by Alex Evans | May 7, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
More evidence of increasing awareness of scarcity issues (and the consequent need for integrated policy approaches to managing them) over in the US: this presentation on ‘environmental challenges and global security’ from a colonel on the joint chiefs’ staff, given at a Department of Agriculture meeting on the food crisis held last week.
Intriguingly, it includes a recommendation for a new National Security Council inter-agency policy committee on environmental security – which would develop a strategy to “utilize all elements of national power (diplomatic, information, military and economic)” so as to prevent conflict and promote regional stability.
The Department of Defense isn’t the only part of the US government where there’s innovative thinking happening on this area. As I noted here last November, the National Intelligence Council’s report on global trends to 2025 placed a good deal of emphasis on scarcity issues,which was thanks to NIC’s Director of Analysis Mat Burrows.
Another key player in all of this is Carol Dumaine – like Mat, a career CIA analyst (where the Washington Post called her one of “the CIA’s dissidents”) – who’s now over at the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence as their Deputy Director for Energy and Environmental Security. Carol describes herself as an “intelligence ecologist” and argues that current global challenges require “generalists who are specialists of the whole” – see this excellent presentation that she gave at an Institute for Environmental Security conference in DC in March.
The signs are also positive that National Security Adviser James Jones recognises the importance of scarcity issues and the need for changes to machinery of government in pursuit of more effective approaches to them. As a Washington Post profile of Jones published this morning observes,
Although the administration is barely more than 100 days old, Jones has launched an ambitious restructuring of the White House national security apparatus so it can focus on modern issues such as energy and climate change.
by Mark Weston | May 7, 2009 | Influence and networks
A worrying factoid from CNN (courtesy of Chris Blattman):
In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 and in the catastrophic flu outbreak of 1918, which sickened an estimated third of the world’s population and killed, conservatively, 50 million people.
As the small print in stockbrokers and pension funds’ ads always tells us (if only we’d listened), the past is not always a guide to the future, but if the swine flu scare wanes over the summer, it would be dangerous to get complacent.
by Mark Weston | May 7, 2009 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Two major cruise lines – Fred Olsen and MSC Cruises – have announced that they are dropping their Indian Ocean routes to avoid Somali pirates. From now on, their ships will go round the Horn of Africa and up the west coast, instead of crossing the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal. This will hurt the economies of stopping points like Dubai, Oman, Jeddah and Egypt, as they lose out on docking fees and cruise ship passengers are forced to divert their spending to West African ports (or, more likely given the absence of gleaming shopping malls on that coast, bypass the entire shore). It could be the cue for a more concerted response to piracy by Middle Eastern governments, which haven’t yet done much to tackle the piracy epidemic.
For the cruise liners, West Africa might appear a safer bet, but as I mentioned here a few months ago, going the other way round the continent is far from risk free. It may be that West African criminal networks, which are notorious for their protean nature, expand into piracy (piracy in the region has so far mostly been limited to attacks on oil tankers off Nigeria).
Antonio Mazzitelli of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime told me recently that West African criminal networks switch easily from one activity to another: “Networks are built purely for carrying out a specific business,” he said. “Someone might do one job and then move to a completely different job.” Law enforcement authorities, including those in the West, are not well adapted to such fluidity – “they are crime-specialised,” said Mazzitelli, “those who look at drugs don’t look at internet fraud, and the latter don’t look at stolen vehicles, for example.” The US navy has recently begun training Nigeria’s navy to fight off pirate attacks on oil tankers, but they may have to broaden their scope if West African criminals take a leaf out of their Somali brothers’ books and target cruise liners as well.
by Alex Evans | May 6, 2009 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka_KfSPkrw4[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | May 6, 2009 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
Something I didn’t know: Portugal has way more liberal drug laws than the Netherlands. In fact, it’s the first European country to have abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of all drugs: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, the lot. That was over five years ago. Now, there’s been a major study of what happened. Guess what?
…in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
All of which makes you wonder: given that Mexico’s drug war – which is responsible for many, many, many more deaths than swine flu – stems largely from the Prohibition policies in the US, what’s the US waiting for?
