Africa Does Not Have to Starve
By NORMAN BORLAUG and ANDREW NATSIOS
May 2, 2008; Page A13
Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries. The crisis threatens to tear apart fragile states and become a humanitarian calamity unless countries get their agricultural systems moving.

Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food.

The U.S. government currently buys grain and other foodstuffs from American farmers for free distribution in poor countries where a disaster has occurred, or sells it in food-deficit nations to generate funds for food-security development programs. Under the law, the food must be shipped almost exclusively on American vessels.

Ocean shipping costs are 20%-30% of the food-aid budget; and it takes on average over four months to order, buy, ship, offload and transport food by ground. In a famine, people can die waiting for the food to arrive.

Other problems arise. One food shipment sunk in a storm off the coast of Asia in 1996. In 2006, two food shipments were hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Hurricane Katrina nearly shut down much of the foreign food-aid delivery system in the Mississippi Delta.

Purchasing food locally simplifies the process, cuts down the time delay in delivery, reduces the logistical risks, and saves transport costs. These savings can be used to buy more food. At the same time, higher prices will probably reduce the purchasing power of USAID's food-aid programs by at least $200 million this year. While President George W. Bush has released food aid from a reserve fund, it is not sufficient.

Direct food purchases in local countries could also help improve their agriculture. In Africa, for example, two-thirds of the 200 million people who suffer hunger are small-scale farmers, primarily engaged in subsistence production because they find too few buyers for any larger harvest.

In Ethiopia in 2003, for example, widespread drought occurred in the low-lying areas of the country and the very dry northern highlands. Some 12 million to 15 million people were at risk of hunger and starvation. But in the central and southern highlands of Ethiopia, farmers were producing a bumper crop of corn and other cereals. Yet with no market for the locally produced grains, prices collapsed.

If USAID could have purchased and helped distribute some of this excess, up to 500,000 small farmers would have benefited, as well as the millions at risk of starvation. But its only option was to import surplus food grain from the U.S.

Seventy-five percent of USAID food aid goes to Africa, the most food-deprived region of the world. More robust agricultural growth there will help in a period of rising food prices. More prosperous African nations will become better trading partners, expanding imports of U.S. agricultural commodities, machinery and technology. Any near-term losses will lead to longer-term gains for the American economy.

What we are advocating is already in place. The World Food Program, the food-aid agency of the United Nations, has been buying food in African agricultural markets successfully for years using European aid funding, while Canada announced this week they were moving to 100% untied food aid.

The Bush administration's reform would have little or no impact on U.S. grain markets. President Bush urged action on his reform before the General Assembly of the U.N. and in his State of the Union address. Even if this authority were exercised fully, it would equal 0.3% of U.S. agricultural exports and a much smaller fraction of U.S. agricultural production.

Congress should amend the Farm Bill to allow up to 25% of the appropriation for USAID's food-aid program to be used to purchase food locally, when the program's administrator deems it appropriate to do so. A great many people's lives depend on this reform.

Dr. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Mr. Natsios, former administrator of USAID, teaches at Georgetown University.

Justice System For Detainees Is Moving At a Crawl
No Sept. 11 Trials Likely Before Bush Leaves Office, Officials Say
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; A01

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- At the end of a tattered, sunbaked runway dotted with large green tents here is a building aptly called the Expeditionary Legal Complex Courtroom, surrounded by coils of concertina wire, where the most notorious alleged terrorists in U.S. custody are supposed to face charges related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Nearly seven years later, however, not one of the approximately 775 terrorism suspects who have been held on this island has faced a jury trial inside the new complex, and U.S. officials think it is highly unlikely that any of the Sept. 11 suspects will before the Bush administration ends.

Though men such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, are expected to be arraigned in coming months -- appearing publicly for the first time after years of secret detention and harsh interrogations -- officials say it could be a year or longer before worldwide audiences will see even the first piece of evidence or testimony against them.

"I think it's a near-impossibility that these cases will be in court before the end of the administration," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, who has observed numerous court hearings on the island.

"Some of the detainees haven't even seen their lawyers yet, there's incredibly complicated issues about access to evidence and discovery, and as we've seen with every single case to date, it's incredibly hard to move through a system that lacks established rules and precedent," she said. "Every little detail ends up being contested, because it's an entirely new system of justice."

That new system, set up by Congress's Military Commissions Act of 2006, so far has been entangled by numerous motions that challenge its fairness and constitutionality. Military officers presiding over the cases have had to make critical decisions on the fly, including some appealed to another new court created by the same legislation.

Although defense officials have said they want to start the Sept. 11 trials before the Bush administration ends -- and one high-ranking Pentagon officer has been quoted talking about the "strategic political value" of doing so before the November elections -- those involved privately agree that opening statements could be a year or more away.

Lawyers for some of the detainees jointly charged in the 2001 attacks say they are going to have to navigate an unprecedented volume of classified evidence and complex legal issues, and to mount a defense against the death penalty -- all matters that have not been adjudicated in earlier detainee cases.

Susan Crawford, who supervises the military commissions process, has not yet even formally referred the Sept. 11 cases to trial, although arraignments could occur a month or so later.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the top legal authority in the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, said: "Assuming it's referred, I expect there to be vigorous litigation by the defense community and the prosecution community." He declined to speculate how long it might take but said: "It will be helpful to the process for there to be a litigated case."

Since the U.S. detention facility on this southeastern corner of Cuba opened in January 2002, only one military commission has reached a verdict, when Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in March 2007. It was part of a politically orchestrated deal that returned Hicks to his home country to serve out his sentence. He was released Dec. 29.

None of the other 14 Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with crimes, including the six alleged Sept. 11 co-conspirators, has seen a courtroom for anything other than arraignments or legal motions.

The comparable figures in traditional U.S. criminal courts are less clear-cut, because the Justice Department has come under wide criticism for claiming terrorism-related convictions in cases that actually turn on immigration or other violations. But the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law has identified Justice Department charges against 202 people in connection with terrorism offenses since Sept. 11, 2001, and finished trials for 116. Of those, 80 were convicted, the center said.

Notably, Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted in a U.S. District Court in Alexandria in May 2006 for links to the Sept. 11 plot and is now serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison, a case that defense lawyers and human rights activists say is proof that such cases can, and should, be tried in U.S. criminal courts rather than by military commissions. They decry the military rules that allow coerced statements and hearsay into evidence and say there is no way the cases can be opened to the scrutiny they deserve.

"This is a self-inflicted wound," said Michael Berrigan, deputy chief defense counsel for the military commissions and a former longtime Army lawyer. "It's a sad day in the history of this republic when we have abandoned the rule of law."

Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor for military commissions, said to the contrary that different rules are required for "enemy fighters" captured on a battlefield -- where evidence is collected under different procedures -- than ordinary criminal defendants. Even the interrogations of such detainees are focused more on gathering "wartime intelligence, not . . . criminal prosecution," he said.

Authorities here had hoped that the first full military commission case, against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was an alleged driver for Osama bin Laden, would proceed smoothly. It is now scheduled to begin June 2. But last week Hamdan became the latest detainee to boycott the process, arguing that he wants no part in the military commissions because they do not reflect American justice.

In a 40-minute exchange with Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who is presiding over the case, Hamdan said that he would do anything to get into a regular American courtroom and that the military commissions process is a sham designed to trap him at Guantanamo Bay. He said his victory in a 2006 Supreme Court case, which forced the government to rewrite the rules for military commissions, was hollow because he has been incarcerated for seven years without any change in his conditions.

"I would like the law, I would like justice. Nothing else," Hamdan said.

Hartmann, who colleagues say has been trying to accelerate the process, responded that "the trials are not going to be held up because an accused exercises his right not to be present." He said that defendants have the right to waive their presence at the hearings and that it is up to them to choose. He also said the military commissions system affords defendants "astounding" rights that in some cases exceed the rights received by members of the U.S. military who are tried at courts-martial.

But Daskal of Human Rights Watch said trials without defendants present "would be a disaster" and the "last thing America needs" because of existing perceptions of unfairness in the process.

Hamdan's motions hearings have highlighted concerns that are likely to arise before all the military commissions, including whether rules allow defense attorneys to adequately represent their clients and gain access to government evidence. Even the interpreting at last week's hearing was fraught with technical difficulties, delaying the proceedings.

Berrigan testified last week that military defense teams do not yet have an appropriate secure facility to use in representing clients such as Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, whose conversations are classified at the highest level of secrecy. The installation of secure computers at the teams' Virginia office is still underway, and defense attorneys must carefully isolate their classified conversations about different clients because of potential legal conflicts.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, who represents Hamdan and alleged Sept. 11 co-conspirator Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, said he thinks Ali's case will take a long time to get to court.

"The arraignment was a year ago in Hamdan, and there is very little classified information," he said. "Ali's case is going to involve dozens of wire transfers, witnesses from various locations around the world, and you add that the death penalty may be sought. I realistically do not think these cases can be rushed to trial."

When they do start, the trials will be only partially open.

Hamdan's hearings partly involved transcripts of conversations that two prosecutors had with investigators for the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General, but military defense attorneys were allowed only to read the documents and were barred from copying them. News reporters who asked the court for copies of the unclassified documents were denied access.

A plexiglass wall and a delayed audio transmission in the new high-security courtroom will keep reporters and observers separated from the proceedings, a measure meant to allow officials to censor classified information. Mizer said it is possible that observers will not hear much of what the high-value detainees say, if they choose to speak.

Hartmann said that within the military commissions process, "the principal obligation is not to the press," and that the cases are full, fair and open because of the rights afforded to the defendants. "That's what we do in the American system of justice," he said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

COLUMN: “The fragility of perfection: When supply chains go wrong,” by Buttonwood, The Economist, 3 May 2008, p. 82.
ARTICLE: “Streams of blood, or streams of peace: Talk of thirsty armies marching to battle is surely overdone, but violence and drought can easily go together,” The Economist, 3 May 2008, p. 67.
Specialization depends on supply. The more specialization, the more the global economy depends on the reliability of supply. Since globalization integrates trade by disintegrating production and spreading it across the planet, our growing connectivity and efficiency in production makes us all more dependent on each others, and the logistical chains that link us.

Obviously that forces us to make those networks as resilient as possible, so the dominant security agenda of the globalization era is protecting those supply lines. That’s why I work for Enterra; I consider it a front-line player in global security. Done right, prosperity reigns. Done poorly, and yes, people die from all sorts of mishaps and purposeful attacks.

But even if done well, don’t we face all manner of security struggles over scarce resources?

The Economist says the “water wars” scenario remains, as I’ve long noted, completely unsupported by world history:

Researchers at Oregon state University say they have found evidence to the contrary, showing that the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict. Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbors, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the argument holds more water involves regions suffering creeping desertification, but guess what? That civil strife typically unfolds in remote regions that already suffer limited or failed governments, so yeah, global climate change will bring more SysAdmin work, but hardly great power war. Wars tend to be fought over more fungible and therefore more theft-prone resources, like minerals and gems. Water is simply harder to steal and sell, says The Economist.

That’s not to say that water isn’t used by more powerful nations to exercise control over weaker states, but that hardly makes water unique. Power is power.

Junta is stealing aid, relief groups assert

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
YANGON, Myanmar: Amid signs that a second cyclone may be headed toward the Irrawaddy Delta, the directors of several relief organizations in Myanmar said Wednesday that some of the international aid coming into the country for the victims of Cyclone Nargis was being stolen, diverted or warehoused by the military.

The aid directors declined to be quoted directly on their concerns for fear of angering the ruling junta and jeopardizing their operations, although Marcel Wagner, country director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, confirmed that aid was being diverted by the army.

He also said it was going to be a growing problem, though he declined to give any further details because of the sensitivity of the situation.

The Associated Press reported that Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej of Thailand arrived for a meeting with Prime Minister Thein Sein of Myanmar on Wednesday, a week and a half after the cyclone devastated the delta region. Sundaravej told The AP that the government had given its "guarantee" that there were no disease outbreaks and that no survivors were starving.

Sundaravej also told The AP that Myanmar's rulers did not want any foreign aid workers because they "have their own team to cope with the situation."

The AP also reported that the U.S. military's Joint Typhoon Warning Center said there was a good chance that "a significant tropical cyclone" would form within the next 24 hours and head across the Irrawaddy Delta.

Myanmar's state-controlled media did not broadcast information about the new storm, The AP reported. Residents of Yangon learned about the prediction from foreign broadcasters and on the Internet.

The death toll from the cyclone rose to 38,491, Reuters reported, citing Myanmar state television. In addition, 1,403 people were reported to be injured and 27,838 missing as of Wednesday evening. Independent experts asserted that far more people had died, Reuters reported.

Late Wednesday night, The AP reported that the Red Cross was estimating that the final death toll would be much higher, giving a range of 68,833 to 127,990.

International aid shipments continued to arrive Wednesday, including five air deliveries of U.S. assistance. Western diplomats said their representatives at the airport were making sure the cargo was unloaded efficiently and then trucked to staging areas.

But the fate of the supplies after that remained unknown, because the junta has barred all foreigners, including diplomats and aid workers, from accompanying any donated aid, tracking its distribution or following up on its delivery.

Wagner and the others said they had not heard of high-quality foodstuffs being stolen and replaced by inferior products. There were rumors in the capital on Wednesday that special high-energy biscuits donated for distribution in the disaster areas had been replaced by cheaper, off-the-shelf crackers.

Although aid flights were regularly seen arriving at the Yangon airport, international rescue teams and disaster-relief experts for the most part remained unwelcome.

A small French rescue team has arrived in Yangon, though it was unclear whether it had received official permission. Diplomats and representatives of aid missions said that visas for overseas experts were still being denied.

Wagner said he and his agency's foreign staff members were now barred from the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, even from areas where the group has projects dating from before the storm. Luckily, he said, he has Burmese staff who are permitted to come and go through an increasing number of military checkpoints.

The Adventist group specializes in rainwater collection, water filtration and sanitation - just the kinds of expertise most needed now - and Wagner said outside experts were needed to train local people in hygiene and the proper use of filters and pumps.

Reports have been mixed about how much aid is actually getting through to the delta. One longtime relief coordinator in Myanmar said Tuesday that 30 percent of the people in the affected areas had been reached.

But other agencies were encouraged about recent improvements in deliveries, especially those groups with projects and local staff already in place, and the agencies with established working relationships with the government.

The World Health Organization said that its medical supplies were arriving in the country normally, without being diverted, siphoned off or replaced with substandard items. Its deliveries were even being made to Labutta and Bogale, two badly damaged areas deep in the southern delta.

Wagner said that his agency also had success in getting its trucks into Labutta, although daily rainstorms were beginning to make road travel more difficult. The upcoming monsoon season will make things worse, he said, and he and WHO experts said they expected to start getting reports from the field soon about malaria, dengue fever and water-borne diseases.

Wagner was careful to point out that the afflictions were not unusual in the delta region, saying, "They happen every year at this time, with or without a cyclone."

Shari Villarosa, the senior diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, said she was encouraged by the military government's acceptance of aid and said that it was a remarkable development given what she called the xenophobia of the junta, but that aid itself would not be enough.

"The Burmese will see they're going to need help getting this aid out, but they're going to come around way too slow - and too late for many," Villarosa said in an interview in her office.

A number of countries have offered to bring in aid and deliver it from the south, by ship, but the junta has adamantly refused. One of the generals' most enduring fears is a seaborne invasion by Western powers that it refers to as "foreign saboteurs."

Fear of a southern invasion is one of the reasons, along with ominous astrological portents, that the junta moved the country's capital from Yangon to the hinterlands. The new capital, Naypyidaw, was carved out of the jungle about 300 kilometers, or 180 miles, north of Yangon.

"These guys really believe we are planning an invasion," Villarosa said. The United States said this week that several of its military ships were in the area and ready to provide help in Myanmar. "It's nuts! We're not! But if they hear that a large U.S. ship is off the coast, they don't receive the message that it's a genuine humanitarian effort."

Pino Annunziata, a medical officer in the World Health Organization's Department of Emergency Response and Operations, said Wednesday that the most pressing public health issue facing the delta was not the presence of corpses in the region's waters.

"I know this issue of dead bodies is a worldwide concern, but the dead bodies do not represent any specific additional public health risk," Annunziata said. "This is a very negligible risk from a public health standpoint. We have to focus on the survivors."

JOURNAL: Why use the Thermodynamic Crisis as a framework?

Posted: 14 May 2008 11:49 AM CDT

As many of you already know, a large part of what I do is to provide people with useful frameworks for thinking through difficult or complex problems. To the extent that these frameworks get you thinking (even if you disagree with me, which is encouraged), they are a success.

The benefit of using the "Thermodynamic Crisis" as a framework is that it is a relatively complete and simple explanation for many of the global trends we are currently seeing. It also appeals to a scale that is beyond the noise generated by cycles of introspection (at the political, social, and economic levels) that forces analysis paralysis. As John Boyd points out in "Destruction and Creation":

...we find that the uncertainty and disorder generated by an inward-oriented system talking to itself can be offset by going outside and creating a new system. Simply stated, uncertainty and related disorder can be diminished by the direct artifice of creating a higher and broader more general concept to represent reality.

To repeat by moving up the scale to a global thermodynamic systems approach, we can start to see the outlines of the real situation. A situation not adequately modeled by global and (even less) national political/economic analysis. Keep this in mind when I begin to expand this framework in the next months.

THE THERMODYNAMIC CRISIS

Posted: 13 May 2008 05:04 PM CDT

Globalization has catalyzed the decline of the nation-state and spawned decentralized violence/opposition (which is increasingly effective due to innovations in theory and DIY technology). The result has been an ongoing crisis in the global control system we use to mitigate the impact of emerging challenges -- our responses/efforts are therefore slower, less effective, and more divisive. Much of this has been documented in this blog and the book, Brave New War.

The Other Crisis
This "Control System Crisis" is particularly unfortunate since globalization has also created a "Thermodynamic Crisis" characterized by increasingly expensive energy (demand growth that far exceeds supply growth as well as expensive/inefficient substitution for declining sources) and ecosystem overload (global warming, pandemics, water/soil depletion, etc.).* The reason for this is that our global scale civilization has exceeded:

The production capacity of stored solar (oil, natural gas, etc.) energy resources. As demand (driven by 2 billion more people, a 3x gain, becoming middle class consumers) continues to outstrip supply, we will see energy inputs become increasingly expensive.
The carrying capacity and natural defenses of our ecosystem. More specifically, our civilization's entropy production has exceeded the baseline negative entropy of our environmental systems.
Our global system's capacity for evolutionary change. Incremental changes to the global system through technological innovation, economic restructuring, and social reengineering can't produce the results needed to reverse or slow this crisis.

The Impact
Worse, there are signs that these crises are coupling into a global scale positive feedback loop that threatens increasingly frequent disasters (of a wide variety of types).

*I'll provide a MUCH more detailed examination of this in my new book, "The Resilient Community."