Is the G8 about to get blown away?

by | Jun 17, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, North America

The G8 is, analysts concur, in trouble.  Since the G20 shot to prominence during the financial crisis, the 8 have always looked, er, 12 members short of full credibility.

Next week, Canada hosts the G8 in Muskoka before the G20 meets in Toronto.   I’m struck by the logo for the Muskoka meeting, which seems to depict a tree being blown about in a storm and losing leaves.  This is doubtless meant to represent the fact that rural Muskoka is a dendrologist’s paradise.  But what an apt image for the G8!

UPDATE: I note that one Muskokan (?) blogger came up with this alternative image for the conference, featuring Barack, Hillary and… a symbol of Canadian power!

OECD / FAO food outlook – a lot worse than this time last year

by | Jun 17, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development

This year’s OECD / FAO agricutural outlook, which looks ahead over the period from 2010 to 2019 (news release; summary), didn’t get terribly extensive coverage in the media – unsurprisingly, given that its key message (“real commodity prices to remain below recent peaks but well above recent decades”) is exactly the same as it was in last year’s report. 

But as soon as you start to delve into the quant projections, you see that there’s actually a big difference between this year’s and last year’s report – and not an encouraging one.

Last year, the 2009 to 2018 outlook (summary) projected that over the decade ahead, “average crop prices are projected to be 10-20% higher in real terms relative to 1997-2006, while for vegetable oils real prices are expected to be more than 30% higher”.

This year?  “Average wheat and coarse grain prices are projecte to be nearly 15-40% higher, while for vegetable oils real prices are expected to be more than 40% higher”. Most media coverage didn’t pick up on this (though the FT, as usual, did).

That’s a big deterioration of the outlook in just twelve months. So what explains it? I can’t immediatelymake out the reason, so I’ve emailed FAO’s press office to see if we can get some more detail for them. But as I noted in The Feeding of the Nine Billion (pdf), the OECD / FAO outlook is in some ways unduly optimistic – as in the past it has “largely overlooked the potential impact of long-term resource scarcity trends, notably climate change, energy security and falling water availability”.

Poland to Europe: beat the retreat!

by | Jun 15, 2010 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, South Asia

In February 2009, I wrote an op-ed for the European Voice about Poland’s decision to pull some of its troops out of UN missions in the Middle East:

Whenever European governments need extra troops for Africa or Afghanistan, it’s rarely long before they’re on the phone to Warsaw. Poland may not match the deployment levels of the UK, France, Spain and Italy – but it has a reputation for sending soldiers pretty much anywhere, and with fewer quibbles than many of its more cautious NATO allies.

But the commitments stack up: 1,130 personnel in Afghanistan, 400 more in Chad, 200 in Bosnia… At some point something was going to have to give. Last week it did. Poland declared that it would pull 800 troops out of UN missions in Lebanon and the Golan Heights, and not participate in a planned UN follow-on mission to the EU force in Chad. [RG notes: in the end, the Poles did stay on in Chad.]

This was down to money and politics. The defence minister admitted the prime cause was budget cuts – and with hard choices looming, “NATO and EU missions are Poland’s priority”. This was bad news for UN officials, short on high-quality forces and concerned that the financial crisis will drive other governments to follow the Polish lead.

Now, as Simon Tisdall points out today, the Poles are going wobbly on NATO too:

Nato’s Lisbon summit in November will hear a call from Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, for “a relatively quick and precise plan for ending this intervention” – an idea with growing appeal for other allies. The Dutch and Canadians have already decided to leave. Now David Cameron and defence secretary Liam Fox are hinting that Britain, too, will seek to draw down its troop presence next year.

I’m not blaming the Poles for their decision – they are still some of the hardiest of the Europeans. So if Warsaw wants out of Afghanistan, I doubt other Europeans are going to hang around. Beat the retreat!