Belgium, mon amour

Europe needs its dreamers in these trying times, or so Donald Tusk says, though the powers-that-be in the European Commission are certainly under no illusions as to the outcome of Brexit.

The chance of the Brexit extension leading to the UK staying in the EU are precisely zero, the Commission believes, and if you want evidence, take a look at the executive’s representation in London.

Despite the stay of execution, the majority of staff at the London office have been given their marching orders. A good number have already left, and many among the 30-strong team who are still in situ are polishing their plans to parachute into an office in another EU country. 

The Commission’s regional UK offices are also for the chop as part of a European Union External Action Service plan to move in. The EEAS is the EU’s diplomatic arm in third countries.

Here follows a short conversation between retail giant Amazon and IATA, as imagined by Alex Labonne, chief technology officer at Hermes Cargo Management Systems.

Amazon: “Given that we do pretty well at warehousing, it’s only logical for us to think about moving into ground handling”.

IATA: “You’ve got to use our SITA system, and there are other things…”

Amazon: “Nah, we don’t want to do that.”

IATA: “You must, otherwise you won’t be able to…”

Amazon [interrupting]: “You know what, I’ll use my own airline as well. I’ll use my own protocol, all the way. You guys do whatever it is you do, and we’ll do what we want to do.”

At which point the conversation ends, Amazon walks out, and, in Mr Labonne’s words, “they smash it”, meaning they put anyone who competes with them out of business.

Welcome to the near future.

If industries now rise and fall according to how successfully they collect and manipulate data, air cargo is in trouble.

Despite predictions of volume growth and reassurances that 3D printing will not bring an end to world trade, there was a sense of foreboding among attendees at the Air Cargo Handling conference in Zaventem, on the outskirts of Brussels.

A wave of technological disruption is racing in from the horizon, and companies still operating as if this were the 1990s are set to be swept away.

Data - or rather, good data - is already what separates the profitable from the also-rans. If you can capture enough of it, and if you know how to analyse it, you can squeeze out that extra few percentage points of efficiency from your logistics chain: the 10% that makes the difference between profit and loss.

Alastair Band, who came to Belgium in a search of applications for blockchain technology, talked about Amazon and its plan to ship the goods you haven’t even thought about ordering yet to your nearest distribution centre. If the data predicts that you will buy face-cream this month, because you buy it every other month, then why not have a pot ready and waiting, just a few minutes from your front door?

While the likes of Amazon and China’s Alibaba ramp up their robotics-controlled warehouses, some legacy air cargo handlers still rely on old-fashioned brawn to prepare pallets for loading. Worse still: many are drowning in paper documents.

The amount of paper produced in 2018 by the air cargo industry is an embarrassment, conference panellists agreed. Agents routinely throw away reams at the end of every working day because their customers, believing that everything has been digitalised, don’t bother to pick it up.

‘Digitalisation’ for some in the industry means scanning a paper document and sending it as an email attachment, which would be laughable if it were not for the fact that some haven’t even got this far.

The fact that industry bodies are talking today of developing a worldwide barcode standard says it all. “Come on guys,” commented one attendee. “Bar codes are technology from 20 or 30 years ago, and we’re still scratching our heads asking how we can implement it.”

“Amazon and Alibaba are not waiting,” warned Céline Hourcade, head of cargo transformation at IATA. “The market is susceptible to being shaken up by new entrants.”

Everyone in Zaventem recognised that modernisation was well overdue. There was talk of “making cargo talk” with microchips that could theoretically also measure temperature and any damage-causing shocks. The buzzwords were all there: new facilities must be “future-proof”; drones and artificial intelligence will carve out a niche. All agreed on the need to move on from tracking consignments to individual parcels so as to latch onto the e-commerce wave and compete with the integrators.

But there was the inescapable impression that the old-fashioned ways of doing business, the ways that still predominate, mean the industry of today may not be up to the task. “We come to conferences like this, discuss initiatives and then go home and do nothing,” lamented Hendrik Leyssens, head of operations at Cargo Swissport International.

‘Doing nothing’ has not been ruinous for the past 30 years, but in it could now be fatal.

To start with, those who do nothing are unlikely to profit from the growth in e-commerce. This new business is benefitting integrators rather than traditional handlers, conferences attendees heard.

Legacy companies must “wake up” to the fact that integrators are eating into their heavy cargo business, said Hans Van Shaik, sales manager at Saco Airport Equipment. “E-commerce growth is tremendous,” he said. “Consignments are increasing in weight and integrators are handling 100 kg, 150 kg packages.”

Handlers cannot compete with the integrators’ ability to both keep track of individual items and move them fast.

“It’s going to go worldwide,” Van Shaik (who, let us remember, has equipment to sell) warned. At integrator hubs in Brussels and Liege there are now 300 to 400 workstations, while at Leipzig there are 700, he said. There’s not much difference between shipping a package and shipping a pallet. “If you can do it for parcels, then why not for pallets?” he asked. The slide on the wall behind him showed a piano, which typically weighs 200 kg, being shipped by an express carrier.

Given that e-commerce is supposed to make up for the small drop in volumes that will be lost to 3D printing – estimated to amount to between 2% and 5% of total volumes, mostly furniture - traditional handlers are on the losing side of this equation.

And that’s before the second wave of disruption hits.

Amazon’s fleet of 40 freighters was brought up in almost every conversation during the coffee breaks. When Amazon and Alibaba realise that they can improve their margins by using their own ground handlers, an era will come to an end.

Part of the problem is scale. Handlers without sizeable cashflow don’t have the financial clout to invest in robotics, it was reported. Ludwig Hausmann, a partner at McKinsey & Company, pointed out that Google makes more profit on its own than the entire air cargo industry.

That said, the chief executives of profitable companies have been guilty of complacency.

“Cargo protagonists could have done a whole lot of things, but no-one wants to pay for it,” said Labonne.  “The standards are low and not good enough, especially the heavy standards. If people want to survive the Amazon or the Alibaba, they have to invest. The fragmentation is a lot of the time in people’s minds.”

Attempts by IATA and others to encourage the spread of technology with top-down standards are doomed to failure because that’s not how technology propagates, says Labonne. Trying to pick a winning standard, much like attempts to predict which hardware or software will be used in the next five to ten years, is futile. “Have we heard this before?” asks Labonne. “We have heard it forever. Everyone’s going to have the same laptop, the same desktop”.  Every two years comes the latest trend, and the predictions are soon forgotten and recast.

“Things don’t evolve that way,” Labonne continues. “For me, interfaces are always between two protagonists. That’s fragmented, but that’s the way the world is. Believe you me, Amazon systems are not that standardised, not that uniform. That’s how Amazon managed to grow so quickly.

“They weren’t too fussed about a uniform support. What they were fussed about is that when they had interfaces, they were tested. If somebody broke something, it was known.” Tolerant systems, rather than rigid standards, allow for patching and growth. “You have to be stringent with what you send and tolerant with what you receive, it’s called Postel’s Law,” says Labonne, quoting one of the guiding principles of data interchange over the internet.

“In terms of interfaces, we all speak different languages, we all operate differently. When you try to string [a new standard] across the world, you’re chasing windmills. You’ll be the Don Coyote swinging at windmills. Half the people will use it and the other half won’t” because the other half simply don’t want to.

Cargo intermediaries should instead make their interfaces public and allow others to link up without any top-down imposition. “It’s an organic system, and that’s how things grow,” says Labonne. “This is how Alibaba and Amazon have grown.” Attempts to force transport onto one single standard are “irrelevant”. It’s the equivalent of carving principles on stone tablets, he says.

Given that few in the industry are prepared to take the coming threat seriously, and given that it will soon be too late, the best hope for legacy players might be to become food for predators. “If the Amazon wave happens, the race will be about who is going to be bought,” says Labonne. “I think everyone has to invest a bit more. That to me is the biggest issue.”

While the fatalistic mind set seemed to have taken hold among many conference attendees, it was not universal. “It isn’t going to happen,” said Sebastiaan Scholte, chairman of The International Air Cargo Association (TIACA) and ceo of Jan De Rijk Logistics. “Alibaba can’t compete with the belly network,” Scholte said. He then pondered, and added: “Anyway, this industry needs disrupting.”

The worldwide network of belly capacity would indeed be difficult for the giant retailers to recreate quickly, unless drones become commonplace. This argument would suggest however that handlers could well be pushed onto minor, secondary routes as the Alibaba et al set up shop.

The problem, in essence, is that the fragmented air cargo industry suffers from low levels of trust. “We have to stop keeping data to ourselves,” was the recurring conference refrain.

The advantages of sharing data were laid out. The automobile industry has managed to reduce the cycle for producing new models from seven years to two through collaboration.

While some attendees were wringing their hands ahead of what could be an apocalypse, others have been spurred to action.

Citing Amazon’s fleet investment as one of the triggers, the Brussels airport air cargo community has with the financial support of the Flemish Government over the last two years worked hard to “demolish the silos” between the various players in the logistics chain. Via a not-for-profit umbrella organisation, 142 cargo community members have pooled their training and lobbying efforts. Their jointly-created applications for slot booking and customs clearance have brought about efficiencies, bringing down clearance times in particular. Members lend their experts to the many community steering committees, while youngsters are encouraged to bond, literally, at speed-dating evenings.

Zaventem did witness some inspired thinking. Why not combine baggage handling with express parcels under the arrivals lounge, one member of the audience asked? But the airports themselves were seen as a brake on innovation. Airport owners are often unsympathetic to the needs of the air cargo industry. Given that passengers and duty free bring in more profit, will handlers inevitably be pushed further and further from the runway?

Will full freighters be forced to operate exclusively from secondary airports? Should airports be publicly owned so as to reflect the interests of all users, not just the most profitable sectors? Can airport designers be lobbied before they lay down their plans?

To get to the root cause of what now afflicts air cargo, it may be necessary to go back to the drawing board. But if that’s just not feasible, handlers will have to make do with the latest iteration of track-and-trace systems (such as the one being put together by pharmaceutical handlers).

Dans mon guide déontologique sur le traitement du suicide dans les médias, on me suggère que je ne mentionne pas le mot “épidémie” lorsque j’écris sur ce thème; ce serait “exagérer son caractère dramatique”. Ce même guide, formulé par l’Association des journalistes professionnels, propose qu’on n’utilise pas non plus le mot “suicide” dans le titre d’un article parce qu’il faut, si possible, “éviter le sensationnalisme”. Pour les journalistes, le message est clair: il faut minimiser l’ampleur du phénomène. Raconter en détail l’histoire d’un individu ayant mis fin à ses jours pourrait déclencher d’autres suicides en série – c’est le fameux “effet Werther”.

Moi, par contre, j’ai envie de le crier haut et fort: les belges francophones se tuent en masse, et presque tout le monde s’en fiche.

Les statistiques sont souvent trompeuses, mais il faut bien commencer quelque part. Selon le centre de prévention du suicide, la Wallonie présente un taux de décès par suicide parmi les plus élevés au monde. Plus de 700 Wallons mettent fin à leurs jours chaque année. On estime aussi que les tentatives “non abouties” (il ne faut surtout pas écrire “manquées”) sont entre dix à vingt fois plus nombreuses.

Vingt fois 700, ça fait quand même 14.000 tentatives chaque année, dans une région qui compte environ trois millions et demi d’habitants.

Et vous ne voulez pas parler d’épidémie?

Je mets l’accent sur la Wallonie, mais les chiffres pour Bruxelles ne sont guère meilleurs. En Flandre, ça va moins mal, mais il y a quand même eu plus de 10.000 tentatives officiellement recensées en 2016.

En tant qu’observateur étranger, habitant en Belgique depuis 2004, j’ai trouvé particulièrement déprimant de découvrir que le dernier plan d’action “quinquennal” des autorités wallonnes date de la même année. D’après ce que je lis, les choses vont commencer à bouger, mais quoi qu’il en soit, la communauté francophone est aujourd’hui plusieurs années en retard par rapport à la Flandre, où un plan d’action a déjà, selon les médias, réussi à réduire quelque peu le taux de suicide. Un site flamand ciblant les parents d’enfants en danger a été lancé en mai.

Ce qui m’interpelle le plus, c’est le manque d’attention donnée à cette urgence régionale. Pourquoi hésitez-vous à en parler? Pourquoi voulez-vous minimiser le problème? D’où vient cette peur de vivre? De la nature conservatrice de la société elle-même? L’influence des milieux religieux y est-elle encore pour quelque chose?

Le suicide est bel et bien un phénomène européen, bien sûr. Selon les chiffres publiés par Eurostat, 56.000 personnes se sont suicidées dans l’Union européenne en 2016. Mais en Belgique, et en Wallonie spécialement, le problème est particulièrement aigu.

Les causes de ce phénomène sont certainement complexes. Je ne suis que journaliste, je n’appartiens donc pas au milieu académique universitaire, mais je soupçonne – excusez-moi de le dire – que ce maudit communautarisme participe à sa gravité.

Les remèdes à apporter pour réussir à diminuer durablement l’incidence de cette urgence morale et sociétale seront aussi et certainement d’une grande complexité, mais si je ne suis certain que d’une chose, c’est que le premier pas à faire pour essayer d’atteindre ce but sera d’entamer un grand débat sur le suicide au sein de votre communauté, celle des belges francophones.

Maltese: an official EU language spoken by around half a million.

Catalan: heading towards 10 million speakers, and not an official language.

What’s going on?

It might well be a bit about cost, and a bit about Spanish fears of breakaway regions, but there’s another factor almost never mentioned in Brussels: the EU does not want to wake its “dormant” Russian language problem.

Everyone knows there are large Russian minorities in the Baltic states, but few know that many ethnic Russians living in both Latvia and Estonia are “non-citizens” who can’t vote or work for the government. 

Their status - there are hundreds of thousands of them, and in some cities they are a majority - is considered unique in the world as they are not, technically speaking, stateless. They have the right to a Schengen “non-citizen” passport.

There’s also a process whereby non-citizens can become citizens, though I have heard that, in addition to the obvious language requirements, non-citizens are required to pass “history tests” that inevitably open up a pandora’s box.

This hot potato goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has become much hotter since the events in Ukraine of 2014.

The EU is increasingly edgy about Russia and recently rushed to upgrade its “hybrid” attacks policy after the Salisbury poisoning. The issue of the non-citizens has been raised at security seminars in recent weeks. There have been attempts to draw a parallel with residents of Puerto Rico or even Washington D.C., though that’s just grasping at straws.

(For what it’s worth, I fully support early sex education for children)

UPDATE: I convinced Brussels newspaper La Capitale to run a version fo this story on October 12 2017.

 A Brussels creche used by European Union officials has been forced to close after falling victim to Belgium’s bitter linguistic feud.

The European Union considers its linguistic diversity to be an asset, though that doesn’t always apply in the EU capital itself, where French speakers from the Belgium's south and Dutch speakers from the northern Flanders region battle for political control.

Flemish welfare minister Jo Vandeurzen in May wrote to creche manager Betty Simon informing her that her that her diploma was not valid, despite the fact that it had been issued in Belgium. As a result she was forced to return children to their parents and shut down at the end of September.

Betty’s language skills are not in doubt; she is perfectly bilingual thanks to her French-speaking mother and Dutch-speaking father. She is also fully qualified to run a creche, having passed a 12-month course. Her only mistake, in the eyes of the authorities, is that she chose to study in French.

“Before opening my own creche I studied all the rules. I know how many square metres is required per child. I worked for three years in creches before deciding to set up my own,” Betty says. “The Flemish authority says my qualification is not good enough because the French course does not come up to the standards of the Dutch course.”

While educational qualifications are in theory recognised across Belgium, the minister’s letter states that this does not apply to creches. Betty’s French-language course is considered inferior because it comprised fewer hours’ tuition than the Dutch-language course.

“They are treating me as a French-speaking Belgian, even after I spoke Dutch with them on the telephone,” says Betty. “I even planned to give the children singing lessons in Dutch, but that was not good enough. My lawyer says that if I had been from outside Belgium, even Turkey, there wouldn’t have been a problem. What they are really afraid of is that in my creche I will be bringing up French-speakers.” The EU has laws designed to encourage mobility across the bloc through the mutual recognition of qualifications, though exceptions abound.

Betty's creche was located on one of the fault lines of Belgium’s century-old language battle: Crainhem (in French) or Kraainem (in Dutch). This suburb is effectively part of Brussels and is populated mostly by French-speaking Belgians and other Europeans. It is officially a bilingual suburb, known as a ‘facility commune’, meaning residents can chose to communicate with the authorities (town hall, police) in either French or Dutch. But, and here is the rub, it lies in the territory of Flanders, where Flemish law applies.

Belgium is slowing separating by means of a series of political reforms that have taken power away from the federal government and transferred them to the country’s three regions: Flanders in the north, Wallonia in the south, and Brussels. Education policy covering creches has been ‘regionalised’, and Kraainem must follow rules laid down by Flanders, even if few of the suburb’s residents are Dutch-speaking.

“I am disgusted that this has happened to me, especially because there is a shortage of creches in Brussels,” says Betty, who plans to  move to Wallonia.

Giuseppe Abbamonte, European Commission director for media policy, is a fan of The Guardian. The EU copyright law Mr Abbamonte  oversees is designed to help “save quality journalism” as exemplified by the British paper and website, he told a European Parliament gathering on February  8. “If the Guardian were to cease operations it would be really sad,” he said. Its disappearance under a deluge of red ink would be a loss to society, especially in this era of “fake news”.

In response to pleas from loss-making mainstream media, the Brussels executive has hatched a plan. New EU legislation will strengthen the hand of publishers when negotiating with “platforms”, the gathering heard. It will become easier to sue platforms - such as news aggregators - for copyright infringement.

Leaving Brexit aside for the moment (many in Brussels are still in denial), how will the EU law help save The Guardian when the publisher gives its news away for free, I asked? Does The Guardian seriously now hope to make Facebook pay when a user shares an article with his or her friends?

To which Mr Abbamonte said: “I didn’t know they give away their news for free. I will check with them tomorrow.”

Hmmmm.....

How can he possibly not know? Isn’t this proposal designed to save the Guardian? Mr Abbamonte might be reading the hardcopy in the Exki café on Schuman roundabout, though that’s not ideal as there can’t be more than one. Is this official actually writing internet copyright legislation when all the time he gets his news from his own Guardian dead tree subscription?

Probably not. The likelihood is that Mr Abbamonte is reading Guardian articles in the Commission’s internal press review, which is widely circulated. The Commission is itself a news aggregator, and is no doubt infringing its own copyright legislation every day.

After the parliament powwow, a lobbyist from Burson-Marsteller took issue with my question. “The Guardian isn’t free,” she said. “OK, readers don’t pay, but the page has advertising”.

!!

I often have the impression that the European parliament inhabits a parallel universe. 

Earlier that same day, The Guardian’s legal counsel was escorted around Brussels with another lobbyist. The plan, the lobbyist tells me, is indeed to somehow make Facebook pay, but the The Guardian is worried that if they ask for actual money, Facebook will simply drop them. FB is more important to the Guardian than the other way around.

This is madness. The Commission can’t touch non-EU aggregators such as Drudge. One-man bands in Europe can easily relocate to a server in Liberia. This legislation will be impossible to enforce. 

My only conclusion is that the Commission’s real target is Google News (everyone denies this, so there might be something to it). And even then, how much of a problem really are news aggregators?

Interested in art? The ‘Belgium Art Exhibition Reviews’ page on Facebook now covers three current exhibits: Congo Art Works (Bozar, 4/5) the Power of Avant-garde (Bozar, 3/5) and Modernity a la Belge (Royal Museum, 4/5). Pictured: Alexej von Jawlensky, 'Portrait of a Girl’ from 1909.