4 February 2012
The Meat of the Matter
By Gwynne Dyer
Four decades ago Norman Borlaug, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on raising crop yields worldwide (the “green revolution”), said: “I have only bought you a forty-year breathing space to stabilise your population.”
In 1970, when Borlaug got his prize for postponing the onset of famine for forty years, the world’s population was 3.7 billion. Today, it is 7 billion. The US Census Bureau expects only two billion more in the next 34 years, and we might actually stabilise the population by the end of the century – but we will have to feed almost three times as many people as there were in 1970. How on earth can we do that?
Actually, you don’t need to panic right away. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) recently estimated that the extra people can be fed, at least until we hit 9 billion, if crop yields rise by one percent a year and the world’s farmland expands by 13 percent.
There is enough potentially arable land for that, although it would involve cutting down the forests over an area the size of South Africa. Grain yields probably can go on rising at one percent a year if we manage irrigation and fertiliser use much better than we do now. And if the grain production expands, so does the meat production.
This takes no account of the ecological damage done by removing even more land from the natural cycles, and it omits details like the looming collapse of most of the world’s big fisheries. Given the frequent forecasts of doom by over-population, however, it is a surprisingly reassuring assessment.
But this is a forecast that ignores the probable impacts of global warming on food production, and those will be dire. In some places a hotter climate will actually increases food production, but in far more places crop yields will fall.
The rule of thumb is that we will lose 10 percent of global food production with every rise in average global temperature of 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F). Since we are virtually bound to see an increase of 2 degrees C before global average temperature stops rising (if it does), that’s one-fifth of world food production gone.
It will be considerably worse in some places. In India, for example, a rise of 2 degrees C means a 25 percent loss of food production. In China, it will probably be worse than that. And a crash in food production doesn’t just bring hunger. It brings chaos: collapsing governments, waves of starving climate refugees crossing borders, even wars between countries that depend on the same river for irrigation water.
Military planners in many countries think that this may be the dominant factor in world politics in 25 years’ time. That will make it even harder to get global agreement on measures to stop further warming, so they are making contingency plans for really ugly outcomes. But what if you could make food production independent of climate?
Specifically, what if you could make meat production independent of climate? Don’t use 70 percent of the world’s agricultural land to grow grain that feeds the animals we then kill and eat. Just grow the meat itself, taking stem cells from a cow, a sheep or a chicken and encouraging them to grow in a nutrient solution.
It’s already being done in labs, but the quantities are small and the meat is still a long way from having the taste and texture that would make it a real candidate to replace meat from live animals. But those are details that can be sorted out with more research and more money. The point is that this could allow people to go on eating meat without trashing the climate in the process.
People are not going to stop eating meat: demand is going up, not down. But if “cultured” meat can be made identical in taste and texture to “real” meat from animals, and if it can be grown in large quantities at a competitive cost, the ecological benefits would be immense. The political benefits might be even greater.
If half of the meat people eat was “cultured”, greenhouse gas emissions would drop sharply (about one-fifth of global emissions from human sources come from meat production). About half the land that has been converted to grain-growing in the past century could be returned to natural forest cover. The famines and wars that would come with global food shortages could be postponed for decades, and even the warming itself might be stopped.
“Cultured” food may be commercially available in only a few years if the research is pushed hard. Indeed, the animal welfare group Peta has offered a million-dollar prize for anybody who can demonstrate lab-made meat in commercial quantities by June 30th this year, and they think that one of the research teams now working on the problem may claim the award.
But it isn’t being pushed fast enough. “There is very little funding,” Professor Julie Gold, a biological physicist at Chalmers Technological University in Gothenburg, Sweden, told the “Observer” newspaper recently. “What it needs is a crazy rich person.”
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 8. (“There is…production”; and “It will…water”)
15 January 2012
Taiwan: Waiting for China
By Gwynne Dyer
The most important thing in Taiwanese politics is always left unsaid. When I interviewed Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, just before he won the presidency for the first time, he was happy to talk about the details of his plans for better relations with the People’s Republic of China: direct flights, more trade, and the like. But ask him about the long-term future, and all you got was platitudes.
Ma has just been re-elected for a second term as president (14 January). “We’ve won,” he told jubilant supporters. “In the next four years, ties with China will be more harmonious and there will be more mutual trust and the chance of conflict is slimmer.” All true, but it still does not address the question of where all this harmony is taking Taiwan.
In his first term, Ma did everything he promised. Direct flights to the PRC resumed in late 2008, a 2009 agreement between Taipei and Beijing facilitated investment flows between the two countries, and a comprehensive trade deal was signed in June 2010.
Ma’s victory this time was smaller than in 2008: then he had a lead of seventeen percentage points; now he’s down to six. But that’s probably due mostly to the country’s slow economic growth and the widening income gap between rich and poor in recent years. There is no evidence to suggest that he lost votes because he was getting too close to China.
So here’s the question. If Ma, like almost everybody else in Taiwan, has no desire to live under Communist rule, then why is there majority support for closer ties with a giant neighbour (about 65 times as many people) that refuses to recognise the legitimacy of Taiwan’s government? Beijing even threatens to attack Taiwan if it ever declares independence from China. What can the Taiwanese be thinking?
This is where it all goes silent, except for the platitudes. But with a little thought you can figure out the logic behind the position of Ma and his supporters in the Kuomintang Party.
They know that Beijing could do terrible damage to Taiwan if it attacked, but they also know that it won’t actually do that unless Taiwan formally declares independence from China. Beijing is willing to live with the present ambiguous relationship for a long time to come, if necessary.
Meanwhile, Taiwan has to make a living, and it has been losing market share to China’s cheaper exports for two decades now. The favoured solution is to invest in mainland industries and subsidise Taiwan’s much higher living standard with the profits. Mainland Chinese investment in Taiwan’s hi-tech sector would not hurt, either. Time for better relations with the mainland, then – but what about the future?
The thinking goes like this. We can cozy up to China now because it serves the interests of a great many people on both sides, and it doesn’t really endanger our de facto independence. Taiwan is not disarming, and China still can’t move an army across the 180-km (110-mile) Strait of Taiwan; its navy isn’t strong enough. As for the long run, it will take care of itself, because the Communist regime in Beijing will not last forever.
Nobody knows when it will end, but most politicians in Taiwan have a fair idea of how it will end. Sooner or later the Chinese economy will stumble into a recession – the enormous housing bubble in China is currently the most likely cause – and unemployment will soar. People’s mortgages will be underwater, banks will fail, and the regime’s credit will run out.
Ideology is dead in the People’s Republic. The regime insists that it gives the people “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but in fact it gives them “unbridled capitalism with Chinese characteristics” – including a plague of corruption that mainly benefits Communist Party members. All this is tolerable while everybody’s income is rising; it is no longer acceptable when incomes are falling.
China is a capitalist country, and it has not been granted some special exemption from the business cycle. Every once in a while, in capitalist economies, a major recession comes along. This is hard enough to manage in a democracy. It is potentially lethal for a dictatorial regime whose only remaining credibility is its reputation as an economic miracle-maker.
So Taiwan’s best strategy is just to wait. Make deals on trade and investment, keep talking to Beijing to reduce the risk that some hothead will launch missiles at Taiwan, but don’t get into talks about reunification with a Communist-ruled China. It’s not hard to avoid such talks, since Beijing doesn’t recognise the Taipei government as a legitimate negotiating partner.
And wait. The wheel will turn, and eventually there will be a different, democratic China that Taiwan can safely rejoin (though it will certainly still insist on retaining a lot of autonomy). Meanwhile keep the mainland regime sweet, and make some money.
The United States government, by the way, completely agrees with this unspoken strategy. The last thing Washington wants is to be dragged into a war with China by its defence guarantee to Taiwan, and it was quietly delighted to see Ma win the election. So was Beijing. No crisis here.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3, 10 and 15. (“In his…2010”; “Nobody…out”; and “The United…here”).
8 January 2012
Defence Budgets and Cavemen
By Gwynne Dyer
If you’re not allowed to enslave people any more, or even loot their resources, then what is the point of being a traditional great power?
The United States kept an army of over 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for eight years, at a cost that will probably end up around a trillion dollars. Yet it didn’t enslave a single Iraqi (though it killed quite a lot), and throughout the occupation it paid full market price for Iraqi oil. So what American purpose did the entire enterprise serve?
Oh, silly me. I forgot. It was about “security”. And here it comes again, on an even bigger scale.
Last Friday, at the Pentagon, President Barack Obama unveiled America’s new “defence strategy.” But it wasn’t actually about stopping anybody from invading the United States. That cannot happen. It was about reshaping the US military in a way that “preserves American global leadership, maintains our military superiority,” as Obama put it.
Curiously, President Obama was not wearing animal skins and wielding a stone ax when he made this announcement, although his logic came straight out of the Stone Age. Back when land was the only thing of value, it made sense to go heavily armed, because somebody else might try to take it away from you.
It doesn’t make sense any more. China is not getting rich by sending armies to conquer other Asian countries. It’s getting rich by selling them (and the United States) goods and services that it can produce cheaply at home, and buying things that are made more cheaply elsewhere. It hasn’t actually made economic sense to conquer other countries for at least a century now – but old attitudes die hard.
If you analyse Obama’s rhetoric, he’s clearly torn between the old thinking and the new. The new US strategy is all about China, but is it about China as an emerging trade partner (and rival), or is it about China as the emerging military superpower that threatens the United States just by being strong? A bit of both, actually.
“Our two countries have a strong stake in peace and stability in East Asia and an interest in building a co-operative bilateral relationship,” said Obama. “But the growth of China’s military power must be accompanied by a greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region.”
Would it help if China were to promise that it has no intention of attacking anybody? Of course not; it already does that. “Clarity about its strategic intentions” is code for not developing military capabilities that could challenge the very large US military presence in Asia. After all, the Pentagon implicitly argues, everybody knows that the US forces are there solely for defence and deterrence and would never be used aggressively.
Well, actually, the Chinese do not know that. They see the US maintaining close military ties with practically all the countries on China’s eastern and southern frontiers, from Japan and South Korea to Thailand and India. They see the US 7th Fleet operating right off the Chinese coast on a regular basis. And they do not say to themselves: “That’s ok. The Americans are just deterring us.”
Would Americans say that about China if Chinese troops were based in Canada and Mexico, and if Chinese carrier fleets were operating just off the US west coast all the time? No. They’d be just as paranoid as the Chinese are. Indeed, they are pretty paranoid about the rise of China even though the shoe is on the other foot.
For the first time in history, NO great power is planning to attack any other great power. War between great powers became economic nonsense more than a century ago, and sheer suicide after the invention of nuclear weapons. Yet the military establishments in every major power still have a powerful hold on the popular imagination.
In effect, the new US defence strategy says that for the United States to be safe, everybody else must be weaker. This displays a profound ignorance of human psychology – unless, of course, it is just a cynical device to convince the American public to spend a lot on “defence”.
The armed forces are the biggest single vested interest in the United States, and indeed in most other countries. To keep their budgets large, the generals must frighten the tax-paying public with plausible threats even if they don’t really exist. The Pentagon will accept some cuts in army and Marine Corps manpower, and even a hundred billion dollars or so off the defence budget for a while, but it will defend its core interests to the death.
Obama goes along with this because it would be political suicide not to. Beijing has its own powerful military lobby, which regularly stresses the American “military threat,” and the Chinese regime goes along with that, too. We left the caves some time ago, but in our imaginations and our fears we still live there.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 13. (“Would…foot”; and “In effect…defence”)
5 January 2012
The African National Congress at 100
By Gwynne Dyer
“It’s a bittersweet victory,” said William Gumede, a distinguished South African academic, about the hundredth anniversary of the African National Congress (ANC), which opens with a enormous party in Bloemfontein on Sunday. “This is our tipping point. From here things will go downhill. No liberation movement has moved upwards from this point.”
It’s a grim prognosis, but Gumede, author of “Thabo Mbeke and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC,” insists that South Africa is no exception to the rule. “Every African country thought it was exceptional. If you look at the archives of Nigerian papers at the time they got independence (1960), everyone in Nigeria, in Africa and indeed the world over thought they were exceptional. No one wanted to criticise them.” But then it all fell apart.
It has not fallen apart yet in South Africa. Eighteen years after Nigeria got its independence, there had been a terrible civil war, the generals were already ruling the country, and the average income was lower than it had been in late colonial times. Whereas eighteen years after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, it is still a more or less peaceful democracy, and the living standards of the poor have at least not declined.
But maybe that was just because South Africa was fortunate to have an extraordinary generation of leaders: men like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo who were intelligent, incorruptible and dedicated to democracy. Without them at its head, can the ANC be trusted? A lot of people doubt it.
Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki as his successor because he trusted him to keep the government clean and democratic, but there was already something wrong there. However saintly Mandela was, the way he imposed Mbeki as leader of the ANC, and therefore president of the country, was considerably less than democratic.
Mbeki turned out to be more autocratic than Mandela had hoped, but his overthrow in an internal ANC coup in 2008 was hardly a triumph for democracy either. Of the two men who played the biggest roles in organising that coup, one, Jacob Zuma, is now president of the ANC and the country, while the other, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, spends all his days plotting to take his place.
Zuma, a man who has faced multiple charges of corruption and rape, miraculously emerges unscathed from the courts each time, and his co-conspirator in the main corruption case, Shabir Shaik, has just been released from prison for “medical reasons.” Malema, an accomplished demagogue, has built his popularity among the poor black majority on barely disguised racial incitement against whites, mixed-race people and other minorities.
Politics is a tough old game in every country, but there is a systemic problem here: the ANC doesn’t do democracy well. Gumede put his finger on it when he pointed out that the ANC, like other African parties that fought liberation wars, had a military structure. “They tended to centralise; there was not much internal democracy. When they came to power they couldn’t break away from this culture, which undermined internal democratic processes.”
Dozens of heads of state and an estimated 100,000 ordinary South Africans are flocking to Bloemfontein to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ANC. They honour it because it brought freedom to the black majority in South Africa without destroying the country’s democratic institutions in the process. South Africa still has free elections, free media and a justice system that is free from government influence (most of the time).
But that has been relatively easy up to now. The ANC still enjoys mass support because of its heroic past, so it has won every national election so far without having to break the democratic rules. The question is: what will it do when it can no longer win without breaking the rules?
That day is probably not very many years off. The ANC’s share of the vote has been falling steadily, partly because of its perceived corruption but largely because almost two decades in power will erode the popularity of any political party. The election in 2014 will probably be the last in which it can hope to win a parliamentary majority honestly.
The most important crisis in South Africa’s history will occur when it loses the election after that. Only if the ANC then goes meekly into opposition can we conclude that South Africa really is an exception to the rule that liberation movements don’t do democracy.
The rule doesn’t mean that Africa is doomed eternally to political oppression and corruption. A number of African countries have passed through that long tunnel and emerged on the other end as flawed but generally law-abiding democracies: Kenya, Zambia, and Mozambique, for example. But it would be much better not to go into the tunnel at all.
The ANC will really deserve the admiration of the world if it can leave power without a fight. At the moment, the odds on that happening are no better than even.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 13 and 14. (“The rule…even”)