Reading Radar:
A Weekly Roundup
Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investment and international land deals in Africa, a study conducted by IIED, FAO, and IFAD, is the first detailed study to examine large land acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa.
The latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required) includes articles on land, education, and fertility in Kenya; indigenous women and fertility in the Ecuadorian Amazon; and the impact of chemical exposure on sex ratios in Greece.
A partnership between local villages and the Bonobo Conservation Initiative has led to the establishment of a 1,847 square mile reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reports Mongabay.
A new article in the Encyclopedia of the Earth lists population growth rates (including births, deaths, and migration) by country, based on CIA data.
AFRICOM Steps Into the Spotlight
Did you notice the rash of AFRICOM coverage last week? The Washington Post and the Washington Times (as well as the military’s own Stars and Stripes) published articles on the U.S. military’s newest combatant command and its attempts at military-to-military cooperation and hearts-and-minds diplomacy in Africa.
As part of a seven-month operation the military is calling the Africa Partnership Station, the USS Nashville is attempting to help stabilize the waters off of West Africa, which are plagued by illegal fishing, drug trafficking, and illegal migration, as well as robberies and kidnappings in the Niger Delta. According to the International Maritime Bureau, these waters are now the second-most dangerous in the world, after
The Post aptly noted that the 
Why the sudden surge in publicity for AFRICOM, when it’s been doing these kinds of outreach and confidence-building activities for more than a year? Perhaps President Obama, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and others in the new administration see AFRICOM as an example of a foreign policy that places as much emphasis on diplomacy and development as on defense. Indeed, even Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, who was appointed by former President Bush, has called for a rebalancing of the instruments of U.S. power; in 2007, he said, "We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years."
Photos: Top—Portugal Navy Lieutenant Commander Antonio Mourinha and a Gabonese Sailor inspect a holding bay for fish after boarding an illegal fishing vessel during Africa Partnership Station (
Reading Radar:
A Weekly Roundup
In the June 2009 edition of The Atlantic, 2008 International Reporting Fellow Delphine Shrank explains how conflict in DRC is harming the local ecosystem and livelihoods.
Oxfam International has released a study (Spanish) arguing that rapidly shrinking glaciers in the Andes are disrupting water supplies and leading to conflict in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
A shortage of clean water is leading to domestic violence in Uganda, report The New Vision and Circle of Blue.
The June 2009 edition of National Geographic includes a special report on food security, agriculture, and population.
“Two decades after its fall, the border between East and West Germany has already become Europe’s biggest nature reserve: an 858-mile ‘ecological treasure trove,’ no longer the Iron Curtain but the Green Belt, and home to more than 600 rare and endangered species of birds, mammals, plants and insects,” reports Tony Paterson for The Independent.
Worldfocus.org’s latest radio show explores the geopolitics of the melting Arctic.
Climate Change Not the Only Environmental Problem, Says U.K. Environment Secretary
Benn called for U.S. leadership on climate change and other environmental issues: “We need America to apply all of its great energy to the task we, together, face.”
The Copenhagen climate conference will be “the most important gathering in human history,” said the United Kingdom’s environment secretary, Hilary Benn, at the Wilson Center on May 14, 2009 (full text of speech). While “an agreement on cutting emissions would be the biggest single step we could take to safeguard [natural] resources,” said Benn, “even such an agreement will not—indeed cannot—encompass all of the things we need to do to safeguard our environment.”
“The most glaring threat is that of dangerous climate change. But it is not the only example of the problems we create when we exploit the world’s resources unsustainably,” explained Benn.
“The spiraling price of food in 2008 was a wake-up call. Riots threatened political stability. Export bans threatened world trade. Wheat prices doubled, rice quadrupled. And another 75 million people were threatened by poverty and hunger,” Benn said.
Although food prices have fallen recently, continuing growth in the global population—expected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050—and rising standards of living in poor and middle-income countries mean that world food production will need to double by 2050. This demand for food—especially more meat and dairy products—will put increasing pressure on land and water. Conflicts could erupt over these scarce resources if they are not managed properly, Benn warned.
Already, wealthy governments and corporations are buying farmland in Africa and other parts of the developing world—leading to unrest. Widespread anger at South Korean company Daewoo’s proposal to purchase more than half of Madagascar’s arable land contributed to the ouster of former Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana.
Benn highlighted an apparent Catch-22: “Development is the best way of lowering the rate of population growth and so, in turn, lowering the pressure on resources. But development also increases income, and therefore demand.”
The way to free ourselves from this cycle, Benn said, is to create an environmentally sustainable economy, so that economic development does not degrade the environment. He proposed:
Photo: Hilary Benn. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.
Women’s Rights: A Silver Bullet for Development?
Any veteran of the international development field will be familiar with the disclaimer that no single intervention, no matter how effective, is a “silver bullet.” But in The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, journalist Michelle Goldberg argues forcefully that there is one change that is key to solving environmental degradation, food insecurity, water scarcity, global health challenges, skewed gender ratios, poverty, and both under- and overpopulation: women’s empowerment.
Malthusian Anxieties
As Matthew Connelly documents in his book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, the family-planning movement sometimes lapsed into questionable moral territory during its early years, when women’s rights were not among its chief motivations. Fortunately, it turns out that family planning is actually more successful when motivated by a larger desire to empower women than when spurred by fears of overpopulation (The Means of Reproduction, pp. 74-76; 84-85). Educated women are more likely to delay marriage, have fewer children, obtain good maternal care, and be less vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, write Caren Grown et al. in a literature review of gender equality and women’s health in The Lancet.
A Birth Dearth—or an Empowerment Dearth?
As Goldberg points out, empowering women is also the solution to slowing the rapid population decline being experienced in many European countries and some wealthy Asian ones. “In contemporary developed societies, birthrates are highest where support for working mothers is greatest, a fact conservatives simply ignore in their doomsday surveys of future European decrepitude,” says Goldberg (p. 204).
Thus, comparatively religious, socially conservative European countries like Italy and Poland have some of the lowest fertility rates on the continent (both 1.3 children per woman), while more secular countries like France and Sweden, with their generous paid parental leave policies, public day care, and after-school programs, have some of the highest (2.0 and 1.9, respectively).
Strong Women, Healthy Families
Women’s empowerment is key to human health. The more education a woman has, the healthier her children are likely to be, explains Goldberg (p. 75). In addition, as Grown et al. point out, “in societies such as Bangladesh, where husbands control most household resources, when women did own assets, household expenditure on children’s clothing and education was higher and the rate of illness among girls was reduced.”
But the connection between empowerment and health also works in the other direction: In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 57 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS—a direct result of women’s sexual, social, political, and economic subordination (pp. 224-225). Women often do not have the standing to refuse sex, or to demand that a man wear a condom. They also frequently lack the financial and educational resources needed to leave violent or unfaithful husbands (p. 225).
Bare Branches: Sex Ratios and Security
A preference for sons persists in many parts of the world—especially Asia—and the spread of ultrasound, which can detect the sex of a four-month-old fetus, has made sex-selective abortion hugely popular for couples seeking to have a son. But the growing imbalance between men and women has potentially grave security implications for countries such as China and India, warns Goldberg. As Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer point out, Indian states “with high sex ratios, such as Uttar Pradesh, have much higher violent crime rates than states with more normal sex ratios, such as Kerala.”
As Goldberg puts it, “as long as women lack an identity without a husband or a son, sex-selective abortion will continue to deform India’s—and Asia’s—demographics” (p.194). She isn’t hopeful about quick progress: “Like any democracy, India will probably find it easier to slouch toward disaster than to infuriate the defenders of patriarchy. Ultimately, though, unless the country finds a way to break through the encrustations of centuries of misogyny, its democracy itself could be in danger from an unmanageable excess of men” (p. 198).
Toward Nine Billion Hot, Hungry, Thirsty People
Goldberg’s take on the links among population, the environment, and security is admirably nuanced—although I would have appreciated a more extensive discussion of demographic security and population-environment links. She acknowledges that the food riots of 2008, combined with growing concern about water scarcity and climate change, may have generated more attention for family planning and reproductive health.
But she reminds us that the main population-related response to these problems—a commitment to decrease fertility in the developing world—misinterprets the causes. The food shortages were largely the result of growing consumption by middle-income people, combined with continued high consumption in the rich world. Climate change will undoubtedly become much worse if all people in the developing world start to live the high-carbon lifestyles we do in the West, but to date, climate change has been caused almost entirely by industrialized countries.
The Micro and the Macro
Goldberg’s storytelling skills are superb, making The Means of Reproduction both an exciting and enlightening read. She illustrates her broader arguments about women’s rights with compelling stories about individual women and men. She demands that we respect these people’s experiences while arguing powerfully against succumbing to the temptations of political correctness and relativism:
“In thinking about the situation of women in vastly different contexts, there are a number of dangers. One is assuming that Western ways are self-evidently superior and that all women would choose them, if only they could. But another is assuming that women in other cultures are so different from us that situations we would find intolerable—bearing child after child into grinding poverty; being utterly at the mercy of fathers, husbands, and brothers; having one’s clitoris sliced off with a razor—do not also cause them great pain” (p. 9).
Goldberg has pulled off an impressive feat: The Means of Reproduction is accessible enough to serve as an introduction to the debates around population and family planning, but complex enough to inform readers about the latest controversies and battlegrounds in the field. Goldberg does have an opinion, but it’s based on reams of research. Here’s hoping The Means of Reproduction finds a place in the canon.
Photo: Women and children at the health post at Sam Ouandja refugee camp in the Central African Republic. Courtesy of Pierre Holtz/UNICEF and Flickr user hdptcar.
World-Renowned Inventor Dean Kamen Talks Water, Energy
“If you tell the world you’re going to do something and they go, ‘Yeah…?’ it’s probably that you’re making an incremental change in something that the world is already doing reasonably well,” said renowned inventor Dean Kamen at a May 2009 meeting co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Program on Science, Technology, America, and the Global Economy. “I’d rather work on the really big stuff.”
His track record proves it: He holds more than 400 U.S. and international patents, and his most famous inventions include an implantable insulin pump, a portable dialysis machine, and an artificial arm, as well as the Segway personal transporter.
Kamen now seeks to provide clean water to the 1.1 billion people who lack it with the Slingshot, a washing machine-sized device that uses just 500 watts of electricity to produce 10 gallons of clean water an hour.
Tackling the Big Problems: Water and Power
Kamen’s career as an inventor began in high school, when he would invent medical devices for his older brother, a doctor. The Slingshot grew out of a portable dialysis machine Kamen developed for patients with renal failure. After inventing a way to make perfectly sterile water for the dialysis machine, he explored whether he could adapt the water-purification technology for the developing world, where millions of people die each year from dirty water.
The data “take your breath away,” said Kamen. More than one billion people lack access to clean water, and 1.6 billion do not have access to electricity. Kamen thought he could address both of these problems with the Slingshot, which uses a Stirling-cycle generator to vaporize and condense the water, removing the impurities.
The generator runs on any kind of fuel, including the methane gas in cow dung, which is readily available in the Bangladeshi villages where Kamen conducted a six-month test of the Slingshot. The generator not only powers the water vaporizer, but also produces enough surplus electricity to power a light, cell phone, and computer for every household in a small village.
The Skepticism of Experts: A Bigger Problem?
In meetings with the World Bank and other international development organizations, Kamen was told that the Slingshot was more expensive than other ways of purifying water, including chlorine tablets, activated-charcoal filters, and reverse-osmosis desalination. But unlike these technologies, the Slingshot can remove any kind of contaminant from water; does not need filters, membranes, or chemicals; and does not require any technical know-how to use.
Kamen granted that the cheaper technologies might be more practical for urban areas, but argued that the Slingshot could have advantages in remote villages without access to technical expertise or a steady supply of chemicals or other components. He also suggested that microfinance might be a way to overcome the large initial cost of the Slingshot—although he emphasized that his expertise lies in developing the technology, and then partnering with experts who know how to surmount the various barriers to distribution.
“If everything I now say by way of recalling my history here seems to you like I’m frustrated, and angry, and disappointed, it’s mostly because I’m frustrated, angry, kinda disappointed,” said Kamen, adding, “But you’re going to fix all that.” Suggestions from audience members included learning from the experiences of venture capitalists who have invested in water technology in the developing world, as well as partnering with the military and defense contractors to manufacture and distribute the Slingshot.
Water, Electricity, and National Security
Kamen suggested that the Slingshot could be used to support U.S. foreign-policy and national-security objectives. For instance, the U.S. armed forces could bring water and electricity to an Afghani village with the Slingshot and Stirling-cycle generator. A telephone and camera mounted on the generator would provide communications technology.
“I would suspect that the Taliban…would be way more worried that everybody in town is happy, and healthy, and has light, and is communicating and showing pictures of everything going on” than about the threat of attack by the United States, said Kamen.
Photo: Dean Kamen. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.
The High Politics of a Humble Resource: Water
Photo: The Nile River Basin is shared by 10 countries. Courtesy of Flickr user Michael Gwyther-Jones.
Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources, a recent report by the Stimson Center’s “Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges” project, exemplifies the kind of integrated analysis that needs to be done on global security, governance, and environmental issues. I want to highlight four areas where the report points us in the right direction for this kind of work:
1. It takes a regional approach. Regions have historically been neglected as units of analysis, and there has not been enough focus on regional institutions. We organize our foreign assistance on an overwhelmingly bilateral basis; we have country strategies and spend much of our money bilaterally. Yet river basins or other ecosystems are almost always transboundary and therefore regional. The chapters in this report show time and again that bilateral approaches are not sufficient to meet the challenges posed by climate change’s impacts on the hydrological cycle.
2. It examines what climate change means in specific contexts. In year of Copenhagen, we need to be talking about global targets and timetables, grand bargains, and massive mitigation. But we must keep a parallel focus on what climate change will mean in specific sectors (e.g., water, food, desertification), in specific locations, and for specific groups (e.g., the poor).
The report has many examples of where glacial and snowmelt patterns have big impacts many hundreds and thousands of miles away. My own program just hosted a conference in Bangkok where we had the India-based expert on glacial melt in the Tibetan plateau talking with USAID environment officers in Southeast Asia. We need more of these kinds of conversations.
3. It takes a holistic, integrated approach toward analyzing problems and recommending responses. This report makes explicit the importance of the analytical and policy connections among climate change, water, governance, conflict, and cooperation. However, governments, NGOs, donors, and international bodies remain wedded to stovepiped, single-sector approaches to diagnosing and responding to problems. This must change.
In 2009 in Washington, there is a greater appetite and a better political environment for taking on a broader approach. This has been framed as rebalancing the “3Ds” of defense, diplomacy, and development; as “sustainable security”; and as “smart power.” Whatever the name, environmental issues such as climate change and water should be front and center in these discussions.
4. It has a nuanced view of conflict and cooperation over natural resources. The report—and David Michel’s chapter in particular—successfully highlights the geopolitical implications of changes in climate and water without inaccurately hyping “water wars.” As we know, there is extensive subnational conflict around water, and we are likely to see more of this type of conflict under the conditions described in Troubled Waters. But states frequently work hard to cooperate and deflect violent conflict over transboundary water.
However, we need greater political and financial investment in transboundary institutions, as international cooperation around water doesn’t happen without a lot of effort. It needs to happen, though, because the future may be more dangerous than the past when it comes to water conflict and cooperation.
As we move forward on the water conflict and cooperation agenda, let’s not just focus on onset of conflict. Let’s be sure to look all along the conflict continuum, from prevention, to conflict, to post-conflict, and evaluate the high-politics importance of water at each of these stages.
I’ll end with an example of where we could broaden our approach to water in a current Washington policy context. Senator Dick Durbin recently introduced the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, which builds on the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005. The new bill is heavily focused on access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene, which are indeed pressing priorities. It says some of the right things about transboundary water, but historically, this has received little funding.
Further complicating efforts to secure more robust funding for transboundary water management and security is the fact that other water activities are usually funded through the Department of State, but transboundary efforts are often put through a multilateral institution like the World Bank—and the Department of the Treasury, not State, typically manages that relationship. This complicated tangle of agencies and institutions emphasizes my earlier point that foreign assistance is too stovepiped, and that we must get better at working across sectors.
By ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
Reforming Foreign Assistance: The Quest for the Holy Grail?
This morning, the Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress released a proposal for a National Strategy for Global Development. This is only the latest in a raft of attempts to imagine a new architecture for U.S. foreign aid—several of which are reviewed in the latest Environmental Change and Security Program Report.
“Security By Other Means: Foreign Assistance, Global Poverty, and American Leadership, compiles the findings of the Brookings Institution-Center for Strategic and International Studies Task Force on Transforming Foreign Assistance in the 21st Century into a manual of sorts for reforming foreign assistance,” writes the Wilson Center’s Sean Peoples in ECSP Report 13. “Not shying away from the nitty-gritty of foreign assistance policy, the book’s contributors delve deep into the current development assistance framework and recommend valuable reforms, which include: integrating strategic security concerns; formulating clear objectives; understanding recipient country capacities; and building effective partnerships that exploit comparative advantages.”
“Trade, Aid and Security: An Agenda for Peace and Development undertakes the challenging task of assessing the interrelationships between trade and aid, as well as the complex causes of conflict within the poorest countries,” writes Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell. “Several chapters in Trade, Aid and Security make the case that resources, whether derived from aid flows or legitimate trade, often are not equitably distributed or used to end poverty or promote sustainable development. Instead, they are captured by special interests or steered to political elites.”
Energy, Climate Change, National Security Are Closely Linked, Assert Retired Generals, Admirals
The United States’—and the Department of Defense’s (DoD)—dependence on fossil fuels poses a significant national-security threat, concludes Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security (summary), the second report from CNA’s Military Advisory Board (MAB), a group of 12 retired three- and four-star admirals and generals. At the report’s launch this morning, several members of the MAB were joined by several of the people they are trying to influence, including Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Ashton Carter and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy, Sanctions, and Commodities Douglas Hengel.
Carter outlined some of the ways DoD is attempting to increase its energy efficiency, from insulating air-conditioned tents in Iraq with foam, which can lead to a 45 percent reduction in energy usage, to incorporating the fully burdened cost of fueling vehicles into the acquisitions process, to tripling the amount of spending on energy research and development over the past two years.
Hengel echoed the report’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of energy, climate change, and security, explaining that President Obama added the Secretary of Energy to the National Security Council for precisely this reason.
On May 28 at 3:00 p.m., ECSP will host a discussion of the report’s findings, featuring CNA General Counsel Sherri Goodman; General Charles Wald USAF (Ret.), chairman of the MAB; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn USN (Ret.), a member of the MAB. ECSP also hosted a discussion of the MAB’s previous report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.
Are Fences the Bridge to a Sustainable Future in Kenya?
“Kenya is destroying itself,” Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, told The Observer. “The population has reached an unsustainable level. We are killing ourselves by slowly destroying the forests and settling there.” Drought, poverty, and population growth have led large numbers of the rural poor to encroach on protected forests in search of arable land, reports The Observer, jeopardizing Kenya’s food and water security and hydroelectric energy production. The government’s inability to manage land tenure has further exacerbated the situation.
In response to these developments, a local conservation group called Rhino Ark has erected a 250-mile electric fence (see photo slideshow) around the Aberdare mountain range north of Nairobi. When members began the project in 1989, they were attempting to protect the area’s rhinoceroses. However, their efforts eventually grew into a broader campaign to safeguard the Aberdares’ critical water and forest resources.
Proponents of the Aberdare fence—including Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai—contend that it serves multiple purposes. First, it discourages settlers from grazing livestock in the forest or felling trees to make way for crop cultivation. Other regions of the country—notably the Mau Forest Complex, the water source for millions of people in Kenya, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan—have suffered severe deforestation and degradation, with serious consequences for human and ecological health. Forests provide a wide spectrum of essential ecosystem services, such as regulating the water cycle, filtering groundwater, and sequestering atmospheric carbon.
The fence also mitigates human-wildlife conflict, argue its supporters. According to a recent 60 Minutes report, some Maasai herdsmen have resorted to poisoning lions and other predators to protect their livestock. Farmers have targeted elephants and other animals that trample crops to safeguard their livelihoods. As a result, wildlife populations—the lifeblood of the Kenyan tourism industry—have been devastated. A study published in the Journal of Zoology found precipitous declines in wildlife at Maasai Mara, one of Kenya’s most renowned national parks. Robin Reid, a co-author of the paper, explains, “There appears to be a ‘tipping point’ of human populations above which former co-existence between Maasai and wildlife begins to break down.”
Following Aberdare’s example, the Kenyan government is considering building thousands of miles of fencing around similarly vulnerable forests and parks. Yet fences may soon prove inadequate. The country’s population has grown from 10 million to 36 million over the past 45 years, and it could exceed 65 million by 2050, given that the decline in its fertility rate has stalled. In addition, its GDP per capita has steadily decreased, leaving more than 55 percent of citizens below the official poverty line.
With more people clamoring for more resources, a sustainable future will depend on robust community conservation programs and land-rights reform. Successful models of community conservation in East Africa include the Lion Guardians and Il Ngwesi Group Ranch, as well as other efforts discussed at the Wilson Center last year. A 2008 report from the Rights and Resources Initiative argues that authorities should shift away from traditional forms of conservation, which focus on excluding people from protected areas, in favor of approaches that empower local communities to care for and benefit from the land through customary tenure or individual property rights.
Finally, Nairobi should craft national forest management practices with an eye toward ongoing international climate negotiations. Policymakers are poised to include provisions for compensating developing countries for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the next international climate treaty, to be concluded in Copenhagen this December. Kenya could benefit substantially if the government takes appropriate action.
Photo: A giraffe in Maasai Mara, where their population has declined 95 percent over the last 15 years. Courtesy Flickr user angela7dreams.
Reading Radar:
A Weekly Roundup
In Seed magazine, seven experts—including Peter Gleick and Mark Zeitoun—weigh in on whether “water wars” are a serious menace or an improbable threat, inflated by breathless media coverage of water shortages.
A major report on managing the health effects of climate change, co-authored by University College London and The Lancet, claims that climate change is the biggest health threat of the 21st century.
On his blog, Signs From Earth, National Geographic editor Dennis Dimick has collected a variety of resources about the possibility of “climate refugees.”
It’s not news that the U.S. and U.K. militaries are studying climate change’s potential security impacts, or seeking to increase energy efficiency on bases and in combat zones. But Geoffrey Lean, the environment editor of the Independent, is surprised that legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap has come out against bauxite mining in Vietnam’s central highlands, which he says “will cause serious consequences on the environment, society and national defense.”
Photo: Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka receives the Whitley Gold Award from Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. Courtesy of the Whitley Fund for Nature.
Next QDR Could Include Climate Adaptation Measures
Climate-change adaptation measures, including military-to-military collaboration on disaster preparedness and response, could be part of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), currently under preparation, reports Defense Environment Alert (one free article provided to new users). Congress mandated that the next QDR address the national-security impacts of climate change in 2008 defense-authorization legislation.
“Speaking at a conference hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Washington, DC, May 5, Kent Butts, a professor with the US Army War College and global warming expert, told delegates that while much attention is being paid to climate change mitigation measures, preparations for inevitable global warming effects have garnered too little attention at the Pentagon,” said Defense Environment Alert. “The armed services have invested considerable resources in developing new energy strategies to reduce consumption and switch to alternative sources of energy, but have yet to really focus on adaptation, Butts says.”
“While the military should not be the lead agency handling climate change impacts in the United States or other developed countries, Butts said, in many developing nations the military may be the only government agency capable of providing services such as disaster response and preparedness work. Civilian government in the developing world is often weak and lacks basic resources such as manpower, transportation and engineering capability, Butts said.”
Environmental-security concerns appear to enjoy considerable traction in the Obama administration. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair cited energy, food, and water scarcity, as well as the impacts of climate change, as potential security threats in his February 2009 testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Last month, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy echoed these concerns.
Land Grab: The Race for the World's Farmland
The world is experiencing a grain rush. With increasing frequency, wealthy, food-importing, and water-scarce countries—particularly the Arab Gulf states and the rich countries of East Asia—are investing in farmland overseas to meet their food-security needs. Similarly, the private sector is pursuing farmland deals abroad, with many investors perceiving land as a safe investment in an otherwise-shaky financial climate.
These investments are sparking both hope and fear. Some believe the deals can boost global agricultural productivity and farm yields, thereby bringing down global grain costs. Others, however, point to the land acquisitions’ negative impacts on small-scale farmers. On May 5, the Asia Program and four other Wilson Center programs hosted a half-day conference that considered the implications for investors, host countries, and food security, highlighting case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the former Soviet Union.
Global Trends
The private sector—including private firms, agribusiness and trading houses, and sovereign wealth funds—now plays a key role in overseas land investment, noted David Hallam of the Food and Agriculture Organization. These investors come from China, the Arab Gulf states, South Korea, and Japan, and they have mainly targeted Africa. Hallam asserted that these investors could potentially benefit developing countries through asset and advanced-technology transfers, employment opportunities, and economic and infrastructure development.
Alexandra Spieldoch of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy examined the “lopsided” power relations that prevail in foreign land acquisitions. Smallholders in poor countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan “have no political voice,” making them vulnerable to exploitation. The loss of land invites political conflict and violence, as exemplified by the public outcry in Madagascar over that country’s proposed land deal with South Korea’s Daewoo. Gary R. Blumenthal of World Perspectives, Inc., acknowledged that displacing small farmers in favor of large agribusiness activities generates “social push-back,” but contended that modern farms and private-sector funding are necessary to feed the world’s hungry and growing population.
Ruth Meinzen-Dick of the International Food Policy Research Institute discussed prospects for a “code of conduct” to regulate foreign land deals. She proposed that such a code have teeth and be modeled after the European Union’s code of conduct on bribery. Meinzen-Dick argued that questions regarding land use, land tenure, property rights, environmental concerns, and transparency should be settled before finalizing land deals. She also underscored the key role of governments in safeguarding and monitoring people’s rights, and of the media and civil society in increasing transparency and keeping up the pressure against “unjust expropriations.”
Case Studies: Asia, Africa, Europe
Raul Q. Montemayor noted that in Asia, some local people are facilitating land deals on behalf of foreign investors. In the southern Philippines, “goons and rogue elements” have been “let loose” to terrorize farmers, compelling the latter to lease their land—or evacuate. Montemayor argued that Asian farmers stand to benefit little financially from leasing their land to agribusiness enterprises. Those who have done so are receiving rental payments between 50 cents and a dollar per day. Yet he argued that any Asian farmer with his or her own standard two-hectare plot can generate the same, if not higher, daily income without renting out land.
Chido Makunike, a Senegalese agricultural commodities exporter, declared that without understanding local conditions, agribusiness investments in Africa are destined to fail. Like Spieldoch, he singled out the deal between Daewoo and the Malagasy government, which would have given Daewoo a 99-year lease on 1.3 million hectares of land—with Madagascar receiving little in return. The deal collapsed after it triggered political unrest. “It’s not enough to look at risk factors,” Makunike argued. “You must look at the sentiments of the people.” In Africa, far from being perceived as a mere “economic resource,” land has cultural, sentimental, and political meanings, and its loss was “one of the strongest symbols of dispossession” during the colonial era.
Carl Atkin of Bidwells Agribusiness highlighted investment opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Land in these areas boasts high-performing and resilient soil, and production costs are low. However, there are also considerable challenges. Infrastructure is lacking, and grain storage is problematic. Obtaining land titles can be “complex,” and land tenancy laws can be “very archaic.” According to Atkin, however, the biggest challenge is local management: “Can people on the ground get things done?”
Though they indicated varying levels of support for overseas farmland acquisitions, all panelists agreed that international investment in agriculture can be a good thing—if done the right way.
While Meinzen-Dick and others lobbied for an international code of conduct to govern the transactions, other panelists insisted that foreign land investment must respect regulations in host countries. Montemayor, for example, called for “clear rules consistent with national policy goals,” and implored foreign investors to respect local laws.
By Michael Kugelman, Asia Program Associate, and Susan L. Levenstein, Asia Program Assistant
Reading Radar:
A Weekly Roundup
In Conservation magazine, David Malakoff examines how cellulosic ethanol may threaten biodiversity around the world.
A Comprehensive Approach to Congo’s Conflict Minerals, a report by the Enough Project, argues that ending resource-related violence in the DRC will require:
- Making the consumer-electronics supply chain transparent;
- Pinpointing and securing strategic mines;
- Reforming and expanding governance; and
- Providing miners with economic opportunities.
Food shortages pose the greatest threat to global stability, argues Lester Brown in the May Scientific American.
The New Agriculturalist describes how some African farmers are adapting to climate change.
Worldchanging features an interview with Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Projecting Population: A Risky Business
Assumptions about human behavior drive our knowledge of future global population trends. Demographers analyze population and other survey data in order to forecast trends, but uncertainty colors these projections.
In the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the UN Population Division projects that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections—7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively—could instead become reality, given slight shifts in fertility rates in developing countries, where growth rates remain higher than in more developed nations. Although both developing and developed nations are susceptible to shifts in fertility rates, uncertainties are greater in the developing world due to factors such as inconsistent data collection, weak health system infrastructure, and low government capacity.
Elizabeth Leahy and I investigate the underlying assumptions behind population projections in an article in the May/June edition of World Watch magazine. By comparing three of the leading population-forecasting institutions, we find that small variations in assumptions can lead to significant differences in projections.
Uganda’s demographic outlook is a prime example. Between 1960 and 2005, Uganda’s population grew by 22 million people, while the country’s fertility rate fell by less than 3 percent. The UN medium-variant population projection assumes the country will buck precedent and experience a 61 percent fertility rate decline between 2005 and 2050, resulting in a population of 91 million people. The U.S. Census Bureau, on the other hand, assumes a less drastic fertility decline and projects a population of 128 million people by 2050. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an Austrian institution that projects population on a regional basis, recently revised its population projections to reflect greater growth in sub-Saharan Africa due to stalling fertility decline and stagnant educational-attainment rates.
Fertility rates rarely decline when governments have not made the proper investments in health and education. The UN medium-variant projection is commonly cited as an inevitable scenario; few people know that one of its underlying assumptions is that access to modern contraception will continue to expand. Without real-world development investments to match these assumptions, a very different scenario could easily materialize. By empowering women, bolstering access to education, and providing comprehensive family-planning services to citizens, governments and policymakers can translate these assumptions into reality.
With Demography, the Devil Is in the Details—and the Assumptions
A micro-economist friend of mine likes to say that macro-economists have correctly predicted nine of the last five recessions. In “The World’s New Numbers,” in the Spring 2009 Wilson Quarterly, Wilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker argues that demographers should be so lucky.
Problematic Projections
Demographers base their projections on complex models that incorporate current population numbers, fertility rates, age structures, and other variables. Predicting how many children women and their families will want to have in the future—across different countries and cultures—is not easy. The result is that different demographers get different results. To cover their backs, even the most esteemed organizations offer a range of projected population sizes; the United Nations, for example, says that world population in 2050 will be anywhere from 7.9 to 11 billion people.
As Walker points out, these calculations are often revised. Between 1998 and 2000, for example, the United Nations’ middle projection (or “best guess”) increased by 500 million people. Seemingly miniscule changes in fertility rates often produce big changes in later decades, as Sean Peoples and Liz Leahy explain in the current issue of World Watch magazine.
So Close, and Yet So Far
Why are the projections so far off? Human behavior—particularly the status of women and the availability of family planning—is notoriously hard to predict. Walker points out that the United Nations “rather daringly assumes” that global fertility will drop to 2.02 children per woman by 2050, and to 1.85 further in the future. He doesn’t discuss, however, that these projections are based on an increase in the availability, accessibility, and use of contraceptives in all parts of the world.
Since increased use of contraceptives is highly associated with increases in supply (assuming associated high-quality, culturally sensitive services are provided, including reproductive health education), the burden of reaching global fertility levels of 2.02 and 1.85 is on funders. But when adjusted for inflation, U.S. funding for family planning has declined by almost 40 percent since 1995. We won’t reach the middle UN projection without some significant commitments from the U.S. government and others.
Communicating Probability
With so many (changing) projections and so much nuance, how is demographic information communicated to the public? Poorly, says Walker, with the result that “sensationalist headlines soon become common wisdom.” This “wisdom” includes the belief that Western countries are having fewer babies, aging rapidly, and will soon strain their social safety nets to the breaking point; that mass immigration to Europe is changing the cultural landscape; and that population growth will continue unabated in developing countries for the foreseeable future.
Walker tackles these misconceptions masterfully, pointing to lesser-known or perhaps ignored data. For example, high levels of Arab and Muslim immigration to Europe are unlikely to continue, given that many of the sending countries are experiencing steep declines in birth rates. Meanwhile, birth rates have recently rebounded in several European countries, and social policies such as increasing female participation in the workforce and raising the retirement age may lessen the stress on social safety nets.
Walker does well to point out that 30 countries—mostly in sub-Saharan Africa—continue to grow rapidly, and that they are the least prepared to tackle the challenges associated with rapid growth, given their weak governments, poor economies, and inadequate health and education systems.
Why Bother?
Given the difficulty of making and interpreting projections, why bother with demographic “best guesses” at all? Because the size of a population—and its composition by age, gender, and other variables—impacts many areas, including health care, infrastructure, environmental degradation, and security. So while population projections and economic forecasts may be difficult to parse, basic demographic or financial literacy and the ability to see through sensationalized headlines are essential to understanding both.
Cowboy Logging to Carbon Cowboys: Natural Resources in Indonesia and India
Parsing the Patterns: Population, Resources, and Conflict However, quantitative studies are also imperfect, cautioned Urdal, because most of them use national-level data, which do not capture local dynamics. In addition, they have a tendency to ignore conflicts in which the state is not involved. Two Sub-National Studies: Urdal sought to avoid these problems by using sub-national data and including political violence and riots, as well as armed conflict, in his quantitative studies of In Indonesian provinces, Urdal and his colleagues found a relationship, albeit a weak one, between population growth and non-ethnic violence between 1990-2003. They also found an increased risk of non-ethnic violence in provinces with high population growth and high levels of inequality between different religious groups. However, there was no relationship between land scarcity and conflict. Forests, Conflict, and Participatory Mapping in Forty million Indonesians—one-fifth of the population—depend on forests for their livelihoods, said Rhee. Yet much of In an attempt to resolve some of this conflict, the Center for International Forestry Research initiated a participatory mapping project in 27 villages in the Malinau district of Kalimantan in 1999. Participatory mapping enables dayaks to establish land rights and negotiate compensation from companies. Following the 1998 ousting of President Suharto, district governments, rather than the central government, began issuing timber permits. The villages in Malinau often used the maps they had created to justify their claims to the land. But the district government did not cross-check the claims, so this generated inter- and intra-village conflict—roadblocks, protests, and lock-ups of timber equipment. Although the “cowboy logging” that characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s has largely ceased, Rhee believes it may be replaced by “carbon cowboys” seeking to capitalize on the UN Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by paying governments to preserve forests. “With climate change, and the link between climate change and forests, 
“Indonesia’s forest loss continues more or less unabated, despite global concern for the resource and forest-dependent people, as well as a wealth of knowledge about the problems and solutions: poor governance, corruption, perverse incentives in the industrial sector,” said AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow Steve Rhee. Rhee was joined by Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who also studied the effects of environmental degradation on conflict in 
Urdal argued that case studies have sometimes overstated the links among population, resource scarcity, and conflict. Researchers tend to choose cases where there is conflict and then look for a population or resource dimension. If you look hard enough, “it’s always possible to find some connection,” said Urdal.
Under Secretary Flournoy: Climate Change, Demography, Natural Resources Pose Security Challenges
In a recent talk (transcript) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy (formerly of the Center for a New American Security) laid out five trends that are affecting U.S. national security:
- The global economic recession;
- Climate change;
- Demographic shifts;
- Dwindling natural resources; and
- The spread of destabilizing technologies.
It’s somewhat surprising that three of these five are the kinds of nontraditional security threats we study here at the Environmental Change and Security Program—not that Flournoy didn’t spend plenty of time addressing traditional security issues, too.
Here’s what Flournoy had to say on these trends:
Climate change: “I believe that over time, as the results of this manifest, it’s going to be an accelerant. It’s going to accelerate state failure in some cases, accelerate mass migration, spread of disease, and even possibly insurgency in some areas as weak governments fail to cope with the effects of global climate change.”
Demography: “In some regions we are seeing tremendous youth bulges. We can all point to a number of countries in the Middle East and elsewhere where the average age is 20 or younger. Contrast that with the number of aging societies in Europe, Japan, Russia where you see depopulation trend[s] happening in some of these major powers.”
Natural resources: “[K]ey natural resources are increasingly scarce and we are likely to see in the future [an] increase in competition for everything from oil, gas, water, and so that is likely to exacerbate some of our challenges.”
The Challenge for Africa: A Conversation With Wangari Maathai
“Almost every conflict in Africa you can point at has something to do with competition over resources in an environment which has bad governance,” said Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, at an April 13, 2009, event co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Africa Program and the International Gateway at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center. Maathai discussed her new book, The Challenge for Africa, with Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko.
“This is why I wrote this book: Because I really was challenging us as Africans to think outside the box and to begin to see why when we seem to move forward, we make two steps forward, and we make one step backward, and so we look like we are not moving,” said Maathai. “Some of these issues are complex, they are difficult—but they have a lot to do with the way we have decided to manage our resources and to manage our politics and economics.”
The Three Legs of Stability
Maathai used the traditional African three-legged stool as a metaphor for what she views as the three essential components of a stable society: sustainable environmental management, democratic governance, and a culture of peace. “Those legs are chiseled by a craftsman…[who] chisels all the three legs at the same time, in order to create a balance,” she said. “If we don’t have these three legs, no matter who comes, and with whatever [loans or aid], we shall never develop.”
Land, Politics, and Ethnicity: An Explosive Combination
Maathai explained that in the absence of democratic governance and sustainable environmental management, natural resources have repeatedly ignited conflict in her native Kenya. For instance, the advent of private land ownership during colonialism pitted Maasai herders, who need large tracts of land to graze their cattle, against Kikuyu farmers, who for the first time obtained deeds to their land and began to erect fences to mark the boundaries.
In addition, Maathai noted that politicians often use Kenya’s ethnic divisions and land scarcity to whip up animosity toward internal migrants and bolster their own re-election prospects. “If you don’t, then, therefore, ensure that the resources within the country are equitably distributed, and you encourage these prejudgments that communities have against each other, you’re going to have conflict,” she said.
Holistic Approach Is Key to Successful Development
The Green Belt Movement began as a small, grassroots project that envisioned tree-planting as a way to address rural women’s needs, including firewood, food, clean water, and soil erosion. “Even though that’s how we started, it very quickly became clear to me that these are symptoms, and therefore we needed to get to the causes. And it is in search of the causes that eventually led me into understanding how interconnected these issues were,” said Maathai, who urged governments, development agencies, and nonprofits to adopt an integrated approach to development.
“Unless you deal with the cause, you are wasting your time. You can use all the money you want for all the years you want; you will not solve the problem, because you are dealing with a symptom. So we need to go outside that box and deal with development in a holistic way.”
“I can’t say, ‘Let us deal with governance this time, and don’t worry about the resources.’ Or, ‘Don’t worry about peace today, or conflicts that are going on; let us worry about management of resources.’ I saw that it was very, very important to use the tree-planting as an entry point,” explained Maathai.
“Even though it is the women who provide the drive for planting trees—partly because it is they who suffer when the environment is destroyed, it is also they who work in the field—once we are in the community, we will have to deal with the women, deal with the men, deal with the children, deal with the livestock, deal with everything,” said Maathai.
Climate Change, Forests, and Environmental Justice
According to Maathai, 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are due to deforestation and forest degradation—more than the percentage due to transportation. She is working with Avoided Deforestation Partners to make avoiding deforestation part of the Copenhagen agreements—a step that would not only slow global climate change, but also help those who are directly dependent on natural resources like forests for their livelihoods, and therefore most vulnerable to climate change. “This is the one issue which really comes to tell us that indeed, the planet is a small village, and all of us are in this little village together.”
Reading Radar:
A Weekly Roundup
How Do Recent Population Trends Matter To Climate Change?, from Population Action International, offers the latest research from this constantly changing area of inquiry.
U.S. Global Health and National Security Policy, a timely report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, examines major threats to human health and international stability, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, pandemic influenza, and bioterrorism.
In the coming decades, Russia will confront “accelerated population decrease; a dwindling of the working-age population; the general ageing of the population; the drop in number of potential mothers; a large immigrant influx; and a possible rise in emigration rates,” warns a new report from the UN Development Programme.
In The National Interest and the Law of the Sea, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Scott Borgerson argues that ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention is vital to protecting the United States’ national security, economic, and environmental interests.
David Sullivan of Enough debates Harrison Mitchell and Nicolas Garrett of Resource Consulting Services (RCS) on the links between conflict and mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). RCS recently published a report arguing that mineral extraction is key to DRC’s development and not the primary cause of conflict in North Kivu.
Responding to the ubiquitous Monsanto ads that ask, “9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. Now what?,” Tod Preston of Population Action International responds, “family planning and empowering women, that's what!”
Water and War, a publication of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), outlines how the ICRC provides access to clean water during conflict and humanitarian disasters.
