by Alex Evans | Jan 27, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Yale and Columbia universities have just published their 2008 Environmental Performance Index, which grades 149 countries on their sustainability. Here’s the press release and the summary for policymakers. According to the Index, the most environmentally sustainable country in the world is – ready? – Switzerland. Then Sweden, Norway and Finland. The United States comes in at number 39. China is at number 105; India even lower, at 120.
Now when you stop and actually think about these “data”, you begin to experience a creeping sense that something strange is going on here. Start from the recognition that climate change is far and away the most significant global issue that the Index looks at, and then ask yourself: how can the United States be 66 places above China – when US emissions are 19.5 tons of CO2 per person compared to less than 4 tons per capita in China (source: WRI EarthTrends)? How can China score so much better than India, when Indian per capita emissions are between a third and a quarter of those of China? And what is Finland doing in the top four countries with per capita CO2 emissions of more than 14 tons per person? What on earth is going on here? Were the researchers drunk?
Dan Esty, were he here, would presumably point out in a tone of hurt sincerity that his Index aggregates numerous indicators other than per capita emissions. Indoor air pollution, irrigation stress, pesticide regulation, access to sanitation, habitat protection and many others are all part of the mix. Plus there are other climate indicators besides emissions per capita; industrial carbon intensity and emissions per unit of electricity generated are also used to gauge climate friendliness.
But that’s exactly why this “Index” is so pernicious – and deserves to be roundly derided as the crude exercise in bullshit that it is. The point about Esty’s indicator set is that countries score badly for being poor. Notice anything about the bottom 20 countries on the index? How about the fact that 16 of them are in Africa?
Of course if you’re poor, you’re more likely to lack access to sanitation, suffer from poor indoor air quality or struggle in combating infectious disease (another metric used by the Index). But much more significant is the fact that the world’s poorest people and countries are those that tread lightest on the planet in terms of their consumption and carbon footprints. If anything, they deserve to be consuming more of the earth’s resources, including atmospheric space.
Yet what Esty’s extraordinarily misleading Index does is to convey the opposite message: that’s it’s the poor who are most at fault in driving environmental unsustainability. Words fail me.
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The FT’s consumer industries correspondent, Jenny Wiggins – who along with commodities correspondent Javier Blas deserves a medal (or at the very least a rise) for excellence in covering the food prices story over the last year – is looking at changing patterns of food consumption in India in the paper’s Saturday magazine today. The whole story is a terrific piece of feature journalism, but it was this passage towards the end that got me thinking in particular:
India, which is still trying to lift millions of people out of poverty, is having problems satisfying its appetites. One of the reasons the Punjabi dairy farmers are doing so well is that demand for milk, and milk-derived products, is increasing so quickly that farmers can’t keep up. India, despite being the world’s largest producer of milk, temporarily halted exports of milk powder last summer to try and stop domestic milk prices from rising too fast after some dairy farmers were tempted by record high global prices and sold their product to exporters rather than local food producers.
Milk isn’t the only hot commodity. After restarting wheat imports in 2006, for the first time since the late 1990s, India banned wheat exports last year. The country can, of course, try and produce more food. But Ajay Shankar, a government secretary in the ministry of commerce and industry, says that while India wants to increase its agricultural yields (which are low compared with the rest of the world), expanding the amount of land farmed is difficult in a country already struggling to support more than one billion people. In Punjab, the state that produces a hefty chunk of India’s wheat, rice and milk, decades of intensive farming and heavy fertiliser use have taken a heavy toll on the land, and water tables are falling sharply.
Although India’s economy is expanding at about 9 per cent a year, its agricultural sector is slowing, with growth declining from 4.7 per cent between 1992-1997 to just 1.5 per cent between 2002-2006. If India can’t produce enough of its own food, it will have to import more. Shankar says it is unclear how much more food India will need, but acknowledges that significant increases in imports would affect the global economy. ”If we become a major importer of food grains as some fear, clearly it will have an impact on global prices,” he says over tea in his Delhi office.
And India is not the only country expected to import more food in coming years. Over the next decade, per capita income in China is expected to triple, which means the Chinese will be eating more – and better. They are already each eating twice as much meat as they were in 1990 and the country now accounts for one third of all meat eaten in the world, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
Now as Wiggins explains earlier in the article, it’s changing consumption in the BRIC countries, more than falling grain stocks or increasing government support for biofuels, that’s really been driving rising food prices. But if the two most populous of those four nations, India and China, are having to import more and more of their food, that raises the question: who’s going to be growing the supply to meet all this extra demand?
And the thing that struck me, as I pondered this, was that if there’s one region that by rights out to be making a mint out of rising food prices, it’s Africa. Africa, after all, is the continent that the green revolution forgot. While productivity was going through the roof in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, African agriculture remains stubbornly unproductive. Now that agricultural commodities appear finally to be heading out of their interminable slump, there’s a powerful case for investors to tackle the productivity gap, you’d think. So is lady luck finally smiling on Africa’s people?
Well, a big part of the answer to that question depends on whether you’re looking at those of her people in her mushrooming cities, or alternatively those of her people still working the land. If you look at the global statistics on hungry people, most of them are in rural areas. Fully 50 per cent of the world’s undernourished people (400 million souls) are in low income farm households. Another 22 per cent, 176 million people, are rural landless and low income non-farm households; and a further 8 per cent, 64 million people, are poor herders, fishers or forest people dependent on community or public resources.
In fact, only 20 per cent of the world’s undernourished people are in low income urban households – 176 million people – and a great many of them are to be found in China and India rather than Africa. [All stats from John Shaw’s masterly World Food Security: a history since 1945.] So presumably, rising prices for agricultural goods ought to spell good news for all those rural poor in Africa, especially if rising prices also incentivise investment in improving productivity – right?
As I blogged back in October last year, development economist legend Dani Rodrik’s answer is that it depends – but that “it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics”:
…it depends on whether a poor household is a net seller or buyer of food (that is, whether it grows more or less food than it consumes). This means that the rural poor generally tends to benefit from higher food prices, whereas the urban poor generally get hurt. How large the impact is depends, in turn, on the size of the food account as a share of total expenditures or income of a household. And whether the change is good or bad for a nation’s poor as a whole depends on the geography of poverty in a country.
But there’s a factor that Rodrik overlooked: climate change. While northern latitude global breadbaskets like Canada and Russia stand to be net beneficiaries from climate change in the short to medium term, the outlook for Africa is not good at all. Falling yields as a result of climate impacts risk increasing Africa’s needs for imported food, rather than its opportunities to export food. For countries already dependent on imported oil – which, as I noted in December, have already seen all their increases in aid and debt relief from the last three years wiped out by higher fuel import costs – it’s a vicious spiral, especially given that biofuels mean that energy and food prices are now linked.
The irony and injustice here is heartbreaking. Just when one major global trend – rising food prices – looks set finally to offer Africa some kind of a break, we find that in fact other trends – climate change and energy scarcity – may convert higher food prices instead into yet another problem, that despite being created elsewhere, somehow ends up in Africa’s lap.
(For more on the international implications of rising food prices, see my briefing note from December last year.)
Update: see also
– On collision course: scarcity and African patronage systems – 5 March 2008
– Food prices: where to get briefed – 2 March 2008
– Third world debt (the sequel) – 1 March 2008
by Alex Evans | Jan 23, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, South Asia, UK
Interesting to see this little nugget included in the UK / Indian communique resulting from Gordon Brown’s talks with Manmohan Singh:
Long-term convergence of per capita emission rates is an important and equitable principle that should be seriously considered in the context of international climate change negotiations.
Manmohan Singh’s getting pretty good at this – as readers will recall, he had a similar conversation with Angela Merkel after the Heiligendamm G8, which resulted in her pushing per capita convergence steadily through the second half of last year (as for instance in her speech at the UN High Level Event on climate at the end of September last year).
I’ve been arguing since then that European leaders need to get behind Merkel’s position – because espousing convergence as the means of sharing out a safe global emissions budget is Europe’s best shot at securing developing country buy-in to a globally agreed ceiling on greenhouse gas levels in the air, an absolute prerequisite for limiting warming to two degrees C (as Europe says it wants to).
India is the obvious partner in this enterprise. Its per capita emissions (a little over a tonne of CO2 per person) are way below the global average of 4.18 t/CO2 – so any system based on convergence will be plenty profitable for India. (I set out a fuller analysis of this argument in the speech I did for the Institute of Environmental Security after Bali.)
What’s ironic in all of this is that India was widely criticised for being ‘awkward’ at Bali – whilst China was lauded for being willing to talk about ‘commitments’ (even if not binding targets). Manmohan Singh looks, in other words, to be pushing a much more progressive position than his own negotiators. Maybe this is a subtle two track negotiating strategy, maybe it’s just incoherence in the Indian government – the balance of opinion in the climate debate would probably say the latter, but who knows.
Either way, Europe and India have a real chance here to grab the political momentum in climate talks between now and the G8 in Japan, if they can pull together a robust joint strategy.
by Alex Evans | Jan 21, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Adam Boulton at Sky News, travelling with the PM in India, gives us a heads-up of another speech on multilateral reform:
The Prime Minister believes that the world has changed so much since then that we need to rewrite the rules. He is particularly interested in the growing might of the so-called BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – the last two of which he is visiting on this tour. Mr Brown cheered his hosts by repeating Britain’s longstanding view that India should join Britain, France, the US, Russia and China with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. But in return he wants India to do more in the global conflict against fundamentalist terrorism. The Prime Minister also wants the UN to establish a standing rapid response team of judges, police, and civilian experts who can be deployed immediately to stabilize countries immediately following violent conflicts.
He seems to have the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the knock on collapse of Northern Rock on his mind in his ideas for the IMF. Mr Brown says it shoud become the “early warning system for financial turbulence”, with the powers to intervene as soon as potential financial crisis are identified. He wants the World Bank to focust on the environment as well as it’s existing mission of poverty reduction. He wants to set up a global climate change fund (Britain has already earmarked $1.6 billion for a similar project). This would be the carrot for poor countries to do something about their carbon emissions complementing the stick of rich nation threats.
Hang on, you say, isn’t there a slight sense of deja vu here? Why yes: it’s the same as his last speech on multilateral reform – and as I observed at the time, that speech in turn read like a re-run of the 2004 UN High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change. To be fair, it’s hard to find fault with the content. But it would be welcome to hear more about how the PM plans to achieve all this, given the snail’s pace of multilateral reform discussions over the last few years.
by Alex Evans | Jan 9, 2008 | Economics and development
Lawrence Haddad, the thoughtful Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, has published a list of eight events and trends to watch out for in 2008: here it is. All eight are interesting, but none more so than Haddad’s discussion of a largely unnoticed event last year: the World Bank’s quiet revision of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates for developing countries.
The new calculations involved big downward revisions for China, India and Brazil GDP after PPP is factored in. In Africa, thirteen countries were revised upwards – and thirty three downwards. According to Haddad, the new estimates will “significantly increase the estimates of those living under a dollar a day in Africa, Asia and Latin America”. While the new figures don’t contradict the basic reality of strong economic growth in emerging economies, Haddad notes that they do…
1. accentuate inter-country estimates of inequality (the rich country GDP estimates were largely unchanged), thus changing the dynamic of discussions around climate and trade.
2. force us to question our assumptions about the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to economic growth. Has it changed in the last 5 years? This is a key question to be answered given the new development cooperation focus on various forms of economic growth.
3. force us to think about the newly increased number of poor within China and India – are they really living in the midst of a sea with a rising tide that will lift them out of poverty or are they caught in an inequality trap that is every bit as unforgiving as the traps in which Paul Collier’s bottom billion are caught?
If one thing’s missing for me on Haddad’s list, it’s scarcity trends. Rising oil prices and rising food prices are already causing real problems for developing countries that rely on imports of fuel or food – c.f. the IEA’s pronouncement between Christmas and new year that oil prices alone have already offset increased aid and debt relief to African non-oil producers over the last three years.
A pronounced downturn in the US and other western economies may ease the pressure in the shorter term – but the long term trends still look tough for developing countries. As I argued in my presentation last year to the PM’s Strategy Unit on international implications of rising food prices, donors need to pay a lot more attention to scarcity – and resilience to scarcity shocks.
