by Alex Evans | May 15, 2009 | South Asia
Indian writer Aravind Adiga yesterday offered the winner of India’s election a heads-up on four emergencies likely to test them early in their term of office. Two of them – terrorism, and India’s fiscal position – aren’t any great surprise. The other two?
Three: In the past few weeks, the Naxals – Maoist guerrillas who operate in the desperately poor states of north and central India – have attacked a major aluminium mine, killed voters and policemen, and disrupted trains. The Naxal insurgency, which taps into the resentment of those left out or threatened by the economic boom, has grown steadily in the past five years. Yet most urban Indians still think of it as an obscure menace that is “out there” – far from the cities and towns.
This is likely to change. The emboldened guerillas look set to escalate their war against the Indian state in the months ahead. Attacks on industries, mines, police stations and trains are likely to rise; a spectacular strike that grabs national and international attention is on the cards. Understaffed local police and corrupt regional politicians will not be able to deal with the Naxals without significantly greater assistance from New Delhi.
Four: India’s population continues to grow and demand for water – for irrigation, industrial and personal consumption – keeps mounting; yet no government has given enough thought to husbanding the country’s water resources. Tensions over the use of water simmer across India. Sooner or later, they will explode. In the months after a bad monsoon, for example, there could be a flare-up between neighbouring regions over the use of a shared river; this could lead to strikes and protests that paralyse parts of the country.
Here’s the go-to site on Naxalites, btw.
by Richard Gowan | May 14, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security, Off topic
Chris Blattman, a political scientist who moonlights as a UN consultant and blogger, is worried by the way international officials insist on flying business class:
I seldom fly business myself, even on Bank and UN consultancies, mostly to conserve my project funds for research assistants and survey expenses. My incentives are just right: money I spend on me comes out of money I’d spend making my research projects just a little better. Not so the rest of the agency?
I also hold back from business for another reason: $6000 for a single ticket? When the purpose of your trip is to contribute (however little) to ending poverty, something about that price tag just doesn’t seem right.
In an age of diminishing aid and global belt-tightening, now seems an opportune time to change this little practice. Mr. Zoellick? Mr. Ki-Moon? [That’s Mr. Ban to you.]
If you Bankers and UNers out there disagree, please comment. I could be convinced. But let me make one final argument. Five years ago, deciding not to stay in the Bank’s preferred five-star hotel in Nairobi, I roughed it in a nearby four star guesthouse (principled, I know). If I hadn’t, I never would have met that cute aid worker, dusty from southern Sudan, at the Internet cafe down the street.
Jeannie and I married 18 months ago.
So remember this in your business class comfort: the hot humanitarian workers fly coach.
That last sentence doesn’t follow logically from the evidence. Perhaps the hot humanitarians are in internet cafes trying to get upgrades online. You can’t be sure.
What you can be sure about, however, is that a post like this is bound to draw irate, self-justifying comments from the business class lovers. To select from one of 40-odd comments Blattman received at random, here are some really cutting-edge thoughts:
A better way to save money (and reduce carbon emissions) would be to increase the use of video and teleconferencing for cases where face to face meetings are not essential.
But what about the hot humanitarian aid workers? Nobody’s going to get dusty in a teleconference!
At the UN, policy is that flights are now economy class for travel times of about 7 hours or less, if I recall correctly. The cost differential between business and economy should also factor in the extra night or two of accommodation and DSA that travelers would need to rest and adjust to the time difference.
Hm, do you happen to be a UN spokesperson in disguise?
Better still: airlines should offer a more modestly priced section with seats that allow for a decent night’s sleep without all the other perks of business class. I think many development professionals would be happy with that compromise (or could be guilted into accepting it).
Ooh yes, that’s a good idea. Why not have a specialized “UN Class” on every plane, with only Hotel Rwanda as a video option and free copies of the Human Development Report instead of in-flight magazines? All the seats could be painted white, and have a little “UN” stencil on the side…
by Leo Horn Phathanothai | May 14, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Yesterday, May 13th, was a momentous – if little noticed – milestone in 21 century geopolitics: it marked the UN deadline for countries to submit their claims to seabed up to 350 miles from their coasts, in the last major redrawing of the world map that would fix maritime boundaries.
Unsurprisingly – given its vast mineral riches – the Arctic emerged as a major battleground, with competing claims over its seabed being filed with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The stakes are huge: the rapidly receding sea ice cover – 50% of which had disappeared in the two last summers – and technological advances in deep-sea drilling will open up a whole new frontier in oil and gas exploitation.
Russia was first to file with the UN in 2001, and in 2007 it reinforced its claim on a large swathe of Arctic prime property – a chunk of the Arctic shelf the size of Western Europe – with the theatrical planting of a titanium flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole (an area also claimed by Denmark).
In all, 48 countries submitted full claims and dozens more have made preliminary submissions under the deadline. Russia’s submission was contested by Canada, Denmark, Norway and the US (even though the US has not ratified the UN Law of the Sea Treaty, which governs these agreements).
In this connection it is interesting to note the timing of the release of a Kremlin document on Security Policy on the very same day. This document warns of the likelihood of future military conflicts over resources on Russia’s contested borders (including its maritime borders). The document predicts that the struggle over energy resources will dominate international relations, and clearly signals Russia’s readiness to use force to protect its resource claims, even against ‘allies’:
In a competition for resources, problems that involve the use of military force cannot be excluded that would destroy the balance of forces close to the borders of the Russian Federation and her allies […] the attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources.
This document signals a continuation of Mr. Putin’s energy grand plan: it was produced by a committee headed by Mr. Putin, and was signed of by Mr. Medvedev himself. An earlier Kremlin document sets a vital national objective to develop Arctic energy reserves by 2020, with plans to establish army bases along the Arctic frontier to ‘guarantee military security in different military-political situations’.
by Mark Weston | May 13, 2009 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Global Dashboard
Further to recent Global Dashboard posts on the attempts by rich countries to buy up African agricultural land (here and here for example), an article I wrote for this month’s EMEA Finance magazine explores the subject in more detail.
The main problem with the deals, I argue, is the difficulty of valuing them in a rapidly-changing global food market. For African countries which lack expertise in such matters, there is a huge danger that they will be ripped off. But the risks are also great for investor countries, as the recent collapse of South Korea’s bid to buy up land in Madagascar has shown. For the deals to work, they will need to be radically different to those made so far – more transparent, properly regulated, beneficial to local people and shorter. More important still, however, is for Africa to realise its own potential for food production, which would in the long-term negate the need for these deals.
For the full article, see after the jump.
(more…)
by Jules Evans | May 13, 2009 | Latin America and the Caribbean
Watch this remarkable video from Guatemala, recorded by the lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, in which he accuses president Colom of ordering his murder. He was gunned down in the street on May 10, and the video released to the media.
Rosenberg was investigating the murder of two clients, Khalil Musa and his daughter, and said he had documents proving that the murders were orchestrated by the president and his wife, after Musa refused to launder drug money for the government at state-owned bank Banrural, where he was recently appointed to the board.
The video has provoked a political crisis in Guatemala, with the president calling for an independent inquiry run by the FBI to clear his name.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC_ODpxMA10[/youtube]
