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.

Oversupply had not been tackled as the FAO had recommended. “Concern is rising among [food exporters] about the short-term sustainability of the current market situation,” it warned, “for market analysts anticipate that the price bonanza may not continue.” (In his preface to the volume, Dr Diouf did not mention prices at all, but stuck to safer ground: how to make a success of the Doha trade round.)

The price bonanza not only continued, however, it intensified. Prices peaked in June 2008 – 2.6 times higher than they were in 2002 and at the highest level for thirty years. The result was a catastrophe. In his foreword to the 2009 State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (understandably, the publication had skipped a year), Dr Diouf instructed us to:

Imagine the impact on the poor in developing countries who were already spending, in some cases, up to 80 percent of their meagre incomes on food. FAO estimates that soaring food prices pushed another 115 million people into chronic hunger in 2007 and 2008. This means that today the world has nearly one billion hungry people.

Now, leave aside the fact that we know these numbers to be pretty shaky, surely by Diouf’s own logic, there should have been some upside (“for the vast majority of the world’s poor and hungry people who live in rural areas of developing countries and depend on agriculture,” for example.)

Unfortunately, not. “High food prices were not an opportunity seized by the majority of poor farmers in developing countries,” the FAO informed us. “Their supply response was limited in 2007 and virtually zero in 2008.”

So for the rural poor, it was all downside when prices fell for forty years and all downside when much, but not all (see graph) of that fall was wiped out in just six years. How so? The FAO gives two reasons.

First, it simply reversed its position from 2006 that declining commodity prices ‘generally outweigh’ the benefits of cheaper food for the rural poor:

The evidence suggest that most households in the developing world and especially the poor are net buyers of food, and this holds even for rural households that are mostly engaged in agriculture.

For net sellers of food in rural areas, “the impact could in principle be positive” (note the weak formulation). But for net buyers, including those in rural areas, “the impact is unequivocally negative” (no doubt there, then).

Second, it found that, while a few large landholders had benefited from higher prices, the majority of developing country farmers had not. The expected supply response had not materialised, with cereal production up only 1% in 2008 in developing countries and most countries cutting production.

FAO gives a number of reasons for the lack of a supply response. Across the developing world, smallholders are isolated from global and regional markets, with price increases at these levels having ‘no effect’ on them. Input prices had risen as fast as food prices – and these are passed on ‘fully and quickly’ to producers.

The situation was bleakest in Africa (as always). Farmers tend to be “elderly with little or no knowledge of farming practices”, lack access to credit, and to make “minimal use of inputs (including fertilizers)”. They also are suffering from decades of underinvestment in technology and infrastructure.

Now, it is hard to resist poking fun at FAO’s prophetic abilities. I especially enjoyed Dr Diouf slapping himself on the back for warning of impending crisis “as early as July 2007”. Prices, after all, were already up by 88% by then.

But there’s a more serious point. Was FAO wrong when it decried low prices as a disaster for the rural poor? Or will a shift to somewhat higher prices indeed have a medium-term benefit for rural areas?

It is easy to accept that, in the short term, a price spike is mostly a bad thing (people who have very few reserves are left with little or no time to adjust). However, I am less convinced by the relentlessly negative slant of FAO’s argument.

I find it hard to believe there won’t be a supply response. Indeed, we are already seeing one. The FAO made much of only seeing a 1% increase in cereal production in developing countries 2008, but there have been big changes since then. Crops were 6% higher in 2010 than the average for 2007-2009, with another 2.3% increase projected for 2011. African cereal production was up a whopping 13% in 2010, although a 1.5% decrease is projected for 2011. It’s hard to be sure whether this is a long-run trend (although FAO had no such scruples in 2009), but the results seem encouraging. And it’s developing countries that have benefited. Rich world cereal production is flat or falling.

It’s unsurprising to see a lag before the supply response kicks in. Agricultural markets have always been bedevilled by the time it takes for supply to match demand. Less sophisticated producers are also likely to react more slowly than sophisticated ones, for all the reasons FAO cites (weaker connection to markets, less credit, etc.). But that doesn’t mean the price signal won’t get through eventually – especially if prices stay high for longer periods. As Africa has the most potential to increase yields (and the most available land), its medium or long-term gains could be the greatest.

Not all the impacts on the rural poor can be negative. Higher prices could be good for agriculture in Africa and other poor countries, but still have a net negative impact on poverty. Even here, I am not fully convinced by the FAO’s case, which relies heavily on (and sometimes stretches the findings of) a 2008 working paper by its in-house economists.

The paper explores the impact of rising prices on the poor in eleven countries (four in Asia, three in Latin America, and two each in Africa and Eastern Europe/Central Asia). It finds that between 7.2% (Malawi) and 67.9% (Vietnam) of rural households are net sellers of the three main tradable food staples in each country.

Broadly speaking, households with land, and those that use more fertilisers and other inputs, do well when food prices go up; poorer households, the landless, and large, poorly educated families are the least likely to benefit.

There are a few caveats in the way that this paper has been interpreted, however:

• It excludes all farmers who don’t grow one of three tradable crops. Net consumers of food must be earning money from somewhere. Presumably some, at least, are selling cash crops and buying staples.
• It also excludes the impact of rising wages. A landless labourer may spend more on food, but this could be fully or partially offset if rural wages increase, which is plausible if agricultural economies are expanding.
• It careful to limit its conclusions to the very short term. Its findings are only relevant to a price shock. None of its finding exclude the possibility that rural areas will become richer if the long slump in agricultural commodities is indeed over, not that this would benefit the rural poor over time. The trend could be positive, in other words, even if the shock has been catastrophic.

There are two bigger questions:

• What is the right price for food? Would a return to very low prices for commodities (and for oil-based inputs) be more likely to feed eight and nine billion people (and to do so sustainably)? Or are somewhat higher prices required to drive the investment this is going to need (with more efficient use of inputs as well)?
• How do we increasing resilience to price shocks? It is important to disentangle long-term price trends from sudden price movements. How can the losers from volatility be best protected? We also need to discuss both growth and poverty. Higher prices could be very good for Africa’s economic prospects, even if the poor suffer in the short term.

The FAO’s next report on the State of Agricultural Commodity Markets should be with us before the end of the year. It has moved from depression about low prices in 2004, through confusion in 2006, to even despair about high prices in 2009. I wonder what its mood will be like in 2011.

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.

Here’s how it works at the moment. The target on food was set at the 1996 World Food Summit and predates the MDGs. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been measuring progress since 1999. Its measurement system has four steps:

• First, it estimates the minimum energy requirement for each member of a population, based on a complex algorithm that takes age, sex, weight, and height into account (with an added allowance for pregnant women).
• Second, it works out how much food is available for human consumption, based on a country’s Food Balance Sheet, which provides an estimate for how much food is available for each person, and how many calories, protein, and fat that food contains.
• Third, it uses household surveys – where they are available – to estimate how evenly food is distributed.
• Finally, it plugs numbers into a formula that estimates the proportion of the population below the minimum energy requirement cut-off point.

There are many problems with this methodology including:

• Micronutrients are left out entirely even though they play a huge role in nutrition, especially for the normal development of young children.
• We often don’t really know how much food a country has available – Food Balance Sheets are poor at capturing data on non-commercial food production; and at estimating how much food is being used for animals, is being stored in reserves, or is wasted.
• People aren’t that good at estimating their own food intake when asked in a household survey (let alone that of family members), while countries do surveys infrequently, if at all. As a result, estimates of the distribution of food are, at best, educated guesses.  Moreover, and as far as I can tell, FAO has not been good at documenting which countries have surveys, or from when.
• It’s hard to know how much food people need – especially as they’ll become less active as their food gets scarce (thus burning less energy).
• In countries where many people go hungry, a large proportion of the population hovers just above and below the minimum energy requirement, making estimates of hunger extremely sensitive to small changes in underlying assumptions.
• Perhaps most importantly for the current crisis, price is not fully considered. As staples become more expensive, presumably the poor consume less and the distribution of food changes markedly.  Hunger may therefore grow much faster than suggested by the fall in average food consumption. Surveys have no hope of capturing the impact of volatile prices.

FAO’s figures have faced sustained criticism for at least a decade. Back in 2004, a somewhat huffy note from a FAO statistician defended its methodology as ‘the best available’ and dismissed various ‘methodologically incorrect’ alternatives.

More recently, however, the damn has burst, with FAO sent back to the drawing board in 2010, by the Committee on World Food Security.  We are promised revised statistics that will improve modelling of the impact of price increases and income shocks, strengthen food balance sheets, integrate more household surveys, and include micronutrients and other factors in the mix.

But in the meantime, the presentation of data is suspended. Estimates for the number of undernourished people in 2009 and 2010 have been withdrawn, and no figures for 2011 have been prepared.

In the midst of the first ever global food crisis, in other words, the lights have been turned off. 837m people were probably hungry four to six years ago. Maybe. That might have gone up above a billion, or perhaps it didn’t. Hunger is either resurgent or it isn’t.

Of course, leaders are using the old figures without too many scruples. Here’s Ban Ki-Moon from just last month:

Even before the food crisis began, eight hundred million people were going to bed hungry at night. Now, a staggering nine hundred and twenty-three million people suffer from chronic hunger and under-nutrition.

But I think it’s pretty clear that, until the FAO comes back with new and better data, the ‘correct’ answer to the question ‘how many people are hungry?’ is – ‘we simply don’t know’. Apparently, the matter will be considered at an International Scientific Symposium in Rome in January next year.

Let’s hope FAO pulls its finger out and we don’t go that much longer without any data.

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…

Then something unexpected happened. The Great Recession largely spared the developing world (so far at least) and, far from slowing down, the decline in poverty accelerated. According to the GMR, the headline target – halving the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015 – is not just going to be met, it’s going to be smashed.

In 1990, 41.7% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.25 a day (this figure has been endlessly restated, which is a story in and of itself – see graphs below). That’s dropped to 25.2% in 2005, less than five percentage points above the 2015 target of 20.9%. By 2015, the IMF and World Bank project it will be down to 14.4% – a reduction of nearly a third.

At this point, it’s more or less obligatory to point out that this is all down to China (with a small contribution from India), and that ‘real’ poverty – in Africa – hasn’t been touched. Except that’s not the whole story.

China has seen an astonishingly rapid progress – poverty was down almost fourfold by 2004, and is projected to be cut 12.5 times by 2015. India is also seeing accelerating improvements and is projected to have reduced poverty by more than half by the target date.

But Africa isn’t expected to do as badly as many people think. Its poverty rate was 57.6% in 1990, had fallen to 50.9% in 2005, and is projected to be 35.8% in 2015. That’s still ten percentage points above the target, but if attained, it would be far from an abject failure (180m fewer Africans in poverty in 2015 than would have been the case with no reduction in the proportion of the poor).

Progress on non-income MDGs has been much less impressive. In 2009, hunger was down only 4 percentage points (to 16%), and seems highly unlikely to halve by 2015. In the same year, 11% of kids were not in primary school, against a universal enrolment target for 2015.

The news on health is a bit better. Infant mortality was down by a third in 2009, when it is supposed to drop by two thirds. And maternal mortality has fallen by 35% when the target is three quarters. But, over the past few years, the corner seems to have been turned on HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria – with deaths from all three diseases now past their peak.

Ending Poverty

But let’s go back to the poverty MDG. In 1990, there were 1.8 billion poor people (in a world of 5.3bn people). If the IMF/Bank projections pan out, by 2015, there’ll be 882.7m poor people left (in a world of 7.3bn). That represents real progress in both relative and absolute terms.

Here’s a thought. In the debate about what should succeed the MDGs, one obvious option is simply to extend the current set of goals and focus harder on the challenges facing the 15% of the world’s population that will still be below the poverty line in 2015.

If poverty does indeed fall by a billion between 1990 and 2015, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t fall as fast over the next fifteen years, even as the global population grows by another billion. In other words, having halved absolute poverty, leaders could commit to abolishing it by 2030.

Here are some thoughts on the implications of an attempt to abolish poverty.

First, much depends on whether the Bank and IMF’s projections hold up for the speed of poverty reduction between now and 2015. The key factor is the speed of growth we see between now and then. The GMR expects 6-7% annually in emerging and developing economies between 2012 and 2014, including 5.7% annually in Africa.

There’s no reason for this not to happen. The Bank and IMF continue to be confident that the twin track recovery (boom times everywhere but in the West) will continue. I am less sure, though, that developing countries can avoid trouble indefinitely if Europe and America continue to head deeper into the mire.

Second, much will depend on the nature and quality of growth that is generated, and whether we will continue to see the worrying divorce of income growth from human development (health, education, gender, etc.).

The GMR has an interesting box on poverty in Brazil, which was one of the most unequal countries in the world in 1990, but has seen both growth and a sharp decline in inequality since 2003:

The 1990s marked the expansion of social safety nets in Brazil. Public social expenditure, including conditional cash transfers such as the Bolsa Família, targeted to poor families rose from 17.6 percent of GDP in 1990 to 26.0 percent of GDP in 2008—an increase of almost 50 percent in education, health, housing, and social security. Recent evidence suggests that this increase in social spending and better targeting contributed much to reducing poverty and inequality.

The Bank and IMF believe that these policies took an additional 17.5 million people out of poverty, bringing the absolute poverty rate down by 9 percentage points more than if inequality had stayed high.

Back in 1990, the World Development Report started the push to put poverty at the top of the international agenda. It said there were two secrets to effective poverty reduction: labour intensive growth and greater investment in the provision of basic services to the poor.

That was true then, and it’s true now. That’s why we need a big push on the non-income MDGs in advance of 2015, and extensive use of social protection is needed to boost the impact of growth on the quality of life of the poor.

Take education – 67 million children are still out of primary school and 70% of them live in just 10 countries. With political will, this is a relatively easy problem to fix, and in a way that improves quality, rather than eroding it. It’s also a vote winner, if politicians can be persuaded that they’ll see results within an electoral cycle.

Third – and assuming, we’re down below 900m poor people in 2015 – a great deal will ride on what happens in Africa, which will be home to 40% of the poor (another 30% will live in India).

I am quite bullish about Africa’s prospects. After 50 years of terrible demography (loads and loads of children), Africa is now swimming with the demographic tide, as its baby boom generation hits the workforce in larger numbers, and its dependency ratio drops (more adults relative to children and young people).

With similarly favourable demography, Asia has seen strong growth as more adults support children and the elderly. In the 2020s, we could be talking about an African ‘economic miracle’, but only if the continent creates jobs for the 7-10 million young people entering its labour market each year, and makes sure that at least some of them have skills tailored to the continent’s comparative advantage.

There are obvious bear traps. Unemployment and underemployment are already far too high. At the moment, the average Nigerian only produces more than he or she consumes for an average of 30 years of their life, compared to 34 years in Indonesia, 35 years in India, and 37 years in China. This intensifies the need for a greater focus on human development and on the distribution of growth.

Fourth, political instability – and, above all, conflict – will be obvious deal breakers for the post-2015 poor.

Unsurprisingly, lower income countries are making the slowest progress on poverty. While two thirds of countries are on target, or close to target, for all MDGs, only six out of forty LICs are on track to meet MDG1 (poverty) and just one is on target to meet MDG5 (maternal mortality).

Almost all of these countries have very weak institutions, and many of them have experienced repeated cycles of conflict. Although the number of civil and interstate wars has fallen in recent decades, many countries remain locked in cycles of repeated violence.

According to the 2011 World Development Report, “for every three years a country is affected by major violence (battle deaths or excess deaths from homicides equivalent to a major war), poverty reduction lags behind by 2.7 percentage points… fragile and conflict-affected states and those recovering from conflict and fragility, account for 47% of the population [of developing countries], but they account for 70% of infant deaths, 65% of people without access to safe water, and 77% of children missing from primary school.”

This is not just a problem for the poorest countries, of course, but for highly unstable middle income countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria, which are guaranteed to be on the frontline of the fight against poverty post-2015.

Fifth, an attempt to abolish poverty will become harder as it progresses, not easier, as poor people are targeted who face multiple obstacles preventing development.

Despite all the money that is spent on international development, we still know far too little about poverty in countries where problems are most deep-seated.

In Africa, 2005 poverty estimates were based on data for less than 70% of the population. Many countries have either not completed household surveys in recent years, or have not collated the results.  It is still common to find donors supporting huge programmes in countries where they cannot even be sure, say, how many children are not in school.

Voices of the Poor – the World Bank’s survey of 60,000 poor people is still spoken of with reverence, but it’s over ten years old. Few countries have the detailed, shared data sources – and accompanying analysis – on the drivers of poverty that are needed to underpin any effort to reach the poorest.

And sixth, much will depend on how resilient developing countries prove to a range of new threats.

Resource scarcity is clearly a game changer, both for poor countries that have extensive natural resources, and which risk an intensification of their ‘resource curse’, and for those that don’t.

Food and energy inflation has a disproportionate impact on the poor, as incomes grow but fail to keep pace with the cost of living. Progress against hunger was stalled even before the food crisis. The IEA projects no decline in energy poverty levels (cooking on biomass and/or no electricity) by 2030.

The poor also have few reserves in the face of famine, floods, droughts, earthquakes, etc. 20-40% of GDP of African countries comes from agriculture – every percentage point loss in the sector due to a natural disaster knocks off a quarter of percentage point, with a more pronounced impact on poor households.  Population pressures, and climate change, will intensify these risks.

The news here is not necessarily bad. In an era of higher food prices, a rural renaissance is possible, if agricultural investment gets down to the grassroots and those living in the countryside are rewarded for the ecosystem services they provide.

Ideally, urban and rural development policy need to be rethought together. All population growth is now in the towns and cities of the developing world, which will struggle to secure the resources they need to support their populations.

Some of the world’s biggest cities look pretty fragile to me (Karachi, for instance – 15 million people in 2015, probably 20 million by 2030), while I also wonder whether trouble is growing in the ‘long tail’ of countless smaller towns where roughly a quarter of the world’s population resides.

Post-2015 Development

If we take out the crystal ball, what are the prospects for development post-2015? We could categorise countries according to the challenges ahead of them (and the poverty reduction strategies that will be most effective).

(i) Development’s A-List: stable middle income countries with a reasonable or strong commitment to inclusive growth, investment in social development, and other pro-poor policies.

(ii) Rising stars: Low income countries with comparatively strong institutions and increasing growth and poverty reduction potential.

(iii) Tough nuts: Middle and low income countries with fragile and/or failing institutions, and endemic problems with conflict/violence.

I then see three broad scenarios post-2105, all of which assume that the Bank/IMF projections hold out for the new few years (this is a big if).

• More of the same: progress on poverty is concentrated in less fragile states. The proportion of the poor continues to drop, but absolute numbers fall slowly, if at all.
• Backwards step: conflict, macroeconomic or political instability, or new risks (scarcity) see one or more large countries drop out of the A-list.
• Tough nuts cracked: progress accelerates in a growing number of fragile states, while more inclusive growth reaches the poorest in all poor and middle income countries.

I’d also expect (or hope) to see:

• An early commitment from governments to ending poverty, allowing development of a roadmap for ending poverty that can be implemented from 8 September 2015, the anniversary of the Millennium Declaration.
• The commitment to ending poverty to be part of any broader package of sustainable development goals, but in a way that ensures resources are ring fenced and the post-2015 poverty agenda is insulated from the (likely) failure to agree SDGs.
• Tailored strategies for ending poverty in key regions (Africa) and groups of countries (e.g. conflict-afflicted), for achieving results on specific MDGs (e.g. the 10 countries where 70% of the kids out of school live), and for an integrated response that releases the potential of catalytic groups (e.g. women).
• A renewed commitment from international development agencies to focus on the very poorest, and to bring together disparate existing bilateral and multilateral development strategies into an integrated approach to the post-2015 agenda.
• Development assistance (and especially development expertise) to be very heavily focused on the ‘tough nuts’, with upwardly-mobile middle income countries largely left to fend for themselves (and to export their models to poorer countries), and a continued provision of budgetary support to any ‘rising star’ able to cope with it.

Conclusion

In the Millennium Declaration, the world’s leaders described the world’s central challenge as ensuring “globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people” and promised to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.”

They were committed, they said, to “freeing the entire human race from want.”

With poverty in retreat, I think we should be doubling down on that commitment, and moving from halving poverty by 2015, to ending it by 2030. It’s a stretching target, especially if contagion from the economic crisis finally hits developing countries, and especially as the last of the poor will find it hardest to escape from poverty.

But it also seems to be a target that could be achieved. What do you think? Am I wrong?

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.

The key article is one by Michael Ventura, who today writes for the Austin Chronicle. The piece was called “The Age of Endarkenment”. And if you have any interest whatsoever in how young people are driving historical change, then it deserves a read. Below is a small sample to whet your appetite – but seriously, read the whole thing.

Ventura opens by talking about the extremism of adolescence (“‘How old’s your kid?’ ‘Fifteen.’ ‘Oh my God.’”). And, he continues “all our models for dealing with these issues are psychological”. Which is, he says,

…frankly, absurd. You can’t reduce a collective phenomenon, a phenomenon that cuts across every class and most countries, that has fundamentally the same elements in Harlem and Beverly Hills, at Woodstock and Tien An Men Square, in English soccer matches and Palestinian villages — you can’t reduce a phenomenon like that to individual and family causes. To try to do so goes far beyond not making sense — it’s to ignore the most important piece of data we have, which is the very fact that the same basic thing is happening everywhere to everyone. As the mid-1990s come and go, and kids become the dominant population of most of the world, there’ll be no way to ignore that data anymore.

After all, he goes on, it’s not as if the extremism of adolescence is anything new:

Robert Bly and Michael Meade, among others, teach that tribal people everywhere greeted the onset of puberty, especially in males, with elaborate and excruciating initiations — a practice that plainly wouldn’t have been necessary unless their young were as extreme as ours. But, unlike us, tribal people met the extremism of their young (and I’m using “extremism” as a catch-all word for the intense inner cacophony of adolescence) with an equal but focused and instructive extremism from the adults.

The tribal adults didn’t run from this moment in their children as we do; they celebrated it. They would assault their adolescents with, quite literally, holy terror; rituals that had been kept secret from the young till that moment — a secrecy kept by threat of death, so important was this “adolescent moment” to the ancients; rituals that focused upon the young all the light and darkness of their tribe’s collective psyche, all its sense of mystery, all its questions and all the stories told to both harbor and answer those questions. Their “methodology,” if you like, deserves looking at, since these societies lasted with fair stability for at least 50,000 years.

But with the onset of modernity, we stopped providing our kids with initiation. Up until the mid-twentieth century, Ventura writes,

Initiation didn’t happen, hadn’t happened in the West for a long time; the dark craving-period in the young was most often utterly squashed, such that it turned in on itself, creating in individuals a kind of deadness, a stiffness that became adulthood, maturity. By the age of 17 or so the effects of a repression from which there was virtually no release or escape had made most people rigid enough to assume the responsibilities society demanded. It was a rigidity that passed (and, in our nostalgia, still passes) for strength, a sort of lifeless life, where one did one’s duties and made a virtue of stoicism. Whether or not people felt particularly alive, they got things done. And certainly there was something to be said for that.

But then something blew up. “All over the world,” he continues, “the children born during and just after the Second World War hit ‘adolescence’, the initiatory moment, with a vengeance, in virtually the same way, with negative and positive poles of the same phenomenon, virtually everywhere.”

And then?

This phenomenon, or complex of phenomena, multiplied geometrically every year, it seemed, until now the dark-tinged craving-period we choose to call “adolescence” has literally become the cultural air we breathe. And while it’s true that most of these forms are now corporately controlled, they originated from the bottom up, they were spontaneously generated by young people — and the corporations that now control many of them are run by people of that first generation of these unleashed young. The result is that, under the guise of entertainment (music, movies, television), a sense of adolescent volatility is now enforced the way the image of “mature” rigidity once was …

The way that tribal people treated this period in their young was to expose them, through precise ritual, to what the Australians call “the dreamtime” — the psyche’s mysteries in their rawest form. And that is what this world cultural environment, structured by the
priorities of adolescence minus the in-struc-tion of fully initiated elders, is doing: it’s exposing everybody to the mysteries of the psyche in their most raw acted-out forms.

By the mid-1990s half the world will be “teens.” Half the world will be in that natural, unavoidable state of craving extreme and dark
experience while, at the same time, demanding the structure of instruction — instruction that no one can give on such a scale. And if it can’t be done by the family or the community, where can they turn but to the larger collective? Hence their demand — inchoate, unreasonable, and irresistible — is that history initiate them.

History itself.

What a ride.

For we’ve already seen what happens when this nonverbal and unconscious demand of youth is acted out in the sphere that we usually call history. It was attempted briefly in America during that time we label “the sixties.” And in France, in ’68; in Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring”; in China during the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, in Tian An Men  Square. It’s still going on in Palestine, while in Europe the impulse has birthed the Greens, in Russia “perestroika.” (You can’t credit mass events to one man, as Tolstoy so brilliantly diagrammed in War and Peace — even if he’s Gorbachev.) It happened in Cambodia — where what mostly happened, if you strip the political lingo from it, was that the kids murdered the grown-ups. And the prolongation of the initiatory moment has everything to do with why there’s such a massive drug market in the United States. And it will keep on happening, more and more, everywhere, until –

Until what? That is the question, and nothing but history can answer it. There’s no going back. In many tribal initiations, if you don’t pass you die. We don’t know what will satisfy the demands of this massive, unprecedented attempt at initiation, or if it can be satisfied. But we can guess the consequences if it can’t.

And yes, of course: no one phenomenon can supply the entire context of what’s happening to us all. But I have no doubt that this unconscious, compulsive prolonging of the initiatory moment into decades — is at the crux of our fate.

All this in 1989. Like I say: 21 years ahead of its time.

What alarms me is that we hardly ever – actually, no, never – talk about this stuff. Instead, we kid ourselves that we’re going to ‘manage’ our way through the cascade of sychronous crises currently threatening to overwhelm us. Sure, a big part of the solution is about institutions, economics and politics. But the collective existential dimension to all this is pretty fundamental. And most of us over 30 are pretending it’s not there.

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?

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.

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.