by Alex Evans | Oct 8, 2007 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, North America
Yesterday’s NY Times had an excellent piece about what it argues to be the US’s increasing reliance on China in numerous matters diplomatic. The piece quotes Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation at length, who also has his own piece on his blog here. Here’s a sample from the Times article:
China, by virtue of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, has always been an important diplomatic player. But its importance to the Bush administration has grown for two reasons: it has become more assertive around the globe and the administration has exhausted a lot of its options.
“I think we need China almost everywhere in the world because we’ve disengaged from the rest of the world,” Mr. Clemons said, criticizing the administration’s initial disdain for concerted international diplomacy and citing its preoccupation with Iraq.
Meanwhile, China has steadily expanded its diplomatic and economic ties far beyond Asia. Mr. Clemons suggested that that has caused a subtle tectonic shift in how nations view it and, conversely, the United States. “They see China as an ascending power,” Mr. Clemons added, “and they don’t see us that way any more.”
On his own blog, Clemons is even more blunt as he rebuts calls made in the Washington Post for the US to boycott China’s 2008 Olympics if it doesn’t force the Burmese government to back down over the recent protests.
So, folks can pine on about America boycotting the 2008 Olympics — or they can get back to the “serious” problem that America isn’t taken all that seriously anymore, and China is.
by Alex Evans | Oct 1, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
Hurrah – Dani Rodrik has a blog. Rodrik is a great international development thinker and a co-author – together with Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian – of my favourite development think piece of 2005, which was absolutely required reading in DFID when it came out.
Anyway, Rodrik’s just been blogging about food prices and poverty, where he observes the existence of two camps cheerfully talking past one another. On one hand, advocates of the Doha Development Round trumpted that higher food prices from agricultural liberalisation will benefit the poor. On the other hand, people worried about the effect of biofuels on food prices (like me) argue that higher food prices will be bad news for the poor. But Rodrik points out that:
The real answer of course is that it depends on whether a poor household is a net seller or buyer of food (that is, whether it grows more or less food than it consumes). This means that the rural poor generally tends to benefit from higher food prices, whereas the urban poor generally get hurt. How large the impact is depends, in turn, on the size of the food account as a share of total expenditures or income of a household. And whether the change is good or bad for a nation’s poor as a whole depends on the geography of poverty in a country.
So as an economist loves to say, it depends. But it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics.
A fair point. But Rodrik overlooks the gorilla in the room: climate change. As we’ve argued here before, the effect of biofuels is just one driver of rising food prices – along with other factors like weather variability, water scarcity, rising demand in China and India and so on. While biofuels is the the key driver among these for now, it’s climate change that is likely to become the real biggie over time.
And the thing about climate change, as IPCC assessment reports make clear, is that while climate change will likely lead to higher food prices, farmers in the poorest countries are likely to become worse rather than better off – since they’ll be hardest hit by the effects of climate change. William Cline, an expert at the Center for Global Development, has a new book out about this which should be required reading in donor agencies:
Developing countries, many of which have average temperatures that are already near or above crop tolerance levels, are predicted to suffer an average 10 to 25 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s, assuming a so-called “business as usual” scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, according to the study. Rich countries, which typically have lower average temperatures, will experience a much milder or even positive average effect, ranging from an 8 percent increase in productivity to a 6 percent decline.
Individual developing countries face even larger declines. India, for example, could see a drop of 30 to 40 percent. Some smaller countries suffer what could only be described as an agricultural productivity collapse. Sudan, already wracked by civil war fueled in part by failing rains, is projected to suffer as much as a 56 percent reduction in agricultural production potential; Senegal, a 52 percent fall.
by Alex Evans | Sep 19, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
So let’s catch up with things on Iran since our last couple of posts (mine, David’s). In Europe on Sunday night, French foreign minister (and founder of Medecins sans Frontieres) Bernard Kouchner commented that:
“We have to prepare for the worst … the worst is war.”
That remark elicited a furious response from International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei, who said on Monday that:
“I would not talk about any use of force. There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons.”
ElBaradei’s comments were buttressed by off the record briefing by UN officials, one of whom told the Guardian that
“There’s a strategic reason for doing these things. He really is alarmed. He sees this thing going out of control. The feeling around here is that this looks like the run-up to the Iraq war.”
So what’s going on here – and is the risk of war real? Here’s a quick rewind of how, as far as I can tell, things got to where they are and how things play out from here.
- During August, ElBaradei (see excellent NY Times profile here) negotiated a secret agreement with Tehran, under which Iran would answer questions about its nuclear program in return for a series of concessions. His approach was essentially supported by China and Russia, but led to an immediate apoplectic reaction from the US, UK, France and Germany, who argued that ElBaradei had undermined the Security Council process and allowed Iran to buy itself more time to pursue its nuclear program – especially since the IAEA’s agreement with Iran included no stipulation that the latter had to suspend uranium enrichment.
- But the EU-3 and the US realised that ElBaradei had won the key political advantage: momentum. According to the New York Times, a senior European official commented that “We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that it would only make him look even more like a hero.” Consequently, the Times went on, the US backed down: “Early in September, when the agency’s board gathered in Vienna and discussed the new plan, the American envoy, Gregory L. Schulte, stunned colleagues by praising Dr. ElBaradei. He told the board that the deal was “a potentially important development and a step in the right direction.”
- Then, on Monday this week, Bernard Kouchner tried to regain the momentum by proposing a new gambit: a European sanctions regime. But there are obvious problems with his approach. While his tougher stance is strongly backed by the US and the UK, the sanctions option is hampered by the fact that no-one (least of all the US) really believes that sanctions work – all the more so when the sanctions are European-only. And there’s also a real risk that proposing a European sanctions regime is a tacit, but still clear, admission that the UN Security Council process is no longer the scene of the action.
And that leaves the question of where the Americans fit into all this. People in touch with the US government think they’ve seen a tipping point where the key American concern now has as much to do with the proxy war it thinks Iran is waging in Iraq, as with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s not clear whether or not a decision has been made in Cheney’s office to push for war; publicly, the White House continues to endorse a diplomatic solution. But it feels like a moment of considerable risk. If the US does want war, then a fractured international approach can work strongly to its advantage: it can argue that the UN process has failed, that the French sanctions approach won’t deliver, and that ElBaradei is placing too much trust in Iranian interlocutors who’ve proved time and again to be unreliable.
So unless the European sanctions approach works, and if the US Security Council process becomes seen to have broken down, then the EU-3 may face a stark choice between throwing their lot in with the US, or backing the increasingly Blix-like figure of ElBaradei.
It remains to be seen how ElBaradei’s approach pans out. But one point in his favour: he appears to be the only international player making a concerted effort to see things from the Iranian side. Last year, I sat in on a House of Lords debate on Iran and listened to David Hannay – a former UK Ambassador the the UN, and member of Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change – speak. A year and a half later, his concluding words still seem as relevant as they are ignored:
Finally, I make a plea as someone who began his diplomatic career 45 years ago in Tehran. We must really try to put ourselves in the shoes of the Iranians and to understand their thinking. It would be quite wrong to suppose that this is exclusively conditioned by religious extremism. Some of the things that President Ahmadinejad says could just as well have been said—indeed, they were said—by Prime Minister Mossadeq in the 1950s. Iran’s experience of being pushed around and manipulated by the great powers is a long and bitter one. We need to appeal to the pragmatic instincts, which exist in every Iranian whom I have ever known and to avoid playing to those memories of earlier defeats and humiliations. To coin a phrase, we need to show them respect, even when we disagree with them.
by David Steven | Sep 17, 2007 | Global system, North America
It’s one thing for an ex-newspaper editor to engage in panic-for-publicity (see Alex’s post below), another for the ex-head of the US Federal Reserve to do the same.
But Alan Greenspan has done just that. Greenspan has mounted a major media offensive with three main messages.
First, you’re all screwed. Second, it didn’t happen on my watch. And third, buy my new book (he has a reported $8.5m advance to pay back).
Greenspan, who never mentioned the word bubble when leading the Fed, now expects single digit falls in the US housing market, but thinks a double digit collapse would be unsurprising.
He compares asset-backed securities to cocaine and describes the current crisis as a ‘disaster waiting to happen.’ Perhaps most interestingly, he predicts long-term upward pressure on inflation, as deflationary pressure from China eases off.
All in the all, though, the ex-Fed chairman comes across as one of those shy and retiring types who is desperately missing the limelight:
“Why am I penalised for effectively coming out of government? Do I abandon my profession? What do I do? I understand that [my statements have a market impact], and that’s the reason why when I speak in public I don’t talk about monetary policy. I do talk about the economy.
“Do I become an anthropologist? I don’t know what to do about this. It’s like putting me in jail. I didn’t do anything!” But while he remains fascinated by the goings-on at the Fed, he harbours no desire to be back there in the driving seat.
“I spent a considerable time there. I learnt a great deal, I enjoyed working with the people, but I’m really more a private economist. I’m essentially introverted, and being out in the open the way I became was very disconcerting to me. I’m a private person.”
by Alex Evans | Aug 29, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in order to grow crops for biofuels instead], the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.
We first posted on this subject on Global Dashboard back in March, and Vidal’s right to be worried. Here’s a link to the one page table we published a few months back showing how the major scarcity trends reinforce one another – and how it’s absolutely the issue of food security we really need to be worrying about.
What’s alarming isn’t just the scale of the challenge, but the extent to which managing it requires a degree of policy coherence both within and between governments that just isn’t there.
