Ukraine, land of black soil

by | Apr 30, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia

I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis – it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, so the harvest is set to be good. Global wheat prices have started to fall on the news.

Ukraine could actually be a much bigger player on the wheat and corn market. It was once the bread basket of Europe, the land of famously arable ‘black soil’, and was an importer of corn to ancient Greece 2,000 years ago. It provided much of the corn for the Soviet Union, to the excitement of president Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, who was never happier than when discussing Ukrainian farming techniques.

But the country’s agriculture sector is a real mess since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only a quarter of its vast tracts of arable land are properly farmed, and a quarter of land isn’t used at all. This is mainly because of the country’s lack of a basic land code to allow the buying and selling of land.

The government may finally pass such a law this year, which would allow the sector to develop rapidly, and would ease pressure on global food prices in the mid-term. The EU should probably tell Ukraine’s prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko (whose hair, pictured, oddly resembles a bread basket), to get on with it.

Where next for humanitarian assistance?

by | Apr 30, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which to look at long-term drivers of change in the humanitarian sector, and ask some of the key questions for the future of humanitarianism.

At the end of the discussion, I was left with the thought that humanitarian agencies will occupy a uniquely interesting place during the turbulent couple of decades of transition on which the world now looks set to embark.  Partly, of course, that’s just because of the obvious point – that it’s humanitarian agencies that will be at the very front line of dealing with the shocks and stresses we’re likely to see.  But more subtly, we can expect to see a difference between the context for humanitarian agencies and for other kinds of multilateralism. 

For most kinds of multilateral collective action – trade policy, say, or global environmental issues, or peace and security – there’s very much an open question about how relevant multilateral cooperation will be over the next two decades.  It could go either way: a more turbulent world could lead to renewed global solidarity; or it could lead to fragmentation and marginalisation of multilateralism.

The humanitarian system, though, is the one part of today’s multilateralism of which that’s not the case.  Whatever happens, publics and states are still likely to look to humanitarian agencies to cope with the effects of a more turbulent world (even if they won’t always fund them properly).  Humanitarian agencies are the one set of multilateral players whose relevance is effectively guaranteed in the years ahead, no matter how bad things get.  Pretty important, then, that they use their profile to set out a strong narrative about why global cooperation – on prevention as well as relief – is essential.

Following the United States

by | Apr 30, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system

I am at the Diplomatic Academy of London for a conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (programme- pdf).

As the title suggests, the launch pad for the conference is US one – the agenda Condoleezza Rice first set out in a speech at Georgetown University in 2006:

I would define the objective of transformational diplomacy this way: to work with our many partners around the world, to build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system.

Let me be clear, transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership; not in paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them; we seek to use America’s diplomatic power to help foreign citizens better their own lives and to build their own nations and to transform their own futures.

In her speech, Rice set out priorities for preparing ‘old diplomatic institutions to serve new diplomatic purposes.’ First, a new ‘posture’ – getting staff out of Europe and the US and onto the diplomatic front line. Second, a regional rather than a bilateral approach. Third, ‘localization’ – less focus on capitals, more on major population centres. Fourth, more ‘jointness’ between soldiers and civilians. And finally, a reskilling of diplomats to meet new challenges.

Rice returned to this agenda in a second Georgetown speech in 2008. The nub of this speech was the scant resources the US devotes to diplomacy (despite some recent increases):

How can it be, for example, that the Pentagon has nearly twice as many lawyers as America has Foreign Service Officers? How can it be that the United Kingdom, with one-fifth of our population, has a diplomatic service nearly as large as America’s? Clearly, modernizing our diplomacy and fully resourcing it will be the challenge of a generation, not just one administration.

In questions at Georgetown, Rice was asked about the United States’s international reputation and gave a bullish response. “America is viewed and revered throughout the world as a country that is a fierce defender of human rights, a fierce defender of liberties, a great multiethnic democracy,” she claimed, while also hailing US leadership in the development field (“the largest international development effort since the Marshall Plan”).

Presenting this agenda to the conference, though, Barrie Walkley, from the United States embassy in London, noted that transformational diplomacy was “a purely American initiative”. Rice “leaves it to other countries to respond to this situation and say what they’re going to do.”

This assumption of US leadership reminded me of the words of Jim Connaughton, the US climate negotiator, at the Bali climate conference: “The US will lead and continue to lead [on climate] but leadership requires others to fall in line and follow.”

But if the problems of an interdependent world are essentially multilateral, interoperability between like-minded actors is surely at a premium. It’s probably not enough for the US to wait for its allies to fall in line…