When international food prices reached an all-time peak earlier this year, many clamored to understand the drivers of this alarming trend. Oxfam dove headfirst into the discussion, pointing out the politics behind the food price crisis, and calling for reforms that would help prevent the most vulnerable from catastrophe.

But often missing from these conversations was a real understanding of how the food price crisis is playing out in communities across the globe. It may be easy for the average person to understand the impacts of higher food prices in their own life, but sometimes the big picture is too remote or complex to comprehend. That’s why we created the food price pressure points map, to provide a snapshot of how global prices are hitting home in some of the most vulnerable communities around the world.

Other groups like ActionAid and the Environmental Working Group have done fantastic work to describe the link between biofuels policies and rising prices and show just how vulnerable some countries are to price volatility. We hope our map adds to their great work, and advances this dialogue by providing new insight into the consequences of a broken food system. We also created this map to give people an easy platform to take action. That’s why we made it easily embeddable, just like a YouTube video. We encourage you to steal it, use it, and share it. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Want to put the map on your website or blog? Just go here to copy and paste the code to add this map to your own site.

On Wednesday June 29, France confirmed that it parachuted arms, including guns and rocket-propelled grenades, to the Libyan rebels in the Nafusa Mountains. This arms transfer is a blatant violation of the arms embargo which was agreed to by the UN Security Council Resolution 1970 on February 26, 2011. The embargo placed on Libya is comprehensive and applies both to rebels and forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. The subsequent authorization of the use of force in UNSC resolution 1973 amends the February 26 resolution by calling on Members States to ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo through inspection of all sea vessels and planes bound for Libya believed to be carrying arms.

France’s action is spurring a legal debate. While the UNSC resolution 1973 appears to strengthen the embargo by calling for strict implementation, France is arguing that the authorization of the use of force to protect civilians overrides the embargo since the weapons were used to protect civilians. Russia has formally disagreed and officially complained about the arms transfer, saying that “if it is confirmed, it’s a flagrant violation” of the arms embargo.

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Foreign aid has taken some hits is the recent Congressional budgets. And it’s definitely vulnerable in the looming debates around debt ceiling and the FY12 budget.

But, on the whole, Congress and President Obama have been pretty moderate in making the cuts. And there has been only a little of the mindless bashing that sometimes passes for reasoned debate around foreign assistance.

Yet, that détente may be falling as the election heats up. A leading indicator is the heated – and closely-watched – special election today in upstate New York. The Democratic candidate has come out for cutting aid to Pakistan and “every other country that doesn’t support us.”

Ugggh. Didn’t expect that to come from a Democrat in New York.

H/T to Molly Kinder @ CGD.

For more, see:

April foolery

Eight budget cuts that would help poor people

Throughout the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union distributed billions worth of weapons to their ideological allies in the developing world. While the Cold War and the revolutions it spawned receded into history, many of these weapons remain.

The AK-47, probably the most ubiquitous weapon used today in conflict zones, was designed to have a life-span of 40 years. These and other weapons, distributed decades ago to fight the Cold War, are now being used to terrorize women, men, and children in conflict zones and areas of instability. Old weapons remain deadly because there are always a steady flow of bullets to load into them. A weapon only becomes lethal when it is supplied with ammunition. Controlling the flow of ammunition into zones of instability and conflict is just as important as controlling the actual weapons. An example from the Kenyan-Sudan border provides a window into why it’s so critical to control ammunition supplies. According to a Small Arms Survey investigation, “a dispute between Toposa and Turkana pastoralist warriors degenerated into a firefight that consumed all of their ammunition.” As a result of their rifles becoming useless, the rivals decided to resolve their differences peacefully.

So if controlling ammunition flows can help save lives and shorten the length of conflicts, why is it that I heard the Obama administration representative make an intervention at the United Nations yesterday saying that it opposes adding controls on international transfers of small arms ammunition into the proposed Arms Trade Treaty?

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Next week at the United Nations, governments and civil society representatives will gather for the latest round of discussion toward a global arms trade treaty (ATT), aiming to close a gaping hole in international law. One of the signature characteristics of the numerous fragile countries where Oxfam provides humanitarian relief is the failure of governments to control their own territory. In such environments, armed groups at times provide security for populations and at other times prey on populations for financial and political gain.

In places like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the lack of accountability and effective security institutions has enabled all parties to the conflict to perpetrate gross human rights abuse with impunity. Regaining civility in these contexts is one of the most vexing problems governments and the international community faces and requires a variety of approaches.

It is clear that no effort to regain civility in fragile and conflict affected countries will succeed unless arms flows are addressed. At a 2007 Oxfam event, the former UN Commander in the DRC described his efforts to address the armed groups destabilizing the country as “mopping the floor when the tap was open. One moment you disarm a group, and then a week later the same group has fresh arms and ammunition.”
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David Bosco at Foreign Policy thinks I’m coming “perilously close to glorifying political stability” and wonders if “rising food prices are contributing to political unrest, which appears to be knocking off a succession of fairly awful Arab governments. Can we at least say that rising food prices aren’t an unambiguously bad thing?”

Well…maybe? Unambiguous is a pretty ambiguous word but let’s really get to the core of the question. I can certainly empathize with those who take to the streets to protest for a better existence as everyone should have the right to do. And political reforms that benefit those who suffer most from economic injustice would be a welcome outcome. But long-term, wide-spread instability is in nobody’s best interest, particularly the poor who are usually the first to suffer the economic consequences. And without doubt, the failure to make serious progress on food security and price volatility could mean further instability without any prospect of dealing with the underlying challenges of poverty and injustice. In fact one of the worst things for food security is violent conflict.

By the way, in some cases there can be benefits to high food prices beyond inspiring political reform. Higher prices can be good for producers of food and even more so for traders of food. (See record high profits for Cargill and ADM). Price volatility – including the very rapid price inflation that we’re observing right now– creates anxiety and uncertainty, which in turn make it hard for producers to make decisions – especially poor people who have very little margin for error. Often the poorest and most vulnerable are not positioned at all to take advantage of these high prices for any number of reasons.

But by Bosco’s logic, all sorts of horrors and pathologies might be viewed in a different light if they instigate the possibility of political change. Let’s see, one of the precipitating events in Tunisia was the self-immolation of a young man upset at heavy-handed policing of his unregistered fruit cart. Was that unambiguously bad? The truth is that food riots have a long history of presaging greater social change. Notably, the French Revolution was spurred by the demand for cheaper bread (“let them eat cake instead”). That doesn’t mean that hunger is a force for progressive reform. But it might make people desperate enough to risk life and limb.

As the crisis in Egypt unfolds, many have expressed shock that Egypt has been unplugged from the Internet. As a source of information, communication, entertainment and, dare we say, distraction, the Internet has come to be seen by many as an essential service. Many citizens in North Africa and the Middle East, though, have been living in an information black hole for years. On many leading indicators of transparency, access to government information, freedom of information, and corruption, countries in the region rank abysmally low.

Access to information on government budgets is a basic element of a functioning compact between citizens and their government in a democratic society. The Open Budget Index put out by the International Budget Partnership ranks countries on the availability of basic budget information such as budget proposals, enacted budgets, and audit reports. Egypt scored 49 out of 100, while Algeria and Saudi Arabia scored 1 out of 100 and Iraq scored 0. Of the countries surveyed in the region, Jordan ranked highest with 50 out of 100.

Many of the countries in the region are rich in natural resources but for the most part governments have studiously ignored the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) since its founding in 2003. EITI is designed to increase public access to information about payments from extractive industry companies and governments. Only Yemen and Iraq are participating, with Yemen becoming the first country in the Middle East to publish an EITI report reconciling company payments and government receipts in the oil and gas sector. While Doha-based Al-Jazeera has been hailed for its coverage of Egyptian uprising, the government in Qatar has not seen fit to join EITI, even after hosting the 4th global EITI conference in 2009 at the opulent Ritz-Carlton Doha.

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When the UN Food and Agriculture Organization announced January 5th of this year that food prices had reached an all time high, my colleague Gawain Kripke warned that, “the record rise in food prices is a grave reminder that until we act on the underlying causes of hunger and climate change, we will find ourselves perpetually on the knife’s edge of disaster.” A year of extreme weather, along with other short and long-term factors, had shocked our food system, disrupting supply chains and sending the price of many food items through the roof.

Just days later rioters in Algeria were heard chanting, “Give us sugar!” as they kicked off a new wave of sometimes violent protests that have shaken the tenuous foundation of stability across North Africa and the Middle East. Gawain’s warning, it seems, had proven prophetic sooner than most might have expected.

As the situation in Egypt has become increasingly tense, the Obama administration has faced questions about how unrest will impact the US aid regime in Egypt and elsewhere. Some are already talking tough about wholesale cuts to aid. But in deciding how the strategic priorities for US security and diplomacy should shift in the aftermath of these events, it’s important to remember just how we got into this mess.
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