On Sunday, the Ugandan army attacked thousands of Turkana herders from drought-stricken northern Kenya who had crossed into Uganda seeking water and pasture for their cattle. “This is the second time our people have been attacked and killed,” John Munyes, Kenyan labor minister and Turkana North MP, told The Daily Nation. In 2005, 60 Turkana herders were killed by the Ugandan army in a similar incident. Yet talks scheduled for last month never occurred, and Munyes complained to The Nation that “the [Kenyan] Government had not shown any concern” over deaths in his community.

Europe’s deepening energy insecurity has been acutely demonstrated by the Russia-Georgia conflict, reports Jeff White, correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Russia’s demonstrated willingness to cut supplies to Europe has prompted the search for alternative sources, including the planned Nabucco pipeline, which bypasses Russia. However, the pipeline “stands little chance of success if this tense situation in Georgia continues,” Zurab Janjgava of Georgian Oil told the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Georgian energy executive Giorgi Vashakmadze expressed his agreement to the Monitor: “Russia is showing it controls this corridor.”

At a recent Wilson Center event, Marshall Goldman of Harvard University explained that Russian influence is wide and expanding because of their energy supplies. One illustration is the German natural gas supply, which is 40% Russian and growing. Russia’s phenomenal economic comeback since 1998 is due almost entirely to the strength of its energy sector. “Putin made a difference, but oil and gas made an even more important difference,” explained Goldman. He warned of the danger of Moscow’s strong control over vital energy supplies to Europe. Said Goldman, “Russia is indeed a petrostate and is very closely tied to the fate of energy.” Europe – and the West – can no longer hold any illusions to the contrary.

Sonia Schmanski contributed to this post.

The New York Times reports that Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev has “ordered a halt to his country’s military operation in Georgia”; however, “he did not say that troops were pulling out and he insisted that Russian forces were still authorized to fire on enemies in South Ossetia.” Despite the ceasefire, a New York Times reporter said bombing continued.

As posted last week in the New Security Beat, the conflict in Ossetia has significant natural resources elements, as the region is rich in timber, manganese, iron ore, and copper and coal deposits. In a Foreign Affairs article last winter (which to a large extent predicted the current conflict), Nixon Center President Dimitri K. Simes pointed out that high energy prices have granted Russia newfound economic and political independence: “Energy exports finance about 30 percent of the Kremlin’s budget”—and this was at $61 per barrel.

By positioning itself as the major energy supplier to Europe, Russia is attempting to regain much of its sphere of influence. However, Georgia maintains oil and gas pipelines to Europe that offer alternatives to the Russian supplies. Some of these, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, were built at the strong urging of the United States.

Reuters reports that Georgia “accused Russia of bombing its fuel lines on Tuesday.” However, while British Petroleum “has closed two oil and gas pipelines [including BTC] running from its Caspian Sea fields through Georgia,” according to inspections “neither has been damaged by recent fighting in the country.”

The BTC pipeline is “the only major conduit for Central Asian resources not under Russian control,” notes The Telegraph, which quotes the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on Russia’s motivation: “They need control of energy routes.”

Four billion people are expected to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics today. But what many people may not know is that in an attempt to highlight Chinese heritage, the medals given to victorious Olympic athletes over the next several weeks will include jade—much of which is mined in terrible conditions in neighboring Burma. Although the Beijing Organizing Committee has publicly stated that the medals and officially licensed products are being made with jade from China’s Qinghai Province, not jade from Burma, Blood Jade: Burmese Gemstones & the Beijing Games, a new report by 8-8-08 for Burma and the All Kachin Students and Youth Union maintains that the “showcasing of jade on the world stage will further escalate the growth in demand.

Despite being internationally and internally reviled, Burma’s ruling military junta has been able to maintain its grip on power by controlling the country’s rich natural resources. Burma exports many types of gems, all of which the junta requires be sold through government auctions, where it takes a cut of the profits. BusinessWeek reported that Burma’s official 2006 jade exports totaled $433.2 million, or 10 percent of the country’s total exports. Official tallies are often unreliable, however, and the black market further obscures the true figures.

“In the mining areas, the companies make their own laws,” says a Burmese citizen quoted in the report. Blood Jade tells of mining companies—sometimes with official military support—beating, torturing, and even killing miners who dig through mine waste for discarded stones or make mistakes on the job. “Jadeite production comes at significant costs to the human rights and environmental security of the people living in Kachin state,” says the report. “Land confiscation and forced relocation are commonplace and improper mining practices lead to frequent landslides, floods, and other environmental damage. Conditions in the mines are deplorable, with frequent accidents and base wages less than US$1 per day.”

In an attempt to keep workers on duty for longer hours and to suppress rebellion, the Burmese government has encouraged drug sales and use. The economic situation is so desperate that many women are forced into the sex trade, which the government also condones. The combination of prostitution and drug use has led to disastrous HIV/AIDS rates. “Today,” Blood Jade reports, “four prefectures in Yunnan Province are regarded as having ‘generalized HIV epidemics.’”

Yet despite the misery they cause, jade and other gems are not even the largest single source of income for Burma’s rulers. According to a 2007 article from Foreign Policy, two other resources rate higher: natural gas and the tropical hardwood teak, which is so valuable that it has “perpetuated violent conflicts among the country’s many fractious ethnic groups.”

Several groups have organized campaigns urging people not to buy jade products, but it is unclear what impact they will have on the trade. Following the junta’s crackdown on anti-government protests by Buddhist monks in November 2007, a representative of Kam Wing Cheong Jewelry in China told BusinessWeek: “We will not stop purchasing stones in Burma because of the political situation. The political chaos did not start with the junta; the country has been plagued by the conflicts with ethnic minorities for years. This is totally out of our control.”

Photo: Man working in a jade factory in China. Courtesy of Flickr user maethlin

“The health of our planet is inextricably linked to the health of people,” says Judy Oglethorpe, director of World Wildlife Federation’s Community Conservation program in “The Human Face of Conservation” (WWF Focus, July/August, 2008). While the links between population, health, and environmental degradation are fairly well understood, environmental groups have largely neglected to incorporate family planning or health programs in their conservation efforts.

Several WWF initiatives are breaking this trend, spreading awareness of ecological issues by integrating health or livelihood strategies. In Mozambique, illegal industrial fishing was leading to conflict with local fishermen, who were left with smaller catches of smaller fish. The WWF program helped authorities crack down on illegal fishing and set aside “replenishment zones” for fish to spawn and grow. As a result, local fishermen “have seen dramatic increases in the size of individual fish and in their overall catch outside these zones – and in their earnings,” allowing them to feed their families.

WWF is also diversifying its focus by partnering with other organizations to bring family planning services to poor communities, including in the Khata corridor of Nepal. “It’s really difficult for women living in remote regions to have access to modern family planning and basic healthcare,” said Population, Health, and Environment senior program officer Cara Honzak. By providing basic family planning services, women in these communities are able to control the growth of their families. With this opportunity, it is easier for communities to support and manage themselves, and reduced population pressures on the environment help maintain their local forest ecosystems.

Programs such as these are popular and effective, because by considering both human and natural needs, both sides can be winners. Said the manager of an initiative in Namibia, “When communities can earn as much – or more – by conserving wild land as they can by burning and planting it, potential conflicts can be turned into win-win situations for both people and wildlife.”

“If you want fast money and are willing to take the risk, that’s the only way to get it,” says Abdullah Dieng, a fisherman in Bissau, Guinea, in a new IRIN article, “Fishermen turn to trafficking as fish profits drop.” Fishermen in Guinea have a problem: No one is buying their fish. “The lack of decent roads into the interior of the country, combined with prohibitive fuel prices, makes it too difficult for fish-sellers to transport fish any further than Bissau, creating a saturated market,” reports IRIN. As an alternative, the fishermen are turning to illegal trade in drugs and humans. By smuggling, they can earn much more money.

“The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates several hundred kilograms of cocaine go through the country each week, while according to 2004 figures from the International Office of Migration, one million West and Central Africans head clandestinely to Europe every year,” reports IRIN.

Fisheries are collapsing all over the world, but especially in Africa. The New York Times article “Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow” reports that there is almost no regulation of Bissau’s fishery, like most fisheries along the African coast. “Creating the Enabling Environment for Effective Fisheries Enforcement,” an event in the Environmental Change and Security Program’s fisheries series, explored some of the challenges associated with fisheries management. One of the most basic problems is a lack of information. Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, told the Times that “no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.” As a result, both local and European fishers have mostly stripped the area of its fish.

The lack of oversight is largely due to a lack of attention, and thus a lack of money. IRIN reports that “The fishing ministry receives just 5 percent of the government’s paltry annual budget, despite fishing bringing in 40 percent of the country’s annual revenues, and most of this money can only cover staff salaries.” Without increased funding and attention, it is unlikely that a solution will emerge to the environmental and economic problems that force fishermen to turn to illegal and dangerous activities. As the source of their livelihoods disappears, they have fewer and fewer options. Said one consultant quoted in the Times story, “The sea is being emptied.”

“Over the past two decades, the extraction and trade of natural resources have helped incite, fuel and prolong violent conflicts,” write Alec Crawford and Oli Brown in Growing Unrest: The links between farmed and fished resources and the risk of conflict, a new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “The links between natural resources and conflict are established and widely accepted,” point out the authors; however, “it has become ‘received wisdom’ that these linkages only apply to a certain subset of natural resources—oil, diamonds, certain minerals (e.g., coltan), illegal narcotics and timber.” This notion is mistaken, as agriculture and fisheries are also often involved in funding and instigating conflict.

The authors highlight four case studies before making general policy recommendations. In the Côte d’Ivoire, instabilities in the cocoa market during the 1980s exacerbated social tensions, eventually leading to civil war. During this war, both sides taxed cocoa transport or production to finance their war effort.

In Somalia, where limited ports make it easy to control exports, a tax on bananas was a significant source of income for many Somali warlords during the 1990s. In present-day Somalia, many warlords have turned to the fishing market, funding local militias by issuing false fishing licenses to foreign companies for millions of dollars.

The final case examines the tensions over water-sharing agreements in Central Asia between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Water necessary for irrigating cotton, the local economic staple, has been a contentious issue for years, and resolution has not been forthcoming even as irrigation infrastructure continues to decay.

Based on these case studies, the authors report three main findings:

• By controlling the trade of agricultural or marine commodities, gangs, warlords, or sovereign nations can extract wealth and use it to support conflicts and other oppressive activities.
• When the prices of farmed and fished goods are volatile, they can lead to instability and conflict in nations without stable markets or political systems.
• Agricultural and marine goods can be seen as “proxies” for more basic commodities, such as freshwater and land — and thus part of larger conflicts over those resources.

The report offers 14 recommendations — falling into two general categories — for policymakers hoping to minimize conflict over these resources. It recommends expanding existing structures – such as extending sanctions that currently punish those who use diamonds, oil, coltan, and other natural resources to fund conflict – to include agricultural and marine commodities. It also recommends stabilizing dangerous situations, such as easing institutional tensions when faced with shortages or conflicting interests, or cracking down on opportunities for exploitation caused by price volatility.

Those interested in natural resources and conflict should expand their focus to fished and farmed resources instead of remaining trapped in a worldview in which only certain commodities are important. The authors write, “It is not the type of resource that matters, but rather how it is produced and traded, to what ends the revenues are put, and what the associated impact is on people and their environments.”

ECSP examined the challenges facing the world’s fisheries in a recent meeting series available at www.wilsoncenter.org/fish. An ongoing series looks at natural resources and conflict: www.wilsoncenter.org/newhorizons.

“They say good fences make good neighbors, and maybe they do. But what I’ve learned is that good medicine makes good neighbors, and it makes good foreign policy too,” said Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a press release received by the New Security Beat. In an appearance at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Thompson announced his new position as global ambassador for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). “It is a tragedy,” he said, “that the world’s poorest citizens are suffering from diseases that have been neglected for too long, particularly when we can treat many of them for less than 50 cents a year.”

Thompson’s announcement came amid news of a $3.8 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to raise awareness about the diseases and advocate for increased funding for NTDs, which include leprosy, river blindness, hookworm, and elephantiasis and affect one billion of the world’s poor. Thompson, who will travel to Rwanda next months as part of his new position, was quick to articulate the broader impacts of global humanitarian aid for health. “Through medical diplomacy, we can win the hearts and minds of people in less fortunate areas of the world by exporting medical care, expertise, and personnel to those who need it most,” he said. “America has the best chance to beat the war on terror and defeat the terrorists by enhancing our medical and humanitarian assistance to vulnerable countries.”