by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Javier Blas at the FT has the details:
Prices for top-quality spring wheat have jumped by 90 per cent in the past month and a half, boosted by a scramble by corporate consumers to secure scarce grain and speculative buying by investors. A surge on Friday in prices for wheat used in bread to an all-time high of $19.88 a bushel – the highest yet paid for any wheat contract and a three-fold increase from a year ago – prompted the US baking industry to call for wheat exports to be curtailed.
The American Bakers Association stopped short of asking for an export moratorium but pressed for curbs on foreign sales. Lee Sanders, ABA vice-president for government relations, said there was usually a surplus in the US wheat market equivalent to three months of US consumption. “It is currently at a very low one-month level, which is extremely concerning,” she said…
The US is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Faced with strong overseas demand after extreme weather damaged other countries’ crops, its wheat stocks are set to fall to a 60-year low this year. The shortage of top-quality spring wheat is forcing US millers to consider buying Canadian supplies… William Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Nebraska-based food consultancy, said that one of the key themes of this year conference would be the realisation that the price surge was not a temporary hump but rather a structural change. “We are not facing a short-term price blip…but a sustained move to a new and higher plateau for prices,” he added.
Meanwhile, Gillian Tett is seeing the other side of the equation:
A WFP official, for example, recently showed me the red plastic cup that is used to dole out daily rations to starving Africans – and then explained, in graphically moving terms, that this vessel is typically now only being filled by two-thirds each day, because food prices are rising faster than the WFP budget.
by Jules Evans | Feb 17, 2008 | Off topic
The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present.
This week, the news read like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company $50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.
Meanwhile, in the US, the world’s greatest scientists and futurists met to decide how science could best help the human race over the next 20 years. One of them, the scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, declared that in the next fifteen years, humanity itself was going to go through an upgrade, thanks to the emerging science of nanotechnology.
“We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” Kurzweil told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would “make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system”.
Kurzweil is talking about something called transhumanism. Never mind communism, fascism, or any of those other 20th century –isms. The –ism that’s going to cause all the debate this century is transhumanism. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 16, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK. It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:
The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity. That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate. This is a problem worsened by the lack of leadership from the majority which in mis-placed deference to ‘multiculturalism’ failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism. The country’s lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without.
Media comment on the Prins / Salisbury story – which was extensive – was cast along predictable lines. The Daily Mail covered the story as “Multiculturalism is making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists'”; the Telegraph splashed it on the front of the paper too. Equally predictably, a comment piece in the Guardian derided the RUSI article as “a glaring example of just how wrongheaded Britain’s political thinking has become” – and its authors as “ranting old colonels”.
It’s tempting, when watching one of these tedious set pieces, to mutter “a plague on both your houses” and retreat back to to blogging about more interesting subjects (like sputniks). But then again, isn’t that what Yeats seems to warn against in The Second Coming?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Admittedly, Yeats’s own idea of “the centre” was not far from from that of Gwyn Prins and Robert Salisbury. (The “best”, for Yeats, refers to the values of Europe’s ruling class in 1919: God, King, and country. The “worst”, on the other hand, were Germans and Russians, plus French and Irish revolutionaries. Were Yeats alive today, he’d doubtless be with Prins & Co. on the subject of multiculturalists.)
But today, you can read Yeats’s poem differently: as a warning against culture wars where each side lurches progressively further towards extreme positions, motivated by outrage that the other side is doing the same thing.
Perhaps the most vivid example of this was the ‘positive feedback loop’ seen in debate over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 (now in the process of reigniting again): fundamentalists on both the religious and the secular side of the fence fanned the flames of the dispute, leading to polarisation of more centrist parts of the debate and an exponential amplification of the debate’s ‘shrillness quotient’.
So – can we break out of the cycle? Or are we doomed to ‘mere anarchy being loosed upon the world’?
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 16, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks, South Asia
The tiny Pacific small island state of Palau has just announced that it’ll be formally requesting protection from the Security Council on climate change and rising sea levels- and co-sponsoring a binding Security Council Resolution calling for mandatory emissions caps.
It’s not the first time that climate change has appeared on the Security Council’s agenda (the UK tabled it last April, as we reported at the time), but Palau’s bid is different both in calling for mandatory action – and in the fact that for Palau, the security threat posed by climate change is not just more direct than in the case of the UK, but positively existential. Stuart Beck, Palau’s Ambassador to the UN, said last week:
It is the obligation of the Security Council to prevent an aggravation of the situation … Larger countries can build dikes, and move to higher ground. This is not feasible for the small island states who must simply stand by and watch their cultures vanish.
Privately, advisors to Palau admit that the Resolution is almost certain to be shot down – but they add that they’re just going to keep submitting it to the Security Council, every session from now on, until it gets debated and one day adopted, in a steadfast effort that’s almost like civil disobedience. This is really smart politics. Watch this coalition grow.
by Alex Evans | Feb 15, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
John Githingo – Kenya’s crusading anti-corruption champion, who was permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics until he had to flee to the UK in 2005 – offers a succint analysis of how aid donors have contributed to instability in Kenya:
To many in the west confronted with images of machete-wielding Africans, what has happened may look like an atavistic uprising. In fact it has been a deadly elite-driven political game in which the machete carriers are pawns on a blood-soaked chessboard. The kings and queens include institutions such as the World Bank, western governments and others who have engaged with Kenya’s polity in a manner that has often involved sweeping fundamental realities under the carpet. For the past four years some of these players insisted that Kenya’s politics were merely noise that would be drowned out by the chugging of a vibrant economic engine. Those who used their credibility as purveyors of this alchemy are as responsible for the current situation as some of the leading belligerents now. They need to engage responsibly and with unity and clarity.
Too true, unfortunately. Githingo also injects a note of realism into reports that a deal between Raila Odinga and Mwai Kibaki is close to being reached, noting that:
Kenya is gripped by a battle within its political elite that has led to a failed election. This has fractured the nation along historic fault-lines of resource inequality, ethnicity, generation and class. Potent grievances over the distribution of land, and over the perceptions that the president’s Kikuyu community feels entitled to rule, are stirred into the mix. It is a contradiction because the two ostensibly opposing forces have no fundamental ideological differences. Indeed, it is not clear that the mediation in Nairobi involves leaders who retain control of the situation on the ground.
