Production underway on CI Access to Knowledge film

CI Head of Media, Luke Upchurch on new developments in CI's work on intellectual property.

As part of CI’s Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme we are producing a short film to look at the ways in which strict copyright laws are affecting consumer rights around the world.

The film will examine the extent to which some companies are demonising consumer behaviour as they seek to hold on to and expand outdated copyright laws. It will look at arguments around the need for a renegotiation of intellectual property laws in the digital age and the roles businesses, governments and consumers are playing in this rapidly changing environment.

Filming kicked off in Paris at a recent A2k Network meeting and at the TACD Paris Accord summit. With contributions from leading figures in the field; from hip hip legend Hank Shocklee, to renowned IP activists Fred Von Lohmann and Michael Geist, the film will seek to set out the critical issues at play in the debate over the future of copyright and access to knowledge.

Release is scheduled for May 2010, so keep an eye on A2knetwork.org for further details.

Meeting ASCOMA in Mali

Sarah Henson, Grants Management Officer, meets ASCOMA in a house in Mali.

Last week I visited our members ASCOMA in Bamako, Mali, Africa to agree on a process to bring the EC funded biosafety project to a successful close at the end of December 2009.

Bamako appears to be a typical African city – dusty, pot holed roads, lots of traffic and most people risking their lives by travelling by motorbike without helmets and randomly cutting in front of cars.

There is a festival at the end of November so the sides of the roads were filling up with traders selling their sheep for slaughter. As we crossed the magnificent Niger river on the way to meet the ASCOMA staff I had a brief glimpse of fishermen heading out in their canoes and discovered that hippos lurk upstream. It appears that most visitors use Bamako as a stopover before they head on to the Dogon region or to Timbuktu – yes it does exist!

We met the President of ASCOMA, Salimata Diarra, in her house, as there is no power in the part of town where their offices are based, so it’s used mostly as an archive while meetings take place in her house. However she has no Internet connection at home either so all external correspondence has to take place in an Internet cafe, which has obvious cost implications with the taxi to get there and hourly rates to use the Internet. That answers the question of why we hear so rarely from our ASCOMA colleagues!

I was told that the bill on biosafety in Mali was adopted in February 2007 and passed in November 2008, however it is yet to be implemented and the ASCOMA team are carefully watching the frustratingly slow implementation of the law while regularly meeting with the various stakeholders to keep them informed of the process. GMOs is a sensitive subject so the remaining few weeks will be spent on targeted awareness raising of the merits of the law.

It was a short visit but I find it invaluable to have face-to-face meetings and get a real idea of the challenges faced by our members.

Nadim's first weeks at CI London

Nadim Berro (Rhoda Karpatkin advocate from Consumers Lebanon) talks about his first impressions of London with CI.

Well, having lived in two different capitals, Paris and Beirut. I found out that living in London is pretty much different and even if I’ve been here for only 15 days, one can quickly see that people are very friendly in general!

I came back last weekend from France with a lot of ideas about future campaigns we may monitor on Financial Services. I wrote a brief report on my meetings with UFC-Que Choisir and CLCV on subjects such as food safety and health, social media and blogging. Dispute resolution and complaint centres issues were also discussed during our meetings.

Well apart from London’s amazing architecture and creative aspect, it has always something new to offer me, from its museums to its public squares, from its various communities to its open-air markets and certainly from its English breakfast to its 5 o’clock break…

I would like to know more about how people feel after living here for several years, but what I really appreciate is that things here are always moving – public and private areas are always changing their trends and habits. This is a different way to look at issues like art, restoration and business.

My 2nd week at CI London

In his second week in London at CI, Dieunedort Wandji (Rhoda Karpatkin advocate from RACE Cameroon Africa) finds words are powerful.

 

As the saying goes, knowledge is power! And fortunately enough, just about anybody can become very powerful nowadays, for most of humankind’s knowledge is written. So, reading is power!

The same holds true for consumer issues. After meeting several consumer specialists in Week 1, I found myself with a great deal of notes, brochures, books, magazines, paper files and links to useful websites. I created a special folder in my CI Inbox, called 'Read Again', to save important emails. Week 2 and part of Week 3 are dedicated to digging them all up. 

I read, read and read. And the more I read, the more powerful I grow as a consumer advocate.

My new reading habit made me curious about the free newspapers found in the London Underground. At first, I couldn’t understand why the morning trains were full of people eagerly reading papers they hadn’t paid a penny for.

Oh! I was wrong to think that 'since these newspapers cost nothing, the content is chicken's feet'.

No, it is worth reading the Metro or Evening Standard. It's another great way of tapping into the everyday British life. For instance, I was both shocked and amused when I read that a father of three had died of toothache. He had consistently refused to see a doctor, and instead had been 'having a few hot drinks' to heal himself. I have come across such stupid and stubborn characters in Cameroon as well!

Nutrition conference: no unhealthy foods, just unhealthy consumers. Hubert Linders, CI Information Adviser, finds this hard to swallow.

Last week I participated in the most important conference for nutritionists in Latin America to officially launch the PAHO policy statement on reducing salt intake. About 2000 professionals and students were in Santiago to learn about diets, micronutrients, functional foods, food safety, or malnutrition, which not only means that there are people sick or dying because they don't have enough to eat. Increasingly it is used for overweight and obese people who eat too much processed food with high levels of salt, sugar and fat.

According to the industry, there are no good or bad foods, only unhealthy diets and a sedentary life. If that's true, why is fast food offered in huge portions? Or are fruit juices produced with flavours that don’t come close to the taste of the fruit shown on the packaging?

Asking companies, present with samples of their products, they told me ‘this is what the consumer wants.’ I very much doubt that. Does the industry produce what consumers want or do we eat what they offer because there are almost no other options? True, there are products called ‘light’, with less salt and better quality, but why do they always have to be more expensive?

If the industry produces what we want, why spend billions of dollars a year in advertising? On several occasions during the congress I heard that nutritionists have to educate consumers, called ‘patients’, because they don't know the truth. It seems obvious that they do not, simply by the fact that food ‘rich’ in salt, sugars and fats are more and more aggressively marketed in all media including TV, radio, Internet and on billboards, kiosks, schools and sporting or cultural events.

All this marketing is paid for by an industry that would have us believe that it is only our fault that almost all of us suffer from overweight and diseases like hypertension, while they want to ‘hook’ us on salty, sugary and greasy foods as young as possible. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

CI London Office makeover

Kate Scott, Office Manager at CI, blogs about the frustrating first steps in the London Office’s refurb.

After a whirlwind three weeks of sourcing boxes, crates, movers, temporary offices and a new phone system – just a few of things that had to be done to get us out of Highbury Crescent – we finally moved into our temporary offices on Friday 23 October. And I think we're just about settled now.

We now move on to the refurbishment of our much-neglected old building, which will be a complete 'head to toe, inside & out' makeover. As soon as we left the building our contractors, Chestnut Ltd, were straight on site putting up scaffolding and stripping out anything and everything that isn't a solid part of the building...including cutting through the alarm wires and setting it off! So I had to make an emergency dash over there last week to get the alarm turned off!

The inside of the building is now looking very naked and sad and the outside is unrecognisable as it's covered in scaffolding and blue tarpaulin.

The challenge right now is to work with the contractors and surveyor to make sure that we can get as many of the requested improvements as possible included in these building works.

Frustratingly it has taken over three weeks to get together all the final costs for me to present them to Sam and Joost for authorisation and many items are coming in at higher costs than expected.

This delay is now in danger of holding everything up, as the builders can't get stuck into the work until the full plan of works is finalised, so the pressure is on to make final, final decisions on what we will or won't do. This should all be sorted out in the next 48 hours though and I'm hopeful we'll get most of what we want.

Next week the working group has a visit planned to a furniture show room so that they can put together a proposal for our new look interior. Hopefully we'll have something more solid on that to share with everyone in a couple of weeks.

click on a photo to see them all full size

Luke at Egypt workshops

Luke Upchurch, Head of Media at CI, talks sugar prices and pyramids in Cairo.

I recently attended a two-day EC TAIEX workshop in Cairo, Egypt – a new initiative to promote consumer-group capacity building in non-European countries. It was a great couple of days, with some really enlightening input from leaders of the Egyptian consumer movement.

Efforts to establish consumer receipts as common practice, concerns over the rising price of sugar, and ideas for the numerous state-based consumer groups to form an association were discussed at length.

Together with presentations on lobbying techniques from BEUC, and institutional capacity from our member from Ireland, I was able to share CI's experience on coordinated campaigning, and lead a workshop on communications strategies for small-sized consumer organisations.


A busy couple of days. So packed in fact, that by the time I managed to get to the pyramids on the final afternoon, they had shut for the day! Six thousand years of history and I got there too late!