For those readers wondering why I posted the new George Clooney “Waging Peace” video immediately below, it’s Peacekeeper’s Day. But although this is sixtieth year of UN peacekeeping, it’s rather hard to be of good cheer, as news has also come in of the first UN peacekeeper killed in Darfur:
The joint U.N.-African Union mission in Darfur says a Ugandan member of the force has been fatally shot. The police officer is the first member of the mission slain since the troops deployed five months ago.
John Kennedy Okecha was found dead in a vehicle operated by the UNAMID force in North Darfur on Wednesday, the mission said. He had been shot three times, in the neck, chest and stomach. UNAMID described the killing as “an act of cold blooded murder” and appealed to anyone with knowledge of the slaying to come forward.
The timing is probably coincidental, although you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if this wasn’t a deliberate message of contempt from… who can say? Killing just one peacekeeper can have a powerful deterrent effect, as in the slaying of an EU soldier on the Chad/Darfur border earlier this year. Today’s news led UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno to dwell on the weaknesses of his forces – typical of his intellectual honesty, but a sign of the UN’s vulnerability:
“Do we have enough resources to protect ourselves and therefore to protect the people we have come to help? Frankly, as I’ve told you before, we don’t have them in Darfur,” he said. “We don’t have the firepower that would allow us to do what we’re expected to do. And that’s very dangerous. It’s dangerous for our people.”
Guehenno is approaching the end of his term in office, and will be missed. As I’ve recently noted, the international community should welcome his successor with a package of proposals on how to give the UN more muscle – but it’s hard to feel optimistic. Even with George on board. Happy Peacekeeper’s Day.
PS: it’s worth adding that the African Union lost nearly 50 personnel in Darfur up to the end of last year. Many of them pretty much unreported.
UPDATE: I discussed this with a UN person shortly after finishing the original post, and they pointed out something that hasn’t been highlighted in the media coverage I’ve seen so far. Nothing was stolen from the murdered peacekeeper. So the chances that this was banditry are pretty low. It looks political.
Thta’s the question lots of market analysts are starting to ask, according to Sarah O’Connor:
French fishermen and British lorry drivers set up blockades in protest at fuel costs, American Airlines grounded scores of older aircraft, and – most significantly – countries across south-east Asia said they would cut their fuel subsidies because they couldn’t afford to keep them.
Francisco Blanch at Merrill Lynch says these are signs that a “demand destruction point” is looming – where oil becomes so expensive that demand for it falls away. The market has already hit that point in Europe and the United States, but demand is still growing in emerging market economies where subsidies insulate consumers from the pain of high prices.
Nauman Barakat at Macquarie agrees with Mr Blanch that things might be changing. “The word on everyone’s lips is demand destruction which is very apparent in the US and may become a feature in the red-hot economies of Asia as those countries reduce fuel subsidies,” he says.
The break point is already here. Oil is in the process of losing its almost total domination in ground transport. It is not going to fade away soon – such is the scale of its use and convenience, it will retain a dominant position for many years. But it will share the transport market with other sources as never before, reinforced by a new drive for fuel efficiency.
So now there are two schools of thought in the market: one that reckons prices are about to peak, and another that thinks that actually the peak will be in production – as we saw in the FT last week:
Veteran traders said they had never seen such a jump [in the price of forward contracts for oil – long term futures contracts have risen 60 per cent since January] and said investors were increasingly betting on the idea that production would soonpeak because of geopolitical and geological constraints. Neil McMahon, of Sanford Bernstein, said: “Peak oil views – regardless of whether right or wrong – are seeping into the market and supporting high prices.”
But actually, just as in the case of food, a short term fall in prices isn’t irreconcilable with an outlook that tends towards a long term increase. Greater volatility – including short term price bubbles, just like the one we’ve been seeing on food – may just be part and parcel of the deal from now on.
After all, higher prices in the short term will indeed tend to ease demand – and also to encourage investment in new production, both of which will reduce pressure on prices. But if the long term geological fundamentals are downwards, then scarcity will tend to yank prices right back up again. The feedback loops between these four factors – geology, price, demand and investment – may make for a rollercoaster ride over the next few years…
Walk along Oxford Street in London, mosey down King Street in Manchester or slink around the Victoria Quarter in Leeds and you are sure to see people wearing the keffiyeh (or shemagh, as it is better known in the UK after British soliders who wore them in WWII – albeit not as a fashion accessory).
The shemagh has become a fashion hit overnight, with most high street retailers selling them and men and women, boys and girls wearing them around their necks in an array of colours.
But it seems that our taste for shemaghs is not shared by our American cousins. Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman Rachel Ray recently wore a shemagh in an ad campaign. And boy, will she live to regret it. The blogosphere went beserk, led by the irratating Michelle Malkin, a Fox News Channel contributor. According to Malkin:
Many folks out there remain completely oblivious to the apparel’s violent symbolism and anti-Israel overtones. Left-wing bloggers responded with complete scorn, deliberate mischaracterizations of the debate, and then outrage when Dunkin’ Donuts commendably showed sensitivity to the concerns and pulled the ad.
Commendable sensitivity – or just realising in an instant that it might affect sales? Nor is it just Dunkin Donuts who’ve found themselves in trouble. Urban Outfitters stocked them in the US until a pro-Israel faction accused the retailers of marketing terrorism even as Palestinians argued that turning the keffiyeh into a fashion accessory for hipster wannabes trivialized their cause.
You’ve heard of greenwash. Now: cornwash! A firm called Abengoa Bioenergy has a full page advertisement in today’s FT, which begins thus:
Manipulation: Bioethanol is the main cause of increased food prices.
Evidence: The main factors of the staggering cost of food are a shift in the Asian diet … and the current price for oil…. In fact, it is estimated that the impact of biofuels on cereal prices will only be in the range of 3% to 6% as compared to 2006 prices.
Where to start? Well, maybe with the point that their advert rests on attacking a straw man. Hardly anyone would disagree that high income growth, leading to changing diet patterns, is the single largest driver of rising prices.
What the advert doesn’t say is that most analysts would also put biofuels as the second largest. Opinion varies as to how much of the food price rise over the last three years is down to biofuels; FAO reckon 15-20%, while IFPRI reckon it’s more like 30%. (I know of at least two experts in the World Bank who’d argue privately that the figure is somewhere between 50% and 70%.) Here‘s one of the authors of FAO’s latest World Food Outlook report:
Biofuels are the largest new source of demand for agriculture and are causing higher prices. We are very worried particularly about biofuel policy. US government incentives for ethanol producers are distorting the market.
True, not all biofuels are problematic. Second generation biofuels like cellulose are great, though not commercially viable yet. Jatropha looks promising. Ethanol from sugar may yet prove sustainable.
But as the 5th largest producer of bioethanol in the US, Abengoa’s one of the prime beneficiaries of subsidies for corn-based ethanol – which, despite being on track to hoover up a whole third of the US corn crop this year, is nonetheless one of the biofuels that from a food security or climate viewpoint alike just makes no sense: for the amount of corn it takes to fill up an SUV with ethanol, you could feed a person for a year.
