German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated that all European Union countries have an obligation to support Greece in its row with Turkey over Cyprus’ offshore energy resources. The chancellor added that she had already discussed the dispute between Athens and Ankara “intensely” with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Tensions between Greece and Turkey escalated again early in August after Ankara announced the renewal of its efforts to find gas and oil in offshore areas of Cyprus, which Turkey considers part of the Republic of Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone, to which it has been given access.
Turkey sent a seismic research vessel to the eastern Mediterranean, escorted by a warship, for that purpose. These efforts have long been opposed by the Greek government, which doesn’t recognise Ankara’s claims to Cyprus’ offshore resources, prompting the country to mobilise military forces in response to the Turkish actions.
The latest escalation was preceded by the two countries striking separate deals with other states to draw up EEZ borders, which conflicted with each other. Athens signed such an agreement with the Egyptian government and Turkey struck one with the Government of National Accord, which controls the north-eastern part of war-torn Libya.
Refugees in Germany – When you meet Raisan Hameed now, you can hardly believe it: the quiet young man, who had his first day as a student at the University of Graphics and Book Art (HGB) in Leipzig in October 2016, stands in the lively Eisenbahnstraße in Leipzig, speaking to a small crowd about his work, which is hanging in a local art gallery.
Visitors listen with interest as the photography student presents to of his pieces in fluent German. DW visited Raisan in Leipzig four years ago. The Iraqi refugee had just been admitted to university. On that day the “Academy for Transcultural Exchange” was opened at the HGB — a special two-year preparatory program for refugee students ahead of fulltime higher education.
The course got underway with a grand opening ceremony. Representatives from politics, the media, and the entire university were present. “I was a bit nervous that day,” says Raisan in retrospect. “I’d only been in Germany for a year, could hardly speak German, and we, the newcomers, were the focus. Everyone was looking at us.”
Raisan had just been catapulted from the relatively straightforward life at a refugee home into the big world of the renowned art school. Back then he was in his mid-twenties, and, by his own admission, full of awe.
The Iraqi refugee came to Germany in the remarkable late summer of 2015. A year earlier, he and his family had been forced to leave their hometown of Mosul when the ‘Islamic State’ conquered the city. At that time, Raisan had studied photography and worked as a photojournalist and cameraman for various media.
He couldn’t complete his studies in Mosul. And staying in Iraq was impossible. The armed militias hunted down artists and journalists. “I had to get out of there,” he says. “A friend of mine was beaten, another was hanged. It was terrible for me to see my own city burn.”
Raisan left Iraq without his family. On an overcrowded boat, he made the dangerous crossing from Turkey to Greece and a few weeks later reached Germany via the so-called Balkan route. He spent his first year at a refugee home in Owschlag, northern Germany. In the beginning, he suffered a lot because he couldn’t speak German.
But in little Owschlag, he quickly made friends and met a woman who volunteered to help him settle in and learn the language. “She was like a mother to me. She, her husband, and her children gave me a warm welcome. They even furnished an extra room for me in their house and said, ‘If you don’t want to sleep in the refugee home, you are welcome to stay with us’.”
His host mother accompanied him to the offices, helped him learn German, showed him the country, and also shared his passion for photography. “She understood me as a person and my story, and accepted me as I am.”
It was the frequent contact with locals that made it easier for Raisan to settle in and integrate. When he moved southeast to Leipzig, he quickly made friends in his shared apartment. “It was a nice time. We did a lot together.” His roommates helped him with homework in German and with writing letters.
He was also able to learn a lot from them about German culture, but in return also told them about Iraq and its culture. He now lives alone because he needs more space and quiet for his studies, but he has a lot of friends, most of whom are German.
Still, not everyone was so welcoming, says the now 29-year-old. He also endured racist attacks — mostly on public transport — and verbal abuse like “S*** Arabs” or “S*** foreigners.”
“Once someone even said ‘You black beard!’” he recalls, smiling a little. But he doesn’t find it funny. The racist insults “made me very angry and hurt,” he says.
But the terrible experiences weren’t about to deter him from reaching his goals. He used the two years at the Academy in Leipzig to learn the German language and prepare for further photography studies at the HGB. It wasn’t easy to begin with. “I sat in photography classes with other students and had to discuss photos in German. That was difficult. But eventually, it worked out.”
In 2018, Raisan completed the preparatory courses and has since been a full-time photography student — and a successful one at that. He regularly takes part in exhibitions. His work has been shown in Leipzig, Berlin, Rotterdam, and even on the Arabian Gulf, in Muscat, Dubai, and Sharjah.
But Raisan is particularly happy about his participation in an exhibition in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany — the Bundeskunsthalle — in Bonn. His eyes shine when he says that his work is now on display in a “really big museum.”
A central motif in his pictures is his traumatic experience of escape: “I try to process my experiences in order to get rid of them so that they no longer burden me.” He also wants to fight racism and “open people’s eyes to something they have never seen themselves.”
Five years have passed since Raisan arrived in Germany.
Has he made it?
He ponders his answer for a long time. No, as an artist he hasn’t quite made it yet, he says. He still hasn’t had his breakthrough, the big hit that attracts a lot of attention.
And on a personal level?
Five years is a long time, Raisan says. He has experienced many beautiful, but also unsightly things. “I’ve come across a difficult path, but I’ve arrived. I live in a city that has accepted me. The university gave me the opportunity to achieve my dream of continuing to study. Yes, I can say that I made it.”
But the photography student isn’t about to rest on his laurels. In a year he wants to finish his studies so he can finally get started internationally. As a photographer, he wants to be able to travel a lot. Quite often, however, he’s denied opportunities because his Iraqi citizenship and refugee status often mean he is refused a visa.
What pains him most is the long separation from his parents, who stayed in Iraq. He hasn’t seen them in half a decade. He especially misses his hometown Mosul, where as a young man he taught himself to take photos in the alleys of the old town.
But he’s optimistic, says Raisan, and is determined to be successful. Failure, it seems, is not an option for him. Many people have helped him on his path so far, he says. “Germany gave me something. I want to give something back at some point.”
Rose Achiego & Vatican News English Africa Service
Chairman of the Dialogue Reference Group, Archbishop Martin Kivuva of the Catholic Archdiocese of Mombasa delivering a press statement at Ufungamano House, Nairobi, said that Kenyans were extremely unhappy with the corruption in the country.
“This Dialogue Reference Group is appalled at the downward spiral of descent into the madness of uncontrolled corruption being witnessed in our nation. This trend is immoral and is contrary to the teachings of God, and we fully condemn it. The information in the public arena indicates that the country has received more than 190 billion Kenya Shillings to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there has been great lack of transparency and accountability in the expenditure of these funds, which has lent credence to accusations that most of the money has been misappropriated. It is inconceivable for us that a Kenyan can sit and plot how to steal money meant to save the lives of Kenyans!” said Archbishop Kivuva flanked by other religious leaders.
Parliament needs to exercise its duty of oversight
The Group reminded the country’s Executive and Parliament not to abet corruption by neglecting their duty of oversight and vigilance over public funds.
“The reports of corruption touching on the Covid-19 funds are a condemnation on the Executive and Parliament, who have the sworn duty to protect the lives and resources of Kenyans. We remind you that every time you abet corruption by failing to exercise your oversight mandate, you are breaking your oath of office,” the Church leaders said.
Public expenditure, procedures and documentation must be transparent
Archbishop Kivuva said that the Dialogue Reference Group had noted that corruption in Kenya is perpetuated by bureaucratically instigated opacity in public finance manifested by the lack of details, clarity and information on matters such as expenditure, procurement and disbursements among others.
The Group has made an urgent appealed to the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, to act swiftly and save the situation.
The inaugural meeting of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development took place on 26 August, bringing together the Commission’s members for the first time to review the objectives and agree the terms and scope of the Commission.
This independent Commission, initiated by Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, seeks to draw lessons on how different countries’ health systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and make recommendations on investments and reforms to improve the resilience of health and social care systems.
Made up of distinguished individuals from a range of disciplines, with a gender and geographic balance, the Commission’s members highlighted the importance of recognizing that health and the economy are intrinsically linked, requiring appropriate investments.
The Commission also placed a strong emphasis on the need for international and supranational solutions to global crises, as highlighted by the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking during a virtual press briefing the day after the Commission’s launch, Dr Kluge said: “I convened the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development to rethink policies in the light of pandemics”.
“The Commission addresses the need to rethink policy priorities and position health at the top of the political agenda, acknowledging that health is a powerful determinant of economic development and social cohesion.”
The objectives of the Commission include:
reconsidering policy-making following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic;
identifying challenges and opportunities for health and social care systems in the WHO European Region;
making evidence-based recommendations on ensuring that policy-making and governance consider the potential impact of pandemics, upgrading the structure of and investment in health systems, building resilience in health systems and calculating the short- and long-term costs of inaction.
Chaired by Professor Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and a former Italian Prime Minister and European Commissioner, the Commission will produce an independent report highlighting policy options to strengthen health systems and societies across the European Region when faced with major health and socioeconomic challenges.
Professor Monti also spoke at the press briefing, outlining the importance of the Commission’s work: “The Commission will take a magnifying glass to current economic and social policies, using the evidence of how these policies have performed in light of this pandemic. We will make recommendations on how such policies should be enhanced at the national and international levels to forecast, prevent and respond to future crises”.
Next steps
The Commission’s Scientific Advisory Board will work closely with WHO/Europe to gather evidence and identify possibilities for investment, as well as priorities for health systems.
It will also evaluate the evidence that is available before providing independent advice on how to improve health system resilience.
Furthermore, the Commission will review the challenges facing health systems over the next 20–30 years, prioritize the outcomes of long-term health systems resilience policies and promote equity of access to health services.
The Commission’s work will culminate in a report to be published in September 2021 with recommendations on investments and reforms to improve health and social care systems.
The next meeting of the Commission is expected to take place in October of this year.
Speaking from the South Lawn of the White House on the final day of the Republican party convention, the current U.S. president told his audience, “This election will decide whether we save the American dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”
He continued, “This election will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchic agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”
During the hour long speech, Trump criticized his political opponent, Democratic candidate Joe Biden saying “If given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness.”
The president’s speech comes at a time of racial tensions in the United States, and amid a fresh wave of protests over the latest high-profile police shooting in Wisconsin of a Black American who was left paralyzed. Relative calm returned to Kenosha after days of civil unrest.
Alluding to the recent civil strife, Mr Trump said “Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities.” He then pledged to end the turmoil.
He accused Democrats at their convention last week of disparaging America as a place of racial, social and economic injustice.
“So tonight,” he said, “I ask you a very simple question – how can the Democrat party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?”
Coronavirus
The president’s re-election campaign comes amid a health crisis that has claimed the lives of 180,000 Americans. Many people have also lost their jobs as the pandemic continues to take its toll on the country.
Addressing this issue, Trump promised, in his second term, to levy tariffs on any company that left America to create jobs overseas. He also promised to rebuild the economy and criticized Joe Biden for saying he would shut down the country if necessary to slow the spread of the disease.
Other speakers on the final day of the convention included the president’s daughter Ivanka.
With just weeks to go until America decides, this campaign is now entering its final stage with both candidates expected to travel to several battleground states in order to convince voters that they are
“I am always amazed to see the potential and will in newborns to grow and develop. As caregivers, we are there help them develop to their full potential. Our care and support are particularly important when they are born premature,” says Fanny Lopez, a paediatric nurse working in the intensive care unit of the neonatal unit in Centre Hospitalier Rives de Seine, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
“I have wanted to care for children since I was 10. I remember the day I first saw my newborn cousin. I was simply enthralled by the baby and remain fascinated with children of every age to this day.”
“I have been working as a paediatric nurse for 4 years. In addition to my nursing degree, I completed a 1-year programme at a specialized paediatric nursing school. In France, paediatric nurses specialize in early childhood and adolescence.
“At the intensive care unit, I take care of moderate preterm babies. We nurses provide care for preterm newborns presenting gastrointestinal and digestive, and respiratory problems. We also support the child’s natural development.
“The most challenging experience I have had at work, concerned a newborn baby girl with acute respiratory problems, requiring immediate intubation. What amazed me was the calm in which the situation was handled. Each of my colleagues knew their role and task, and despite it being emotionally hard, we took care of the baby. We were relieved to hear afterwards that she had recovered and was well. I find it truly difficult to see a child’s health degrade or become unstable.
“In addition to providing medical, nutritional and hygienic care in hospitals or maternity units, we play an educational role in our collaboration with families and parents. We make use of our team management, communication and educational skills.”
Helping mothers and fathers become parents
“Parents can come and visit their child at the intensive care unit day or night. With our help, parents learn how to interact with their baby – how to feed and bathe them, change their clothes and diapers, take their temperature. It’s important that the baby has a full and profound connection with the parents, so skin-to-skin contact is highly recommended and encouraged from the start.
“Parents need to gain confidence. Premature birth is often linked to trauma, guilt and psychological issues. We are there to support them.
“When the child leaves the neonatal unit and if a follow-up at home is needed, a paediatric nurse and paediatrician continue to offer psychomotor and language development assistance up to the age of 7.”
Working in teams to analyse and draw lessons from experiences
“Teamwork is extremely important in everything we do in the intensive care unit. We always work in pairs and discuss our tasks extensively among ourselves, which gives us a broader view of what we do.
“Each morning a paediatrician joins the nurses’ team to talk about the babies and their condition. The specialist consults us about our concerns and we discuss the baby’s development. We also have weekly meetings with paediatricians, psychologists and physiotherapists, which gives a holistic overview of each baby, their progress and parents. We aim to individualize the care as much as possible.
“We also take the time to reflect on and assess the way we take care of children and their parents. In groups, we go through past incidents and try to identify what we can learn from them and how we can improve.
“As paediatric nurses, we work closely with newborns and children, and have much to share with other health professionals in terms of our experiences and observations. I wish we could dedicate more time to reviewing scientific literature, to support our contributions.”
Listen to the Gospel Reflection for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised. Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Greif Q3 2020 earnings call. [Operator instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator instructions] Thank you. I’d now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Matt Eichmann, vice president, investor relations and corporate communications.
Please go ahead.
Matt Eichmann — Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications
Thank you, Jack, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Greif’s third-quarter fiscal 2020 earnings conference call. On the call today are Pete Watson, vice president and chief executive officer; and Larry Hilsheimer, Greif’s chief financial officer. Pete and Larry will take questions at the end of today’s call.
In accordance with Regulation Fair Disclosure, we encourage you to ask questions regarding issues you consider material because we are prohibited from discussing significant nonpublic information with you on an individual basis. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up before returning to the queue. Please turn to Slide 2. As a reminder, during today’s call, we will make forward-looking statements involving plans, expectations, and beliefs related to future events.
Actual results could differ materially from those discussed. Additionally, we’ll be referencing certain non-GAAP financial measures, and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics can be found in the appendix of today’s presentation. And now, I turn the presentation over to Pete on Slide 3.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As we expected, during the third quarter, we faced unprecedented economic turmoil caused by the global health pandemic, but the Greif team responded and delivered solid results through strong cost control and operational discipline. Through that focus, we generated solid free cash flow and paid down debt.
This is only possible, thanks to the commitment of our global Greif team, their extraordinary dedication to our business and our customers, and the pride they have in safely packaging and protecting critical goods and materials that serve the greater needs of our communities all around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic remains an evolving situation. We are focused on executing enhanced health and safety protocols to safeguard the health of our colleagues and ensure the continuity of our supply chain to serve our customers. During the quarter, we achieved an all-time high trailing four-quarter Customer Satisfaction Index score, which further strengthens our standing with customers.
And while profits were lower due to soft industrial demand and a significant price cost squeeze in our paper packaging business, free cash flow remained roughly flat to the prior year, and we have reduced net debt by more than $260 million versus the prior-year quarter. Please turn to Slide 4. Our rigid industrial packaging business delivered solid third-quarter results despite significant volume decreases due to weak demand in the global industrial economy. Global steel drum volumes declined by 10% versus the prior-year quarter.
And demand was strongest in China, where volumes rose 6%, thanks to an improving economic activity. As you move west to our EMEA region, demand was weaker. While the Middle East and North Africa business delivered steel growth of 6% versus the prior year and the Mediterranean region grew by low single digits, our Central and Western European steel drum volumes declined by low double digits due to weak chemical and lubricant demand. The Americas region experienced the weakest conditions, with steel drum volumes in the U.S.
down by almost 20% versus prior year. This was a result of weak demand for industrial paints, chemicals, and lubricants. Global IBC production fell by roughly 1% as we faced weaker demand from specialty and bulk chemical customers. RIPS’ third-quarter sales fell roughly $79 million versus the prior-year quarter on a currency-neutral basis due to lower volumes and raw material price declines and corresponding contractual pricing adjustments.
Despite the decline in sales, RIPS’ third-quarter adjusted EBITDA fell by only $5 million versus the prior-year quarter due to lower raw material cost, primarily attributable to roughly a $5 million opportunistic sourcing benefit and strong cost control that resulted in lower year-over-year manufacturing expenses and segment SG&A expense. Finally, despite considerable external challenges in the quarter, RIP continues to demonstrate improved EBITDA. On a trailing four-quarter basis, the Ridge Industrial Packaging business is already delivering profits well within their fiscal 2022 commitment range. I’d ask that you please turn to Slide 5.
I’d like to spend a moment to discuss what we are currently seeing in the market. The weak volumes in Q3 were anticipated and communicated during our second-quarter call, but we believe the worst is behind us as our year-over-year steel drum volume comparisons improved throughout the quarter after bottoming in May. That said, the pace of improvement is somewhat slower than what we had anticipated in Q2. This slide highlights major end-market progression for our largest RIPS substrates, which is steel drums.
And broadly speaking, we continue to see positive demand for food, flavors, and fragrances during the quarter. There is improving demand for chemicals as the auto manufacturing is returning, but we continue to experience softness in industrial paints, coatings, and lubricants. I’d ask you to please turn to Slide 6. The flexible products’ segment third-quarter sales fell roughly 5% versus the prior-year quarter on a currency-neutral basis due to soft demand, raw material price declines, and corresponding contractual pricing adjustments.
Third-quarter adjusted EBITDA was roughly flat to the prior year despite these lower sales, thanks to strong cost control resulting in lower SG&A’s segment expense. I’d ask if you turn to Slide 7. Paper packaging’s third-quarter sales fell by roughly $70 million versus the prior-year quarter primarily due to lower published containerboard and boxboard prices and the divestiture of our Consumer Packaging Group. We took 10,000 tons of containerboard economic downtime early in Q3 but none in July or, thus far, in August.
Paper packaging’s third-quarter adjusted EBITDA fell by roughly $39 million versus the prior year largely due to product mix and a significant $37 million price cost squeeze. The team also demonstrated strong cost control management and offset some of the headwind through lower manufacturing and SG&A expense versus the prior year. If I could ask you to please turn to Slide 8 to give you some color on what we’re seeing in the PPS markets. Volume in our CorrChoice corrugated sheet feeder network improved by 4% versus the prior-year quarter.
Volumes have progressively strengthened since May due to improving demand in durables and a recovery in the auto supply chain and solid e-commerce growth. In our tube and core business, fiscal third-quarter volumes were down 10% versus the prior year but showed progressive improvement in the quarter and was down 4% in July. We continue to see some demand weaknesses most pronounced in non-containerboard paper mill segments and textile end market segments. Film and construction market demand continues to remain positive.
I’d like to now turn the presentation over to our chief financial officer, Larry Hilsheimer.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Pete, and good morning, everyone. I’ll start by reiterating Pete’s comments and thank the global Greif team for their continued dedication during this COVID-19 crisis. The team’s professionalism has been remarkable given all of the external distractions, and we greatly appreciate their efforts. Slide 9 highlights our quarterly financial performance.
Our third quarter was very challenging, as expected. However, we generated solid free cash flow and paid down debt, as promised. Third-quarter net sales, excluding the impact of foreign exchange, fell roughly 12% year over year due to lower volumes, lower selling prices, and the divestiture of the Consumer Packaging Group. Adjusted EBITDA fell by roughly 22%, with the bulk of the decrement driven by the EBITDA reduction in our paper business that Pete described.
All segments achieved reductions in SG&A expense. Below the operating profit line, interest expense fell by roughly $5 million. Our GAAP tax rate during the quarter was roughly 22%, while our non-GAAP tax rate was roughly 23%. We expect our non-GAAP rate to range between 26% and 29% for fiscal 2020.
Our bottom-line adjusted Class A earnings per share fell to $0.85 per share. We recorded roughly $16 million of non-cash impairment charges in the quarter, of which roughly $11 million relates to the closure of the Mobile mill announced at Q2. We also recorded roughly $19 million in restructuring expense, including roughly $9 million to exit a multi-employer pension plan as a result of plant consolidation within our RIPS business. We view this planned exit as a positive development as it prevents exposure to probable increased obligations in the future.
Finally, despite lower profits, third-quarter adjusted free cash flow held roughly flat at $107 million versus the prior-year quarter, thanks to $7 million of lower capex and stronger working capital performance. Please turn to Slide 10. Given our solid operating performance and better line of sight into customer demand and only two remaining months in fiscal 2020, we are reintroducing our adjusted Class A earnings per share and adjusted free cash flow guidance for this year. We are also providing the key fiscal 2020 assumptions you see listed on Slide 10 to assist with modeling.
We expect to generate between $3 and $3.20 per share for fiscal 2020, which implies roughly $0.66 per share in fiscal Q4. Profits are anticipated to be lower sequentially from the fiscal third to fourth quarter due to normal business seasonality; higher SG&A due to the incentive releases that benefited the third quarter; less opportunistic sourcing cost benefits, which we do not forecast; softer sales in our high-margin filling business in the U.S.; and a sequentially higher non-GAAP tax rate in the fourth quarter. We also assume OCC costs of $61 a ton in Q4. More importantly, and in line with our financial priorities, we expect to deliver between $260 million and $290 million in adjusted free cash flow for fiscal 2020.
We assume capex to range between $120 million and $140 million; for working capital to be a source of cash; and for cash taxes to range between $75 million and $80 million. We will reevaluate our guidance practices again at the end of the fiscal year to align to our visibility into customer ordering patterns. But let me emphasize, we have no plans to move to a regular habit of providing quarterly guidance. Please turn to Slide 11.
Our capital allocation priorities are unchanged and are outlined on this slide. They are funding organic capex, delevering our balance sheet, maintaining steady dividends, and pursuing our strategic growth priorities in IBCs, IBC reconditioning, and containerboard integration. Our balance sheet is extremely solid with roughly $523 million of available liquidity, including $99 million of cash. Our only near-term debt maturities are senior notes due midway through 2021, with a principal of EUR 200 million.
At quarter-end, despite substantial COVID recession negative impact to EBITDA, our compliance leverage ratios stood at roughly 3.72 times, well below our debt covenant of 4.5 times due to our success in paying down debt. With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Pete for his closing comments before our Q&A.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
OK, thank you, Larry. And if everyone could please turn to Slide 12. In closing, I just want to thank our 16,000 colleagues again for their commitment to Greif and to our customers. Our diverse global team is highly engaged and is providing differentiated service to our customers.
With our industry-leading product portfolio, we are well-positioned to serve a variety of attractive markets around the world as businesses reopen. Through sharp focus on cost control and operating discipline given by the great business system, we are generating solid cash flow despite considerable external headwinds, and our balance sheet is in great shape. Thank you for participating this morning, and we appreciate your interest in Greif. Jack, if you could please open the line for questions.
Questions & Answers:
Operator
Certainly. [Operator instructions] George Staphos with Bank of America, your line is open.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for all the details. Hope you’re doing well.
Hey, I wanted to dig in a little bit into cash flow, and my first question. So recognizing that this is an unprecedented time, as you put it, the free cash flow guidance range for fiscal 4Q is fairly wide by $30 million. I was wondering what the swing factors are there, why it’s particularly wide given there’s only a couple of months left to go. And then if you could remind us, capex is down, I think, year on year in the fourth quarter, yet the free cash flow guide 4Q versus 4Q last year is down $90 million.
Again, what are the key drivers there that I might be forgetting about in terms of why you’d be pleased with that outcome?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Thanks, George. So in terms of the range of cash flow, yes, let me do the last one first. I mean, clearly, we have done an extremely good job of generating cash in the last 12 months.
If you look at the trailing 12 months, we’ve produced $322 million of free cash flow. So a lot of those activities began some time ago, and we saw the benefits of those fallout in last year’s Q4. But because of the production of cash through the early parts of this year, there’s generally — just less to generate in the last period of the year. We really had phenomenal performance in working capital management in the fourth quarter of last year.
We’ve become much more consistent in that. But we enhanced our performance again in the third quarter of this year as we have every quarter, and so it just has evened it out a bit more. But if I look at the range for the last quarter, there’s a couple of things going into that, George. We’re expecting to complete a number of capex projects.
But we’ve run into difficulties, frankly, in having suppliers get us equipment that’s ordered, those kind of things. And obviously, we’re not going to pay for it until we get it. So there’s some flexibility in that range for that. And the other is just where we are going to end up on working capital in the fourth quarter.
So we built relatively wide range in for basically those two. The other thing that can fluctuate a bit is we’ve got a number of closures to tax exempts that is what ended up helping us have a substantially lower tax rate in the third quarter. A number of those are ongoing and some of those could close, and you could end up needing to make payments or not. And so those three factors, that capex volatility, the working capital volatility and the tax timing on payments, are the reason for the wider range in that fourth-quarter guidance, George.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Larry, that’s great. Very, very clear. And my other question, and I’ll turn it over. You gave us a little bit of color in terms of what you’re seeing out of CorrChoice.
Can you talk at all about what you’re seeing in terms of the corrugated markets and containerboard markets? August, how far is your order book stretching? Any kind of a qualitative commentary would be great. Thank you. I’ll turn it over.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Sure, George. This is Pete. Thanks for the question. So, as you know, at our CorrChoice business, where our corrugated sheet feeder is, so visibility in the backlogs is virtually 24 days.
But I will tell you, our demand in August is very strong, with double-digit growth versus prior year. So similar to the evolution we saw in July. And our containerboard system is very solid, and demand is very good. And I can’t predict what’ll happen in the future, but it appears to be solid.
Our exposure in the end markets are around durables, predominantly, because we serve independent box makers whose customers — their customer demand is very strong. And we also have some exposure to e-commerce. And so at this point, while we struggled in that business at the beginning of the COVID health pandemic, the business has responded very well. And our containerboard and corrugated system is very strong and healthy at this point.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Thank you, Pete.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Thank you, George.
Operator
Gabe Hajde with Wells Fargo, your line is open.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Good morning, Pete, Larry, Matt. Hope you guys are all doing well.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Thanks, Gabe.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Pete, maybe I’m trying to understand and maybe if you can help marry up of some of the comments that you’re making in containerboard. And I appreciate your customer set is different, but I feel like some of the end markets are somewhat similar. And is it possible that we could see an acceleration in demand across your RIPS segments, where you’re seeing weakness now? You talked about some chemicals, coatings and lubes, and more specifically, thinking about automotive and perhaps it’s just a function of where things are in the supply chain. Any visibility or thoughts there?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So our end markets are really entirely different between our RIPS business and our corrugated business, predominantly CorrChoice. And again, it’s durables. We have exposure to e-commerce, some food.
But some of that strength in CorrChoice is related to our new sheet feeder in Pennsylvania, so that helps it. And then in the auto industry, those two businesses. So CorrChoice really serves customers who supply tier 1, 2, and 3 parts supply. Our RIPS business supplies customers whose products go into manufacturing, one or two product streams down, component parts inside a car.
So again, the context and the touchpoints to that segment are slightly different. The auto supply chain comes earlier and then the resulting impact to RIPS would come a little later.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Gabe, let me add a couple of things. One is lubes are a big business for us. A lot of that is automotive use and mileage is down because of commutings going away.
Now, you’re seeing some pickup as people drive to vacations instead of flying. But net-net, mileage is down and particularly in the U.S. The other thing I’d point out is industrial production in the U.S. and capacity utilization, yes, the Federal Reserve just published some statistics.
And if you look at average production utilization from 72%, through ’19, was at 78%. In April, we were at 60%; May, 62%; June, 66%; and July, 69%. When machines aren’t running, they don’t need lubricants. So the recovery is not coming back as rapidly as Pete and I thought it might when we talked to Q2.
It’s coming back gradually, but we need machines running. We need lubricants to create demand. We think it’s coming. We’re seeing stuff, but it’s not there yet.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Thank you, guys. And then, I guess, on the PPS side, I didn’t see the slide that you normally put in about synergy realization. I’m assuming that’s still on track, but if you could kind of provide any commentary there.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. We still are, Gabe. I mean, if we were just, point in time, looking at it, it’s down slightly but still over $70 million. Down slightly only because some of them are volume oriented in the URB, CRB business being down.
It’s a little bit down. But we believe, as the economy comes back, that number on those that are down by capacity and utilization will go back up but still over $70 million and well on track.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Ghansham Panjabi with Baird, your line is open.
Ghansham Panjabi — Robert W. Baird — Analyst
Hey, guys, good morning. You know, Pete, in your prepared comments, you were talking about the RIPS space of improvement being a little bit slower. And I think, Larry, you just mentioned that as well. Can you just give us more color on that by region? Just how do you see this kind of shaking out? Because China was up 6% in the quarter, and obviously, they’ve recovered nicely from that initial dislocation.
Just curious as to how you’re seeing that same trajectory in Europe and also the U.S.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Ghansham. So we see the improvement in our global RIPS business, quite frankly, similar in FPS. The demand conditions are tracking on a very similar path to the geographic-related improvements to COVID-19 health, meaning China, obviously, has recovered faster in COVID and they’re our strongest region. We see, in EMEA, it is improving overall, but we’re still down high single digits versus prior year in our volumes there.
It’s a mixed scenario because it’s a more complex region. So the Middle East volumes were very strong. But Central Europe and Western Europe, which is the predominantly highest-volume components in that geographic sector, are weaker because of chemical lubricant demand. But we are seeing moderate improvement in conditions through the quarter.
And then the weakest is North America and South America. And again, it mirrors the transition of the health pandemic, and we still see that as being the weakest demand in our global portfolio during Q3. Just to give you a little color, in August, our global steel drum volumes are improving versus July, but there’s still mid-single-digit declines versus prior year, and our IBC growth is normalizing. So we had a little lower quarter than normal, but we’re showing double-digit improvements in August, which kind of normalizes the path we’re on versus prior year.
Ghansham Panjabi — Robert W. Baird — Analyst
OK. Great. And just as a follow-up to that. For 4Q, specifically, looking at RIPS, what are you modeling from a volume standpoint? And then also for PPS, is it reasonable to expect a similar price cost headwind in 4Q as you saw in 3Q? Thanks so much.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
So our volumes to the forecast, really, across all of our portfolio, is we see volumes just slightly improved versus July, and the July volumes were highlighted in the deck. And in regard to the price-cost squeeze, I’ll let Larry talk through the bridge and what we see from Q3 to what we expect in Q4.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes, Ghansham. You know, clearly, we had that unprecedented spike — unprecedented in terms of cause, spike in OCC in Q3 because of the shutdown of the retail sector and restaurant sector in the U.S., as well as a lot of industrial. So the supply side was squeezed. Well, as you know, the demand side was up because of the pantry stuffings.
And so the OCC costs shot up, and that, with what we felt was unwarranted nonrecognition by resuscitated price increases, created basically a $36 million year-over-year price cost squeeze. And actually, if you step back and look at that, we were $44 million down on EBITDA year over year, with $36 million of it, that price-cost squeeze, missing a year ago by $8 million. And in an economic situation like this, we are quite proud of our team, to be quite frank. But in the fourth quarter, we’re predicting $61 on our OCC.
So we don’t see the same year-over-year price squeeze there, which is actually a lift of roughly $15 million on the year-over-year relative to the third quarter, sequential improvement over the third quarter from where we were.
Matt Eichmann — Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications
And in the fourth quarter, Ghansham, just to add to Larry’s comments — it’s Matt. I think OCC last year in Quarter 4 of ’19 was about $30 a ton. So relative to the $61 that we’re expecting in the fourth quarter this year, that will certainly be a headwind.
Ghansham Panjabi — Robert W. Baird — Analyst
OK, great. Thanks so much.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Ghansham.
Operator
[Operator instructions] Mark Wilde with Bank of Montreal, your line is open.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
Thanks. Good morning, Pete. Good morning, Larry. I really appreciated that kind of crisp walk-through at the start.
For my first question, I wondered with this hurricane hitting down on the Gulf Coast today, if you can just talk about potential fallout from that, what you’ve seen in kind of past hurricanes down there, thinking mainly about the RIPS business. But maybe you could also address sort of any kind of potential fallout on your landholdings down there.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Thanks, Mark. So in that Gulf Coast region, just to give you some perspective, we have 10 manufacturing operations that generate roughly $200 million of revenue in the Gulf Coast. As of 8:30 this morning, all of those operations are secure and safe.
And as majority of those operations are in the Houston metro area, which, thankfully, the storm bypassed. But our biggest concern is our thoughts and prayers with all of our colleagues and their families in the region, I hope they’re safe and healthy. We don’t have a view of that yet, but our thoughts are with them. And I think the impacts, going forward, really, are the extent of the damage to our customers’ operations.
And we don’t have clarity on that, but there’s certainly some large paper mills that we supply cores and a variety of products to. There’s a lot of petrochemical companies in that region that we supply RIPS products to. So, again, that will certainly be an impact. We have no idea that the extent of that damage will be today.
And they’re also — we would always expect disruption in the supply chain on a short term. It really impacts our resin suppliers who are located there. Not all of our suppliers are in that region but some of them, and we’ll certainly see some transportation disruption for the short term. So regarding our land management holdings, we obviously do have some holdings in Louisiana.
And at this point, it’s too early to determine what impact that had. But I think we’re very fortunate in that the majority of our cluster of operations in Houston were spared. But again, what that does to our customers is undetermined at this time.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. And the only thing I’d supplement in trying to put out the guidance range, obviously, it’s very early. But looking back at prior storms and stuff, we basically set aside from $0.01 to $0.03 a share as the potential impact. And that was just our best estimate based on prior experiences.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
OK. That’s excellent, Larry. That’s exactly what I was looking for. As my follow-on, I just wondered, Pete, if you can give us some sense in CorrChoice, what the cumulative impact is on the start-up of the sheet feeder in Pennsylvania.
And then I think you guys put in bulk packaging plant into Kentucky not long ago. So I’m just curious about how both of those ramp-ups are going and then what they add on a year-over-year basis to CorrChoice.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So the triple-wall bulk plant in Louisville has been there for a while. We just added capacity to that business. And some of the e-commerce lift have come from that facility.
And that business is doing quite well, serving ag customers, industrial customers, some direct to ag markets and some through the independent and integrated box systems. The Palmyra sheet feeder is progressing well, ramping up volume. A little slower than we anticipated due to COVID, but it’s responding very, very well. When you look at the uptick in July, and in August, I think you’ll see our base business is up probably 4%, and the remainder of that double-digit growth is the addition of Palmyra.
So, again, we’re real pleased with how that’s progressing. It’s getting good response from customers in that market, and we’ll be in a good path for that business.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
OK, very good. I’ll turn it over.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes, thank you.
Operator
Adam Josephson with KeyBanc, your line is open.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Pete and Larry, good morning. Hope you your families are well.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Hey, Adam.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Adam.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Larry, just on your — thanks for your 4Q commentary. I just wanted to dig in a bit to it. So you mentioned higher SG&A, sequentially, I think as incentive comp comes back. And SG&A year-to-date has gone from, I think, $135 million at the start of the year down to $120 million in 3Q.
I’m just wondering what exactly you’re expecting in terms of SG&A cost in the fourth quarter. And then what do you think a sustainable quarterly level as given the degree of the declines year over year in fiscal 2Q and 3Q. And then you mentioned — I think you had $5 million of opportunistic sourcing benefits in 3Q. I forgot what that number was in 2Q.
I know you said you’re not expecting more in 4Q. But do you think it’s possible you’ll get more opportunistic sourcing benefits in 4Q? And just how are you thinking about the sustainability of that benefit in the RIPS business?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Sure. Let me take the sourcing first, Adam. Yes. Could we get more? Certainly, and we challenged our sourcing team to do it all time.
We just don’t build it in the forecast. I mean, we had roughly 11 million in the — it was 11 million in 2Q.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
7 million.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
7 million in 2Q and 5.5 million in Q3. So that $5.5 million, by not putting it into the fourth quarter, it’s about $0.06 this year kind of thing. In SG&A, it’s a combination of we — when we completed our forecast for the remainder of the year, looking at the numbers, we knew the impact on incentives. And so we’ve made a bunch of incentive adjustments in the third quarter that won’t repeat in the fourth quarter because, obviously, if we hit our forecast, we’ve already made the adjustments to a great degree.
So it’s that. It also is we had some ERP noncapitalizable costs that were delayed. COVID has required us to slow down. We can’t travel quite as much.
We’re starting to open that up and catch up. We want to try to get those things done so we can leverage that into savings and insights. So there’s some of that cost going in. And then the other is professional fees, both related to that and actually some tax planning things we’ve got going on that we think will benefit us in the future that relate to some regulations that were just issued and some other transactions that we’re doing, along with some other professional fees that have been deferred.
Some of those are also travel-related things that could not happen and have been pushed off. So all told, we’re expecting SG&A to be about $11.5 million higher in the fourth quarter roughly and so about $0.14 a share kind of swing there. Since I basically — let me just walk from third quarter to fourth quarter since we’re going through that. I might as well just do that.
Say third quarter at $0.85 a share, I mentioned $0.01 to $0.03 on the hurricane. That’s a drop there. We also have — the SG&A is about $0.14. Sourcing is about $0.06.
Going the other way is OCC, $0.15 pickup over the last quarter. Then tax is about $0.09 a share, roughly, because we ended up settling a lot of exams, really cashing through and looking at a lot of the reserves we set up for various tax positions over the years, and the settlement positions that we had, that ended up freeing up about — what equates to about a $0.09 per share differential between Q3 and Q4. So a little bit of that, the good quarterly results, at least we thought it was good, for Q3 related to this tax pickup. The other item’s a little bit more complex, but it has to do with the success in CorrChoice.
And CorrChoice ran hard, as Pete mentioned, through July. That drove inventories down. We obviously have a mill system. We then sell into CorrChoice.
Oftentimes, they’re holding paper inventory that they have for production needs. What happens is there’s intercompany profit tied up in that. The mill profit gets tied up in the inventory held in the CorrChoice system. When it gets sold out, that’s recognized.
And so intercompany profit is generally tied up. The other thing that causes some of that to free up is if margins squeeze. Well, margins got squeezed. The combination of reduced inventories and margin squeeze in CorrChoice actually freed up about $6.7 million of profit in the third quarter that maybe usually would have been tied up in ending inventory.
In the fourth quarter, that will reverse. We’ll probably end up, we think, with about $1.1 million of profit tied up in inventory more than where we are now. So you basically have a $7.8 million swing in profitability between the quarters for that item, which is about $0.09. If you take all those items together, it’s about $0.25.
It would take you down to $60. Our midpoint on the guidance is $66, so a 10% improvement quarter over quarter in just operations. And then the range around it is it could be 10% or — plus 10% on that just because of the uncertainty of how quickly things will recover in the industrial side of things. So hopefully, that’s helpful clarity.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Yes. And I really appreciate that, Larry. Thank you. And then can you just — one geographic question, specifically North America.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like, at the moment, CorrChoice is the standout and then tubes and cores and rigid, specifically steel drums, are operating considerably lower demand levels than CorrChoice in North America. Can you just talk about what you’ve seen fiscal year-to-date in North America, specifically, and why you think the demand trends have diverged among your businesses, to the extent they have, and if you expect those divergences to continue or reverse for whatever reason?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So it really depends on the end market exposure for each of those three businesses. And as I’ve said, in CorrChoice, we have heavy influence in durables and e-commerce, and we’re aligned to a lot of independent box customers whose demand is very strong. They have some access to a broader market and end market exposure.
And we also supply integrated customers as their business gets better. So when you look at tube and core in our RIPS business, the end market exposures are entirely different. They’re tied a little bit more to some segments that are struggling. When you look at the big influence in North America and RIPS, you look at bulk and specialty chemicals, they’re challenged.
And industrial paints and coatings and lubricants, where we have no exposure in CorrChoice or corrugated, are very, very weak now. And in tube and core, the exposure, again, is different. As I said, we sell the paper mills’ cores, and the non-containerboard paper mill cores are weak. And we have pretty heavy exposure to textile-related end segments, and they’ve been hurt by this COVID.
They’ve reopened, but they’re still at a pace considerably weaker in the past. So again, totally different end segments and totally different go-to-market approaches. So a lot of times, you might see CorrChoice being a little weaker than the others, and it really reflects their end market segments. Going forward, again, we see incremental improvement from July.
And while tube and core is down, it’s still down less in July. And we expect a low single-digit growth — excuse me, a decline of low single-digit growth in Tube and Core. And at this point, we expect our RIPS business in North America to be very weak and what we can see through our fourth quarter.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Thanks so much, Pete.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. Thank you.
Operator
Steven Chercover with D.A. Davidson, your line is open.
Steven Chercover — D.A. Davidson — Analyst
Thanks. Good morning. I just wanted to bracket segments a little more for the fourth quarter and looking at it from an EBITDA basis. So it looks like, consolidated, you will be down $15 million to $20 million sequentially.
And in paper, you’ve got less downtime, at least on the corrugated side, and about a $50 million headwind or tailwind from OCC. And then in RIPS, you got that $5 million nonrepeat. So should paper be up? And then RIPS is really where things are weaker than anticipated, and I recognize Pete just said North America will be weak.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. We’ve got that intercompany profit swing that I mentioned on the paper side as well, Steve. So you got $7.8 million decrement going from Q3 to Q4. But yes, we do anticipate that being a challenge.
On SG&A, about half of that is in the rigid segment and half of it is in corporate costs. So you’ll have that impact there. And then the sourcing, obviously, comes out, the $5.5 million, on a relative basis. And then you’ve got the OCC benefit, though, in PPS.
So those are the elements of the trend in EBITDA. I hope that’s helpful.
Steven Chercover — D.A. Davidson — Analyst
Yes. That helps kind of narrow the gap a wee bit. And then Pete made a point of indicating that RIPS is already at the EBITDA run rate, in line with your 2022 Q commitments. And if I’m right, paper is about $100 million to $150 million off.
So what are the levers that you intend to pull will help you close the gap over the next couple of years?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. I think the biggest thing is, Steve, is, yes, the economic recovery. I mean, clearly, a lot of our end segments are dramatically impacted by an economic impact that is worse than anything since the Great Depression. I mean, when you look at the GDP declines, they’re unprecedented in that time frame of the last 80, 90 years.
So industrial production statistics that I mentioned in the U.S. are dramatically off. Obviously, our hope and, I think, everybody’s hope is that by the time you get to ’22, that’s in the rearview mirror by quite a way. And if it is, and we can recover even back to the sort of loop-form economy that we had before, I mean, it seems like a long time ago now, but our investor day in 2019, I stood up on the stage and said we’re in an industrial recession, and we were.
And the statistics I quoted earlier, I mean, even February of this year was way below the average of the last 40 years of industrial production. So if we get back to that, we have no concerns about hitting our commitments. If you look at the underlying assumption — we will update all this in December, but OCC is right about where we had it in the assumptions. Pricing on paper is down somewhat, but we expect our RIPS business, and we’ve talked about it, the benefit of this portfolio of companies all the time.
Obviously, we’re already hitting their targets. We expect them to be better, and we expect full realization of the synergies that we’ve identified in the paper business. So I’ll tell you that we are extremely confident of hitting those commitments, and we’re very confident of paying down the debt and getting back into our 2 to 2.5 times range. And we don’t think it’s a stretch.
Steven Chercover — D.A. Davidson — Analyst
OK. And I’ll be a bit of a pig and ask and try to get one more in. You guys made a really good kind of presentation on OCC at your 2019 investor day. Do you think that the long-term price for OCC is going to go back kind of those to the $30 to $50 range?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
I think we’ve been pretty consistent, Steve. We’re saying that we think the longer-term range is relatively about where it is now. And the range that we gave at investor day, I think, was $35 to $75 on our commitments. We think that’s the sweet spot risk.
He’s actually projecting it to go up. We don’t feel that way into next year. I mean, we think the supply side is picking up. Obviously, China has backed out.
Some of that demand is going to go elsewhere. But we think that that forecast of what we thought then is — that remains a good one.
Steven Chercover — D.A. Davidson — Analyst
OK. Thanks, guys. Stay safe.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Thanks, Steve.
Operator
George Staphos with Bank of America, your line is open.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Hi, everyone. Pete, Larry, maybe an unfair question, but you must have some view on this. So if you take a step back, I assume the fourth quarter plays out more or less as you expect, and we are, again, a little bit of swag here but — or wiggle room, I should say. Let’s say things in fiscal ’21 are relatively normal, what do you think COVID took out of your EBIT or EBITDA in fiscal ’20? Do you have any sort of approximation of what kind of hole that created that will come back to you over the next couple of years, kind of a similar plan, what you see there?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. Based on our forecast, George, I mean, we again identified it in the third quarter, it was $24 million, OK? It’s $33 million of lost business and about a $9 million tailwind from various subsidies, lower travel costs, and all that kind of thing. Looking at where we’re forecasting for the year, you’ve got a couple of things. We had the OCC price cost squeeze impact to us that’s roughly going to be, say, $50 million for the year, the price in the OCC, and everything for the quarter.
And that’s a rough number. It might be a little less than that. But then on an overall basis relative to where we thought we’d be, I think COVID impact for this year would be another $50 million on top of that, so roughly ending up maybe $100 million less than where we thought we’d be. Now, we’ve built some of that price-cost squeeze in.
But roughly, we’d end up with $100 million less than where we would have predicted at the beginning of the year.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
All right. Larry, I appreciate that. And this is probably more of a question for the next analyst day, whenever that you do that, so you can keep your comments brief here. But what have you learned about the portfolio over these last three quarters now, heading into fourth quarter to finish up the year? And interrelationship and how complementary the businesses are, and perhaps maybe things you’ve learned about, they’re not as complementary as you would have expected through what’s been a very stressful period.
How do you look at the portfolio now and whether it makes more sense or lessons having gone through COVID? Thanks, guys, and good luck in the quarter.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. I think, George, we found that we have a very resilient global supply chain dependent — or centered on regional supply. So I think that’s supporting what we’ve done over the past three years, and it played well for us in the COVID. And I think our balanced portfolio, globally, has demonstrated that, in normal times, it is a good portfolio.
It’s balanced, and our ability to serve our customers in a variety of substrates, while it’s short-term challenge, I think, helps us in the future.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. And I think there’s a couple of things. One, we’ve seen more and more alignment between our flexible business and our rigid segment in terms of the end market customers we serve. We continue to leverage that more and more.
And then the other part is relative to the Caraustar acquisition. This time of working through this crisis has made us nothing but stronger about our resolve, that it was a good acquisition. The leverage that we’re getting off of utilizing the skill sets of our mill management team across the entire portfolio is really paying benefits for us. I mean, we can’t control the economy and the end market demands.
But what we can control, we are controlling, and we’re doing a lot of things to really take cost out of the organization. Sort of back to that adage of don’t let a good crisis get wasted. It’s refined our view. It’s caused us to really focus.
It’s caused us to strengthen and modify our footprint and leverage the assets that we have. So we’re very, very comfortable with the portfolio at this point.
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
I appreciate the thoughts. Take care, guys.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
You, too.
Operator
Gabe Hajde with Wells Fargo, your line is open.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Thanks for taking the follow-up. I’m curious in the URB mill system, are you guys taking any kind of particular downtime or more precedented than any other quarter? And how would you kind of characterize your individual supply demand as it sits today and, perhaps, more particularly, where your inventory position is?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So thoughts to our recycled boxboard mills, we run the demand, and it’s very similar to what we’ve had before. While we have a little lower demand in our tube and core business, we offset that with volume from non-tube and core business. And again, our inventory position is that we manage our inventories and our working capital very stringently.
And we tend not to try to, in slower demand times, run up our inventories because we just don’t think that’s the best way to operate. Run the demand and manage our working capital very, very effectively.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Thank you, Pete. And maybe, Larry, if you could — I appreciate it’s pretty volatile right now, but there’s some fairly sizable price increases that have gone through on the resin side. And assuming there’s some sort of normal industrial markets kind of in fiscal 2021, can you maybe tell us what you’re expecting working capital to be on an aggregate basis as a benefit to cash flow this year and then perhaps what the reversal could look like next year?
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. I mean — yes, thanks, Gabe. We anticipate that year over year, our benefit of working capital is roughly in the $60 million to $70 million range of benefit year over year. We’ll tend to run up a little bit of working capital in the first quarter of the year, but then we fully anticipate that in ’21, we should be able to, again, manage working capital well, and it should be a nominal either increase or decrease year over year.
Although we do believe in certain areas of our business that we have opportunities to improve our working capital even further, the Caraustar business has improved dramatically. We still believe there’s room there. And we believe there’s room in our flexible business and also in some of our operations, particularly in EMEA in RIPS. But we’re not talking huge numbers, but there are opportunities there that could allow us to drive improvement again next year or even more than what we had this year.
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Thanks for that. Good luck.
Operator
Mark Wilde with Bank of Montreal, your line is open.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
All right. I’ve got three just real quick ones. First, Pete, I wondered, looking in the back of the slide deck, there’s a 31.4% drop in what you’re calling kind of nonprimary product revenues in the quarter. What exactly was the big driver in the drop in those nonprimary products?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
That’s predominantly small water bottle, small plastics. It’s a small part of our portfolio.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
OK. The second one is can you give us some just general sense about the sort of the transition strategy for the CRB business as the Graphic contracts will fall away over time?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So as we’ve talked about on the divestiture, we have an agreement, for one mill for two and a half years and the other two mills for five years. So the transition is going very well. Graphic’s a very good customer of ours, not only in paper but other products.
We feel really good about our position as an independent supplier of CRB to the independent folding carton community. So we made the right decision. We’re really happy. I think it puts the consumer products business in the hands of a more strategic partner.
And we’re real pleased with how we’re operating our CRP mills and our position in the market at this point.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
Yes. And are those contracts — just not to get too far into the weeds here, but do they just drop off? Or do they kind of step down over time?
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
No. They drop off. One is two and a half years and two mills are five years on a similar-volume basis on when we stepped off from the divestiture.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. The thing I would say, Mark, is that’s when the contractual obligation ends now. When does the actual relationship and is maybe a different question? Our business with Graphic has only increased so and beyond what they’re obligated to. So it’s a good relationship.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. There’s a lot of synergies beyond just the paper that we serve them many other products.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
OK. All right. That’s not hard to imagine. The last one, I’m just curious, there are an awful lot of printing and writing paper mills that are looking for new products, maybe new owners.
And I’m just wondering whether there might be any opportunity for Greif to look at taking on one of those mills at a point and potentially ending up with a lower cost structure or a better kind of product quality, product mix coming off of a reconfigured printing and writing paper mill versus maybe some of what you’re operating right now.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. So we’re never going to comment on hypothetical future situations. But our whole focus as new mills come on stream is to focus on how do we further integrate the existing capacity we have in our mill system and our converting operations. And we think that’s the key to driving the most value.
And we’re not interested in getting more containerboard capacity. We’re interested in creating a position where we have a one-to-one ratio of tons between converting and mill output.
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
OK, fair enough. Good luck in the fourth quarter.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks.
Operator
And today’s last question comes from the line of Adam Josephson with KeyBanc. Your line is open.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Thanks, guys, for taking two follow-ups. One on tubes and cores. I’m just wondering what you think long-run demand trends are in that business, just given what we know are the secular declines in paper demand and the pressure on the textile market. I mean, do you think that’s a flat business long term, slowly declining business? I’m just wondering what your view of long-run demand there is.
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes. We think it’s a GDP-plus business. I think we’ve seen an unprecedented market that’s impacted negatively some of the segments. But we’ve got a very creative sales group that provide a lot of different product development opportunities we’re looking on.
So it’s a much broader end-use market, and we’re focused on how to provide different innovative product solutions. So it’s a really talented group. And right now, it’s challenged, but we think it’s a low single-digit growth business that can drive a lot of margin and value through our integrated system in that recycled boxboard business.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Right. Thanks, Pete. And, Larry, just one question on guidance. You mentioned that, at your analyst day in ’19, you talked about an industrial recession and, of course, this year’s COVID.
We have no idea what next year will bring. Obviously, you said you have no control over economic conditions. So along those lines, what is your thought about giving guidance, both short term and longer term, in light of the fact that, as you said, you have no control over economic conditions, as a result of which, you can end up having to revise guidance or pull guidance depending on those economic conditions? I’m just wondering what you think the benefits are of giving both short- and long-term guidance versus perhaps not doing it.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Yes. I think it’s a fair question. And you could always go to a period where you just don’t give any guidance. I mean, obviously, some people opt to do that.
We’ve opted generally to try to give annual guidance to try to hold ourselves accountable and be as transparent as we can. And that’s where I would anticipate us getting back to presuming that things are at a point where you have some level of confidence when we get to December. Is that going to happen? I don’t know. We will have to assess it then.
I think there’s the prospect of do you see a second wave as the temperatures cool and all that kind of thing. And if that occurs, sort of all bets will probably be off. If a vaccine gets developed more quickly and there’s a path to when it could be dispensed widely, that could influence things. So very, very hard to predict where we’ll be.
But I think over time, we get the pandemic behind us, I think we’d feel comfortable again moving back to annual guidance.
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Thanks so much, Larry, and best of luck.
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks.
Operator
I will now turn the call back over to Matt Eichmann for final remarks.
Matt Eichmann — Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications
Thanks a lot, Jack, and thank you, everybody, for joining us this morning. We appreciate your interest in Greif. We hope you have a great remainder of the week and a good weekend ahead. Thank you.
Operator
[Operator signoff]
Duration: 61 minutes
Call participants:
Matt Eichmann — Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications
Pete Watson — Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Larry Hilsheimer — Chief Financial Officer
George Staphos — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Gabe Hajde — Wells Fargo Securities — Analyst
Ghansham Panjabi — Robert W. Baird — Analyst
Mark Wilde — BMO Capital Markets — Analyst
Adam Josephson — KeyBanc Capital Markets — Analyst
Amid pandemic, domestic and sexual abuse is skyrocketing. Activists worry that news is being buried
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Elections in the United States, a global pandemic and human rights protests have crowded the news coverage for most of 2020.
But activists and sexual abuse survivors continue to ask that the protection of minors and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church and elsewhere remain a priority despite losing momentum, as risks of online and domestic abuse grow globally.
“It became pretty clear to us very early on that the attention given to safeguarding and protecting the dignity and safety of children, and vulnerable people in general, moved out of the center of attention for many people and for many institutions,” said the Rev. Hans Zollner, a Vatican official spearheading the fight against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, in an interview with Religion News Service on Wednesday (Aug. 26).
Zollner heads the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Centre for Child Protection and is a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, created by Pope Francis in 2014.
As the pandemic triggered global lockdowns, forcing citizens to stay at home and avoid crowded events, many young people and vulnerable adults found themselves at a heightened risk of suffering physical and psychological abuse.
The largest nonprofit anti-sexual assault organization in the United States, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, announced in a July news release that it received an unprecedented number of reports by minors of sexual abuse this year during the pandemic.
Throughout Europe, countries have recorded a worrying spike in domestic violence just as “corona divorces” grow in Japan and China after months of lockdown, with many women citing domestic violence as the main cause.
For young people, more time at home also means more access to the internet and social media, where global watchdog organizations have found an increase in sexual predators and grooming efforts. The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, called Europol, warned of a “sharp increase” in the exchange of abusive material online in a news release issued in June.
Pope Francis touches the head of a baby at the St. Louis Hospital in Bangkok on Nov. 21, 2019. Pope Francis called for migrants to be welcomed and for women and children to be protected from exploitation, abuse and enslavement as he began a busy two days of activities in Thailand. (AP Photo/Rapeephat Sitichailapa)
Despite these concerning trends, child protection agencies and survivors told RNS they feel set aside in the global discourse as donations dwindle and media attention is focused on health and financial questions posed by the pandemic.
The head of the largest clergy abuse survivor network in Italy, Rete L’Abuso, said he saw a “massive drop” in attention and action on child protection since the beginning of the lockdown in the peninsula.
“There was a sense of abandonment for many victims,” clergy abuse survivor Francesco Zanardi told RNS on Thursday, adding that many centers for reporting abuse and providing services to victims were shut down at the height of the pandemic.
Sexual abuse trials, both lay and canonical, have been stopped or postponed for several months, Zanardi said. He also said many victims in Italy are now seeking to settle deals with dioceses in order to avoid costly fees and receive immediate cash amid a struggling financial outlook.
Meanwhile, donations for the survivor network have “dropped to zero,” with many donors withdrawing their monthly subscription, Zanardi said.
“It’s too soon to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sexual abuse by clergy,” Zanardi said, especially since reports tend to emerge years — even decades — after the offense, but continued media attention “gives victims the courage to come forward, as well as providing a better awareness for citizens.”
Zanardi highlighted the island of Sicily, located at the tip of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula, as a high-risk region for abuse that lacks adequate safeguards for minors. One such example is the case of the family of an underage girl who authorities say was raped over a four-year period by the head of a lay Catholic association.
The trial for the lay head of the Catholic association, Piero Alfio Capuana, has been postponed numerous times during the pandemic and even the local diocese has fallen silent on the case, which had acquired significant media scrutiny in the past.
“We didn’t hear anything from the Curia,” said the mother of the victim, who wishes to remain anonymous to protect her underage daughter’s identity, in a phone interview with RNS on Thursday.
“We are now forgotten,” she added.
The Rev. Hans Zollner, one of the founding members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, speaks during a news conference at the Foreign Press Association headquarters in Rome on Sept. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)
Even the church struggled in the early months of the pandemic to continue monitoring and instructing on abuse safety measures as the global attention shifted to health and policy concerns. Zollner said the first two to three months of lockdown showed a drop in communication and collaboration requests from the numerous institutions and dioceses around the world.
“Before (the pandemic) there was much interest about sexual abuse committed by priests even in the past. There was a rise of interest in many media outlets across the globe,” he said. “All of a sudden it stopped.”
The German priest said that even in conversations with policymakers and activists in several countries, sexual abuse scrolled down the international agendas to benefit concerns over the pandemic’s impact on the economy, travel restrictions and public health.
“People got interested in their own well-being, which is understandable, of course, not looking at the dangers for others, in this case for young people, while at the same time those dangers were bigger than before,” he said.
He called for a renewed interest by the media in covering cases of sexual abuse, while encouraging reporters to also focus on positive stories of how survivors have found justice and reconciliation.
Current setbacks have also fueled creativity and ingenuity in the Centre for Child Protection, Zollner said, especially through the use of social media and online news conferences that were able to bring together larger numbers than was possible with in-person meetings.
“We learn from different experiences and we come up with new pedagogical insights,” he said, adding that the online presence of the center has “intensified” in recent months, creating the framework for future steps forward.
Over the next few months, Zollner hopes to unveil a concrete new approach that builds on the lessons learned during the pandemic: namely, networking.
“Financial means will be restricted as public attention is decreased,” he said. “To come up with something that will bring us back to the previous stage of attention we will necessarily need to come together and work together, because this is something that no one can do for themselves or an institution alone.”
Talk about a spoiled birthday. For years leading up to its 150th anniversary the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been planning a swell of celebratory programming: an overhaul of its British Galleries, debuts of major gifts of photography and drawing, new cross-cultural displays, an international symposium on collecting, a Great Hall photo op with the mayor and a big cake.
At the center of this Busby Berkeley-scaled jubilee was to be “Making the Met,” an exhibition mapping the growth and transformations of the museum’s collection. You know the rest: Days before the show’s planned opening, the coronavirus pandemic forced this museum and every other in New York to shut down, and turned the Met’s sesquicentennial into an annus horribilis.
The museum now foresees a $150 million loss in revenue for the year, and has shrunk its staff by 20 percent through layoffs, furloughs and early retirement. Shows have been delayed or canceled, budgets tightened. The Met Breuer, its four-year, hit-and-often-miss satellite, closed with a whimper; its meticulous last show, of the German painter Gerhard Richter, saw the light for just nine days.
By June, the Met’s director, Max Hollein, was apologizing for a botched statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor ignited online arguments over museums’ past and present wrongdoings. Later that month he had to apologize again, after a senior curator misstepped on Instagram as protesters nationwide pulled down statues. Mr. Hollein, using far more direct language than his predecessors, conceded that “There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy.”
So the museum that reopens to the public Saturday, after by far the longest closure in its history, has taken some knocks, and “Making the Met” now has to answer weightier questions. Just what kind of institution is this? How does this museum, does any universal museum, give an account of itself today?
Andrea Bayer, the Met’s deputy director for collections and administration, and Laura D. Corey, a senior researcher at the museum, have tried to craft that account with a team of hundreds, all credited by name at the entrance to “Making the Met.” Its more than 250 objects are displayed, roughly speaking, by the date the Met acquired them rather than the period or place they were made. This unusual organizing principle lets you map the growth of the Met from room to room, even as it creates strange, riveting juxtapositions across time.
The opening gallery of “Making the Met, 1870-2020.” From left: a 19th-century Mangaaka power figure from the Kongo kingdom; Vincent van Gogh’s “La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle)” (1889); Isamu Noguchi’s “Kouros”; Rodin’s “The Age of Bronze (L’Age d’airain)”; and Richard Avedon’s 1957 photograph of Marilyn Monroe.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Body mask, from the mid-20th century, created by the Asmat people of New Guinea. The young anthropologist Michael Rockefeller negotiated its purchase with Asmat clan leaders in 1961, and disappeared the same year.Credit…via The Metropolitan Museum of Art A closer view of the nail-studded Mangaaka power figure from the Kongo kingdom.Credit…via The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Michelangelo drawings mingle with Egyptian statuary. Burmese harps sit beside Flemish lace. The show’s horn-blowing prologue, where van Gogh and Rodin appear with a nail-studded Mangaaka power figure from the Kongo kingdom and a Richard Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe, testifies to the unparalleled strength and breadth of the Met’s collection, first modeled after European museums and now outclassing them.
For visitors returning after five months, the catholicity of these galleries will be a treat. Here is a legends-only mini-Met, which can be appreciated on the surface as a supersaturated treasure house. But in its structure, “Making the Met” is all about the ambitions and blind spots of an institution — and the changing schemes of meaning, value and interpretation that form an invisible frame around all the world’s beauty.
Those ambitions began in 1866, in a flush of American optimism after the end of the Civil War, and came to fruition four years later with the acquisition of a Roman sarcophagus. The early Met, like the nearly contemporaneous art museums of Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, scored rather higher on aspiration than connoisseurship. Anthony van Dyck’s 1624 painting “Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo.” A fitting work for our current time, it was among the Met’s first acquisitions.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The earliest purchases in “Making the Met” include a fine marble bust of Benjamin Franklin, by the Revolutionary-era French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, but also misattributed old masters, replicas of European sculptures, and thousands of Cypriot antiquities that its first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, excavated with something less than scientific rigor. (Also among these first acquisitions is Anthony van Dyck’s 1624 painting of Saint Rosalia, the protectress of plague-stricken Palermo, which I was lucky to see in the first days of the pandemic.) “It contains no first-rate example of a first-rate genius,” griped an anonymous critic for The Atlantic Monthly — who turns out to have been Henry James.
But the Met was underway, and from here “Making the Met” plots the development of the collection in nine further chronological galleries, joined up by a central alley that displays projections of the museum’s old information desk, signage workshop, repair rooms.
One gallery focuses on the Met’s deep study collections of textiles, works on paper, and musical instruments, established in the early 20th century. Another zeros in on antiquities acquired through museum-financed archaeological digs of the 1920s and ’30s, when the Met would divvy up discoveries with host countries under a now obsolete legal principle called “partage.” A commanding seated statue of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, unearthed in Egypt in 1927-28, entered the Met in this way, or at least her head and left arm did; the museum only pieced her body back together later after finding the other bits in Berlin. The commanding “Seated Statue of Hatshepsut” (circa 1479-1458 B.C.). Visible through the window is the obelisk “Cleopatra’s Needle” in Central Park.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The ultimate stimulators of the growth of the collection, in the first Gilded Age as in our current one, were the city’s richest: J.P. Morgan, Robert Lehman, and other financiers and industrialists who inherited the tastes, and in the best cases the noblesse oblige, of European princes. They set out to “convert pork into porcelain,” in the rather gauche words of one early museum trustee — and “Making the Met” has heaps of their finest donations, from an exquisite 14th-century mosque lamp, which Morgan gave in 1917, to a burnished 1636 van Dyck portrait of the pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria of England, which Jayne Wrightsman bequeathed to the Met upon her death last year.
Picasso’s 1913-14 “Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair,” whose disjunctive articulations of arms and breasts owe debts to West African statuary, is another new arrival; Leonard Lauder delivered it last year, part of his promised gift of Cubist painting that has beefed up the holdings of a museum once frightened of modernism. Manet’s “Dead Christ With Angels” (1864), in which Jesus is seen hovering between life and death. Our critic calls it “one of the most staggering paintings in the whole museum.”Credit…Edouard Manet, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The transformative Impressionist gifts of the Havemeyer family (whose fortunes, a text here acknowledges, were made in the brutal sugar trade) take over nearly a whole gallery in this show. Manet’s fearlessly blunt “Dead Christ With Angels” (1864) — a Havemeyer gift in which the sallow Jesus, hovering between life and death, looms in a depthless cave — remains one of the most staggering paintings in the whole museum. Here it functions almost as an emergency brake, appearing with Courbet’s lusty “Woman With a Parrot” (1866) and one of Monet’s first plein-air riverscapes, “La Grenouillère” (1869), but also with Havemeyer donations like opalescent Tiffany vases and an impression of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave,” circa 1830-32. An installation view of some of the Islamic acquisitions, including, from left: the end of a balustrade; on the wall, a folio from “Hamzanama (The Adventures of Hamza)”; two folios, one from the Shah Jahan Album and the other from the Shah Jahan Album; and an early 17th-century “Pierced Window Screen (Jali).”Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
During World War II, several museum officials joined the effort to save, catalog and restitute art looted by the Nazis. These “Monuments Men” — and several women — included James J. Rorimer, the director of the Cloisters (and later the entire Met), whose notebook here is open to an inventory of loot he found in Neuschwanstein Castle in 1945; and Edith A. Standen, a tapestries curator and decorated military officer, who oversaw the restitution of thousands of artworks to Berlin’s state museums. She’s represented here by her stiff wool military uniform, now part of the Costume Institute. “Night-Shining White” (circa 750), a scroll painting of a bucking steed by the Tang Dynasty painter Han Gan.Credit…Han Gan, via Metropolitan Museum of Art
Acquisitions made around the museum’s centennial illustrate the postwar expansion of the Asian collection and the Islamic holdings; the creation of the Rockefeller wing for art of Africa, Oceania and the Indigenous Americas; and a growing embrace of modern and contemporary creation. Stop before “Night-Shining White,” an energetic scroll painting of a bucking steed by the Tang Dynasty painter Han Gan, and scrutinize the white horse’s bristling mane and flaring nostrils. Examine the remarkable full-body mask, woven by the Asmat people of New Guinea, affixed with eyes of carved wood and eyelashes of cassowary feathers.
And now? The open-ended conclusion to “Making the Met” suggests a few new priorities for the museum’s departments. The European sculpture team has acquired some Venetian Judaica, the Islamic department has bought gold-trimmed headdresses for an Indonesian hajji, and the modern division owns recent works by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui and the Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, subject of a Met Breuer retrospective last summer. An installation of “Making the Met.” On the far back wall is El Anatsui’s “Dusasa II,” 2007.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The conclusion is somewhat baggy, but for a show about collecting that may be the point. For the Met’s primary challenge in 2020 is not what to buy. It’s how to show it, and whether a 150-year-old museum can remain nimble enough to forge new practices of research, interpretation and display.
It’s easy to identify gaps in a supposedly “universal” collection, and very easy to post anachronic judgments of what your predecessors ignored. Harder and more important is to engage with the deep structure of collecting: to understand what we value most, and how, and why, as the museum tries to chart a path from Eurocentricity to a real universalism. The Met’s holdings have globalized, to be sure. And they’re not implicated quite as directly in colonial violence as the loot-filled ethnographic museums of Western Europe. Still, if the Met’s “development,” as Mr. Hollein himself says, is “connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy,” then what exactly is to be celebrated at this anniversary party? A wall case contains a dizzying array of intricate pieces, including an Islamic glass bottle, alabaster figures, and a book cover with ivory figures from before 1085.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The answer, Ms. Bayer and her team affirm in “Making the Met,” lies inside the beautiful objects themselves, in the layers of history that have accreted in the last century and a half. These works, having traveled to New York from all corners, bear memories of encounters, scars of violence, new names, new prices. They’ve been transformed as they’ve moved, and so they’re ideally positioned to map the intersections and interdependence of our histories.
But to articulate that interdependence you need to do more than fill gaps in a purportedly universal collection. You need a new “relational ethics,” in the words of the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, authors of the groundbreaking 2018 report on the restitution of African art. Relational ethics means recognizing that what the museum once called “universal” was one specific worldview — not to be scrapped wholesale, but to be absorbed into a global network of other tactics, other approaches, other voices.
Relational ethics means treating objects of the collection not as static objects of beauty, but vectors whose meanings and values change as they circulate among peoples — as the Met did in “Interwoven Globe,” its unbelievably intelligent textile exhibition of 2013. It means opening new circuits of research and collaboration that stretch well past 1000 Fifth Avenue — as the Met has done in its current knockout show “Sahel,” whose curators worked with colleagues in Senegal and Niger. Relational ethics means something much deeper than a box-ticking exercise; it means elaborating the humanism that the Met supposedly stands for to its fullest, most global extent.
Reformists inside our universal museums now promise “inclusion.” Radicals outside them prefer “decolonization.” But both of those objectives will come to naught, as Ms. Savoy and Mr. Sarr understood, unless we see culture as an infinite chain of differences, which always defies the binary oppositions we’ve inherited from the age of empire, colonialism and encyclopedic collecting. The Met in 2020 has the potential to be an exemplar of this relational ethics, and to place the Mangaaka statue, the Michelangelo drawing, the Marilyn Monroe photograph within a web of lived relations — where all of us, at all times, from all places, find our reflections in the art of all peoples. It is the only metropolitanism worth the name.
Making the Met, 1870-2020
Through Jan. 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reopens Aug. 29. (Member preview days are Aug. 27 and 28.) Visit metmuseum.org for an overview of safety protocols and ticketing information.
