by Alex Evans | Oct 31, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
The International Energy Agency will publish this year’s World Energy Outlook on 7 November – but in advance of then, executive director Nobuo Tanaka has been giving a sneak preview at the Oil and Money Conference in London. As the FT’s Ed Crooks has it, he said:
“Despite five years of high oil prices, market tightness will actually increase from 2009. New capacity additions will not keep up with declines at current fields and the projected increase in demand.”
by David Steven | Oct 31, 2007 | Influence and networks
From the Onion:
Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical form of government known as megalocracy.
“We were attempting to recreate a military junta in a controlled diplomatic setting, and we applied too much external pressure,” said head researcher Dr. Adam Stogsdill, a leading expert in highly reactionary ruling systems. “The resultant government has the ruthless qualities of a dictatorship combined with the class solidarity of a plutocracy—it’s quite a remarkable find.”
Stogsdill explained that megalocracy is extremely unstable and can only exist in idealistic conditions for a few minutes before collapsing into anarchy.
by Alex Evans | Oct 31, 2007 | Conflict and security
William Lind has been ruminating about the renewed importance of sea power in a less secure world.
We [the US] need naval supremacy because in a world where the state is weakening, water, and transport by water, grow in importance. People today think of land uniting and water dividing, but that became true only recently, with the rise of the state and the development of railways (which can only function in the safety and order created by states). From the dawn of river and sea-faring until the mid-19th century, water united and land divided. It was easier, safer, cheaper and faster to move goods and people by water than by land. So it will be again in a 21st century dominated by Fourth Generation war and declining or disappearing states. Already, in places such as the Congo, the only way to move is on the rivers. A country that can control waterways anywhere in the world will have a great strategic advantage.
Unfortunately for the US, Lind continues, its Navy is configured in precisely the wrong way for this kind of tasking:
Today as throughout the Cold War, the U.S. Navy is building a fleet perfectly designed to fight the navy of Imperial Japan. If someone wants to contest control of the Pacific Ocean in a war between aircraft carrier task forces, we are ready. Unfortunately, no one does, absent that general Resurrection when Shokaku and Zuikaku, Soryu and Hiryu will rise from their watery graves.
If the US were serious about configuring its Navy the right way for the 21st century, it would “…build lots of ships designed for operations in coastal waters and on rivers, often with troops on board. But such ships are small ships, and the U.S. Navy hates small ships.”
So what of the UK? Let’s start by consulting the helpfully candid Diaries of the late, great Alan Clark, who conducted a Defence Review during his time as MOD Minister of State for Procurement during 1989. Turn to page 262 and we find:
I am in despair about the Navy or, rather, the sailors. This is the Service which has to be the centre-piece of my plan – swift, flexible, hard-hitting. Yet the only thing they want to be is the forward anti-submarine warfare screen for the United States Navy in northern waters. That’s all over, I say. Forget it. The Soviet ‘threat’ no longer exists. Raise your eyes.
Well, fair enough, but that was eighteen years ago. Surely the Navy has reinvented itself by now – just as soldiers (next in line for Clark’s ire in page 262) have finally been weaned off their Main Battle Tank addiction and persuaded of the utility of investing in expeditionary kit like helicopters (not they yet have anything like enough of them, but at least they’re now asking) and armoured personnel carriers? Er, no. Here’s Max Hastings in the Guardian all of two months ago:
Some big ambitions must be forfeited somewhere. A coherent vision is needed, such as is lacking today, and that only a defence review can provide. The navy needs more ships – not expensive hi-tech exhibits like the Type 45 destroyer, but economy models which can provide landing platforms for helicopters. A thinking secretary of state would tell the admirals that, having got their carriers, they must now change the habit of centuries and start building cheap, simple boats. One soldier observes: “The most credible threat to the Royal Navy in the next generation is posed by men in rubber boats.”
by Alex Evans | Oct 30, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Regular readers will know that we’ve been watching food prices rise steadily over the last few months with increasing concern – see the Scarcity category of posts for the backstory, and also this excellent in-depth analysis piece that the FT published last week. Today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s head, Jacques Diouf, had some blunt words in an interview with the FT:
“Many [countries] will have to take hard decisions because of the impact of food prices. In some countries there will be price controls, some will scrap import tariffs on food to minimise the impact of rising costs and others will increase food subsidies … If prices continue to rise, I would not be surprised if we began to see food riots,” Mr Diouf said, noting that in the past year, Mexico, Yemen and Burkina Faso had all witnessed social unrest over high food prices.”
Concern at FAO is clearly rising steadily; last week, the FT quoted the head of its grain trading division as saying that “the world is gradually losing the buffer that it used to have to protect against big swings [in the market]. There is a sense of panic.” But Diouf has a plan:
At the FAO’s annual meeting in Rome next month, Mr Diouf will propose a “high-level conference on world food security” that would aim to agree on measures to cool down rising food prices.
Interesting idea – and welcome to see Diouf seeking to raise the political temperature on food prices. But it still leaves the question: how much can an FAO summit on its own really achieve? Step back for a moment and consider what’s actually driving the increase in food prices. Here are Jenny Wiggins and Javier Blas last week in the big FT analysis piece mentioned earlier:
Some of the price rises are the result of temporary problems, such as drought in Australia, and diseases, such as blue-ear in Chinese pigs. But there is a more permanent increase in demand from Asia, as richer populations in China and India demand more protein, and from the biofuel industry, which is on course to consume about 30 per cent of the US corn crop in 2010 – developments that will underpin prices for the medium term. The FAO estimates that those structural new trends will help to push the cost of agricultural commodities in the next decade between 20 and 50 per cent above their last 10-year average.
Problem is, these challenges – droughts, affluence in China and India, demand for biofuels driven by high energy prices – lie well beyond FAO’s sphere of influence. Even if ministers attending the forthcoming FAO summit agreed to cap food costs, it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to deliver it, given the sprawl of drivers at play – just as environment ministers have a bad habit of signing glitzy treaty declarations that then (with a few exceptions like the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances) comprehensively fall down during the implementation phase.
But none of this is to deny that there genuinely is a problem – and one that we can expect to get a lot worse once long term scarcity trends like climate change and water depletion get stirred into the mix. So what should Mr Diouf do?
Here’s a starter for ten. Instead of going all out for a meaningless summit declaration full of warm words, big targets, no new funds and no compliance mechanism, Diouf should start the slow, painstaking process of building shared awareness of the fact that we have a major geopolitical scarcity problem in the post. While the first stirrings of the problem are already clear, he should recognise that building consensus on the nature of the problem could take a decade or more; just consider the fact that eighteen years elapsed between the IPCC’s establishment in 1988 and 2006 when consensus on the reality of climate change really coalesced.
The first step, then, is simply to get the key agencies talking to each other. Anyone who’s spent any time working in international bureaucracies knows that the most fundamental fact about them is that they are organised in silos that don’t talk to each other. The problem is bad enough within individual agencies or government departments; it’s even more serious when two rival agencies work on the same area. But even that is still simple compared to trying to build a relationship between agencies that barely know each other exists.
That’s where we are today with the international agencies who will have to manage the geopolitics of scarce oil, scarce water, scarce food and scarce atmospheric space. Lots of staff at IEA won’t even know what FAO stands for; and vice versa.
So Diouf should go ahead and organise his summit. But he should also organise a retreat for 50 key staff from 50 key agencies relevant to the management of scarcity, and start building the shared awareness that they’ll need in the next few years: mapping the most vulnerable countries, how food scarcity could exacerbate conflict flashpoints, figuring out how currency fluctuations could affect the situation, running scenarios for $150 a barrel oil, reading William Cline’s CGD research on how climate change will affect developing country agricultural productivity, working out what kind of developing country governance frameworks have proved effective at managing local scarcity, devising ways of building scarcity awareness into peacekeeping operations (as DPKO are doing with Darfur)… the list is endless.
Building the barest bones of a common language that all the relevant players can speak may seem a modest first step, especially as the clamour for kneejerk responses builds. But it is an indispensable one too.
