by Richard Gowan | Apr 9, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
I normally leave scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand. UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment. John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief and increasingly cited as one of the Secretariat’s stars, set out the problem today:
Combined with the negative impact of climate change and soaring fuel prices, a “perfect storm” is brewing for much of the world’s population, said Holmes. “The security implications (of the food crisis) should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe.”
His comments came after two days of rioting in Egypt, where the prices for many staples has doubled in the past year. And violent food protests were continuing for a second day in the capital of Haiti. “Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity,” Holmes said, noting a 40-per-cent average rise in prices worldwide since the middle of last year.
What to do? Well, not unreasonably, the UN is continuing to push for more food aid to the worst off:
John Powell, the deputy executive director of The United Nation’s World Food Program, emphasized the need for developed countries to help governments in the developing world. Developing countries experiencing unrest over high food prices need help in developing “social safety net programs,” he said.
“Riots today mean you need a solution tomorrow,” Powell said. Governments with no “policy space” and under pressure from organized discontent in urban centres “is not likely to be the best decision” in trying to solve the problem, he said.
So, governments facing serious rioting make bad decisions. Hm. Sometimes, the real problem is that bad governments face riots. That isn’t about “policy space”, but about the fact that autocratic or incapable regimes tend to reinforce or manipulate food shortages to their own advantage. The popular response: rioting.
Throwing food at the problem might be a “solution tomorrow”, if there was food to be thrown. But it seems there isn’t – and the essential response to food riots is creating more accountable (dare one say “democratic”?) governments that are politically motivated to respond to inequalities (rather than simply offer a “safety net”, although that may have to do for now). My colleagues who think about such things will find this blindingly obvious, but there’s a risk that the current crisis will obscure the underlying political dimensions of the inequalities involved…
PS: whatever the precise linkage between scarcity and urban violence, nobody should attempt to intervenc before reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. It should be the book of the moment, and even makes UN statistic compelling. If you don’t have time to read that, there’s an article-length version of the case online.
by David Steven | Apr 8, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of how the world’s elite acts in a moment of global crisis, a moment like the one we are in now, it’s instructive to watch a player like Timothy Geithner at work. The New York Federal Reserve Bank president has been at the center of frantic behind-the-scenes efforts to stem the spread of the U.S. credit collapse, to manage the bank run that brought down Bear Stearns, and many crises before it…
Because interest-rate changes and cash infusions have less lasting impact on markets than in the past, the power of central banks is effectively more limited. In today’s world, no one institution, not even the U.S. Fed, has the power to contain a crisis. Being a successful central banker now depends on what Geithner calls “a convening power … that is separate from the formal authority of our institution and which can be a very powerful tool.” […]
Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world’s 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Interestingly, no Asians were there, not even the Japanese. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein “jokingly called them ‘the 14 families,’ like in ‘The Godfather’,” says Geithner. “And we said to them, “You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime to make sure there are no free riders to give you comfort; you know that if you move individually everybody else will move with you.”
There was nothing in writing, no rules, no formal process, and while no one asked the Fed to act, the Fed let everyone in the markets know it was acting. The beauty of the process was its absolute efficiency, seeing what a tight circle of large firms with “some global reach” could get done, fast-with an executive committee of only four running the weekly conference call until the crisis was past. “There is no formal mechanism we could have used to force this on anybody, so we had to invent it. I think the premise going forward is that you have to have a borderless, collaborative process. It does not mean it has to be universal, every jurisdiction or every institution,” said Geithner. “You just need a critical mass of the right players. It is a much more concentrated world.”
In Superclass, his new book on global elites, Rothkopf identifies a group of around 6000 key movers and shakers – literally ‘one in a million’. Their role is generally a stabilising one, if they can keep in line with the wishes of the wider population (a point echoed by Gideon Rachman in the FT today). But sometimes it doesn’t work out this way:
I once overheard a dinner conversation among the CEO of a leading aircraft manufacturer and a senior member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. “Here’s the deal,” said the CEO. “I want to sell a plane to Muammar Kaddafi and he wants to buy one. But we have sanctions in place that won’t let me sell to him. The U.S. wants this guy dead. So, what I’m thinking is, if you help me get the OK to sell him the plane, I’ll build with explosive bolts connecting the wings to the fuselage. Then, one day he’s up flying over the Med and we push a button. He’s gone. I make my sale. Everyone’s happy.” Fortunately, the conversation took place in the 1990s, a time before U.S. foreign-policy makers began bending international laws to achieve national security goals. The congressperson declined the offer.
by Alex Evans | Apr 8, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
Over at NetworkWeaving, there’s a bit of compare and contrast going on, between this sort of campaigning:
…and this sort:
Worth a read.
by Alex Evans | Apr 8, 2008 | Global system
Nouriel Roubini wins the prize for metaphor of the week: will the US recession be shaped like a V (short and shallow), a U (a bit more sustained at the bottom, but with recovery after 12-18 months); a W (a double dip, in other words) – or, horror, an L (a protracted slump like Japan’s in the 1990s after, er, its housing bubble burst)?
Roubini says his own view is closest to a U – because, he says, the last 2 recessions (1990-91 and 2001) were 8 months each, and this is worse (see the post for why). Still, for me the real story here is that Roubini thinks the L to be unlikely: he’s been the bear of bears for months (and generally correct with it), so light at the end of the tunnel from the Stern School’s Mr Downturn is a welcome thing indeed. He thinks an L is unlikely, by the way, because:
…the policy response of the US is already more aggressive than the one of Japan. Japan waited almost two years after the bursting of its bubble to ease monetary policy; and it waited two years before providing fiscal stimulus. In the US, instead, both monetary and fiscal stimulus have started in earnest early on.
Also Japanese postponed the necessary corporate and banking restructuring for years keeping alive zombie firms and zombie banks via inappropriate forms of forbearance. In the US both private and especially public efforts to restructure the impaired assets and firms will start faster and more aggressively. Thus the risk of a decade-long economic stagnation is quite limited so far.
by Richard Gowan | Apr 7, 2008 | Influence and networks
There isn’t a think-tank, policy institute or academic department anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a cupboard or entire room given over to hoarding vast quantities of unread pamphlets from years gone by. When I was at the Foreign Policy Centre in London, we actually had a whole cellar (although the FPC has moved office since then, which probably meant a good spring clean). Surveying the serried ranks of good ideas going stale, your average policy wonk is liable to wonder whether anyone actually reads their stuff – and then go and gloomily Google themselves for any scrap of evidence that someone might have done so…
It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a theory of why nobody reads stuff. An insightful summary of the problem comes from the unexpected quarter of Police Practice and Research (erm, rather ironically given the subject-matter of this post, I can’t get a working link to the PPR website). I guess you’ve already powered through your copy, but just in case you’ve been too damn busy policing to get to round to it, you should check out “Their Reports are not Read and the Recommendations are Resisted” by Gordon Peake and Otwin Marenin. Their tripartite theory of why writing on police reform goes unread could be applied to almost any field:
There is a copious amount of non-directed research produced by this community. There have been country and regional specific articles, monographs and books. Why is their effect so slim?
First, it is simply difficult to get people to read them. Reading an article, book or report takes time and patience. This combination of luxury and attribute is something that only a few have. Moreover, as these pieces of writing are targeted to general audiences, they tend to lack the specificity that may resonate with implementers. Policing is often asserted as being one of the most ‘context-specific’ of activities – it is scarcely surprising that authors writing in geographic and temporal isolation from these contexts don’t get specificities correct.
Second, these products may be written with purposes other than police reform more uppermost in the mind of their authors. Members of this community write with multiple intents – the desire to burnish a career in the ‘community,’ get invited to conferences in exotic locales and generally live the interesting life of the travelling purveyor of policing knowledge. Some of these goals may even run contrary to police reform. For those desiring recognition within an academic community, an esoteric argument has more motility than a simple one.
The third reason is prosaic but no less important for that: the outputs of this community are not easy to find. Determined sleuthing is required to seek them out. Articles are parked in academic journals or working papers that are hard to find. Members of the community seem content to let research pollinate freely, hoping that someone will happen up it up, read it, internalise and use it. At the very least this is a leap of faith.
I’d like to quote more, but that would be a breach of copyright. Just in case you felt like reading about not reading… but that would defeat the point of the article.
