Jim Pickard at the FT’s excellent Westminster blog has been wondering whether David Miliband really has the common touch. “Will the public warm,” he wonders, “to the former policy wonk who – despite shedding the previous Mr Logic image – is still best known as an intellectual?”
In seeking to answer that question, he turns to Gideon Rachman’s profile of Miliband from earlier this year. “Here,” he proffers, “is one extract:”
“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”
Hmm: is that really all that nerdy? It’s not as if Miliband is the only Cabinet member who’s into Sen: so are Gordon Brown, Douglas Alexander, and Hilary Benn (who quoted his views on freedom at length in his preface to DFID’s third White Paper). David Cameron turned out to be a fan too, when he made his first big speech on development back in 2006.
Here’s a profile of Sen from back in 2000 by Meghnad Desai in case you haven’t made the acquaintance of this excellent writer; his book Development as Freedomcan’t be recommended highly enough.
Although all the attention lately has been on food prices and the effect of their sharp rise for inflation, development and security, the rises seen on food have been as nothing compared to some of the increases seen on fertilisers over the same period.
A briefing by Andrew Dorward and Colin Poulton, published in June by the Future Agricultures consortium, gives chapter and verse. Between May 2006 and May 2008, here’s what prices did for selected key foods and fertilisers:
Cotton – up 29%
Beverages – up 41%
Wheat – up 61%
Maize – up 108%
Rice – up 185%
Urea (a key nitrogen fertiliser) – up 160%
DAP (a major phosphate fertiliser) – up 318%
The underlying causes cover both sides of the supply / demand line. On the demand side, there’s the basic fact that the need for fertilisers is soaring as a result of higher food prices and demand for crops as biofuels.
On the supply side, energy costs are a huge factor (especially in the case of nitrogen fertilisers); some fertiliser exporters (like China) have imposed export controls; and in the background, there are capacity limits to increasing production, especially for phosphates – a point that has the peak oil crowd already thinking hard about the concept of peak phosphorus.
None of this, needless to say, is good news for farmers, who according to the paper find themselves hit twice: once on the affordability of fertilisers when purchasing them, and then again (given food / fertiliser price differentials) on their profitability when using them.
Dorward and Poulton argue that in the short term, it’s still worth developing country governments’ while to subsidise fertiliser use, even if the rates of return are lower – and that donors need to step up fast with additional financing (a proposal that the World Bank signalled its openness to in its ten point plan on food). Dorward, Poulton and the Bank all agree that the question of getting them to the right place – fast – is as important as the question of who picks up the bill.
In the longer term, the paper suggests, the focus needs to be on more integrated soil fertility management with greater use of organic materials [i.e. compost and manure] together with smarter use of inorganic fertilisers – an area of work that the big agricultural research institutes like CIMMYT are already focusing on heavily. Moving towards more integrated soil fertility management already makes sense for reasons of environmental sustainability. If fertiliser prices fail to fall in the longer term, these areas of research are also going to be one of the critical front lines in feeding 10 billion of us.
The Telegraph has another “EU-is-taking-over” story today about how moves to create a European intelligence service will jeopardise the work of British spies.
Improving intelligence cooperation and information-sharing inside the EU is important both to help combat terrorism and to provide the necessary intelligence for ESDP missions, such as the EULEX mission in Kosovo.
A first step towards improving intelligence-sharing was the establishment of the Joint Situation Center (SITCEN) for intelligence analysis within the Council Secretariat. One of its goals is to bring together experts from both the intelligence and security services.
For a while federalist-minded politicians have tried to push the idea further. In 2004, Finnish and Austrian politicians proposed to take this further, creating an EU intelligence service.
But this has gone – and will go – nowhere. Nor is it even clear how such a service would function. Creating trained and experienced staff, investing in technology, networks, agents etc is beyond what the EU can do.
Whilst EU-level bodies may develop their analytical functions, creating a cadre of analysts that may even sit in EC Delegations, no serious analyst believes that the member states will loose full control of operational decisions, information gatheredm their network of sources etc.
But don’t let that stop a story like the one the Telegraph is running.
The video is a spoof of John McCain’s ‘celebrity’ advertisement released last week in which the Republican candidate compared Barack Obama’s popularity with that of Ms Hilton and claimed the Democrat was no more than a celebrity candidate who was not ready to lead the nation.
In Ms Hilton’s version of the advertisement, she tells electors: “Hey America, I’m Paris Hilton and I’m a celebrity too. Only I’m not from the olden days and I’m not promising change like that other guy. I’m just hot!
Tara Parker-Pope, the health guru at the New York Times has created a quiz based on the brilliant book The Unthinkableby Amanda Ripley (it should have been on the Conservatives reading list).
