FILE; SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

How many generals would put meeting with development and finance experts as one of the top items on their to-do list?

My guess: not many. Which makes Gen. David Petraeus, who is gearing up to take the reins at Central Command later this month and putting together a 100-day review of U.S. strategy in the region, all the more impressive.

In what I see as a very encouraging sign, Petraeus reached out to officials at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund last week, Bank President Robert Zoellick reportedly among them. A source close to the general told Reuters that the meeting's purpose was "to touch base and note the Central Command's interest in supporting comprehensive approaches in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and others."

With Pakistan melting down and Afghanistan fast becoming a Taliban paradise, a change in strategy couldn't happen soon enough.

JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images

FP's Elizabeth Dickinson spoke with economist Jeffrey Sachs this week about how the financial crisis will affect the world's poorest.

Surprisingly, Sachs doesn't think the mayhem on Wall Street necessarily spells doom for people living in low-income countries. It's middle-income countries, which are more connected to the global economy, that are most at risk.

His biggest worry? That the credit crunch will distract leaders from the "life-or-death" issues that affect the poor on a daily basis.

Check it out.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

I didn't realize that Bono (a.k.a. the king of Ireland) had been blogging last week for the Financial Times about the U.N.'s Millenium Development Goals. Turns out the U2 frontman is something of a long-winded fella, though one can find some interesting tidbits amid the filler.

For instance, he offers some sound investment advice here at a time of financial crisis:

As I mentioned earlier in the week, there are 18 non-oil economies in Africa which have grown now at 5.5% for a decade, countries which on average have seen a 66% increase in aid, most are democracies and most have received full debt cancellation. With statistics like these it proves it's still time to aid Africa. But it also proves it's time to invest in Africa. Any remaining capital out there couldn't find a better long-term bet than the African subcontinent, that's my tip for the week.

Seems like Bono has been listening to Gareth Penny and the folks at DeBeers.

World Toilet Expo 2007; Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

This spring, Beijing Olympic organizers went to extraordinary lengths to ensure athletes had the most comfortable sanitation facilities. When foreign athletes at test events complained about the squat-style toilets at key venues, such as the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, officials initiated "toilet alteration projects" (as an organizer described it to Reuters) to replace as many as possible with sit-down commodes.

If only others around the world were so lucky -- to have hygienic toilet facilities of any type.

In this International Year of Sanitation, some 2.5 billion people don't have access to improved sanitation, according to a recent progress report (big pdf). So, in this week's FP List, "The Hardest Places in the World to Find a Bathroom," we highlight five countries, by geographic region, where safe sanitation is in short supply. Yes, there's a "yuck" factor, but sanitation is crucial for public health and is likely one of the most important health advances ever.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A food porter carries a basket on his head at Kawran Bazaar, a sprawling, 24-hour complex of wholesale food markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Kawran Bazaar, which really comes to life after midnight, is the entry point for much of the food in the Bangladeshi capital. According to a recent World Bank study, Bangladesh is among at least 33 countries that are at risk of serious political unrest if food and fuel prices keep rising. Bangladesh is currently one of the world's poorest countries, where nearly 40 percent of the 144 million population survive on less than a dollar a day and on average spend 80 percent of their income on food.

Barack Obama's foreign policy speech on Tuesday made liberal use of one of our worst foreign policy clichés: the Marshall Plan. Here he is talking about development aid:

I know development assistance is not the most popular program, but as President, I will make the case to the American people that it can be our best investment in increasing the common security of the entire world. That was true with the Marshall Plan, and that must be true today.

That's why I'll double our foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012, and use it to support a stable future in failing states, and sustainable growth in Africa; to halve global poverty and to roll back disease. To send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, "You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.

On his blog, Yale's Chris Blattman asked leading aid skeptic Bill Easterly for his response:

All aid proposals since the 60s follow the same script:

1. announce an ambitious goal ('halving poverty')
2. invoke Marshall Plan as a very promising precedent
3. say you will double foreign aid (its always exactly double)
4. ignore the historical record on previous aid programs that also did (1) through (3)

I was disappointed that Obama's advisors didn't come up with something a tad more fresh and different. Since the press mostly ignored Obama's aid proposals, I guess the political incentive to do something more than the same old pro forma proposal is not very strong.

There's also not much pressure for Obama to say anything substantive about aid since John McCain isn't exactly offering much fresh thinking on the subject. Still, a candidate who's running on "change" and who's known for his genuinely brilliant rhetoric ought to be able to come up with something more original than "a new Marshall plan."

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

Disneyland it's not, but war-torn Afghanistan is still hoping to lure international tourists -- at least those who don't mind venturing off the beaten path. Eight hours by car from Kabul, the country's Bamiyan province boasts the country's first National Park, complete with several crystal-blue lakes and Afghanistan's own picturesque "Grand Canyon."

The area is no secret to local Afghans, who have been coming to the Band-e Amir area for years. Local families come on the weekends to picnic, swim and rent boats, as do a few more adventurous foreigners.

While the area is beautiful and much safer than other parts of the country, violence in surrounding areas has cut into the tourist flow. So has a lack of funds according to provincial Governor Habiba Serobi, the country's only female governor:

Unfortunately the aid is always going to the more difficult areas where there are problems and conflict - that's where the international community puts more money."

While addressing the country's security situation is a necessary reality, it's sad to see it hamper development in other parts of the country like Band-e Amir--especially after all the effort and hope that went into the park's creation. The US government still strongly warns its citizens against traveling to Afghanistan, but hopefully, in time, we'll see more foreigners in Afghanistan with cameras rather than rifles.

KAMARUL AKHIR/AFP/Getty Images

As the "elite 8" wrapped up an 18-course dinner in Hokkaido earlier this week, members of the developing countries summit, or "D-8," were also focusing on food -- or rather, the lack of it. Leaders of member nations Indonesia and Malaysia spoke out Wednesday about the need to curb biofuel production. Indonesian Prime Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was blunt:

The idea is to reduce greenhouse gases and to wean themselves away from dependence on fossil fuels... It is not a good idea: it has only worsened the global food crisis."

Yudhoyono knows a thing or two about this problem firsthand. Indonesia has lost vast swathes of rainforests due to the production of palm oil, an increasingly popular biofuel. But while a little hypocrisy might make his words ring hollow, it doesn't make him wrong.

As FP's own Editor in Chief Moisés Naím tells us, increased food demand from developing countries is hardly to blame for the global food crisis. The real culprit is biofuel production, he aruges, and the government policies that promote it at the expense of crops for human consumption. Biofuels may account for as much as 75 percent of the global increase in food prices since 2002, according to the latest World Bank estimate.

The G-8, to its credit, had something to say about the crisis. Problem is, as usual the group didn't address the real policy problem -- it only "requested" that developed countries open their food stockpiles. Quick fixes, though, aren't going to feed the hungry for long. G-8 countries need to brainstorm feasible, long-term policies. Here's a healthy start: Stop dumping millions of dollars into subsidizing biofuels before this man-made disaster spins out of control.

ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images

This is heartbreaking: Times have gotten so tough in Indonesia that parents have been sending their children to live in orphanages, where they can at least get food and an education. A 2006 government survey found that 80 percent of children in orphanages have two living parents. Orphanages say that, this year, even more parents have been giving up their children, according to a recent CNN article.

DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP/Getty

A quarter might not get you much more than a ketchup packet in the United States these days, but in India it's enough to buy a meal for one of Mumbai's poor. Well aware of this fact, dozens of destitute Indian men line the streets in front of the city's "hunger cafes" each day, hoping the affluent will roll down their car windows and offer a rupee note or two.

Many of these cafes have stood for decades, and their poverty-stricken patrons keep coming back. "Car-bound charity" is typical in India, where "feudal giving" (e.g, when a patron pays school tuition for the children of his household's maid) also accounts for much of the nation's charitable work, reinforcing household and societal chains of command. Anonymous or "checkbook charity" is more popular in Western countries, where parading the poor out on the streets is considered degrading.

Drive-by charity, however altrusitic, is clearly not going to cut it as India tries to deal with the global food crisis. As of 2006, the country already ranked 96th -- below Nepal and Pakistan -- on the Global Hunger Index. And more recently, malnutrition among children has skyrocketed in India's central regions. The government has promised to dole out 30 kg of subsidized flour a month to poor families, but corruption and inefficiency often foil such efforts.

The cafes also fail to address one demographic that continually feels the food-shortage burden: women. Second-class citizens in many parts of India, women often eat last and get the least to eat. Looks like India still has some historical vestiges to confront if its going to become the new world power that so many expect it to be.

Adam Blenford/Flickr/Creative Commons

Few Westerners have had the chance to witness what China is building in Africa. From Angola to the Sudan, the Middle Kingdom’s reach throughout the continent is growing by the day. And, for several years, Swiss journalist Serge Michel got the chance to document Africa’s relationship with its new patron.

In the current issue of FP, Michel shows firsthand what happens when a budding superpower meets the poverty, corruption, and fragility of Africa. It’s a fascinating look at what China has been able to accomplish in a place other powers have all but abandoned—and a glimpse into what happens next. But it’s also one that raises as many questions as it answers. Luckily, Serge Michel will respond to your questions next week. So read “When China Met Africa,” and send your questions to letters@ForeignPolicy.com by Sunday night. We’ll send the best on to him. Don't forget to check back on May 30, when we'll post his responses.

Here's another great documentary from our friends at Current. In "City on Steroids,"  American filmmaker Adam Yamaguchi tours the little-known megacity of Chongqing, China. Growing at a rate of nearly 200,000 people per year, Chongqing is the one of the fastest growing cities on the planet and an emblem of China's rapid urbanization. The clearly overwhelmed Yamaguchi takes viewers on a quick tour of this modern boomtown from brand new yuppie apartments to factory floors. Along the way he takes time to discuss "Desperate Housewives" with college students, lift heavy sacks with migrant workers, and get taken in a card game called "fighting against the landowner."

Check it out:

Cindy L writes in response to "Think Again: The Peace Corps":

Heh, wonder if Robert Strauss would have jumped to the same conclusions about me. Back in '83-'85, fresh out of college, I was a 'generalist,' one of those fluent Spanish speakers sent to Africa he suggests were misplaced. Would he have read my mind and heart and assumed that I, too, was in it for subsidized travel experience or bolstering my resume. [...] [O]ur volunteer group consisted of 16 or so -- some had advanced degrees, one was at Harvard Law, another from MIT, and guess what, the specialists did not outperform the nonspecialists. The Peace Corps cannot solely be blamed for not using my Spanish, as I, already familiar with Latin culture because of my Colombian background, chose to take advantage of the travel opportunity to go to Africa--not for a some exotic fun, but because I could learn more there. It took me a whopping 3 months to become [fully conversant] in Setswana, big deal. And yes, I learned it not in the training classrooms, but in the bars, in the village, dancing, running village trails, and hanging with the natives--mostly the poor, but also the rich. [...]

[E]ven when I did accomplish good things -- development things -- the locals appreciated not what I did, but who I was. For [example], my generalist self got to the village and realized we had no electricity, no water, nothing to teach agriculture with, and most of all very low morale. So I went into the capital, taught myself how to build a water catchment tank and how to write grants, raised money, got supplies, electrified the school, put up fencing for gardening, built the swimming pool size tank. But what I was always noted for was not those things, but for getting sporting goods and starting various sporting teams that became competitive against better-supplied, established schools. It was running through the village with my students, sending them on distance runs with papers to be signed w/split times by store or bar clerks. It was speaking the language, hanging out.

Development got done, but the greatest value was the cross-cultural component, the public relations, and what *I* learned and took home with me, that will stay with me for a lifetime, affecting what I do now and how I do it. The tax dollars went into me and my growth and now I'm pouring myself out for society.

Some of the political appointees, a phenomenon I noticed as well, did cause a few problems for me, in that they made some serious cultural mistakes (like insulting my landlord, which ended up being an insult to his uncle--the chief! which ended up getting the witch doctor after me), but mostly we volunteers just ignored or derived a chuckle from the clueless appointees.

 Earlier on Passport:

• Readers react to 'Think Again: The Peace Corps'
• Is the Peace Corps any good?
• Peace Corps advice: Don't 'get drunk and fall down in a ditch' 

FP reader MC weighs in on "Think Again: The Peace Corps":

As a recently returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Ukraine, I would tend to agree with some of what Mr. Strauss argued in his article... while still seeing Peace Corps as serving a useful purpose. Peace Corps is in some ways the post-college study and party abroad opportunity for those with little or no work experience. In one of our training sessions, we were told half-jokingly that the only thing we could do wrong in our two years of service was to get drunk and fall down in a ditch. I believe that the comment was based on an incident that happened earlier in the year.

On the other hand, it is also a great chance for motivated young adults to gain much-needed experience in the international development field that can serve as a stepping stone to a future career. During my time in Peace Corps, I witnessed both types of volunteers: those that over-drank and generally embarrassed the United States of America, and those whose service truly made a difference in the world. I found that the best volunteers were those who were able to find small successes despite the cultural, linguistic, and bureaucratic obstacles.

There are indeed aspects of the Peace Corps that need to be reevaluated. The site placement process to determine where volunteers will serve definitely needs to be adjusted. Many times, volunteers seem to be assigned to sites at random with little input from the person affected most by the placement decision -- the volunteer.

Overall, the Peace Corps volunteer receives much more from the experience than he/she does for the country of service... In the end, the volunteer's attitude (along with a little luck) determines whether it's worth the taxpayer dollars spent and the volunteer's time.

You can check out previously posted letters here and here, or send in your own thoughts.

Readers are weighing in on both sides of a hard-hitting new Web exclusive by Robert L. Strauss, a former Peace Corps country director. Here's an e-mail in support of Strauss from FP reader JH:

[B]eing a former Peace Corps Volunteer (Morocco 99-00) I think he hit the nail on the head.

I recently attempted to reenlist with Peace Corps after receiving a master's degree in international development administration with an emphasis on monitoring and evaluation of development projects in Asia and the Pacific and was rejected by Peace Corps.

After being 'medically cleared,' they wanted to send me to Africa to work on HIV/AIDS projects and I stated that I would be best utilized in an area and field I'm trained in. I was then told I was cut from the application process for being 'inflexible' when it came to placement. It seems that any questioning about the placement process is taken as a threat to the organization's authority and there are plenty of recent college graduates with no idea about development who are willing to take an available spot.

I'm sorry to say that Peace Corps is not serious about development and it seems they would rather have bright eyed idealist with no experience or idea about sustainable development practices instead of skilled or trained personnel who could point out the flaws in the system and work to improve it while have a positive impact on the community.

Thanks for pointing out the flaws in Peace Corps which could be a development system for USAID, The World Bank, or the UN, but is instead a post-college hangout where little is accomplished.

And here's a complaint from CH, who volunteered in Togo from 2004 to 2007:

The first question that came to my mind as I read this was why a former Peace Corps country director, who spent four years of his life working for the organization, would be on such a vendetta. I question his motivation in publicly bashing the organization and makes me wonder what happened in Cameroon...

It seems that his main and only recommendation is for the Peace Corps to recruit the 'best of the best' to serve as volunteers. While he may be correct in this assessment, I think his opinion makes it obvious that they should do a better job recruiting the staff as well. I have a tough time imagining what my service would have been like had I been a volunteer in Cameroon during his tenure. A country director is responsible for setting the overall tone in the country where he or she is employed and I can't imagine a very positive or motivating environment under Mr. Strauss.

Despite all this, I tend to agree with many of his arguments. Peace Corps volunteers are generally fresh out of college or untrained in the field they're expected to serve in (as I was) or both. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will be ineffective as volunteers. I'm very proud of what I was able to accomplish in my three years as a volunteer in Togo. I worked with some incredibly dedicated and inspiring volunteers, some of whom did not come to Togo with any particular skills yet who excelled in their assignments.

While in no way do I believe the Peace Corps to be perfect, highly effectual or a model to be used by development organizations, it remains an incredible opportunity for Americans and, at the very least, offers volunteers the opportunity to accomplish wonderful things. It is hard not to take Mr Strauss's bitterness personally and the motivation behind his writing should be explained.

Readers, what do you think? Were you a Peace Corps volunteer? How does his analysis fit with your experience? Read the article and comment below, or send us your thoughts by e-mail. Requests for confidentiality will be strictly honored.

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

A shipment of ammunition, rockets, and mortar bombs en route from China to Zimbabwe has been denied passage from the South African port of Durban to the shipment's landlocked destination. 

On Friday, South Africa’s High Court barred the transport of weapons aboard the An Yue Jiang, arguing that the shipment would be used by Zimbabwe's president of 28 years, Robert Mugabe, against members of the opposition party. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, temporarily in self-imposed exiled, declared himself the victor of the March 29th elections. Since then, journalists and activists alike have reported that hundreds of opposition supporters have been detained, beaten, or tortured (warning: illustrations may be unsettling).

Although the An Yue Jiang is expected to return to China, a South African paper, News24, reports that a second arms shipment from China is scheduled to arrive by air in order to "expedite the delivery and to circumvent the controversy around last week's shipment by sea." The story also claims that both orders, placed by the Zimbabwean government, were finalized just days after Zimbabwe's elections.

The arms shipments brings to light the hazards of China's growing role in the world's poorest and most unstable continent. According to Serge Michel in the current issue of FP, in the last seven years, "trade between China and Africa jumped from $10 billion to $70 billion." But the resulting projects highlight the competing interests of Chinese-African cooperation:

Take, for example, the dam being built at Imboulou in Congo. Officially, it's a huge success: It's expected to help double national electricity production by 2009... [But according to a project engineer] the quality of the cement being used is sub-standard, the Congolese workers are so poorly paid that none of them stays longer than a few months, and, above all, the drilling has been so poorly done that half of the dam sits on a huge pocket of water that continually floods the site and could cause it to collapse one day."

From weapons to shoddy cement, the Chinese-Africa deal is looking more like a recipe for disaster every day.

TEH ENG KOON/AFP/Getty Images

Zhao Baige, the Chinese vice minister of family planning, announced yesterday that though the details still need to be ironed out, the government would like to gradually amend its controversial one-child policy. The system today is much more fluid than the original name intended. In practice, rural families and ethnic minorities can have more than one child, as can urban couples who are both from one-child familes. For the most part, so can families with money

In its desire to stay in power, perhaps the Communist Party is following Richard Cincotta's advice about mature populations giving rise to democracy. The more mature the Chinese population gets, the more stable society becomes which can yield a definitive, lasting transition to democracy. China seems to have missed the boat in multiple senses. The student protests of 1989 were a bit too early on the national democracy cosmic calendar, and according to Cincotta’s numbers, the People’s Republic passed the democracy threshold in 1998. 

This one-child policy amendment may be an attempt to assure a robust, young generation whose workforce wages will pay for the aging generation; but the higher proportion of youth would also create the unsettledness necessary to prevent democracy. It could be an act designed to draw diplomatic brownie points ahead of the Olympics by easing one of the most intrusive government policies still in place. As controversial as the system has been, population control has definitely been an important factor in curbing poverty and fostering development. It will be interesting to see what the Chinese government's new target will be for a sustainable population in the next century.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Although President Bush's achievements in fighting poverty and disease in Africa have been lauded by popstar and social activist Bob Geldof as well as many Africans during Bush's recent tour of the continent, Brookings senior fellow Homi Kharas offers a "reality check" on U.S. aid to Africa under Bush. Kharas points out:

• U.S. economic aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased from $2.1 billion to $5.4 billion between 2000 and 2005. But EU countries gave $21.9 billion to Africa in 2006, and the United Kindgom alone gave $5.2 billion -- with an economy one-sixth of the size of the U.S. economy.
• $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Africa was in the form of food aid, which Kharas describes as "a form of assistance which is so questionable in terms of its impact on development that several large U.S. charities, including CARE, have stopped dealing with it."
• The United States' economic assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006 (and this isn't even touching upon the enormous military expenditures on this region) was more than $6 billion, which is more than what was given to all 45 sub-Saharan African countries combined.

Kharas concludes:

So while we should celebrate the U.S. contributions to Africa, we should also keep in mind the fact that it is Europe, not the United States, that is leading the international fight against African poverty."

William Easterly

If there is a "bad boy of development studies," it's NYU economist Bill Easterly. When he spoke recently on a Davos panel with Bill Gates, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Paul Wolfowitz about the usefulness of foreign aid, moderator Fareed Zakaria gently poked fun at Easterly by calling him the "devil." He may not be the devil, but he's certainly the devil's advocate, constantly questioning whether traditional conceptions of foreign aid are actually helpful to poor countries. He's done it in the pages of FP, in "The Utopian Nightmare" a couple years ago, and more recently in "The Ideology of Development."

Now, Easterly is turning his contrarian guns on the United Nations, asking, "Are the Millennium Development Goals Unfair to Africa?" At a luncheon I attended today at Brookings, his answer was, unequivocally, yes. Virtually everyone agrees, he began, that by the time we hit the MDGs' deadline in 2015, Africa will have failed all of them. Africa will not have reduced its poverty rate by half; it will attain neither universal primary education nor gender equality in schools; child mortality will not be reduced by two thirds, and so on. Easterly then went down the list of goals, claiming they were all unfair and biased to begin with. Africans, he said, never had a chance of attaining them. His argument was pretty wonky—with lots of charts and graphs showing how the U.N. should be measuring rates of change and growth in Africa, rather than absolute figures, and how the MDGs were arbitrarily designed and made Africa look worse than it really is. I found it quite convincing. Eventually you'll be able to download a transcript here to judge for yourself, or you can download the original paper (pdf).

What Easterly said made sense, and yet I couldn't help thinking, "So what?" Easterly says the MDGs paint Africa unfairly. But does that really matter if more attention leads to more investment in Africa? And even if you think the MDGs are just another meaningless U.N. project, the fact that people pay attention to them must stand for something.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Easterly is famous for opposing much of the research of anti-poverty crusader Jeffrey Sachs (in his talk, he even joked that he's mandated to take potshots at Sachs at least once in each speech), and for being highly skeptical of the efforts of celebrities like Bono, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie. He thinks they give off a neocolonial air, the sense that Africa needs the West for salvation. Asked if all the attention brought by such celebrities was helping, Easterly said he didn't think so. Quite the opposite: He thought the kind of attention Africa gets because of celebrities, or because of failing the MDGs, does more harm than good because it reinforces stereotypes that Africa needs to be dependent on the West to be lifted out of poverty.

What do you think? Do celebrities help or hurt? Is the U.N. setting unfair, arbitrary goals? Share your thoughts at passportblog@ceip.org.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Further proof that blogging is injurious to your plans to enjoy Davos: Having sent off my previous post after 3 a.m., I awoke too late to show up at a UNICEF panel with the former child soldier Ismail Beah, whose bestselling memoir has just come under attack from a section of the Australian media. Last night, with my blogging duties in mind, I managed to forget the Google After-Hours Party, a much sought-after event where the likes of Bono, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair hobnob with the regular pass-holders. So this will definitely be my last post: In future years, if I return, it will be to enjoy myself fully rather than enlighten the cognoscenti.

The last full day of the Forum, Saturday, began to show a slight slackening of the pace, as many attendees started bidding farewell to Davos. (The official closing is on Sunday, with a final session expected to attract so few that it has been shifted from the plenary Congress Hall to a smaller room, and a lunch in the mountains, both of which are likely to be feel-good events and neither of which I intend to blog about.) There was a strong session on the global economic outlook, which nonetheless only confirmed that the outlook is mixed and that economic forecasting is usually slightly less reliable than meteorology.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty

I attended one of the prestige private events, a lunch with the Japanese prime minister (who had flown down to Davos in the midst of a regular session of his country's parliament, the Diet, something that in the previous 37 years had only been done once by any of his predecessors). But the number of empty seats at the half-dozen tables around the PM testified to the declining salience of Japan, a country that two decades ago was seen as the world's economic powerhouse and, bluntly, no longer is.

Otherwise, it was a day of conversations—some accidental, some planned—with a host of friends from the multilateral world: Juan Somavia, the head of the International Labor Organization, EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo of the Yale Center on Globalization, and my old U.N. colleagues Zohreh Tabatabai and Nick Van Praag. Talking to these dedicated servants of the international system was itself a reminder of how little Davos had focused this year on multilateral institutions, once seen at the Forum as the foundation of global cooperation and now largely treated as somewhere between an irrelevance and an afterthought.

So, how would I wrap up this week's experience of Davos? A few observations, not meant to be comprehensive:

• The Forum remains, above all, a networking event. People come to meet and be met, and officials as well as executives expressed satisfaction with the large number of private and "bilateral" meetings they were able to hold in Davos. By this yardstick, the Forum was a success—as it always is.
• The panels were, as usual, of varying quality, with world-class speakers and a few slightly off their game. The scheduling—a huge challenge—meant that no one could really attend everything they'd have liked to, because each interesting panel clashed with another interesting panel.
• Some of the topics chosen were of limited interest, and some of the omissions surprising ones. There was surprisingly little discussion of U.S. politics in a presidential election year—and few American political figures were present. The first few days, thanks to the gyrations in the financial markets, prompted an excessive degree of short-termism in the conversation, which was unfortunate for an event that likes to think of itself as taking the grand and long view of the really important trends in the world.
• In my opening post, I mentioned I'd pay attention to India. There was an extraordinary number of Indians present. The movers and shakers from the worlds of business and politics ranged from the finance minister to the CEOs of all the top information technology companies. But what struck me was the extent to which India is now taken for granted at Davos, in a good way. There's scarcely a panel without an Indian on it, and most discussions of world affairs—economic or geopolitical—witnessed several mentions of India. This Forum afforded confirmation, if any were needed, that my homeland has truly arrived at Davos. It no longer needs any special effort to promote itself to this audience.
• I also promised to look at the attention paid to poverty and development. Some years ago, a World Social Forum was created as a challenge the World Economic Forum. This was the first year in nearly a decade that there wasn't a rival gathering proclaiming that "another world is possible." This is at least partly because Davos has quietly taken on board the same slogan, as this year's Forum demonstrated. The discussions of development and corporate social responsibility have reached a level of seriousness that can only be applauded by an old U.N. hand like me. Of course, action must follow and results have to be visible, but both are beginning to be seen, and the companies and political leaders at the Forum are in many cases responsible for that positive trend.

Finally—as the debris of the extensive Bahrain-sponsored lunch is cleared away and preparations begin for tonight's concert and the black-tie Gala Soirée—it is time to reflect on those peculiar habits of Davos Man (and Woman) that they will have to struggle to shed when they fly away from this snow-capped wonderland. These include, but are not limited to:

• The Davos bend-and-bob: the peculiar movement required to stretch your smart-card badge to one of the ubiquitous scanners that determine whether you can be granted entry, whether you can read your e-mail, and whether you can attend a session for which you may have forgotten to register.

• The furtive chest glance: The quick darting movement of the eye toward the dangling badge that sports a participant's name, which usually precedes a familiar exclamation of pleasure at meeting its wearer, whose identity you had completely forgotten until you saw his or her badge. (Davos is the only place where it is completely socially acceptable, when you meet a woman, to look quickly at her chest first. The operative adverb is "quickly.")

Enough amateur anthropology. Now for the real thing—time to don my glad rags and get ready for the Gala Soirée, which begins at 9 p.m. and goes into the wee hours—a veritable smorgasbord of food, drink, music and last-minute networking. Your faithful blogger relinquishes his keyboard at last. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure.

Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, was India's candidate in the 2006 race to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General and came second out of seven contenders. He is the award-winning author of 10 books, most recently The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century. Visit him at www.shashitharoor.com.

You can find Tharoor's previous Diary entries here or at the following links:

• Davos Diary, Day 5: Never tempt Providence
• Day 4: Fatigue can't stop this blogger
• Day 3: Panels galore
• Day 2: Snowy arrival
• Day 1: Setting the scene