by Richard Gowan | Sep 3, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Off topic
In April 2009, I noted that UN forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo mounted an anti-rebel operation codenamed “Rock of Steel”. This week, after mass rapes near a UN base in the DRC, the UN mounted operation “Shop Window” which is aimed at “reassuring the population and demonstrating its efforts to use all available resources to fulfill its mandate to protect.” As I’ve noted before, the UN presence in the Congo is in a mess, and the shift in codenames may symbolize its loss of confidence.
Watch out for news of “Operation Cuddly Kitten” in the DRC shortly.
by Alex Evans | Sep 3, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The FT’s big front page splash today (“Fears grow over global food supply“) has sent a ripple of interest through the wider media – expect to hear a lot about the issue on the broadcast media over the course of the day. So is this a repeat of 2008? In a word, no – though it could yet become one, and even if it doesn’t, we need to regard this as a wake-up call. Here’s a quick summary.
What’s going on? Wheat prices are soaring. A year ago, a tonne of wheat cost €141; today, it costs €231, and most of the rise has happened over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, meat prices have hit their highest level in 20 years. The overall FAO Food Price Index rose 5% during August, and is back to where it was in late autumn 2007 (when the food price spike was well underway) – though it’s still some way off its peak during summer 2008.
So why are prices rising? For wheat, the main driver has been adverse weather – principally in Russia, but also in parts of the EU, Kazakhstan, Australia and Ukraine. The effect has been compounded by export restrictions, again with Russia (which has banned wheat exports outright) the main driver. On meat, the issue’s more to do with demand (especially in emerging economies, where people are increasingly shifting to meat-rich ‘western diets’) – though the supply side has also lagged.
But why the sudden spike in media coverage? Media interest has stepped up over the last 24 hours because of two things that just happened: a food price riot in Mozambique that left 7 dead, and Russia’s announcement that it will extend its export ban on wheat for 12 months.
Is this 2008 all over again? No. Despite the adverse weather in Russia and other countries, the world as a whole is on course for a bumper crop this year – the third highest on record, according to the International Grains Council. Stock levels are also much more comfortable than they were in 2008, providing more of a buffer. And the 2008 food spike was greatly amplified by a concurrent oil price spike (reaching $147 at the top), which made food more expensive by upping fertiliser, energy and transport costs, as well as making it more attractive to put crops into biofuels. Today, by contrast, oil is at $76 – still high, by historical standards, but a long way off 2008 levels.
So there’s nothing to worry about? No, that’s not the case either. The situation could still get a lot more serious – if more harvests get damaged by extreme weather, if price bubbles develop through investors going long on futures markets, if the oil price starts rising, or if more countries start implementing export bans or restrictions.
Looking to the longer term – with food demand forecast to rise 50% by 2030, even as trends like water scarcity, climate change, intensifying energy security risks and competition for land constrain supply growth – there are strong reasons to think that 2008 wasn’t “just a blip”.
Most of all, remember that for many poor people, the food price spike didn’t end in 2008. The number of undernourished people in the world was 850m before the food spike; today, it’s over a billion – not surprising, when you reflect how high food prices have been since then by historical standards (again, see the FAO Food Price Index), or on the fact that poor people typically spend 50-80% of their household income on food.
So what do we need to do? See The Feeding of the Nine Billion for a full answer to this – but the short answer is, a) invest in a 21st Century Green Revolution that produces more food, more sustainably, more resiliently, and in a way that works for small farmers; b) scale up targeted social protection systems to protect people like the ones rioting in Maputo (and which make a lot more sense than price controls or economy-wide subsidies); c) start getting serious about making international agricultural trade more resilient, especially through better crisis management mechanisms and probably including new rules against sudden export restrictions; and d) do a serious global deal on climate change. And get a move on. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Sep 3, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
That’s the rather arresting finding of new research from the University of Texas, published in the journal Energy (which should be behind a paywall, but someone’s helpfully posted it here). The key message in the paper is this:
The global peak of coal production from existing coalfields is predicted to occur close to the year 2011 … It is unlikely that future mines will reverse the trend predicted in this BAU [Business As Usual] scenario.
Now if true, that obviously has rather far-reaching consequences for climate policy – and, indeed, for the most basic assumptions used by the IPCC, as the authors explain:
Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the IPCC generated forty carbon production and emission scenarios. [Our research] provides a reality check on the magnitude of carbon emissions in a BAU scenario. The resulting base case is significantly below 36 of the 40 carbon emission scenarios from the IPCC … After 2011, the production rates of coal and CO2 decline, reaching 1990 levels by the year 2037, and reaching 50% of the peak value in the year 2047.
Grist magazine’s David Roberts summarises the two key implications of this:
1. If coal is soon going to get harder to reach and more expensive, an enormous investment in carbon capture and storage may not make sense. Remember, building the infrastructure necessary to run our economy on renewables and efficiency will itself be an expensive, energy-intensive undertaking. If our fossil-fuel savings are running low, we urgently need to spend every penny of that energy wisely. If we waste a huge chunk of it on CCS only to find coal drying up, we’ll have that much less to put toward building post-fossil infrastructure.
2. If there’s much less coal than widely assumed, climate change may not be humanity’s biggest problem. Most of the more dire IPCC climate change scenarios assume endlessly rising energy demand and use, and thus endlessly rising CO2 emissions. But those models tend not to pay heed to the physical world. If some of the new research on coal reserves is accurate, it is mathematically impossible to emit as much as the high-end IPCC scenarios. There just won’t be enough fossil fuels.
I’m a bit suspicious of the methodology the researchers used to yield the 2011 peak date, and want to see some peer reviews of it by people who know more about solid fuels than me. But it’s interesting to see peak oil analysts broadening their argument to encompass power generation as well as liquid fuels for transport – an argument they’re applying to uranium for civil nuclear power as well as to coal, as for instance in this quote from an energy analyst in a recent edition of Energy Bulletin:
I feel the uranium market right now could be the world’s most unbalanced commodity market. . . . the planet, by means of the nuclear power industry, consumes approximately 172 million pounds of uranium per year, as well as the planet only produces about 92 million pounds of uranium per year. The supply deficit is produced up through above-ground inventories, which are becoming worked down pretty quickly…
Again, can’t vouch for the data sources. But interesting, and worth hunting around to see what other evidence is (or isn’t) out there.
by Alex Evans | Sep 1, 2010 | Influence and networks
Tyler Cowen sets it all out:
I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession. A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much. And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline? Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad. The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end? So someone else can take his place? And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?
Diplomats are in some ways like university presidents: little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events. Plus they are underpaid relative to human capital. They must speak carefully. They must learn how to wield power in the subtlest ways possible. Who was it that said?: ” Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggie” until you can find a stick”.
Colum Lynch, meanwhile, is chewing on the hypothesis that if being a diplomat sucks, being one at the UN really sucks:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1965 until 1968, approached his job with trepidation, recalling that a generation of top American officials had been sent to New York to see their careers run aground. “I had seen Stevenson humiliated. Goldberg betrayed. Ball diminished. Wiggins patronized. Yost ignored. Bush traduced. Scali savaged,” Moynihan recalled in his memoirs on his U.N. days, Dangerous Place. “I had twice said no to the post I was now to assume.”
Dean Acheson, an affirmed believer in multilateral diplomacy, ran into Moynihan at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan to convey his contempt for the top American job at the U.N. “Moynihan,” Acheson said. “My respect for you took a precipitous decline when I learned you even considered that ridiculous job.”
by Alex Evans | Sep 1, 2010 | Economics and development, Global system
On the fight brewing between the US and Europe over IMF board seats that I wrote about last week, David Bosco at Foreign Policy has been talking to Ted Truman, a former US Treasury official now at the Institute for International Economics. Truman’s take:
First, he argues that the American gambit was not sudden but is a response to what he characterizes as longstanding European intransigence. He believes that Europe has failed repeatedly to respond to American signals of discontent over the past five years. “In 2008 and 2009, they basically said that this issue was not on the table,” he recalls. In that context, the new U.S. position is “an aggressive move in the context of a pretty aggressive defense.”
He also emphasizes the oddity of current European policymaking in a body like the IMF. It’s not as if each of the European seats offers a unique policy perspective. Through the EU, individual member states coordinate their positions in advance. “They just get eight to ten voices every time an issue comes up,” he says. Truman contends that it might actually be better to revert to a smaller board, not least for reasons of cost. IMF executive directors and their staffs are relatively expensive, and in today’s environment of budget-slimming there could be some non-trivial savings for the Fund in a pared-down board.
On this issue, Washington is aligned with India, China and Brazil in an effort to tame traditional European prerogatives. If that trend continues, it could spell trouble for Europe in the world of multilateral institutions.
