But the real stand-out blog here is from Sherard Cowper-Coles, our man in Kabul. Apart from the fact that he’s written far more content than any of the other bloggers (and posted four YouTube videos in a week), it’s also much more interesting. This is less for what he says about policy (not much, for obvious reasons, though he is forthcoming about differences with the US over aerial spraying), and more for what you learn about operational realities. It’s intriguing, for instance, to learn that the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency has “a big presence” in Afghanistan, and still more so to discover that HM Ambassador whiles away his Friday nights getting thrashed by DFID Kabul’s head of comms on a Nintendo Wii.
Still, if there’s one piece of content in particular that’s worth a look, see Cowper-Coles’ interview with Brig. John Lorimer, the outgoing Commander of Task Force Helmand. Asked by Cowper-Coles to offer “a few thoughts” about Helmand, Lorimer emphasises “good progress”. How? Well, relationships with the Governor and some of his line ministers are “much improved”. And levels of cooperation between the military team, the FCO and DFID are “a real step forward” [from what? – ed.] But, er, what about the military side?
The aim has always been to say goodbye to the enemy and that’s what we’ve done and we have beaten them many many times during the last six months.
Which just about says it all where fourth generation warfare is concerned… Still, top marks to Cowper-Coles for public diplomacy. (Has he been reading David Kilcullen?) There’s something refreshingly un-Foreign Office about an ambassador who talks you through a visual tour of the Kabul skyline while a member of his Royal Military Police close protection team obligingly acts as cameraman.
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.
At Chatham House, this morning, DFID’s chief economist, Tony Venables gave a somewhat elusive presentation on what developing countries want from climate change policy.
Taking it as a given that climate change will hit the poorest hardest, Venables argued that carbon trading between countries increases both efficiency and equity. Emissions are reduced in the most cost effective fashion, while income is distributed from rich to poor countries.
But all this depends on how property rights are allocated within the carbon markets. What DFID is surely thinking about, but not willing to talk about publicly, is what a fair share of future carbon emissions for poor countries would be.
Maybe Pakistan’s environment minister will have something to say about this later this afternoon…
A gaggle of UN agencies have just published a report on biofuels, says the Guardian this morning (see also previous Global Dashboard posts on biofuels). Although the report presents a mixed picture of upsides and downsides, it’s clear about the food security risks:
Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications… The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources. At their worst, biofuel programmes can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.
Absolutely. Slightly confusing, then, to see UNEP head Achim Steiner saying the opposite, according to the FT last month:
The UN’s top environment official has backed a European Union plan to require the blending of plant-based biofuels into road fuels despite fears by environmentalists that this could lead to increased deforestation in south-east Asia and Brazil. Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme, said on Thursday that biofuels were needed to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels.
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
