Thank you very much for your question. It's a very important question and I don't know if we have an answer, because we find it very hard to try to transpose ourselves from here in our ILD third-world conditions into what it must mean to be working on or being concerned about these things in the way you Canadians are sensitive about development, to a degree that most developed countries are not.
First of all, the main issues are of a political order. In other words, I would stop looking at the issues of empowerment and poverty as technical...it's a political order. Let me give you a story. It's an indiscretion on my part, but it will give you an idea.
We were called into Ethiopia in 2006, five years ago. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called us after having been told by some of our friends in the west that he had to do something about property rights. They had even given him the book.
Meles Zenawi, a former Marxist, said frankly: “I don't understand what you're talking about. We're a different culture. Stop giving me Mr. de Soto's book”. He had a little wooden cabinet and he opened it up to the person who was then the administrator of USAID, a man called Mr. Natsios. He said, “I already have five copies, so why do I need six copies of the book?” It was a very hostile answer. It was the first time we had been asked to go to a country and they basically let us set our own agenda. So we said, “Well, everybody tried, and that's it”.
About six months, later the secretary of Mr. Meles Zenawi wrote to us in Peru and said, “Come on over, I would like to talk to you”. Obviously he was intellectually interested. He said, “Let's talk about it for four hours, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and let's agree on a date”. So we did.
Before my meeting with Mr. Meles Zenawi, which lasted about four hours, I asked Mr. Mayorga to head up a little team of about six people and go to Addis Ababa before I did. When my meeting with Meles Zenawi began a few days later, at 2 p.m. exactly on the dot, he said to me: “You obviously have something to sell. I understand. I'm going to sit and see if you can convince me”. I said, “Before that, let me go through the protocol. According to good old third-world tradition I owe you a present, so here's my present”.
I handed him over a package. He said, “Must I open it now?” I said, “Yes, protocol indicates that you open the present first”. I learned that because my parents were diplomats in Canada, which is where I learned my English at the age of five. I knew that you had to come in with a present first. He opened the package and saw a bunch of old yellowed paper. He asked what it was. I said that my people had travelled eight blocks around the government palace in Addis Ababa to find out if people had titles to their homes and that in spite of him being a Marxist, they all have titles to their homes. That's the present, I told him. I said that those titles hadn't been signed by him, but signed in part by his opposition and in part by local leaders, but certainly by people who didn't like him because he wasn't giving them the titles they needed and wanted.
The first thing one has to do in developing countries is indicate that titles are already in place. We haven't gone to any place in the world--whether it be Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Afghanistan, Thailand, Mongolia, or India--where we haven't found that everything is already titled. It is, of course, titled in very primitive ways, like the way it is in the Amazon, and it's not very well updated, but everybody knows where everybody is according to some kind of local law. The problem, of course, is that you're talking about thousands of local laws, so when you don't have standards, sometimes titles mean very little.
But all of this is to tell you that on that side of the world divide, the first problem is political--and by the way, we're hired now.
This man trained as a Marxist just couldn't believe that it couldn't be communal. The fact is that there are many things that are communal, but there are many things that are individual or family-oriented as well. Both realities exist. What you have to do is simply find out and ask, and not many people do. In many of our cases in the developing countries, it's because the place is dominated by anthropologists who have worked for Discovery Channel, and they just like to think that we like to huddle around the fireplace and there's no individuality involved. But the practice is that the world is mixed.
On the other side, our problem is that when a head of state of a developing country calls a head of state of a developed country to ask for help in giving property rights to people, what the developed country does is bring out all sorts of devices, the purpose of which is to measure land and geographical information systems. I think that in Canada you also call it geomatics, the purpose of which is essentially to measure the land, but it doesn't solve the issue of who actually has a right to the land.
When you try to get close to that issue, you get into what we call the property rights wars, which means that the developed countries split into two: the left, which believes that property rights are an instrument of the right to exploit--which in some cases it is, obviously--and on the other hand, the right, which believes that property rights are crucial to development. The real question, as in the case of Meles Zenawi, should be this: what do people really want? Because you're not going to make them do what they don't want at all.
There is an ideological problem there. We find that in many agencies of development throughout the world there is a refusal to...a wish to understand that many of the poor people in the world have seen globalization, one edge of it, somewhere or other, whether it's the machete in their hands or the outboard motor on their canoe. They've seen what the west is like. They have actually moved very much towards doing something about being not necessarily communal about their property, but they can't find the correspondent in the west who will want to help, because they also have a romantic view of what our people are.
I know I'm rambling on and on, but I really think that all the technology that's necessary to map, to register, is there. What is missing is all those things that you did in the west when you broke down the feudal and tribal systems and went from being organized like Obélix and Astérix, or began going from a feudal organization in Britain to becoming one where patrimony, feudality, and tribalism were actually replaced by systems of property rights, where people could decide how they held their lands and their assets regardless of the government's preferences.
We were talking about Ethiopia. Until it is clear at the level of government that people should be left to decide, as they probably are in Canada, whether they're going to be a hippy commune, a kolkhoz, a sovkhoz, a cooperative, a limited liability company.... That's a personal choice. What you have to do is make all of that available in terms that local people can understand. That would be the first thing. Then you can get ownership going, because for all the rest, we have the maps, we have the technology, and we have the software.
The issue is still that property rights, or the words “property rights”, are very conflictive, and I'm not sure I got this across. It's a very conflictive term that tears people apart, both in developing and developed countries. Sometimes we think that what we would have to do is actually find a new word for this, something that isn't so explosive, something that doesn't get everybody so emotional,. That's why we like to talk about “control”, but for the moment, we unfortunately don't have that in English.
We would be able to do something like that in Latin America, but you see, in Latin America, we have the Royal Academy of the Spanish language, so eventually we could amass votes and change the vocabulary, but you can't do that in English.