by David Steven | Oct 21, 2008 | Conflict and security
A snip at just $84.99 from Costco – a 275-serving, emergency food supply. Only problem: “Due to overwhelming response, this item will be delivered in 10-15 business days.”
Here’s what you get:
Delicious and easy to prepare. Each bucket contains 275 servings of Pre-mixed and Pre-seasoned 100% vegetarian and vitamin fortified food. With a 20 year long shelf life, this kit is perfect for the preparation of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or even for a camping or hunting trip.
Easy to Prepare
275 Servings
All Meals 100% Vegetarian and Vitamin Fortified
Sealed in convenient Weather-Proof bucket for easy transport
30 Servings – Potato Bakon
25 Servings – Corn Chowder
25 Servings – Ala King
25 Servings – Cacciatore
25 Servings – Western Stew
25 Servings – Country Noodle
25 Servings – Rice Lentil
45 Servings – Whey Milk
25 Servings – Blueberry Pancakes
25 Servings – Barley Vegetable
Total Weight: 23 lbs.
For best taste and nutritional value, use product before:
20 years of manufacturing date when stored at 60° F (16.6° C)
10 years of manufacturing date when stored at 70° F (21.1° C)
by Alex Evans | Oct 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
Yesterday was World Food Day, on which subject BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight programme did a piece asking whether the current steep falls in commodity prices meant we were out of the woods on the food price spike. By no means, I argue in this interview – a point I also argued at the World Food Programme’s global senior management meeting last week.
Spending 36 hours with WFP leaders and country directors was something of an eye-opener, incidentally. I had always regarded WFP as being as the humanitarian relief agency that wouldn’t bother to co-ordinate its action in the field with other emergency aid providers, not least because its sheer size allowed it to call the shots on its own terms. But I have to say: having listened to WFP-in-introspective-mode (probably not a mode they indulge in very often, one suspects), I’ve come away with a different impression.
One thing you realise, as you spend time with them in this kind of a setting, is that they are all genuinely, viscerally passionate about what they do. Josette Sheeran, their director, likes to say that ‘nothing gets between WFP staff and a hungry child’, and as you listen to them talk to each other, it transpires that this is actually not just a neat soundbite. These people are very focused on the people they’re there to feed.
And they are also – unusually, perhaps, for a UN agency – just not that interested in process for its own sake. You could see that in part just in the sheer efficiency with which the meeting was organised: everything worked flawlessly, with no fuss.
By comparison, another UN agency which shall remain nameless asked me to speak at an event in Geneva earlier this year, and it took them six months (and a veritable torrent of chasing emails from me) to reimburse the cost of a night’s hotel stay. The reply to my last email on the subject was apologetic, but explained that most of the agency’s finance people had been away all summer, and the expenses claim needed to be approved by five different departments.
Which made me think: I know which of the two agencies I’d want to be delivering my emergency assistance, if I were an internally displaced person in a disaster. And it also gave me a new sympathy on why WFP might think that time spent in co-ordination meetings with agencies that need sign-off from seventeen departments before they can visit the bathroom, might be time better spent delivering actual aid to actual people.
by Richard Gowan | Oct 16, 2008 | Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, Off topic
As the financial crisis has intensified, Alex has frequently pointed us to the thoughts of NYU’s Nouriel Roubini, a long-time prophet of economic doom (see here, here and here). Given his warnings of “systemic meltdown”, you might imagine that Professor Roubini is a dour figure. Not so. In a bizarre twist to the Demise Of Capitalism As We Know It, gossip blog Gawker has gone to war with the prof:
It’s time to call bullshit. The image of Dr. Doom may satisfy the needs of the media and partygoers this Halloween—but Roubini is anything but dour. The 50-year-old Iranian-Jewish economist is a promiscuous Facebook friend who draws a cosmopolitan crowd to the frequent parties at his Tribeca loft—an apartment with walls indented with plaster vulvas, incidentally.
I’ll leave you to investigate Gawker’s initial assault and follow-up post, which includes recent correspondence on the current crisis from, er, St. Tropez. Still, in this time of generalized panic and depression, it’s good to see that one of our gurus is having a good time (and pretty hot for 51 too!).
by Leo Horn Phathanothai | Oct 12, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Global system
So far, many observers and experts point out, developing countries seem to be holding out quite well amidst the global financial turmoil. In reality the current global financial crisis poses multiple and profound risks to development, which I will briefly outline.
Finance ministers from 24 developing countries (the Group of 24, or ‘G-24’) meeting last Friday at the IMF, noted that:
“many emerging markets and developing economies are not immune to the spillovers of the ongoing global financial crisis”
and that:
“preventing macroeconomic volatility from financial spillovers and sustaining continuous growth were key priorities for developing countries”
See the G-24 public communiqué here.
There are several ways in which the global financial crisis can impact on development. Impacts will be highly country-specific. Key factors include:
- Cuts in international development aid – Jakaya Kikwete, President of Tanzania and Chairman of the African Union, expressed his ‘deep concern’ about the financial crisis dampening rich countries’ commitment to development aid (see news report here). And for good reason: development aid tends to be strongly pro-cyclical, in other words a nation’s generosity to other nations tends to be proportional to its own good fortunes.
- Reduced access to international financial capital markets – The impact will likely be bigger for middle-income countries and some emerging markets (excluding China, given it is a super high saver). Much of sub-Saharan Africa had limited access to international private capital to start with, and will therefore not be strongly affected by this.
- Possible reversals in capital inflows to developing countries – due to the global credit crunch and as investors’ appetite for risk abates.
- The spread of stock market turbulence to emerging markets – in one day last week, markets in Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey plunged 10%.
- Downturn in global demand for developing country exports.
- Postponement of large investment projects. There is emerging evidence that large investment plans (e.g. in India’s power sector) are being delayed or cancelled as turbulence in capital markets undermine prospects for raising funds.
- Remittances will be impacted by the economic downturn, as well as inflation and a weak dollar. See a recent news report on how remittances to the Caribbean are being hit.
It is of course unrealistic to expect that developing countries can be wholly insulated from the global financial crisis. However, the one very powerful instrument that rich countries do have at their disposal to help keep development on track is aid. A cutback in aid at this point can have severe impacts, as high food and oil prices justify increases in aid. Aid will be needed for countries with reduced sources of revenue and finance, as social expenditures are typically the first to get cut when fiscal resources tighten. Emergency support should be targeted to countries that are fiscally highly vulnerable (the IMF has identified 22 such countries).
by Alex Evans | Oct 10, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Global system
Although there’s no consensus on whether we’re heading for a 2-3 year recession or a much longer period of deflation a la Japan in the 1990s (c.f. Nouriel Roubini on V, U and L shaped recessions), four implications for development are already clear.
First, donor countries are going to be facing a dramatically different situation in their public sector budgets from next year. With the US Treasury’s $700 billion bailout plan now approved by Congress, the incoming US Administration will face a budget deficit of up to a trillion dollars next year, rather than $300 bn as planned. Other donors will find their budgets constrained too – by falling growth, lower tax revenues and probably also higher public debt. In the UK, for example, public borrowing next year is likely to have to rise from an expected £43 bn to £100 bn or more.
All this means that governments will have less to spend – so we should start worrying now about what that means for development assistance. While it remains to be seen whether those governments that have committed to spending 0.7% of national income on aid will row back on those commitments, it now looks much likelier that for example climate adaptation costs will come out of aid budgets, rather than being additional to 0.7% – as they should be.
This shift will be compounded by the second implication of the credit crunch: change in public attitudes. So far, the full impacts of the financial crisis have yet to hit the real economy in developed countries. But when they do, they will accelerate a switch that we can already see, towards more priority on issues that are ‘close to home’, and less on global issues like development and climate change.
Third, the financial crisis will obviously hit growth in developing countries. Monday’s stock market falls hit developing country exchanges hardest: the benchmark MSCI emerging markets index, for example, fell 11% as investors fled for safety. Meanwhile, the debate about whether developing countries in Asia and Africa have ‘decoupled’ from developed countries seems to be ending, with the conclusion that developing country growth is not immune from a downturn in the wider global economy.
And fourth, a reduction in commodity prices for the duration of the global downturn (however long that may be) as demand for them falls. As I’ve mentioned, futures prices for grain crops are already falling; we can expect that trend to be supported by falling energy prices, which will reduce some of the pressure on food that’s come via fertiliser prices, transport costs and demand for crops as biofuels.
That said, let’s be clear: the fall in commodity prices due to a global downturn does not mean that we’re out of the woods for good on high food and fuel prices. As Javier Blas notes in the FT today, the downturn also means that necessary investment in increasing supply will be put off. As soon as we’re out of the dowturn and demand starts going up again, we’ll discover that there’s been no shift in the underlying supply fundamentals – and hence that the stagflation drivers we were all worrying about until the credit crunch really began in earnest are just waiting where we left them. Let’s hope policymakers use the current easing as a moment of opportunity to start getting long term policy frameworks in place to manage high commodity prices a bit better than we did over the last two years.
