The WaPo reported today on a trend that could have impacts from African stability to the global food supply: companies and governments from developing nations are leasing or buying large swaths of agricultural land, especially in Africa, but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The WaPo article focuses on Ethiopia, which uses only about a quarter of its arable land despite facing chronic food shortages. Indian investment there has already reached $2.5 billion, and Saudi Arabian and Chinese firms are moving in as well, with active encouragement from the Ethiopian government.
This could have positive effects:
- This kind of project could increase global farmland and the global food supply.
- This could bring new flows of investment to poor nations, and improve their infrastructures.
- Access to inexpensive food might rise in the land-leasing countries.
- People could gain access to paid work, and learn modern farming skills.
However, the potential downsides seem serious:
- Land may be diverted from local food production to exports, increasing hunger.
- Poor locals might be deprived of land and water so that governments or elites can profit from it.
- This could extend the “resource curse” to agriculture, as it could enable elites to make money from farmland while largely excluding their own countrymen from the benefits. The WaPo article notes an Ethiopian river that is now to be used for irrigation, with locals banned from watering their cows in it.
- With many of the companies coming from India, Saudi Arabia, and China, the potential for serious ill-treatment of workers, and even human rights abuses, is vast. Indian and Chinese companies often treat their own workers abysmally, and Saudis sometimes revert to near-enslavement of foreigners, so the fate of African workers could be grim — especially if their own governments fail to protect them, which is likely in many poorly governed countries.
- The land leases run for as long as 99 years; exactly what this means, and how far the rights of the leasing country extend, could bring diplomatic clashes.
- The sum of the problems above points suggests that this trend could drive instability in some land-leasing countries.
(Image courtesy mrflip, Flickr)
In an attack on the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance,” Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal make an interesting point
“Strategic reassurance” seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline. Yet nothing would do more to hasten decline than to follow this path. The British accommodation of America’s rise was based on close ideological kinship. British leaders recognized the United States as a strategic ally in a dangerous world — as proved true throughout the 20th century. No serious person would imagine a similar grand alliance and “special relationship” between an autocratic China and a democratic United States.
Leaving aside that the writers are straining to detect how Obama differs from his predecessors — some see unusual continuity — it is true that the US lacks a natural protege. Brazil and India come much closer than China, as multicultural, democratic countries strongly shaped by Western culture, but real “kinship” is absent.
In any case, having a protege offers no guarantees: the US actively worked to deprive Britain of its chief global-power asset, its empire, even as the “special relationship” formed.
Given the strong odds that China and other countries will singly or collectively surpass the United States, the lack of proteges reinforces the value of the embedding the rising powers in an international system that Americans find amenable. It also argues for vigorous pursuit of soft power, converting rising powers to think more like us. Both of these tools were battered by the Bush administration, but Obama is pursuing them.
It should also be noted that an “autocratic China” is not forever. In many respects China is already less oppressive than South Korea and Taiwan were 50 years ago, when they were bastions of “the free world.” China may follow a similar course, and Kagan and Blumenthal imply that that matters. (Pure realists might object. After all, the US and Britain spent the first 100 years of their relationship warring or talking about warring with each other.)
Decline can be gradual: Britain remains a great power, 120 years after losing its place as the world’s largest economy. By that math, America will still matter in 2150.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with link and permission)
Getting rid of Ahmadinejad or the current regime may not greatly change the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program, as some seem to assume.
As Iran vacillates — or appears to — on the uranium stockpile deal, the opposition is accusing Ahmadinejad of giving away too much to the West.
The WaPo reports that
The strongest criticism has come from Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition presidential candidate in Iran’s June 12 election. Even though the two-term government of his political partner, former president Mohammad Khatami, tried several times to reach a compromise with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, Mousavi charged that the current proposal would lead to disaster. “The discussions in Geneva were really surprising, and if the promises given [to the West] are realized, then the hard work of thousands of scientists would be ruined.”
Iran’s approach to security is not just about Ahmadinejad, nor about “extremism.” It has structural drivers as well, and those will not change rapidly.