by Alex Evans | Mar 12, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
That’s the headline conclusion of an IPS analysis piece by John Vandaele. Average GDP growth in developing countries today is 7 per cent, compared to 3 per cent for developed countries; and even per capita income grew faster in South than North between 2003 and 2007 (old news in East and South Asia, but a big shift in Latin America and Asia). And whereas in 1980 developed country GDP was 23 times higher than in developing countries, it was 18 times higher in 2007. Vandaele comments:
East and South Asia are almost exclusively responsible for this. For Africa, Latin America and the so-called transition economies (former communist countries), the relative gap is much wider today then in 1980. Nevertheless the last five years show a generalised improvement in the South. More and more, South-South relations play a role in the world’s economy. India and China thrive because of their industrial and services success, but their boom drives up commodity prices, and so benefits even quite weak economies in Africa and Latin America. South-South interaction makes globalisation a tide that lifts almost all boats.
But, he goes on, “inside most countries, income inequality is on the rise” – faster in developing than developed countries, and fastest of all in China.
Between 2001 and 2003 the Chinese economy grew 10 percent each year, but the 10 percent bottom earners lost 2.5 percent in income, according to the World Bank. Official figures show that the difference between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent grew 40 percent over the last three years.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 7, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific, Global system
Meanwhile, on the Time magazine blog, Simon Elegant has been sitting in on Wen Jiabao’s ‘work report’ to delegates at the National People’s Congress.
It took two and half hours but there was no question then and in subsequent comments by senior officials that inflation is very much on their minds. Wen said their target for the year is 4.8 per cent, which seems optimistic given that its currently running at 7.1 per cent (January) and rising. With inflation, as with everything else, perception is just as important as reality. And that’s where the problems lies for Beijing. With most of the rise coming from food (80 plus per cent according to the government) these jumps really hit hard.
His colleague Jodie Xu, meanwhile, has been seeing the impacts up close in Beijing’s food market:
Wang Litian, a 67 year old retired worker from Beijing Bus Factory, recently faced an impossible choice: cut her medical expenses by not taking painkillers or cut down on her food spending. Wang lives with her husband, son and daughter-in-law and a granddaughter The family’s income is mostly spent on food and medicine. But with the food prices continuing to soar, they now have a choice between food or medicine. “Last year, our food expense was a little over one thousand yuan a month. It has risen to over two thousand now,” Wang says, waving her hands in agitation. “My salary has just been increased by 200 yuan a month, but the food prices rise much faster.”
Wang isn’t alone in suffering from a recent bout of inflation that hit the food sector hardest. A retired factory director who gives his name only as Old Ma grumbles about the price of lamb. “Our quality of life is steadily declining. Last year, my family could afford to have meat twice a week. Now we only eat meat once every month.” Ma, says his family of seven budget 1,500 yuan a month for food. But now that means most meals consist of cabbage and potatoes. To get cheaper prices, Old Ma delays his daily visit to the food market until four o’clock in the afternoon. “The later I go, the cheaper the price is. I exchanged the quality for the quantity. If the price doesn’t stop going up, it won’t be long before people start to protest.”
As Simon Elegant recalls, it’s not hard to see why the CCP are so worried about inflation: it was one of the main drivers of protests at Tiananmen nearly 20 years ago…
by Alex Evans | Mar 5, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
“If you see people throwing stones, it means if they had guns, they would have been shooting”, observes Frederick, an economics grad who drives a motorcycle taxi in Douala, Cameroon.
The FT’s Matthew Green explains:
Only a few crumbs were left on the counter at the Boulangerie du Rail delicatessen in Douala after looters swept the shelves of cake, croissants and champagne… “People are hungry, they have nothing to eat,” said Felix Djoyo, the manager, who had locked himself behind a metal door while shanty dwellers ransacked his bottles of Bordeaux.
The crisis in Cameroon might have generated few headlines abroad, but the violence shows how soaring oil and food prices on global markets are threatening the patronage systems propping up some of Africa’s longest-serving leaders. Protests linked to surging inflation have broken out in Guinea and Burkina Faso in recent months, where presidents have ruled for more than two decades. Niger, Ghana and Senegal have also seen demonstrations …
The government has agreed to a small reduction in fuel prices to placate protesters, saying it cannot afford the kinds of subsidies needed to shield the economy from global market forces. But many residents blame Mr Biya for the hardship, saying years of venal rule have skewed the economy to favour a tiny elite.
So, another point to add to the growing list of what rising food and energy prices mean for Africa: patronage systems come under increasing stress in conditions of scarcity. Look at Kenya. People at the tops of agencies are acutely aware of the problem – DFID’s Douglas Alexander and the World Bank’s Bob Zoellick both returned from Davos fired up about the political impacts of scarcity issues, for instance. Some people in country offices get it, too.
But the underlying problem is still that many donor agencies’ culture is all about disbursing cash – rather than having a really sophisticated analysis of endogenous drivers of change and a theory of influence to go with it. Neither the old problem of patronage nor the newer problem of scarcity issues is really that well understood in donor agency cultures. We’d better hope they get up to speed pretty fast…
by Alex Evans | Mar 2, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
[Last updated: May 30th]
Now that food prices are moving fast up the agenda, you might want to check out some of the wider briefing available on the web. Here are some sources worth a look:
- The hub site for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis is here; see also their latest update (from 20th May). The task force is currently preparing a ‘Comprehensive Framework for Action’ in time for the UN’s food summit in June.
- The Food and Agriculture Organisation has set up a new portal on the world food situation. It’s got a news feed on news from countries and from FAO itself, plus good links to background briefing including the latest FAO Food Outlook reports, which come out every six months (here’s November 07‘s – next one in June). See also the latest joint FAO / OECD report on the agricultural outlook to 2017: summary here.
- The World Bank has a pretty good selection of material, including a briefing paper for the Spring Meetings in April 2008, a chart showing which policies are in place in which countries, a slideshow on rising food prices and of course the latest World Development Report (2008’s is on agriculture and development). Also worth reading is World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s ten point plan for tackling the food crisis, published in the FT.
- The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (snappy title, no?) published its report through UNESCO on April 15th. Press release here, executive summary here and full report here.
- The Financial Times has been way out in front of the rest of the broadsheet media, as I’ve noted here before. They have a special portal page set up on the issue, including links to key articles as well as slideshows and videos. The New York Times has a similar page here. Reuters has a terrific hub site that includes a clickable map of all food-related instability around the world; and the BBC has a very useful set of graphs and stats.
- The International Food Policy Research Institute published a new World Food Situation report in December last year; more recently, they’ve also produced a ‘What, How and Who of proposed policy actions“. See also this briefing paper from the Overseas Development Institute.
Finally, a couple of plugs on stuff that I’m involved in:
- I’ve published a briefing paper (April 2008) on why prices are rising and what it means for development as part of a joint CIC / Chatham House project that I’m leading on international implications of rising food prices. Chatham House also has a major research project underway on UK food policy in the 21st century, and released a set of scenarios for UK food supply in May.
- And of course, we’ll keep tracking the issue closely here on Global Dashboard – we’ll file everything we do on this under the Food Prices section.
by Alex Evans | Mar 1, 2008 | Conflict and security
Stephen Flynn, the Senior Fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an oustanding essay – America the Resilient – in the current edition of Foreign Affairs.
Right at the heart of Flynn’s argument is that resilience needs to be a bottom-up undertaking – something I’ve written about here before, as has David. His premise: “When it comes to managing the hazards of the twenty-first century, it is reckless to relegate the American public to the sidelines.” Historically, he notes, resilience has been one of America’s great natural strengths: “the quality that helped tame a raw continent and then allowed the country to cope with the extraordinary challenges that occasionally placed the American experiment in peril”.
But today, he continues, “this reservoir of self-sufficiency is being depleted”. Partly that’s a function of “an increasingly urbanised and suburbanised population [embracing] just-in-time lifestyles tethered to ATM machines and 24-hour stores that provide instant acess to cash, food and gas”. Partly it’s the result of under-investment in emergency management capacity and critical national infrastructure.
But it’s also, he continues, the result of how the government is treating the citizenry. In Climate Change: the state of the debate, David and I queried the wisdom of a dual narrative on climate change that applies apocalyptic imagery to the problem of climate change, but then plays a solution narrative that extends little further than remembering to turn the lights off and recycling a bit more. Flynn thinks the same applies to terrorism:
Since September 11, 2001, the White House has failed to draw on the legacy of American grit, volunteerism, and ingenuity in the face of adversity. Instead, it has sent a mixed message, touting terrorism as a clear and present danger while telling Americans to just go about their daily lives. Unlike during World War II, when the entire U.S. population was mobilized, much of official Washington today treats citizens as helpless targets or potential victims.
This in turn results, he continues, from a need-to-know rather than a need-to-share mentality on information management. In a point that Charlie also makes in his last Demos report on national security, Flynn says that
This discounting of the public can be traced to the culture of secrecy and paternalism that now pervades the national defense and federal law enforcement communities. After decades of combating Soviet espionage during the Cold War, the federal security establishment instinctively resists disclosing information for fear that it might end up in the wrong hands. Straight talk about the country’s vulnerabilities and how to cope in emergencies is presumed to be too frightening for public consumption.
This is madness. The overwhelming majority of Americans live in places where the occurrence of a natural disaster is a matter of not if, but when. And terrorist groups’ targets of choice are noncombatants and infrastructure. These are hazards that can be managed only by an informed, inspired, and mobilized public. Both the first preventers and the first responders are likely to be civilians.
Flynn understands the importance of narrative, too. It’s a shame, he says, that the prevailing story about 9/11 is about the attacks that succeeded, rather than the one that failed – because of self-organised action by citizens on United 93. Later, he notes that
Two tricky but potentially influential allies in the effort could be the mass media and Hollywood. To a large extent, the stories Americans see on their small and big screens have been part of the problem. A more inspirational and less dramatic reality is rarely portrayed. As the mass evacuation of Manhattan on September 11 made clear, in real crises Americans largely keep their wits about them and assist one another. During World War II, Hollywood played a helpful public-service role by supporting war-bond drives and producing training films, while providing much-needed entertainment. Media executives today could do the same by committing themselves to relating stories and communicating messages that inform and inspire individual and societal resilience.
His conclusion:
Rebuilding the resilience of U.S. society is an agenda that could reverse the debilitating politics and mounting cynicism now bedeviling the U.S. electorate. Whereas increasing security measures is an inevitable answer to a society’s fears, resilience rests on a foundation of confidence and optimism. It involves taking stock of what is truly precious and ensuring its durability in a way that would allow Americans to remain true to their ideals no matter what tempest the future may bring.
Outstanding. I’m off to buy his new book.
