It’s interesting to look back a few years – to when the world was worried that food was too cheap, not too expensive.

In 2004, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization looked back on a long bear market for food: forty years in which real prices of agricultural commodities had fallen 2% per year, or 50% between 1961 and 2002.

Innovation had driven up yields and productivity; growing numbers of suppliers had flooded onto global markets; and subsidies were keeping production levels artificially high. It was good news for consumers, but bad news for farmers and for poorer countries reliant on food exports, where low prices had “battered income, investment and employment.”

In his introduction to the State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2004, the FAO’s director general, Jacques Diouf, delivered a homily on the chronic oversupply of food. Prices in the mid-1990s were lower than at any time since the Great Depression, he complained, eroding the viability of rural communities and fuelling migration to cities.

There were winners and losers of course, but more of the latter than the former:

The main beneficiaries of lower food prices have been consumers in developed countries and in urban areas of developing countries.

However, for the vast majority of the world’s poor and hungry people who live in rural areas of developing countries and depend on agriculture, losses in income and employment caused by declines in the prices of the products they market generally outweigh the benefits of lower food prices when commodity prices fall.

FAO wanted the problem of oversupply fixed. It called for rich countries to cut subsidies and take land out of production. Poor countries needed to stimulate demand for food, it said, and equip their farmers to export cash crops – preferably processed ones – to the West.

The next State of Agricultural Commodity Markets came out in 2006, by which time the FAO could see that times were a-changing. In real terms, food prices had bottomed out in May 2002, and had jumped 34% by the end of 2005. Good news? Well, no. (more…)

The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t.  That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015.

Great strides have been made on poverty, as I explained in a recent post, with the proportion of the poor projected to fall to 14.4% of the population of developing countries, from 41.7% in 1990. But what about hunger?

According to the UN’s 2011 assessment of the MDGs, the news is not good. In 1990, 828m people were hungry or 20% of the population of developing countries. Progress has been very slow since then:

The proportion of people in the developing world who went hungry in 2005-2007 remained stable at 16 percent [837m people], despite significant reductions in extreme poverty. Based on this trend, and in light of the economic crisis and rising food prices, it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world.

But hang on a minute. Why is the UN trotting out data for 2005-2007? That’s before the global food crisis, which hit at the same time as the financial crisis and has been just as slow to go away.

Food prices hit rock bottom in 1999, but then rose quickly with vicious increases in 2007 and 2008 (20% and 18%) and 2010 and 2011 (17% and 28%) as illustrated in the chart below.  Yet we’re still relying on data from five years ago to estimate hunger.

The UN reported ‘dire’ news of a spike in its 2009 and 2010 MDG reports, with an estimate of more than 1 billion people hungry by 2009. But then it backed off in 2011, simply reporting the old data (which, oddly and without explanation, had been revised up slightly for all years, including 1990).

What gives? The problem is that our data on hunger are extremely patchy and rely on assumptions so heroic that I am left wondering if we are currently able to say anything useful about global hunger at all. (more…)

The MDGs are so over

Having just been rude about one World Bank report, here’s a positive review of another – the Global Monitoring Report 2011, which the Bank produces jointly with the IMF.

The GMR updates progress against the Millennium Development Goals – targets that were set as the culmination of a push throughout the 1990s to take poverty to the centre of the international agenda.

For a long time, it seemed that the MDGs were going to be an embarrassing failure. In 2009, as the UN prepared for the 2010 MDG review conference, Kofi Annan rang the alarm:

We have been moving too slowly to meet our goals. And today, we face a global economic crisis whose full repercussions have yet to be felt. At the very least, it will throw us off course in a number of key areas, particularly in the developing countries. At worst, it could prevent us from keeping our promises, plunging millions more into poverty and posing a risk of social and political unrest. That is an outcome we must avoid at all costs.

The MDGs’ many critics felt vindicated. In particular, Bill “just asking that aid benefit the poor” Easterly was over the moon. “Let’s face it: it’s over,” he wrote. “The MDGs will not be met.” Idealistic development campaigners had wasted their time on a set of arbitrary and poorly designed goals. Africa had been deliberately made to look like a failure, in what was an unforgiveable set up.

The 2010 MDG summit was a somewhat sombre affair. Sir Bob Geldof (seen saluting the troops, above) demanded that all 189 leaders who agreed the Millennium Declaration should be pulled out of retirement (or the ground, if applicable) to issue a personal apology to him, and the world’s poor. [OK – I made that bit up.]

But wait a minute…

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A while ago, there used to be a magazine called Whole Earth Review. Not all that many people remember it now, but at the time it brought together some of the most cutting edge thinkers around. It was an offshot from the seminal Whole Earth Catalog, which ran from 1968 to 1972, and which had been set up by Stewart Brand – who also founded Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. Among Whole Earth Review’s early editors were Kevin Kelly, who would go on to set up a magazine called Wired,  and Howard Rheingold, who would years later identify the phenomenon of smart mobs.

The Whole Earth Review emerged, in other words, out of conversations between people who had a habit of being a long way ahead of their time. (All of the Review’s back issues are online, by the way – go read.) And in the winter of 1989, an especially interesting issue of the Review came out. Its subject: “the global teenager”.

Before you ask, no, the Review didn’t predict the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the London riots; not exactly, anyway (although there is an article on a certain technology, “gradually becoming accessible to the general public”, called Usenet – which noted with interest how “Chinese students in North America used it to organise support for the pro-democracy movement back home”).

Instead, it did something arguably more interesting and important: it jumped, feet first, in to what the global youth bulge would mean for the world. Not just in consumption patterns, or the need for investment in education or job creation or whatever, but at a much more subtle, interesting and fundamental level.

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From MDGs to… SDGs? That’s one of the ideas swirling around in discussions ahead of the Rio 2012 sustainable development summit next year, anyway.

You can see the attraction. With less than a year to go, there are precious few concrete ideas on the table for what the summit might produce, especially in the area of “institutional framework for sustainable development”, one of two key themes for the event (sure, there’s much talk of a new World Environment Organisation, but colour me very unconvinced of the case for that). So might SDGs help to fill the gap?

Well, that would depend on what they cover. The government of Colombia has set out a proposal for SDGs that would cover various sectors – atmosphere, climate resilience, land degradation, sustainable agriculture, biotech, waste and so forth. This would mainly be about ‘reaffirming’ (that awful word – who, other than diplomats, ever ‘reaffirms’ anything?) commitments made at Rio 1992. But you have to wonder: important though delivery of existing commitments undoubtedly is, is ‘reaffirmation’ of stuff agreed 20 years ago really going to set any pluses racing outside the sustainable development priesthood?

Much more interesting, on the other hand, is the idea that SDGs could provide an institutional foundation for the nine planetary boundaries identified – and quantified – by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (see also this previous GD post). The core idea in the boundaries approach is to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ – and, of course, the global economy. So if you’re looking for a serious synthesis of environment and economic development, this is ground zero.

Of course, a host of questions would still need to be answered. One would be about what timeline the SDGs would span: 25 years, like the MDGs’ 1990-2015 timescale, or much longer than that?

There’s also the small question of which countries would be covered, and how. The MDGs were basically about developing countries (Goal 8 notwithstanding) – an approach that clearly wouldn’t be possible with SDGs, given the huge sustainability impact of consumptions levels in rich countries. So would the SDGs apply globally, but not to specific countries – leaving them open to the charge that they’re rhetorical aspirations, not serious engines of change? Or would they apply to individual states – opening up the issue of how to differentiate countries’ commitments?

Then, of course, we’d need to know how the SDGs would relate to the MDGs. Some (greens, especially) would like to see SDGs replace MDGs beyond 2015. But lots of developing countries would be deeply suspicious of any perceived dilution of focus on poverty reduction, or anything that looked like it might ‘pull the ladder up after developed countries’ by denying them space to develop – and large and influential aid donors might well agree.

And we’d need to figure out an institutional home for the Goals, too. It would be crucial for them not to be ‘owned’ by the environment priesthood – if SDGs became seen as UNEP’s baby, they’d be stillborn at birth. Instead, it might be interesting to set up a new, independent, scientifically based international institution to monitor planetary boundaries – kind of like a global Congressional Budget Office for planetary boundaries. (Normally, I’m adamantly opposed to creating new international institutions, given how many we have already – but here, I think there’s a compelling case.)

Finally, there’s the question of process. It’s almost certainly too late to define any set of SDGs in time for Rio. Instead, the best option now would be for Rio to provide a launch pad for a process to define a set of SDGs – perhaps leaving open, for now, how they might relate to post-2015 MDGs further down the line. This would create valuable time for some serious outreach, above all to developing countries – though not too much time, given that you’d want to have the SDGs finalised before the US slides back into Presidential election mode from 2015 onwards. 12-18 months would probably be about right – with the Goals signed off at a UN summit in, say, spring 2014.

I just read Mark Lynas’s new book, The God Species, in one sitting. I hardly ever read books in one sitting. So yes, it’s very good. And you should pack it along with the sun cream, shades and flip-flops, even if you’re not a nerd like me (which is, let’s face it, unlikely if you’re reading foreign policy blogs on a day as sunny as this).

I didn’t think it was going to be this good. Not because I don’t rate Mark as a writer – his previous books, High Tide and Six Degrees, are both great – but because the blurb on the back made it sounds less than it was, with its its proclamation that the book is “a radical manifesto that calls for the increased use of controversial but environmentally friendly technologies, such as genetic engineering and nuclear power”.

That sounded a bit underwhelming, given that views like these are rapidly becoming mainstream rather than radical, following the trail blazed by people like Jim Lovelock on nuclear and Gordon Conway on GM. (Even former head of Greenpeace UK Stephen Tindale is pro-nuclear these days  – I remember him being so outraged that a 2002 IPPR report of mine should have argued in favour of nuclear that he phoned up my boss to tell him that the Institute’s green credentials were being damaged.)

And besides, if Mark’s book was really just an argument that things like cities, geoengineering, nuclear power and biotech are part of the environmental solution rather than part of the environmental problem, then it wouldn’t be saying anything that hadn’t been said two years previously in futurist Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, Radical Science, and Geoengineering are Necessary.

But actually, Mark’s book has a lot more to say than this – and two new ideas stand out in particular.

One is that The God Species is the first mainstream exposition of the concept of nine planetary boundaries that Johan Rockstrom and others at the Stockholm Resilience Centre first set out in a seminal Nature article back in 2009.

The idea here is that humanity must remain within nine safe and sustainable operating spaces, which in turn are defined by nine key boundaries. These boundaries are biodiversity; climate change; the nitrogen cycle; land use; freshwater; toxics; aerosols (like soot); ocean acidification; and the ozone layer. Rockstrom and co reckon we’re already beyond safe limits on the first three, and not far off most of the others.

Mark knows Rockstrom and his colleagues, and as a participant at some of the earliest conversations on planetary boundaries was ‘present at the creation’ of a defining agenda for the century ahead. More than that, he wrote this book with Rockstrom’s explicit blessing – as he puts it, “to do what the scientists could not: get this scientific knowledge out into the mainstream and demand that people – campaigners, governments, everyone – act on it”.

The book achieves that goal with aplomb, and that’s the first reason why you should read it. If, as seems increasingly likely, next year’s Rio summit focuses in part on the idea of Sustainable Development Goals as a potential replacement for the Millennium Development Goals beyond 2015, then expect the nine planetary boundaries to assume centre stage in discussions.

The other thing I like about The God Species is its framing  of humans as, well, gods. This is a rich narrative seam, breathtaking in its apparent arrogance. Humans, like gods? Isn’t that sacrilege, heresy, the pride before the Fall?

Mark’s answer to that, in a nutshell, is that it doesn’t do us or the planet any favours to affect a faux-humility about our degree of power, choice and agency over the planet. The question isn’t whether we or not we have a Zeus-like capacity to hurl thunderbolts from our Mount Olympus; clearly, we do. Rather, the question is whether we’re going to start exercising that decision-making power consciously, rather than pretending we don’t have it, all the while sleepwalking closer to the edge. As he argues,

“The Book of Genesis is full of instances of Man being punished for his attempts to become like God. After the woman and the serpent combine forces to taste the forbidden fruit from one tree, in Genesis 3:22 the Lord complains: ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ …”

He continues a moment later,

“With the primacy of science, there seems to be less and less room for the divine. God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things.”

My one regret about this aspect of the book is that Mark only half develops this theme. He’s clear about how badly things will turn out if humans continue to bury their heads in the sand about their god-like powers – as he says in a quote from Stewart Brand in the introduction, “we are as gods and have to get good at it”. Amen to that, as he says.

But you’re left wondering: what would it look like if we did get good at it?

What the book sort of sets out, but never quite states explicitly, is the notion that not only are humans not guilty of Original Sin; they’re on the verge of growing up as a species, assuming their responsibilities and starting to Create consciously.

Which is quite an interesting prospect, if you think about it. Presumably if we’re operating at that sort of level, then averting planetary catastrophe is just the overture, no, the tuning up of the orchestra before the main symphony gets underway. That’s one way of reading Genesis 1:27, anyway.

One last thought: what is it with Oxford and books about creation myths? Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, Mark Lynas – is there something in the water?

Yesterday WWF and Oxfam co-hosted a workshop in London on scarcity, fair shares and development – I did the introductory presentation, and wrote a paper ahead of the event which is published online today. In one sentence, my argument at the workshop was that,

As the 21st century global economy hits natural resource limits and planetary boundaries, fundamental questions about fair shares will start to arise – and these questions will increasingly come to be seen as the new front line for international development.

As I stressed in the presentation,this is not to say that I believe we’re headed for a neo-Malthusian nightmare:

On the contrary, I think we can be confident that markets will adapt and that technological innovations will emerge – as they always do. But that process of transition will take time. It will need to overcome inertia, market failures, externalised costs and perverse subsidies. And until it’s complete, poor people and poor countries risk losing access to resources that they depend on for their basic needs. And so any discussion of limits is also, inevitably, a discussion about fair shares.

And this will be a different kind of ‘fairness’ agenda to the one that those of us who think of ourselves as progressives are used to. I think we’ve only just begun to internalise just what a game changer the emergence of environmental and natural resource limits will be for global agendas about justice and equality:

Left and right have long disagreed about more or less everything, except the existence of an expanding ‘cake’ to share out. As long as the cake is expanding, then you can argue – as the political philosopher John Rawls famously did in his Theory of Justice back in 1971 – that inequality is OK if the worst off people are better off, in absolute terms, than they’d be under an equal distribution. But if the cake is finite, then by definition more for the better off means less for the worse off. It’s a much starker proposition.

These days, it’s become almost universally accepted that the key dynamic in early 21st century international relations is the ‘powershift’ underway between the US and emerging economies – or more specifically, in most people’s minds, between the US and China.

But reading Jamil Anderlini’s excellent FT comment piece today on the state of the Chinese Communist Party at its 90th birthday, I was struck that the ubiquity of the powershift narrative obscures a more interesting story: that of how the two countries’ situations are remarkably similar – and stand right in the way of making progress on the most important global issues. Consider:

Economically, both countries are caught between a rock and a hard place. Each is pursuing a growth strategy that is essentially unsustainable: China remains reliant on its export sector, while America’s [anaemic] growth is built on public and private debt. As they pursue these growth strategies, the two countries continue to create vast global economic imbalances that create enormous risk for everyone else. Both also have screwed financial sectors with massive bad debts, which their policymakers are studiously ignoring.

This economic mess in turn results in part from each country’s political sclerosis. Both countries have relied on the aforementioned unsustainable growth strategies to secure political support and legitimacy. But both countries now face truly breathtaking gulfs between their haves and have-nots that risk undermining their social contracts - a challenge amplified by weak social protection provision in both cases. And both have institutional and political systems that look increasingly moribund and unable to cope with the complexity and intensity of the challenges confronting them.

In the foreign policy context, both countries’ international postures are shaped by their reliance on imported oil – reliance that is likely to generate increasing friction between them in the future, as global demand for oil increasingly outstrips supply. At the same time, both countries’ political cultures have nationalist streaks to them that may lead to foreign policy adventurism – particularly when the economic and political chips are down (see above).

Most fundamentally, as each of the two countries grapples with its similar set of problems, neither finds itself able to muster the political will to  act decisively with other states on shared global risks like climate change, financial risk, resource scarcity or state fragility. If the world as a whole is to move towards positive sum cooperation on global risks, rather than a slide towards zero sum fragmentation, competition, protectionism, and resource nationalism, then it’s in these two countries that most has to change: while the ‘G-Zero’ world described by Ian Bremmer and David Gordon is about a larger group of countries than just the US and China, it’s these two that are its principal exponents.

It may be that both countries are now approaching some sort of (perhaps shared) moment of political economic denouement. If so, it’s likely to have vast – and potentially extremely hazardous – consequences for the rest of us. But it’s hard to see how the current stalemate will be unlocked without some sort of moment of catharsis for China and the US.

As governments struggle to agree what to use next year’s Rio+20 meeting for, it is encouraging to see that Secretary General Sha Zukang has this pithy quote at the ready for the world’s disinterested news desks.

“The environment is getting worse day by day. The resources are depleting very quickly day by day and the population is increasing day by day.” (Source)

Promising. Very promising.

h/t Natalya Sverjensky.

One year from now, on 4 June 2012, the Rio summit on sustainable development will begin, at the same time marking the twentieth anniversary of the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in the same city. Preparations are well behind where they should be at this stage, and there is a real risk that it will be the latest in a series of damp squibs for the international sustainable development agenda.

David Steven and I have just completed a new paper (pdf) on the summit, which is the latest output from the NYU Center on International Cooperation’s resource scarcity program. In it, we explore the reasons why so little progress has been made on making development sustainable since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 – and set out some suggestions for how Rio 2012 could start to turn things around, not just within the environment policy silo, but also more broadly on renewing the international development agenda beyond 2015 and tackling the global risks that make up the ‘long crisis’ of globalisation that we have written about before for the Brookings Institution.

We argue that three overarching themes will be critical for making progress on these areas: greening growth, facing up to the issues of fair shares that arise in a world of limits, and building resilience to shocks and stresses, both internationally and within states (especially fragile ones). While Rio 2012 faces a tough political context, it could still – with a major push from key actors – make a tangible difference on all three fronts.

You can download the paper here.

@reallyvirtual – “An IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” – found himself in the midst of things today:

And it was Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld former Chief of Staff who first broke the news that Bin Laden was dead.

The 2011 World Development Report is now out, and a must-read for anyone who’s interested in how conflict and state fragility affect international development – and what can be done to prevent them.

But I’m especially pleased that WDR puts the World Bank’s support behind the idea of an integrated World Resources Oulook, an idea set out in Globalization and Scarcity. Here’s what the WDR has to say on the subject in its concluding section:

Knowledge about the impacts of food, energy and resource shocks is limited. Rising global demand for food and energy may impact fragile and violence-affected states severely. New analytical efforts are an important first step in understanding this phenomenon. One forward step would be for the relevant agencies – the World Bank, UN Energy Programme, International Energy Agency, and others – to work together on a World Resources Outlook, bringing together the multiple reports and analysis already undertaken by these agencies independently.

Such a report could give policy makers the valuable integrated analysis they currently lack. It could examine the state of scientific knowledge about the availability of key resources, including oil, food, water, and potentially land, together with how climate change will affect each of them; the economic dimensions of resource availability, including the risk of price spikes, inflationary trends, and how resource prices interact with wider trends in the international economy; and vulnerability to scarcity trends among poor people and regions affected by violence. Without such analysis, the risk of unintended consequences from policy may remain unaddressed – as with biofuels, where the possible food security implications of measures to promote energy security were inadequately considered.

With the Bank now openly backing the proposal, as well as implicit buy-in from the governments on the World Bank’s board, who sign off the WDR prior to publication,  there’s now a real possibility of this report actually happening – an outcome that would not only give policymakers a joined-up overview of scarcity issues that they currently lack, but would also create crucial interoperability between agencies in their single issue silos, by forcing them to collaborate on a joint output.

So what happens next? Well, next summer’s Rio 2012 summit would provide an ideal opportunity for member states to commission such a report, if they wish - watch this space.

Continuing our recent international development futures theme on Global Dashboard (see Andy’s post on international NGOs last week, and also the podcast I did on global development challenges with Owen Barder and Malini Mehra on Development Drums) – here’s a new report (pdf, 42 pages) that I did for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between now and 2020.

ActionAid commissioned the report as an input to their new International Strategy for 2012 to 2016. They asked me to review a large range of futures studies, outlook reports, scenario planning exercises and so on, and from them distill a sense of what are the key questions for the development outlook over the decade ahead – and also to extract some key recommendations for what this changing context would mean for them as a global campaigning organisation. Putting it together was a lot of fun.

There’s a brief summary below of the eight uncertainties and ten recommendations for ActionAid, lifted from the executive summary; click here to download the full report.

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The uncorrected transcript of David and my appearance in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week on the role of the Foreign Office has now been published on the Parliament website – our summary opening statement is after the jump below.

(If you’re interested in contributing to the inquiry, there is still time to submit written evidence. See here for details on how to do that; the deadline is the end of this month.) (more…)