Some very plain speaking on Afghanistan from David Miliband in the Telegraph yesterday, in a piece written to coincide with the commemoration of Richard Holbrooke’s life in DC.

While international forces are “suppressing” the insurgency, he notes reports that “unpublished UN security assessments [show] a marked deterioration in security. That, he continues, “tallies with extremely worrying reports of the insurgency spreading into the far north of the country”. He suggests the need for a twin-track approach:

Track one is an internal political settlement. Western influence is currently limited to ineffective and unspecified “pressure” on President Karzai. We need to be far more up front about our end game: a decentralised series of political settlements in the villages and valleys of Afghanistan, with security forces limited to holding the ring and keeping al-Qaeda out.

But this track will never get going unless track two – the track of regional political engagement – has real legs. This means agreements which recognise the divergent interests of the different neighbouring countries, from Pakistan to Iran. At the moment, it is a free-for-all – a recipe for the slide to ethnic enmity that Yvette Cooper, the shadow foreign secretary, has highlighted, and even renewed civil war that would be the most awful epitaph to Western engagement.

So much for my observation a week ago that the new record high on the FAO Food Price Index hadn’t led to widespread unrest yet – almost immediately afterwards, Algeria erupted in rioting, as was widely reported at the time. But two other developments in the past week are worth noting too:

First, the major dust-up underway in Argentina between farmers’ organisations and the government, over the charged issue of export restrictions. The government wants to limit wheat exports to only 8 million tonnes of the country’s 14 million tonne total. Farmers are furious, as they want to export more. As the FT’s Beyond BRICs blog notes, “The breakdown in talks heralds the end of an uneasy peace that has existed between the two sides since a bitter conflict in 2008 over taxes levied on soya exports. That led to farmers blocking roads, food shortages in Argentina’s major cities, a drastic fall in exports and a subsequent price rise on world grain markets.”

Second, the US government just cut stock forecasts dramatically for key grain crops, pushing corn and soya to their highest level since the price spike – so much for my observation that so far, the new price spike wasn’t afflicting grains all that much. Here’s the money quote, again courtesy of the FT:

Dan Basse, president of AgResource, a Chicago-based forecaster, added: “There’s just no room for error any more. With any kind of weather problem in the upcoming growing season we will make new all-time highs in corn and soy, and to a lesser degree wheat futures.”

Here’s the webcast of our appearance in front of the UK Foreign Affairs Select Committee earlier today – you’ll need to have MS Silverlight installed on your PC.

Do you live in London?  Do you have plans for Tuesday 8 February?  Does this event at the Southbank Centre sound like your idea of a good time?

Following the success of the 2010 sell-out Think Tank Clash we’ve invited the UK’s leading think tanks including Demos, IPPR, ResPublica, Policy Exchange, Reform, the Fabian Society and others to compete in Think Tank Clash II hosted by writer, broadcaster and comedy scriptwriter John O’Farrell, author of The Best a Man Can Get.

Based on the model of a sound system clash, some of the leading minds of the UK’s think tanks compete to persuade the audience with the power of their ideas. Calling on star witnesses to support their arguments, Think Tank Clash II examines notions of truth, justice, respect and community in a series of tightly timed sessions. No jargon allowed, no rambling and no abstentions as the audience decides who wins.

Ideas are the new house music! Policy geeks are the new Chemical Brothers!!

I despair.

I’ve written on the BBC Editors site about whether the Kosovo intervention is being reassessed in the light of allegations against Prime Minister Thaci

Kosovo has been back on the front pages in recent weeks with lurid allegations against its Prime Minister and dominant politician, Hashim Thaci, accusing him of involvement in organised crime and even harvesting human organs for sale for profit.  Mr Thaci has denied the allegations. 

Mr Thaci has also been in the news as his party was accused of vote rigging in last month’s parliamentary elections which were the first organised by the Kosovo government. This week, the vote had to be rerun in some of Mr Thaci’s strongholds and a new government should be formed in the next few weeks. 

Why is this interesting to people who don’t follow affairs in south east Europe closely? Read More

As preparation for this afternoon’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee hearing, one of the papers I’m looking at the Public Administration Select Committee’s excellent report (pdf) on Who Does UK National Strategy? 

The whole report is worth reading, and pulls no punches about the strategic deficit that bedevils UK policy on global risks: “the overwhelming view from our witnesses was that the UK is not good at making National Strategy and there is little sense of a national direction or purpose”. And so:

This leads us to the profoundly disturbing conclusion that an understanding of  National Strategy and an appreciation of why it is important has indeed largely been  lost. As a consequence, strategic thinking has atrophied. We have failed to maintain the  education of strategic thinkers, both in academia and in governmental institutions. The  UK lacks a body of knowledge on strategy. Our processes  for making strategy have become weakened and the ability of the military and the Civil Service to identify those  people who are able to operate and think at the strategic level is poor

Some of the quotes from oral and written evidence given to the Committee are positively hair raising – as for instance when an official who’d served in the Chief of Defence Staff’s office recalls being told in Afghanistan that “there’s no plan, Sir. We’re just getting on with it”.

What to do about all this? The Committee’s recommendations are very good, but especially helpful is this distillation of principles that can, in the Committee’s words, “form the basis of an agreed ‘grammar’ for a renewed strategic literacy amongst practitioners”:

i. investment of time and energy by ministers to create an ‘appetite’ for strategic thinking; 

ii. a definition of long-term national interests both domestic and international;  

iii. consideration of all options and possibilities, including those which challenge established thinking and settled policies; 

iv. consideration of the constraints and limitations which apply to such options and
possibilities;

v. a comprehensive understanding of the resources available; 

vi. good quality staff work to develop strategy; 

vii. access to the widest possible expertise beyond government; 

viii. a structure which ensures the process happens; 

ix. audit, evaluation and critical challenge; and

x. Parliamentary oversight to ensure scrutiny and accountability.

Amen to all that. It’s a long way from where we are now.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee is doing an inquiry at the moment into “The Role of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in UK Government” – details and terms of reference can be found here. You can also read what Lords Hennessy and Jay had to tell the Committee here, and what former Foreign Secretaries David Miliband and Malcolm Rifkind had to say in their session here.

Tomorrow David and I are up in front of the Committee, talking about our Chatham House report Organising for Influence (pdf) – it’s at 3pm in the Grimond Room of Portcullis House if you’re in Westminster. We’ll post a link to the transcript of our evidence once it’s up.

I am hugely reassured to hear that, in this era of global crisis, British diplomats are focusing on the really important issues:

An agreement has been signed to bring two giant pandas to Edinburgh Zoo, the first to live in the UK for 17 years.

The deal was signed at Lancaster House in London by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the Chinese Wildlife Conservation Association.

It was witnessed by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Vice Premier of China Li Keqiang.

Tian Tian and Yangguang, a breeding pair born in 2003, will be under the custodianship of the zoo society.

The project represents the culmination of five years of political and diplomatic negotiation at the highest level and it is anticipated the giant pandas will arrive in their new home as soon as a date is agreed.

The Chinese government is said to charge around $2m a year to rent a pair of pandas. Apparently though, “the Giant Panda Project will be funded through sponsorship, offering unparalleled opportunities in terms of international corporate, commercial and diplomatic relationships between China and the UK.”

Happy days.

On the face of it Pakistan may have bigger things to worry about, but recent weeks have seen it fall out with India over the humble onion:

The pungent vegetable is now at the centre of a mini diplomatic storm that has further soured relations between both countries over the past few days. The Pakistani commerce ministry banned the export of onions across the border by road and rail due to high prices and shortages at home.

Food inflation is running high across South Asia and onion prices are soaring in both Pakistan and India, as the two have had bad harvests of the crop. Reported hoarding and speculation in India have added to the crisis.

Onions are a touchy subject in India and past price hikes have brought down governments. In retaliation, farmers in Indian Punjab have stopped exporting vegetables to Pakistan.

A sideshow, surely, to the really big issues like Kashmir or religious extremism? Maybe not. You can’t spend anytime in Pakistan without noticing the powerful role played by resource scarcity in the country’s politics.

It all goes back to the global food and energy price spike of 2008. According to the IMF, growth had been robust up until that point and government finances were in reasonably good shape.

Conditions deteriorated in mid-2008 with the sharp increase in international food and fuel prices and worsening of the domestic security situation. The fiscal deficit widened, due in large part to rising energy subsidies, financed by credit from the central bank.

As a result, the rupee depreciated and foreign currency reserves fell sharply. Inflation reached 25 percent in mid-2008 [mostly food], causing harm to vulnerable social groups.

The country has never really made it back onto an even keel. The global economic crisis gave Pakistan a little relief, pushing commodity prices sharply lower, but the public finances never recovered.

And as food and energy prices have risen again, Pakistan has been hit by a succession of mini-commodity shocks (the sugar crisis of 2009 and 2010, the flour crisis of 2010). Some estimates suggest that higher food prices have led to a precipitous decline in caloric intake (though robust data is hard to track down).

Gas and electricity are in critically short supply, leading to frequent load shedding, for consumers, business, and industry in winter. Around the major cities, one sees trees being stripped bare by people desperate for heat for their houses and businesses:

Shopkeepers operating in the streets and mohallahs are using pieces of wooden and cardboard crates and other packing material to brace the chill in the air.

Many Lahorites are having ‘bonfires’ even during day time. An empty tin of cooking oil is usually converted into a hearth by making holes in it. Old newspapers, textbooks and copies besides parts of broken furniture are used to make fire as it is hard for many to afford Rs1,200 per 40 kilo fire wood or Rs40-50 per kilo coal.

There are no easy solutions. Pakistan has also been under intense pressure from the IMF and the United States to reduce fuel subsidies, in order to cut its deficit and meet the conditions of its IMF loan.

But its attempts to comply simply fuelled political instability. The PPP-led government came close to falling when it attempted to push up the cost of petrol at the end of 2010. Backing down was the price of getting its junior partner, MQM, back into the coalition late last week.

The result, though, has been unwelcome speculation that Pakistan may on the road to default – a worry that is likely to intensify as oil prices head ever higher.

Inflation is now up to 16%, with food prices expected to rise 20% in December 2010 (year-on-year). In November last year, onions jumped in price by 67% in just one month alone.

As in 2008, many of the drivers of the crisis are regional and global. While the attention of the world is fixated on Pakistan’s struggle with religious extremism. In the background, the struggle for resources seems to be doing as much to push this country towards ruin.

The BBC’s story today about an undercover policeman who infiltrated environmental groups for nearly a decade, before switching sides and offering to give evidence for the defence in their prosecution case, is a gem. I particularly enjoyed this aspect:

He lived a double life: as Mark Kennedy of the Metropolitan Police and as Mark Stone, green activist, based in Nottingham.

He would disappear for extended periods, saying he had to visit his “brother” in the United States.

So, er, he helped to organise protests against coal-fired power stations, but none of his fellow activists thought there was anything untoward in his commuting from Britain to the US?

The UK parliament’s development committee begins its inquiry into UK aid to India next week with a question mark over the future of UK aid to a country where there are 450 million poor people – a third of the world’s poor -living below US$1.25/day. In fact, 8 Indian states alone have more poor people than the 26 poorest African countries combined.

This is emotional territory – on both the UK and India side – during Cameron’s autumn 2010 visit sparks flew with the Indian finance minister calling UK aid ($700m) ‘peanuts’ in an angry response to the suggestion that the UK might end aid to India.

An Indian official’s memo leaked to the BBC largely concurred with the ‘who do you guys think you are?’ line.

It might be that the Indians got mad because DFID signaled it wanted to direct more aid to individual states rather than the central government. More recently the idea of an emerging power, that is a foreign aid donor itself, accepting aid has raised substantial debate within India itself.

DFID’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell is said to be open to discussion either way but was persuaded so far by Cameron that the UK can’t be seen to be cutting aid to a country that British people think is a poor country even if it isn’t.

Donors have a somewhat tangled logic on middle income countries (MICs):

1. The mission of donors is poverty reduction

2. 72% of the poor live in MICs

3. Donors are withdrawing from MICs, where the poor live

4. Oops…

Currently, India receives about $2bn of aid/year from donors and the UK makes up about a third of this. Since 1998, India has received more UK overseas aid than any other country. Further DFID works in 27 MICs and spends about a third of bilateral programming in MICs in 2008/9. In contrast, almost a half of EU ODA is to MICS.

The paradox is India, like many other countries was ‘graduated’ out of ‘poor country’ status by the World Bank in 2009 to middle income status (more than $1000 per person per year) but is still home to a third of the world’s poor or 450 million people. India is still IDA (World Bank) eligible but will likely graduate three years from now.

(more…)

As if to mark the start of the new decade with an indication of what we can expect from it, the FAO’s Food Price Index has just surpassed its 2008 peak (it’s now at 214.7, compared to 213.8 in June 2008), putting it at its highest level since its launch in 1990. FAO is now warning of a new “food price shock” that could lead to a “food crisis”, and its senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian warns that “it will be foolish to assume this is the peak”.

But if the Index is at its highest ever level, why aren’t we seeing riots on the scale of 2008, when (according to the International Food Policy Research Institute – pdf), 61 countries experienced unrest, with protests turning violent in 23 of them? And should we expect to see the global total of undernourished people climb back over the one billion mark next time the UN figures are compiled?

A few things make this food spike different from the last one.

First, this one is – so far – about a somewhat different set of food commodities. Whereas the 2008 spike was heavily concentrated in key grains – rice, corn, wheat, soya – this one is being driven more by meat, sugar and vegetable oils, which are less fundamental as staple foods in low income countries. Admittedly, corn has been rising strongly too – but rice, in particular, has so far not spiked (it hit $1,000 a tonne in 2008; it’s at $535 a tonne today – see the FT graph below).

Second, many African and Asian countries have actually had good harvests over the last year. As the FT points out, “while the international export price for corn jumped 45 per cent between May and November [last year], it declined by up to 10 per cent in parts of Africa”. Part of the backstory here is how well many African countries have done at investing in their agriculture sectors since 2008, through programmes such as CAADP - an interesting datum to stir in to the argument over whether low income countries should scale up endogenous production capacity and seek to reduce their reliance on international markets to meet their needs.

Third, while oil prices are high at the moment (around $95 a barrel), they’re certainly not at their 2008 peak level of $147 a barrel – a factor that helped drive food prices much higher as costs rose for fertiliser, transportation, processing, on-farm energy use and so on. (On the subject of what drove the 2008 spike, incidentally, this new IFPRI report is worth a look – it raises a sceptical eyebrow at those who argue the role of biofuels in that spike was overstated.)

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we haven’t yet seen a slide into panic measures that amplify the problem. The last food spike was a story in two acts, with the first part of the spike driven by fundamentals like rising demand for biofuels and the depreciation of the US dollar, and the second, steeper part of the spike driven in particular by export bans or restrictions imposed by over 30 countries. Although Russia imposed an export ban on wheat last summer, and India has recently restricted the export of some staple vegetables, we’re not in the trade meltdown scenario of 2008 – thankfully.

 But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. The oil price may well rise higher over the year ahead, as emerging economy growth continues to power onwards. Further depreciation in the dollar would be likely to increase commodity prices. And above all, don’t forget climate change. Extreme weather could cause poor countries’ food outlook to darken substantially this year – as Oxfam’s Gawain Kripke puts it, the latest rise in food prices is “a grave reminder that until we act on the underlying causes of hunger and climate change, we will find ourselves perpetually on the knife’s edge of disaster”.

So last week, I sent off an application for a provisional driver’s license (I know, I know – 33 and still can’t drive). At the bottom of the DVLA application was a box asking if I agreed to donate my organs in the event of an accident. An easy way to feel noble, I thought, and ticked the box.

Now, I discover I’ve been nudged! The Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insight team, run by David Halpern, released its first report last week. The team is advised by behavioural economist Richard Thaler, who wrote the book Nudge, and it tries to find ways to ‘nudge‘ British citizens towards socially desirable behaviour. The unit ‘draws on insights from behavioural economics and shows ways in which health improvements can be made without resorting to legislation or costly programmes.’ So, for example, Thaler found that men could be ‘nudged’ to pee in urinals, rather than on the floor, by putting little toy goalposts in the urinals. Brilliant – although I feel a bit sorry for the poor behavioural economists who had to hold the goalposts in place. I just hope they had lab goggles.

Anyway, the report reveals how the Behavioural Insight unit has been quietly nudging us Brits over the last few weeks. It highlights two new initiatives:

- A smoking cessation pilot beginning in early 2011. This will encourage participants to make commitments to quit smoking (for example, by signing a contract) and will reward those who pass regular smoking tests. The pilot will be run by Boots, with the support of the Behavioural Insights team and the Department of Health.

- A system of ‘prompted choice’ on organ donor registration will be introduced to the DVLA application form for renewing and applying for driving licenses. This will require applicants to state whether or not they wish to become an organ donor. Where this has been introduced in other countries, it has significantly increased the number of organ donors. If the DVLA scheme proves successful, it will be rolled out to other areas.

So! My decision to donate my organs to humanity was not as noble as I thought. I was nudged, m’lud. Good idea though. I’d be interested to see the results, and wouldn’t be surprised to see a big rise in organ donations. If they get enough donations, maybe they can flog some spare organs to other countries, reduce the deficit eh?

On 22 December, I published an op-ed over at World Politics Review (now behind a paywall, but also available for free via ECFR) about Ban Ki-moon’s overloaded agenda:

For Ban Ki-moon, the past few weeks have arguably been the most dramatic he has encountered since becoming United Nations secretary-general nearly four years ago. In Côte d’Ivoire, UN peacekeepers are guarding the internationally recognised winner of this month’s presidential election while the country slides toward chaos. Meanwhile, in New York, the Security Council spent Sunday locked in fruitless debates on the simmering Korean crisis.

Ban, as South Korea’s former foreign minister, can do little to shape the council’s discussions of his home country’s security. He has based his tenure on maintaining good relations with both Washington and Beijing, and taking a forceful stance on the Korean situation would alienate one or both. Ban must focus on Africa instead.

That doesn’t just mean Côte d’Ivoire, though. Ban and his advisers are painfully aware that another crisis is in the making in South Sudan, which is slated to hold a referendum on independence from Khartoum on January 9. Unless the poll is delayed or rigged, it will almost certainly result in a vote for independence. The resulting tensions could tip into major violence, either immediately or later in 2011.

Ban has his detractors, but I found a lot to praise in his performance last month:

Ban has so far handled the Ivorian crisis well. He was quick to recognise the electoral victory of Alassane Ouattara over President Laurent Gbagbo, speaking out days before the Security Council could agree on a statement. This weekend, he flatly refused a demand by Gbagbo to pull UN forces out of the country.

Ban knows that Western and African governments are solidly on his side in this case: Even China backs Ouattara’s cause. Nonetheless, his firm line is a welcome break from his frequently stated preference for soft-spoken diplomacy. Ban’s many critics, both inside and outside the UN, believe that he tends to equivocate and has too little interest in the UN’s peace operations. He has raised his game.

And, two weeks on, I still think Ban is handling the Ivorian crisis impressively.  But I am depressed by a poorly cobbled-together op-ed published under his name in multiple outlets last week.  (more…)

Two twits tweet:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has accepted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to go skiing.

‘@Schwarzenegger: Thanks. We agreed – I remember. We’ll definitely find the time,’ Medvedev wrote on Twitter.

Action movie star Schwarzenegger, who on Monday stepped down as California governor, earlier used his Twitter account to invite the Russian leader to ski with him.

Medvedev, one of whose hobbies is mountain skiing, wished good luck and success in new undertakings to the ‘Governator’ on Monday.