by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by Mark Weston | May 1, 2008 | Global system
A typically forthright and sensible article from former WTO head Mike Moore in the New Zealand Herald argues that we need more globalisation, not less, in response to the food crisis. He berates rich countries’ wrongheaded fuel subsitution policies – biofuels – as “a populist Green response to global warming that does the opposite of what was intended,” and argues that, while food aid to the poorest will be needed in the short term, the medium and long-term solution is more trade liberalisation and fewer subsidies.
And then, to really ram his point home, Moore adds a startling factoid, which recalls the equally memorable cartoon posted by Alex a while back: “Filling a Range Rover with subsidised ethanol takes as much “grain” as would feed an African family for a year.” Yikes. Anyone for a ban on Range Rovers?
by Jules Evans | Apr 30, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis – it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, so the harvest is set to be good. Global wheat prices have started to fall on the news.
Ukraine could actually be a much bigger player on the wheat and corn market. It was once the bread basket of Europe, the land of famously arable ‘black soil’, and was an importer of corn to ancient Greece 2,000 years ago. It provided much of the corn for the Soviet Union, to the excitement of president Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, who was never happier than when discussing Ukrainian farming techniques.
But the country’s agriculture sector is a real mess since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only a quarter of its vast tracts of arable land are properly farmed, and a quarter of land isn’t used at all. This is mainly because of the country’s lack of a basic land code to allow the buying and selling of land.
The government may finally pass such a law this year, which would allow the sector to develop rapidly, and would ease pressure on global food prices in the mid-term. The EU should probably tell Ukraine’s prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko (whose hair, pictured, oddly resembles a bread basket), to get on with it.
by Alex Evans | Apr 30, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement). Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which to look at long-term drivers of change in the humanitarian sector, and ask some of the key questions for the future of humanitarianism.
At the end of the discussion, I was left with the thought that humanitarian agencies will occupy a uniquely interesting place during the turbulent couple of decades of transition on which the world now looks set to embark. Partly, of course, that’s just because of the obvious point – that it’s humanitarian agencies that will be at the very front line of dealing with the shocks and stresses we’re likely to see. But more subtly, we can expect to see a difference between the context for humanitarian agencies and for other kinds of multilateralism.
For most kinds of multilateral collective action – trade policy, say, or global environmental issues, or peace and security – there’s very much an open question about how relevant multilateral cooperation will be over the next two decades. It could go either way: a more turbulent world could lead to renewed global solidarity; or it could lead to fragmentation and marginalisation of multilateralism.
The humanitarian system, though, is the one part of today’s multilateralism of which that’s not the case. Whatever happens, publics and states are still likely to look to humanitarian agencies to cope with the effects of a more turbulent world (even if they won’t always fund them properly). Humanitarian agencies are the one set of multilateral players whose relevance is effectively guaranteed in the years ahead, no matter how bad things get. Pretty important, then, that they use their profile to set out a strong narrative about why global cooperation – on prevention as well as relief – is essential.
