by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2007 | Conflict and security
Time for an update on the peacekeeping shortage, which gets a lot of well-deserved attention in the current edition of The Economist. Oh that this could have been the last word on the matter – but things have got substantially worse since the magazine was being put to bed in the middle of last week. It looks worryingly like the UN is going to dragged deeper into all-out war in the eastern Congo, where it only narrowly avoided a breakdown earlier this year. Meanwhile, the EU may be about to flunk badly on Chad.
In theory, the Europeans are going to send 4,000 troops and 10 helicopters to Chad to operate alongside UN police. This would be the EU’s biggest mission in Africa to date – but I’ve found a lot of officials are pretty skeptical that it’ll work. The main problem is, by now grindingly familiar: nobody wants to risk any helicopters for the mission. And without helicopters, the troops will sit trapped in vulnerable bases, etc, etc.
After this shortage became clear at a pledging conference in Brussels last week, one EU diplomat was briefing that “cancelling the mission is an option.” The strain has started to show in public. Just before the meeting, Ireland’s defense minister Willie O’Dea was offering troops, but explaining that his helicopters can’t operate beyond the Emerald Isle. He did have ideas about who could, but they weren’t making him any friends:
Asked whether the Darfur spillover mission could proceed without these aircraft, O’Dea said: “In short – no.”
He specified Germany and Italy as two countries with “ample military resources, and so far they haven’t made any contribution to this particular mission.”
The German government declined to comment Tuesday. Last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said his country was willing to provide only “political support.”
The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed no troops would be sent to Chad and indicated no comment would be made in response to O’Dea. But the Italian Foreign Ministry pointed out Italy is the leading contributor to the U.N. force in Lebanon and has troops in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
And, the Ministry might have added, they are quite nervous enough about those deployments as it is. While O’Dea was calling for Rome to step forward, his Italian counterpart Arturo Parisi was trying to rank the problems on his agenda:
Arturo Parisi said potential change in Kosovo trumped short-term security concerns elsewhere, describing Afghanistan, for example, as “stable in its instability”.
“Kosovo is surely (the biggest concern). It is exposed to a change and therefore a possible stress,” Parisi told Reuters in an interview. “It is also the closest region (to Italy).”
And Lebanon? It’s “unsettled”. While “stable in its instability” is an interesting new category for peacekeeping academics to set about defining (it’s certainly a lot more revealing than “fragile states”) the overall message is crystal clear. Don’t expect the EU to play the peacekeeping (air) cavalry, especially in a second-order crisis like Chad.
So if the UN’s overstretched and the EU’s over-committed (or at least claims to be), who’s left? Optimists keep on pointing to China, which has gradually been increasing its UN commitments as part of its Africa strategy. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno was in Beijing last week to press for more contributions. But this weekend, one Darfuri rebel leader welcomed the first Chinese troops to deploy there with a call to quit Sudan immediately, on the grounds that Beijing is complicit with Khartoum. “I am not saying I will attack them. I will not say I will not attack them,” quotes the BBC.
It’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of despair.
by Mark Weston | Nov 22, 2007 | Africa
You know you’re in trouble when you need combat camels to save you. The latest masterstroke in the world’s response to the genocide in Darfur is to import specially trained Indian camels to transport African Union and United Nations peacekeepers around the province. The Sudanese government, the main aggressor in the conflict, has helicopter gunships, but the peacekeepers will have to chase these on humpback because the West won’t send in its own helicopters.
All is not lost, however – Darfurians can be reassured that the camels will have gone through a “crash course in combat” where they will learn how to crawl and, according to the head of the Indian army’s camel division, perform other “soldierly movements.” Phew.
by Alex Evans | Oct 1, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
Hurrah – Dani Rodrik has a blog. Rodrik is a great international development thinker and a co-author – together with Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian – of my favourite development think piece of 2005, which was absolutely required reading in DFID when it came out.
Anyway, Rodrik’s just been blogging about food prices and poverty, where he observes the existence of two camps cheerfully talking past one another. On one hand, advocates of the Doha Development Round trumpted that higher food prices from agricultural liberalisation will benefit the poor. On the other hand, people worried about the effect of biofuels on food prices (like me) argue that higher food prices will be bad news for the poor. But Rodrik points out that:
The real answer of course is that 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.
So as an economist loves to say, it depends. But it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics.
A fair point. But Rodrik overlooks the gorilla in the room: climate change. As we’ve argued here before, the effect of biofuels is just one driver of rising food prices – along with other factors like weather variability, water scarcity, rising demand in China and India and so on. While biofuels is the the key driver among these for now, it’s climate change that is likely to become the real biggie over time.
And the thing about climate change, as IPCC assessment reports make clear, is that while climate change will likely lead to higher food prices, farmers in the poorest countries are likely to become worse rather than better off – since they’ll be hardest hit by the effects of climate change. William Cline, an expert at the Center for Global Development, has a new book out about this which should be required reading in donor agencies:
Developing countries, many of which have average temperatures that are already near or above crop tolerance levels, are predicted to suffer an average 10 to 25 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s, assuming a so-called “business as usual” scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, according to the study. Rich countries, which typically have lower average temperatures, will experience a much milder or even positive average effect, ranging from an 8 percent increase in productivity to a 6 percent decline.
Individual developing countries face even larger declines. India, for example, could see a drop of 30 to 40 percent. Some smaller countries suffer what could only be described as an agricultural productivity collapse. Sudan, already wracked by civil war fueled in part by failing rains, is projected to suffer as much as a 56 percent reduction in agricultural production potential; Senegal, a 52 percent fall.
by David Steven | Jul 30, 2007 | Conflict and security
According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Lots of hopeful coverage last week about the find, made by Boston University researchers, of a massive underground lake in Darfur. The Independent was pretty typical:
In the dry wasteland of Sudan’s war-racked Darfur region, the imprint of an ancient 8,000sq-mile underground lake has been discovered by geologists from Boston University. If confirmed, a lake as big as the area of Wales could replenish the region for a century. It is also raising hopes that one cause of the devastating civil war could be alleviated if drinking water is pumped to the surface.
The Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz, who led the research, hopes up to 1,000 deep wells would bring some relief to an area where conflict between nomadic herders and farmers has been exacerbated by climate change and dwindling water supplies.
But a thoughtful article in the New York Times yesterday argues that the find may, if confirmed, be as much a curse as a blessing. Alex de Waal is quoted as saying,
Like all resources water can be used for good or ill … If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.
Exactly right. In resource-scarce contexts, environmental goods are assets: so the key questions are ones like: who owns them? Who gets to use them? Who gets to lend them? And who gets to trade them? Unfortunately, most donor agencies these days are pretty bad at integrating these kinds of question into their development programming. But as resource scarcity takes centre stage in an increasing number of developing countries, watch this space…
