Food for thought
Yang Liqun

RISING food prices are not only a highly charged issue in the international community but also topped the agenda of the recent Group of Eight (G8) Summit in Japan. Developed countries have accused emerging economies of forcing food prices up with their growing demand. German Chancellor Angela Merkel attributed the food crisis to China and India. She said many Indians are eating one more meal than before. “People are eating twice a day, and if a third of 1 billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people,” Reuters quoted her as saying. “That’s a large part of the European Union (EU).”
“And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too,” she said, referring to EU limits on dairy production. U.S. President George W. Bush also said increasing food demand in India is mainly responsible for the global food crisis. In fact, poor countries have proven much more vulnerable to rising food prices. Statistics show that rich Western countries are big food consumers. According to data released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in January, per-capita meat consumption was 124 kg in the United States, 89 kg in West Europe and 54 kg in China in 2007. Indians consumed even less meat for religious reasons. Per-capita milk consumption was 268 kg in developed countries, 21.7 kg in China and 90 kg in India in 2005. Per-capita grain consumption was 1,046 kg in the United States, less than 400 kg in China and 178 kg in India in 2007.
Food waste is another serious problem in Western countries. A recent report published by the British Government showed that Britain throws away an annual 4.1 million tons of edible goods. Before heading to Japan for the G8 Summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said food waste is one of the factors fueling food prices. China has contributed greatly to the world’s food security. The numbers speak for themselves. It produced 501.5 million tons of grain in 2007, when the world’s grain output was 2.075 billion tons. Its grain output was on the rise from 2004 to 2007. It feeds about 20 percent of the world’s population with some 9 percent of the world’s arable land. For nearly 10 years, China has met over 95 percent of its grain demand on its own and exported a net amount of 8 million tons of staple grains such as wheat, rice and corn annually on average.
Complicated background
Attempts to blame developing countries for growing global food demand neither tally with the facts nor represent a constructive attitude toward tackling the food problem. Causes of the current food crisis are quite complicated. First, rising oil prices have driven up the production costs of agriculture. Given the oil price hikes, fertilizer prices in the international market have nearly tripled in the past five years. Zhang Haibing, Deputy Director of the Division for World Economy Studies at the Shanghai International Studies Institute, pointed out that fertilizer costs generally take up more than 10 percent of total agricultural production costs, and rising fertilizer prices naturally make agricultural production costs higher. They can also lead to higher transportation costs of agricultural products.
Second, extreme weather has resulted in the decline of total agricultural output. For example, Australia’s wheat output in 2007 was only 60 percent of that in normal years due to the record drought. Because wheat and rice are alternatives to each other, reduction of wheat output caused rice prices to soar. Third, grain reserves have been drastically on the decline across the world. Today, global grain reserves stand at some 405 million tons, of which rice reserves amount to 102.4 million tons, the lowest point since 1982. Moreover, Zhang pointed out that restrictions imposed by major rice exporters such as India and Viet Nam on their rice exports have cut global rice supplies by one third.
On the demand side, Western countries’ drive for biofuels has made a major impact on international food prices. A leaked World Bank report claims that a basket of world food prices it studied went up by 140 percent between 2002 and February this year. The bank found that U.S. and EU efforts to develop biofuels had the biggest impact on food prices, forcing them up by 75 percent during that period. In addition, growing consumption demand, the increase of the non-agricultural population in emerging economies and growing purchasing power resulting from economic development were also responsible. On top of these, grain speculation has fueled food market panic. Song Guoyou, a researcher at the Center for American Studies at Fudan University said a large amount of hot money has poured into crude oil and grain markets because of the financial market fluctuations and the depreciation of the dollar in the wake of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.
Zhang said that the protective tariffs and agricultural subsidies long in place in the United States and the EU have posed barriers to normal international trade in agricultural products. As they make agricultural product prices unreasonable in the international market, these policies have dealt heavy blows to the agricultural markets in developing countries and dampened farmers’ enthusiasm about grain production, she added.
Collective solution
Today, more than 800 million people across the world are facing the threat of hunger. The number is expected to increase sharply given the rising food prices. Worse still, the food issue has led to social problems and political turmoil in some countries. Analysts believe that concerted efforts should be made to address the food security problem and food price hikes. The international community should step up its assistance to developing countries to help them pull through the difficulties. But from a long-term perspective, developed countries should consider adjusting their biofuel development strategy. It is also important to foster an equal environment for the trade in agricultural products.
“A fair global agricultural trade environment is even more important to developing countries than foreign aid,” said Zhang. “Liberalization of the trade in agricultural products can present opportunities for agricultural development in developing countries and is the basic means of ensuring long-term food security.” At the same time, developed countries should help developing countries strengthen capacity building in agriculture and grain production. “At present, more than half of the African countries have to import food,” said Shu Yunguo, Director of the Center for African Studies at the Shanghai Normal University. “Their problems lie in the lack of funds, technology, improved crop species and infrastructure.” He believes it is more important to assist them with their self-improvement than to provide them with food aid. Of course, energy price hikes, changes in the environment and climate and financial stability all have a bearing on food price stability. All countries should strengthen cooperation in a wide range of fields in a joint effort to resolve the global food problem.

—The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item

Karadzic: A victim of soft power
Gwynne Dyer

RADOVAN Karadzic’s disguise was quite elaborate, but he didn’t spent the past 13 years hiding from the Serbian authorities. They knew where he was all along. Only ten days after the government changed, the police plucked him off the 73 bus that he rode to work every day and started the process of extraditing him to The Hague to face the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. So why was Karadzic in disguise, then? Because he was a compulsive showman who always sought the limelight, and hiding in obscurity was driving him crazy. The disguise, the false name, the whole different persona were a way for him to resume a public life (as an alternative medicine “healer”), not a way of hiding from the state security and intelligence services. They were actually protecting him from the agents of the International Court, because that was usually what the Serbian government wanted.
It was certainly what Slobodan Milosevic, the main author of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, wanted. Until he was overthrown by a bloodless revolution in 2000, all the ultranationalists who had set out “cleanse” non-Serbs from the Serbian-inhabited parts of former Yugoslavia were safe from the UN tribunal in The Hague, including Karadzic and his chief collaborator in the murder of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Gen. Ratko Mladic.
But Milosevic was overthrown because he had lost the wars and ruined the economy, not because he had sponsored a genocide. Even today, fully a third of the Serbian population believes that Serbs are the innocent victims of foreign plots, not the citizens of a state that set out “cleanse” non-Serbs from all the parts of former Yugoslavia where there was a substantial Serbian population. And the new president who sent Milosevic and a couple of his close allies off to face trial at The Hague, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated by a Serbian extremist in 2003.
Serbia was sinking into the role of a pariah state — even Montenegro voted to separate from it in 2006 — but nobody in power was able to make a clean break with the past by denouncing the genocide and handing its other chief actors, like Karadzic and Mladic, over to the International Court. Other parts of former Yugoslavia joined the European Union (Slovenia) or at least became candidates for membership (Croatia and Macedonia). Their economies began to take off as EU funds flowed in, and foreign investment followed because they now seemed like good, stable places to invest. All the while, Serbia sat in the corner muttering to itself about how unfair it was and clinging to its self-justifying myths about the past. Indeed, in recent years it seemed likely that none of the major Serbian perpetrators of the genocide would be punished at all. Milosevic died before he could be convicted, and Serbia wasn’t handing over any more suspects even though it was increasingly beset by isolation and poverty. Then came the parliamentary election of ten weeks ago. It was not a sweeping rejection of the nationalists and their obsessions, but it did create the mathematical possibility of a coalition government in Belgrade that rejected the past.
It took two months, but early this month a government emerged (with much help from President Boris Tadic) that was willing to move against the Serbian war criminals. Led by Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic, it has already “found” Radovan Karadzic, and before long it may also find Gen. Mladic and the Serb responsible for the worst atrocities in Croatia, Goran Hadzic. What is motivating it to act so decisively, and why are so many Serbs now willing to go along with it? Two letters: EU. The Serbs are tired of being out in the cold, and they want back into Europe. They want the prosperity, the constitutional stability, the democracy, the rule of law that seem to flourish almost magically in countries that join the European Union. And EU diplomats have made it very clear to the Serbs that there will be no discussions about membership until Serbia hands over its war criminals.
What got Karadzic, in the end, was the “soft power” of the European Union: The immense attraction of belonging to a continentwide organization that really does deliver such benefits to its members. It’s a cumbersome organization and frequently criticized for good reasons, but it offers Serbia a way back into civilized society. Under Tadic and Cvetkovic, it is taking that route at last.
The EU is playing hardball: No formal discussions on membership until the other two “most wanted” men, Mladic and Hadzic, are also handed over to The Hague for trial. But meeting that demand should not even cause the Serbian security and intelligence people to break out in a sweat, because they surely must know their whereabouts day and night. Then, the Serbs reckon, it’s one year to candidate membership status, and five years to full membership. Genuine repentance for all the horrors that Serbia inflicted on its partners in former Yugoslavia would be nice, but it’s too soon to hope for that. Radovan Karadzic in chains will have to do.

—Arab News


Unilateral & unhelpful in Iraq
Bruce Ackerman

PRESIDENT Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki are poised to conclude a bilateral “memorandum of understanding” that would authorize US troops to continue military operations in Iraq. There is only one problem — the memo won’t be binding US law. A memo isn’t a “treaty,” which requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate under Article 2 of the Constitution. It isn’t a “congressional-executive agreement,” which requires the approval of a majority of both houses of Congress under Article 1. It is just a statement of intent. According to the State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor, “memo” is the term that is “common for nonbinding documents.” The United States is moving into legal no-man’s land because the president refuses to ask the UN Security Council to renew the annual resolution that provides the legal foundation for the presence of our troops in Iraq. If this resolution is allowed to expire Dec. 31, it would create a legal vacuum — a vacuum that can’t be filled by a presidential memo.
The US needs a solid legal basis for its continuing actions in Iraq to replace the UN mandate. There must be a new agreement on day-to-day issues such as the resupply of goods to the troops, which are usually exclusively resolved by the president in his capacity as commander in chief. But more important, this deal also covers questions at the center of far-reaching policy debates that rightly require congressional participation — the timetable for the withdrawal of US troops central among them. In the attempt to reach an accord with Al-Maliki, the president made news by negotiating a “general time horizon” for withdrawing troops — but he hasn’t been willing to take the agreement to Congress and deal with Democrats in order to create a sound constitutional foundation for an enduring and bipartisan policy.
Once the deal is signed by both parties, it’s quite possible that the president will proclaim that this memo is special and can serve as a legal basis for all our activities in Iraq. If he does, he will be acting unconstitutionally. No precedents support the presidential creation of legally binding commitments on the use of force without congressional consent. Resorting to the use of a memo also undermines democracy in Iraq, the very democracy we went to war to create. Just as it allows Bush to avoid Congress, it allows Al-Maliki to make an end run around his own Parliament, which, according to the Iraqi Constitution, must approve formal international agreements; Al-Maliki is widely expected to sign the memo unilaterally.
That will only make it easier for the next Iraqi prime minister to repudiate the entire deal on grounds that the memo, if binding, was made unconstitutionally. Despite the president’s claim that he is creating a solid basis for future cooperation, his initiative will leave the fate of the American military at the mercy of Iraqi politics. At the same time, the expiration of the UN resolution, without a clearly legitimate alternative in place, could invite US lawsuits challenging the ongoing use of force in Iraq. The courts might try to avoid deciding the merits of these cases, but the litigation would further polarize US politics and leave the military uncertain about the legitimate range of its activities in a war zone.

—Arab News