Underpaid Genius

At least some people are looking at the geopolitical implications of long-term drought in the Middle East and north Africa, instead of rah-rah boosterism about democratic impulses and the shiny power of social media.

Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell via The Center for Climate & Security

Out of the blue?

International pundits characterized the Syrian uprising as an “out of the blue” case in the Middle East  - one that they didn’t see coming. Many analysts, right up to a few days prior to the first protests, predicted that Syria under al-Assad was “immune to the Arab Spring.” However, the seeds of social unrest were right there under the surface, if one looked closely. And not only were they there, they had been reported on, but largely ignored, in a number of forms.

Water shortages, crop-failure and displacement

From 2006-2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced, in the terms of one expert, “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.” According to a special case study from last year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR),of the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), “nearly 75 percent…suffered total crop failure.” Herders in the northeast lost around 85% of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.

The human and economic costs are enormous.  In 2009, the UN and IFRC reported that over 800,000 Syrians had lost their entire livelihood as a result of the droughts. By 2011, the aforementioned GAR report estimated that the number of Syrians who were left extremely “food insecure” by the droughts sat at about one million. The number of people driven into extreme poverty is even worse, with a UN report from last year estimating two to three million people affected.

This has led to a massive exodus of farmers, herders and agriculturally-dependent rural families from the countryside to the cities. Last January, it was reported that crop failures (particularly the Halaby pepper) just in the farming villages around the city of Aleppo, had led “200,000 rural villagers to leave for the cities.” In October 2010, the New York Times highlighted a UN estimate that 50,000 families migrated from rural areas just that year, “on top of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled in earlier years.” In context of Syrian cities coping with influxes of Iraqi refugees since the U.S. invasion in 2003, this has placed additional strains and tensions on an already stressed and disenfranchised population.

The biggest implication is that deposing one — or even a dozen — strong man totalitarian governments will not alter the situation on the ground. And projections — cited by the authors in the report above — show continued decline in rainfed crops in Syria “between 29 and 57 percent from 2010 to 2050”.

I agree with the authors and others that stopping the brutal suppression of the opposition movement in Syria is and should be the immediate focus of international efforts. However, the broader implications of Syrian drought — and the drought across the entire region — are not really addressed by the authors.

A region with growing population and rapidly diminishing water can only lead to a few scenarios, none of them good. Water wars and massive waves of ecological migration are not outcomes that the region — or the world as a whole — are willing to face.

(h/t Thomas Friedman)

Egypt’s financial state is rapidly worsening, and is likely to derail hopes of democratic reform:

NY Times

The country’s [Egypt’s] foreign currency reserves have fallen from a peak of $36 billion to about $10 billion and could run out entirely by March. The currency is under severe pressure, and a steep drop in the exchange rate could bring painful inflation and more social unrest. Youth unemployment is about 25 percent, a dangerous situation where 60 percent of the citizens are 30 and under.

The near term issue — cash reserves — is not the issue: it is drought, rising food prices, and a large, restive, young population out of work. I recipe for revolution and an authoritarian, populist takeover.

I predict the Muslim Brotherhood will wind up as top dog, and running the show. But the likely outcome will be a war for resources with some neighboring country, probably Libya (remember the 1977 Libyan-Egyption War), which is home to the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, the largest fossil aquifer in the world, containing an estimated 150,000 km³ of groundwater. Yes, 150,000 cubic kilometers of water.

Compare that with the Great Lakes, which are about 23,000 km³. Now the Great Lakes are renewed by rainfall and the Nubian aquifer is not, but it is still a great deal of water. And perhaps worth going to war over.

Michael Cooper article is just a big head scratch: southern and western regions, formerly booming, are not bouncing back as fast as northern areas, but the piece provides little rationale.

Now, with the concentration of the highest unemployment rates in the South and the West, some economists wonder if it is an anomaly of the uneven recovery or a harbinger of things to come.

“Because the recovery is so painfully slow, people may begin to think of the trends established during the recovery as normal,” said Howard Wial, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program who recently co-wrote an economic analysis of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. “Will people think of Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona as more or less permanently depressed? Think of the Great Lakes as being a renaissance region? I don’t know. It’s possible.”

The West has the highest unemployment in the nation. The collapse of the housing bubble left Nevada with the highest jobless rate, 13.4 percent, followed by California with 12.1 percent. Michigan has the third-highest rate, 11.2 percent, as a result of the longstanding woes of the American auto industry.

Now, though, of the states with the 10 highest unemployment rates, six are in the South. The region, which relied heavily on manufacturing and construction, was hit hard by the downturn.

Economists offer a variety of explanations for the South’s performance. “For a long time we tended to outpace the national average with regard to economic performance, and a lot of that was driven by, for lack of a better word, development and in-migration,” said Michael Chriszt, an assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s research department. “That came to an abrupt halt, and it has not picked up.”

How about the weather? The southeast and southwest have been crushed by heat and drought, hurricanes and tornadoes. Meanwhile, the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic region — while suffering from floods and cold winters — may be looking like a haven from the overabundance of weather down in Dixie.

The drought and ensuing famine in the Horn of Africa is in the news again. Ultimately, tens of millions may die, either directly from lack of food and water, or secondary factors like disease or war.

Jeffrey Gettelman via

[…] according to a famine monitoring program financed by the United States, “over the past year, the eastern Horn of Africa has experienced consecutive poor rainy seasons, resulting in one of the driest years since 1950-1951 in many pastoral zones.”

The years of conflict — and recent increases in food prices — have depleted Somalia’s ability to withstand it. Thousands of people are leaving relatively uneventful rural areas to seek refuge even in Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-riddled capital, which has experienced a mass exodus for years because of fighting between the shaky government and Islamist militants.

These are the Waters Wars, which are likely to be a permanent feature of the coming decades.

The proximate cause of these refugees deaths is the departure of Western charities from Somalia, because of the absence of any centralized government, and the dangers posed by warlords and extremists of various sorts, like the Shabab. But the collapse of the region is being caused by the prolonged drought, which is not likely to end soon.

Note: this drought is regional. It extends to northern Syria, Iraq, Israel, across the Red Sea to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, across the Persian Gulf, and west across most of North Africa. I have already written about the possibility that the Arab Spring may in fact be a response to drought, not a renaissance of democratic aspirations.

There is no Somailian Spring in the wind. Just drought, famine, and millions of refugees.

So they have the worst drought ever in Texas, and folks are worried about the football fields.

Kate Galbraith via Texas Tribune

Across Texas, as one of the worst droughts in history intensifies, numerous cities and towns have instituted water restrictions. Earlier this week, the federal Department of Agriculture designated most of the state a natural-disaster area, allowing farmers and ranchers statewide to apply for emergency low-interest loans.

A notable if lesser worry is the condition of athletic fields. Too much dirt creates safety concerns, and some fields are getting patchy. Worse, a summer of 90- to 100-degree temperatures and tightening restrictions on sprinklers lies ahead — not to mention that players will begin trampling the fields in August, when practices start.

“The extreme heat and no rain is burning up our fields,” James W. Riggen, a maintenance official with the Midland Independent School District, said in an e-mail.

[…]

In Llano, if the football practice fields cannot get the estimated 54,000 gallons of water that they need each week, the community may feel the effect. That’s because practice would move to the game field, which is watered by a working well. But heavy use could make that field unsuitable for games, so Llano might have to play its entire schedule at opponents’ homes, hurting morale — and the local economy.

“A lot of folks come to the ball game,” Mr. Hill said, “and they buy some gas and eat dinner.”

I can’t even begin: so many layers of what’s wrong here.

Just remember that this drought — stretching across the entire southwest and northern Mexico is permanent. There will be no return to normal. So maybe it doesn’t matter if Texas pours out the last remaining gallons of water trying to maintain their ball fields. They are only hastening a return to subsistence, where the people that don’t emigrate out of this desert region will have to exist based on the water that comes every year from the sky, because the aquifers are all played out.

South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat — an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding. India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. And in countries like Congo and Zambia, China is acquiring land for biofuel production.

These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt.

Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. Egypt is now the world’s leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread — for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year — is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it.

As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt’s grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.)

Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today’s demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean.

The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river’s flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusinesses snatch up large swaths of arable land along the Upper Nile. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.

The coming water wars will divide the world like never before.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick on Tuesday said global food prices have reached “dangerous levels,” and warned that their impact could complicate fragile political and social conditions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

World Bank data released on Tuesday showed higher food prices — mainly for wheat, maize, sugars and edible oils - have pushed 44 million more people in developing countries into extreme poverty since June 2010.

“There is no room for complacency,” Zoellick told a conference call. “Global food prices are now at dangerous levels and it is also clear that recent food price rises are causing pain and suffering for poor people around the globe.”

Zoellick said although higher food prices were not the main cause leading to recent protests in Egypt and Tunisia, it was an aggravating factor and could become worse.

He warned that a sharp rise in food prices across Central Asia could also have social and political implications for that region.

The World Bank report comes days before a meeting of the Group of 20 major economies in France where higher food prices and the reasons for those upward spikes will be discussed.

Zoellick also said he was concerned that as countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan address causes of their social upheaval, higher food prices may add to “the fragility that is always there any time you have revolutions and transitions.”

The World Bank chief said the international community needed to be aware of such risks and should not exacerbate problems by imposing policies, such as export bans or price fixing, that would push global food prices even higher.

“There is no silver bullet to resolving the potent combination of rising and volatile food prices,” Zoellick said, “but food security is now a global security issue.”

Catastrophic storms and droughts have hurt the world’s leading agriculture-producing countries, including flooding and a massive cyclone in Australia, major winter storms in the United States, and fires last year in Russia.

[…]

But he said it was disturbing to see maize prices soar about 73 percent over six months, while prices for sugar for fats and oils have risen 20 percent and 22 percent, respectively, in the past quarter alone.

The World Bank cautioned that rice prices needed monitoring given measures by some countries to significantly import more rice to boost domestic stocks.

He said there was less margin for error in Africa because of high poverty rates across the region, although he noted problems in Burundi and Cameroon where bean prices, an important food source, have risen by more than 40 percent.

Surveys show that the poor spend more than 80 percent of their total disposable income on basic foods, and if prices rise, poor families have few — if any — alternative but to eat less.

More turmoil, more regime change, and then? Famine and war: war for food and water.