Regulating Uber Off The Road

Uber: Going, going, gone?

Uber provides a terrible service in Bogotá!

So terrible, in fact, that many people prefer it over taxis because of Uber's nicer cars, friendlier drivers, greater control and more convenience. So terrible, that taxi drivers and companies are fearing for their carreers.

Is the solution to improve taxi service? Perhaps not. Instead, the government - undoubtedly pressured by the traditional taxi industry - is working on a law intended to legislate Uber out of existence.

The proposed law, which has yet to be reviewed, would require drivers from Uber, Cabify and other

Back to the future of old taxis?

such platforms, to drive only black cars with checkered sides. But that's just the beginning. Drivers would also have to have completed a course in the Sena technical school, completed a second course about how to treat customers, and god only knows what else.

All of these unreasonable, unrealistic requirements are for an industry - the gig economy on wheels - which has been operating pretty well on its own.

Anti-Uber marchers compare the
company to a proveer of prostitutes.

In truth, these proposed regulations have almost nothing to do with improving the quality of ride services. Rather, they're intended to destroy such services in order to protect the taxi drivers' vested economic interests.

'Uber out of Colombia.'

An Uber marketing stand.

Taxi drivers and companies unquestionably find themselves in an unenviable and probably unfair situation in the new economy. But the solution isn't to try to halt change - which has brought lots of benefits in the form of convenient transit and extra income for many people. Instead, the answer is to assist the taxi drivers to improve their service and, ultimately, train for jobs with better prospects.

None of which is to say that ride-sharing platforms don't produce negative impacts, particularly by increasing traffic congestion and pollution. But those are not just the fault of Uber, and should be addressed with a traffic congestion charge, pollution sanctions and other measures.

Incidentally, Colombian tourist guides are threatened by simlarly unreasonable ertification requirements designed to create barriers to entry and protect the interests of a small number of guides who were grandfathered into the industry and often do not even speak the languages needed to do the work.

Professional certifications like these are generally required for professions which involve big risks, such as medicine and engineering, or require intense knowledge, such as law. But driving a car? Telling tourists where Bogotá was founded?

These 'training laws' are really disguised barriers to competitors and attempts to monopolize their industries.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours,

Paying With Our Lungs - and Wallets

'Subsidies for fuels have cost the nation more than 20 trillion pesos.'

Polluting on the public dole.

Bogotá's traffic congestion costs all of us everyday: In stress, pollution, lost time and damaged hearing. However, now El Tiempo reports that every one who pays taxes here is subsidizing every one of those cars, buses and trucks.

A recent report by the government's Mining & Energy Planning Unit calculated that between 2008 and August 2014, Colombia spent 20 trillion pesos subsidizing gasoline and diesel fuels. That's as much money as it plans to spend on the National Development Plan (PND) between 2014 and 2018.

Should Colombia really subsidize this?

There are economic and social justification for subsidizing buses and other mass transit. But I can think of lots better ways to do that than handing out subsidized diesel, which also subsidizes beer trucks owned by Colombia's wealthiest men, those smog-belching buses and trucks on Colombia's roads and gas-guzzling SUVs bereft of emissions controls.

So, fuel subsidies are not only terrible for the economy, but also an inequitable shift of money that should help the poor, to wealthy car and truck owners. Fuel subsidies are bad for cities, for the environment and the economy. But the government fears the protests which raising the price brings.

I can't help observing that, as destructive as Colombia's subsidy is, it's tiny compared to neighboring Venezuela, which is driving itself bankrupt spending about 15% of its GDP subsidizing fuels down to a few cents per gallon.

Take a whiff of that subsidized smoke.

Idling away the nation's wealth.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Disaster Repeats in Venezuela

Coming again soon? 1989 'Caracazo' riots in Caracas, Venezuela.

Venezuelans wait for hours outside a supermarket.

The supermarket shelves are bare - and yet customers sleep overnight outside stores hoping to find something to buy. Inflation is nearing three digits. Civil rights are being suffocated. And things will only get worse.

Government arrogance and incompetence has turned Venezuela into an economic and political disaster area, causing great hardship for Venezuela's 24 million people. And if Venezuela implodes, it'll mean great hardship for Colombia as well.

Last year, Venezuela already boasted the world's highest inflation rate, and widespread shortages of basic goods like coffee, milk, diapers and toilet paper. Then, the price of petroleum, which provides 95% of Venezuela's foreign revenue, nosedived. Today, Venezuela looks increasingly likely to default on payments to both international lenders and to Venezuelans themselves.

Empty shelves in a Venezuelan supermarket.

Pres. Maduro, whose public support is below 28% percent and dropping, has no solutions. His recent begging trip to China and the Middle East produced scant results, and he appears to lack confidence to apply the hard medicine the economy needs to staunch the financial hemorrhaging - devaluing the currency, lifting price controls and eliminating gasoline subsidies, among other measures - because he knows they'd fuel protests. But the alternative - letting things get worse and worse - is setting the stage for a monumental economic implosion and social explosion.

Paralyzed, Maduro has already postponed his annual state-of-the-nation speech twice, because he has nothing to offer.

Maduro, the hand-picked successor of Hugo Chavez, fears making necessary economic adjustments for another reason: Because they would call into question the legitimacy of his so-called 'socialist revolution.' Chavismo traces its roots to the 1989 Caracazo - huge riots triggered by government removal of subsidies on gasoline and other goods. Thousands of people were killed, some by government forces. The discontent fueled the movement which swept Chavez to the presidency a decade later.

Today, Maduro's government is setting the nation up to repeat 1989's catastrophe - but on a larger scale. Gasoline is even more heavily subsidized, and the country is almost completely dependent on oil income, which is dropping precipitously. (Of course, when it all comes crashing down, Maduro & Co. will blame the disaster they created on the United States and neoliberalism.)

When Venezuela implodes, the victims will include Colombia. Venezuela is historically Colombia's second-largest trade partner after the U.S., but a collapsed economy doesn't buy much stuff. And Venezuelan refugees will rush across the border, fleeing lawlessness and desperate for livelihoods. Amid the chaos, narcotrafficking and other crimes will flourish.

Is there a way for Caracas to avoid this calamity? It's hard to see it.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Deforestation Nation

Slowing down? Deforestation in the Colombian Amazon. (Photo: MongaBay)

The news was hopeful, even inspiring. On a planet whose environment condition seems to be worsening at an accelerating rate, Colombian authorities announced in late 2014 that the nation's deforestation rate had plummeted from 310,349 hectares in 2012 to only 120,933 hectares in 2013 - a 60% drop.

Unfortunately, the good news probably wasn't true.

In fact, according to researchers from the Universidad Nacional, deforestation has not dropped, and 400,000 hectares per year.

Colombia is losing forest fastest in the red areas
on the coast and in the Andes.
(Image; Claslite)

is actually much worse than the worst figures. The researchers estimate Colombia's deforestation rate at above

Causes of deforestation include logging, mining and the expansion of agriculture (both legal and illegal).

"If the government wants statistics which serve it for its development plans, it must urgently gain credibility in cases like this one," the university's news service wrote.

The galloping deforestation destroys not only biodiversity and the habitats of indigenous peoples, some of whom are going extinct, but is also eliminating an important part of Colombia's natural patrimony.

Those fast-disappearing forests might otherwise have been sustainably logged, and could also serve as valuable storehouses of carbon, or as sources of medicines and as tourist attractions. Their destruction produces short-term incomes - usually small ones - but destroys the nation's capital. The profits appear on the nation's import-export balance sheet, but the loss is ignored.

Deforestation in the Amazon, including Colombia. Data is from 2007-8. (Map from WWF)

After forests are cut down, the land gets rapidly exhausted, leaving behind erosion and desertification.

The supposed drop in deforestation is not the government's only miraculous environmental statistic. When Bogotá environmental authorities announced this year that the city's air was substantially cleaner, independent experts shook their heads and asked how it was possible, with the number of vehicles increasing and no apparent application of environmental controls.

Tragically for the region's forests, they seem to lose no matter what happens to the economy. When commodity prices were high, so was pressure to deforest to extract materials from wold areas. But as
commodity prices have declined, reducing nations' incomes, countries may frantically cut down trees in order to rip out resources as fast as possible to balance their budgets.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

What El Tiempo Forgot to Mention

'Successful debut for Aval on the New York Stock Exchange.' Aval's owner, it just so happens, also owns El Tiempo.

If you read yesterday's El Tiempo you learned that Grupo Aval, the huge Colombian banking group, made a successful initial offering on Wall Street - altho it didn't make quite as big a splash as did Alibaba.

'Wall Street welcomes
Grupo Aval's Shares.'

But Colombia's leading newspaper neglected to mention that Aval and El Tiempo share the same owner, billionaire Luis Carlos Sarmiento. The news wasn't necessarily distorted - Reuters and Fox business news also described the offering as successful. But you could question the huge spread Sarmiento's newspaper gave his bank. Other Colombian media also reported the offering, but made it their second or third story. 

The website La Silla Vacia also pointed out that El Tiempo has given much less coverage to other stock offerings, including even that of EcoPetrol, Colombia's national oil company, in 2008. La Silla Vacia also observed that El Tiempo gave flattering attention to a highway project in which Sarmientos has interests.

El Tiempo has the right to splash whatever it wants across its pages, and readers have the right to judge the paper's credibility. But in the United States and other nations it's basic journalistic ethics to mention possible conflicts of interest in reporting. Take, for example, the Washington Post's coverage of Amazon Corp. and its owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the newspaper last year.

When Sarmiento, Colombia's richest man with a fortune of $17 billion, purchased El Tiempo in 2012 he probably saw it mostly as a trophy. But when he did so, he promised that the paper's coverage would not be biased by his business interests. Now, the more that he uses it to blow his own horn, the less respect it'll bring him. 

For its part, El Tiempo's smaller but older rival El Espectador has belonged since 1997 to Colombia's second-richest family, the Santo Domingos. A glance at El Espectador's coverage of one of the family's other prominent properties, La Cerveceria Bavaria, finds a lot of flattering coverage, including the information that Colombia's beer consumption is still relatively low. 

I'll wait with bated breath for El Tiempo to do an exposé on Grupo Aval or one of its banks, or for El Espectador to uncover corruption inside Bavaria.

Latin American journalism, unfortunately, is known for corruption and favoring special interests. The ownership of Colombia's two most important newspapers by its two richest families is a test for whether journalistic ethics can stand up to economic interests, and the results don't look so encouraging.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Venezuela Goes Off the Deep End

Hugo Chávez reaches for godliness.

Can a man be God?

Are the victims the aggressors?

Are economic laws really suspended by the Bolivarian Revolution?

Commenting on the progressive disaster in Colombia's neighbor Venezuela means struggling between pathos and laughter. And last week brought laughter.

Venezuela's socialists have long regarded their deceased ex-president Hugo Chavez with a near-religious reverence. And, Venezuela's chavistas have had a long-running clash with the Catholic Church. But Venezuela remains a deeply Catholic nation.

So, how to shift the people's allegiance to the 'socialist revolution'?

Well, how about making the deceased Chávez god? A group of Venezuelan revolutionaries took the first step toward that this week by replacing the traditional Padre Nuestro (Our Father) with Chávez Nuestro (Our Chávez). The Catholic Church, naturally, criticized the replacement of Christianity's founder and greatest prophet with a failed coup leader and authoritarian president.

Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro told the 'inquisition' to mind its own business. But, with its sagging economy and soaring inflation and crime rates, Venezuela had better pray to somebody.

With a huge government deficit, the Bolivarian Revolutión has to turn somewhere to fill its fiscal gap. And what better source of financing than a fellow authoritarian petrostate like Russia? And how to stay in Russia's good graces? Try reinterpreting the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which almost all the rest of the world sees as a calculated, violent territorial grab by Russia against its smaller neighbor.

According to the Venezuelanalysis website: Maduro criticized the "threats" made by the United States and Europe, insisting that "Russia defends itself, and is then accused of employing aggressive politics against the West." 

"We in Venezuela demand in a clear voice … that those who accuse and accost Russia desist the attack, desist from seeking war with Russia. Peace!"

Yes, why won't those darn war-mongering Westerners quit provoking those peaceful Russian soldiers, tanks and missiles now invading eastern Ukraine?

And Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution long ago declared normal economic laws, such as supply and demand, suspended in revolutionary territory. That's produced the world's highest inflation rate, widespread shortages and huge smuggling economies along the Venezuelan-Colombian border.

Recently, however, the government hinted that it would actually reduce its disastrous gasoline subsidy, which costs Venezuela billions of dollars per year and enriches smugglers. But this week Pes. Maduro seemed to make clear that his government is too afraid of protests to actually charge for gasoline. Instead, it'll continue blaming 'conspirators and coup mongers' for the fact that the country's an economic basket case.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Year Without Hugo Chávez

A year without Hugo Chavez, who died a year ago yesterday...has brought Venezuela closer to social and economic breakdown. That's bad for Venezuela, and also for Colombia, especially if Venezuela's chaos spills across the border.

A year without Hugo Chavez...has brought further decline in Venezuela's economy. Inflation is over 50%, basic products like toilet paper are hard to find and the budget deficit keeps growing.

A year without Hugo Chavez...has seen increased government repression and further restrictions on the media - a predictable result of an uncharismatic president struggling to hold on to power amidst a disintegrating economy.

Yesterday, a young Venezuelan guy did the bike tour. He's in Colombia on his way back to his homeland - if they'll let him in. His family fled Venezuela more than six years ago because his father, an opposition politician, feared persecution if he stayed. They now live in another Latin American nation, which I won't name just in case the family could be identified. The young man wants to visit Venezuela because a grandmother recently died. But he fears what the government might do to him because some of his relatives were and are active opponents of the government: They might not let him in; they might let him in and seize his passport; they might let him enter and not let him leave again. It all sounds a bit like the old Soviet Union or even North Korea, where children are punished for their parents' 'sins.'

That's the story of just more victim of Chavez's revolution.

While Chavez lived and ruled, Venezuela was, at least, pretty stable. Under Nicolas Maduro, who lacks Chavez's charisma and political acumen, the country appears to be unraveling.

Venezuela, it seems, could go one of several ways: It might continue with its ongoing instability, with the government exercising periodic repression to maintain control. Or, Venezuela's economy and government might really collapse if the government fails to pay its debts and the military and poor neighborhoods align with the opposition. That scenario could bring anything from genuinely democratic elections, a military government or a full-on dictatorship. More likely, however, is that Maduro or a successor will manage to hold on to power by becoming more and more authoritarian.

The most positive outcome, for both Colombia and Venezuelans, also happens to be the least likely: That Maduro will recognize that his policies have driven the economy into the ground and repressed normal civil society and agree to step aside and allow free elections.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

What's Wrong With Robusta?

A sack of Colombian arabica coffee. Why not robusta, as well?

Colombia exports nearly all of the coffee it grows - and imports 80 to 90% of the coffee it drinks.

This paradoxical situation has been the source of much angst and even protests by Colombians, who feel it's wrong for the country to send its best arabica beans to rich countries, and keep only the defective beans and cheaper imports for Colombians to drink.

Freshly roasted Colombian
arabica beans.

Altho exporting that good arabica coffee makes economic sense, since the beans bring high prices internationally, importing even cheap beans does not. Most of Colombia's coffee imports - from Peru and Ecuador - but occasionally from as far away as Vietnam - are the cheaper, bitterer and smaller robusta beans. In contrast to arabica beans, which are grown in small plots at high altitude, generally under tree cover, robusta beans grow in corn-style monocultures at lower altitudes. Arabica is harvested by hand, robusta with machines. Robusta, as its name suggests, is hardier and more resistant to diseases. The beans also contain about twice as much caffeine and have a stronger, harsher taste.

Some other coffee producing nations, particularly Brazil, grow both the arabica and robusta varieties.

Regions of Colombia where arabica
coffee is cultivated.
(Image: Cafe de Colombia)

At a recent national meeting, Colombian coffee growers rejected a proposal for the country to plant robusta beans.

"We're against robusta," Marcelo Salazar, a coffee planters' representative from Caldas Department, told Reuters. "It doesn't require much labor, it's much cheaper in the international market...and doesn't reflect the quality of Colombian coffee."

It's true that Colombia, the world's fourth-largest coffee producer, has built its reputation for good coffee by planting expensive, high-quality beans. And that solid reputation deserves to be protected.

Samples of 'green' and roasted Colombian arabica beans.
The piles on the left are cheap beans for the domestic
market; on the right are export quality beans.

But robusta and arabica beans are so different in how and where they are grown and in their markets and uses, that they might as well be considered different crops.

Chains like Starbucks, which plans to open cafes in Colombia next year, mix arabica beans for their taste and quality with robusta beans for their higher caffeine content. When Starbucks lands in Colombia, it will be importing robusta.

Arabica and robusta coffee beans.
(Photo: Whole Latte Love)

Robusta could be planted on Colombia's Llanos Orientales - the low elevation Eastern Plains region - far from the mountains where arabica grows. To protect Colombian coffee's international image, the robusta could be packaged differently, clearly marked 'robusta' and without the title 'Cafe de Colombia' label. And, the robusta wouldn't even have to be exported. They could plant only enough to replace what's now imported, providing more jobs and income at home.

But this is a great example of vested interests at work. At the recent meeting arabica coffee farmers were eager to denounce the supposed threat of that evil robusta bean. No robusta coffee farmers were there to sing their bean's praises simply because they don't exist in Colombia. And, the way things are going, they probably never will.



By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours