by Alex Evans | Jan 8, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
Via Blake at ForeignPolicy.com, news of the latest casualty of rising food prices: detente with North Korea. Full details:
Measures to stabilize soaring domestic food prices in China have resulted in tighter controls on grain imports, which is likely to threaten food aid to North Korea. China is one of the largest providers of food aid to the impoverished North, where severe flooding in August destroyed crops and further depleted food supplies.
In Dandung, Liaoning Province, near China’s border with North Korea, food exports to the impoverished country have been completely suspended. Up until now, an average of approximately 1,200 tons of food has crossed the border every day, but as of the beginning of the year, the Chinese government has not issued any new permissions for exports. An official in Dandung said on January 4, “We can’t send trains carrying flour to North Korea. We have applied to the authorities for permission but we have no idea when we will get it.”
China’s Ministry of Commerce on January 1 issued emergency decrees, including an imposition of export duties of 5 to 25 percent on major grains such as rice, wheat, corn and beans. The ministry has also adopted an export quota system for powdered goods, including flour.
China began blocking grain exports in late December of last year in order to stabilize domestic food prices. On December 20, 2007, Beijing suddenly abolished tax incentives for grain exports. Since then, food assistance to North Korea has been completely stopped. As China has refused to permit food exports, officials are finding it useless to try to pay duties on grains.
As Blake reports, North Korea isn’t happy – and is once more lapsing into its habitual uncooperative stance on proliferation.
by Alex Evans | Jan 2, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Hal Weitzman is with Barack Obama in Iowa. Barack Obama loves ethanol.
When the last presidential caucus was held in 2004, Iowa produced 860m gallons of ethanol. A year later, after Washington introduced a renewable fuel standard mandating the yearly production of 7.5bn gallons by 2012, the industry enjoyed a growth spurt. Today, Iowa’s 28 plants are responsible for 2bn gallons of the US’s annual production of 7bn gallons, with 18 new plants expected to add 1.6bn gallons next year. As a result ethanol is one of the few issues on which there is near-consensus among the leading presidential hopefuls on both sides.
Go figure. As Weitzman continues,
Nationally, there is a growing chorus of disapproval against the ethanol industry. Foodmakers and retailers blame ethanol for higher corn prices. Livestock producers resent the effect of the corn boom on feed costs. Some environmentalists question ethanol’s green credentials and say there should be more support for wind and solar power. Free-market groups oppose a 51 cent-a-gallon government subsidy for refiners who blend ethanol into traditional petrol.
Regardless of this opposition, ethanol is likely to become a permanent fixture of the US’s energy supply, boosted by growing interest in renewable fuels and a widespread sentiment that the country needs to wean itself off its dependency on oil imports. Polls show most Americans support the industry. This month Congress passed an energy bill that mandates an increased annual production of 36bn gallons of ethanol by 2022. “It’s pretty easy to take a shot at ethanol, but the reality is that it’ll be a part of any ‘final package’ on energy,” says Wallace Tyner, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Grrr.
by Alex Evans | Dec 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
While we’re on the subject of food, two interesting things to report from the Brussels conference that I mentioned a couple of posts ago:
First, it looks as though there may be pressure in Brussels for the EU to revisit its (extremely ill-advised) target for 10% of transport fuels to come from biofuels by 2020. Avril Doyle, an MEP who sits on the EP’s Environment and Climate Change Committees, was especially blunt about this, having returned from Bali apparently horrified by the revelation that the amount of corn it takes to fill a fuel tank with ethanol could feed someone for a year (a stat I can’t vouch for, not having come across it before). The EU’s target was, she said, a policy commitment made in good faith, but loooked now like it had been a mistake.
Interestingly, Tom Spencer – a former MEP who used to chair the EP Foreign Affairs Committee and who remains a leading light of GLOBE, the global network of green-minded Parliamentarians – flatly rebutted the notion that Brussels had set the target on the basis of a sustainability case that was sincere if perhaps flawed. In fact, he said, GLOBE had made it abundantly clear to MEPs throughout the policy development process that a biofuels target of the kind that was set would have serious, negative repercussions for global food security; but, he went on, the EP had backed the target anyway, not on the basis of a sustainability case, but purely and simply because of pressure from agricultural lobbies.
The other interesting point on food was in remarks made by a USAF Colonel representing EUCOM, the US military command for Europe. In an arrestingly forthright presentation, he led on the argument that in years to come, the real scarce resources were not, as policymakers were starting to think, oil and gas: instead, it would be food and water.
by Alex Evans | Dec 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
As promised a few weeks back, here’s the presentation on rising food prices that I gave the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit a couple of weeks ago.
The Strategy Unit team working on food policy haven’t yet made any of their research public, but if / when they do, it will appear on the project web page here. Although the SU is primarily looking at the issue from a UK perspective, my presentation leads on the international dimensions – in particular the drivers of rising food prices, and the implications internationally. All comments very welcome…
by Alex Evans | Dec 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos’s new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards. It’s an excellent pamphlet and anyone interested in how governments co-ordinate themselves to deal with complex risks should read it. Anyway, at the event, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Nick Clegg made a strong call for an end to the “politics of fear” (duly picked up the media), arguing that the public “will come to resent parties and governments who beat the drum of fear most loudly”. He said:
“In a climate of fear, decisions are taken as a short-term response rather than as part of long-term strategy. As more and more of these decisions are made, the overall approach becomes less – rather than more – coherent. And as government lurches from one decision to the next, it succeeds in neither protecting people nor empowering them”.
Well, amen to that. Instead, Clegg went on, we need a national security strategy “based in part on public engagement, involvement and action … putting power and confidence into people’s hands so they are equipped to tackle danger”. So, he said,
“If Britain is to be prepared for emergencies of all kinds, I believe we need to re-establish some form of Civil Defence organisation. And it must be community-based, community-led, and engage people. I want to explore how we can get people to learn skills to serve their community, and share the skills they have, so when emergencies happen – from flooding to a terrorist attack – it isn’t just a small, professional elite who step up, it’s everyone, with their own particular skills. I will set up a working group to look at how best to structure this sort of Community Resilience Force. And I want to use the principles of openness, engagement and individual action across the board, not just in terms of national security.”
Now, admittedly Clegg’s Community Resilience Force is thin on the detail. Well, fair enough; he’s in the closing straight of a leadership contest. But what’s appealing here is the idea of resilience as a bottom-up undertaking. Clegg seemed tacitly to admit that faced with a really serious system shock – a ‘Black Swan’ event – top-down co-ordination will quickly become overwhelmed: even a competent FEMA would have struggled to cope with Katrina, in other words. In such circumstances, a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse (c.f. The Upside of Down).
Or so I thought. But then came the questions. Having spent the weekend reading John Robb’s must-read book Brave New War, I stuck my hand up. Quoting Robb, I observed that insurgents in countries as disparate as Iraq and Nigeria were proving increasingly adept at identifying ‘systempunkt’ nodes: the critical hubs which, if attacked successfully, risk taking down the entire system through a cascading failure. There are plenty such points in our power, water, gas, food and financial systems – just look at today’s FT for a snapshot of how much trade into Britain relies on a couple of over-congested ports, Felixstowe and Southampton.
What would Clegg’s vision of participatory resilience look like in the context of that kind of shock, I wondered? Hmm, said Clegg. Well, community empowerment wouldn’t really be the point in that kind of context. That sort of context is more a matter for the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Right, I nodded, ignorant of the content of said Act but resolved to look it up at the earliest opportunity.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered this afternoon that not only does the CCA 2004 not appear to be based on participatory resilience, it is in fact the epitome, the quintessence, the very archetype of a top-down approach.
Once you’re past the (sensible) parts on emergency planning, you find that the part Clegg was referring to is about overhauling Emergency Powers in UK law. What it says, in essence, is that that in an “emergency” (that’s any event, not necessarily in Britain, which “threatens serious damage” to human welfare or the environment, or “war or terrorism that threatens serious damage to the security of the UK”), then the relevant Secretary of State – that’s any Cabinet member, not just the PM- can do anything.
Oh, you think I exaggerate? Here’s section 22 (1):
Emergency regulations may make any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.
Now, I may not be a politician, but I must admit that I’m struggling slightly to see any particular correlation between (a) this interesting approach to governance and (b) community-based resilience or decentralised, participatory citizenship. If I understand Nick Clegg’s position correctly, then, the executive summary goes something like this:
“Centralised bureaucracies perform badly in conditions of stress, while decentralised citizen-led systems are more robust – except if the conditions of stress are sufficiently stressful, in which case the exact opposite applies.”
Um… glad we got that straight.
