Food Experts Worry as World Population and Hunger Grow – NYTimes.com

As of July over 30 countries had food emergencies.  Technology doesn’t seem to be enough;  how will we feed the world, and how much of it is the result of our process of organization?

“The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn’t work,” said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. “There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger.”

But the conundrum is whether the food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it, at prices they can afford. Poverty and difficult growing conditions plague the places that need new production most, namely sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

A straw poll of the experts in Rome on whether the world will be able to feed its population in 40 years underscored the uncertainty surrounding that question: 73 said yes, 49 said no and 15 abstained.

via Food Experts Worry as World Population and Hunger Grow – NYTimes.com.

Book Review: “Crude World” – WSJ.com

An interesting journey exploring several countries linked together by the curse of oil–Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Russia.  The book is filled with implications for energy policy as well as geopolitics–not to mention its an interesting look at the corrupting influence of easy money on a state:

The moral pit of the oil world is not Russia but Equatorial Guinea, a country in west-central Africa ruled by the violent dictator and torturer Teodoro Obiang, with whom Big Oil made a deal in the 1990s. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to extract oil from the country has done nothing for the local economy, which remains one of the poorest on Earth. Mr. Maass’s visit to a Marathon natural-gas facility in Equatorial Guinea is like a visit to another planet. Everything is imported, even the South Asian labor. The cement for construction is produced on site; the facility has its own water-purification and sewage system. There is almost no contact with the host country. The profits go to Marathon, a Houston company, and to Mr. Obiang’s private bank accounts. A man given to excess, Mr. Obiang once bought, for $49.5 million, a Boeing 737, in which the bathroom fixtures were gold-plated.

via Book Review: “Crude World” – WSJ.com.

In for the Long Haul? Trouble with the Coalition of the Af-Pak Willing?

The Europeans begin to tire in Afghanistan:

We are all convinced that it would be best for everyone, whoever they are, to remove our conspicuous presence from Afghanistan quickly,” Mr. Berlusconi said.

Senior elected officials in Germany and Britain have also expressed weariness with the mission as violence has increased and casualties have mounted.

via Italy Looks at Afghan Pullout After Deadly Blast – NYTimes.com.

But the larger question looms?  Is this war winnable?  If its a culture of corruption on both sides (Karzai’s government, as well as the Taliban), can a satisfactory outcome be achieved?  Is this the Balkans, the Korean “conflict,” or something else?  From a recently returned captain who served two tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, from Wed NYT Op-Ed:

I have just returned from Afghanistan, where I spent seven months as a special adviser to NATO’s director of communications. On listening tours across the country, we left behind the official procession of armored S.U.V.’s, bristling guns and imposing flak jackets that too often encumber coalition forces when they arrive in local villages. Dressed in civilian clothes and driven in ordinary cars, we were able to move around in a manner less likely to intimidate and more likely to elicit candor.

The recurring complaint I heard from Afghans centered on the untenable encroachment of government corruption into their daily lives — the homeowner who has to pay a bribe to get connected to the sewage system, the defendant who tenders payment to a judge for a favorable verdict. People were so incensed with the current government’s misdeeds that I often heard the disturbing refrain: “If Karzai is re-elected, then I am going to join the Taliban.”

Today, on Diane Rehm (NPR) was one of the most informative discussions I have heard in a while on the situation, for anyone interested in really understanding the policy nuances of this challenging issue for the US, NATO allies, and, of course, the Karzai Government.

Options for Afghanistan

The top U-S commander in Afghanistan warns that without more troops, mission failure is a possibility. Diane and a panel of experts discuss the situation there and the benefits and drawbacks of sending more troops to Afghanistan.

• Paul Pillar, is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. and a former CIA National Intelligence officer.
• Karin von Hippel, codirector of the CSIS Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project and senior fellow with the CSIS International Security Program.
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Senior Correspondent and Associate Editor at The Washington Post

via WAMU 88.5 FM American University Radio – The Diane Rehm Show.

Norman Borlaug dies at 95; revolutionized grain agriculture and won Nobel Peace Prize — latimes.com

Want to change the world? Become a scientist.  RIP Dr. Borlaug:

In the 1940s, when the specter of famine was stalking much of the world, Borlaug collected thousands of strains of wheat from around the globe and tediously crossbred them to produce varieties that were much higher yielding and resistant to the diseases that were destroying crops.

He spearheaded efforts to spread these new strains around the world, sparking an explosion in crop yields that helped lead devastated countries toward food self-sufficiency.

In 1960, before his techniques were widely adopted, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, largely as a result of Borlaug’s pioneering techniques, it was producing 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people — using only 1% more land. India and Pakistan are now agriculturally self-sufficient as a result of his intervention.

via Norman Borlaug dies at 95; revolutionized grain agriculture and won Nobel Peace Prize — latimes.com.

UPDATE:  Hold on there…if he did revolutionize food science, then why do we still have so much hunger?

The answers are complex and involve everything from American farm politics and African corruption to war, poverty, climate change and drought, which is now the single most common cause of food shortages on the planet.

But David Beckmann, president of the antihunger group Bread for the World, boiled the causes down into one unifying theme — “a lack of give a damn.”

“It’s mainly neglect,” he said. “Political neglect.”

U.N. Reports on Developing Nations’ Energy Needs – NYTimes.com

And you thought dating was expensive? Try picking up the tab for the developing worlds’ energy needs…500-600 billion per year for 10 years!  The actual request at a recent meeting, was slightly more reasonable:

Developing nations want a commitment from the developed world of financial support for reducing current and future emissions, but no concrete commitments have been forthcoming. At the summit meeting of African Union leaders this week in Tripoli, Libya, members agreed to ask the industrialized world for $67 billion annually, including compensation for the consequences of global warming it created, according to news reports.

via U.N. Reports on Developing Nations’ Energy Needs – NYTimes.com.

Corporate Responsiblity for Society?

Can a corporation have dual purposes, to be profitable and to change society?  A new “rambling” (according to WSJ) book conveys a discussion of various viewpoints to address this question.  One of the naysayers:

Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary, states the difficulty succinctly: “It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.” He offers as an example Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-created corporations that were supposed to achieve a social goal — affordable housing — while operating as businesses. They did neither well, eventually leaving their catastrophic debts for taxpayers to pay.

As noted, “In the end, these differing judgments are left unresolved, as one might expect in what is essentially a collection of blog posts.”—but this is the type of question asked by the UN Global Compact, successor to the troubled Code of Conduct for TNC’s—and an important one to consider.

A Tale of Two Africas | Congo in Chaos (update)

Just over a week ago the Ambassador from Mali to the United States urged students at BYU’s Kennedy Center to think of Africa as more than conflicts, chaos, and disaster.  In Africa, Congo provided a counterpoint as a conflict was brewing.  (Historically, we know that throughout the Belgian colonial rule, “Kurtz” wasn’t fiction, but this is more recent stuff.)

We have seen some of the worst fighting in Congo in a decade with 50k refugees displaced.  At the end of the week, these people are moving back under as the US/UN tries to find a peaceful path, according to the WSJ.

Perhaps a little context would be helpful.  Monday’s reporting notes that just a ‘little fighting’ brings a great fear of chaos as conflict in 1996 resulted in a regional war, and in 1998 a war with six other African armies.

What Congo needs, he said, is a true change of culture that would end the long tradition of corruption and criminally inept government and the attendant rebellions.  Given the decades of unending crisis here, no one sees that happening anytime soon.

Postscript:  A guaranteed career path in Somalia in piracy.  “In Somalia, it seems, crime does pay. Actually, it is one of the few industries that does.”

UN receives its allowance: Will they do their chores?

Of the $25 billion promised to Africa by the Group of 8, only $4 billion has been received,  with an additioanl $16 billion in pledges coming this month—but the drumbeat for more support of the Millennium Development Goals (a series of eight targets) continues.  Does this development work?

William Easterly, development scholar, notes in an article (subscription required) on Foreign Policy magazine that aid agencies make up a “cartel of good intentions” in which the result is  “bloated, unaccountable foreign aid.”  He notes the “Golden Oldies”–decade-old ideas about development that are made “new” for current initiatives, such as MDGs:

• Donor Coordination
• Aid Selectivity
• Focus on Poverty
• Africa Reforms.

Not to make a trivial point, but it is interesting to compare various indicies and lists of GDP and FDI with this….the hardest places to find a bathroom, starting with Eritrea.

A tough look at the MDGs

More General Assembly opening session issues to think about–in this case, a review of the MDGs. (Watch it all live here.)   Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, doesn’t see a lot of success:

A further weakness with the Millennium Development Goals is that they are devoid of strategy; their only remedy is more aid. I am not hostile to aid. I think we should increase it, though given the looming recession in Europe and North America, I doubt we will. But other policies on governance, agriculture, security and trade could be used to potent effect.

But he sees that, albeit with some rejiggering, there is hope to address global poverty (assuming you can get excited about the word “coordination” used as an intransitive noun:

International coordination has been, indeed, the great achievement of the Millennium Development Goals; all the major donor countries have bought into them. But they should now be revised so as to focus on the challenge of helping the bottom billion to converge with the rest of mankind — and on a more realistic timescale.