by Richard Gowan | Feb 6, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, North America
While the UK struggles with snow, spare a thought for Kentucky, which is suffering from an ice storm:
The storm has been blamed for 27 deaths in Kentucky, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators. More than 175,000 homes and businesses served by 55 water systems remained under orders to boil water, emergency officials said.
But there’s good news for my GD colleagues who major on community resilience:
The chairwoman of an Ohio County school board converted a middle school into a shelter. And in Murray, Murray State University’s student-run radio station was the only source of communication.
An unexpected problem has emerged, however: a peanut panic.
Making matters worse, because of a recent salmonella outbreak, federal officials on Thursday recalled all “ready to eat” meal kits that included packets of peanut butter. The packets had been distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In a news conference on Thursday, Gov. Steve Beshear tried to send a reassuring message to residents who had received the food packages. He said there had been no reports of food-related illnesses, even though more than 100,000 emergency packages had been given out in storm recovery efforts.
Mr. Beshear said he had eaten one of the peanut butter products and suffered no ill effects. As an alternative, emergency officials were trying to hire a private food vendor to secure hundreds of thousands of prepared meals, the governor said.
Yum yum.
by Alex Evans | Feb 4, 2009 | East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia
As David just noted, this morning’s Lex column in the FT is relatively upbeat about the dangers of protectionism, arguing that “the disaggregation of global supply chains, the source of the huge efficiencies that companies pass on to consumers, will not be easily undone.”
Whether or not that’s right (and like Willem Buiter, Martin Wolf is also a good deal more downcast than the Lex team), it’s interesting to compare today’s Lex column with what they had to say about capital flows to emerging markets just a couple of days ago. Here’s the bit that made me sit up:
Take Brazil and India, the globe’s ninth and 12th biggest economies, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest estimates. While the developed world is expected to shrink by 2 per cent this year, the IMF reckons Brazil will grow by 2 per cent, and India by 5 per cent. Why? One answer is that they have stable banks, relatively closed economies, and large internal markets. This has insulated them from much of the global turmoil.
The contrast with East Asia is stark. Singapore’s economy shrank at an annualised 17 per cent rate at the end of last year, South Korea by some 20 per cent. Yet this is not for lack of capital. Asian economies, after all, are global creditors. Their economies have shrunk instead because they are heavily oriented towards collapsing international trade. Meanwhile, their local markets are undeveloped and weak. Asia’s challenge is how to best deploy its accumulated surpluses to boost domestic demand.
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by David Steven | Jan 30, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system
Image Author: mike_is_scrumptious
Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.
Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.
Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.
This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.
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by Richard Gowan | Jan 29, 2009 | Europe and Central Asia, Off topic
OK, it’s only NYC East Village Gastropub “EU” – but it makes for a snappy photo:
What went wrong? The original review from New York magazine rings a bell:
The menu at E.U. is a schizophrenic mélange of received trends and styles, centering on European comfort foods. You can get German sausages squeezed into a bun made of fresh pretzel dough, and two styles of Euro burger: the German, topped with liverwurst and bacon, and the Cheddar-and-gravy-smothered English (mine was overdone).
Apply your own similes and metaphors as required.
by Richard Gowan | Jan 28, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Off topic
Alex has got a good deal of media attention for his excellent new Chatham House report on future of food crises but the Daily Telegraph got the real scoop – by making up a scare story about the death of the Sunday Roast:
Researchers at Chatham House, a think-tank, found that a recent fall in the price of butter, milk and bread was likely to be only a “temporary reprieve”.
The price hikes would hit the price of beef, pork and lamb harder because they are reared on proportionately more grain than “white meat” like chicken.
Alex Evans, the report’s author, said the likely effect would be to make Britons less reliant on beef as a core part of the nation’s diet.
“It will become more expensive,” said Mr Evans. “We are not saying people won’t be able to have a Sunday roast but we will be eating less red meat in future.”
Now, there are some kill-joys who might point out that Alex’s report doesn’t actually mention the Sunday Roast once, but Global Dashboard has an established track-record of commentary in defense of fine British food: check out Evans and Gowan on Bubble, Squeak and eels last July. But the fact that pork prices are set to sky-rocket may explain an American internet phenomenon noted by the NYT today: a BBQ recipe going viral.
This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.
Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.
Leaving aside the new media aspect of all this, I’d argue that Americans are wisely stuffing down bacon and sausage before the prices head back up. If you want to make your own Bacon Explosion, the recipe’s here. My own urge to start layering the bacon wrapping was reduced by the discovery that the outcome looks like, well, you know…
For those more interested in making a quick buck than a Bacon Copralite (google it yourself), switch over to Porkworld, Latin America’s leading swine-trade website, which naturally features quotations from one Alex Evans…
