by Richard Gowan | Jan 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
British journalist Jonathan Steele has been getting a good deal of coverage for Defeat, his account of the Iraq war (if nothing else, he deserves a prize for finding an even pithier title for an Iraq book than Fiasco by Thomas Ricks). While I’m all for picking over the bones of US and UK decision-making in 2002-3, I grow more and more concerned that this sort of retrospective analysis distracts readers/voters from wondering what we should actually do in Iraq now, and what options may open up after the U.S. elections. The absence of serious debate about Iraq among the Democrats – and most Republicans bar McCain – was well-described by Noah Feldman in the NYT Magazine earlier this month:
What if the United States were at war during a presidential election — and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there — a probable result of current policy — the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.The reasons for Iraq’s political eclipse begin with the unfortunate fact that candidates strive to create feel-good associations, and the war is a certain downer. The film studios could barely get a Middle East movie to break even in the past 12 months (”In the Valley of Elah,” anyone?), and the political image makers have apparently taken note.
“How true,” I thought on reading this over a pint of the excellent Brooklyn Winter Ale in, suitably, Brooklyn. But, after lingering by Lake Geneva for a week, I’m struck by the extent to which Iraq is now simply off the European agenda in a way that is still quite hard to imagine in the US. And that is worrying because, as Feldman acutely observes in the American context, the glimmer of stability offered by the Surge means that there is a real debate to be had about whether it’s time for another go at statebuilding in Iraq:
According to one view, the United States cannot shape the local players into a cohesive order regardless of Iraq’s level of killing. The best we can do is calm the worst of the violence, leave and let the Iraqis sort things out for themselves.An alternative view presumes that state-building has failed so far in Iraq because of the violence. Once the bloodletting has decreased and there are credible negotiators on all sides, a stable Iraq is just barely possible, even if it will never be an exemplar of democracy.
Now, that’s mainly an issue for the Iraqis and Americans, but I don’t think that EU governments (whether pro- or anti-war back in the day) can really ignore it either. As I’ve just pointed out in a new piece that’s both available from EU Observer and on the ECFR website, a renewed decline in Iraq’s fortunes would undo European efforts on Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, maybe even Palestine – so ignoring it isn’t really an option. (Charles Grant has just made a similar argument in a new CER pamphlet). Here’s the nub of my argument, which could be summed up as “start thinking really hard”:
Rather than passively wait to see who’ll be driving Middle East policy in Washington in 2009, EU governments should use the next twelve months as an opportunity to iron out their differences and develop new options on Iraq.Whoever enters the White House next year, the incoming administration will probably make charting a new course on Iraq the central priority for their first hundred days. If the EU is still trying to work out where it stands at that stage, it will find it’s irrelevant soon enough. If it has a package of ideas about what it can contribute – even if it is relatively limited – its initiative is likely to be welcomed, getting relations with the new administration off to a good start.To start outlining what such a package should look like, European governments should now agree to put their differences to one side, and appoint a senior political figure (or maybe two, one originally against the war, one for it) to lead a small “EU Options Team”: a brains-trust of European officials and experts on Iraq, tasked with laying out a menu of potential plans for coordinated EU policies from 2009 on.To ensure that these aren’t just abstract term papers, the Team should have a cell based in Iraq – in part modelled on the EU police and civilian planning teams that have been developing policy in Kosovo since 2006. And to give the Team a sense of immediate relevance, its political chief(s) should also be directly involved in trying to sort out the dysfunctions of EU aid to Iraq.
To be quite honest, even this level of hatchet-burying and deep thinking may still be beyond the EU, but hope springs eternal. My argument is also meant to be an invitation for those who still think we have some obligations and interests in Iraq to offer new ideas – if you go the ECFR version of the piece, you can add a comment, and I’d be a happy junior public intellectual if any Dashboard readers had constructive thoughts to add there.
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The FT’s consumer industries correspondent, Jenny Wiggins – who along with commodities correspondent Javier Blas deserves a medal (or at the very least a rise) for excellence in covering the food prices story over the last year – is looking at changing patterns of food consumption in India in the paper’s Saturday magazine today. The whole story is a terrific piece of feature journalism, but it was this passage towards the end that got me thinking in particular:
India, which is still trying to lift millions of people out of poverty, is having problems satisfying its appetites. One of the reasons the Punjabi dairy farmers are doing so well is that demand for milk, and milk-derived products, is increasing so quickly that farmers can’t keep up. India, despite being the world’s largest producer of milk, temporarily halted exports of milk powder last summer to try and stop domestic milk prices from rising too fast after some dairy farmers were tempted by record high global prices and sold their product to exporters rather than local food producers.
Milk isn’t the only hot commodity. After restarting wheat imports in 2006, for the first time since the late 1990s, India banned wheat exports last year. The country can, of course, try and produce more food. But Ajay Shankar, a government secretary in the ministry of commerce and industry, says that while India wants to increase its agricultural yields (which are low compared with the rest of the world), expanding the amount of land farmed is difficult in a country already struggling to support more than one billion people. In Punjab, the state that produces a hefty chunk of India’s wheat, rice and milk, decades of intensive farming and heavy fertiliser use have taken a heavy toll on the land, and water tables are falling sharply.
Although India’s economy is expanding at about 9 per cent a year, its agricultural sector is slowing, with growth declining from 4.7 per cent between 1992-1997 to just 1.5 per cent between 2002-2006. If India can’t produce enough of its own food, it will have to import more. Shankar says it is unclear how much more food India will need, but acknowledges that significant increases in imports would affect the global economy. ”If we become a major importer of food grains as some fear, clearly it will have an impact on global prices,” he says over tea in his Delhi office.
And India is not the only country expected to import more food in coming years. Over the next decade, per capita income in China is expected to triple, which means the Chinese will be eating more – and better. They are already each eating twice as much meat as they were in 1990 and the country now accounts for one third of all meat eaten in the world, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
Now as Wiggins explains earlier in the article, it’s changing consumption in the BRIC countries, more than falling grain stocks or increasing government support for biofuels, that’s really been driving rising food prices. But if the two most populous of those four nations, India and China, are having to import more and more of their food, that raises the question: who’s going to be growing the supply to meet all this extra demand?
And the thing that struck me, as I pondered this, was that if there’s one region that by rights out to be making a mint out of rising food prices, it’s Africa. Africa, after all, is the continent that the green revolution forgot. While productivity was going through the roof in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, African agriculture remains stubbornly unproductive. Now that agricultural commodities appear finally to be heading out of their interminable slump, there’s a powerful case for investors to tackle the productivity gap, you’d think. So is lady luck finally smiling on Africa’s people?
Well, a big part of the answer to that question depends on whether you’re looking at those of her people in her mushrooming cities, or alternatively those of her people still working the land. If you look at the global statistics on hungry people, most of them are in rural areas. Fully 50 per cent of the world’s undernourished people (400 million souls) are in low income farm households. Another 22 per cent, 176 million people, are rural landless and low income non-farm households; and a further 8 per cent, 64 million people, are poor herders, fishers or forest people dependent on community or public resources.
In fact, only 20 per cent of the world’s undernourished people are in low income urban households – 176 million people – and a great many of them are to be found in China and India rather than Africa. [All stats from John Shaw’s masterly World Food Security: a history since 1945.] So presumably, rising prices for agricultural goods ought to spell good news for all those rural poor in Africa, especially if rising prices also incentivise investment in improving productivity – right?
As I blogged back in October last year, development economist legend Dani Rodrik’s answer is that it depends – but that “it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics”:
…it depends on whether a poor household is a net seller or buyer of food (that is, whether it grows more or less food than it consumes). This means that the rural poor generally tends to benefit from higher food prices, whereas the urban poor generally get hurt. How large the impact is depends, in turn, on the size of the food account as a share of total expenditures or income of a household. And whether the change is good or bad for a nation’s poor as a whole depends on the geography of poverty in a country.
But there’s a factor that Rodrik overlooked: climate change. While northern latitude global breadbaskets like Canada and Russia stand to be net beneficiaries from climate change in the short to medium term, the outlook for Africa is not good at all. Falling yields as a result of climate impacts risk increasing Africa’s needs for imported food, rather than its opportunities to export food. For countries already dependent on imported oil – which, as I noted in December, have already seen all their increases in aid and debt relief from the last three years wiped out by higher fuel import costs – it’s a vicious spiral, especially given that biofuels mean that energy and food prices are now linked.
The irony and injustice here is heartbreaking. Just when one major global trend – rising food prices – looks set finally to offer Africa some kind of a break, we find that in fact other trends – climate change and energy scarcity – may convert higher food prices instead into yet another problem, that despite being created elsewhere, somehow ends up in Africa’s lap.
(For more on the international implications of rising food prices, see my briefing note from December last year.)
Update: see also
– On collision course: scarcity and African patronage systems – 5 March 2008
– Food prices: where to get briefed – 2 March 2008
– Third world debt (the sequel) – 1 March 2008
by Mark Weston | Jan 26, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa
The humble low-tech wall continues to muscle its way stubbornly onto 21st century newsreels, with Palestinians tearing down the barrier that separates Gaza from Egypt and flooding over the border to stock up on much needed supplies. The UN reports that no less than half the population of Gaza has crossed into the Sinai. Egyptian shopkeepers are delighted, of course, but their government has used water cannon to hold back the tide and attempted, unsuccessfully, to seal up the wall to stop further incursions.
Israel, whose blockade of Gaza sparked the crisis, says it is now Egypt’s problem. Gaza is overpopulated anyway, and there is plenty of room in the Sinai, so allowing some immigration into Egypt seems sensible, but Arab governments’ professed support for Palestinians has rarely translated into action. Do the Egyptian leadership’s warm words towards its Muslim brothers mean anything? We will soon find out.
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks
Continuing my mini-series on what happened to the anti-globalisation movement: if some of them became the Yes Men, some of them remain very firmly as the No Men. Here’s one Ben Trott on Comment is Free this morning:
The movement has generally defined itself negatively, in terms of what it is against. In itself, this is not a problem. In fact, it has been one of its greatest strengths: allowing it to recognise what it has in common – a shared opposition to neoliberalism – despite its internal heterogeneity. If from the beginning, the focus had been on formulating more precisely what it was fighting for, it would likely have long collapsed under the weight of sectarian, ideological debate.
However, with the hegemony of neoliberalism now on the wane, the challenge – and opportunity – with which the movement is presented is to redefine what it is opposed to. Of course, one option would be to maintain the focus on neoliberalism, the most fundamentalist form of free market ideology. Hegemonic it may no longer be, but the doctrine is certainly not dead.
Alternatively, it could choose to locate itself more explicitly in the longer, broader, tradition of anti-capitalism. Obviously, this too would involve active opposition to the neoliberal project. But it would also call for a deeper negation of the present, exposing – and developing forms of political organisation capable of taking on – the capitalist organisation of society more generally.
That’s it? That’s the full set of options? Er – thank you, World Social Forum. Don’t call us…
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
Nick Butler – treasurer of the Fabian Society, chair of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board, erstwhile chief of staff to BP’s former CEO John Browne – is a worried man. Europhile though he is, the omens look not good:
The European economy is just beginning to feel the impact of Chinese growth, which will add to the pressures already created by America’s powerful and accelerating lead in the development of innovation and intellectual property. In a world where both low and higher value added goods and services are traded through open competition based on price and quality, Europe’s comparative advantage is unclear. We are losing on both sides of the playing field.
The risk for Europe in the next ten years is not one of war or starvation, but of gradual and steady decline, with growing structural unemployment, rising public sector deficits, and an expanding gap between the sense of entitlement felt by ordinary people and the capacity of the European economy to meet those entitlements. The image which comes to mind is the gradual descent to shabbiness of a once beautiful country house whose needs have outstripped the means of its owners.
So in a new think piece for CER, he sets out five ideas for Europe’s future. One of them goes like this:
Given the magnitude of the challenge of climate change, Europe should lead the response, not just through rhetoric and support for environmentally dubious products such as biofuels, but through the development of the science, engineering and technology that will cut hydrocarbon consumption.
To underline its determination, the EU should establish a 100 per cent tax credit for all investment, personal and corporate, in all activity which reduces emissions. The credit should be enduring and would stimulate research, development and application. The businesses created would have the chance to be world leaders and contributors to the necessary global solutions. The cost would be minimal, because of the positive impact on employment and activity, and would be a worthwhile investment when set against the eventual costs of unconstrained global warming.
Know what? He’s exactly right. Europe is, as ever, full of talk and targets and short on radical implementing action – whether you’re looking at Afghanistan, the Lisbon agenda, climate change, connecting Europe with its citizens or whatever. And on climate change, as David Steven and I noted in Climate change: the state of the debate, the problem narrative still isn’t commensurate with the solution narrative.
If Europe really wants to be taken seriously on climate change, it needs to be thinking of actions on a different order of magnitude. David and I were talking just last weekend (at an event chaired by Nick Butler, oddly enough) about just this problem – and concluding that the kind of signal needed would be the abolition of corporation tax, to be replaced by a carbon tax. Just think what that would do to inward investment – and to the EU’s emissions.
