by Alex Evans | Sep 10, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
So the World Bank has finally published its big report on landgrabs (this after an earlier version of it was leaked at the end of July, as I noted at the time): here’s the news release, a 4 page issues note and a pdf of the report itself.
The report is upfront about the fact that many recent land access deals have been bad news for poor people – the result, it says, of factors like weak land governance and a failure to protect local communities’ land rights, lack of country capacity, unclear investor strategies, or lack of overall national development strategies that can help to identify where investments can be helpful. World Bank MD Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala puts it like this in the press release:
These large land acquisitions can come at a high cost. The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these land deals must be lifted so poor people don’t ultimately pay the heavy price of losing their land.
The report divides countries up into four categories, on the basis of two main variables: whether or not they have lots of surplus land, and whether or not they have a big ‘yield gap’ (i.e. between actual and potential agricultural productivity). Depending on which quadrant countries fall into, different considerations for governments and investors alike become apparent.
Arguably the key task for governments identified in the report is the deceptively simple prescription to “improve land governance to ensure that the pressures from higher land values do not lead to dispossession of existing rights”.
This means, according to the Bank, ensuring that existing rights are sufficiently protected to create the basis for voluntary transfers, having state land identified geographically and ensuring transparent mechanisms for its “management, acquisition, divestiture and imposition of land restrictions”, making complete and current information on land rights available to all, and ensuring accessible mechanisms for dispute resolution.
All fine in principle, though in practice about as politically charged as it gets. The Wilson Center’s Michael Kugelman, who edited an excellent publication on land grabs last year, is unimpressed, arguing that “the World Bank’s talk about codes of conduct and other normative modes of fostering good investor behavior is well-intentioned, but ultimately naïve”. That may well be true – although it’s not wholly clear to me whether the World Bank can really do that much to twist governments’ arms into playing nice on the issue.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 9, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for UN peacekeeping, with (i) the fall-out of the DRC mass rape story; (ii) Rwanda’s threat to pull troops out of Darfur in response to the UN report on its role in the Congo; (iii) a less well-publicized but worrying Indian proposal to stop deploying helicopters in DRC and Sudan. This last development could signal a broader Indian disengagement from UN ops, with serious consequences for the organization’s overall operational abilities (something I’ve warned about before).
Two weeks ago, I wrote a brief post about the need to rethink the fundamentals of peacekeeping. I promised to offer a few ideas about this on the blog – and I still will – but for now these urgent developments are crowding out longer-term strategic issues.
I’d worry less about individual set-backs and withdrawals if they weren’t taking place in the context of worrisome debates about how much UN operations cost ($7-$8 billion a year) and if this can be sustained. The French ambassador to the UN recently told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping [is] increasingly difficult to manage.” Private chats around and about NYC indicate that the French aren’t alone in this view. I’ve just written a briefing for ZIF, the German think-tank, on peacekeeping in the age of austerity. Here’s the opening summary:
UN peacekeeping has not faced drastic budget cuts during the financial crisis. But the UN is not immune to economic stresses: major donors, including members of the EU, are looking to keep costs down. These constraints could harm the UN as it prepares for possible crises in Sudan and the Middle East. Budgetary disputes could also damage relations with big troop contributors to the UN like Brazil and India. To avoid this, EU governments should make counter-cyclical strategic investments in UN peacekeeping to (i) sustain confidence in big UN military operations in Africa; and (ii) increase support to its light-weight political missions, including those in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
I’m not suggesting that we’ll see a collapse in funding for peacekeeping. But it’s easy to see how budgetary worries can distort strategic debates about what the UN can do:
France wants costly missions downsized but opposes shrinking UN forces in former colonies like Côte d’Ivoire and Lebanon. The U.S.defends the mission in Liberia. If the U.S. queries the cost of a mission France likes, the French duly question the number of peacekeepers in Liberia.
There are deeper tensions between the main financial supporters of UN missions and big troop contributors like India (which provides crucial assets to UN missions in Africa) and Brazil (which is essential to the mission in Haiti). The latter argue that their decision to put soldiers in harm’s way means they should have more say in peacekeeping decisions.
Major financial contributors like Germany and Japan respond by arguing that they should also be given more opportunities to shape the future of the missions they pay for. They complain that the rising Asian economies pay a tiny part of the peacekeeping budget. While Germany still pays 8% of the costs (a slight reduction on previous years), China pays 4% and India less than 2%.
There are always tensions between “those who pay” and “those who play” in UN ops, but I can imagine a perfect storm emerging as (i) budgetary pressures push the payers to be ever tougher on costs, and (ii) exogenous strategic concerns and bad PR drives players like India and Rwanda to take their forces away from the UN. To counter these converging trends, we need stronger strategic arguments for UN ops. I raise some in the ZIF paper, and will return to the topic here soon, as promised.
by Alex Evans | Sep 9, 2010 | Global system
News just in from Colum Lynch at FP’s Turtle Bay blog:
Sha Zukang, the U.N. undersecretary general for Economic and Social Affairs and the organization’s most senior Chinese official, offered U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a toast last week at a retreat in the Alpine resort town Alpbach that degenerated into an intoxicated rant against the United Nations, the United States, and his boss, Turtle Bay has learned.
“I know you never liked me Mr. Secretary-General — well, I never liked you, either,” Sha told Ban at a dinner attended by the U.N.’s top brass, according to a senior U.N. official who attended the event. “I didn’t want to come to New York. It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I’ve come to love the U.N. and I’m coming to admire some things about you.”
The blunt dinner remarks — which came after Sha had a few drinks — prompted U.N. officials to approach Sha and try to coax him into putting down the microphone, according to a U.N. spokesman and several U.N. sources who were there. It didn’t work. Sha continued a lengthy speech, in which he also expressed his antipathy toward the United States. “It was a tribute gone awry,” said a second senior U.N. official who was at the dinner. “It went on for about ten or fifteen minutes but it felt like an hour.” Ban was described as having smiled and nodded awkwardly during the Sha rant, but he allowed the dinner to continue.
U.N. officials said that Sha realized that he had gone too far, and that he spent much of the following day out of sight. “Sha Zukang was deeply apologetic when he met the Secretary General in person early the following morning at his own request,” said Farhan Haq, the acting deputy U.N. spokesman, in a statement to Turtle Bay. “He said that he had risen to speak the previous evening because he felt that recent criticisms of the Secretary General had been unfair and that he wanted to set the record straight. However, Sha told the Secretary General that he realized that the way that he spoke, coming as it did after he had had a few drinks, was inappropriate, as it went too far. He was also aware that his statements had embarrassed and irritated other senior advisors.”
[snip]
Sha’s colleagues, including Catherine Bragg, a humanitarian relief official, tried to approach Sha to persuade him to calm down. But Shaw continued. At one stage, Sha singled out a senior U.N. official, Bob Orr of the United States, and said “I really don’t like him: he’s an American and I really don’t like Americans,” according to the senior official. But he then went on to credit Orr for delivering a commendable speech at the U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen, in which Orr praised Ban for taking a courageous stand and laying the groundwork for progress on global warming. “He was right,” Sha said, according to the official.
See also.
by Alex Evans | Sep 8, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
Following up on my post last week about the spike in wheat prices and the rioting in Mozambique that killed (at last count) 10 people, it emerges this morning that the government of Mozambique has backed down and won’t after all try to cancel the 30% subsidy it currently applies to wheat.
That’s going to be pretty horrendous for Mozambique’s Treasury, as Reuters note:
The government will introduce austerity measures to help fund the subsidies by freezing salary and allowance increases for senior government officials and curbing foreign travel.
Analysts said the bread price about-turn would put pressure on an expansionary budget designed to tackle Mozambique’s lack of roads and electricity, a legacy of years of civil war. Consequently, the government would have to rely more on foreign direct investment and external aid flows, both of which could fall victim to another global economic slowdown, said analyst Celeste Fauconnier of FirstRand in Johannesburg. “It will definitely put further strain on the budget,” she said.
A classic case in point, then, as to why targeted social protection measures are a way better option for developing countries coping with unrest over food prices, than economy-wide subsidies, price controls or export restrictions.
Unfortunately, though, there’s often political opposition to social protection: Treasuries worry about the long term fiscal commitment, while middle classes fret that it’ll encourage welfare dependency, a concern not supported by evidence from development research. (For more on social protection and how it relates to hunger, see this WFP report (pdf) from last year, which I co-authored.)
One other interesting angle in all this is the fact that Mozambique’s former PM, Luisa Diogo (profile), is to be a member of the new UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, which meets for the first time on 19 September. The Panel, which has a pretty impressive line-up of members, will be an excellent chance to look in the round at improved global management of scarcity issues – and having Diogo on board is definitely a plus for the Panel’s coverage of food security issues.
by Richard Gowan | Sep 3, 2010 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, UK
Earlier this week, Alex linked to a blog-post by Tyler Cowen on why diplomacy is a “a stressful and unrewarding profession.” I’m afraid I found much of the post a bit silly.
Diplomats, we learn, work with “little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events.” The same is presumably true of a lot of plumbers, dog-walkers and Anglican bishops. Tyler observes that diplomats suffer from a “false feeling of power” because their authority is “borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements.” Well, yes, welcome to the nature of existence in modern bureaucratic society. A car salesman would be lost without car-makers. A best-selling author requires the framework of editors, PR folk and Amazon to advance their personal achievements.
But Tyler does capture a real complaint about the life of the modern diplomat. Whereas ambassadors of yesteryear enjoyed a lot of autonomy, the current generation are dependent on their capitals and struggle to influence decisions at home. Our Person in X is at the mercy of turf wars back home between junior officials. Now, individual ambassadors can hardly make up their own policies on climate change. But there are still times and places where old-fashioned diplomacy is required.
I’m thinking, as I often do, of the nastier backwaters of the globe – places where old-fashioned conflicts bubble away, and you need personal political contacts if you want to affect the bubbling. In a paper published in July, Bruce Jones and I argued that the UN and other international organizations have lost sight of the political dimensions of conflict, relying instead on the placebos (or pabulum) of semi-scientific conflict indicators. The same is sadly true of a lot of diplomatic services today.
In a significant new report for RUSI Richard Teuten and GD alumnus Daniel Korski argue that its time to tilt the balance of British diplomacy back towards the guys on the ground, at least in conflict zones:
The report suggests developing the function of the National Security Council (NSC) to take on a stronger coordinating role, with British ambassadors taking the responsibility as the ‘whole-of-government’ representative in-country. They propose the systematic development of a more robust supply of civilians and military officers ready to work together in hostile environments, including closer integration of civilian-military personnel and assets, with structured career incentives to encourage collaborative, cross departmental work.
Amen to that! I have questions: in a lot of cases, the real challenge is not just joining up UK initiatives towards a country at risk, but combining everything on offer from the EU, UN, World Bank, etc. Daniel and I have previously argued in favor of shifting greater responsibility to the EU’s people in the field to do just that. But aren’t we swimming against the tide of history? Diplomatic services, not least the UK’s, are going to keep on getting cut left, right and center in the name of austerity in the next few years. Next time we have to deploy a bunch of over-educated but ill-prepared interns to some failed state that we’ve ignored for years, don’t blame Korski or Gowan.
NB: you can see Teuten and Korski live at RUSI in London on 24 September. Register here!
