Black and White Cat

There’s a very impressive collection of flags that has been circulating for some time, showing various interesting and disturbing facts about each of the countries involved. I saw it for the first time last night at ProState in Flames. A quick Google search identifies Icaro Doria, a young Brazilian designer, as one of the creators of the series called Meet the World. Doria says he and four others created it as part of an ad campaign for the Portuguese news magazine Grande Reportagem.

The flags spread around the world in an email chain letter that wrongly identified a non-existent Norwegian diplomat as the creator. The series has also become popular on blogs.

Doria says of the original ad campaign:

The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.
….
We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

And then, presumably, they threw all the data away and just made things up. The Chinese version that’s going around contains a note disputing the “facts” portrayed by the Chinese flag. And that made me wonder - what about the other flags?

It turns out that most of them are either totally wrong, or questionable or exaggerations. And that begs the question: when a serious news magazine runs an ad campaign, do the facts presented in the ad need to be true, or can you just invent them?

Here are the flags, along with my comments:

Angola

It’s hard to know what exactly this flag is trying to tell us. One interpretation might be that half of Angola’s population is HIV-positive, half is infected with malaria and an overwhelming majority has no access to medical care. Another interpretation might be that roughly the same unspecified number of people in Angola have either HIV or malaria (or both) and the overwhelming majority of this unspecified number of people has no access to medical care. Both of these possible interpretations are wrong.

According to the World Health Organization (pdf), “by the end of 2004, an estimated 400 000 adults and children were living with HIV/AIDS in Angola, and the adult prevalence was estimated to be about 2.6%.” That is nothing like the 50% suggested by the flag. (A later report gives a lower figure for people with HIV/AIDS - an estimated 320,000 in 2005) The first WHO report cited here says “only 30% of the population has access to health services,” a shockingly low figure, but considerably higher than the flag indicates. On the other hand, the report estimates that 52,000 people needed antiretroviral therapy, but only 2,700 were receiving it.

The WHO says malaria (pdf) “is by far the highest cause of morbidity and mortality in Angola, with varying levels of endemicity throughout the country and epidemic potential in five provinces.” There were 1,409,328 reported cases of malaria in 2002, nearly five times the estimated number of people with HIV. However, the real figure for malaria could be considerably higher than this.

Brazil

The United Nations’ definition of extreme poverty is living on less than $1 a day (adjusted for purchasing power parity). This flag suggests that more than three quarters of Brazil’s population lives on less than a third of that. Brazil’s 2004 report to the United Nations on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals gives a dramatically different figure:

In 1990, year of reference for the MDGs, 8.8% of Brazilians lived under this per capita income line. Therefore, the target would be to reduce this percentage to 4.4% in 25 years. However, after only one decade, this proportion had reached 4.7%,only 0.3 percentage point away from reaching the target.

But the flag may not be referring to purchasing power parity. I don’t know what the actual breakdown of income is in Brazil, so I can’t really comment. Three quarters of the population living on less than $10 per month seems extremely unlikely to me, but if I’m wrong and someone out there knows the answer to this, please let me know in the comments.

Burkina Faso

At a rough estimate, the yellow star in this flag covers about one fortieth of the total area - or 2.5%. So the flag is telling us that only 2.5% of Burkina Faso’s children survive into adulthood. Or, conversely, 97.5% of children die. This is absurd. Equally absurd is the claim that nearly half of all children die before they reach one year old and the same number dies before the age of three. Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries on Earth and has a very hight infant mortality rate. But it’s not even remotely as high as that.

UNICEF’s figures for 2005:

Infant mortality rate (under 1): 96 per 1,000 live births (9.6%)
Under-5 mortality rate: 191 per 1,000 (19.1%)

China

14-year-olds are of junior middle school age. According to the Ministry of Education, the enrollment rate for junior middle schools in 2005 was 96%, with a drop-out rate of 2.62%. The ministry says 69.68% of junior middle school graduates enrolled in senior middle schools. Even allowing for the notorious unreliability of Chinese government statistics, the figures cannot possibly be as wrong as this flag claims.

Colombia

I hesitate to comment on this flag, since commodity prices vary considerably from year to year and I’m worried that I will make some stupid mistake. Nevertheless:

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says Colombia exported about 1.5 million metric tons of bananas in 2001. That document does not give a dollar value for those exports, but it does give a value for Costa Rica’s banana sales, which works out at about US$250 per ton. That would mean Colombia earned about US$375 million from bananas.

UNCTAD values Colombia’s exports of coffee and coffee substitutes for 2001 at just under US$860 million.

According to one study in 2001, exported Colombian cocaine in 1999 had a street value of US$46 billion and a wholesale value of US$14 billion, but only US$3.5 billion were repatriated.

I’ll leave it to readers to decide what the flag should look like based on these figures.

European Union

According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2004, the European Union consumed 14.57 million barrels of oil per day and produced 2.876 million barrels a day. That’s a ratio of 5:1. So the flag is right in saying that the EU consumes more than it produces, but the proportion it gives is a gross exaggeration.

Somalia

UNICEF says 95% of girls in Somalia are subjected to female genital mutilation. So this flag is a fair representation of the truth.

United States

US public support for and opposition to the war in Iraq has varied over time, but at it is fair to say that at some point in time the two sides have been equal. However, the flag may be hopelessly overoptimistic about the number of Americans who know where Iraq is. In 2006, the National Geographic found that 63% of young American adults between the ages of 18 and 24 could not find Iraq on a map. At least that was better than 2002, during the build-up to war, when 85% were unable to find the country they were about to invade.

I have mixed feelings about this series. As an ad campaign it’s supposed to grab the attention and it succeeds in doing that. As a design or a work of art, it’s intended to provoke thought and it succeeds in doing that too for some people. Different people will be prompted to think of different things. In my case the line of thought was: are these facts accurate, and if they are not, then what are the real facts. And this adds more weight to the argument that the campaign was, and still is, effective.

But I wonder how many people have questioned the accuracy of the series at all. Is it good or bad if people believe that most Chinese children don’t go to school?

This reminds of the case of the photo-journalist Liu Weiqiang who has just been sacked by the Daqing Evening News because of his photoshopped picture of Tibetan antelopes and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The doctored picture had won an award from CCTV as one of the top ten news photographs of 2006.

Liu justified himself saying it was an artistic work and he had never presented it as a news photograph. But that’s not what Liu told CCTV at the award ceremony, translated here by ESWN:

Li: You take a look at your photograph. It was taken at an uninhabited area at 4,000 or 5,000 meters above sea level. What is the probability that you, the train and the Tibetan antelopes all appeared at the same time and place?

Liu: In the language of photography, this was an instant. It was a very brief moment. The Tibetan antelopes are smart and easily scared. When humans are even far away, they are already fleeing. When I took this photograph, I dug a hole half a meter deep and I put camouflage on top. I hid in the hole covered by camouflage. That was why the Tibetan antelopes came to pass in front of my camera. It took only a several seconds for the Tibetan antelopes to pass in front of me. But I had waited for eight days.

Similarly, Icaro Doria does not say “it’s a work of art intended to make you think, not a real representation of facts.” Instead he says “We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.”