The MEPs and Iraq: strong on details, weak on strategy?

by | Mar 4, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa

Last week, I noted that the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq’s reconstruction.  I’ve now read the text in full.  It’s a detailed set of proposals, built on a strong case that most current European funding to Iraq might as well go down a drain, and it gets 60% of the way to a strategic alternative.   Here’s a summary:

  • The EU should move from supporting reconstruction to governance: the bulk of European money earmarked for Iraq is currently committed to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI), which is jointly managed by the World Bank and UN.  The MEPs think this is poorly managed, isn’t transparent and (sin of sins) doesn’t give the EU “visibility”.  They skip over the fact that many EU members have basically ignored the fund – France has donated a whopping $31,800 to it since 2003 – but they’re probably on the money overall.  Except, as they point out, nobody’s quite sure where the money is.  The alternative is to shift towards “projects focussed on technical assistance and capacity-building in the fields of rule of law, financial management, democratic governance and human rights.”  
  • Link the money to missions: although the MEPs may not like the way IRFFI’s been managed, they’re happy for a lot of governance work to be run through UN agencies.  But they also seem to like the idea of getting EU personnel to assist in police reform and “large-scale disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration”.  They support greater European involvement in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq – the US currently has 25 PRTs around the country, although they focus on infrastructure rather than all that governance jazz.  In addition, the British and Italians lead one each already, but this is one area on which the MEPs are coy about what to do.  More European personnel in U.S.-led units?  Stand-alone Euro-PRTs?
  • Fly the flag: what the MEPs really seem to want is that elusive “visibility” though.  EU members that don’t have diplomatic missions in Baghdad should set them up.  Security allowing, current European offices in provincial cities like Erbil should raise their profile, and so forth.

It’s this flying the flag dimension that worries me a bit.  I like the idea of targeting money on governance, and there’s a case for deploying smallish EU missions to handle issues like police reform.  To date, the only EU-flagged mission “to” Iraq is a justice reform program largely based in, erm, Brussels organizing training courses and (ah the romance) work experience for Iraqis in Europe.  Slightly closer-range support should be an option – although the MEPs have doubts, and argue that the EU should look at how to use Private Security Companies to deliver missions.  

But wherever the personnel are found, “visibility” is not a strategy.  And here the MEPs mix realism (for the time being, it’s the U.S. that provides the strategic framework for EU engagement) with optimism (over time, the UN should take on that role).  They rightly note that the UN has adopted a greater role in Iraq in recent months, and they urge the EU to support its efforts to promote political reconciliation.  But they avoid the question of what happens after the U.S. elections, and how the EU’s members should react to the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal – or, if McCain wins, a whole lot more counter-insurgency. 

So I give the report an A+ for its basic instinct (the EU can’t desert Iraq); an A for its overall logic (the EU needs to use its money better); and a B+ for its tactical proposals (reduced from a B++ due to over-use of “visibility”).  But the pupil doesn’t really want to study strategy, so I can’t really offer a mark for that.

Food prices: where to get briefed

by | Mar 2, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development

[Last updated: May 30th] 

Now that food prices are moving fast up the agenda, you might want to check out some of the wider briefing available on the web.  Here are some sources worth a look:

Finally, a couple of plugs on stuff that I’m involved in:

  • I’ve published a briefing paper (April 2008) on why prices are rising and what it means for development as part of a joint CIC / Chatham House project that I’m leading on international implications of rising food prices.  Chatham House also has a major research project underway on UK food policy in the 21st century, and released a set of scenarios for UK food supply in May. 
  • And of course, we’ll keep tracking the issue closely here on Global Dashboard – we’ll file everything we do on this under the Food Prices section.

Third world debt (the sequel)

by | Mar 1, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system

Lots of concerns lately about stagflation, given how commodity prices have continued their inexorable rise even as the US economy falters.  Inevitably, some have wondered whether it means it’s the 1970s all over again. But here’s another reason to think about dusting off those flares: what about the risk of a new third world debt crisis? 

Consider how rising commodity prices – especially food and energy – are affecting low income countries.  I saw a very worried-sounding email this week from UNDP in Yemen, noting that the country is 75% dependent on food imports, that the price of a bag of wheat is now over two and a half times its level a year ago – and that fuel subsidies are already going to absorb 30% of government expenditures this year “against a backdrop of declining revenues due to a combination of reduced production and rising local consumption of oil and its derivatives”.  Not good.

On top of that, consider how much aid is being diverted towards coping with these price increases.  As I noted back at the start of the year, we already know from the International Energy Agency that oil importing low income countries in Africa have seen all of their aid and debt relief over the past three years offset by increased costs for energy imports.  That’s before food prices are even factored into the equation – and as WFP head Josette Sheeran’s alarm bell-sounding interview last week underscores, there are plenty of problems on that front too.

If aid isn’t enough to offset the problem, then it follows that some countries may have to take out loans to cope with the balance of payments problems.  One place they might look to is the IMF; the Institute of Development Studies’ Stephany Griffith-Jones made such a proposal in January, when she wrote in a letter to the FT that

When oil prices went up in the 1970s, the International Monetary Fund created low conditionality oil lending facilities. These helped sustain growth and facilitate adjustment in many developing economies. Should not a similar facility be created now in the IMF to ease the burden, especially on the poorest countries? Or should not existing IMF facilities, like the different windows of the Poverty Reduction Growth Facility, be modified to provide rapid, significant, cheap, low conditionality loans to poor countries facing the external shock of a large deterioration of their terms of trade?

The Fund itself subsequently confirmed that this was already happening: “several countries already receiving support under the International Monetary Fund’s poverty reduction and growth facility have recently requested additional lending in response to a terms of trade shock”.

But of course it may not be the Fund that emerges as the key lender in all this.  Just as in the 1970s, the world economy is suddenly awash with petrodollars from newly flush oil producers – hence all the fuss about the rapidly evolving role of sovereign wealth funds.  China, too, is also starting to invest some of its vast dollar reserves – now around $1,500 trillion – in Africa.  So far, these investments have concentrated on commodity producers rather than importers, but this could change if China comes to regard balance of payments lending as an inexpensive means of purchasing influence more generally.

In all cases, the underlying question on balance of payments loans to poor countries is: what happens if – as many commentators believe – the current food and oil price shock isn’t just a cyclical blip, but is instead a longer term structural shift?  Are low income countries just supposed to keep borrowing? 

One to add to the agenda when food prices come up at the IMF / World Bank spring meetings, perhaps…

Welcome to the ‘Doomsday Vault’

by | Feb 25, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.

It’s pretty barren.

No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of its inhospitable climate and remoteness. The average winter temperature on Svalbard is around minus 14C. The vault is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, doors armoured with steel plate and a home guard of free-roaming polar bears.

As the world’s first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet’s main food crops and has been designed as a latter-day Noah’s Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.

The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway’s Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the “perfect place” for seed storage.

The vault is made up of three large, airtight, refrigerated cold-storage chambers which are housed in a long trident-shaped tunnel bored through a layer of permafrost in to a mountain of sandstone and limestone on the archipelago.

Scientists involved in the project point out that some of the world’s biodiversity had already been lost as a result of war or natural disaster with gene vaults disappearing in Iraq and Afghanistan following the conflicts there and while seed banks in the Philippines and Honduras have been wiped out from natural disasters. The vault is the world’s last line of defence against extinction.

‘Every nation has been invited by the Norwegian government to place its seeds in this vault. It’s the last line of defence against extinction for all the crops we have, and the most long-lasting, most futuristic and most positive contribution to humanity being made by the international community today.’

Each country’s seeds will be stored inside heat-sealed, four-ply aluminium envelopes originally designed for use by the military, placed inside sealed boxes, stored on metal shelving and secured inside an air-locked chamber. Each packet will hold one representative crop sample, and about 500 seeds depending on their size. They will remain the property of the country that donated them. This last part is very important as according to researchers at the World Vegetable Centre (I kid you not) in Taiwan, up to 27 “orphan” crops with a value of US$100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries. Orphan crops like cowpea and groundnut are not minor or insignificant crops but are crucial to regional food security.

Free Kosovo, Week 1: Albanians winning on points

by | Feb 23, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia

While everyone still seems to be aghast that Kosovo’s declaration of independence somehow hasn’t resulted in unrestrained Sweetness and Light flooding across the Western Balkans, the general media line that “we are teetering on the edge of a precipice” isn’t entirely sustainable.  Yes, sustained violence by the Kosovo Serbs has made life exceedingly difficult for the international presence.  And yes, the assault on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade is a reminder that this isn’t just about a few weeks of posturing and rhetoric – people are very angry.

And as I noted a few days ago, the Kosovo Serbs may have identified clever tactics to exploit NATO’s weaknesses.  But for all that, I’d still be pretty satisfied with how things have gone if I were a Kosovo Albanian.  Five reasons why:

  1. The thuggish faction among the Kosovo Albanians has been kept in check: it’s clear that a lot of the Serb provocations over the last week have been aimed at getting the Kosovo Albanians to reply in kind.  Before independence, UN officials almost all assumed that “some idiot will burn down a Serb’s house in week one”.  That would give Belgrade a huge publicity boost.  But that hasn’t happened – yet.
  2. The thuggish faction in Serbia is winning all the attention: Belgrade’s best hope for managing the crisis was to keep looking like the injured party.  The huge peaceful rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. embassy was a good example of how to get that message across: a nation mourns, etc.  But then a few cretins go after the embassy, and the headline is: a nation riots.  No wonder that moderate President Boris Tadic and his allies have been lamenting “one of Belgrade’s saddest days”. 
  3. Russian rhetoric is already starting to look bankrupt: there’s been much excitement because Russia’s ambassador to NATO has talked of using “brute force” if the EU and NATO break with the UN.  Well, perhaps we are on the road to World War III, but another interpretation is that Moscow is actually pretty short on leverage and has thus had to play this card extremely early.  Remember, Boris Yeltsin warned in 1999 that a NATO intervention in Kosovo would result in “a European war for sure and maybe a world war.”  New crisis, same old play-book – even if the smell of vodka is less these days.
  4. The Europeans aren’t making utter fools of themselves: things looked bad at the start of the week when Spain signaled that it couldn’t support independence, but Spanish NATO troops have still been involved in handling disturbances.  The big question was whether Germany would waver – it hasn’t.  I’m not as confident as Daniel Korski that the EU has crossed a rubicon, but it hasn’t turned tail either.
  5. Lots of money is coming Kosovo’s way: welcoming Kosovo’s independence, George Bush pledged $335 million in aid – that’s about three times the level of U.S. aid last year.  And there’ll be more to come from the EU.  Of course, much of it will disappear one way or another, but would you say no?

It may all go horribly wrong tomorrow, or in a week, or a month or whatever.  But don’t be fooled by all the shots of burning border-posts – by the (admittedly low) standards of post-Yugoslav state formation, this isn’t a bad start.