Author: Ed

I swear, it's for the hygiene . . .

The BBC reports on the relocation of the Roque Santeiro market from the waterfront of Luanda (Angola) to a site 12 miles outside the city.  Interesting here is the government’s use of the standard script for the bulldozing of the informal market:

“The authorities say the market had to be closed down because it was cramped and unhygienic, a den of organised crime and prostitution.”

I say standard script because it is employed so often to justify otherwise problematic government actions – for example, Mugabe used more or less this same script to justify bulldozing Harare shantytowns full of people who voted against him in 2005:

“Zimbabwe says the policy – known as Operation Murambatsvina [Drive Out Rubbish] – is intended to crack down on black-market trading and other criminal activity in the slum areas.” (via BBC)

The informal economy is a tremendously important source of income and resources for those living in the developing world.  However, the script is also technically true – most of this economy functions outside of formal taxation, regulation, etc., and is therefore criminal.  This makes life pretty precarious for those living in the informal economy – most of the time they are allowed to operate as they wish, but when it is politically or economically expedient, they are relabeled criminals and can lose everything.  This is not to say that there are no criminals, prostitutes or other problematic people/activities to be found in the informal economy – indeed, a former student of mine, Denise Dunovant, found that much of Accra’s street vending appears to be loosely organized by organized crime networks that decide who can sell what and where.  But that is not the point – everyone knows this sort of thing is going on all the time.  So, whenever you hear a government refer to the informal economy as “organized crime” or otherwise criminal, ask yourself why they are finally choosing to enforce the law at that moment, in that place.  In the case of the Roque Santiero Market, the BBC is right – the real estate was just too valuable to leave alone any longer.

Posted on by Ed 4

Nobody is paying attention, it seems . . .

The BBC has a remarkably feel-good story about Angola’s newly-refurbished Luanda-Malange train route.  While I love positive stories about Africa in any media – if for no other reason than to offset the over-reporting on conflict and poverty – this story completely  misses the important point here.  This line was refurbished through Chinese financing . . . despite the fact Angola cannot really pay the bill.  The story intimates that China was somehow surprised or dismayed at the non-payment, and held up the opening of the line until they were paid.  Really?  Anyone who has been paying attention to the growing Chinese presence in sub-Saharan Africa will find this storyline borderline hilarious.  The Chinese simply don’t care all that much about getting paid now.  Their interest is in the rich agricultural areas around Malange, and securing reliable transportation routes in and out to enable the movement of agricultural goods from this area to future Chinese markets.  In other words, they will get theirs later – this is an investment, not a repayable loan.  The new scramble for Africa has been on for nearly a decade, but nobody seems to be paying attention except the rank-and-file Africans, who grow more leery of this sort of thing all the time.  At what point will the US or another power step in to try to counterbalance the massive growth of Chinese influence in Africa?

Posted on by Ed 9

More on food prices, shortages, and riots

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I’m in orientation for the new position, which just swallows whole days – useful, but a bit exhausting.
So, a quick post following up on my previous comments about food prices. The Guardian has a good piece on this issue at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel
This piece is much better than reporting from US sources, but it does have a significant flaw driven by the political goal of the author – highlighting the failures of economic/development policy and practice, and how this led to our current situation. While I agree that these are major issues, I am concerned with the way the author downplays the fact that there has been simmering discontent with the government in Mozambique for some time. The riots are locally-specific: tied to food markets, development policy and other geopolitical processes, but crystallized into action through a local lens. This is why we have riots in some places, but not others. It’s just too hard to generalize . . . and we don’t learn much when we do, I fear.

Posted on by Ed 0

Still not quite getting it . . .

I’ve gotten a bit of attention for this blog by commenting on my frustrations with the IPCC’s relationship to the media.  Andy Revkin has a great post on his Dot Earth blog at the New York Times on the latest iteration of this issue.  Revkin argues:

“Here’s the vital step: The panel would do well to cultivate, rather than restrict, contact between its authors and reporters in poor countries. There is a glaring need for the panel and related institutions — the United Nations Environment Program and World Meteorological Organization — to facilitate informed media coverage of climate risks, both natural and human-driven, in poor places. This is nowhere more pressing than in sub-Saharan Africa, where exposure to climate-driven hazards, particularly drought, is acute even now, let alone with whatever shifts may come through the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (And keep in mind that populations in the region are projected to double by 2050, greatly increasing exposure to climate-related hazards.)”

I couldn’t agree more.  What spurred this commentary from Revkin was a request for help from a Nigerian journalist, who wanted to contact African scientists on the IPCC but couldn’t.  Revkin circulated this call to a number of people, including me – so I was fortunate to be included on the group emails that he includes in his post.  I offered a number of comments, but one seems pertinent to the issue of media relations.  While several people on the email immediately moved to get this information to the journalist, the new media officer for the IPCC, Isabel Garcia-Gill, seemed to be slowing down this process.  When Nick Nuttall, the senior press officer for the United Nations Environment Program, asked if she could provide an updated register of national expert climate scientists from across the key and relevant disciplines for the media, Garcia-Gill responded:

“So far we are going to keep that list at the Secretariat so that all requests come through the media and communications team. We cannot yet post it on the internet, not before the authors are media trained. But of course, you will be informed.”

I responded to this comment in an email to Revkin:

“I was a little bothered by Isabel’s response to Nick – basically, she reaffirmed her and her organization’s right to gatekeep “their” experts.  This does not build our credibility or our legitimacy.  I am not at all convinced by claims that the authors need to be media trained – they just need to make it clear they speak for themselves, and not the larger processes to which they belong.  We need to hear the different voices in this process, and the different foci they might bring to these assessments – otherwise, we run the risk of the problem I mentioned earlier – we get African voices parroting the same lines as those of us from advanced economies, which does nothing to move us forward on issues of adaptation and mitigation.”

Thanks to Revkin for working this concern into his post, near the end.  We’re getting better, but institutional cultures seem hard to overcome . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

Not to say I told you so . . .

but I told you so.  Remember this post?  Well, the New York Times has finally caught up to the story, and its not good news. The UN is finally starting to make official their concerns for global food prices.  Now, you can argue that it is in the UN’s interest to raise this issue and make it a big deal, as the organization’s funding relies on donor countries who often are reticent to contribute except in times of crisis.  However, the main person downplaying this potential crisis in the NYT story is Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) economist Abdolreza Abbassian:

“If you look at the numbers globally, the Americans, the Europeans and the Australians can make up the supply,” Mr. Abbassian said of the wheat harvest, playing down the chances of repeating the 2008 crisis. “There is no reason for this hype, but once the psychological thing sets in it is hard to change that perception, especially if Russia keeps sending bad news.”

There are a few important things to note here.  First, while Abbassian downplays the idea of real shortages driving market prices, he is acknowledging that the uncertainty in the market is likely to drive price instability – the end result being unpredictable, and likely rising, food prices.  Second, Abbassian must not be looking at the data that is trickling in from around the world.  For example, I have firsthand information from Southern Malawi about the failure of the maize crop there – not as bad as a few years ago, but bad enough that it might compromise Malawi’s status as a maize exporter.  Without wheat, people will start to press other grains, which are now themselves starting to get tight.
This is problematic globally, but I am very, very concerned for the situation in Southern Africa.  Mozambique is already starting to see significant civil unrest related, at least in part, to rising food prices.  Basically, this seems to have been the match that finally set off significant civil discontent with a problematic government.  The last time Mozambique fell apart, refugees flooded places like southern Malawi, stressing land availability and people’s livelihoods – sort of exporting the problems to surrounding countries.  The convergence of climatic variability and a highly interlinked global food market could be setting this region up for a really serious disaster in the immediate future . . . and we will feel the disaster here at the supermarket.  Not good.  Not good at all.

Posted on by Ed 0

Here comes trouble

Nobody is reporting this very heavily, but the drought and subsequent really enormous fires in Russia are having an impact way beyond Russia’s borders.  Specifically, a lot of arable land, used to raise wheat, suffered through a serious drought, and then burned, taking with it a big chunk of Russia’s, and indeed the world’s, wheat production.  We are being set up for another serious spike in wheat prices, and therefore food prices, worldwide.
NPR’s reporting on this issue is very optimistic. But the problem here is that the optimism is very, very selective.  When the chief executive of the International Food & Agricultural Trade Policy Council, says “U.S. producers will be able to step up to the plate and meet global demand that’s not presently being met by Russian wheat producers,” she is correct . . . assuming that nothing else will go wrong this year that might compromise wheat production elsewhere.  In 2008, the wheat price spike was driven by the convergence of a rise in biofuels production, a drought in Australia, and some fairly shadowy financial instruments that may have generated a commodity bubble around wheat.  In other words, a lot of stuff went wrong at once.  Given the uncertainty we see in the global economy, and the rising climate variability in wheat production centers like Southern Africa, arguing that nothing else will go wrong strikes me as a really weak bet.
Yes, US farmers will profit mightily from an increased demand for their wheat – but if demand outstrips supply, which seems increasingly likely as we move into the fall, everyone from the global poor to the average US consumer is going to feel the impact of rising food prices again.  Right now, nobody is doing anything to address this likelihood, and a reactive approach to food price spikes never solves the problem in time to matter for those most affected . . . anyone want to get proactive about this, please?

Posted on by Ed 3

Like I said . . .

Yep, the InterAcademy Council more or less stated that the overall findings of the IPCC are not in question.  However, they did raise some interesting issues with regard to structure and leadership that should be taken seriously.  Admittedly, I have selfish reasons for this – as the review editor for one of the chapters of AR5, how the IPCC chooses to deal with comments and suggestions during the review process will have a very large impact on my life and workload starting in the summer of 2012 . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

When being exonerated hurts . . .

While I have written on this blog about the IPCC’s need to be more transparent in its workings, there comes a point where the constant barrage of reports and studies of previous IPCC findings becomes a serious problem.  Yes, another report, this time about the issue of glaciers in the Himalayas in the previous IPCC assessment report (AR4).  Despite fairly intense efforts to discredit AR4 – coming under the heading of “climategate” (people saying dumb things, and sometimes not so dumb things that were willfully misconstrued, on e-mails that were stolen from a server at a major climate research center) and Himalayagate (where the working group I recently joined relied on a bit of non-peer reviewed literature from an otherwise reputable source – called grey literature in scientific jargon – that turned out to be wrong), the reports on AR4 (yep, reports on the report) have yet to question the overall findings of the IPCC to this point.  Some see this as evidence of a conspiracy, where the inquiries into the IPCC and its findings are already corrupt and unable to come to independent conclusions.  Personally, I have a bit of difficulty believing in such a wide-ranging, well-coordinated conspiracy.  Maybe, just maybe, the findings are as close to valid as we can verify under current knowledge.  Maybe?
Anyway, my complaint here is not really with yet another inquiry into the IPCC – I’d bet my house that the inquiry will not challenge the larger findings of AR4.  However, when all that ever reaches the news is a constant barrage of reports on the findings of inquiries into supposed misdeeds on the part of the IPCC, it is hard to blame the general public for doubting the validity of its findings.
All of this goes back to a much earlier post that got a lot of attention, especially considering how remarkably simple its central point was: we need to be very transparent in what we do going forward.  That, and as Bob Watson, former head of the IPCC and a colleague from the Millennium Assessment and GEO-4, noted about the “Himalayagate issue”:
“To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner.”
Yep.  The IPCC, and indeed most major environmental assessments, really need to get comfortable with the idea that sometimes we will be wrong – that is the nature of knowledge, let alone science – and we need to start engaging the professionals when it comes to PR.  I have it firsthand from Pachauri that the IPCC is fully engaged in such an effort (PR, that is), and has been for some time.  Good.  We recruit scientific experts for their special abilities, but somehow we resist recruiting PR people?  To quote the physics Nobelist Erwin Schroedinger, “If you cannot – in the long run – tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless”.  To take it another step, if we cannot honestly and clearly communicate what we do and don’t know, and when we get things wrong, than whatever we have done right will be lost in the maelstrom.
Oh, and can we get a new tag for scandals?  Himalayagate?  Really?  Could we find a more odd combination of geography to cram into a single word?

Posted on by Ed 4