak is really problematic in this, you know, war torn region of drc where rebels, many rebel groups are controlling the area and thwarting the health workers who are trying to control the outbreak. And there is some concern that calling a public health emergency of international concern would actually give these rebel groups some leverage as well in terms of they may choose to further hamper the response as a way of sort of drawing attention to their causes.

So is it just the existence of those rebel groups that makes it so hard to fight Ebola in the drc?

I mean, the whole region is lawless and there are a variety of rebel groups. Aid workers are being attacked just because of random violence. They're also being attacked because they have mobile phones and equipment. There's also been rumors spread that Ebola has been made up for political reasons. So, I mean, it's about as difficult a place you can imagine to control an epidemic. You've had aid workers attacked and a doctor killed from the WHO facilities burned down, Ebola facilities burnt down, and peacekeepers as well killed, all in the last year or so. So it's a very dangerous place and difficult place to work.

So we had very similar stories when there was the 2014 outbreak of Ebola, at which point the WHO did in fact declare a public health emergency of international concern. How is the situation different? Or is it different? Is it better since then?

The Difference is in both the sort of scale and also the numbers and also the geographic spread. And at the moment, Ebola is still still in drc. I wouldn't say it is in Uganda, just for the simple reason that these cases were detected in drc. They were DRC cases and they fled across the border when everyone knew they had Ebola. They've since been rounded up. As far as we know, it still remains in drc. This time we do have vaccine. And one of the things that happened in the outbreak last time is that health facilities amplified the Ebola outbreak. And what I mean by that is that when people were getting sick, remember people can get sick of all sorts of things, including malaria, they were going to sort of rudimentary health care facilities and they were picking up Ebola from nurses and doctors. And that's not something that's happening now because all the healthcare workers have been vaccinated. We know the vaccine is highly effective. The sort of the dynamics of the outbreak are very different. And what we do know is in the areas of DRC that are easier to access, that Ebola has been brought under control, I think about 40% of the areas that have had Ebola in DRC are now Ebola free, or at least they haven't seen a case in three weeks. So we know it can be controlled. The issue is really just in these lawless areas. And you know, to my mind, the question really simply is, can we keep Ebola contained in those regions until the locals, the local leaders and local communities can be brought round and convinced to, you know, trust the interventions of health workers and aid workers.

Natasha, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jason.

Thank you. Last year Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to approve the use of medical marijuana. A government run facility opened near the capital Bangkok earlier this year to grow the drug.

So the Thai government is trying to create a medical marijuana industry and as part of that it built this incredibly expensive facility. It spent over $3 million on a pot plantation, an indoor medical marijuana facility which is just 100 metres square, so really tiny.

Edward MacBride is the Economist's Asia Editor.

What it lacks in size, it makes up for in high tech gadgetry. The plants are bathed in a warm pink glow for 20 hours a day. There are special sensors to make sure that would be stoners, don't sneak in and pinch some of the marijuana. It's state of the art facility.

So why is the Thai government doing this?

Well, it is slightly mysterious, I must admit, from the outside Someone high up in the government has clearly decided that Thailand should be in the vanguard of the medical marijuana industry in Asia. They passed this law recently legalizing medical marijuana, and the facility that's just been built is the upshot of that law. But there wasn't a great groundswell of support for this. There wasn't a big campaign. There isn't a sort of big change in the Thai people public perception of drugs. It's clearly a decision that's come from the top in the hope that this will be a lucrative industry for Thailand to become involved in.

So beyond the government's official push for marijuana cultivation, how much pot is being grown in Thailand?

Thailand has plenty of other pot plantations and none of the others are legal, of course. And also marijuana's grown quite widely in the region. So on the street, marijuana costs as little as sort of 10 Thai Baht. That's about 30 US cents a gram. And needless to say, the $3 million facility is not producing it quite that cheaply.

And where does this fit in sort of with the consumption in other ways? I mean, what are the attitudes around recreational marijuana smoking?

So, interestingly, the Thai populace as a whole is quite anti drugs. Way back in 2003, the Prime Minister of the day, Thaksin Shinawat, started what he called a war on drugs. He encouraged the police and vigilantes to go after drug dealers. Two and a half thousand people died just in a couple of months. And that was very popular. People felt that drugs had got out of control. The thing was, though, it wasn't marijuana, which isn't that widely used in Thailand. It was methamphetamines, which were spreading like wildfire at the time and are still very prevalent. So with marijuana, it's a bit more complicated. There are some Thais who think it would be fine to legalize it, and there are others who just lump it in with all illegal drugs and are very much against that.

And so the government efforts to kind of legitimize it by making in medical contexts is meant to sort of normalize it more broadly.

I don't think the government intends this as a social policy. I don't think it's moving towards legalization. Thailand is currently run by a military junta. That's just not part of their sort of broad attitude. You know, they're kind of law and order government. There was a party that advocates legalization that did quite well in the recent elections, and that, because it's sort of politically independent, probably will end up being drafted into the coalition government that's due to be formed shortly. I think the original impetus behind this very expensive plantation was simply to try and build an industry. And I think people who see it as the harbinger of a broader legalization are probably thinking a bit wishfully. I doubt that's on the cards as long as the generals stay very influential in Thai politics.

Edward, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

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