by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by Jules Evans | May 1, 2008 | Influence and networks, Off topic
One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join them.
We’re seeing a similar process slowly occurring in the media. Western media are in financial trouble. Sales at every American national newspaper except the Wall Street Journal and USA Today are on a long-term downwards trajectory. The same is true in the UK, with the exception of The Sun and The Observer, whose circulations are slightly rising.
Papers are being undercut by sites like Google News and Yahoo News, and by free rags like Metro and London Lite, which have skeleton editorial staffs and rely on recycling press releases and paparazzi photos.
However, in the emerging markets, the story is much rosier. The World Association of Newspapers says that in India, daily newspaper sales rose by 33% between 2001 and 2005, while in China, circulation rose by 28% between 2000 and 2004.
As the Guardian’s media section noted last year:
The seemingly inexorable decline of the newspaper in Europe and, more dramatically, in North America sometimes makes the industry sound doomed, regardless of its heavy online presence.
Overall, however, global newspaper sales are on the increase, a fact which is all too often ignored by gloomy commentators in the West, who need only look eastwards when optimism is in short supply at home.
That means western media firms are now targeting markets like India and China. Journalists at The Times, for example, were told to keep the Indian market in mind while writing web stories (how does one do this exactly? Describe the new budget as ‘pukka’?) The Sun, The Independent and The Daily Mail have all launched joint ventures in India in the last 12 months.
But it also means local media firms having the capital to attract western journalists onto their staff for English language ventures. This often involves quite serious culture clashes, and the results can be quite comic. (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 30, 2008 | Conflict and security
Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks around the world last year … more than double the number in any of the past 25 years … More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983 … [S]ince 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs. Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Apr 23, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific
Amidst the general swooning over Kevin Rudd (to which even we at Global Dashboard are not immune), the latest convert is David Miliband, who last week penned a blog post that ran thus:
…his travels are now being put to good use as he showed in his speech in London last week, arguing for “creative middle power diplomacy”. Rudd argued that we should shape the global response to global challenges together – us because of the links to Europe, them because of their links to Asia, both of us because of our links to the USA. Now fully part of the climate, terrorism, financial regulation debates, Australia embodies the point that in a small world anyone can carve out a leadership role.
Oh dear. Australia not happy about that last bit there. Over to our friend Sam Roggeveen at The Interpreter – the blog of Australia’s premier foreign policy research centre, the Lowy Institute – who’s not best pleased about this
…rather condescending bit about how anyone can be a global leader, even tiny, insignificant Australia. What are we, The Little Engine That Could? Perhaps the next time Rudd speaks in the UK, he needs to put more emphasis on the ‘middle’ in ‘creative middle power diplomacy’.
Fair point. Let’s not forget that once you adjust for purchasing power parity, Australia has a larger GDP per capita than Britain…
by Daniel Korski | Apr 22, 2008 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia
Later in the week half of the European Commission will go to Beijing. Playing Kissinger to EU President Barroso’s Nixon, Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson has prepared the way for his boss with a thoughtful speech to the China-Britain Business Council.
Instead of boycotting the Olympics, Mandelson argues that China should be treated with respect – but asked to make quick concessions on its trade tariffs, as part of the Doha round of trade talks. For this proposal he gets full marks from the The Times.
But Mandelson’s approach is unlikely to satiate Western publics’ concerns about Beijing’s crack-down in Tibet, its human rights record or its behaviour in Africa (the subject of a conference in Berlin this week). Furthermore, while the Doha round will benefit many African countries – including by removing tariffs on import of many African goods to China – trade, as we know, is not enough to alleviate poverty.
So what should Europe do? The EU commission’s visit should not only be an opportunity to establish on-going contact between the two trading partners (although this if, of course, important); it represents a chance for the EU to lay out a strategic agenda for what it expects China to do, including in Africa.
Key “asks” of China should include getting Beijing to support the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), joining the G8 African Partner’s Forum and committing to undertaking all aid projects in Africa with an OECD donor of IFI. Now that we are at it, what about a joint EU/China/AU study of the impact of China’s investments? Sure, it would have to phrased differently.
Mandelson’s right to call for a sober assessment of the benefits of EU-China relations. But any “deal” between the two needs to go beyond commerce and trade. In American political folklore, Nixon opened the door to China. Barroso should work to ensure that what comes through that door in the next fifty years benefits not only China but the EU as well as the developing world.
