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.

Organizing for Influence: our new Chatham House report

by | Jun 2, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Global Dashboard, UK

Today sees the publication of Organizing for Influence: UK Foreign Policy in An Age of Uncertainty (pdf), a new report authored by David and me, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is one of the first two publications from Chatham House’s project on rethinking Britain’s overall foreign policy role; the other, also out today, is a scene-setter by Chatham House’s director Robin Niblett. (Still to come are in-depth papers on Britain and… the global economy; the US and Europe; the rising powers; energy and climate; the developing world; and security and defence.)

In our report, we observe that while foreign policy and global issues barely got a mention during the general election campaign, it’s a racing certainty that the new coalition won’t have the luxury of ignoring them in government. As we’ve argued before, globalization is in the midst of what we term a ‘long crisis’. As an open economy and society, Britain is especially exposed. The government’s international workload is about to increase, perhaps dramatically. And given the need to reduce the deficit, it’s going to find itself stretched to the limit.

All this means, we think, that the government needs to work to upgrade and reform all aspects of its international programme. For one thing, that means making clear strategic choices – specifically, we think, seeing Britain’s international agenda through three overlapping lenses:

– First, national security. For us, this is about the direct threats to Britain, within a relatively short timescale – 5-10 years or so. It should not be about the longer-term or non-security risks like climate, scarcity or global economic risks. While we very much welcome the coalition’s creation of a National Security Council and appointment of the UK’s first National Security Adviser, we argue that if it tries to cover the whole of foreign policy, then we’ll be back to a storyline we know all too well: the urgent crowds out the essential, and preventive action gives way to fire-fighting.

– Second, global risks and the global system. We have to look at these issues separately from national security, we argue. For one thing, the amount of risk that’s tolerable in each is totally different. Any failure on the national security front can be disastrous. On global system issues, on the other hand, you have to take risks if you want to get anywhere – to be a venture capitalist, not a bank manager.

– Finally, fragile states. National security is fine as a lens when you’re looking at countries where the UK actually has troops deployed, like Afghanistan. But it’s the wrong lens for looking at places like Nigeria – where the challenge has much more to do with taking a long-term, political economy based approach to questions of governance, resilience and ‘development diplomacy’.

What does all this mean in practice?

A dramatic overhaul of the Foreign Office’s London HQ, for one thing – turning it into something that looks a lot more like the Cabinet Office (with at least half of senior policy posts filled from other government departments, and a lot more recruitment from outside government too), so that it can finally be the department for global issues that it should have become years ago.

A much tighter focus on fragile states at DFID, too – which we argue should close down its offices in ‘good-performing’ countries like Tanzania in favour of putting its aid through partnerships with other donors, or the multilateral system, and focusing its staff much more heavily on the really difficult cases. It’s staff, not cash, that’s DFID’s scarcest resource, so that’s what it needs to prioritise. (Did you know that DFID has only 2,586 people – to the Foreign Office’s 14,549?)

Plus a bunch more recommendations besides – including more ambassadors for issues (like we already have on climate and arms control), a tighter focus on the alliances and networks that could really magnify UK influence (especially the EU, G20 and NATO), a much bigger role for Parliament in foreign policy, and – perhaps the farthest reaching change of all – allocating budgets to strategies rather than departments, on the basis of first-principles reviews of UK objectives, capabilities and performance on the 3 areas of national security, global systems and fragile states.

Read the whole thing – all comments, as ever, very welcome. We’re also doing an event on the report at Chatham House on 9 June, and will be running the concluding session of the Institute’s two day conference on Britain’s future foreign policy role on 13 and 14 July.

Israel and Turkey – time for cool heads

by | May 31, 2010 | Conflict and security

Waking up to the catastrophic news of Israel’s attack on the flotilla that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza, my snap reaction was that this event had the potential to trigger a chain of uncontrollable consequences. Nothing has since happened to reassure me that this was an early-morning overreaction.

Perhaps most worrying is the potential for friction between Israel and Turkey, countries that once enjoyed an unexpectedly good relationship (£2.5bn in bilateral trade in 2009). Turkey was the aid convoy’s main national sponsor, leading Israel’s unions to retaliate with a boycott of the country.

According to one Israeli union leader:

Turkey had been wiped off the workers unions’ travel maps. In a survey we conducted among the participants in the semi-annual union heads forum, we found that Israel’s workers’ unions have had enough of Turkey’s hostility toward Israel, which in the past had been characterized by verbal attacks by the country’s prime minister, but had now shifted to active attempts to harm Israel’s sovereignty. The tourism boycott is a weapon that will send a message to Ankara that words and deeds have consequences.

But Tel Aviv may now be the capital to discover that deeds have consequences that can go well beyond a boycott. The Turkish government is reported to be threatening to send more boats sailing towards Israel’s coast, but this time to give them a naval escort. That would put the two countries on track towards a very dangerous confrontation.

Bradley Burston, writing in Haaretz, is also worried:

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

“This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel’s ties with the Muslim world.

Let’s hope the Turkish government continues to pursue its grievances with Israel through the international system, rather than putting the two countries’ navies on a collision course. Otherwise this grim year could get soon get much worse – yet again.

Update: Channel 4’s Faisal Islam points to NATO’s charter, presumably with Turkey in mind.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence…

An armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack… on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

Update II: NATO will meet on Tuesday at Turkey’s request. According to an unnamed diplomat:

NATO does not really have instruments with which to deal with the follow-up from this type of affair. Turkey has not invoked article five which envisages all allies coming to the aid of a member country that is the victim of an attack.

But, given that numerous Turkish citizens appear to figure among the casualties, it is understandable that (Ankara) triggers political dialogue with its partners.

Update III: One to watch is the Irish boat – MV Rachel Corrie (yes, that Rachel Corrie) which is yet to reach Israel:

Five are onboard the Irish-owned vessel, MV Rachel Corrie, and all are safe. The ship was one day behind the main flotilla and is still on its way to Gaza.

Among the passengers on the Rachel Corrie are Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday.

Does it sail on towards a second confrontation? And if so, how will the Israelis react?