I recently had an e-mail exchange with Rick Piltz over at Climate Science Watch (I link to them regularly, and if you are not familiar with the site, you should check it out – it is an activist site that does very good work) about the whole Cucinelli circus. At the end of that exchange, Rick mentioned that with the upcoming IPCC plenary the question of Patchauri’s leadership was once again on the table. This got me thinking . . . and I shorthanded an answer to him that I think I can expand on here.
For those not neck-deep in the world of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the authoritative scientific body working on the issue of climate change – it is empowered to review the existing literature and evidence (it does not do its own research) and present what amounts to a summary of our best understanding of what is happening to the global climate and why it is happening. (full disclosure: I have been appointed to the IPCC for this round as a review editor – basically, I will manage the peer-review process for one of the chapters).
The IPCC has come under fire quite a bit – in my opinion, mostly because the scientific story of climate change is getting clearer and clearer, and it is not a happy story. However, there have also been screwups – for example, some of you may have heard how a completely unrealistic assessment of glacier melt in the Himalayas somehow got through review into the last IPCC report (this melt is important, as it tells us how much flooding to expect downstream (i.e. northern India and Bangladesh, among other areas) in the near term, and how much the river flows of the region will decrease once the glaciers have largely melted (potentially creating significant food crises in the same areas). I wasn’t completely freaked out by this error – it is large document that is hard to manage, but the review process is very comprehensive. It’s just not realistic to expect a review, compiled by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by hundreds more as well as representatives from the participating governments (including the US), to come together flawlessly in a reasonable timeframe. However, when this popped up, the handling of it was botched – it was more or less the classic error: instead of identifying, acknowledging and fixing the error, at first the IPCC was seen to be stonewalling and trying to defend an undefendable statement. At one point, Pachauri issued a remarkably tone-deaf statement in which he effectively called India’s Environment Minister “arrogant” and dismissed the Indian Government’s report which seemed to contract the IPCC findings. Even if the IPCC report had been correct in its claims, this could have been handled better. However, the IPCC claims were wrong, and the Indian report was closer to the truth . . . which makes this a disaster. The whole event badly damaged the legitimacy of the IPCC in some people’s eyes, and was fodder for those who would deny the role of human beings in climate change. It was a PR disaster, really – the overall science of the report is, in my opinion (and it is an informed opinion) quite solid. If nothing else, note that as the models of climate get more sophisticated, their results are mapping ever closer to observed reality . . . and the models are predicated on widely accepted understandings of the causes of climate change brought forth through exercises like the IPCC assessments. Still, it was bad.
Add this to the fiasco from this summer (in which I’m afraid I was a visible participant), where the IPCC secretariat, in Pachauri’s name, issued guidance to members of the IPCC on how to interact with the press. The letter was astonishingly poorly worded to sound like those of us on the IPCC were not to speak to the press at all, when what was meant was that we were not to represent the entire IPCC report by ourselves to the press (in other words, we can speak to the press and say “in my opinion . . .” and be fine, but we cannot say “The IPCC says/believes/thinks . . .” because we do not speak for everyone on the IPCC). The meaning of the message was completely innocuous, but the initial wording was very unclear, and set off something of a firestorm.
So, does tone-deafness qualify as a reason to throw the chairman under the bus? Well, if you think that the chairman’s job is to be a media spokesperson, maybe it is. But if the chair is to run the larger IPCC process, I don’t think replacing Pachauri changes anything – it’s just finding a scapegoat to make it look like the panel has been reformed or something – which I strongly object to, as I don’t think the IPCC needs reform. The process is sound, the author selection is sound, the data is sound (yes, I know some people have issues with the data, but the vast majority of the scientific community does not – so I am going with them until such time as I see new evidence – though I remain open to new evidence, as our understanding of the climate as a complex system is incomplete, at best). So replacing Pachauri might actually be read as an admission of guilt or problems with previous IPCC reports that I do not think exist – there is no systematic rot here.
Besides, this round of the IPCC has already started – the authors are selected, and the first plenary will meet soon. So changing the chair now will do nothing but create administrative confusion. And the importance of replacing Pachauri rests on the assumption that the chair has a lot of power – and the post does not, in the grand scheme of things. In the end, the IPCC is an intergovernmental process, which means that the diplomatic process in large, key countries like the US greatly constrain and shape what the IPCC can do – probably more than the chair can. You’ll notice an absence of calls for replacement from the diplomatic community, which tells you what they think. More to the point, Pachauri still has his job – if any major country had an issue, he would be out. For an illustration, take a look at what the Bush administration did to Bob Watson, the previous chair of the IPCC. The Administration withdrew support for him (and there is documentary evidence to suggest that they did so because ExxonMobil really wanted him gone) and that was that.
So, in the end I vote to keep Pachauri in place. I think he is sincere in his efforts to get outreach right, both in terms of his own statements and in terms of the dissemination of the IPCC reports. He knows the process. And the governments are, for now, backing him, so all of the demands for removal are going nowhere right now. That said, I fear he may be one more public gaffe away from someone in the diplomatic world getting fed up and demanding a replacement . . . and that would not be good for the IPCC process during this assessment report.
Category: Food Security
Hang on, here we go!
Via Resilience Science:
International wheat prices are up 60-80% since July. And according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), this price increase is not a standard market function – despite some crop failures, “Global cereal supply and demand still appears sufficiently in balance” to have much more stable prices. So what, pray tell, is driving the increase? Well, the FAO blames “national policy responses and speculative behaviour.”
Garry at Resilience Science does a great job of covering the obvious rebuttal: “Oh, the FAO is another organization out to demonize markets – this argument isn’t based on evidence.” Um, not so fast . . . in a discussion paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – and by the way, the US is a major funder for IFPRI – Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles appear to have demonstrated quantitatively that various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets best explain the dramatic price rises for food in 2008. To quote:
“Overall, we conclude from our time series analysis that when taking the four commodities analyzed here there is evidence that financial activity in futures markets and/or speculation in these markets can help explain the behavior of these prices in recent years. Other explanations are only partially supported for the particular case of one agricultural commodity or not supported at all. We do not claim, however, that these other explanations should be disregarded; all that we can say is that in using the variables considered in this study and the particular time series models herein, we do not find such evidence.”
Well, looks like Frederick Kaufman (see this earlier post) was at least partially right . . . in this case, the futures markets are causing more problems than they are solving. Put another way, these studies demonstrate empirically that the manipulation of these markets is killing people – literally. This is not market failure, people. This is human moral failure. But we wouldn’t want to regulate those markets, now would we?
Sigh.
An opportunity in the challenges . . .
Via Grist:
TIANJIN, China — China will on Monday host its first U.N. climate conference as it seeks to showcase its green credentials, but hopes are dim that the event will yield major breakthroughs that environmentalists crave.
Three thousand delegates will converge on the northern port city of Tianjin for the latest round of tortured United Nations negotiations aimed at securing a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.
But even the most optimistic forecasts for the six days of talks foresee only incremental progress amid the continuing fallout from last year’s failure in Copenhagen by world leaders to forge a comprehensive deal.
“Our expectations are not very high, in the sense that we have not witnessed a willingness from governments to really move the negotiations forward,” Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio told AFP.
Check the Oh Crap box in the right sidebar. These guys are foot-dragging, and we’re already out of what most people think is the safe range for CO2 concentrations. What do I mean by safe? Well, it comes down to the odds of catastrophic change. The concern is that, as CO2 levels inch upward, we are approaching a situation where nonlinear changes start to happen – that is, where slow, steady changes in the climate “jump” to a new state very, very rapidly (in decades or less). We can cope with slow, steady changes in rainfall in most parts of the world. That is much of what adaptation planning is about these days – adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure for expected changes in the future to minimize the negative impacts.
What worries me, however, is what I don’t know. Global climate and ecology are extraordinarily complex, linked systems that are not completely understood. Changes in some parts of these systems may have no effect at all on the larger picture. Other changes might radiate through these systems, having massive, unintended and largely unpredictable consequences. As we inch the CO2 concentrations ever upward, and we inch global temperatures upward, we create conditions in which the likelihood of this sort of non-linear change increases. The big example of this you might have heard of is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream, a shift in ocean circulation triggered by larger changes in oceanic circulation linked to salinity and temperature. If this happens (and it could, though I think it remains unlikely), Europe (for example) would become much, much cooler, radically altering agricultural production and the accessibility of ports from France north much faster than we could keep up with the changes.
This is an extreme example, but there are many other such shifts we worry about . . . and many, many more that we’ve not yet thought of because of the complexity of the systems with which we are engaged. It is possible to plan for adaptation to such events, though – in fact, I would argue that the idea of the discontinuous change is an opportunity for more productive adaptation and development thought than that which is practiced today. All you can do in the face of discontinuous change is make communities and countries as resilient as possible – build as much capacity for change as you can, and then let people address these changes in locally-appropriate manners as they start to happen. In other words, discontinuous change gives us the opportunity to take our hands off the wheel – to stop lying to ourselves that we can plan for everything, or that we even have all of the knowledge we need to make such plans. Instead, it encourages us to think about a more flexible, resilient world in which people are empowered to address the challenges in their lives.
In every challenge, there is an opportunity . . .
Well, it all depends on what you mean by "have" a government
So, according to NPR Iraq has now set the record for the longest time after a parliamentary election without a government. For those unfamiliar, Iraq operates under a democratic system that awards seats in parliament by percentage of the vote, and they’ve got several political parties. The end result? Nobody has a majority, and at this point nobody seems to be able to cobble together a coalition of enough parties to get a majority and form a government. Man, you really have to dislike the other guy when you more or less give up power rather than partner with them.
But this is not the sweeping case that the title of the article, “Iraq Breaks World Record for Length of Time Without a Government,” suggests. By any reasonable standard, the contemporary record has to go to Somalia, which has been operating without anything resembling a real national government since . . . 1991. Yep, I graduated from high school right about the same time Somalia lost its government. Current college freshmen and sophomores have never lived in a world where Somalia had a national government. So why no mention of Somalia? I mean, even if you count the transitional government (put in place in 2004), they went 13 years without a government. Well, they are disqualified because they are not a parliamentary democracy (turns out Iraq’s record is pretty narrow, after all). It’s too bad Somalia is out of this competition, though , because it is an amazing case of state failure in the modern world. The transitional government appears to control, at best, a few city blocks in Mogadishu. Seriously – that’s not a hyperbolic statement. They literally control a few blocks. Sometimes. Er, that does not count as a national government, people.
Somalia is lines on a map and a bustling informal economy that seems to float a stable national currency – despite lacking a central bank or, as I mentioned above, A GOVERNMENT. (Economists hate that. A lot.) That’s about it. Somalia is the hole in the map, the one place in the world where there is really no effective control of the territory of the country by anything resembling a state. Sure, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and many in Asia, contain territory over which they have very little, if any, control – but those tend to be little spaces within countries. Somalia is basically a giant sovereignty hole, with a tiny pocket of control.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this these days, as I think the connection between the state and local communities is probably the central governance question for development agencies in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Simply put, in much of SSA, the only legitimate governance (that is, governance that people feel bought into, and believe in) is pretty local, and vested in land tenure (those with control over access to land tend to be in charge, since so many people need land to farm and make a living). Development agencies, on the other hand, tend to work with national governments and generally avoid dealing with “traditional” or “informal” modes of governance, such as those seen at the local level. The result is a disconnect between a lot of development planning and programming and the reality of life on the ground in many countries – we do our planning and programming through a state that is simply unable to represent the needs of its people effectively, and even if it could it has no means of actually carrying out development planning in a meaningful way. Yet some folks persist in worrying about how to write legislation that would lead to effective adaptation planning . . . which completely misses the point. You can write all the laws you want, but if nobody can enforce them and the citizenry don’t see any reason to pay attention to them or any other governmental activity, all you are doing is killing time and trees.
In these situations, we’re looking for governance in the wrong places. Hell, the people in Somalia are quite vulnerable – to drought, violence, disease, etc. But they are not all dead, which means they have organized into structures that provide food, shelter, clothing and other goods in an informal way – there is governance here, but not from the state. I’m not going to valorize much of that governance, as it is rooted almost completely in violence and physical force without respect for the needs of the wider population, but the point is that this governance has found its own form of legitimacy that works, for better or for worse, much better than the pointless national government that the rest of the world seems to want to prop up so they can go on with the charade of working with another national government.
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?
And now the book has a cover . . .
I took the photo in 2006 – it is the road through Dominase and Ponkrum, where I work in Ghana, looking to the south toward Ponkrum. What do you think?
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.
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.
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?
Why food security analyses fail . . .
Case 1: when you fail to define your basic terms correctly.
Laurie A. Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried to write an interesting piece about climate change and food security recently. Her case is compelling, though she draws far too heavily on a few high profile examples of possible climate impacts on food supply without providing appropriate caveats about the difference between climate change (a trend over time) and climate variability (which can be one-off events, or the byproduct of a larger trend). This is somewhat standard fare in the popular media, as such caveats really don’t make for good reading.
What got my attention was Garrett’s complete failure to properly define food security. She argues “The overwrought phrase “food security” connotes literally obtaining sufficient calories and nutrients to stay alive.” Well, maybe in 1980. Since then, a tremendous amount of work (to which I have made a very small contribution) has expanded this definition dramatically – food security is about access and entitlement to food and other livelihoods resources – in other words, food security is more than enough calories on hand – you also have to have rights of access to those calories, or you are out of luck.
Why is this a problem in her article? Well, Garrett is trying to draw a link between climate change a food prices . . . which are presumed to hit the global poor the hardest. However, rising prices are only a part of the food security story. If we don’t know people’s rights of entitlement to the calories they need, then it becomes hard to say if we have enough or not enough food available.
For example, let’s assume that a Ghanaian husband and wife have three children – one girl and two boys. The household needs, at a basal level around 6000 calories a day to meet basic needs. We can go to their farm, and measure the food they eat, and get a caloric figure. Perhaps that figure comes back at 6500 calories per day. This is not enough to say that this household, and all its members are food secure. Does the wife and her girl child, have the same rights to food as the husband and boys, or must the females wait for the men to eat their fill, before eating whatever remains? If the females do not have the same rights of access, it may be that the husband and boys are more than food secure, while the wife and her girls are not.
Certainly, it is useful to know where there simply isn’t any food around – but even this is tricky. Most people forget that Ethiopia was actually increasing its agricultural exports across its famous mid-1980s famines. It’s just that the food was sold overseas for foreign currency, which was then used to pay off their national debt . . . as the Ethiopian population starved.
This article addresses but one part of the global food security equation – not enough to make sweeping claims of what is to come.