Ambassador's Corner
WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM AMBASSADOR JOHN BRUTON
April 11, 2008
Rising food prices - 40% up in the past year
I had the privilege of taking part in a seminar on rising food prices in the
State Department this week. Among the participants were Josette Sheeran,
Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme, Erastus Mwencha of the
African Union Commission and Joachim von Braun of the International Food Policy
Research Institute.
Rising food and oil prices are linked to one another, and both are problems
caused in part by economic success. As people in India and China have become
more prosperous as a result of access to the global market place, their demand
for food and oil has risen.
In particular, demand for meat has risen, and meat requires more land to produce
a given amount of nourishment than do either grains or vegetables. Meat
consumption in China has increased from 20kg. per head in 1980 to 50 kg. last
year. But 1 kg. of beef requires ten times as much water to produce as 1 kg. of
wheat.
Higher petroleum prices mean that biofuels have become competitive with oil, and
using land to produce biofuels reduces the amount of land available for food
production. In developed countries, urban sprawl has also taken over some of the
best food producing land.
The casualties of this trend are found in countries like Eritrea, Sierra Leone,
Niger and Haiti, which are net importers of both food and fuel and who are
seeing their costs of living rise dramatically.
World agricultural production is also set to decrease because
global warming is
causing drought. Africa is particularly vulnerable because a high proportion of
its food comes from low input rain-fed agriculture.
The rise in food prices is a severe test for fragile democracies. Last year the
average Afghan household had to spend 45% of its entire income on (more
expensive) food, as against only 11% the year before – a dramatic change.
Many of the hungriest people are found in land-locked countries with poor
transport links. Getting goods in and out of such countries costs twice as much
as it does in a developed country.
The upward trend in food prices comes at the end of a long period when food
prices, and the incomes of farmers, had been falling in real terms. Food prices
have until recently been about half, in real terms, what they were when they
last peaked in the mid 1970’s.
The present rise in prices reminds us of the need to invest in long-term
agricultural capacity in developing countries – in water conservation, roads,
seeds and education of farmers – and also to ensure that commercial agriculture
is maintained on a self-supporting basis in the US and the EU.
But it should also remind us of a drastic short-term threat of famine. One
hundred fifty million who are already living on less than 50 cents a day cannot
feed themselves at these prices without immediate help from the World Food
Programme – whose budget needs urgent replenishment. We are talking here about
many deaths in coming months, and many more instances of long-term retardation
because of malnutrition. And all of this is happening because of the success of
globalisation in lifting the living standards of the rest of the world and
thereby increasing the demands they are placing on a limited amount of land.
Visit to Pittsburgh
This week, the Ambassador of Slovenia, Samuel Žbogar
[at right], and I spent two days
visiting
Pittsburgh in
Pennsylvania.
We spoke to students in the Southside High School
[left] in Hookstown, Pennsylvania, a
rural school district about 30 miles from Pittsburgh. We also spoke to students
and faculty in the University of Pittsburgh [below, right] and Duquesne University in
Pittsburgh itself.
I told my audiences in Pittsburgh that almost 70% of all foreign investment in
the State of Pennsylvania comes from the European Union. I reminded them that
Pennsylvania exports four times as much to the EU as it exports to China.
Between investment and exports, Pennsylvania economic relationship with the EU
supports 228,000 jobs in the State.
I also pointed out that the EU was investing heavily in
R&D. Of the
world's top 50 companies ranked according to R&D investment, 18 are from the EU, 17 from
the US and 12 from Japan. Of government spending on R&D, 56% of the United
States R&D spending goes to defence, as against only 13.5% in the European
Union. A priority for European R&D is environmental sustainability. The rise in
energy and food prices underlines the urgency of this.
One of the purposes of our visit to Pittsburgh was to mark officially the
handing over to the
University
of Pittsburgh of the library collection of the European
Commission Delegation here in Washington. These go back to the Delegation’s
foundation in 1954. The University of Pittsburgh is digitising the documents and
making them available to scholars worldwide.
Ambassador Žbogar and I also took the opportunity of taking the temperature of
the hotly contested presidential primary campaign currently underway in
Pennsylvania. We visited the campaign offices of both Senator Hillary Clinton
[top, below]
and Senator Barack Obama [middle, below]. We had a meeting with representatives of the
Republican Party in Pittsburgh, Matt Drozd and Vince Gastgeb [bottom, below].
I found the discussions about the primary campaign very interesting. The use of
published data to target tailor-made messages on behalf of candidates to
individual voters based on the voter's age, status, occupation, etc. is much more
sophisticated here than anything with which I would have been familiar in
Ireland. The people involved in the campaigns all were young, very well-informed
and very enthusiastic.
Franklin Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan
Speaking of presidential campaigns, I read two very interesting biographies of
US politicians while on holiday in Ireland over Easter.
James McGregor Burns’s biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Lion and the Fox
was first published in 1956, only 11 years after his death, but it remains
highly topical today. It shows that Roosevelt did not enter office with a grand
plan to cope with the Depression. Indeed some of his plans, like balancing the
budget, might have made things worse. Instead he was an energetic experimenter
and a consummate political tactician. The book shows how much all US Presidents
are constrained by Congress and the courts, something not all Europeans realise.
William Jennings Bryan ran for President as a Democrat three times, in 1896,
1900 and 1908. He is remembered for his rôle in the Scopes Trial, in the 1920’s
when he opposed
the teaching of evolution. He made a living as a paid public
speaker dealing with political and religious themes. He based his politics on
the Bible.
Michael Kazin’s excellent biography of Bryan, The Godly Hero, shows that he
was a strong fighter for federal income tax, for direct election of Senators,
for votes for women, for federal funding of election campaigns, for national
ownership of the railways and against military occupation of the Philippines and
corporate abuses. But he tolerated segregation, favoured the inflation of the
currency and promoted Prohibition of all sales of alcohol.
Reading these two biographies shows that there are many constants in US
politics.
Improved traceability of explosives in EU
As one of a series of measures to help combat
terrorism, the European Commission
has this week adopted measures to strengthen the
control of explosives for civil
use, for instance in the mining industry. To prevent theft and to ensure that
any thefts or losses are quickly detected, the new
EU Regulation requires unique labelling of explosives everywhere in the EU. In addition, manufacturers,
traders and users will be required to tighten recordkeeping and stock
management. This will make it easier to
trace the origin of lost or stolen
explosives and quickly to establish whether persons holding explosives are doing
so legally.
At present diverging labelling requirements in different EU Member States mean that
it can take up to two days in order to identify the origin of explosives. With
this new regulation, this time lag will be much reduced.
This is an important example of how EU-wide measures can assist in the battle
against crime and terrorism.
Please send me your
comments about this or any of my weekly messages or other EU matters. I
look forward to hearing from you!
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