by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t put its reviews online, I thought I’d extract a few paragraphs here. These deal with what strikes me as the most interesting and least discussed element of the (generally badly reviewed) book: Bolton’s obsession with the political uses of jokes…
Mr. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by the UN. For them, “the United Nations to this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing countries.” Bolton now sets out to disillusion “those who still think glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago.” His volume may be a first in international relations literature: a book explicitly intended to sour childhood memories.
To achieve this he hauls us through some highly involved descriptions of diplomatic negotiations enlivened by the breaking of confidences, ad hominem attacks on most other participants, and a lot of jokes. Curiously, the most interesting element of the entire project may be the jokes. We already know quite a lot about the humor of the Bush administration – Bob Woodward has revealed, for example, that the president finds flatulence funny. Mr. Bolton is more interested in verbal repartee, and from time to time he is genuinely witty. Describing a visit by George Clooney to New York to discuss Darfur before the Security Council, he notes that the actor was swarmed by female staffers, “providing humility lessons, and therefore character-building, for the rest of us.” However, he is best at skewering those he dislikes with harsh humor, and he knows it, often returning to the same victims (such as his British and Swedish counterparts at the UN) again and again.
This fascination with comedy is clearly essential to his understanding of how diplomacy works. Mr. Bolton has often been presented as a devotee of power politics, seeing little beyond interest, influence and advantage. This book does not dispel that view. But humor seems to act as a guide to how these forces work. He explains how he gained advantage over a senior German official in a meeting on Iran by noting that he inspired “general merriment”, while his adversary only “joked lamely” and then responded “dourly” to Bolton’s comedic success.
Contrary to his stated intentions, Mr. Bolton has not produced a book that will appeal to those suffering belated qualms about whether their trick-or-treating was misguided – it would be utterly ludicrous to believe that anyone without a sad obsession with multilateral diplomacy is going to care one iota whether Mr. Bolton bested largely unheard-of diplomatic rivals in the humor stakes. But for those of us who are burdened with that unfortunate obsession, this is a treasure-trove.
And if that doesn’t make you want to buy it, what will?
by Alex Evans | Feb 6, 2008 | Conflict and security
- In Kenya the death toll now tops 1,000, according to the International Red Cross (quoted in a CBC story yesterday). The number of internally displaced people is reported to be over 304,000, although that figure’s expected to rise too.
- Meanwile, AP reports that hundreds are dead in Chad, and that “most downtown shops and buildings have been looted”.
- IRIN reports that two million people in Somalia face a humanitarian crisis and need urgent aid, amid large numbers fleeing from fighting in Mogadishu, attacks on aid workers, hyperinflation and drought in two regions
- Fighting in the north of Yemen is escalating, also according to IRIN, despite a recent peace deal brokered by the Qatari government
- And the CIA has for the first time publicly admitted waterboarding detainees.
All this and plenty more from the excellent daily news roundup emailed by the Human Security Report Project in Canada. It’s free – if you’d like it, you can sign up here.
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The FT’s consumer industries correspondent, Jenny Wiggins – who along with commodities correspondent Javier Blas deserves a medal (or at the very least a rise) for excellence in covering the food prices story over the last year – is looking at changing patterns of food consumption in India in the paper’s Saturday magazine today. The whole story is a terrific piece of feature journalism, but it was this passage towards the end that got me thinking in particular:
India, which is still trying to lift millions of people out of poverty, is having problems satisfying its appetites. One of the reasons the Punjabi dairy farmers are doing so well is that demand for milk, and milk-derived products, is increasing so quickly that farmers can’t keep up. India, despite being the world’s largest producer of milk, temporarily halted exports of milk powder last summer to try and stop domestic milk prices from rising too fast after some dairy farmers were tempted by record high global prices and sold their product to exporters rather than local food producers.
Milk isn’t the only hot commodity. After restarting wheat imports in 2006, for the first time since the late 1990s, India banned wheat exports last year. The country can, of course, try and produce more food. But Ajay Shankar, a government secretary in the ministry of commerce and industry, says that while India wants to increase its agricultural yields (which are low compared with the rest of the world), expanding the amount of land farmed is difficult in a country already struggling to support more than one billion people. In Punjab, the state that produces a hefty chunk of India’s wheat, rice and milk, decades of intensive farming and heavy fertiliser use have taken a heavy toll on the land, and water tables are falling sharply.
Although India’s economy is expanding at about 9 per cent a year, its agricultural sector is slowing, with growth declining from 4.7 per cent between 1992-1997 to just 1.5 per cent between 2002-2006. If India can’t produce enough of its own food, it will have to import more. Shankar says it is unclear how much more food India will need, but acknowledges that significant increases in imports would affect the global economy. ”If we become a major importer of food grains as some fear, clearly it will have an impact on global prices,” he says over tea in his Delhi office.
And India is not the only country expected to import more food in coming years. Over the next decade, per capita income in China is expected to triple, which means the Chinese will be eating more – and better. They are already each eating twice as much meat as they were in 1990 and the country now accounts for one third of all meat eaten in the world, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
Now as Wiggins explains earlier in the article, it’s changing consumption in the BRIC countries, more than falling grain stocks or increasing government support for biofuels, that’s really been driving rising food prices. But if the two most populous of those four nations, India and China, are having to import more and more of their food, that raises the question: who’s going to be growing the supply to meet all this extra demand?
And the thing that struck me, as I pondered this, was that if there’s one region that by rights out to be making a mint out of rising food prices, it’s Africa. Africa, after all, is the continent that the green revolution forgot. While productivity was going through the roof in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, African agriculture remains stubbornly unproductive. Now that agricultural commodities appear finally to be heading out of their interminable slump, there’s a powerful case for investors to tackle the productivity gap, you’d think. So is lady luck finally smiling on Africa’s people?
Well, a big part of the answer to that question depends on whether you’re looking at those of her people in her mushrooming cities, or alternatively those of her people still working the land. If you look at the global statistics on hungry people, most of them are in rural areas. Fully 50 per cent of the world’s undernourished people (400 million souls) are in low income farm households. Another 22 per cent, 176 million people, are rural landless and low income non-farm households; and a further 8 per cent, 64 million people, are poor herders, fishers or forest people dependent on community or public resources.
In fact, only 20 per cent of the world’s undernourished people are in low income urban households – 176 million people – and a great many of them are to be found in China and India rather than Africa. [All stats from John Shaw’s masterly World Food Security: a history since 1945.] So presumably, rising prices for agricultural goods ought to spell good news for all those rural poor in Africa, especially if rising prices also incentivise investment in improving productivity – right?
As I blogged back in October last year, development economist legend Dani Rodrik’s answer is that it depends – but that “it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics”:
…it depends on whether a poor household is a net seller or buyer of food (that is, whether it grows more or less food than it consumes). This means that the rural poor generally tends to benefit from higher food prices, whereas the urban poor generally get hurt. How large the impact is depends, in turn, on the size of the food account as a share of total expenditures or income of a household. And whether the change is good or bad for a nation’s poor as a whole depends on the geography of poverty in a country.
But there’s a factor that Rodrik overlooked: climate change. While northern latitude global breadbaskets like Canada and Russia stand to be net beneficiaries from climate change in the short to medium term, the outlook for Africa is not good at all. Falling yields as a result of climate impacts risk increasing Africa’s needs for imported food, rather than its opportunities to export food. For countries already dependent on imported oil – which, as I noted in December, have already seen all their increases in aid and debt relief from the last three years wiped out by higher fuel import costs – it’s a vicious spiral, especially given that biofuels mean that energy and food prices are now linked.
The irony and injustice here is heartbreaking. Just when one major global trend – rising food prices – looks set finally to offer Africa some kind of a break, we find that in fact other trends – climate change and energy scarcity – may convert higher food prices instead into yet another problem, that despite being created elsewhere, somehow ends up in Africa’s lap.
(For more on the international implications of rising food prices, see my briefing note from December last year.)
Update: see also
– On collision course: scarcity and African patronage systems – 5 March 2008
– Food prices: where to get briefed – 2 March 2008
– Third world debt (the sequel) – 1 March 2008
by Alex Evans | Dec 1, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
The right wing blogosphere in the US is, needless to say, having a field day about the jailing of Gillian Gibbons over the teddy bear incident in Sudan – just look at what Michelle Malkin has to say (see also David’s survey of comments a couple of days ago).
But in fact, the whole incident is very much to the advantage of moderate shades of opinion – both inside and outside Islam. The sheer ludicrousness of the charge itself – a teddy bear, for heaven’s sake – combined with the manifestly absurd scale of the overreaction of the mob in Khartoum, has done much to unify opinion around a common sense position. Here’s the Muslim Council of Britain:
This case should have required only simple common sense to resolve. It is unfortunate that the Sudanese authorities were found wanting in this most basic of qualities. They grossly overreacted in this sad affair and this episode. Gillian should never have been arrested, let alone charged…
And a group of Muslim protestors staged a noisy demo outside the Sudanese Embassy in London today too. These kinds of reactions play well with non-Muslim moderates in the UK. Take this vox pop from Associated Press, for instance:
“One of the good things is the U.K. Muslims who’ve condemned the charge as completely out of proportion,” said Paul Wishart, 37, a student in London. “In the past, people have been a bit upset when different atrocities have happened and there hasn’t been much voice in the U.K. Islamic population, whereas with this, they’ve quickly condemned it.”
The reaction of moderate Muslims in Britain is being replicated internationally, too. In Canada, the Muslim Canadian Congress is organising a mail-in to protest Gillian Gibbons’ imprisonment, by asking its members to send tiny teddy bears to the Sudanese ambassador in Ottawa. Meanwhile, it hasn’t been lost on moderate media outlets in the Arab world like Gulf Daily News that Gillian Gibbons’ own comment from jail has been to stress “I don’t want any resentment towards Muslims”, according to her son John.
It all feels very different to the Danish cartoons story – which left moderates on both sides feeling bruised. While those extremists with an interest in increasing division (on either side – Khartoum mob, Michelle Malkin) naturally seek to polarise the debate as much as they can, this time the battle looks to be going the other way.
by Alex Evans | Oct 20, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America
Who’d have thought it? UNCLOS – the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, hardly the sexiest multilateral environmental agreement around – has become a cause celebre for both the the progressive end of the US blogosphere and the Pentagon. What gives?
Here’s the story so far. UNCLOS, which covers issues like defining maritime zones, protecting the marine environment and preserving freedom of navigation, came into force in 1994. The US has signed it, but the Senate – where a band of diehards led by Sen. James Inhofe wants to block the treaty- has not yet ratified it. So far, so predictable.
But now the fun starts. First, why is the Administration – including the Pentagon, and indeed the President himself – telling the Senate to get a move on and ratify? Since when does the Pentagon care about this sort of thing? And second, why is the progressive blogosphere right alongside them in this endeavour?
Let’s take the bloggers first. They’re interested in the treaty not because of its environmental benefits (though those are fine by them too), but primarily because they think they can use it tactically to marginalise their enemies. Here’s Scott Paul at the Washington Note:
…the opposition to the Bolton nomination was a battle well chosen. It was very important on its merits: it successfully weakened and then partially removed an extremely negative element from the administration. But just as important was its execution. Thanks to some smart group decisions on strategy and message, the Bolton campaign is making current battles against pugnacious nationalism more winnable than before.
The effort to ratify the Law of the Sea convention is a campaign that matters for similar reasons. Yes, the Law of the Sea is compelling on its face. The armed forces rightly wants its navigational and overflight rights protected. Environmentalists rightly want the U.S. to join and add to global ocean stewardship efforts. And U.S. companies should have a chance to compete with foreign firms for offshore resources…
All of these are good reasons for the U.S. to accede to the Law of the Sea, but none of them alone or even in combination would necessarily make it important for the progressive agenda. So why is the Law of the Sea significant? Simple: our absence from the Law of the Sea is the outer wall of Fortress America. Winning the ratification battle would seriously de-fang the same pugnacious nationalists who are on the opposite side of almost every important foreign policy issue facing the U.S.
Matt Stoller expands on the point:
Without being able to pass the very basic Law of the Sea treaty, there is no way we will ever get a treaty through on global warming, create the space to internationalize the Iraq mess, or work with allies abroad in any coherent manner. Fortunately, this is extremely winnable. All it will take is some floor time from Reid, and we’ll win, embarrass, and marginalize the hyper-nationalists.
Note also the messaging strategies that progressive bloggers are using. Take this post by Taylor Marsh, for instance, which employs the derisive term “black helicopter crowd” no less than seven times to describe Sen. Inhofe’s band. It’s a pretty smart marginalising strategy, especially given that the national security tribe want the treaty.
Which leads us on to our other question. What does the Pentagon care? And what makes UNCLOS such a big deal that President Bush himself should endorse it? Essentially, the answer has to with securing access to international waters for the US Navy. The military worries that without being a party to the treaty, states might arbitrarily restrict access to US ships.
Well, fine, but that doesn’t altogether explain the urgency. This is hardly a new concern, is it? Well, actually, it is: step forward the emerging spat over the Northwest Passage, which in a warmer world becomes navigable by normal ships rather than just icebreakers. Canadian PM Stephen Harper is trying to make the case that the Passage lies within Canada’s waters – and hence that Canada gets to choose who sails through it. And if the US ratifies UNCLOS, it gains an important new tool in its kit for contesting Canada’s claim. QED!
So that, my friends, is the story of how the Pentagon, the netroots, President Bush and the Natural Resources Defense Council all got into bed with each other. Say what you like about climate change, it sure can trigger some curious political realignments…
