Articles by Peter Custers

For many years the Ivory Coast was cited as an example of successful post-colonial development, based largely on the expansion in cultivation of a single agricultural crop, i e, cocoa beans. In the late 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed structural adjustment programmes on the country. Later the fall in cocoa prices at the farm level and smuggling transformed cocoa into an export product used to finance military campaigns.

The Angolan Civil war is illustrative of the close interconnection that today exists between raw materials and civil wars as well as of the trading structure that characterises the system of disparate exchange. Disparate exchange leads not merely to a drainage of resources and wealth from the poorer southern countries to the north, but also to impoverishment and destruction following the influx of weapons of war, bought by warring parties with income from sale of diamonds, oil and other indegenous wealth.

A Critique Peter Custers IN 1987 and 1988 Bangladesh faced excessive annual floods which drew broad international attention after the flood- waters reached foreign embassies in Dhaka's Gulshan area. Bangladesh's large donors then, after many years' neglect, got alarmed to the devastations caused by the yearly floods, and sent out teams com- peting to find the proper, permanent 'solution' to prevent future flood damages. Thus, the French government under Mitterrand appointed a team of engineers, and others

Peter Custers Japan has for long prided itself on, and has been praised for, maintaining a system of life-long employment with security of jobs and steadily increasing incomes. This paper, based on a month-long tour of factories and workshops, finds a systematic approach to exploitation of women's labour in Japanese capital's international offensive and the Japanese government's policies relating to women labourers.

When General Ershad sought the support of, Jamat-Islam in March he simultaneously announced his resolve to turn Bangladesh officially into an islamic republic This decision deeply hurts the feelings of all those who, with the independence of the country in 1971, had opted for secularism, for separation between religion and the state. The West, which has been so generous with aid for Bangladesh's generals, cannot plead innocence if the terror of 1971 recurs.