World leaders deeply rooted in the Kiwi way

By SIMON COLLINS

When the Taleban suddenly abandoned most of Afghanistan in November, it was a New Zealander, Ross Mountain, who took charge of United Nations efforts to provide humanitarian relief to the war-ravaged Afghans.

In Jerusalem, when effective civil war broke out between Israel and Palestine, the chief administrative officer of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, which was caught in the middle of the shooting, was another New Zealander, James Baldie.

In The Hague, when former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic appeared in the dock at a special International Criminal Tribunal in July, another Kiwi, Steven Upton, was the deputy chief investigator.

Although World Trade Organisation chief Mike Moore and Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon are well known, behind the scenes New Zealanders are world leaders in an amazing variety of ways.

One of the most remarkable is an almost unknown Kerikeri agronomist, John Greenfield, who has championed a grass species that can stop soil erosion in tropical countries and transform wasteland into productive farms.

Dr Ngaire Woods, a former Aucklander who now chairs a working party on global financial governance, says international public policy is "full of New Zealanders".

"New Zealand does have an internationalist strand right through its population," she says. "We are going abroad and doing things that are still consistent with NZ values, but we are just working on them in an international setting."

John Greenfield's story is a classic one. Originally from Hawkes Bay, he farmed sheep and cattle before deciding: "There is nothing you can tell farmers here, they know it all. If you want to do something useful, you might as well go and live in the tropics."

So in 1950 he got a job with Colonial Sugar Refining in Fiji, where he was asked to find a way to expand the sugar plantations from the flat land to the hills.

After various experiments, he discovered a spiky, deep-rooted grass called vetiver which, if planted along the contour of the hills, succeeded in stopping erosion, holding back rainwater and allowing the water to seep slowly into the soil.

In India, vetiver grass transformed a flat area of salty and alkaline desert into a forest of grass, shrubs and trees within 20 years.

The vetiver grass blocked the drying winds and reduced the erosion they caused, and provided protection for other growing plants.

Even more remarkably, vetiver's roots absorbed toxic wastes being washed down by the rain, preventing it from seeping into the groundwater supply.

"The plant is a fungicide which stops the fungus from germinating. It's a pesticide. The leaves from it make an excellent mulch, so for organic farmers it's fantastic," Mr Greenfield says.

"It can be underwater for six months [in a flood] and survive. It's a truly amazing plant."

After discovering its virtues in Fiji, Mr Greenfield applied for a job in the World Bank, but was told he needed more experience. So he went to Hawaii instead, and then to Iraq, Spain, Ghana, Sudan, Vietnam and Jordan, working for various agencies.

Twenty-three years later, the World Bank finally heard about his work and offered him a job. In 1985, when the bank posted him to India, he was able at last to promote vetiver on a wide scale.

His main enemies were established businesses, which were making millions out of highly engineered soil erosion and flood control schemes that were far too costly to be practicable for most of the country.

"The [vetiver] hedges just cost the nursery. Once the farmers have the material, it doesn't cost them anything," he says.

From India, the idea spread. Mr Greenfield wrote a vetiver handbook designed to fit into a farmer's pocket. It has sold a million copies, in more than 100 countries.

A Vetiver Network is now based in Washington. Though he "retired" in 1990, Mr Greenfield is still on its board of directors, and has just delivered to Washington a 300-page manuscript for a new book on vetiver.

His only regret is that vetiver has yet to be used in his home country, apart from a single cut slope on a private road near Kerikeri.

Ngaire Woods is another quiet leader who is unknown at home. Brought up in Torbay and educated at Rangitoto College and Auckland University, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and is now a fellow in politics and international relations at Oxford's University College.

The topic she chose for her master's degree was the governance of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was - and is - weighted by wealth.

Rich countries such as the United States and the major European countries have their own representatives on the banks' joint board of directors, but poorer countries have only one director for up to 21 nations.

At the time, back in the 1980s, virtually no one had written about this issue. But since then it has become a prime matter of dispute between the rich and poor countries, and Dr Woods is now one of the leading experts on the subject.

In 1999, Canada's International Development Research Centre invited her to chair a working party on reforming global financial governance.

She brought together a high-powered group including the former finance ministers of Mexico and Chile, the central bank governors of Indonesia and Uganda and some of the world's leading economists. The group has met twice so far, in Oxford and Ottawa.

"I love bringing together people with real experience and fresh ideas and a really constructive approach towards thinking about how to make our institutions better," she says.

"I looked at the debate about increasing [the poor countries'] voting share and said, 'This is not going anywhere because the major shareholders don't want to. So let's try another, different kind of argument'."

She suggested, for example, that the fund and the bank should be subjected to the same rules of transparency and accountability that they impose on poor borrowing countries.

And even if some countries still have to share directors, each country could be represented directly when its own borrowing is discussed.

"I really do believe that in the next five years we will see the governance structure changing," she says.

Dr Woods is due to finish a book on the politics of the IMF and World Bank in mid-March, have her second baby at the end of March, then spend three months in Washington with her American husband, Dr Eugene Rogan, who is director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford, and their 2-year-old son Richard Huia Woods Rogan and the new baby.

"I will be finishing a book on global economic governance, the broader issues," she says.

This will look, for example, at the "global compact" which the United Nations has developed for multinational companies to sign up to basic standards for labour, human rights and the environment.

Critics claim that multinationals such as Shell and BP use the compact as a "bluewash", a public relations disguise for exploitative behaviour.

But Dr Woods says: "I never take the totally cynical line. You have to be aware that those are the driving forces. Because so much of the global system is unregulated, you have to make use of whatever opportunity you can to get corporations involved in self-regulating."

She believes that being a New Zealander is an advantage in chairing international meetings.

"You don't come with baggage of having a colonial beginning.

"I think I'm a Kiwi in my approach, in the sense that when you are brought up in NZ you are brought up with a ferocious egalitarianism where you are not put off by people's titles.

"I look at what people do, rather than their status."

Although she loves her job, she also loves getting away from it for regular holidays in New Zealand.

"It really strikes me when I come back - this country is bursting with brilliant, talented people," she says.

"Those of us that make our contribution abroad are just doing it in a different place from those that are here."