Price of Rice Doubles on World Markets, Undermining Asian Stability

Rice is a basic food staple for nearly half the world's population. The world's two most populous nations, China and India, depend heavily on the grain for basic sustenance, and for economic stability. The price of rice has doulbed in the last 3 months, causing concern about potential for conflict along Asian border regions.

The Philippine president has ordered government agents to investigate potential "hoarders", seeking to either cash in on rising prices or protect themselves against the instability that could result from prolonged scarcity. The causes of this scarcity are complex, tied to environmental trends, rapidly expanding population, elevated living standards, poor water-use planning and the loss of arable land.

The New York Times is reporting that

Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days — meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs — drove prices on the world market even higher this week.

Even agricultural powerhouses like the United States may find themselves impacted by the price increase. The US is already facing down impending recession, and prices have been exploding in food, healthcare and transport, while the overall economy slows to zero growth.

But poor nations with chronic food scarcity will likely be hardest hit. Asia's major rice exporters are limiting or freezing exports, putting rice-poor importers at risk of severe scarcity. Many African nations are struggling with issues of agricultural productivity or economic instability, and cannot easily afford to replace vanishing imports with locally produced grains.

One potential stress on populous Asian nations, which also harbor some of the world's poorest communities, is the risk of mass migration. Failure to generate a sustainable flow of basic food, entire communities can be forced to flee their homes in search of survival. In any environment, this is a stress on local economies; when scarcity is a regional or even global problem, weak economies or political structures can collapse.

OneWorld reports that the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) has found, in its most recent report that "Due to absence of rural infrastructure, incomplete land reforms and limited alternative income generating activities, agriculture productivity has declined", and that an agricultural "revolution" is needed to reverse trends that have impoverished 218 million people.

• NY Times: "High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest"
• OneWorld: "UN report calls for agricultural 'revolution' in Asia-Pacific"
  

Tibet Crisis Deepens, Chinese State Media Say "Crush" Protesters

The Chinese government's military crackdown on demonstrators in Tibet and in neighboring Chinese provinces has been intense, though foreign media have been unable to confirm reports of mounting death tolls. In Sichuan province, there are allegations of 23 killed by security forces in one incident, including a 16-year-old. Reports of mounting fear among civilians in Tibet and Sichuan have become common in recent days.

Despite early official reports from Chinese state-run media claiming that protests were limited to radicals in the capital, they have in fact spread across Tibet and well into China. According to the Sunday Times:

[T]he violence reached right into the centre of Chengdu, a city of 11m, where nerves were on edge last week. In scenes not witnessed in a Chinese city since 1989, troops in battledress joined black-uniformed special police in clamping a cordon around the Tibetan quarter.

The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has condemned the military assault on civilians, calling the situation "a challenge to the conscience of the world". She also said "If freedom loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China's oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world".

While Tibet's independence struggle is political and cultural, linked to the Chinese invasion 60 years ago (political in resisting occupation, cultural in resisting what Tibetan Buddhists believe is Beijing's intention to eliminate its religious traditions), the planned mass migration of ethnic Han Chinese into the agrarian mountain region has caused an escalation in interethnic tensions, and resentment among Tibetans who say economic growth and educational opportunities have been concentrated in Han Chinese communities.

Now, some observers believe, China is facing what appears to be the failure of its post-Tiananmen plan to use economic development as a lure to long-term peace and integration. Chinese in Tibet and in neighboring provinces have reportedly been expressing feelings of despair over the Tibet situation, saying they don't see how Tibet could win its independence, or how China will win Tibetans' hearts.

The conflict could continue to deepen if China depends more heavily on impunity, masking the use of force by way of censored and structured media reports, than on dialogue and working toward a political solution. Some Tibetans are alleging Beijing's plan is to eradicate Tibetan opposition by way of a kind of "economic ethnic cleansing", forcing Tibetans from their homes or even into Chinese cities in search of work.

Today, 29 prominent Chinese intellectuals published an open letter calling on their government to "stop the violent suppression", and suggesting 12 ways to better deal with the worsening but long-lived tensions. The letter went as far as to urge that "As the Chinese government is committed to integrating into the international community, we maintain that it should display a style of governing that conforms to the standards of modern civilization".

Witness.org Brings Truth of Human Rights Abuse to the Eyes of the World

A revolutionary web-based social networking project, Witness.org has created a platform for delivering evidentiary video documenting human rights abuses for the collective conscience of the online world. 'The Hub', as the video sharing platform is called, is designed to ensure that individuals who have documented potential human rights abuses, or who are able to give their testimony via video, can put their message before the eyes of the world.

Begun in 1992, after a number of prominent occasions made it clear that video evidence made it far more difficult to obscure brutal acts of state violence (namely Tiananmen Square, and in an American media phenomenon, the Rodney King tape), Witness was started as an organization whose mission was to find documentary evidence and make it available, in the interests of promoting human rights and righting injustices.

The Hub is now providing select human rights activists with pocket-sized digital video cameras, in hopes they can gather interviews from witnesses to human rights abuses around the world, and begin creating a video archive of testimony from those who know and those who can help to motivate change and spur public opinion abroad to take an interst in specific crises, like those in Darfur, Burma or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Witness has helped to bring abourt awareness of abuses in Darfur, Chechnya, Burma, and many other places, as well as focusing on the plight of the most ignored victims of mass tragedy: internally displaced people (IDP), refugees who remain within the borders of a war-torn country with a totalitarian or ethnically repressive regime, or which is subject to a state of continual anarchy and bloodshed.

The Time is Now, an Action Plan for Global Emissions Reduction

Due to the science we already have, the laws we have to govern our own activity and to force government to act for the public health, we face the real possibility of being forced, in American courts, in the future, to pay for damage done to the most affected populations in other parts of the world, as a result of inaction by our government. And if not in court, then as a matter of the de facto urgencies of international political stability.

If we do not find a way to work to mitigate global climate change, future generations will look back and will see clearly that a zeitgeist of selfish convenience and primitive disregard for the wellbeing of our fellow human beings led to a reckless attitude with regard to this snowballing crisis. The public voice, and those campaigning for the level of public respect needed for election to office, should bring this issue to the fore, push for real initiatives to tackle the problem boldly, in a collaborative way, now.

In November, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon wrote a piece entitled "At the tipping point", in which he explained some of the most dire aspects of the advancing effects of global climate change. Among the serious potential crises is the evidence that 20% of of Antarctica's territory, in the form of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, may break up. "If it broke up, sea levels could rise by six meters", he writes.

Added to that, such massive events may take some time to unfold, but once they reach their respective tipping point, the event itself could happen "quickly, almost overnight". It's worth considering what effect such a sudden sea-level rise would have on low-lying coastal cities, like New York, Mumbai or Shanghai, Dubai, Sydney or Hong Kong. The storm surge that breached New Orleans' levees and plunged the city into chaos was roughly six meters.

The IPCC is one of the most comprehensive and prestigious bodies of scientists ever gathered from around the world, and it has been unequivocal in its reports this year. Every major player in world politics, including Pres. Bush, has acknowledged that global climate change is happening, and is the result of human activities. 2007 will be remembered as the year the climate crisis went public and stayed on the global public interest radar, for good. The United States cannot afford to be lagging behind, not now, and not in the eyes of history.

Senator Barack Obama's campaign website explains the problem as follows: "Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human activities. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years. Glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; oceans are becoming more acidic, threatening marine life; people are dying in heat waves; species are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct." In fact, large-scale mass extinction already appears to be underway, with the IPCC predicting 15% to 37% of all species may be wiped out by climate change alone.

The campaign issue write-up continues: "Scientists predict that absent major emission reductions, climate change will worsen famine and drought in some of the poorest places in the world and wreak havoc across the globe. In the U.S., sea-level rise threatens to cause massive economic and ecological damage to our populated coastal areas." Many may disagree, but the science supports every word of the problem as stated. US presidential candidates are, for the first time, seriously contending for the climate-responsibility prize.

So, for those candidates serious enough to work across ideological rifts, a proposal for responsible legislation to deal with this crisis (to be pushed for and initiated in advance of the November 2008 US elections):

1. Push a 90% emissions reduction goal for 2050, and make it global. (There's no reason this cannot be done. Wind-energy resources in Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone could power the entire US economy and more, if properly funded and developed. Most nations have a surplus of wind resources; the secret is local development and responsible construction and implementation. Other new technologies and a rebuilding of transport infrastructure can help reach this goal, without undermining economic stability.)

2. Work to punish all forms of corruption associated with energy production, and implement stiff sanctions against any nation that does not severely punish such corruption (whether it's bribery is Appalachian coal mining schemes, Saudi authoritarianism and arms trafficking, Uzbekistan's megalomaniac leader, or China's support for the Bashir government in Khartoum).

3. Ensure that the US economy is incentivized, from top to bottom, to adopt renewable resources and that we can fund through innovation, entrepreneurship, research and development grants, the green technology boom, which if properly carried out, will far surpass the 1990s economic expansion related to the building and popularization of the world wide web.

4. Institute in US law a "limited use" doctrine for nuclear plants, which means they will be employed in a period of transition (with no new construction) as a means of softening the price pinch that could come to sectors that lag in the renewables transition. This is not meant to allow new growth or prolonged use of fossil fuels, but rather to avoid punishing the underprivileged for their lack of access to easy capital. Eventually, a plan will need to be implemented that will transition away from these extremely costly plants with unequaled capacity for contamination (in case of accident).

5. Greening the military: begin immediately the funding and incentivization for defense contractors of a comprehensive transition to a military made more efficient, flexible and green in its global reach by way of the ecological (which in the very near future means economic) sustainability of its technologies and deployment systems. This will soon be a measure of rapid-deployment capacity, i.e. the ability to project power without bankrupting the state, so there is a direct security motivation involved in this. (The US military is a massive source of research and development, and cutting-edge technologies could emerge for civilian use, if the fossil fuel addiction is broken.)

6. Plan for "jump" generation innovations: energy resourcing is still in its infancy, comparatively (fossil fuels are square one; nuclear a bold but ill-advised 'spur'; renewables are the first step toward rational sustainable energy policy; after renewables, or within the context of, there will come a more advanced mode of powering the global economy). Geothermal still relies on risky construction methods, wind requires massive construction and solar occupies space (ever less, but still a constraint), whereas new capabilities may be lying in wait beyond the scope of current scientific methods.

Let's think ahead and privilege the "zero emissions" criterion. The more we can do to implement large-scale energy solutions that are in themselves zero-emissions processes, the larger the percentage of current emissions we can do without. It's that simple.

We are on the cusp of an energy revolution, which is synonymous with acting to save the relative homeostasis of the global environment, to which our civilization is accustomed and which it requires for long-term stability. We can phase out fossil fuels, then nuclear, while building a global renewables grid, and (parallel to that) jumping ahead to what's next. Integrated thinking will help us to serve the needs of a global systems ecology imperiled by our current practices.

Lastly, I propose that it is of the utmost urgency to examine security risks involved with climate change. We already have water wars in Africa. There are potential hydrological conflicts brewing in South America and south Asia. Australia faces the possibility of the Sydney region becoming near uninhabitable in a century's time. And Bangladesh, with more than 150 million inhabitants, is caught between India's overpumping of vital rivers and the constant threat of mass death and chaos from monsoon flooding.

We need to look at the potential for crop failure on massive regional scales, resulting economic or political collapse, or the unplanned migration of tens of millions of refugees, and what happens when local militia start responding (reference: Darfur, or Afghanistan, on a much larger scale).

We need to find a collaborative framework wherein:
1. democracy is not in any way curtailed nor are totalitarian measures elevated by the global protocols;
2. global treaties are bold, viable, respected and implemented;
3. the median wealth of the human population globally is increased (to de-incentivize violations).

This is the very least we can do to get started.

Darfur Scene of Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing, Largest UN Peacekeeping Force Deployed

Sentido.tv :: Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world's largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.

Estimates at the time suggested that at least 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with more than 2 million refugees unable to return home, some since 2003. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has noted the scale of the mission is "unprecedented" and told the Security Council "You are sending a clear and powerful signal of your commitment to improve the lives of the people of the region, and close this tragic chapter in Sudan's history".

After years of staunch opposition and threats, the government in Khartoum said it would "support" a UN force to police Darfur, but only after intense negotiations, the backing of China, a key Sudan ally, and the "toning down" of language attacking Khartoum for involvement in a deliberate campaign of genocide. China's backing allowed for a unanimous vote in favor of the peacekeeping mission.

But cooperating has been spotty, and human rights groups are now calling for a comprehensive probe of the murder of 10 peacekeepers and police, allegedly by the same groups accused of carrying out the slaughter of Darfur civilians. It remains unclear whether the Khartoum government is committed to peace, and the rebel groups have not all signed up to the framework for peace.

The world community is facing in the case of Darfur a grave challenge to the rule of law and the right of people to live free of state-backed killing. Issues of national sovereignty, state policing powers, interventionist diplomacy and regional unity have made resolving the fractious crisis a political hot-button among security council powers, so for now, much depends on the success of the peacekeeping mission in overseeing tenuous peace.

MORE AT
Sentido.tv, Darfur Humanitarian Crisis Special Report

The Elders Initiative, an Effort to Infuse Wisdom into Global Policy & Conflict Resolution

The Elders is a humanitarian initiative led by South African archibishop Desmond Tutu and former South African pres. Nelson Mandela, designed to bring the African "village elders" concept to the global village, in an effort to defuse flashpoint crisis situations and speed responsible policy-making. Its foundations are the basic principles of human rights and the experience and credibility of the group's emissaries.

Apart from Mandela and Tutu, the group also includes Mandela's wife Graça Machel, Kofi Annan, Lakhtar Brahimi, fmr. US pres. Jimmy Carter, Ela Bhatt, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Cardoso, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Nobel laureate Grameen Bank for microcredit.

The stature of those included is part of what is expected to bring an international diplomatic prestige to its chosen approach to select humanitarian causes and conflict resolution. The Elders have said they reserve a place for detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The idea was originally brought to Mandela seven years ago by British billionaire and philanthropist Richard Branson.

Nelson Mandela, in his inaugural address to announce the group's founding, said:

"As institutions of government grapple, often unequally, with challenges they face, the efforts of a small, dedicated group of leaders, working objectively and without any vested interest in the outcome, can help resolve what often seem like intractable problems ... Using their collective experience, their moral courage and their ability to rise above the parochial concerns of nation, race and creed, they can help to make our planet a more peaceful, healthy and equitable place to live."

He added that the group will not become "arbitrary and arrogant" and will seek "long-term, sustainable approaches", based on the advice of local interests, scientific experts, political advisors and "anyone who is motivated to help resolve a problem".

The group's first mission will be to Sudan, in an effort to lay the groundwork for a lasting political solution to end the killing in Darfur and help Darfurians return to their homes, re-establish civil society, obtain an appropriate level of self-rule and get the food and medical aid needed to help achieve these goals.

The peace negotiated in Darfur is tenuous at best, as one of the major rebel factions has refused to sign on so long as the Khartoum government remains in political and military control of the region.

Mandela also declared that "It is kindness and generous accomodation that are the catalysts for real change", citing the African proverbial idea that "we are human only through the humanity of other human beings" and foresaw the group bringing "new energy to areas where others have become weary, because of endless conflict."

Population, Land & Conflict

Lester R. Brown, EPI :: As land and water become scarce and as competition for these vital resources intensifies, we can expect mounting social tensions within societies, particularly between those who are poor and dispossessed and those who are wealthy, as well as among ethnic and religious groups. Population growth brings with it a steady shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person. That decline, which is threatening to drop the living standards of more and more people below survival level, could lead to unmanageable social tensions that will translate into broad-based conflicts.

Worldwide, the area in grain expanded from 590 million hectares (1,457 million acres) in 1950 to its historical peak of 730 million hectares in 1981. By 2004, it had fallen to 670 million hectares. Even as the world’s population continues to grow, the area available for producing grain is shrinking.

Expanding world population cut the grainland area per person in half, from 0.23 hectares (0.57 acres) in 1950 to 0.11 hectares in 2000. (See data at http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/ch2data_index.htm) This area of just over one tenth of a hectare per person is half the size of a building lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This halving of grainland area per person makes it more difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million or more people added each year. If current population projections materialize and if the overall grainland area remains constant, the area per person will shrink to 0.07 hectares in 2050, less than two thirds that in 2000.

Having less cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies with nutrient-depleted soils, it threatens survival itself. Tensions among people begin to build as land holdings shrink below that needed for survival. The Sahelian zone of Africa, the broad swatch of the continent between the Sahara Desert and the more lush forested land to the south, which stretches from Sudan in the east through Mauritania in the west, has one of the world’s fastest-growing populations. It is also an area of spreading conflicts.

In troubled Sudan, 2 million people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups—Arab camel herders and black African subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Africans in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps. To date, some 140,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died in the refugee camps of hunger and disease.

In Nigeria, where 130 million people are crammed into an area not much larger than Texas, overgrazing and overplowing are converting 351,000 hectares (1,350 square miles) of grassland and cropland into desert each year. The conflict between farmers and herders in Nigeria is a war for survival. As the New York Times reported in June 2004, “in recent years, as the desert has spread, trees have been felled and the populations of both herders and farmers have soared, the competition for land has only intensified.” [Complete Text]