3 June 2013
Drums Along the Nile
By Gwynne Dyer
Beware the open mike. On Tuesday Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi summoned senior politicians of all parties to discuss Ethiopia’s plan to dam the main tributary of the Nile river. One proposed sending special forces to destroy the dam. Another thought buzzing the dam site with jet fighters might scare the Ethiopians off.
Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate and a more sophisticated player, suggested that Egypt support rebel groups fighting the Ethiopian regime. “This could yield results in the diplomatic arena,” he said. And none of them realised that their discussion was being broadcast live by Egyptian state television.
All students of geopolitics are familiar with the legend that Egypt has privately warned the governments upstream on the Nile that it will start bombing if they build dams on the river without its permission. The truth of that story is about to be tested.
Last month Ethiopia started diverting the waters of the Blue Nile in order to build the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4.7 billion, 6,000-megawatt hydroelectric project that is the centrepiece of the country’s plan to become Africa’s largest exporter of power. Egypt instantly objected, for it depends utterly on irrigation water from the Nile to grow its food.
Even now Egypt must import almost 40 percent of its food, and the population is still growing fast. If the amount of water coming down the Nile diminishes appreciably, Egyptians will go hungry.
A treaty signed in 1929 gave 90 percent of the Nile’s water to the downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan, even though all the water in the river starts as rain in the upstream countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. That caused no problems at the time, but now Egypt is using all of its share of the water – and the upstream countries are starting to use the water for irrigation too.
The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is the first real test of Egypt’s tolerance for upstream dam-building. The reservoir will take 63 million cubic metres of water to fill; Egypt’s annual share of the Nile’s water is 55.5 million cubic metres. So even if Ethiopia takes five years to fill the reservoir, that will mean 20 percent cuts in the water Egypt receives from the Nile for five years. And even after that there will be a large annual loss to evaporation.
The dam that was getting the Egyptian politicians worked up is just the start. Ethiopia plans to spend a total of $12 billion on dams on the Blue Nile for electricity and irrigation, and Uganda is negotiating with China for financing for a 600-megawatt dam on the White Nile. More dams and irrigation projects will follow – and the upstream states are in no mood to let Egypt exercise its veto under the 1929 treaty.
That treaty was imposed when all the countries involved except Ethiopia were under British rule, and it reflected Britain’s big investment in Egypt. In 2010 the upstream countries signed a Cooperative Framework Agreement to seek more water from the River Nile, effectively rejecting the colonial-era treaty and demanding that Egypt relinquish its veto and accept a lower water quota.
That’s not going to happen. Mohammed Allam, Egypt’s minister of water resources under President Hosni Mubarak when the upstream states signed their agreement three years ago, warned that “Egypt reserves the right to take whatever course it sees suitable to safeguard its share.” The post-revolutionary Egyptian government cannot afford to be less firm in defending Egypt’s interests.
The issue will probably be kicked down the road for a couple of years, because the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will not be completed until 2015 at the earliest. But there is big trouble for Egypt (and Sudan) further down the road.
By 2025, a dozen years from now, Egypt will be trying to feed 96 million people, which would be very hard even with its existing giant’s share of the Nile’s water and all its current food imports. The countries that signed the Cooperative Framework Agreement will have 300 million people, so by then they will also be extracting very large amounts of water from the Nile Basin for irrigation.
Without that water, Egypt’s only options are beggaring itself with massive food imports (until the foreign exchange runs out), or famine. Unless, of course, it decides on war – but its options are not very good on that front either.
Not only are the upstream countries a very long way from Egypt (the Nile is the world’s longest river), but they will have strong support from China, which is financing most of the dams they are now building or planning.
Egypt, by contrast, has repudiated its former American ally, and may find that the US is reluctant to re-engage even if the government in Cairo can overcome its own distaste for Washington. Why would the United States want a confrontation with China over Egypt?
So there probably won’t be a war. And Egypt will probably face an apocalyptic food shortage in ten or fifteen years.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 10. (“The Great…evaporation”; and “That’s not…interests”)
3 June 2013
Drums Along the Nile
By Gwynne Dyer
All students of geopolitics are familiar with the legend that Egypt has privately warned all the governments upstream on the Nile that it will start bombing if they build dams on the river without its permission. The truth of that story is about to be tested.
Last month Ethiopia started diverting the waters of the Blue Nile in order to build the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4.7 billion, 6,000-megawatt hydroelectric project that is the centrepiece of the country’s plan to become Africa’s largest exporter of power. Egypt instantly objected. “We have a strong legal case to insist that our share of the Nile water is preserved,” said an anonymous government source – but he didn’t mention bombers.
Egypt depends utterly on irrigation water from the Nile to grow its food. Even now there is not enough (it already imports almost 40 percent of its food), and Egypt’s population is still growing fast. If the amount of water coming down the Nile diminishes appreciably, Egyptians will go hungry.
A treaty signed in 1929 gave 90 percent of the Nile’s water to the downstream countries, Egypt and Sudan, even though all the water in the river starts as rain in the upstream countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. It seemed fair at the time: the 20 million people in the downstream countries depended heavily on irrigation, while the 27 million in the upstream countries had plenty of rain-fed land and hardly irrigated at all.
Things have changed since then. According to the International Data Base of the US Census Bureau, there are now six times as many people in the Arabic-speaking countries downstream, and eight times as many people in the African countries upstream. Egypt is using all of its share of the water – and the upstream countries are starting to use the water for irrigation too.
The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is the first real test of Egypt’s tolerance for upstream dam-building. The reservoir will take 63 million cubic metres of water to fill; Egypt’s annual share of the Nile’s water is 55.5 million cubic metres. So even if Ethiopia takes five years to fill the reservoir, that will mean 20 percent cuts in the water Egypt receives from the Nile for five years. And even after that there will be a large annual loss to evaporation.
This dam is just the start. Ethiopia plans to spend a total of $12 billion on dams on the Blue Nile for electricity and irrigation, and Uganda is negotiating with China for financing for a 600-megawatt dam on the White Nile. More dams and irrigation projects will follow – and the upstream states are in no mood to let Egypt exercise its veto under the 1929 treaty.
That treaty was imposed when all the countries involved except Ethiopia were under British rule, and it reflected Britain’s big investment in Egypt. In 2010 six upstream countries (including Burundi and Rwanda) signed a Cooperative Framework Agreement to seek more water from the Nile, effectively rejecting the colonial-era treaty and demanding that Egypt relinquish its veto and accept a lower water quota.
That’s not going to happen. Mohammed Allam, Egypt’s minister of water resources under President Hosni Mubarak when the upstream states signed their agreement three years ago, warned that “Egypt reserves the right to take whatever course it sees suitable to safeguard its share.”
His country sees the matter as a national security issue, Mohammed Allam said: “Egypt’s share of the Nile’s water is a historic right that Egypt has defended throughout its history.” The post-revolutionary Egyptian government under President Mohammed Morsi cannot afford to be less firm in defending Egypt’s interests.
The issue will probably be kicked down the road for a couple of years, because the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will not be completed until 2015 at the earliest. But there is big trouble for Egypt (and Sudan) further down the road.
By 2025, a dozen years from now, Egypt will be trying to feed 96 million people, which would be very hard even with its existing giant’s share of the Nile’s water and all its current food imports. The countries that signed the Cooperative Framework Agreement will have 300 million people, so by then they will also be extracting very large amounts of water from the Nile Basin for irrigation.
Without that water, Egypt’s only options are beggaring itself with massive food imports (until the foreign exchange runs out altogether), or famine. Unless, of course, it decides on war – but its options are not very good on that front either.
Not only are the upstream countries a very long way from Egypt (the Nile is the world’s longest river), but they will have strong support from China, which is financing most of the dams they are now building or planning.
Egypt, by contrast, has repudiated its former American ally, and may find that the US is reluctant to re-engage even if the government in Cairo can overcome its own distaste for Washington. Why would the United States want a confrontation with China over Egypt?
So there probably won’t be a war. And Egypt will probably face an apocalyptic food shortage in ten or fifteen years.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 10. (“The Great…evaporation”; and “His country…interests”)
20 May 2013
What Drives Shinzo Abe?
By Gwynne Dyer
Shinzo Abe, now six months into his second try at being prime minister of Japan, is a puzzling man. In his first, spectacularly unsuccessful go in 2006-07, he was a crude nationalist and an economic ignoramus who rarely had control of his own dysfunctional cabinet. By the time he quit, after only a year in office, his popularity rating was below 30 percent and his health was breaking down.
Last December his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a landslide victory in the elections for the lower house of the Diet (parliament), and as party leader he became prime minister again – but what a difference six years makes. He’s still a radical nationalist who on occasion comes close to denying Japan’s guilt for the aggressive wars of 1931-45, but in economics he is now Action Man. His approval rating is currently over 70 percent.
In only six months Abe has broken most of the rules that defined Japan’s budgetary and monetary policy for the past twenty years, and he has promised to break all the old rules about restrictive trade policies as well. (Together, his new policies are known as “Abenomics”) He has launched a make-or-break race for growth that only the boldest gambler would risk. Who is this guy, and what happened to change him so much?
A resident foreign academic with long experience of Japan once told me that there were only around 400 people who really counted in Japan: they would all fit into one big room. Most of them would be there because their fathers or grandfathers had also been there, and Shinzo Abe would certainly be one of them.
Abe’s grandfather, Nobosuke Kishi, was a member of General Tojo’s war cabinet in 1941-45, a co-founder of the LDP in 1955, and prime minister in 1957-60. But heredity does not guarantee competence, and on his first outing in power Shinzo Abe was an embarrassment to the LDP. He has obviously acquired some braver and perhaps wiser advisers since then, most notably Yoshihide Suga, now chief cabinet secretary.
Abe put several ultra-right-wing ministers in the cabinet, and it is Suga’s job to keep them from giving voice to their revisionist views on history. “Our Cabinet will adopt a unified perception of history,” he told them. “Make no slip of the tongue because it would immediately cost you your post.” He also polices Abe’s own tongue: no more remarks like “It is not the business of the government to decide how to define the last world war” or “comfort women were prostitutes.”
Abe doesn’t mind, because he has bigger fish to fry this time round. He has launched a high-risk strategy to break Japan out of twenty years of economic stagnation by cutting taxes, raising government spending, and flooding the economy with cash. One of his first acts was to put his own man in as head of the Bank of Japan, and order him to break the deflationary spiral by adopting a target of 2 percent annual inflation.
He has also promised to smash the protectionism that has hampered the Japanese economy for so long, although this will require him to take on the powerful agriculture and small-business lobbies. He has even promised to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an American-led effort to liberalise trade in the region, in order to guarantee that the structural reforms will continue.
Structural reforms will have to wait until Abe also has a majority in the upper house of the Diet, which he confidently expects to win in the July elections, but already his strategy is showing results. Economic growth in the first three months of this year equates to about 3.6 percent annually, more than four times higher than the long-term average of the past two decades, and the Japanese stock market is up 80 percent since January.
The strategy is high-risk because Japanese government debt is already the highest in the developed world: 240 percent of Gross Domestic Product. If the surge in growth does not last, the government’s income from taxes will not rise (it is no higher now than it was in 1991) and in a few years the debt will soar to an unsustainable level. The country will essentially go bankrupt.
Of course, the surge may persist; creating a perception of vigorous growth is half the battle. But why take such a risk? Probably because Abe is keenly aware that Japan had the world’s second-biggest economy when he was prime minister the first time, and now it’s only the third-biggest. The country that overtook it was China.
For a thousand years China was the dominant power in eastern Asia. Japan wrested that role from it in the late 19th century, but now it’s going back to its natural home – and Abe would do almost anything to prevent that. That’s why he takes such a hard line on the dispute between the two countries over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. But much more importantly, he must get the Japanese economy growing again, or the country will end up far behind China.
To avoid that, he will take any risk.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 8. (“A resident…them”; and “He has…continue”)
2 March 2013
Carbon Tax: The Chinese Are Frightened
by Gwynne Dyer
Last week’s announcement by China’s Ministry of Finance that the country will introduce a carbon tax, probably in the next two years, did not dominate the international headlines. It was too vague about the timetable and the rate at which the tax would be levied, and fossil fuel lobbyists were quick to portray it as meaningless. But the Chinese are deadly serious about fighting global warming, because they are really scared.
A carbon tax, though deeply unpopular with the fossil fuel industries, is the easiest way to change the behaviour of the people and firms that burn those fuels: it just makes burning them more costly. And if the tax is then returned to the consumers of energy through lower taxes, then it has no overall depressive effect on the economy.
The Xinhua news agency did not say how big the tax in China would be, but it pointed to a three-year-old proposal by government experts that would have levied a 10-yuan ($1.60) per ton tax on carbon in 2012 and raised it to 50-yuan ($8) a ton by 2020. That is still far below the $80-per-ton tax that would really shrink China’s greenhouse gas emissions drastically, but at least it would establish the principle that the polluters must pay.
It’s a principle that has little appeal to US President Barack Obama, who has explicitly promised not to propose a carbon tax. He probably knows that it makes sense, but he has no intention of committing political suicide, the likely result of making such a proposal in the United States. But China is not suffering from political gridlock; if the regime wants something to happen, it can usually make it happen.
So why is China getting out in front of the parade with its planned carbon tax? No doubt it gives China some leverage in international climate change negotiations, letting it demand that other countries make the same commitment. But why does it care so much that those negotiations should succeed? Does it know something that the rest of us don’t?
Three or four years ago, while interviewing the head of a think-tank in a major country, I was told something that has shaped my interpretation of Chinese policy ever since. If it is true, it explains why the Chinese regime is so frightened of climate change.
My informant told me that his organisation had been given a contract by the World Bank to figure out how much food production his country will lose when the average global temperature has risen by 2 degrees C (3.5 degrees F). (On current trends, that will probably happen around 25 years from now.) Similar contracts had been given to think-tanks in all the other major countries, he said – but the results have never been published.
The main impact of climate change on human welfare in the short and medium term will be on the food supply. The rule of thumb the experts use is that total world food production will drop by ten percent for every degree Celsius of warming, but the percentage losses will vary widely from one country to another.
The director told me the amount of food his own country would lose, which was bad enough – and then mentioned that China, according to the report on that country, would lose a terrifying 38 percent of its food production at +2 degrees C. The reports were not circulated, but a summary had apparently been posted on the Chinese think-tank’s website for a few hours by a rogue researcher before being taken down.
The World Bank has never published these reports or even admitted their existence, but it is all too plausible that the governments in question insisted that they be kept confidential. They would not have wanted these numbers to be made public. And there are good reasons to suspect that this story is true.
Who would have commissioned these contracts? The likeliest answer is Sir Robert Watson, a British scientist who was the Director of the Environment Department at the World Bank at the same time that he was the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
George Bush’s administration had Watson ousted as chair of the IPCC in 2002, but he stayed at the World Bank, where he is now Chief Scientist and Senior Advisor on Sustainable Development. (He has also been Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for the past six years.)
He would have had both the motive and the opportunity to put those contracts out, but he would not have had the clout to get the reports published. When I asked him about it a few years ago, he neither confirmed nor denied their existence. But if the report on China actually said that the country will lose 38 percent of its food production when the average global temperature reaches 2 degrees C higher, it would explain why the regime is so scared.
No country that lost almost two-fifths of its food production could avoid huge social and political upheavals. No regime that was held responsible for such a catastrophe would survive. If the Chinese regime thinks that is what awaits it down the road, no wonder it is thinking of bringing in a carbon tax.
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To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraphs 2, 4 and 5. (“A carbon…economy”: and “It’s a…don’t”)