by Alex Evans | Oct 30, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Regular readers will know that we’ve been watching food prices rise steadily over the last few months with increasing concern – see the Scarcity category of posts for the backstory, and also this excellent in-depth analysis piece that the FT published last week. Today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s head, Jacques Diouf, had some blunt words in an interview with the FT:
“Many [countries] will have to take hard decisions because of the impact of food prices. In some countries there will be price controls, some will scrap import tariffs on food to minimise the impact of rising costs and others will increase food subsidies … If prices continue to rise, I would not be surprised if we began to see food riots,” Mr Diouf said, noting that in the past year, Mexico, Yemen and Burkina Faso had all witnessed social unrest over high food prices.”
Concern at FAO is clearly rising steadily; last week, the FT quoted the head of its grain trading division as saying that “the world is gradually losing the buffer that it used to have to protect against big swings [in the market]. There is a sense of panic.” But Diouf has a plan:
At the FAO’s annual meeting in Rome next month, Mr Diouf will propose a “high-level conference on world food security” that would aim to agree on measures to cool down rising food prices.
Interesting idea – and welcome to see Diouf seeking to raise the political temperature on food prices. But it still leaves the question: how much can an FAO summit on its own really achieve? Step back for a moment and consider what’s actually driving the increase in food prices. Here are Jenny Wiggins and Javier Blas last week in the big FT analysis piece mentioned earlier:
Some of the price rises are the result of temporary problems, such as drought in Australia, and diseases, such as blue-ear in Chinese pigs. But there is a more permanent increase in demand from Asia, as richer populations in China and India demand more protein, and from the biofuel industry, which is on course to consume about 30 per cent of the US corn crop in 2010 – developments that will underpin prices for the medium term. The FAO estimates that those structural new trends will help to push the cost of agricultural commodities in the next decade between 20 and 50 per cent above their last 10-year average.
Problem is, these challenges – droughts, affluence in China and India, demand for biofuels driven by high energy prices – lie well beyond FAO’s sphere of influence. Even if ministers attending the forthcoming FAO summit agreed to cap food costs, it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to deliver it, given the sprawl of drivers at play – just as environment ministers have a bad habit of signing glitzy treaty declarations that then (with a few exceptions like the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances) comprehensively fall down during the implementation phase.
But none of this is to deny that there genuinely is a problem – and one that we can expect to get a lot worse once long term scarcity trends like climate change and water depletion get stirred into the mix. So what should Mr Diouf do?
Here’s a starter for ten. Instead of going all out for a meaningless summit declaration full of warm words, big targets, no new funds and no compliance mechanism, Diouf should start the slow, painstaking process of building shared awareness of the fact that we have a major geopolitical scarcity problem in the post. While the first stirrings of the problem are already clear, he should recognise that building consensus on the nature of the problem could take a decade or more; just consider the fact that eighteen years elapsed between the IPCC’s establishment in 1988 and 2006 when consensus on the reality of climate change really coalesced.
The first step, then, is simply to get the key agencies talking to each other. Anyone who’s spent any time working in international bureaucracies knows that the most fundamental fact about them is that they are organised in silos that don’t talk to each other. The problem is bad enough within individual agencies or government departments; it’s even more serious when two rival agencies work on the same area. But even that is still simple compared to trying to build a relationship between agencies that barely know each other exists.
That’s where we are today with the international agencies who will have to manage the geopolitics of scarce oil, scarce water, scarce food and scarce atmospheric space. Lots of staff at IEA won’t even know what FAO stands for; and vice versa.
So Diouf should go ahead and organise his summit. But he should also organise a retreat for 50 key staff from 50 key agencies relevant to the management of scarcity, and start building the shared awareness that they’ll need in the next few years: mapping the most vulnerable countries, how food scarcity could exacerbate conflict flashpoints, figuring out how currency fluctuations could affect the situation, running scenarios for $150 a barrel oil, reading William Cline’s CGD research on how climate change will affect developing country agricultural productivity, working out what kind of developing country governance frameworks have proved effective at managing local scarcity, devising ways of building scarcity awareness into peacekeeping operations (as DPKO are doing with Darfur)… the list is endless.
Building the barest bones of a common language that all the relevant players can speak may seem a modest first step, especially as the clamour for kneejerk responses builds. But it is an indispensable one too.
by Alex Evans | Oct 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, North America
Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050” kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,
That’s three months before there’s not enough water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans to take showers, flush their toilets and cook. Three months before there’s not enough water in parts of the Chattahoochee River for power plants to make the steam necessary to generate electricity. Three months before part of the river runs dry. “We’ve never experienced this situation before,” state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch said of the record-breaking drought and fast-falling lake.
As the New York Times observed over the weekend, “the response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion”. The drought afflicting Georgia has been underway for more than a year. Yet:
All summer … fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.
Atlanta’s waking up to to the juggernaut bearing down on it, as the lakes on which it depends – Lake Lanier and Allatoona Lake – sink lower and lower, has been sudden. On September 28, Couch ordered an immediate ban on all outdoor water use, the most severe step laid out in state drought plans – but warned as she did so that, “my calculation is it may be inadequate”. She would be “reaching out”, she went on, to the US Army Corps of Engineers, to lobby for more water to be released from corps-run lakes (of which Lake Lanier is one).
By October 11, the full extent of the problem – including the fact that only three months’ worth of water remained, in the face of a forecast for another dry, warm winter – was becoming clear. Couch and her officials began drawing up a more demanding crisis plan to figure out where the pain should land. Couch commented at the time, “there has to be a balance between determining how much water we can conserve against how much lost jobs and lost economy there is. You don’t do that lightly.”
Then, on Friday last week – with drinking water down to 80 days – Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue staked out his position: it’s not our fault. Carol Couch’s attempts to “reach out” to the Corps of Engineers had been met by a blunt refusal, based on federally mandated protection for mussels and sturgeon downstream in the Sunshine State. The governor’s office claimed bitterly that “the amount of water the corps sends downstream is about double what Mother Nature would provide to federally protected mussels living in Florida’s Apalachicola River”, and promptly sued the Corps. (Even the local paper conceded on its editorial page, “Let’s be honest: It’s not about the mussels. The struggle for control of water flowing down the drought-stricken Chattahoochee River is about money and politics and human frailties such as jealousy, greed, laziness and procrastination.”) On Saturday, as the story went national, the Governor declared a state of emergency for more than half the state, and requested federal assistance.
Yet as the New York Times observed, “these last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth”. As Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of engineering firm CH Guernsey commented, “we have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency”.
True and necessary as such statements of tough love may be, they are of scant consolation to the people of Georgia – who, as Katie Couric’s flagship news program on CBS reported yesterday, are feeling “rising panic”:
Across North Georgia, thousands of people are digging private wells, nervous that their regular water’s about to run dry. “The phone is just ringing off the hook,” said Bob Askew, the owner of a well-drilling company. “It’s like working at a telethon or something.”
So here comes another test of urban resilience – and one that emphatically illustrates the importance of futures and horizon scanning (as well as the fact that in the US, when you need a scapegoat for your incompetent water management, you can always blame the Corps of Engineers). And as a thoughtful feature in the NYT magazine on Sunday suggests, that what’s happening in Atlanta may well be a preview of coming attractions:
A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.
An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
by David Steven | Oct 19, 2007 | North America, South Asia
130 people reported dead in Pakistan and Scrappleface – the right-wing answer to the Onion – sees an opportunity to use its wit to settle some political scores. Nice.
As the death toll climbed past 130, with nearly 400 injured, in a suicide-bomb assassination attempt on former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned the attack as “symptomatic of fundamentalist Islam’s crusade against equality for women.”
Rep. Pelosi, D-CA, said the fact that a prominent female politician was targeted has shaken her thinking about the war on terror.
“This misogynistic massacre has finally got it through my thick skull what President Bush has been trying to tell us for years,” she said. “These terrorists have no legitimate political grievance, no conscience, and no place in civilized society. We must crush them wherever they are to prevent the spread of their poisonous ideology and brutal tactics.”
Rep. Pelosi said that when news of the attack broke, she held a conference call with Senators Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Barbara Boxer, D-CA. The three women agreed that “if these evil men are willing to attack a beautiful, charismatic female politician overseas, there’s not much to stop them from trying it on U.S. soil.”
The three lawmakers plan to introduce legislation next week to increase funding for the surge in Iraq, to finish the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, and to remove barriers to eavesdropping by U.S. spies on suspected terrorist communications at home and abroad.
“These woman-haters need to know that we mean business,” Rep. Pelosi said. “And to those who commit these atrocities against women, I say, we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer negotiate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.“
by Alex Evans | Jul 12, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Regular readers of GlobalDashboard know that we’re big fans of fourth generation warfare theorists William Lind and John Robb. Both writers have warned persistently that 4GW isn’t just something that happens “over there”, in Anbar or Helmand. It’s “over here”, too, whether “here” is low-intensity war in Mexico (see the Economist on Mexico’s drugs conflict a couple of weeks ago), or proliferating use of 4GW tactics by home-grown insurgents in the UK.
Lind, reviewing John Robb’s new book, summarises the latter’s conclusions approvingly:
Robb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security but in de-centralization. What Robb calls “dynamic decentralized resilience” means that, in concrete terms, security is again to be found close to home. Local police departments, local sources of energy such as roof top solar arrays – I would add local farms that use sustainable agricultural practices – are the key to dealing with system perturbations. To the extent we depend on large, globalist, centralized networks we are insecure.
John Robb, though, thinks that as the use of 4GW tactics “over here” proliferates, things will develop much further:
Members of the middle class will (take) matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security — as they do now with education – and shore up delivery of critical services. These “armored suburbs” will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boost their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems.
And in case you thought the idea of decentralised local energy and food independence was only for survivalists in Michigan: we have news for you.
by Alex Evans | Jul 10, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Usually when you see phrases like “oil crunch in five years”, you assume that you’re being addressed by a peak-oiler who is about to go on to explain to you the composition of the canned food stash that he’s secured in his attic. So when you realise that you’re actually reading the FT, and the people using the phrase are the International Energy Agency, it’s easy to do a double-take. But there it is, in black and white (well, pink):
In its starkest warning yet on the world’s fuel outlook, the International Energy Agency said “oil looks extremely tight in five years time” and there are “prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn of the decade”.
The IEA said that supply was falling faster than expected in mature areas, such as the North Sea or Mexico, while projects in new provinces such as the Russian Far East, faced long delays. Meanwhile consumption is accelerating on strong economic growth in emerging countries.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that supply from non-members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will increase at an annual pace of 1 per cent, or less than half the rate of the demand rise.
The widening gap between rising consumption and lagging non-Opec supply will force Opec to sharply increase its production in the next five years.
Lawrence Eagles, head of the IEA’s oil market division, told the Financial Times: “If we get to the point were there is insufficient supply, the only way to balance the market will be through higher prices and a drop in demand.
IEA’s gloomy pronouncement comes within a week of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation forecast of food price increases of between 20 and 50 per cent over the next decade, thanks to biofuels, climate change, water scarcity and increased demand (see GlobalDashboard’s one pager on how scarcity trends intersect here).
All of which raises the rather pertinent question: Does anyone, at either national or global level, have a plan to manage all this – or indeed clarity over whose job it is to worry about such a cross-cutting trend?
P.S. If you’re now wondering what you should have stashed in the attic: help is at hand.
