Yale Globalist Currency Issue - Summer 2013

GLOBALIST The Yale

Summer 2013 / Vol. 13, Issue 4

currency

letter from the editors 03

GLOBALIST The Yale

dear

Readers,

As the school year comes to a rapid close, many students at Yale will begin a summer of

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs

internships, classes, or fellowship-funded travel. The class of 2013 will look beyond that, to

Summer 2013 / Vol. 13, Issue 4

first jobs or graduate degrees. In many cases, Yalies, like college students across the country,

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

find themselves on a continued job search, facing an economy and job market that provides more concern and frustration than comfort. We came of age after the 2008 recession and will both matriculate and graduate during its prolonged aftermath. This is not, however, a situ-

Journalism Advisory Board Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

Academic Advisory Board Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to gloeics2013@gmail.com

ation that is uniquely applicable to the United States; nations all over the world face similar struggles, including recent crises in Greece and Cyprus. Money and trade continue to evolve, exchange rates fluctuate, and banks fail. This is the nature of our global economy.

Our theme for this issue, Currency, was inspired by our experiences with this everchanging economic system. Currency is the money that pays tuition, but also the common link of the Euro that creates a bond among European nations, for better or for worse. Currency is also an exchange of ideas and cultures, in the sense that globalization applies to the market and to the people who are a part of it. Currency is at its simplest but also most profound level, the way we place value. It is the way we indicate what things, ideas, and even people, are worth investing our time—and currency. From the advent of mobile money, transferring money and financial data through cell phones, to a restaurant in Florence that returns to the pre-monetary system of currency, bartering, to an in-depth look at how money is designed and how the old stalwarts, investment banks, are changing with changing technology of exchange, we hope to present a range of issues relating to currency today.

As always, this issue includes several incredible off-theme pieces. Articles include an in-depth look at the issues immigrant tobacco farmers face, an interview with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and a stunning photo

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essay capturing the work of literacy-focused nonprofit in Caribbean.

Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

but also a joy, serving as editors-in-chief, and we are excited and proud to leave the magazine

This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Currency is the last issue of the Globalist under our leadership. It has been a challenge, in the hands of the brilliant and capable Rachel Brown next year. We appreciate your continued support and readership, and hope that you will continue to explore issues in international affairs, as we have done, through the incredible work of our authors. Finally, we hope that you will follow us on our blog (http://globalistsouthernafrica.wordpress.com/) as we embark on the ninth annual Globalist reporting trip to South Africa and Botswana in May. One final note—we would like to thank all of our sponsors who made the The Yale Globalist’s 10th Annual Spring Photo Show possible: Katalina’s Cupcakes, Pure, Box 63, Miya’s Sushi, Pacifico, Zaroka, Tomatillo, and Hull’s Art Supply & Framing. Check out our last issue so see the incredible photography produced by Yalies at home and abroad.

With Love,

ON THE COVER: Design by Kelly Schumann for The Yale Globalist.

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Anisha Suterwala & Emily Ullmann Editors-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

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contents 05

04 contents

Map of Contents

TABLE of CONTENTS

summer 2013 volume 13 issue 4

21

18

20

currency 16 | A Brave New World: Automated Trading in Equity Markets

20 | Pressing OK to Mobile Money

18 | A Coffin for a Cutlet: Bartering towards Sustainability. One restaurant in Florence offers an

21 | The Man Behind the Money

Mobile phones manage nearly 60% of transactions in Kenya today.

By Ashley Wu.

New share trading practices offer fresh dangers to world economic stability. By Charles Goodyear.

innovative way to help customers afford a meal: barter.

By Angelica Calabrese.

Production & Design Editors Kelly Schumann & Sera Tolgay Chief Online Editor John D’Amico Online Associates Janine Chow, Danielle Ellison, Charley Locke, Isabel Ortiz

Editors-in-Chief Anisha Suterwala & Emily Ullmann Managing Editor Sophie Broach, Aaron Gertler, Dan Gordon, Maggie Yellen Associate Editors Rachel Brown, Ashley Dalton, Ashley Wu

Executive Director & Publisher Jason Toups Director of Outreach Margaret Zhang Events Coordinator Deena Rahman

Copy Editor TaoTao Holmes

features

8 | Drilling in Canada

Oil ventures encroach on sacred waters. By Eleanor Marshall.

10 | Help Wanted

What does it take to legally hire foreign farm workers in the US?

By Sophie Broach.

A look at currency design. By Fiona Lowenstein.

letter from 6 | Costa Rica: Finca Köbö

Ten Yalies explore the Green Economy Initiative. By Naintara Rajan.

photo essay

conversation with 22 | Serge Brammertz

Prosecuter for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

Interview by Igor Mitschka.

26 | Hands Across the Sea

The fight for children’s literacy in Dominica. By Semhal Tsegaye.

Editors-at-Large: Raisa Bruner, Jeffrey Dastin, Marissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Eli Markham, Charlotte Parker, Sanjena Sathian, Diana Saverin, Jessica Shor

summer 2013, issue 4

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letter from 07

06 letter from

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Costa Rica: Finca Köbö Ten Yalies explore the Green Economy Initiative

By Naintara Rajan

Yale students enjoy a meal at the Finca (Mitch Barrows/TYG).

summer 2013, issue 4

inca Köbö sounds like a dream. Perhaps it could be a tropical island resort in the Dominican Republic, or an especially fruity flavor of ice cream. It’s light, colorful and rolls off the tongue in soothing tones. Fittingly, in the language of the Guayami, “Köbö”, means dreams. And in the heart of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, Finca Köbö is Alex Retana’s dream: A sustainable farm that combines rainforest conservation, sustainable agriculture, and eco-tourism to create a model estate for all those hoping to preserving the environment. Yet as I discovered over spring break, the solution isn’t as sweet as it may sound.

For two weeks in March, nine Yalies and I traveled to Costa Rica to study the country’s efforts incredibly successful policy and grassroots level efforts to preserve the environment—their Green Economy Initiative. Our trip was in part motivated by the recent Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which cast Costa Rica in the global spotlight for its efforts to promote economic growth while simultaneously preserving the environment. The conference lauded Costa Rica especially for enacting legislation that provides monetary incentive to land owners who maintain the natural state of the land. Such legislation is supported by a 1994 Law gives citizens the lawful right to demand a healthy environment from the government.

Yet, while Costa Rica’s decision to outlaw deforestation brings the Nation closer to their goal of neutralizing carbon emissions by 2015, the legislation also comes with significant costs. While agriculture products are currently Costa Rica’s number one export, the legal requirement to maintain all forests makes it difficult to further increase agricultural output. As a result, Costa Rica has looked to ecotourism to bridge the resulting GDP gap it faces.

How, though, could the finite number of natural phenomena in Costa Rica possibly serve to generate enough revenue to overtake the globally traded and adored pineapples and coffee? To me, it seemed impractical, and potentially environmentally destructive. As Carlos de la Rosa, Director of the La Selva rainforest preserve, offers the example of Monteverde, Costa Rica’s cloud forest that suffered ecologically as a result of heavy “eco”tourism.

However, this logic fails to understand the different kinds of ecotourism in Costa Rica. While large-scale natural attractions are limited, small sustainable farms and wildlife preserves

are perhaps an even more important part of the industry. It is these small, independent retreats that serve the purpose of both educating the public, and generating revenue. And, it is through these places that the underlying love of nature fueling these policies comes through.

Though I spent only a matter of hours on the Finca Köbö estate, it quickly became clear that Alex Retana, a native Costa Rican with long black hair and an easy smile, embodies an uncommon respect and responsibility for the environment. Retana is a self-proclaimed “Agriculturist and Dreamer.” His property is a stunning plot of land in the Osa Peninsula impeccably and artistically crafted into an organic farm come real-life chocolate factory, dotted with thatched cacao bean huts, and a flood of eco-tourists. And though Finca Kobo’s visitor’s area is adorned with a small plaque reading, “Paradise is a Feeling, not a Place,” I couldn’t possibly imagine paradise on earth in any other form.

Retana grows “heirloom” or all natural fruit, promoting organic farming practices. This allows him to combine economic opportunity and his goal of preservation: His environmental message attracts eco tourists, to whom he offers tours and lodging. Our tour—or trek— across the property zigzagged across rows of pineapples plants and doubled through dense rainforest, regeneration areas, and biological corridors.

Retana uses the tour as more than a mere opportunity to make money off of foreigners’ sweet tooth, he seeks to inspire real change in small ways. Half way through our trek, he offered us the opportunity to taste the difference between a hybrid and an all-organic heirloom starfruit. Eagerly I reached for free food — the hybrid was fairly average tasting, but the heirloom fruit that followed was sweet and enticing. A love of the environment is not something he could have forced upon us, but his sweet yet tangy, organic fruit had the same effect, and instilled in us a desire for a sustainable way of life Retana’s respect for nature comes out in other ways, too. In an offhand comment, he mentions that Monkey’s often eat his banana trees, and most traditional farmers stop this by laying poison traps. “Instead, I grow the monkeys their own banana grove,” he remarks. “I haven’t had a monkey problem since.”

Despite the optimism Alex Retana’s slice of paradise instills, it is impossible to say that sustainable agro/eco tourism is the save-all solu-

Alex Retana, owner of Finca Köbö, holding a fruit while at work on the farm (Bianca Kim/TYG). tion. While tourism itself is a massive industry in Costa Rica (it remains the most visited nation in Central America, above even Mexico), ecotourism is a small facet of it. Large hotel chains like Hyatt and Marriot have far more influence and power, stemming from significant financial backing and the “western is better” mentality found in much of the developing world.

Chains often ignore environmental regulations in order to expand; a recent controversy surrounded a Hotel’s diversion of limited water supply to tourism related endeavors in the community of Sardinal. Unfortunately, much of Costa Rica’s tourism industry is based on these resorts that boast a “locals free” beach experience. It is the large busloads of people that these hotels attract who promote further environmental degradation. As Monteverde showed us, Costa Rica’s natural environmental sites are unable to cope with such heavy tourism. Unfortunately, it is through these tourist traps that Costa Rica generates the most revenue, and while in theory organic farms are the perfect mélange of sustainability and profitability, family run businesses like Finca Köbö do not even come close to measuring up to the Hilton Papagayo Costa Rica. Ecotourism alone is not profitable enough to overtake agriculture, and Costa Rica must either look to other industries, or fall victim to a commercialized tourism industry devoid of Costa Rican culture and flavor. As de la Rosa points out, “It is possible to love a place to death.”

Naintara Rajan ‘15 is a Psychology major in Branford College. Contact her at naintara.rajan@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

08 feature

feature 09

A Chevron refinery impacts the Canadian Tsleil Waututh Nation’s Unceded Territory in British Columbia. Homes and fishing grounds are seen behind the oil installations (Courtesy Irwin Oostindie).

Members of the Tsleil Waututh nation canoe next to an oil tanker in their native waters. Pollution from oil tankers has made the inlet’s seafood inedible (Courtesy Irwin Oostindie).

Drilling in Canada Oil ventures encroach on sacred water

By Eleanor Marshall

O

n Feb. 17, a bus of Yale students joined a 40,000-strong crowd in Washington D.C., wearing Yale Student Environmental Coalition t-shirts and bandanas over jackets and earmuffs.

You could see their breath as they chanted, “Hey! Obama! We don’t want no pipeline drama!” The Forward on Climate rally was the second in the past year urging the president to say no to Keystone XL, the proposed oil pipeline that would snake over 2,000 miles through the American heartland, from Alberta, Canada to Texan refineries.

President Obama has deferred the proposal once, and is expected to make a final decision by July or August. But ultimately, the oil deposits lie across the Canadian border – beyond the reach of even President Obama. In fact, three major oil companies eager to strike black gold have already proposed alternate routes from Alberta directly to Canadian coasts, cutting directly through the sacred lands of Canadian first peoples. These plans are not beholden to American approval; and the Canadian government is not immune to the lure of potential profits.

Supporters like Bérubé argue that extraction is a question not of “if,” but “when” and “where.” Canada houses vast oil re-

summer 2013, issue 4

serves second only to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, stored in oil sands—loose sandstone saturated with viscous petroleum.

The largest deposit spans almost all of Alberta and spill over into British Columbia.

Oil and gas production from these regions has generated an average of $22 billion per year in government revenue over the last five years, and Natural Resources Canada predicts Canadian oil production to double by 2035, an expansion Bérubé says depends on building bigger pipeline capacity.

Though Canada was once a global leader on environmental issues like reducing ozone depletion and protecting biodiversity, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has spearheaded modification of his nation’s environmental laws to expedite oil extraction and production—speeding the process for government safety and impact reviews and limiting the influence of nonprofit groups.

According to Guillaume Bérubé, a spokesperson for the Canadian government’s Department of Natural Resources, the Keystone XL proposal is one of five to develop oil pipelines from the tar sands region. Enbridge has developed the Northern Gateway Pipelines project that would pump oil west to the Pacific for export

mainly to China. Kinder Morgan has announced plans to submit an official proposal for a similar westward pipeline by the end of 2013. Even TransCanada, the company that proposed Keystone, announced a second proposal on April 2 to build the Energy East Pipeline to oil refineries in eastern Canada.

Bérubé said that other proposals will still be considered even if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved in the U.S. He explained that Canada is not content to continue funneling crude only into the oversupplied American market, where prices are below the global average, and that Canada’s economic prosperity will depend on reaching new markets.

But environmentalists argue that profits from oil extraction are kept afloat by $1.6 billion spent on oil subsidies by the Canadian government and do not consider the true costs of over 6,000 barrels of oil and toxic chemicals spilled each year on average, or the 10,000 barrels of crude leaked from an oil pipeline in Arkansas on March 29.

Over the past two years, Ceremonial Chief Rueben George of the Tsleil-Wautuh Nation has become increasingly outspoken against the Kinder Morgan proposal that would cut through his tribe’s traditional

territory in Vancouver. Known as the People of the Inlet, George grew up eating fish caught from the waters on his tribal lands.

But, polluted by tankers and drills, the inlet can no longer support him and his family. The clams and the oysters are gone, and the salmon do not migrate through anymore. He said the same is true for the native peoples of Alberta, where his sister cannot bathe her children in the waters anymore. George said the pipeline construction directly threatens these waters.

His biggest concern, however, is that no matter how safely pipeline is constructed or how spill-proof it may be, burning oil fundamentally contributes to climate change, threatening not just his way of life, but all people’s.

“That’s something that I can’t stand by, when I think about how I grew up and how I was sacredly connected to the land. My children are sacred and the land and the water are sacred,” he said.

Leah George, a former chief of the TsleilWassuth, explained that the tribe stands on not just moral, but legal grounds. In the 1997 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia case, the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed that if a tribe has an interest in a land, the government is legally obligated to consult them and accommodate that

interest. She said the tribe remains in firm opposition to the pipeline proposals currently on the table.

“Tsleil nation has a sacred trust and obligation. It’s our job, essentially, to protect our land and our water, and that’s what we will always do. There is always hope. We are a small nation. Two hundred and fifty people live within our ancient reserve –but I would not count us out,” she said.

Rueben George referred to everyone – not just tribe members or Canadians – as brothers and sisters.

“It’s not a first nation’s problem or an indigenous problem,” he said. “As we’ve seen with the tragedies that have happened, it’s everyone’s problem.”

He argued that simply because Americans cannot vote on Canadian proposals, they should not stop protesting. Just as George spoke to crowds at the Forward on Climate Rally in February, standing in solidarity with students from across America, he asks his brothers and sisters in America to do the same for him and his nation—just modifying the chant.

Hey! Canada! We don’t want no pipeline drama!

“ Tsleil nation has a sacred trust and obligation. It’s our job, essentially, to protect our land and our water, and that’s what we will always do. There is always hope. We are a small nation.

Two hundred and fifty people live within our ancient reserve—but I would not count us been repaired. As I stood by the bridge— oneout” of North Korea’s few links to the outside world—I saw a truck heading toward —Leah George, the other side. The sun had already sunk;

Former Chief, Tsleil-Wassuth

Eleanor Marshall ’16 is in Saybrook College.

Contact her at eleanor.marshall@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

10 feature

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O does it take to hire foreign farm Help Wanted What workers legally in the U.S.?

By Sophie Broach

n a crisp afternoon in November, I joined Steve Jarmoc as he went to check on a tobacco curing barn on his farm in Enfield, Connecticut. The broad red building stood on a green hillside, and dozens of its wooden boards tilted slightly outward, opening its dark interior to the cool autumn breeze. The sweet, musty smell of tobacco hit us before we even stepped inside.

Jarmoc paused in the doorway, smiling as he surveyed the scene within. Dozens of workers wearing dirty sweatshirts and blue rubber gloves sat before heaps of tobacco, methodically stripping the wrinkled brown leaves from their green stalks. Their soft chatter barely rose above the faint rustling sound of the leaves. Glenville Graham, a tall Jamaican man, was scooping armfuls of the shucked leaves off the dirt floor. Others were wrapping the fragrant tobacco in brown paper and tying the bundles up with twine.

Graham and the others are a rarity—unlike an estimated 70 percent of all farm workers in the US, they are here legally. (This figure includes native-born workers.) Jarmoc has brought them to Connecticut using the H-2A program, the only existing legal avenue farmers have to hire workers from overseas. Though the program requires great sacrifices from Jarmoc and his employees, they both must use it to survive: he to find laborers willing to do the dangerous and difficult work Americans avoid, and they to support their families with half a year of high American wages.

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Tobacco hung out to dry after the harvest in a Suffield, Connecticut barn (courtesy Flickr Creative Commons).

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ack in March, Glenville Graham was standing in his house, which he built with his own hands in Trelawney, Jamaica, when he received a long-distance call. The voice on the other line belonged to Jarmoc, his longtime boss, who told him he had been invited back to work on Jarmoc Tobacco Farm in upstate Connecticut. Though Graham had expected this conversation, and the two had repeated this ritual each of the last twelve years, his body still felt awash with relief.

Once again, five months of work in Connecticut would allow him to support his family for the year.

Jarmoc, too, was glad. Once again, he would have Graham’s experienced hands to harvest his tobacco before it rotted in the fields.

Graham, who looks to be in his early thirties, has a neat mustache on his otherwise boyish face and wears glasses with thick lenses that give him a pensive aura. In a strong Jamaican accent, he recalled in vivid detail the first time he came to work on Jarmoc’s farm, back in 2000.

“Coming to America, it had always been my dream. There are so many guys who want to come who’ve just stopped trying, so every year I consider it a blessing to be here,” he said. The handful of Jarmoc’s workers I spoke to all said they had friends at home who had tried and never managed to secure H-2A visas for themselves. One of Jarmoc’s other workers, Cory Jones, had tried himself for eight years before being accepted. As he told me about his struggles to secure an H-2A visa, his voice grew faster and angrier: “You go to the [Ministry of Labor] office a couple times and they say you gotta try again. If they don’t like you they don’t give it to you. You gotta be lucky.”

Graham only tried for two years before he was accepted as an H-2A guest worker, becoming one of the roughly 55,000 foreigners who travel to the US through the program for temporary agricultural work each year. “They feel your hands,” he said, rubbing his palms with his thumbs, “to see if they’re rough.”

Rough hands indicate a history of manual labor and, the thinking goes, suitability for toilsome farm work. He, like all would-be H-2A workers, also had to undergo an annual medical screening before receiving permission to work in the United States. Someone hastily wrapped his muscular arm in a blood pressure cuff and then filled a small vial with his blood. Next, a doctor quickly inspected him for sexually transmitted diseases. High blood pressure, high sodium levels, and venereal diseases all can bar potential workers from the H-2A program.

Graham was thrilled the first time he learned that he had passed these tests and could begin farm work in the US. But at that point he had no idea what to expect. When

he thought of his new location, he pictured images of New York City that he had seen in his textbooks at school.

“Coming to Jarmoc was like venturing off to another planet. When we got here and got on the bus”—he let out a long whistle— “that was something else. Back on the island, two vehicles pass on the road, and they almost hit each other. And now there are these highways!”

When Graham first met Jarmoc, he remembers thinking he was “a cool guy.” Now he says fondly, “I wouldn’t trade him for any other boss.”

T

hough he’s never enjoyed cigars himself, Jarmoc has worked in his family’s tobacco business his entire life. He grew up on the farm, playing hide and seek in the curing barns amidst a thick jungle of hanging tobacco leaves and spending summers cutting tobacco in the fields. “I could drive a tractor when I was 12,” he told me, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening as he smiled.

When Jarmoc walks around his barns, he jokingly shouts things like: “Every day’s a good day for tobacco work!” and “This is 10 times better than going to the gym—and you get paid!” Workers respond with chuckles or good-natured eye rolls. He greets his veteran Jamaican farm workers by nickname, calling out to “Yellow Belly,” “Lover Boy,” and “Cookie Monster.”

The day I visited his barn, he wore dirty boots and his hands were stained dark from touching tobacco leaves. He had spent part of the morning putting up dozens of campaign signs for his wife, who is running for State Senate. Jarmoc himself served as a state representative for 16 years, and is still a prominent figure in the Enfield community.

Driving his pickup truck around the roads crisscrossing his farm, he seems to beep his horn and wave at every other car he passes.

When Jarmoc’s forebears started their tobacco farm in the early 20th Century, the local trade was flourishing, but that golden age passed long ago, and farms like his are now a rare sight. Each year, he grows 150 acres of broadleaf tobacco. Manufacturers slice the enormous leaves into strips to use

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12 feature in upscale, old-fashioned cigars. “The leaves are just like gift-wrap. They go around to make it look pretty,” he said, tearing off a strip of leaf with a soft rippling sound and wrapping it around his thick, dirty finger to demonstrate for me.

“It’s still all done by hand. These guys are the machines!” he said gesturing to the dozens of workers methodically shucking tobacco leaves from their stalks.

Jarmoc can’t hire any workers from Ja-

maica until he has verified that no Americans want to fill the spots. Each year, H-2A regulations force him to pay for classifieds in local publications, farm journals, and newspapers across the country. If a qualified American does show up looking for work in the first half of the growing season, Jarmoc is legally obligated to hire him on the spot.

“Everyone’s biggest gripe is that this is taking American jobs away,” said Jarmoc, noting Connecticut’s high unemployment rate, which hovered around eight percent in 2012. “But if a guy from Hamilton Standards becomes unemployed and is looking for a job, he’s not looking for this job,” Jarmoc said, referring to an aircraft-parts supplier plant in a neighboring town. “So he stays on the unemployment rolls. And that’s the reality of it,” he added. And Jarmoc has offered jobs to unemployed neighbors—all of whom flat-out refused them. “They don’t want just any job that comes along. This is hard and hot and dirty,” he said. Some Americans who accepted his offers worked for a few days before quitting abruptly.

Jarmoc does receive some replies to the ads, and occasionally farm workers from Florida or Texas might journey up to work for him, but he claims he could never find enough American workers to staff his entire farm.

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fter seven months of spotty, low-paying carpentry jobs in Jamaica, Graham not only desired to work on Jarmoc’s farm, but was eager to take on as many hours as possible. He hopes to save enough eventually to finish building his house and pay school tuition for his two children. He also dreams of visiting England one day and seeing Europe, but admits that this probably won’t happen. In the meantime, he sends most of each weekly paycheck home to support his parents and sisters as well as his own wife and two kids.

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feature 13 “I just can’t stop work. The day I lose work is the day something is short for me,” said Graham, who makes around $10.50 an hour.

“If the day requires going 15 hours, I’m ready to go. If it requires less than 10, I’m like ‘oh my god I’m dead,’” he said his voice rising to a yelp as he clasped his face between his hands. “I want as much work as I can get,” he said slowly, as if spitting out each word.

Graham spoke with a touch of pride in his voice about the work ethic of the H-2A guest workers. “You’re never gonna find one of us say we’re not comin’ because of the rain.

We’re going to put on trash bags and come out here. We’re not going to run off just cuz’ it’s the weekend, and Jarmoc can’t force us to come on the weekend, but he never has to force us. We’re going to come seven days a week. You can guarantee that,” he said.

Working these long hours leaves Graham with a voracious appetite, and paying for food each week sucks away upwards of a quarter of his weekly paycheck. “With this kind of physical work, a couple biscuits and stuff wouldn’t do it. I have to eat some good food and balance my diet, ‘cuz there can’t be a day I come out here and can’t perform,” he explained.

I asked Graham if he thought Jarmoc preferred Jamaican workers. He hesitated, searching, it seemed, for a way to answer diplomatically. “Well he likes us for sure, but as far as this kind of work you just need to get it done, and he gets very nervous about that. So that reliability, you could say that gives us a little bit of an edge,” he said.

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ut that reliability stems from a desperation that makes H-2A farm workers vulnerable to exploitation—perhaps even more vulnerable than their undocumented counterparts. Bound by contract to one farm, they often cannot switch jobs without being deported, and if they object to mistreatment, their employers can easily replace them from an endless supply of foreigners seeking coveted H-2A visas.

Reports from Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have uncovered rampant blacklisting of workers who speak up about poor conditions or wage theft or seek help from legal services. One list issued by the North Carolina Growers Association in the late ’90s included over 1,000 names of former guest workers known for these forms of “undesirable” activity. A 1997 GAO report found

that H-2A workers “are unlikely to complain about worker protection violations,” and many organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, maintain that this still holds true for the program.

Knowing that they are expendable, foreigners on the H-2A program work harder and longer, and complain less. Farmers have taken notice, and often prefer them to Americans. Last year a group of American farm workers sued a broccoli grower in North Carolina who ordered them to dig holes for seeds with their hands to coerce them into quitting. Then he hired H-2A workers.

Nigel Williams, another of Jarmoc’s workers, could recall the few white American citizens who have been part of Jarmoc’s team over the years. When I asked him if they were as productive as the Jamaicans he laughed, paused, and then replied, “They are not.

They are definitely not.”

Back in 1994, the Department of Labor denied Jarmoc’s request for Jamaican workers, citing an especially high Connecticut unemployment rate. But no unemployed Americans showed up for work. Jarmoc scrambled and hired a labor contractor to find workers for him.

“That was kind of a disaster year,” he said, seeming anxious to suppress the memories, but pressing onward nonetheless. “It was just an all around bad situation. We were behind schedule, and we only harvested about 70 percent of our crop.” Left in the ground for too long, the tobacco plants sprouted small dark branches that tore holes in the delicate leaves. Fall’s first frost destroyed much of the rest.

J

armoc’s Jamaican H-2A workers would never let a crop fail. They are extremely hard-working and reliable—but they come at a high price.

Government regulations compel Jarmoc to pay his H-2A workers above the Connecticut minimum wage of $8.25. He must instead pay them $10.56 an hour, to avoid undercutting the wages of local U.S. workers.

In using the H-2A program, Jarmoc also incurs some “crazy and stupid expenses” and encounters “logistics and paperwork [that] have always been a nightmare.” The transportation costs and fees to acquire each worker cost him an estimated $1,200 per head. “No matter how you cut it, it’s expensive. The time constraints and paperwork could certainly be pared down,” he said.

Graham is acutely aware of these problems. “It’s not easy for him to get us here. If we stop coming, I think it will be because of the H-2A and the complications he has to go through,” he said.

But Jarmoc says Graham’s job is safe—at least for now.

“It’s still worth it to get these guys. Worth every penny.”

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hile staying in the US, Jarmoc’s workers live in housing that H-2A regulations compel him to provide. Each year, the Department of Labor (DOL) inspects his camp several times for cleanliness, good lighting, adequate bedding, working appliances, and safe drinking water. Jarmoc has long dreaded these inspections. He recalled one particularly persnickety DOL inspector who faulted him for chipped paint and would not pass him until he applied a new coat to the outside of the barracks. In a different year, he failed him at first when he noticed cobwebs between the screens and windows in the barracks. “I told him, ‘I have cobwebs between my screens and windows—and on the inside of the house too!’ And he said ‘I don’t care, I’m not inspecting your house.’ I mean, the place looked better than where you live or where I live,” he said.

Jarmoc excused himself to check on a faulty propane burner outside, calling Nigel Williams over to talk to me in his absence. We stood together outside in the misting rain next to a tree with flaming orange leaves. He wore a woolen hat with a snowflake design, and mottled gray and black stubble covered his cheeks. I had my sleeves rolled up in the cool autumn air, but he, accustomed to warmer climes, was wearing two sweatshirts and hugging himself to shield against the cold. Williams has been with Jarmoc since he started bringing in workers and has stayed in the same bunk for the past 22 years. I asked him about what it was like to live at the farm.

“It’s boring. Very boring. We don’t have our families around,” he said. He and the other workers try to ward off the stultifying monotony by watching for news about Jamaica on a small TV in the evenings. They cook for themselves in a kitchen with picnic tables and stainless steel countertops—sometimes preparing cow heads they buy cheap from a nearby slaughterhouse. The whitewashed space lacks any decoration except for strips of curling yellow flypaper hanging from the

ceiling and a tack board where someone has pinned a wad of slips listing the winning numbers of the Connecticut lottery.

The workers occasionally escape from the farm in an old school bus that Jarmoc painted green and now uses to drive them around town on their evenings off. Williams likes to kill time by meandering around the Walmart in Enfield. “We’ll go eye-shopping. I’ll look at some nice kids’ clothes and dresses. And I’ll think ‘wow, that would look good on my wife or good on my daughter,’” he said quietly.

The noises of cars whizzing by on the nearby road filled the long silence that followed.

“It’s really hard to be away from your family for so long,” Williams then said. “Sometimes I call on the phone, and they say ‘Daddy when are you coming home?’ and I just say, ‘pretty soon… pretty soon.’”

Graham, a self-professed “gadget freak” who wears a shiny black Bluetooth in his ear, estimates he spends more than a quarter of the workday on the phone with his wife.

Sometimes neither speaks for long stretches of time as they each go about their days on opposite sides of the hemisphere. “It’s not so easy being away from your family so long.

How am I supposed to wait until the evening to know they’re okay?” he asked.

T

ers standing on three different levels beneath him. As one of the younger, sprightlier workers on Jarmoc’s farm, he often finds himself enlisted for this dangerous job.

Williams also spends his fair share of time in the top levels of the tobacco barns. “If you fall from up there, it’s gonna be a disaster,” he said, shaking his head. And people do fall. Williams has a friend who once narrowly missed plummeting to the barn floor after he slipped off a board near the roof of the barn. He caught himself on the plank and ended up dangling by one arm nearly 30 feet above the ground. One farm worker in Springfield, Massachusetts, fell to his death doing the same job this summer. Jarmoc himself once fell doing the same work, and his back still aches sometimes.

Other, minor injuries arise all the time.

But the desire to maximize earnings and avoid drawing unwanted attention to themselves often impels the workers to avoid seeking treatment for health problems.

“If guys get hurt, they’ll keep it a secret to themselves and won’t say anything,” said Williams.

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wo weeks after my visit, Graham had finished packaging the tobacco. The fields lay bare, and the barns, once filled to the rafters with hanging leaves, stood empty. Jarmoc was ready to send his yearly crop down to fine cigar manufacturers in the Caribbean.

Graham too headed in that direction. When he arrived home, he told me, he would take his children in his arms, looking at them to see how they had changed in the five months since he’d been gone. But after a few languid days, he said, he would begin to feel a creeping restlessness. “When I go, I want to come back here in the same breath,” he said.

“But it’s always been like that because I just don’t have anything to do back there.”

Graham is one of the lucky H-2A applicants, but even so, his future is uncertain. He can only hope that his body will stay strong and healthy, that the tobacco farm will stay afloat, and that the Department of Labor will grant Jarmoc’s request to bring him back.

he fear of becoming injured while working on the farm haunts Graham constantly; he thinks about this possibility every day. The death rate for agricultural work is seven times the national average for all jobs, and only the construction industry has higher rates of occupational injuries and illnesses, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Jarmoc’s farm workers must cope with pesticide exposure and repetitive motion injuries brought on by cutting, or hanging, or stripping tobacco leaves from their stalks week after week after week.

“What if something should happen to me and I can’t send back money? It’s not gonna affect me but six other persons, and my kids couldn’t go to school, and… I just try to block that out,” Graham said.

Graham probably finds these thoughts more difficult to stifle while perched pre- Sophie Broach ’13 is a History major in Piercariously on planks high above the ground son College. Contact her at sophie.broach@ in tobacco curing barns. He spent much of yale.edu. the month of October this year straddling planks four feet apart, removing bundles of tobacco leaves from hooks and passing them down a vertical assembly line of work-

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A Brave New World: Automated Trading in Equity Markets New trading practices offer fresh dangers to world economic stability

“I

t was quite eerie watching the markets suddenly melt down—it happened so fast that ‘panic’ didn’t enter my mind. Most of us were just mesmerized by the intensity and could only stare...”

“M,” a stockbroker and financial consultant with a North American trading institution, was recalling May 6th, 2010. That Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points in the span of 30 minutes before fully recovering. This troubling half-hour, now known as “the flash crash,” temporarily decimated a variety of equity shares. The stock price of consulting firm Accenture fell from $40 to one cent at one point, as did that of Procter and Gamble.

Other companies’ shares rose to $100,000 or more before crashing down again.

Later, SEC investigations came to implicate automated trading systems: Computer networks built to make trades free from human direction, using algorithms to determine whether to buy or sell equities. But the flash summer 2013, issue 4

crash was not the only market fiasco in which one specific system, known as “high-frequency trading” (HFT) has been implicated. From the Knight Capital disruption of 2012 to Facebook’s IPO (the company lost half its initial share value within three months), aggressive market automation has in recent years been found to increase instability. These events opened a divide within the realm of finance: Do these alleged missteps merit further government regulation of the industry, or would this only make the problem worse?

“Oh, it was scary”, M recalled later, over the phone. He went on to explain that the use of HFT was “harming the small investor”—the kind some call a “day trader.” How is this possible?

First, we must understand the gulf between day traders and those with access to HFT systems. M refers to the former as “professionals who either don’t have the time to run their own [portfolios], or would rather trust someone else

By Charles Goodyear

with their capital.” Meanwhile, HFT systems are operated by larger institutions (e.g. mutual funds), and have a tendency to reduce day traders’ earnings in times of rapid change. However, many casual investors inadvertently use HFT programs, as mutual funds that many day traders invest in utilize these systems.

“Let’s take the flash crash as an example,” M explained. “You have these computers selling their shares as all of these algorithms tell them to sell”—a process that sets off a “waterfall effect.” The selling of shares brings a lower stock price, which in turn triggers more share sales in a vicious spiral that often ends only when a stock can drop no further. Were humans the only traders around, this couldn’t happen: As thinking beings, we have some ability to recognize the intrinsic value of companies, and wouldn’t let Accenture drop 99 percent even if a meteor crushed its Dublin headquarters.

Thus, when HFT systems “panic,” rational traders are caught off guard and can’t sell fast enough

The Bank of England, seen above, is just one of many international market governing bodies that have opposed and limited the adoption of HFT systems (Charles Goodyear/TYG).

to keep up; they might know the real worth of their shares, but for a time, they lose out to the mass action of computers.

W

ith such gaping flaws, what’s the use of HFT? One key feature of these systems is their ability to exploit microscopic price changes in a stock, by trading on a larger scale than humans would in their place. A predicted shift of a penny per share might not sound like much, but buy a million shares low, sell high, and you’ve just made ten thousand dollars. This can happen in seconds—or milliseconds.

The speed of HFT distinguishes it from other forms of “algorithmic trading”, which still involve automated decision-making but operate over longer time periods. The power of speedy transactions isn’t a new feature of modern markets, and wealthy investors have been twisting time to their own advantage for centuries. Gary Gorton, a professor at the Yale School of Management, referenced the use of “carrier pigeons

by the Rothschild family” to monitor the Battle of Waterloo; the Rothschilds used this advance warning to invest their money on the outcome.

“Back then,” said Gorton, “the days were like seconds [in today’s markets].”

But the strategy’s long history doesn’t make it ethical. In modern markets, regulators and traders widely acknowledge that, in the world of HFT, at least some “bad actors” are perpetrating “shenanigans” that could diminish market stability. So the question remains: Is it possible to prevent this behavior? Many see federal oversight of algorithmic trading and HFT, even for the sake of suppressing unfair trading practices, as misguided, unlikely to succeed, and even counter to its objectives.

“Markets,” says ‘H’, an algorithmic trader, “are determined by human nature, and so there will always be shenanigans that occur”—regardless of whatever technology is embraced. H doesn’t necessarily think that the onset of algorithmic and electronic trading adds more unfairness or volatility to markets. In the old days, he says, “traders would prioritize their biggest clients” over the smaller ones if the same trade was executed by both (thus costing the smaller investor more money), and would even discreetly collaborate with other traders on the floor (for example “signaling each other by a strong kick to the leg”), activities now seen as unethical.

While electronic trading has made these techniques irrelevant, “human nature” has provided incentive for the invention of new ways to “game the system.” As an example, H pointed to “flash trading in the modern market,” which essentially involves flooding the market with very large share orders that are never filled, thus altering the prices of shares. While flash trading—which doesn’t require HFT—isn’t strictly illegal, traders and regulators widely concur that it should be. But for government to “fix” volatility, the SEC would need to crack down on a massive assortment of suspicious practices—perhaps doing more harm than good in the process.

“P

eople may ask how we got to this point in the markets, and the answer is legislation.”

According to “T,” the head of automated trading at a U.S. institution, regulation in the US has driven market structure by increasing the competition between markets, leading certain “bad actors” to adopt aggressive trading practices.

From T’s perspective, unintelligent regulation drove us to adopt unsafe practices, especially the imposed process of “decimalization.” When, in 2000, the SEC ordered U.S. markets to stop trading shares in fractions (instituting a process of “decimalization”), brokers scrambled to revise their trading programs. Now that stock val-

ues can fluctuate by tiny fractions of a penny, humans can scarcely keep up with their movement—helping algorithms get ahead of the game. Though decimalization helped improve liquidity, its unexpected effect on the rise of HFT—and thus, volatility—shows that smart regulation isn’t easy. Better strategies from the SEC will have to strike at the heart of the system, by placing limits on the capability of all involved to profit from these short-term trades.

Some have argued that heavy taxes on short-term sales would suppress these practices. Current tax proposals, however, have been criticized for lacking a path to implementation or attacking too broad a range of transactions.

T’s view: “Some estimates say that 70 percent of all shares traded have only been held for a duration of minutes or seconds,” which indicates the critical role rapid trading plays. Any move which reduces this activity—without honing in specifically on millisecond-level trades—puts a serious damper on the stock market.

The regulation ahead aims to capture the best of both worlds, reducing volatility while remaining moderate enough to not alienate traders. “Circuit breaking”—a technique that soothes human panic by freezing markets, but cannot stop algorithms from picking up right where they left off—will soon be replaced by a system called “limit up/limit down,” which restricts how much a stock’s price can change within five minutes—reducing algorithmic “panic” but hopefully not human trading. According to T, this concept has been embraced: “A fairly broad consensus is in support of it, as it is intelligent and is being rolled out in phases, rather than one huge and disruptive shift.”

When asked for his views on regulation, M gave a wry reply: “That’s like asking the fox if there should be a guard at the henhouse.” Keeping this in mind, alongside the perspective of H—that “everybody’s got an agenda”—can we really trust that limit up/limit down will be sufficient? The sad truth: While traders, regulators, and civilians have a vested interest in cracking down on bad actors within finance, experts on all sides admit that entirely eliminating them is impossible. However powerful our new rules, loopholes will exist within financial markets, and traders will learn to exploit them, as bacteria evolve to shrug off antibiotics. The SEC’s new “medicine” aside, we must remain vigilant: HFT or no HFT, it is naïve to believe that volatility will ever vanish for long.

Charles Goodyear ’16 is in Pierson College.

Contact him at charles.goodyear@yale.edu.

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A Coffin for a Cutlet: Bartering Towards Sustainability

A restaurant in Florence offers an innovative way to help customers afford a meal: barter By Angelica Calabrese

Owner Donatella Faggioli determines the exchange value of a bartered bottle of wine (courtesy Whitney Richelle/http://blog.studentsville.it).

summer 2013, issue 4

nside the Florentine restaurant L’e’ maiala, the lights are low. Dark wood and one stone wall give the place a cozy, rustic feel. But this restaurant is different from the myriad other cozy, rustic Italian trattorias in the area: The far wall is decorated with a series of portraits of pigs by a local Florentine artist, pig-shaped chandeliers dangle from the low ceiling, and ceramic pigs line the register. Each artisanal pig product has been bartered in exchange for a meal.

The pig is L’e’ maiala‘s mascot: The restaurant’s name translates literally to “It’s a pig!”

However, in the local dialect, “l’e’ maiala” is used more figuratively, in rough equivalence to the English phrase “tough times.” These tough times are precisely what L’e’ maiala seeks to remedy. As Italy’s unemployment levels rise and austerity measures increase, the restaurant offers Florentines young and old the opportunity to trade surplus or handmade goods for a well-made Tuscan dinner.

Owner Donatella Faggioli describes it as “a way to lessen the blow of the crisis and bring back an ancient form of payment, with sustainability in mind.”

L’e’ maiala, Italy’s first barter-friendly restaurant, opened in September 2012 to widespread excitement in Florence and across the nation. Though their traditional Tuscan food is excellent, the opportunity to barter an item and save on a meal draws many of the restaurant’s clients. “When someone has something extra, something that we might be able to use, they can trade it,” said Duccio Cantini, one of the associate owners of the restaurant.

“This way, they can afford to go out for dinner.

After all, you’ve got to eat every day.”

Cantini is one of the directors of Stranomondo, a Florentine entertainment bureau that primarily operated clubs and events in the city before opening L’e’ maiala. He, Faggioli and the rest of their cohort hope to use their new restaurant and its innovative payment system not only to stimulate the local economy, but to ensure that L’e’maiala supports farmers in its use of fresh ingredients.

“It lets us fund local producers,” said Cantini.

“It’s more equitable, more fair,” he said, than buying their ingredients from faraway suppliers or multinational corporations. Though the restaurant must conform to standard restaurant sanitation regulations, and can’t accept tomatoes or eggplants from just any garden, they trade prepared foods for produce from certified local growers and bottled items like wine or olive oil. They also trade menu items

for the work of artists and artisans, which they use to decorate the space. Though produce is exchanged at market price, Duccio and his partners determine the exchange value of everything else, based on the materials used and the maker’s creativity.

The restaurant serves homemade pasta, sliced meats and Italian cheeses, Tuscan soups, and “poor dishes” such as tripe, made from cow or lamb stomach—“the good food of your nonna,” as the owners describe it. Usually, one of these Tuscan meals will cost about $30 for two or three people, and bartering reduces that significantly, though the exchanges often won’t cover the full cost of a meal.

L’e’maiala customers range from youth eager to barter plastic pig magnets for a dessert to retired Italians offering old chairs for a bowl of soup. However, Cantini noted that the majority of those who barter are local producers in the prime of their production, which raises some questions about which population the barter services benefit most.

Though bartering may be an exciting option, many young people, especially Italy’s unemployed and student population, may have little to offer.

But some customers, desperate to save on their meal, have offered items that the store was not able to accept: One customer, a carpenter, offered a coffin (“Of course, we couldn’t take it—it’s bad luck!”). Another customer offered his mother-in-law.

In recent years, restaurants and businesses across the world have also turned towards barter. Fireside Restaurant in Chicago has been bartering for many years, exchanging meals for everything from dental services to custom chocolates for its staff. Unlike L’e’maiala, Fireside barters for services as well, such as the work of their electrician. Fireside and others use online services that coordinate trade exchanges between thousands of different businesses, but these online exchanges don’t focus on local ingredients and sustainability in the manner of L’e’ maiala.

Italy’s first barter restaurant may not boast the sheer economic impact of larger outfits like Fireside, but in its new definition of “payment,” it’s helping citizens of a cash-strapped country fill their bellies with true Tuscan cuisine, even if only for a night.

Angelica Calabrese ’14 is an Anthropology major in Morse College. Contact her at angelica.calabrese@yale.edu.

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Pressing OK to Mobile Money Managing your finances in Kenya

By Ashley Wu

M-Pesa is the most successful mobile money payment/transfer service in the world (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

O

n a bustling street corner in Nairobi, a passenger gets out of a taxi.

Juggling his briefcase in his right hand and cell phone in his left, one click of a button makes an instant peer-to-peer transfer to his taxi driver to pay fare. Later that afternoon, his daughter sends him an urgent text message reminding him that her boarding school tuition is due the next day. Moments after she sends the message, he replies with a transfer of 40,000 shillings.

In Kenya and across the developing world, technologies to facilitate money transfers have leapfrogged those available in the developed world. At the end of last year, there were twice as many mobile money users as Facebook users in sub-Saharan Africa. A future without clunky ATM machines and cash has already arrived – now, over two-thirds of Kenyan households have at least one member who uses M-PESA, a mobile phone based financial service provided by Safaricom, the leading mobile network operator in the country.

“Mobile money technologies are important because the majority of individuals in many developing nations are stuck with insecure, expensive and inconvenient ways of managing their financial lives. Financial inclusion is important to bring them into the formal economy,” said Seema Desai, director of Mobile Money for the Unbanked at the Global System for Mobile Communications Association.

Kenya, which rapidly adopted mobile money technology, sees a volume of money close to 60 percent of GDP move through mobile channels. But this level of dependency on mobile money brings with it a concern that large telecommunications

summer 2013, issue 4

companies, which have a near monopoly over the technology in most countries, will abuse their power by raising transaction fees. Recently, Safaricom raised tariffs by 10 percent for transactions over 100 shillings. However, researchers agree that competition against large telecom companies is still possible and increased fees have thus far not affected usage rates.

“What’s important to remember is that mobile money is one element of a wider financial ecosystem, and a number of alternatives exist for making payments and sending and saving money. If a single operator has a majority market share in mobile money, it doesn’t mean they have control over the entire payments market. A mobile money operator that raises fees will lose customers to these other providers, just like in any other competitive industry,” said Desai.

MIT Professor Tavneet Suri, a pioneer in mobile money research, adds that although Safaricom’s power in Kenya may be alarming, other countries have seen a higher level of successful competition. For instance, “in Sierra Leone, Splash was started by a non-telecom entrepreneur, and it works on any cell phone network,” she says.

No longer just a platform for exchanging taxi fares and paying for groceries, researchers and telecommunications companies are rolling out new programs that allow mobile money to play an even larger role in previously inefficient financial transactions.

“Since formal insurance is pretty much unavailable for most of the population, they use informal networks, like friends and family, to help smooth risk. They make informal deals with each other. For example, I make a deal with you so that if something

bad happens to me, you help me; when something bad happens to you I return the favor. Mobile money has made this process much cheaper, more efficient,” said Suri.

Fisk smoothing is just one of the many potential positive impacts of mobile money. Suri and co-researcher William Jack posit that mobile money may also increase labor market efficiency by providing a secure method to transmit money across large differences. For instance, families may be more willing to send children farther for school or work, knowing that money transfers can be made with the click of a button.

Beyond just mobile money, M-PESA’s success has spawned an entire community of other mobile technology-based applications aimed at poverty alleviation.

M-Farm gives farmers the latest price data for their crops, allowing them to better negotiate with middlemen who buy their harvests. In the world of public heatlh, the Gates Foundation recently approved funding for mHealth, an application for transmitting health records via text message.

In four sub-Saharan African countries now, mobile money agents outnumber physical bank branches. Mobile money itself also has potential for future innovations, such as more widespread use of the technology as a savings account, or for loan repayment. As the number of mobile money users continues to grow closer to 100 percent market penetration, the landscape of currency in the developing world increasingly looks electronic.

Ashley Wu ‘15 is a Global Affairs major in Morse College. Contact her at ashley.wu@ yale.edu.

The Man Behind the Money A look a currency design

By Fiona Lowenstein

The Euro coin designed by Luycx is now in circulation in seventeen EU countries throughout Europe (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

T

ake out your wallet. Empty the change. Pick one up and examine it. Perhaps your coin is a penny, approximately 19 mm in diameter and 1.55 mm in thickness, made of copper-plated zinc. On the obverse—the term numismatists use for the front of the coin – you’ll see the bust of Abraham Lincoln facing right, “IN GOD WE TRUST” written in an arc above his head, the word “LIBERTY” to his left, the date to his right. Turn the coin over. On the reverse, you might see a number of different designs. The words “ONE CENT” and “E PLURIBUS UNUM” would likely decorate the penny, but the image might be of the Lincoln Memorial or the Union Shield, depending on the date of your coin.

Despite the fact that coins are an integral part of our daily lives—we hold them in our hands every day, hear them jingle in our pockets, complain about them when they build up into endless piles of change—we scarcely ever take the time to examine them. Only when there is a serious proposal to change our currency do we think about the way our money looks. Even then, we rarely think about who designed it.

In 1999, the policy for a unified currency across the EU was settled, and three years later, the Euro began to circulate. The Franc, the Lira, the Peseta, the Deutsche mark and many more evaporated from daily use. As the world watched to see what the economic impact of the switch to the Euro would be, one man in Belgium watched as his drawing became a symbol of European unity.

Luc Luycx was a forty-three year old Belgian computer engineer who had been working for the Belgian Mint for fifteen years as a designer when the EU announced

a contest to design the new Euro coin in 1996. Every member state of the EU except Denmark participated, and Luc Luycx was one of thirty-six professional coin designers and artists to submit a design. The final nine contenders were determined by a jury of experts and then put to a vote among the general public. Luycx’s design was chosen as the favorite in June of 1997.

Luycx’s design is simple. It features a map of Europe, including countries’ borders with twelve stars. “I thought that the new European currency has to be simple, clear, and instantly recognizable, so I thought [of ] the map of Europe.”

Luycx told me in an interview, “Everyone recognizes the shape of Europe.”

“It started as a pen drawing, then converted to digital,” Luycx said of his design. “And after I won the contest I had to do some adjustments--on the borders of certain countries.” Luycx edited his design several more times before the coins went into circulation.

Today, Luycx’s coins can be found in seventeen of the 27 member states to the EU. There are eight values of coins, all showing the unification of Europe. Luycx says the one, two, and five cent coins show Europe situated on the globe, and the 10, 20, and 50 cent coins show Europe in the making—with the countries “still growing toward each other.”

The one and two dollar Euros can be interpreted to show “a unification of Europe.”

The EU now owns Luycx’s design and Luycx has gone back to his job at the Belgian Mint. “In the beginning [right after the contest] there was more interest in me,” Luycx said, “but [now I just continued] to work in the royal Belgian Mint as designer. [It is a little] busier, though.”

Luycx says the one, two, and five cent coins show Europe situated on the globe, and the 10, 20, and 50 cent coins show Europe in the making— with the countries “still growing toward each other.” The one and two dollar Euros can be interpreted to show “a unification of Europe.”

The coins, too have faded into Luycx’s every day life. Luycx describes being very excited when the coins first went into realization. “I loved it,” he said of the time when the coins were first introduced. “After ten years now, I see the coins every day, so it is a part of my life now,” Luycx explained.

The shape, size, and design of our money often goes unnoticed. We move through our daily lives touching money constantly, but rarely considering the way it looks or feels and almost never thinking about the person who designed it.

Fiona Lowenstein ‘16 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at fiona.lowenstein@ yale.edu.

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TYG:

Bosnian women at the monument for victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica Massacre. At the annual memorial ceremony in Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

July 11, 2007 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

What does justice in the context of the wars in the former Yugosla-

via mean to you?

When the Security Council decided to create the ICTY in 1993, accountability for crimes was an integral part of the global project of the international community to bring peace and justice to the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

TYG: Most recently, victim groups and members of the international community were stunned by the ICTY Appeals Chamber’s acquittal of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač in November 2012; and of Momčilo Perišić, army chief of staff of the Yugoslav army in the 1990s, in February 2013.

Did these acquittals distort your personal perception about the application of justice of the ICTY?

Conversation with Serge Brammertz Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia Interview by Igor Mitschka

summer 2013, issue 4

To say that I was pleased with these acquittals would not be the reality. We had convictions in both cases in the first instance based on evidence presented by our office, and for both cases we were of the strong opinion that those judgments should be confirmed.

Gotovina was sentenced to 24 years, Markač to 18 years and Perišić to 27 years. The majority of judges in the Appeals Chambers saw it differently. As unhappy as I may be with their judgements, as a party to the proceedings I must accept them. Both decisions have provoked strong reactions in the victims’ communities.

TYG: Equally?

I think in both cases the reactions were really strong. The situations were, of course, different. In the Gotovina case, we speak about the “Homeland War” in the middle of Croatia and about Operation Storm, where there can be no doubt that crimes were committed.

Even the Croatian authorities accepted this.

The judges in the Appeals Chamber, however, were of the opinion that responsibility was not sufficiently established. In relation to Perišić, the situation is different. Perišić was chief of staff of the army under Milošević which was, over a long period, providing military support to the Serbs in Bosnia. He was convicted by the Trial Chamber for aiding and abetting crimes committed by Bosnian Serbs.

A majority of judges in the Appeals Chamber,

however, found that the Trial Chamber should have considered whether Perišić’s assistance was “specifically directed” to the crimes as opposed to being directed to legitimate military activities.

TYG: It is hard to believe that Perišić’s assistance was not directed to the crimes, though.

The Appeals Chamber’s finding was not our case theory and was not the opinion of the judges in the first instance. But that’s how it is. I thought the first decision was a landmark-decision, as it clearly provided that if you support parties in a conflict, knowing that crimes have been committed, you are responsible. This was an important development.

However, the Appeals Chamber saw this differently, and they have the final say.

TYG: One could also argue that the recent acquittal of Perišić might be a politically motivated tradeoff to acquiesce the Serbians who were outraged about the Gotovina acquittal.

I think this is speculation. I have heard this rumor too, but even though I am not pleased with the decision, I do not believe that our appeals judges are influenced in this way.

TYG: The ICTY was the first international court for criminal justice created by the United Nations. How, would you argue, has it shaped international criminal justice in theory and in practice?

The ICTY was the first international tribunal after Nuremberg. While the ICTY adopted some legal concepts from World War II trials, it has also developed new ones. We can see jurisprudence developed at our tribunal in relation to command responsibility and joint criminal enterprise. We can also see how sexual violence has come to be characterized as a crime against humanity, a war crime or even genocide, where previously it was often considered an opportunistic event occurring during conflict. Our cases show that sexual violence can be an element in the policy of ethnic cleansing. Some of this jurisprudence has been adopted by other international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court (ICC).

TYG: Your predecessor, Carla del Ponte, decried Croatia’s and particularly Serbia’s unwillingness to cooperate with the ICTY. In

her memoirs, she recommended that the United Nations, upon creating future tribunals, “should include a basket of preapproved adjustable, Chapter 7-supported sanctions mechanisms for the trial chamber to apply, at its discretion” (374). What are your thoughts about her proposal?

I don’t know if it’s possible in advance to determine a list of sanctions from which trial chambers can choose and I am not sure if that’s the right approach. But I agree with the general assessment that it has been difficult to obtain cooperation from the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In Serbia, those prosecuted were initially still in power. Croatia did not accept the jurisdiction of the Tribunal in its first years of operation. A particularly complicated story was access to documentation.

For many years, we did not have access to military databases and archives and it was not until relatively recently that we got comprehensive access. However, the main problem has been the arrest of fugitives. Today, we are the only international tribunal with no fugitives at large. Very often, members of the international political community have said that our Tribunal provides the best example that nobody can escape justice. I would be careful in saying that, however. It took sixteen years for Karadžić and Mladić to be arrested.

In 1995, when the arrest warrants were issued, there was no political will to have them arrested; not by national authorities and not by the national community that had other priorities at that time. The lesson learnt is that it takes much time and it’s very difficult to have someone arrested when you have no police force of your own. This is also the biggest problem the ICC is facing today. Look at the Sudan case with Omar al-Bashir, who continues to travel around African states. The inability to arrest fugitives undermines the work of international tribunals and affects the credibility of international justice.

TYG: So why wouldn’t you then support discretion for international tribunals to apply sanctions?

Personally, I don’t think it would be wise for a criminal court responsible for individual criminal responsibility to impose sanctions on countries. Sanctions must be imposed by political bodies. However, we have seen at the ICTY the advantage of a carrot-and-stick policy. Fugitives from our Tribunal were arrested

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24 conversation with as a result of the European Union’s conditionality policy, in which Croatia and Serbia were required to fully cooperate with the ICTY as a condition for enlargement. The conditionality policy provided incentives, if not pressure, to cooperate, particularly for Serbia. The policy has played a very positive role. It is clear that if there is a political objective like the one the EU and the candidate countries of the Former Yugoslavia shared, one faces a win-win-situation.

TYG: You mentioned the EU-prospects of countries of the Former Yugoslavia. Croatia is about to join the European Union this summer. If you go to Croatia today, you will still see cities adorned with statutes of Franjo Tuđman whom the Prosecution of the ICTY indicted for being a “key member of the joint criminal enterprise” to cleanse Krajina. Operation Storm is yearly commemorated with a holiday on August 5th, the day of Croatian re-conquest of Knin. Does this way of commemorating history pose a problem for Croatia’s accession to the European Union?

There is a culture in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia of celebrating certain events in the Yugoslav wars or earlier wars going back long time in history. These historical moments are considered victories by one side and dark moments by another. As Prosecutor, it is not my role to tell sovereign democracies what they should celebrate and what they should not. I hope, however, that politicians in the region are becoming more responsible.

I think it is more courageous for them to accept that people from their own group have committed crimes than to close their eyes in denial of a historical reality. When I see politicians in Serbia, or Republika Srpska, deny the existence of crimes that have been clearly established by the ICTY, such as the genocide in Srebrenica, then I react: at the EU-level, in the UN Security Council and in interviews.

TYG: One of the characteristics of the ICTY’s work is to outreach to affected communities.

What has effective outreach looked like in the context of the ICTY, and which lessons can be learnt for the future?

Outreach is mainly conducted by the Registry and has proven very difficult, especially in the early years of the Tribunal. The reality is that we are conducting trials far away from the affected communities and in a different lan-

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conversation with 25 guage, which means the proceedings are not easily accessible. The best way to bring justice to the region is for trials to be conducted as close as possible to the affected communities.

Over the past years, we have therefore invested energy in transferring the remaining cases to Serbia and Bosnia. To this end, with funding from the European Commission, we integrated Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian prosecutors within our office. We strongly support these national efforts because that is the best way for justice to be achieved. A lesson learnt is thus that, over time, there should be an investment in capacity building on the local level. This brings me to a significant difference between the ICTY and the ICC. The impunity gap is much smaller at the ICTY. While indictments against 161 persons were confirmed by our Tribunal, hundreds of additional cases are also conducted or to be conducted on the national level. The ICC faces a different situation.

For example, they are working on only three cases related to the Democratic Republic of Congo and don’t have national counterparts to prosecute all the other crimes committed there. The international community should work on closing this impunity gap.

TYG: Why do you think there is this difference between the ICC and the ICTY when it comes to capacity building in national courts?

There are a number of reasons. We have only one situation within our jurisdiction, compared with the ICC which is currently working on eight. Another reason is that, in 2004, the Security Council asked us to transfer cases to the national authorities to support capacity building in the Former Yugoslavia.

The ICC has jurisdiction based only on complementarity. I think that the countries that signed the Rome Statutes were clear in insisting that the core function of the ICC must be investigating and prosecuting crimes. Personally, however, I think that the international community must come up with a strategy on how to deal with lower level cases whenever the ICC has jurisdiction over a situation, in order to reduce the impunity gap.

TYG: Do you see a tension between peace and justice?

I don’t think that a choice between peace and justice should be made. Both must be part of the same strategy. Even for me as a prosecutor favoring prosecution, I fully un-

derstand that timing can be an issue and that, for the resolution of a conflict, it can be reasonable to find a political solution first. What is fundamentally wrong, however, is to speak about impunity and amnesty.

ICTY Prosecutor Serge Brammertz (courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

TYG: Tactics seem to have played a role in your decisions as Prosecutor. You decided to limit the charges against Ratko Mladić, who is tried for the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo, from 196 to 106 charges.

When is it appropriate for a Prosecutor to compromise?

The prosecutor needs to consider the magnitude of the crimes while also ensuring that the trial is manageable. We saw that, in Milošević’s trial, there was a comprehensive indictment but he died before judgment. With Karadžić and Mladić, we therefore reduced the indictments by almost fifty percent. Finding this balance is the most frustrating part of my job, because you have to choose between horrible and even more horrible crimes. It is difficult to explain to survivors why we can include only certain incidents in an indictment.

It is hard to say to a victim: ‘You have been a victim of sexual violence, but unfortunately the evidence is weak and that’s why, strategically, we will pursue another crime with less victims but stronger evidence.’

TYG: Your career is emblematic for what many Yale students see themselves doing in the future. Do you have one particular advice for people who would like to pursue a career in international justice?

In whatever job you start, start by accepting that there are more things you do not know than things you know. Be ready to question the things you know, especially in the international field. I always encourage people to try to understand the historical, religious and political background of their work before expressing any opinions, and to have a critical evaluation of everything. Make up your own opinion before you take up a position.

The interview took place at the European Conference at Harvard, Boston, on Sunday 3rd, 2013. Igor Mitschka ’15 is a Global Affairs major in Saybrook College. Contact him at igor.mitschka@yale.edu.

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26 photo essay

25

Hands Across the Sea

The fight for children’s literacy in Dominica

A

tiny island nestled between Guadeloupe and Martinique, Dominica is something of a secret paradise.

Often confused with the more well-known Dominican Republic, it has managed to escape the resort culture that is pervasive on the surrounding islands. Dominica gained independence from Britain in 1978 and initially experienced economic prosperity because of its active banana trade. However, due to recent changes in global trade, Dominica’ s reliance on its agricultural sector poses a danger to the economy, and the need to diversify has become increasingly important. In order to breed the human capital necessary to foster Dominica’ s progress, the federal government has made secondary school mandatory for all Dominican youth. However, literacy still remains an issue. Hands Across the Sea is an

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NGO that aims to address the issue of literacy across the Caribbean by sending books and arranging libraries in primary schools, with an especially large presence in Dominica. Over the course of 12 days, a Reach Out trip led by Dominican native Illyana Green ‘14 and Jamaican Ashley Ferguson ‘13 traveled to three primary schools with Hands Across the Sea to catalogue books, arrange their libraries, and encourage students to read.

M

arigot Primary School hosts volunteers from the Peace Corps who assist in youth development in the area. Penville Primary School and Paix Bouche Primary School are classified as UNICEF “Child Friendly” schools, which are characterized as “inclusive, healthy and protective for all children, effective with children, and involved with families and communities-

By Semhal Tsegaye

and children. Many of the schools that Hands Across the Sea works with are “Child Friendly schools, because they tend to be more committed to maintain the libraries.

Semhal Tsegaye ’15 is a Political Science major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at semhal.tsegaye@yale.edu.

Clockwise from top left: (1) Shivan, 3rd grade, and Chris, pre-school, watch through the windows as we put the finishing touches on Paix Bouche Primary School’s library; (2) A first grade teacher at Penville looks on as Rebecca Wolonski ’16 reads to her class. (3) Students reading.

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28 photo essay

photo essay 29

Clockwise from top left: (1) Levine ’13 shows students some books from the “Boys favorites” section. (2) Students working at Penville Primary School (3) Students dig through the books that the Reach Out team has sorted. (4) Green discovers her childhood favorite among the books. While we sorted many books that were written by Western authors and had Western storylines, The Nutmeg Princess is driven by a Caribbean narrative. (5) One of the many books with encouraging messages hanging from Paix Bouche’s library ceiling. www.tyglobalist.org