by Alex Evans | Jun 16, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Looks like lots of people (including me) may have spoken too soon in hoping for a near term easing of food prices. Notwithstanding recent causes for good cheer on wheat and rice, the extreme weather that the US mid-west has been experiencing over the last week or so spells devastation for the corn and soya crops. Corn’s now at $7 a bushel – up from $4 a year ago – and many (“if not all” – Citigroup) small and medium sized ethanol distilleries are likely to have to shut down. The NYT paints a picture of how bad:
Dave Timmerman’s small farm has been flooded four times in the past month by the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Cedar River which overflowed its banks at a record 31 feet last week, causing catastrophic damage in nearby Cedar Rapids and other eastern Iowa towns and farmsteads.
“In the lean years, we had beautiful crops but they weren’t worth much,” Mr. Timmerman said, surveying his farm, which his family has tended since his great-great-grandfather. “Now, with commodity prices sky high, mother nature is throwing us all these curve balls. I’m 42 years old and these are by far the poorest crops I’ve ever seen.” And he added, “It’s going downhill by the day.”
All of this will mean a sharp fall in production of corn-based ethanol, and the potential for political intervention. But what form – and with what long term effects? One to watch over the next week or two…
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
by Daniel Korski | Jun 13, 2008 | Influence and networks
The resignation of David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, in protest over the 42-day detention vote in Parliament, was followed by a number of stories about his relationship with party leader David Cameron.
Both insist they’ve not fallen out and not rowed about policy. But once the bizarre specter of David Davis running for his own seat is over, I could not help but think that one narrative would remain; namely, that David Cameron runs the Tories with a tight-nit clique of friends, which outsiders – even Shadow Cabinet Ministers – find hard to penetrate.
My point here is not to accuse the Tory leader of being a toff. He may or may not be, but I don’t really care. Rather, my point is that at a time when the Prime Minister is clearly failing to deal with the complexity and speed of modern policy-making in part because he clings to a small tight-knit clique of allies, it would seem that the Tory leader risks doing much the same.
If true, this sits uneasily with the growing complexity and rapidity of contemporary policy challenges. In today’s world, policy-makers need to find ways to open policy processes, include stakeholders, marshal governmental and non-governmental resources etc. etc. It is not just, as it once was, important to avoid Groupthink and thus bad decisions; it is key to even get the necessary information for policy-making to take place on highly complex issues like energy, food prices, non-proliferation etc.
True, acusations of this kind of “cliqueness” dogged Tony Blair as well. Remember the Sofa? But by now, politicians should see that this is not only deeply unpopular, but bad for policy-making.
by David Steven | Jun 6, 2008 | Off topic
In case, you missed Ravi Gurumurthy, David Miliband’s speech writer, on the F-Word, you can watch the whole thing on C4 on demand (requires Internet Explorer, a software download etc etc.)
Or you can have a look at this great montage from Channel 4. Ravi was competing on Gordon Ramsay’s programme with his mum, his newsreader brother, and his brother’s wife, with money raised going to the International Childcare Trust.
So how did he do? Details after the bump. (more…)
by Mark Weston | Jun 5, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Among the most popular policy responses to recent rises in food prices are export bans. Cambodia has banned rice exports, for example. Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran have refused to export wheat to hungry neighbours like Afghanistan. And Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries that has been hardest hit by the price rises, has banned cereal exports to neighbouring Ghana.
Such measures have been widely criticised, but they are not new. I recently came across FJ Pedler’s ‘Economic Geography of West Africa’, published by Longmans in 1955. Among many other interesting topics, he writes about the maize shortages of 1947. He notes the wildly fluctuating price of guinea-corn in the Zaria region of Nigeria, which rose from £8 per ton in 1946 to £38 per ton a year later. “These price movements,” he says, “are an indication that too little food is produced to meet the needs of the people throughout the year.” Traders take advantage of this, buying up food at harvest time to sell it later when prices rise (a bit like today’s commodities traders, who have been stocking up on food): “They are often blamed for high prices and scarcity [plus ça change…], but their action is the result of shortage, not the cause of it.”
As in today’s crisis, Mr Pedler reports that governments “often get frightened by the high prices and shortages…and prohibit the movement of food from one place to another.” Like Burkina Faso today, West African governments in the 1950s banned the export of guinea-corn from one state to another – in this case, from Katsina Province into Zaria Province. It didn’t help then either, and Pedler explains why the approach is flawed:
It is difficult to defend these bans on economic grounds. If they are effective, they prevent food from moving to the place where people will pay most for it. This must drive prices even higher in the needy area: while in the producing area an artificially low price is maintained, so that there is less economic incentive for farmers to increase their production.
Little has been learnt, it seems, in the intervening half-century. However, as Mr Pedler observed back then, the bans are easily evaded; “their principal effect is to add to the cost of transport by making it necessary for traders to avoid control posts or bribe the guards.” Good news for the corrupt, then, but bad news for the hungry.
