by David Steven | Jul 15, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia
I’m back in Pakistan where the economic picture continues to worsen, as inflation hits 21.53%.
Delve into the detail and you can see the impact of ordinary people. Food prices have risen 32% over the past year, fuel by 11% (despite government subsidies), transport by 25% and health care by 14%. Another petrol and diesel price rise is on the cards.
The new government, meanwhile, is borrowing heavily to maintain subsidies and invest in public services. In the short term, this may dampen down unrest, but it adds to inflationary pressures, and probably merely delays the inevitable economic crunch.
A further problem is the failure of food supply to expand in response to rising prices. According to Mahmood Hasan Khan, food productivity has been stagnant for a decade, with water one of many serious constraints.
Writing in the Daily Times, Rasul Bakhsh Rais sums up the prevailing mood:
The hope that the present elected leadership of the dominant party can address the many challenges facing the country is fast dissipating. There are no alternatives other than chaos, confrontation and even more chaos.
Things are not looking good…
by Alex Evans | Jul 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
Cory at BoingBoing and Alex at WorldChanging sat down for a coffee together last week and started brainstorming about life after the apocalpyse. Cory says:
I noticed that while there’s a whole ton of stories — and people who emulate them — about heavily armed survivalists bravely holding off the twilight of civilization after the Big One, there are damned few stories about super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together. I even came up with a name for it: the Outquisition; the opposite of the Inquisition — missionaries who come to your town to remind you of how awesome it can all be, leave behind a bunch of rad, life-improving systems and tools, and generally get on with the business of being happy, well-fed and peaceful.
Alex wrote up a great post about this and 24 hours later, some WorldChanging readers created Outquisition.org. I’m not sure what they’ll do there, but in my dreams, they’re off building a non-secret society of emergency-preparedness Nice People who think that the response to catastrophe isn’t lifeboat rules and militias, but humanitarian aid and kick-ass tools.
Alex elaborates:
What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.
Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.
Interestingly, all this has generated a torrent of debate on the comments section, with rural people cocking a number of eyebrows at the idea that urban folk will sally out to rescue them. One of the more gentle responses suggests that
The thought that a bunch of city folks could come out to the country and teach the farmers how to do their job is comical. Ideally it would be a two-way system with both sides contributing to the conversation. The farmers would be able to teach the city folk how to farm to grow their own food, while the city people would bring their particular skill set to the table.
On the other hand,
You know, maybe the city folk DO know more about some things than the farmer might. If the farmer has been dependent upon hybrid seed he must buy every year, because the seed produced by his crops is sterile, and the fertilizer he must buy is petroleum based and no longer affordable or even available. Some “City Person” showing up with non-hybid seed and plans for a DIY manure composter that produces burnable methane gas and, as a byproduct, high quality organic liquid fertilizer, well that “city Person” just might be that farmer’s personal saviour.
The whole comments section on the WorldChanging post is worth a look: a very lively and informative discussion.
by Alex Evans | Jul 11, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Influence and networks
Oxfam’s head of research, Duncan Green, has published a new book called From Poverty to Power (and Duncan’s started a blog, too, which is definitely worth bookmarking). It’s an official Oxfam publication, and is effectively their state of the world report for the next decade thereabouts.
The whole book’s deeply thoughtful, and rests on a massive body of research, but I especially like two of its core themes. One is emphasis on resource scarcity as a central feature on the development landscape. For Duncan, the gap between haves and have-nots isn’t just about wealth; it’s also over “technology, water, soil and carbon” (see also his excellent Guardian op-ed from a couple of weeks ago).
The other strand that appeals to me is the emphasis not only on effective states (where Matthew Lockwood’s work remains a core reference point for me), but also active citizenship. Particularly strong here is the book’s Annex on How Change Happens, which everyone interested in campaigning should read (immediately).
by Alex Evans | Jul 9, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Lots of people converging on the need for an integrated approach to food, climate and energy this week (funny how the same ideas often seem to sprout in different places at the same time). Just as I was about to publish my paper on multilateralism and scarcity on Monday, I saw Indian PM Manmohan Singh quoted as saying that,
Climate change, energy security and food security are interlinked, and require an integrated approach.
Then yesterday Mark Malloch Brown and I spoke at a meeting in Parliament organised by the All Party Groups on Africa and Conflict, which was on (guess what?) the conflict risk posed in Africa by the convergence of peak oil, climate change and soaring food prices – here’s the speech I gave.
But the prize for joined-up thinking of the week goes to the United Nations University in Japan, who yesterday launched a new site on the three scarcity issues entitled Our World 2.0: one to add to the bookmarks list…
Update: I’ve done a piece on the G8 and joining up the dots on scarcity issues on Comment is Free.
by Alex Evans | Jul 8, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa, Off topic
Those of you who follow Middle East politics will be aware of the endless succession of peace envoys who head to the region to try their hand (latterly our beloved former PM). But now, reports Yossi Alpher (co-editor of Bitter Lemons and a former Mossad official), there’s a new player in town – as he and a Palestinian colleague recently discovered:
We had been asked to be interviewed for a documentary that would explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the youth of the world. A worthy cause. The producers explained that our interviewer, a German rock star, was the perfect person to establish strong communication with our audience.
At this point, British or American audiences might begin to sniff the air suspiciously – looking, perhaps, for the faintest scent of a rat on the breeze.
They took us down winding stone stairs and through long corridors, ostensibly to have some make-up dabbed on our noses for the cameras, in fact to meet the interviewer and test his disguise. We confronted a tall, blond-ish man in his thirties, dressed in leather and studs, his face heavily powdered, his arms and chest shaven. He spoke in a heavy German accent, his movements and mannerisms ultra-gay. He tried to write down our names, but they came out dyslexic.
“This guy is going to interview us?”
Yes, dear readers: Sacha Baron Cohen – or rather his alter ego, Bruno – is loose in the Middle East.
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