Foreign Affairs

by hilzoy

Paul Krugman in today’s NYT:

“These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people.

I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.”

Krugman has a good rundown on the causes of the shortage. (I’d add the Iowa caucuses to the list of culprits — read his article to see why. Yet another reason to actually rotate the first primaries and caucuses away from Iowa and New Hampshire.) But just to provide an illustration that’s all over the papers here in Karachi, but not that widely covered in the US:

” Nearly half of Pakistan’s 160 million people are at risk of going short of food due to a surge in prices, the World Food Programme said on Friday.

The WFP survey covering the year to March showed the number of people deemed “food insecure” had risen 28 percent to 77 million from 60 million in the previous year.

The WFP estimates that anyone consuming less than 2,350 calories per day is below the food security line.

Sahib Haq, an official with the WFP’s Vulnerability Analysis & Mapping Unit in Pakistan, said food prices rose at least 35 percent in the past year compared with an 18 percent rise in minimum wages.

“There is a very big gap between the increase in prices and increase in wages … the purchasing power of the poor has gone down by almost 50 percent,” Haq said. (…)

The price of wheat flour in January was between 24-25 rupees (38 U.S. cents) per kg in three of Pakistan’s four provinces, compared with 15 rupees per kg in January 2007, the WFP said.

Prices have since moderated to around 17 rupees but are expected to shoot up 40 percent or more in the coming months, according to grain industry officials.

“There will be a big crisis,” Haq said. (…)

Prices for rice, vegetables and cooking oil have also risen sharply, and the economic hardships faced by ordinary people played a big part in an election in February that resulted in President Pervez Musharraf’s political allies being thrown out of government.

The new coalition government, which took power last month, raised the support price it pays farmers to buy wheat to ensure adequate supplies, but Haq said the move would result in sharply higher flour prices in months ahead.

The consumer price index, a key indicator of inflation, rose 11.25 percent in February from a year ago, mainly due to food prices.

Due to the previous administration’s reluctance to reduce subsidies for food and fuel, the government is saddled with a widening fiscal deficit. While wanting to alleviate the hardship of the poor, the new government will face some painful economic choices. ($1 = 62.85 Pakistani rupees) (Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Alex Richardson)”

Pakistan was not particularly well off before food prices shot up. Its GDP per capita was well below $1,000/year. But half the population facing food insecurity is another thing entirely. Likewise, a decline in purchasing power of 50%. The poor here didn’t have much purchasing power to start with.

And Pakistan is not alone. This is happening all over the developing world. It’s worth keeping an eye on, and making a donation if you have the money.

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by hilzoy

Whenever you get depressed about our elections, just remember: it could be worse:

“The Zimbabwean authorities are guilty of denying opposition supporters access to state food supplies as part of a systematic attempt to intimidate opponents ahead of next week’s presidential and parliamentary elections, the US rights group, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday. (…)

The report compiled during a seven-week undercover trip to all of Zimbabwe’s provinces accuses officials of bribing voters with agricultural equipment and manipulating the distribution of state-subsidised maize and seed for political gain. It quotes an unnamed Zanu-PF supporter saying: “the mealie meal is only being accessed by us. It is very easy. Only those who are on the councillors’ lists can access the grain. A person who is not on the list cannot.””

Zimbabwe is continuing its apparently endless collapse. The inflation rate is now over 100,000% per year. The country’s wheat supply is projected to run out any day now, and the harvest, which will probably be utterly inadequate, is in mid-November. Zimbabwe will have to import about 300,000 tons of wheat to make it until then, and where it will get the necessary hard currency is anyone’s guess. The upcoming elections have produced headlines like: “Police in polling booths can intimidate voters, say NGOs“. (You think?) There’s a huge exodus of Zimbabweans with marketable skills, leading to such horrifying quotes as this:

“Last year, a parliamentary committee heard that Zimbabwe’s road network was crumbling because there was not a single civil engineer left in government.”

But back to the use of food aid as an electoral tool:

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by publius

One concept that first-year law students learn is the so-called “reasonable man” standard. The point is that negligence depends on objective — not subjective — criteria. For instance, if Eagles songs cause you to have painful seizures, you can’t — sadly — sue someone for singing Desperado. Singing that song is not — sadly — an unreasonable thing to do. Juggling chainsaws in crowded areas — well, that’s a different story. The reasonable man doesn’t do that sort of thing, so you could be sued for it.

The reasonable man standard gets tricky though when you start trying to define baselines. For example, medical malpractice depends not on a what reasonable person would do, but on what a reasonable doctor would do. The implication is that doctors — being medically trained — should be held to a higher objective standard than, say, a random waiter who performs CPR at a restaurant. Same deal with lawyers. A state-certified “Esquire” (i.e., someone who passed the bar) is held to a higher standard than someone representing themselves. (Though I’m not sure if it’s metaphysically possible to sue yourself for malpractice).

The point of all this is to illustrate just how atrocious — how wretchedly horrible — Tom Friedman’s latest op-ed is. Yes, it’s already been sharply criticized (see also Hilzoy). But even Greenwald — not one to pull punches — fails to recognize the sheer level of wretchedness here. That’s because you can’t hold Friedman to a “reasonable man” standard. He must be held to a much higher standard. He’s a Middle East expert. Unlike the various people you see on Fox News, he’s actually lived there for many years. He even wrote a fantastic book once.

VADER

So, you have accepted the truth.

LUKE

I’ve accepted the truth that you were once
Anakin Friedman, author of From Beirut to Jerusalem.

VADER (turning to face him)

That name no longer has any meaning for me.

We must expect more from Friedman. Krauthammer — well, he’s like Grandpa Simpson. Even assuming you understand what he says, who cares? But Friedman, well, there was good in him once.

Snark aside, there are two aspects of Friedman’s op-ed that are simply baffling given his experience and expertise. The first is the casual lumping together of diverse Muslim groups as “Iran’s chess pieces”:

There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.

Using the term “Shiite militias” in this context is idiotic in and of itself. Maybe Friedman can explain why the pawns are killing each other and don’t seem to realize they’re all on Team Iran. For what it’s worth, this is exactly the type of error that Anakin Friedman rightly criticized Israel for making circa 1982 in a really great book:

Not only did the Israelis enter Lebanon with a myth about their allies . . . but also with one about their enemies, the Palestinians. . . . They saw the Palestinians as part of an undifferentiated Arab mass stretching from Morocco to Iraq. . . . Myths are precisely what give people the faith to undertake projects which rational calculation or common sense would reject.

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by hilzoy

As Publius noted, the news out of Pakistan is not good at all:

“The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency on Saturday night, suspending the country’s Constitution, firing the chief justice of the Supreme Court and filling the streets of this capital city with police officers.

The move appeared to be an effort by General Musharraf to reassert his fading power in the face of growing opposition from the country’s Supreme Court, political parties and hard-line Islamists. Pakistan’s Supreme Court had been expected to rule within days on the legality of General Musharraf’s re-election last month as the country’s president. (…)

After a day of rumors in the Pakistani news media than an emergency declaration would come, the first proof came just after 5 p.m., when independent and international television news stations abruptly went blank in Islamabad and other major cities. Soon after, dozens of police officers surrounded the Supreme Court building, with some justices still inside.

Under the emergency declaration, the justices were ordered to take an oath to abide by a “provisional constitutional order” that replaces the country’s existing Constitution. Those who failed to do so would be dismissed.

Seven of the court’s 11 justices gathered inside the court rejected the order, according to an aide to Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Issuing their own legal order, the justices called General Musharraf’s declaration unlawful and urged military officials to not abide by it.

By 9 p.m., Chief Justice Chaudhry and the other justices had gone to their homes, which were surrounded by police officers. The police blocked journalists from entering the area, disconnected telephone lines and jammed cellphones in the area.”

Also:

“”There have been 400 to 500 preventative arrests in the country,” Aziz told a news conference in Islamabad.

Media and police sources say 1,500 opposition figures from Pakistan’s military, judiciary and political sectors have been detained.

In the wake of Saturday’s declaration, the government also issued new rules forbidding newspapers and broadcasters from expressing opinions prejudicial to “the ideology of Pakistan or integrity of Pakistan”.”

In addition, “all non-state TV stations and some radio channels, including international services such as BBC World TV, have been taken off air”; and elections scheduled for January have been postponed indefinitely.

Along with a lot of other people, I think one of the best pieces of background is Joshua Hammer’s After Musharraf. Barnett Rubin is covering the situation at Informed Comment: Global Affairs, and here are links to bloggers from Karachi and Lahore. (Their blogrolls have links to other Pakistani bloggers.) The text of Musharraf’s emergency declaration is here.

My take below the fold.

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