Why the EU is like Danny Glover

by | Jun 10, 2010 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America, Off topic, UK

What am I talking about here?

You’ve seen this story in a thousand cop shows. The aged policeman, a week from retirement, takes one last case with an ambitious young partner. They bicker. They learn to work together. They face down a bad guy at dawn. The old guy gets to go home…

Ah-ha, the reader will think, this will segue into an analysis of the Lethal Weapon movies, in which Danny Glover famously played a cop worried about getting old…

Not so. I am, in fact, trying to capture the EU’s dilemma over diplomacy with Iran. Yesterday, the Security Council approved new sanctions on Tehran. The EU supports these, and will add to them. But, whereas the “E3” (Britain, France and Germany) used to lead efforts to constrain Iran at the UN, there are new officers on the beat:

In the short-term, this is primarily a U.S. success. Washington has largely replaced the EU in diplomacy around Iran – a switch made clear when President Obama announced new intelligence on Iranian activities at September’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Other players have been involved too. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have been sending clear signals to Beijing that it should get tough with Iran or risk damaging their bilateral relations – a powerful warning, given China’s reliance on Gulf energy supplies.

Russia, the inveterate rogue cop in this story (the type normally played by Harvey Keitel) has also come good, at least for now. Whether thanks to U.S. engagement or because of concerns over its economy, Moscow has turned against Iran, tipping the scales at the UN.

At times, European leaders have been irritated by their reduced profile on the issue. Last month, The Economist reported that President Sarkozy hopes to use France’s presidency of the G20 in 2011 to reassert a leadership role on Iran – among a small host of priorities.

In reality, the Europeans are now consigned to the Danny Glover role on Iran: backing up the U.S. in diplomacy at the UN rather than playing the starring role. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The E3 should be satisfied that the U.S. has now adopted their strategy, even if matters could turn nasty at short notice. And like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, Washington will need back-up when things do bad…

The UN’s Saigon moment – with added apes!

by | Jun 7, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security

This is how some international interventions end:

What if you add in a gorilla?  The beleaguered UN mission in the Congo – which David Axe and I have been blogging to and fro about of late – has a wild airlift option:

In continuing efforts to preserve gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered species, the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), will next month carry out a second airlift of six baby gorillas to a sanctuary where they will be cared for before they released into the wild. “Together, the orphaned gorillas are hoped to form a new “family” of 10,” the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which recommended the airlift along with INTERPOL, said in a press release yesterday.

The operation, planned for mid July, is the second to be conducted by the UN peacekeeping force in DRC as part of a wider effort to combat the illegal cross-border trade in baby gorillas, which has intensified in recent years with the proliferation of armed groups in the region. The first rescue was conducted by the peacekeeping mission on 27 May, when four eastern lowland baby gorillas, seized from poachers, were flown to safety by UN helicopters to a sanctuary in Kasughu in North Kivu province. The ultimate objective is to rehabilitate the gorillas and to reintroduce them back in their natural environment.

According to a report by UNEP entitled “The Last Stand for the Gorilla”, unless urgent action is taken to strengthen the enforcement of environmental law and counter poaching, endangered gorillas may largely disappear from the Greater Congo Basin, in the next 15 years.

Previous projections by the agency in 2002 suggested that only 10 per cent of the original ranges would remain by 2030. Those estimates now appear too optimistic, given the intensification of pressures including illegal logging, mining, charcoal production and increased demand for bushmeat, of which an increasing proportion is ape meat.

This is a pretty depressing statement about the state of the Congo. I’m glad we’re saving the gorillas. But what about the people the UN will ultimately leave behind?

Land grabs meet climate policy

by | Jun 4, 2010 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development

Very interested to see the news today that City of London police have “arrested the director of a Merseyside-based business in connection with an alleged plan to pay Liberian officials $2.5m (£1.7m) in connection with land concessions the company hoped would earn it more than $2bn”.

The thousand-fold disparity between what the British company was planning to pay and what it hoped to earn is obviously astonishing (and that’s before we take into account allegations that the Liberian government would apparently have been liable for making up any shortfall against the project’s anticipated earnings). It all brings back to mind the case of Daewoo’s disastrous attempt to lease one half of Madagascar’s arable land back in March last year – Global Dashboard coverage of that here.

This would appear to be landgrabbing at its worst: the host country gets screwed on the terms of the deal thanks to weak negotiation capacity and/or naked corruption, and poor people get few if any benefits (as well as the risk of getting turfed off community land that they may have had access to for years, but without having the formal ownership rights).

But two things are new and interesting this time round. First, the fact that this land grab is not about staple crops, nor about biofuels, but about carbon credits – specifically, forest credits for avoided deforestation, that can then be used by EU states or other Kyoto signatories to meet their emission targets.

As the FT observes this morning, the global carbon market is now worth $144 billion annually. That’s $20 billion more than total global aid flows. As the carbon market grows, we’ll see more and more problem cases like this – as David and I predicted in our scenarios (pdf) for future climate policy last year. The fact that land grabs are now taking place for carbon sequestration as well as crops and biofuels also underlines just how many different land uses are now competing for the world’s soil – expect this one to run and run.

The other novelty here is the fact that the deal led to an arrest on bribery charges. Land access deals tend to be opaque at the best of times – I’ve been looking at them as part of work I’ve been doing on resource scarcity with the World Bank, and evaluating their implications for governance, conflict risk and poverty reduction is far from easy. It’s often suspected that bribery of host country elites is part of the picture, but extremely hard to prove – and in any case, many investor countries will turn a blind eye, given their strategic interest in improving security of supply on key commodities. So more power to the City of London police’s elbow for sending a signal on this one – it’ll be interesting to see more details of the case as they emerge.

Above all, massive credit to Global Witness, long one of the most impressive NGOs on resource security issues. They’ve been saying for a very long time that the emerging global climate regime on reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) needs to take far more account of governance and conflict risk issues (see their new report on this, out yesterday). That point has just been vindicated in spades. And on top of that, it was their information that led to yesterday’s arrest. Bravo.