Sheikh Rashid

That perennial joker Sheikh Rashid makes for some of the most entertaining television available in Pakistan today. It was back when he was Railways Minister that he developed the habit of calling up four or five TV stations in succession, one immediately after the other, to air his views on every political matter in the country EXCEPT the railways. One would have thought that after losing the elections back in February, he might have faded from the limelight, but of course politicians in Pakistan never fade, but linger on like revenants hoping for a change in political fortunes to resurrect their careers.

So, quiet apart from the fact that Sheikh Rashid still spends his evenings with every major TV station on speed dial, last week he went and gave a sorry excuse for a news conference. After bemoaning the sad fate of the poor, hungry and naked masses who are the victims of rampant inflation, he theatrically demanded to know why the new government has not formulated any new policies to deal with their plight. The implication of his words was that the new government was continuing with the failed policies of his own former government. I wonder if he thinks this is a viable campaign strategy?

China and Tibet

There is a very interesting letter by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in last week's London Review of Books that is worth reading for some insight into both China and Tibet. Firstly, the author questions the traditional media narrative of good guys and bad guys, and also points out that:

"What the images of Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorising Buddhist monks conceal is a much more effective American-style socio-economic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the US. It seems that the Chinese Communists have finally got it: what are secret police, internment camps and the destruction of ancient monuments, compared with the power of unbridled capitalism?"

Of course the mainstream western press can't square these important trends with their own preconceived notions and instead resorts to the narrative of nationalistic mythology tinged with oriental exotica. In the current media group-think, more capitalism-driven economic development must equal more democratization and 'freedom'. So its easier to ignore images of mobs of Tibetan youths smashing Chinese shops and lynching Chinese immigrant workers and instead focus on Chinese policemen beating up Tibetan monks. The first image raises troubling questions about the political economy of development and exploitative capitalism while the second can be nicely slotted into the old story of meditative monks being brutally oppressed by vicious communists.

Mr Zizek ruminates further on our idea that there necessarily is a connection between unfettered capitalism and democracy:

"The Chinese used unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs of the transition to capitalism. The weird combination of capitalism and Communist rule proved not to be a ridiculous paradox, but a blessing. China has developed so fast not in spite of authoritarian Communist rule, but because of it.

There is a further paradox at work here. What if the promised second stage, the democracy that follows the authoritarian vale of tears, never arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about China today: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past – of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, took place from the 16th to the 18th century – but a sign of our future?"

Not an especially cheerful thought.

The Gilded Age (Part Deux)

From TomDispatch:

"Think of it as gilding the pain. Last year, hedge fund manager John Paulson of Paulson & Co. hauled in a nifty $3.7 billion. (Yes, you read that right.) Mainly, he did so, according to the Wall Street Journal, "by shorting, or betting against, subprime mortgage securities and collateralized debt obligations." And he wasn't alone. Hedge fund money-maker Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners raked in a comparatively measly $1.7 billion in 2007, also by shorting subprime mortgages. These are fortunes beyond imagining, made in no time at all by betting on the pure misery of others. Think of them as Las Vegas with a mean streak a mile wide.

In a week in which Citibank released news of quarterly losses of $5.1 billion and sweeping job cuts, food riots dotted the planet, oil hit $117 a barrel, and regular gas prices averaged $3.47 a gallon at the pump (with another 30 cents likely to be tacked on in the next month), Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine released its list of the 50 top hedge fund managers. In 2007, they "made" a cumulative $29 billion. (Even to slip in among the top 25, you had to take in at least $360 million.) To put this in perspective, Paulson alone made $1.6 billion dollars more than it is going to cost J.P. Morgan Chase to pick up the tanking Bear Stearns; in one hour, he made 30 times what the median American family earned all last year. And here's a little tidbit to go with that: Income inequality in 2007 was, according to the Associated Press, "at the highest level since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began."

Well, huh.

Food Crises, Agribusiness and Famines

There's an interesting post over at Lenin's Tomb connected to my recent posts on global food prices. Lenin throws in some interesting historical analysis as well and asks the very pertinent question: "Why is it that for the first time the number of obese people (1 billion) exceeds the number of starving people (850 million)?"

But don't just stop at reading the post, I also strongly recommend reading the comments. Of particular interest are several running debates amongst the impressively informed readers, that include the question of whether Mao's agricultural policies saw an improvement in the lives of the bulk of the peasantry, the massive famine associated with the Great Leap Forward notwithstanding, and (more my own area of interest and expertise) to what extent the massive famines of the last 19th century in colonial India were the direct result of British policy. [I strongly recommend the book that is referenced, Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts]

Another article well worth reading is this one in the Telegraph. It argues that rising demand in Asia for meat has less to do with the dramatic increase in prices than the switch to biofuel and speculation on the commodity trading markets [incidentally it is also commodity traders that are artificially raising the price of oil higher as well], citing the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. There certainly is an element of capitalism gone mad when we find that rain forest is being slashed and burned in Brazil to clear land to grow grain for "environmentally friendly" biofuel.

Feudalism?

Blaming 'Feudalism' has become the lazy way of expressing 'concern' about Pakistan. It has become a catch-all phrase to describe and explain any kind of troubling social phenomena in the country. But what is this creature called feudalism anyway? Akbar Zaidi has an excellent article in Dawn arguing that the term is out of date and obscures far more than it helps to understand the social, economic and political realities of Pakistan.

Yet More Updates

Some interesting articles that serve to follow up on some of my previous posts:

The United States says it will release $200 million in emergency aid to alleviate food shortages in Africa and other parts of the world. While I hope this is a useful step, the cynic (realist?) in me wonders if this may not be another disaster in the making like the one where food aid arrived in a drought-stricken country a year late, and only served to bankrupt local farmers.

The Ghosts of Alexander blog has an interesting post called The Afghan Individual as a Unit of Analysis, which takes to task the intellectually lazy tendency amongst journalists and academics to "talks of groups in Afghanistan as if they were a coherent unit with a single will".

On a similar note, the folks over at the Kings of War blog, take aim at silly statements like this:

"Muslim countries are not like other countries. In as much as occupying troops are a much bigger theological, psychological problem for Arab countries than somewhere like Japan and Germany. And if you don't understand that about Islam, then you really aren't judging and you really haven't learned from the last four or five years."

Quite apart from the lazy, interchangable use of Muslim and Arab, one wonders if what the reporter in question is trying to suggest is that other racial/religious (same thing, no?) groups have much less of a problem being occupied by foreign troops than Arab/Muslims (same thing, no?)

The money quote from the blog: "Whenever I hear talk that smacks of cultural determinism, I reach for my revolver!"

I had also previously written about Obama's attempts to improve his image in Israel. The Rootless Cosmopolitan has an excellent article entitled "Obama and the Jewish Vote".

Barnett Rubin at 'Informed Comment: Global Affairs' provides the text to the policy speech of the ANP's Amir Haider Khan Hoti, the new Chief Minister of NWFP. Its worth reading, and as a policy statement, seems to me to be nuanced and sounding all the right notes. Lets hope the NWFP government has the ability and wherewithal to implement it.

Finally, I leave you with this excellent guest post by Alastair Cooke at the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog about Iraq and the U.S. faith in violence:

Although there are different ideas about how and when to use it, there is, I think, a consensus in Washington on the idea that by applying its overwhelming advantage in military force, the U.S. can do good in the world. It can make the world a better place through the transformative impact of violence, in the way that the violence of the hero in a Hollywood movie “cleanses” the world of incorrigible evil.

More on the Global Food Crisis

Helena Cobban at 'Just World News' (which is an excellent source for analysis on current affairs), has an interesting post about the global food crisis, with some excellent links in it. Particularly noteworthy is the World Bank report that public order is at risk in 33 countries because of rising food prices.

Ms. Cobban also expresses the opinion that the global food crisis is going to bring about the end of 'America's unipolar moment'. She doesn't elaborate on why she feels this is so. To me, the idea seems counter-intuitive, since the United States is (a) a net exporter of grains and (b) sharply rising demand in the U.S. is driven by the switch to bio-fuel. So, to me at least, it seems as if the food crisis wouldn't cause serious harm to America's global standing and in fact, will probably strengthen it.

One of Ms. Cobban's ideas for a remedy is switching to a less meat-oriented diet. The background to this is that one of the reasons for the rise in food prices is the demand for meat by the growing middle classes in developing countries, particularly China and India. A rise in demand for beef burgers means a much larger rise in demand for grain since grains are used in feed for cows. Cows also take up much more agricultural land.

Now as this old article in the Guardian points out:

The basic rule of thumb is that it takes 2kg of feed to produce every kilogram of chicken, 4kg for pork, and at least 7kg for beef. The more meat we eat, the more grain, soya and other feedstuffs we need. So when we hear that the total global meat demand is expected to grow from 209m tonnes in 1997 to around 327m tonnes in 2020, what we have to hold in our mind is all the extra hectares of land required, all the extra water consumed, the extra energy burned, and the extra chemicals applied to grow the requisite amount of feed to produce 327m tonnes of meat.

So even if vegetarianism is not your thing, eating less beef and more chicken would still make a positive difference (and white meat is much healthier anyway). Still not convinced? Why not browse through this report on 'The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat', especially the graph comparing land use efficiency at the bottom of page 23. Beef has the lowest efficiency with 20 pounds of usable protein per acre, rice has 261 pounds of usable protein per acre and soybeans has the highest efficiency with 356 pounds per acre.

So roughly speaking, in the same amount of agricultural land it takes to feed 1 person with beef, you can grow enough rice to feed 13 people.