Alliance Online - April 2007

Interview Norine MacDonald

Taking the heat

When funders talk about risk, they are usually referring to the risk that the money they put into a project may not have the effect they anticipated or may be wasted. But risk can refer to the possibilities of making powerful enemies and suffering actual bodily harm, as Caroline Hartnell found out when she talked to Norine MacDonald about the work of Senlis Afghanistan, which is proposing alternatives to the current US and UK policy of destroying the Afghan opium poppy crop.

Could you start by saying a bit about how the Senlis Council is funded and what your role is?

The Senlis Council is a project of the Mercator Fund, which is in turn a project of the Network of European Foundations (NEF). I’m the president of the Gabriel Foundation, which is a member of NEF and from which the Mercator Fund’s money comes. I’m managing director of the Mercator Fund, and I’m the president and founder and lead field researcher of the Senlis Council and Senlis Afghanistan – so I have many different hats. I spend about 80 per cent of my time in Afghanistan – basically I live there.

So the Mercator Fund has established the Senlis Foundation to do the drug policy work rather than funding an existing organization?

When we first started working in drug policy we couldn’t find the type of project that we wanted to fund, which was a combination of research on the impact of global drug policy, new initiatives in the area, and advocacy for change. As that didn’t exist, we founded the Senlis Council to fill the gap. The Senlis Council works in a number of countries but its work in Afghanistan is the riskiest and the most high profile.

What is the Senlis Council doing in Afghanistan?

About three years ago it became clear that even after the establishment of the new government there, Afghanistan was still the world’s largest producer of opium for heroin, so the country was important in its own right from a drug policy point of view, but it was also important as a laboratory for drug policies. Based on our research, we had been critics of the dominant global drug policy, which tends to criminalize drug users rather than considering the humanitarian healthcare aspects.

So we were concerned that drug policy in Afghanistan, where the international community is very active, should be an effective and appropriate one. We felt that in Afghanistan the farmers, many of whom are very poor, should be helped rather than demonized. So we did a feasibility study on the licensing of opium production in Afghanistan for morphine and codeine. There is a global shortage of morphine and codeine, and most developing countries have no access to them.

But opium production in Afghanistan is very linked to security and development concerns, so it was important to us to make sure that the drug policy we were promoting also made sense from that point of view. Part of the problem is that there’s very little else that you can currently grow in Afghanistan: the country suffers from droughts and opium poppies are a crop that can grow in places without much water. The US and the UK were pursuing a forced poppy crop eradication policy in Afghanistan, which meant the farmers’ crops were ploughed under, leaving them no way to feed their families. It causes great hardship and fuels insurgency, so we were not only promoting opium licensing for medicine as an alternative livelihood; we were against this policy of eradication because of the very dramatic and negative effect it has on local people, which means that they are much more open to Taliban insurgency propaganda.

Have other organizations adopted this sort of approach?

It’s happening in Turkey and India. Once we started looking into it we realized that it’s not a new idea. In the 1960s, opium was grown for heroin in Turkey and India and it was going into the US. The Nixon government financed several years of forced poppy crop eradication in Turkey, which led to a great deal of political instability, so eventually they gave up and instead financed Turkey to convert its production to medicine. They signed a preferential trade agreement with Turkey so that now the US has a guaranteed supply of morphine and codeine – something which only the six richest countries have.

Even in the UK, for example, the British Medical Association recently started a conversation about getting diamorphine from the Afghan farmers because there are occasional critical shortages of diamorphine in the UK. The World Health Organization has identified painkillers as an essential type of medicine, and one of which there’s a critical shortage. There’s also an expense issue, in that most Western drugs are too expensive for most developing countries. So our policy does address two separate crises at the same time, the opium crisis in Afghanistan and also what WHO describes as the global pain crisis.

How does the programme in Afghanistan work?

We did an extensive feasibility study which looked at all aspects of production, supply and demand. We’ve asked for permission to pilot projects to test the ideas that came out of the study, and we’re hoping to have that for the next planting season. But for the moment the US and the UK prefer to continue the eradication policy, which is extremely expensive and breeds violence since there’s no provision for dealing with the economic situation of the farmers.

So what are the risks – for the Senlis Council and obviously for the Mercator Fund – in funding this?

First of all, when you’re challenging an established policy in an area as sensitive as drug production and use, there’s a risk that people will try and misinterpret your objectives, so you have to manage that risk and constantly reassure people and explain what your intentions are and what your goals are. What we’re trying to do is come up with an effective and humane drug policy. When you go to a place like Afghanistan that’s very controversial from a global security point of view, you’re just increasing the tension around any conversation about drug policy. US policy on narcotics is not very open to debate, and they tend to react harshly to anyone who suggests that their drug war policies are ineffective or inappropriate. On top of that, you’re talking about the future of Afghanistan, which is a topic that many people don’t want raised.

And what does that mean practically? Does it mean that people will block what you’re trying to do for instance?

Yes. That happens. I don’t want to talk about this too specifically, so let me put it this way: everybody who’s involved has to be committed to the idea that a debate on policies is correct and appropriate. Even if there are people who don’t want you to talk about a certain topic, you have to be able to and it’s not acceptable to be told that it’s not appropriate to discuss this area of policy. If you’re not committed to the principle of open debate, the first thing that happens is that the people who don’t like your message want to ‘kill the messenger’. For example, we have a lot of private support for our work and our viewpoint, but in the climate that surrounds the issue of drug policy, a lot of people who support us must remain private because of the political consequences for them.

Is there a danger that the whole programme will run aground? If there is, how do funders feel about that?

I think the higher the risk, the greater the heat you have to be willing to tolerate, and you have to be willing to maintain commitment in the face of opposition, either open or covert. In the investment community, they talk about ‘creating alpha’, which means achieving returns that exceed expectations. When you look at investment portfolios, you can choose one that’s low risk or high risk. You get a lower rate of return on a lower risk portfolio. On a higher risk portfolio of course there’s a risk you’ll lose all your investment, but normally you get a higher rate of return.

The changes we are proposing are dramatic; they would affect a lot of people. So you have to set up a system where you can manage the risk. In Afghanistan there are all types of risk – political risk, risk that you’ll lose your investment, risk that you will be ostracized in some way because of the political views or the debate that you’re promoting – but if you’re successful the return is very high.

So the funder will go into this situation accepting the possibility of a very high return and the unwelcome possibility that the whole thing will fail because you can’t manage the risk?

Exactly. And that’s not very common. We get a lot of compliments about our work but only a small group of people are willing to engage in it.

Is the Afghan Government supportive of what you’re doing?

They accept our presence there, but the counter-narcotics policies of Afghanistan are financed and pretty much administered by the US and UK Governments, who do not agree with our criticisms of their policies or with the alternatives that we propose. So we’re very respectful of the Afghan Government, but they’re not in any position to be openly supportive of our work. But, constitutionally, they must be committed to the freedom of speech of Afghans, and as I said most of the people who work for us are Afghans – so everybody’s learning.

Are there other influential groups in the country that do support what you’re doing or are you so isolated that nobody could afford to support you?

Politically, it would be very difficult at the moment, and civil society barely exists in Afghanistan. It’s a new idea, there’s no financing for it, there’s no capacity, there’s no infrastructure; almost everybody who has an education or can read and write left the country during the war, out of absolute necessity. So what you’re left with is a country that’s completely ravaged. I think the female literacy rate is around 2 per cent, and most people who can read and write have fought for that privilege. So the entire concept of doing research and writing reports and having press conferences, all of that, is very, very new there. It’s like chaotic open space, and most Afghans are just struggling to get by.

How long is the present research programme?

It’s scheduled to run until the end of 2008 but, as I said, the UK and the US have not so far agreed to us running a pilot project. I’m ready to do one, and we’ve offered to finance it, but we don’t have permission yet. So the next thing that has to happen is to get permission to run the pilot projects in the next planting season, which is this fall.

And is that likely?

Well, there’s a lot of debate about it now because it’s becoming more and more clear that eradication doesn’t work. Cultivation is actually up 60 per cent despite the eradication strategies, because there are no alternative livelihoods. The British Medical Association says it needs diamorphine. In Canada one of the major political parties, the liberal party, has called for implementation of alternative strategies, as has a group of conservative MPs in the UK and the Italian Red Cross. So it’s a question now of whether the UK and the US insist on continuing with this failing and expensive policy or whether they will agree that it’s time to try something new.[1]

Afghanistan is a war zone, so there must be physical risks to yourself and to your staff. Presumably these were also things you discussed when you went into this programme?

Yes. And in the over two years that we’ve been there, we’ve learned a lot. When I think back to when I first went to Afghanistan and what I didn’t know, it’s shocking. Senlis Afghanistan, when everybody’s working, is around 70 people, and there are only three of us who are not Afghan. One of the principles I had from the beginning was that Senlis Afghanistan really has to be an Afghan organization. It is primarily run by Afghans; most of the research is done by Afghans; the administrative staff are all Afghans. Now that really helps us from a security point of view because we are less conspicuous.

We westerners dress like Afghans when we’re there, and we go around like Afghan civilians, not with a big western military convoy. I actually dress as an Afghan man – I chose that over wearing the burkha; those were my two choices – and the Afghans that I work with and the people that I meet in southern Afghanistan are used to that. Luckily they have different types of headgear in different parts of Afghanistan, and almost all of the things that they wear allow you to have something that you can pull over your face or over your head. So from the point of view of the cultural necessities I’m in some way able to at least symbolically cover my head or my face, and I’ve been able to manage so far without offence.

I’m sure there must have been times when you have felt physically in danger.

Two of our field offices are in a war zone. There’s fighting and bombing there every day, and when we go out we’re very mindful of security. The presence of a westerner with my Afghan staff puts them at risk because the Taliban will injure or kill Afghans for collaborating with westerners. So we spend a certain portion of every day on questions of security, we change vehicles, we make sure all the local commanders know we’re there and what we’re doing.

I make a point of always having as good relationships as I can with the local commanders, and doing what I can for the villages and for the mosques in the areas that we’re working in. You’d want to do it anyhow, as it’s an important part of our relations with the communities that we’re working in, but it’s also very important for our security that they know us and believe that our commitment to understanding their situation and being advocates for them is genuine.

Most people who work for Western foundations probably never feel personally at risk. Your experience must be very different?

Well, I think it’s going back to the point about the risk-return ratio. In this project everybody who’s involved understands that although the risks are high the returns could be high, from the point of view of global policy change and the effect on the Afghan people.

Do you have people around you who’ve wanted to dissuade you, people you are close to you who are not happy with what you’re doing?

Absolutely, continually, family and friends and colleagues. I’ve decided to take it as a sign of affection.

Say you were killed in Afghanistan, do you think that it would rebound badly for the Mercator Fund and the Senlis Council, that it would be said that they took an unwarranted degree of risk?

We’ve discussed that possibility, and I think that everybody who’s involved is well aware of what we’re doing, so I would like to think that that wouldn’t be the end of the project.

Can I just ask you to talk briefly about the Raymond Georis Prize?[2]

The idea behind the prize was to draw attention to people who are doing more innovative philanthropic projects, who are really dealing with the more edgy, more controversial issues in new ways. It’s true there’s a lot of really excellent work done in a classic philanthropic way, but we wanted to reward people who are willing to take risks and try something different. We’re looking for a project that shows European leadership. It can be something that hasn’t been done before, or an issue that’s controversial. As I said earlier, one of the problems you have when you enter a controversial or new area is that the people doing it have to tolerate the sense of discomfort of everybody else in the community. We wanted to reward people who are willing to take those risks and say, ‘Good for you, that you, your organization, your foundation was willing to take some risks and explore some new territory in philanthropy.’

So it’s the same philosophy as is behind the Senlis Council work?

Yes. We don’t all just want to be curators of one type of philanthropy or one set of issues or one way of doing our work. The world is changing rapidly, we’re faced with a lot of very challenging issues, and we need innovation in all parts of the philanthropic sector, so we have to reward the innovators. We need a whole kaleidoscope of approaches because we have so many difficult challenges. So we just wanted to draw attention to those people who were doing that type of work and say ‘good for you’.

1 According to the Independent on Sunday (1 April), UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has ordered a review of the UK’s counter-narcotics strategy – including the possibility of legalizing some poppy production.

2 For information about how to nominate someone, visit www.mercatorfund.net. Deadline for nominations is 13 April.

Norine MacDonald QC is president of the Gabriel Foundation, managing director of the Mercator Fund, and president, founder and lead field researcher of the Senlis Council and Senlis Afghanistan. Email info@senliscouncil.net

For further information
www.mercatorfund.net
www.senliscouncil.net

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