Showing posts by Christina Daggett.
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Mapping the Hot Spots of the 2010/11 Food Crisis
›If you’ve taken a trip to the supermarket lately or scanned the headlines you may have noticed something: Food prices are on the rise. Worldwide, food prices are on track to reach their highest point since their peak in 2008. Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the World Bank, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and ActionAid have collaborated to create an interactive world map called, “Hot Spots in the Emerging Global Food Crisis.”
The focus of the map is to highlight the 52 most at-risk countries where increases in staple food prices could tip the scales of stability. There are three variants of the map to choose from: countries at risk which depend on imported cereals, countries where prices are already increasing (featured above), and countries with vulnerable economies and high rates of hunger.Food prices have become a hot topic of conversation lately for their alleged role in the instability that is rocking the Middle East/North Africa region. But the Middle East is not the only area affected: Besides in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, food-related riots and protests have also broken out in Mozambique, Bolivia, and India. As the map’s accompanying text puts it, these food riots “feed deeper discontent about economic inequalities and hunger and help give rise to revolutions that can topple governments, as in Tunisia and Egypt.”
Scrolling over a country reveals more information, like, for example, the specific percentage increases in the price of wheat or rice over the past year (wheat prices have risen 15.9 percent in China vs. 54 percent in Kyrgyzstan) or the amounts of corn, soybean, and wheat annually imported and exported (Afghanistan exported 908 million metric tons of wheat in 2010 while Egypt imported 4,978).
Users can also click on vulnerable countries to see how many people are malnourished and their per capita income per day. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, an estimated 42 million people were undernourished between 2005 and 2007, and the average person lives on $0.28 per day. According to EWG and ActionAid, the total number of people living in extreme poverty rose by 25 million in 2008 during the last global food crisis. Since June 2010, the start of the current upward trend in prices, the World Bank estimates that 44 million people have fallen into extreme poverty.
One recommendation from EWG and ActionAid for developed countries and the United States in particular: Stop looking to biofuels as an energy option. In their view, “spending scarce taxpayer dollars to shift crops from food to biofuels at the expense of hungry people and already stressed resources like soil, water, and air is unsustainable.”
Image Credit: Map courtesy of the Environmental Working Group and ActionAid, and Food Price Index and Food Commodity Indices, extracted from Global Food Price Monitor, January 2011, courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Sources: ActionAid International, BBC News, CNN, the Environmental Working Group, The European Union Times, Time, Voice of America, World Bank. -
Carrying Capacity: Should We Be Aiming to Survive or Flourish?
›“In the eyes of many governments, population has, as we all know, been a rather uncomfortable topic for a number of years,” said Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, FRS, chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics, and Innovation at the University of Manchester and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group. At an event at the Wilson Center on February 22, Sulston and his co-panelists, Martha Campbell, president of Venture Strategies for Health and Development, and Professor Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University, encouraged active debate on a range of population dynamics and their connections to economic, environmental, and political futures. [Video Below]
The Nexus of Population and Consumption
The dialogue between population and environmental communities has been pushed aside for many years but has lately been climbing its way back onto national agendas, said Sulston. However, the debate remains polarized. Scientists need to “sort out the facts as best we can” to help bring the communities together, he said. The Royal Society’s People and the Planet study, which will be completed by early 2012, will “provide policy guidance to decision-makers as far as possible” and “play our part in engendering constructive dialogue,” he said.
“What we should be aiming to do is to ensure that every individual on the planet can come to enjoy the same high quality of life whilst living within the Earth’s natural limits,” said Sulston. Instead of talking about the maximum number of people the Earth can hold, we should also focus on “the quality of life of those people,” he said. People are happier, healthier, and wealthier than ever before, according to human development indexes. But, Sulston said, 200 million women worldwide have an unmet need for family planning, ecosystems are degraded, biodiversity has decreased, and there are widespread shortages of food and water.
For centuries humanity has pursued a policy of “competitive growth,” both in population and consumption. But in preparation for the UN “Rio+20” summit on sustainable development in 2012, policymakers should be discussing “pathways to sustainability within the context of population,” said Sulston.
“Humanity needs to learn to act collectively and constructively in the face of these long-term and therefore rather elusive threats, just as we do rather well when we’re faced with immediate and tangible ones,” Sulston said. “So we need the best technology, but we need it in the context of a thoughtful society, and then we can both survive and happily flourish.”
A Demographic Crossroads
“No longer is population growth or population size the only issue of the day,” said Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue. “You have to worry about both population growth and population decline, you have to worry about immigration, you have to worry about aging, you have to worry about HIV and adult mortality, et cetera.”
Some people, Eloundou-Enyegue said, take this diversity of demographic issues as “grounds for complacency” by thinking they do not share in others’ problems. Yet, he said, population and ecology are areas where the risks are shared by all.
These challenges demand a “more comprehensive framework” that details the interactions between population, affluence, environment, technology, and inequality, said Eloundou-Enyegue. Tensions persist between these different areas, and breaking them will require “call[ing] on other qualities of the human spirit,” he said. The world is, Eloundou-Enyegue concluded, at a “demographic crossroads.”
The Timing of Declining Fertility
The key to ending the sensitivity to the issue of population growth is to “understand that this is about options: options for women and options for families,” said Martha Campbell. Strong attention and funding support can meet needs and lead to declining birth rates, as in the case of Kenya before the mid-1990s. But with the broader emphasis on reproductive health and concerns about coercion that followed the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, funding for family planning declined. As a result, Kenya’s fertility rates leveled off instead of continuing to decline, said Campbell, contributing to an upward revision of global population projections.Campbell illustrated the impact of delays in achieving replacement-level fertility on the overall population size of individual states. In the case of Pakistan, for example, analysis by Venture Strategies for Health and Development and the African Institute for Development Policy projects that the country will have a total population of 350 million if replacement-level fertility is reached by 2020, and a population of almost 600 million if that same mark is reached by 2060.
Looking ahead to the “Rio+20” summit in 2012, Campbell emphasized the need for continued discussion about population growth and family planning. The silence on these issues after Cairo in 1994 and the subsequent global impact should serve as a warning for future generations, she said: “It is important for this next generation and the current generation to understand what happened so that it will never, ever happen again. The silence on population must not occur.”
Photo Credit: “Rush hour,” courtesy of flickr user Jekkone, and Pakistan fertility chart, courtesy of Martha Campbell and Venture Strategies. -
Watch: Sir John Sulston on the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Study
›March 1, 2011 // By Christina Daggett“At the moment, the agendas of the growing population of people and the environment are too separate – people are thinking about one or the other,” said Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group, in an interview with ECSP. “People argue about, ‘Should we consume less or should we have fewer people?’ The point is it’s both. We need to draw it together. It’s people and their activities.”
Sulston won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on mapping the human genome. He said that experience helped him appreciate the importance of utilizing science to the benefit of the wider public as he advocated for keeping the human genome in the public domain rather than allowing the knowledge to be privatized.
Sulston spoke at the Wilson Center on Febraury 22 on carrying capacity and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet study. He said “what we want to do is to see the issue of population in the open, dispassionately discussed on the environmental agenda, and then we’ll see where it goes.” The study will “draw together the strands, to summarize, and to put it down as a statement of the state of the art of our knowledge and where it’s going.” The study will be released in early 2012 with an eye to informing the UN “Rio+20” conference on sustainable development.
“We have one planet,” Sulston said, and “we have a lot of people, an increasing number of people. Now it’s not straightforward…but I think if you look at the facts dispassionately, you find that actually, because of our sheer numbers and because of our activities, the combination of those two things mean that we are putting an increasing burden on the planet and I think it is something we have to start thinking about.” -
Watch: Geoff Dabelko and John Sewell on Integrating Environment, Development, and Security and the QDDR
›“We all must check our stereotypes of the other communities at the door…we’re not talking about hugging trees and hugging pandas,” said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, in a panel discussion on Foreign Policy Challenges in the 112th Congress as part of the Wilson Center on the Hill series. Dabelko argued for a more multi-dimensional and integrated approach to addressing environmental issues.
“To tackle these problems, these connections between, say, natural resources, development, and security, it really does require that we have an integrated approach to our analysis [and] an integrated approach to our responses,” Dabelko said.
In dealing with climate change, for example, “a more diversified view would be one where we spend more time trying to understand adaptation,” said Dabelko. “How are we going to deal with the expected impacts of these problems?” he asked.
Dabelko called on policymakers to seek “triple bottom lines,” pointing out that “if you’re worried about climate change, or you’re worried about development, or you’re worried about fragile states, some of the same governance interventions and strong institutions in these fragile or weak states are going be the ones that will get you benefits in these multiple sectors.”
The Political Space
Fortunately, the current political environment is one in which “there is political space for integration,” said Dabelko, as demonstrated by, for example, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), which Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell addressed in his remarks.
“All of you who are directly or indirectly engaged in Congress are going to be faced with a very important opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months,” Sewell said, “to focus both diplomacy and development on the major challenges that are going to face all of us in the first half of the century.”
Calling the QDDR a “major rethink of both American diplomacy and American development,” Sewell applauded its conceptual alignment, but cautioned that the review leaves many questions unanswered about its implementation.
“The QDDR sets no criteria,” said Sewell. “Are we going to continue to put large sums of money into countries that aren’t developing? Are we going to follow the choice of issues – food, environment, and so on and so forth? It’s a question that is not answered in any of these documents.”
Sewell also pointed to potential clashes over budgeting, USAID/State leadership, and the lack of coordination with other large development agencies, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
For more on Sewell’s analysis of the QDDR, see his recent blog post “Reading the QDDR: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?” -
The International Framework for Climate-Induced Displacement
›In an article sponsored by the East-West Center, author Maxine Burkett discusses the challenges climate-induced migration presents to the people of the Pacific Islands. In the brief, titled “In Search of Refuge: Pacific Islands, Climate-Induced Migration, and the Legal Frontier,” Burkett states that millions of people in the Pacific Islands will be forced to leave their homes because of “increased intensity and frequency of storms and floods, sea-level rise, and desertification.” These low-lying islands could face a loss of agriculture and freshwater resources, or even be wiped out altogether, an outcome for which there is no international legal precedent.In “Swimming Against the Tide: Why a Climate Displacement Treaty is Not the Answer,” published in the International Journal of Refugee Law, Jane McAdam takes a different position on the plight of so-called “climate refugees.” McAdam argues that focusing on an international treaty for these migrants distracts from efforts to establish responses for adaptation, internal migration, and migration over time. The article, writes the author, “does not deny the real impacts that climate change is already having on communities,” but rather questions the utility and political consequences of “pinning ‘solutions’ to climate change-related displacement on a multilateral instrument.” -
Book Preview: ‘The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security’
›February 3, 2011 // By Christina DaggettThe word “population” doesn’t come up too often in national security debates, yet, a shift may be coming, as global population reaches the seven billion mark this year, youth-led unrest rocks the Middle East, and questions of aging enter the lexicon of policymakers from Japan and South Korea to Europe and the United States. What does a population of nine billion (the UN medium-variant projection for 2050) mean for global security? How will shrinking populations in Europe affect Western military alliances and operations? Is demography destiny?The latter question has plagued demographers, policymakers, and academics for centuries, resulting in heated debate and dire warnings. Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba continues this debate in her new book, The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security, but with a decidedly more measured and optimistic tone (full disclosure: Sciubba was one of my professors). The book is targeted at policymakers but is accessible to anyone with an interest in the field of demography and national security. She will launch her book at an event hosted by the Wilson Center on March 14.
Turning Challenge Into Opportunity
The main themes of The Future Faces of War are challenge and opportunity. Yes, national security will be tested by a series of evolving demographic trends in the decades ahead, but with proper insight and preparation, states can turn these challenges into opportunities for growth and betterment. Sciubba writes, “How a state deals with its demographic situation – or any other situation for that matter – is more important than the trends themselves” (p.125).
Part of turning these population challenges into opportunity is understanding long-term trends – a daunting task given the range and number of trends to consider. Drawing on her own experiences in the defense community, Sciubba writes how policymakers were “receptive” to the idea of population influencing national security, but that the “overwhelming number of ways demography seemed to matter” made them hesitant to act (p.3). With the publication of this book, which clearly and concisely outlines the basics of each population trend with demonstrative examples, hopefully that hesitation will be turned into action.
Youth and Conflict
The first population trend Sciubba highlights is perhaps the one of most immediate concern to national security policymakers given recent world events. In the chapter “Youth and Youthful Age Structures,” Sciubba discusses the security implications of those countries (in particular those in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia) with a majority of their population under the age of 29. She writes, “Most important for national security, countries with youthful age structures are generally the least developed and least democratic in the world, and tend to have the highest risk of civil conflict” (p. 18). In fact, between 1970 and 1999 countries with very young and youthful age structures were two to four times more likely to experience civil conflict than countries with more mature age structures.
The risks of very young and youthful populations are well documented (Sciubba cites the examples of Somali piracy, religious extremism, and child soldiers in Africa), but what has not been as widely discussed are the opportunities. Youthful states have a large pool of potential recruits for their armies, plenty of workers to drive economic development, and even an opportunity to grow democratically through social protest. Sciubba writes, “Youth can also be a force for positive political change as they demand representation and inclusion in the political process… social protest is not always a bad thing, even if it does threaten a country’s stability, because it may lead to more representative governance or other benefits” (p. 23). (For more on youth and the transition to democracy, see “Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and Transition to Democracy,” by Richard Cincotta, and his recent blog post about the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia).
Graying of the Great Powers
At the other end of the demographic transition is population aging. Sciubba points out that the countries with the highest proportions of people aged 60 and older are also “some of the world’s most powerful and economically or politically strategic states” (p. 42). Europe, Japan, and the United States are all getting older (though the United States to a slightly lesser extent), and Sciubba states that the “graying” of these countries has the potential to greatly limit military preparedness, size, and funding. She points out that the number of recruits available will be much smaller and more money will have to be spent on pensions and health care for the growing number of elderly persons.
To counteract these challenges, Sciubba recommends that aging states seek out alliances with each other and countries with younger populations. She writes, “As part of strong alliances, states have strength in numbers, even if they are individually weakened by aging” (p. 47). Another alternative would be to improve military technology and efficiency to compensate for the drop in personnel.
Migration and Security: A “Unique” Relationship
Migration, the third pillar of demographic change after fertility and mortality, has what Sciubba calls a “unique relationship to national security” (p.83). Migration “is the only population driver that can change the composition of a state or a community within months, weeks, or even days” (p. 83). Mass migrations (such as those caused by a natural disaster or violent conflict) are the best examples of this trend. Some of the security challenges Sciubba highlights about migration are refugee militarization, competition for resources, and identity struggles among the native and migrant populations.
However, Sciubba also argues that both migrants and receiving countries can benefit. Origin states release pressure on their crowded labor markets and earn income from remittances, while receiving countries increase their labor market and mitigate population decline (a key component of U.S. growth).
Much of this has been studied before, but two new developments in migration trends that Sciubba calls to our attention are what she calls the “feminization of migration” (the increasing number of women who are likely to move for economic reasons) and migration as a result of climate change. Both are intriguing new areas of inquiry that deserve further study, but only get a passing mention in the book.
Making Her Case
The basic trends outlined above are only a small sampling of the wealth of information to be found in The Future Faces of War. Other noteworthy topics include a discussion on transitional age structures, urbanization, gender imbalances, HIV/AIDS, differential growth among ethnic groups, and many more. The topics are varied and wide-ranging and yet, Sciubba manages to connect them and makes her case convincingly for their inclusion in the broader national security dialogue. Sciubba has briefly written about many of these topics before, but this is the first time she (or anyone else, for that matter) has brought them together in one comprehensive book with such a focus on national security.
Christina Daggett is an intern with ECSP and a former student of Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba’s at Rhodes College.
Sources: Population Action International.
Photo Credits: “Children at IDP Camp Playful During UNAMID Patrol,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. Book cover image provided by, and used with the permission of, Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba and ABC-CLIO. -
Mapping Muslim Population Growth
›Recent unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere across the Middle East has led to a resurgence of interest in the region’s demography, just in time, it turns out, for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s 2011 refresh of its report on Muslim population growth, which this year includes a new interactive feature, “The Global Muslim Population.”
According to the report, current security hot-spots such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria will continue to grow considerably faster than the mean.
On the flip side, the report also found that the median age in the Middle East-North Africa region is rising – a generally agreed upon good indicator for the prospects of more liberal, democratic regimes – and though global Muslim population will continue to grow faster than the world’s non-Muslim population, this growth will be slower than in decades past.The accompanying interactive feature allows users to select a region (the Americas, Europe, Middle East/North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia-Pacific), a specific country, and a decade (1990-2030) in their search. In the example above, Egypt will add 25 million Muslims to its population over the next two decades, representing a 30 percent increase. Comparatively, from 1990 to 2010, Egypt’s Muslim population increased by 48.5 percent.
The user is able to see the estimated Muslim population of the country, the percent of the total population that is Muslim, and the country’s percent share of the world’s total Muslim population (as seen in the example above of Egypt in 2010 and 2030). In addition, these variables can be sorted in tables.
It’s important to note though, write the authors of the report, that projections are not predictions:This report makes demographic projections. Projections are not the same as predictions. Rather, they are estimates built on current population data and assumptions about demographic trends; they are what will happen if the current data are accurate and the trends play out as expected. But many things – immigration laws, economic conditions, natural disasters, armed conflicts, scientific discoveries, social movements and political upheavals, to name just a few – can shift demographic trends in unforeseen ways, which is why this report adheres to a modest time frame, looking just 20 years down the road.
Image Credit: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Sources: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. -
Water Security, Nonproliferation, and Aid Shocks in the Middle East
›In a report sponsored by the Stanley Foundation and the Stimson Center, authors Brian Finlay, Johan Bergenas, and Veronica Tessler discuss the implications of what a growing population and dwindling water supply will have on the people and governments of the Middle East. In the report, titled “Beyond Boundaries in the Middle East: Leveraging Nonproliferation Assistance to Address Security/Development Needs with Resolution 1540,” the authors point out that while the Middle East has six percent of the world’s population, it has only 0.7 percent of the world’s fresh water resources. This supply is expected to be halved in the coming decades due to “rapid population growth and increased standards of living in urban areas.” To make up for this shortfall, governments are turning to nuclear-powered desalination technology, which poses risks to the nonproliferation movement and the safety and stability of the region. (Editor’s note: for more on water as a strategic resource in the Middle East, see CSIS’ latest report.)A recent study by Richard Nielsen, Michael Findley, Zachary Davis, Tara Candland, and Daniel Nielson from Bringham Young University examines the relationship of severe decreases in foreign aid to inciting violence among rebels in recipient countries. The study, “Foreign Aid Shocks as a Cause of Violent Armed Conflict”, examines aid shocks in 139 countries from 1981-2005. The authors find that when a donor country cuts off or suddenly limits aid due to economic or political reasons, this volatility upsets the status quo and gives strength to rebel groups who play upon the government’s inability to deliver adequate resources to the population. Instead of a sudden or sharp withdrawal in aid, Nielsen et al conclude that “if donors decide to remove aid, they should do so gradually over time because sudden large decreases in aid could be deadly.”
