While the media plays …

Parts of the US to have a year without summer, says Watts up with that. If it was not so tragic, it would be funny – but, with the politicos and the media looking the wrong way, we are in serious trouble. The Egyptian food riots will look like a rehearsal.

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Round and round the same track

As Der Spiegel reports:

An international conference in Egypt on Monday resulted in $4.48 billion (€3.5 billion) in new pledges to help rebuild the Gaza Strip and fund the Palestinian government. The donors who gathered in the resort of Sharm el-Sheik gave a powerful boost to the moderate Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas while seeking to isolate the militant Hamas movement, which controls Gaza.

That would be our money, the various taxpayers of the Western world because we strongly suspect that most of the funds will be coming from the United States, the EU and the separate European countries.

More money to go on rockets that can be fired into Israel and on vicious propaganda that turns children into psychopaths. Woops, no, the money is to go to Fatah the "moderate" wing of the Palestinian polity and to bypass Hamas. Exactly how is that going to be achieved?

Fatah has no control over Gaza and its supporters are routinely arrested, beaten up, tortured and murdered by Hamas, as even Amnesty International has acknowledged. Were we not told that the aid sent into Gaza a while ago was not going to go to Hamas but the people of Gaza? Well, Hamas simply helped themselves to the food and the blankets.

As it happens, Egypt, where the conference took place, is very carefully keeping its borders with Gaza closed as well and controls very tightly what goes in and what comes out of that unfortunate area. Even the reporter of Der Spiegel wonders how the reconstruction of Gaza can begin in those circumstances (not to mention the fact that the truth of what has really happened there during the Israeli attack has not been clearly spelled out with Hamas doing its best to obfuscate the situation).

Some German journalists are saying that it is impossible to reconstruct anything or create a lasting solution without Hamas. Even they are not convinced, as it is reasonably clear that there can be no lasting solution with Hamas. They are not interested in any solutions short of Israel's destruction that, even if they can achieve it, will not exactly produce peace and prosperity for the Palestinians. After all, Israel's withdrawal from Gaza produced nothing except a base from which endless rockets could be fired into that country.

Rockets are being fired now and there is some speculation that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton intend to signal to Israel that it would be best if they did not attack Gaza again, no matter what sort of shelling they have to put up with. Otherwise, there will be angry donor nations to face up to who will not like to see the destruction of what their aid has created.

That sounds like a departure from the usual pattern. In the first place, a good deal of the aid, namely from the Arab countries will never get there; in the second place, much of what does get there will be stolen; in the third place, any reconstruction will get bogged down in corruption, inefficiency and a civil war. And the rockets will go on being fired.

By the time the Israelis once again decide that enough is enough either there would have been a change in the Administration or, at least, a new Secretary of State or the present incumbents will have learnt the lesson every American government has to learn over and over again: Hamas does not want peace and will work very hard to make sure that there is none. Meanwhile, we all carry on paying for this lunacy.

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Just in case you have not seen this

Israel has declared a ten-day cease fire in Gaza with Prime Minister Olmert (pictured) proclaiming Operation Cast Lead a victory. All Israel's objectives have been achieved, he added, though the IDF will stay in Gaza to prevent a resumption of the rocket attacks.

Hamas has already announced that it will not honour the cease-fire but then when did they honour those they had actually signed?

"Its leaders are in hiding," Olmert said of Hamas. "Many of its members have been killed. The factories in which its missiles were manufactured have been destroyed. The smuggling routes, through dozens of tunnels, have been bombed. The Hamas's capabilities for conveying weapons within the Gaza Strip have been damaged."

Many things will have to be sorted out. Has Hamas's capabilities been really eroded? How soon will they be able to rebuild them with the help of the inevitable foreign aid, especially from the UN and the EU? Will the Israelis come to an agreement with Egypt and manage to stop the smuggling of arms? Or will the whole process start again in the near future?

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Collateral damage

Given that there is very little time left for the Bush presidency to make a significant mark on world affairs, given that President-Elect Obama seems to be strangely silent on the Gazan situation (voting "present" perchance) and given Secretary of State Rice's complete inability to understand what goes on in the Middle East, I thought that the United States abstaining on UN Resolution 1860, which was always going to be disregarded by Hamas and is, consequently, disregarded by Israel was as good as we could get.

It seems that the outgoing Secretary of State wanted to support the rather fatuous British proposal but was overruled by the President. So she abstained, explaining that the United States wanted to make sure that the Egyptian proposal (hey, what happened to the French bit of it?) would have a good chance of going through.

John Bolton does not think much of this. If the United States wanted to give the Egyptian proposal, which, incidentally concentrates on Fatah as the negotiating partner, not Hamas, a reasonable chance, there should have been a veto with that explanation. France and Britain, he thinks would have gone along with that, albeit with gritted teeth. As it is, America voted "present", as we know the favoured stand of the President-Elect.

John Bolton, rather gloomily, sees this as the precursor of many similar abstentions. He may well be right, though it is also fair to say that we still know nothing about the next President's views or attitudes as far as foreign policy is concerned. He said a number of contradictory things during the campaign, many of which were rather frightening. Then he appointed Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy expertise he contemptuously decried. Now he is keeping quiet though he is making plenty of pronouncements about more bail-out and yet more bail-out.

It is, however, fair to say that the present Gaza conflict (I doubt if it will be the last but you never know) has claimed a number of collateral casualties and one of them is Secretary of State Rice's reputation - or what was left of it.

When Condi Rice became Secretary of State (black and female, actually a descendant of slaves who grew up in the segregationist and KKK infested south but hey, the earth did not move) I had high hopes, which were based on her professional achievements. Sadly, she, too, fell victim to the State Department's mentality and disappointed many of us.

It was not only her cack-handed and fliberty-gibberty attitude to the Middle Eastern situation that were such a problem, although how anyone with a spark of intelligence could compare a fence put up to protect innocent civilians from suicide/homicide bombers with the segregation of her childhood Alabama remains incomprehensible. Luckily, President Bush stepped in from time to time and prevented her from making too much of a mess.

But Dr Rice's speciality is Russia, the Soviet Union and related matters. Yet she seemed unable to grasp what is going on in that country either. Possibly, those who briefed her from the State Department got it all wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. Then again, I don't suppose her successor will be any better. But I should like to register my disappointment.

Today's Wall Street Journal, however, brings us news of a reputation that has been completely ruined by the Gaza conflict, according to the author Alistair MacDonald.

As the death toll in Gaza mounts, the conflict is causing some collateral damage in an unforeseen area: the reputation of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as an international statesman.

During his 10 years as Britain's prime minister, Mr. Blair played a prominent role in events ranging from the Northern Ireland peace process to the Iraq war. Now, though, as Middle East envoy for the Quartet group of the United Nations, the US, the European Union and Russia, he is finding himself marginalized while another European statesman, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, garners the headlines as a joint sponsor with Egypt of a cease-fire proposal.

Alistair MacDonald was appointed last year as the Wall Street Journal's UK politics, economics and European financial regulation correspondent. We shall see a lot of him and his articles, I assume. If this is a fair sample, the prospect does not fill me with joy.

First things first. One can argue about Condi Rice's reputation but Tony Blair's? He certainly spent a lot of time racing round the world, talking to all sorts of people - but an international statesman? On what grounds?

Yes, yes, I know he is about to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom together with former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe but that still does not make him an international or any other kind of statesman.

Mr Blair certainly played a prominent role in the Northern Ireland peace process but that, for Mr MacDonald's information, is not an international matter. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, of which Mr Blair was Prime Minister for ten long years. (My goodness, if this is the calibre of the people hired and/or promoted by the WSJ in the Murdoch empire, I shall have to give up on that newspaper as well.)

In any case, the situation in Northern Ireland where different terrorist-turned-into-criminal gangs control bits of territory is not much to the man's credit.

Tony Blair played a prominent role in the Iraq war and many Americans from President Bush down felt grateful to him. I think that he was right to line up with our greatest ally but his argument for the need to do so was so ridiculously cack-handed (I am beginning to like that expression) that we have done nothing but argue about files and their appearance instead of concentrating on the important issues: is participation in this war in Britain's interest and are we going about it the right way.

The first question was not aired even once, as the words Britain and interest do not figure high in Mr Blair's scheme of life. The second, as we all know from my colleague's meticulous research can have only one answer: absolutely not and, furthermore, we are refusing to learn from our mistakes.

What of Mr Blair as the Middle East envoy with somewhat nebulous tasks and no powers?

Mr. Blair, charged with developing the economies of the West Bank and Gaza, has faced an uphill battle since his appointment in June 2007. Because of security concerns, he hasn't visited Gaza but has focused on negotiating with Israeli and West Bank officials on issues such as removing roadblocks in the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, the economies of the territories have declined, leading many to question his effectiveness.

I expect they did and Mr MacDonald quotes at least one "moderate" Palestinian politician who says just that, wording it slightly differently. (How does one get a job like Mr MacDonald's?)

The truth is that if Hamas was not prepared to or could not guarantee Mr Blair's safety then there was no point in taking on the envoyship. Roadblocks are an issue but a bigger one is the internal situation in Gaza and the West Bank, affectionately known as Hamastan and Fatahland, future parts of the coming three-state solution.

Economic development comes from within a country or a society with, naturally enough, links to the outside world. Either Mr Blair does not understand this, in which case he is the wrong person to appoint or he does understand this but does not bother to think beyond today. The latter tended to be his attitude during his premiership, so I am inclined that he jumped into this without bothering to consider the consequences.

As for President Sarkozy, who is so reluctant to relinquish his role as representative of the European Union and go back to solving the problems his own country is facing, it is not entirely clear whether his reputation will not be part of the same collateral damage.

At present he is managing to annoy the Czechs, who feel that they are the ones to conduct negotiations, as they have taken over the EU presidency. This is causing a certain amount of amusement.

Nicolas Sarkozy is a small man, about an inch shorter than Napoleon, with an ego as large as an empire. He also travels the world with a famous wife and a penchant for inserting himself into the center of international crises.

The most recent is the Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza, where the peripatetic French president, uninvited by the participants, shuttled between Jerusalem; the West Bank town of Ramallah; Beirut, Lebanon; Damascus; and Sharm al-Shaykh, the Egyptian resort on the Red Sea; attempting to negotiate a cease-fire.

In fact, the cease-fire is now referred to as the Egyptian plan with the French part of it conveniently overlooked. Egypt is, apparently, trying to push Hamas into accepting a truce and the government is not happy with the Hamas leadership. Turkey is also mediating and seems to feel the same way. Hamas is, naturally enough, worried that a truce or a longer-lasting peace will sideline or completely destroy them.

Where is all this is the perpetually moving President Nicolas Sarkozy? Or the EU for that matter? Sigh. Another casualty of collateral damage.

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Gosh, what a surprise!

It seems that Arab states and governments are secretly relieved that Israel is waging war against Hamas and may well destroy that group's ability. In some cases the opposition to Hamas and the support for Israel have not been all that secret. Well, colour me surprised. After all, anyone with half a brain would have realized some time ago that despite the rhetoric Arab states, rich or poor, give very little support to their Palestinian brethren and tend to urge them to ever greater suicidal missions.

Nor have the pictures of demonstrations in the Middle East shown enormous crowds; not if one compares numbers to demonstrations when something really important happens like the bread riots in Egypt last spring.

However, not all is lost. Hamas will still have the EU, the UN, various NGOs and other tranzis on their side. Somebody should do a psychopathological study on people who wander round the corridors of all these organizations.

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Different dogs, same trick

Unable to defeat Israel, and knowing that an all-out, unrestrained military operations would destroy them, first Hezbollah and now Hamas have been employing the same stratagem to enable them to pursue their terror campaigns yet avoid annihilation.

The stratagem was perhaps discovered by accident in April 1996 when a UN-supervised building in the centre of the village of Qana had been shelled during an Israeli operation code-named "Grapes of Wrath, aimed at clearing out Hezbollah from the region. This had resulted in over 100 civilian deaths, the resulting international pressure precipitating the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.

On 30 July 2006, in the second Lebanon War, when the Israelis were attempting to complete the job they had started ten years before, Hezbollah was struggling against the might of Israel and desperately needed a cease-fire in order to regroup and re-build its forces and stocks of weapons. By what appeared to be convenient coincidence, in the small hours of that morning an IDF aircraft was claimed to have bombed a building in the hamlet of Khuraybah, close to Qana.

Hezbollah operatives were quickly asserting that that 60 or more people, many of them children, had been killed. With the complicity of the international media, the recovery of the bodies was stage managed, the figure of "Green Helmet" milking the event for maximum publicity value. The resultant photographs were then used to marshal the international community to press for a cease-fire, finally implemented on 14 August. Once again, Hezbollah had escaped the full consequences of its terrorism.

Now, having provoked Israel beyond endurance from its enclave in Gaza, Hamas, and under extreme pressure from Israeli military action, seems to be playing the same trick, going to the extent of engineering a "massacre" which will mobilise again the international community to push for a cease-fire.

Such is the obvious construction to be drawn from the incident yesterday when Israeli forces "bombed" – or otherwise attacked - "UN schools" being used as refugee centres, and are being accused of killing "more than 50 people," including, of course, many children.



Hamas terrorists, however, have been deliberately placing themselves in the grounds of at least one of these schools while attacking Israeli forces, in order to provoke an Israeli response. This goes beyond using women and children as "human shields". This is a deliberate attempt first to engineer their deaths and then to exploit those same deaths for strategic military gain.

That, in at least one of those same schools, many of the deaths may have resulted from secondary blast, indicates that ammunition or explosives may have been stored in the building, this maximising deaths arising from a provoked attack. One cannot even rule out the placing of explosives deliberately set be to detonated by a primary shock.

The choice of a UN supervised building – as in Qana 1996 - seems too much of a coincidence, thereby ensuring the active engagement of UN officials who have been quick to condemn this "rule of the gun."

Sensibly, however, the Israelis have excluded the international media from Gaza, an exclusion which has had Robert Fisk wailing and gnashing his teeth. The Israelis have also been quicker with their rebuttals, this time providing video evidence of Hamas using school buildings for mortar attacks.

Nevertheless, with Pallywood Productions Inc in high gear, carefully posed photographs (see above, top) are flooding out of Gaza, redolent of the Qana scenes - see right. But, even though the left-wing media is in full cry, the events do not seem to have gained the same political traction as the earlier episodes. Needless to say, the Tranzies are pushing hard for a cease-fire, playing into the hands of Hamas, determined to perpetuate the agony of the people of Gaza, but again there is not the same head of steam that we saw in 2006.

Still, the line is holding – that only a complete cessation of violence by Hamas will call off the IDF. Olmert is now "indicating" that he is open to international efforts to end hostilities if Israel can be sure that supplies of weapons to Hamas will be severed by international monitoring of Gaza's border with Egypt.

This requires the Tranzies to step up to the plate, and then rather neatly transfers to them any responsibility to ensure that violence does not recommence. Hamas must be hoping that pressure mounts for a cease-fire to fend off an outcome that would most definitely restrict their homicidal campaign.

However, with the "Green Helmet" manipulation of the second Qana still fresh in people's memories, the same trick by different dogs does not seem, so far, to be having the required effect.

COMMENT THREAD

Does anyone care what David Miliband says?

This may sound a frivolous question but I would like to know the answer. After all, he is making statements and calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

The Foreign Secretary insisted any ceasefire had to ensure Israel's security and reinforce the position of elected Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Speaking before the talks in Paris, Mr Miliband said the EU also had an important role" to play in the provision of humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.

The first part sounds like a lost cause since Hamas is seriously uninterested in Israel's security or even in its existence and couldn't care less about Mahmoud Abbas, especially as the latter has blamed the crisis on them.

The second part is idiotic. Humanitarin assistance is going through and all the much-vaunted EU aid has done so far is to enable Hamas to acquire quasim rockets at our expense.

Then again, the Shadow Foreign Secretary has not exactly disintinguished himself in this crisis. What else is new, one might say.

It is very difficult to know what to do about the Gaza story and my colleague and I have had some discussion on the subject without coming to any conclusions. On the one hand, the story is the biggest one around and we cannot simply ignore it; on the other hand, it is being covered by every media outlet and numerous blogs, especially on the other side of the Pond.

Then again, how often can one say that the Israeli attack was predictable from that day a couple of weeks ago when Hamas stepped up its rocket barrage? Or announce that this time the Israelis must finish the job and get rid of Hamas as that is an absolute prerequisite for anything resembling peace in the area and decent life for Palestinians?

For the time being we shall do periodic round-ups of interesting news items. So here goes:

Fausta blogs on the conference call conducted by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, as organized by the Israel Project. Speaking as someone who has been trying without any success to interest various organizations in this country in the importance of the blogosphere, I can only welcome such an exercise. The more we hear directly about what is going on in Israel and in Gaza, instead of accepting Hamas propaganda and media distortions (but I repeat myself) the better for all concerned.

Oddly enough, there is disarray among the media. However much one talks about disproportionate this, that and the other, it is hard to get away from the fact of that continuing barrage of rockets and the other fact of Hamas refusing to consider any kind of negotiations.

The excerpts on Fausta's blog are worth reading and she is promising a link to the full transcript as soon as possible.

Richard Landes is blogging from Israel, keeping up-to-date on all the news and still managing to read the western media.

Al-Jazeera, as ever, provides excellent coverage on the English-langage website. Here is the hilarious story of the little boat, Dignity, equipped by the Free Gaza Movement (free from whom, I should like to know), that was stopped by the Israeli navy.

Rule number one: when you are a small boat trying to get through a naval blockade you do it a little less obviously. Unless, of course, the aim is to get maximum publicity rather than help anyone else.

Avital Leibovitz, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said that humanitarian aid was being allowed into the Gaza Strip and the medical supplies on the boat would not have made much impact on the humanitarian situation.

Sadly, Al-Jazeera missed on a particularly juicy aspect of the story, the presence on the boat of former Congresswoman Cindy McKinney (Dem, of course, since you ask) who, back in her DC days got into trouble by refusing to show her pass to security guards and trying to bully them. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now.

Meanwhile, back in the tranzi farce of the UN, the SecGen Ban Ki-Moon has announced that Israel's response was disproportionate to the original problem and called for everyone to sit down and talk nicely to each other. Yes, I expect you did all know that.

Naturally, the UN is not taking up the point that a proportionate response would be indiscriminate shelling of civilian towns and villages, something the Israelis are trying to avoid, thus being disproportionate in their response. Even according to the UN of the 380 plus people killed about 61 are women and children, who can be counted as "civilians". The overwhelming majority are Hamas fighters. Fighters get killed in a war. Well, not if they simply fire rockets over the border into Israeli towns but things have changed in the last four days.

I shall not cover the various demonstrations, having already pointed out that several of them are against Arab states and governments who are refusing to support Hamas. Then again, the demonstrators are not volunteering to go and fight either. They are simply complaining about the unfairness of it all.

Here is Al-Jazeera's story on Mahmoud Abbas and the Egyptian Foreign Minister blaming Hamas for the troubles and here is the Press Association report on Egyptian border guards firing on Palestinians trying to escape from the Gaza strip. Good to see that famous Arab solidarity we are always being threatened with by our media.

The still-in-place American Administration is refusing to support any all-out calls for a cease-fire, insisting that the trouble was caused by Hamas and they should stop firing rockets into, otherwise known as attacking, Israel. The incoming Administration is keeping quiet. Oddly enough, this was the lead article on the Reuters website. Clearly, their journalists have not quite got over their Obamania. The President-Elect has made statements on all sorts of issues, despite maintaining that he does not have to say anything yet. The crisis in Gaza, on the other hand, he is keeping quiet on.

COMMENT THREAD

Whatever the media may say ...

... the Arab leaders are not supporting Hamas and the protests in those countries are not as widely attended as one might think. Of course, if the EU and the UN starts bribing various Middle Eastern countries with aid then, undoubtedly, Hamas will become flavour of the month. As long as they stay in Gaza and do not enter, say, Egypt, whose foreign minister has openly accused them of being at fault.

Let us not forget that in the endless cycle of violence since the end of the Second World War the highest level of casualties suffered by the Palestinians was in 1970 - 71 when the Jordanian army on orders from King Hussein threw the PLO out of Jordan.

The PLO went to Lebanon and proved conclusively that King Hussein and his army knew that they were fighting for the survival of their country.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot: William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary has come up with rubbish again. Does that man ever get anything right?

UPDATE: An interesting short piece on the Atlantic blog that indicates support for the Israeli Air Force from Fatah. Given the treatment meted out by Hamas to their Fatah brethren, this is hardly surprising.

Meanwhile, the IDF, sensibly, is taking the battle to cyberspace, setting up a YouTube Channel "to show the precision and care they are taking in destroying Hamas terrorist weapons dumps smuggling tunnels, and rocket launching sites located in residential areas by the terrorists".

Needless to say, some sequences have already been flagged by pro-Hamas users and removed for "terms of use violation". Some have been restored. Some not. Michelle is following the story with a great photoshop. I really hate being rude about YouTube as I spend hours watching bits from old films and listening to such luminaries as Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra.

In a fantasy world of his own

Two events yesterday, each in their own way, struck chill in the hearts of ordinary mortals – as opposed to the increasingly vapid chattering classes whose detachment from reality seems to grow with each passing day.

The first was more immediate and recognisable - if long expected – the price hike in gas and electricity from another two utilities, following up from British Gas and EDF. Most consumers are now resigned to increases in their energy costs of up to 35 percent, and not a few are seriously asking how they are going to afford to heat their homes.

It is perhaps small wonder that retail outlets are seeing soaring sales of thermal underwear, winter coats and warm knitwear, demonstrating that the public at least have a firmer grip of reality than the chatterati.

The second of the events was the offering by Mr Nick Clegg, leader of the well-named Lib Dims, of an "energy policy" of such fatuity that, had we been able to boast of a media where the combined headcount divided by the sum of their individual IQs gave a number less than one, they would have laughed it out of court.

According to this cretinously stupid man – who, against enormous competition, is obviously bidding for life-time tenure of the post of Westminster village idiot – there is "no evidence" of a "terrible energy gap" with the lights going to go out in the middle of the next decade.

Considering how, clearly, the lights went out in Mr Clegg's dim little brain some time ago, it is a moot point as to how or whether he would notice the difference but, that notwithstanding, his "analysis" of the problem is that our energy mix "is not green enough and we're over-dependent on oil and gas from parts of the world that aren't very reliable."

With thus less than half a watt of residual luminosity, the prescription a la Clegg is to increase greatly production of wave, wind and solar power, buoyed by a staggeringly banal expectation that, with this "magic mix", we could become net exporters of renewable energy by 2050. And how, precisely he plans to increase generating capacity to the 120 GW which we are expected to need by 2020, he does not even begin to say.

Back in the real world, however – the one currently uninhabited by any politician – the situation daily begins to look more and more bleak. This probably explains why so many politicians prefer the comfort zones of their own backsides (or each other's as the case may be).

From the other side of the world comes news via Bloomberg that in Asia liquefied natural gas prices may climb about 80 percent this year "as new projects get delayed and countries from Indonesia to Egypt curb exports."

Apparently, production at plants in Russia, Yemen and Indonesia, with a combined capacity of about 24 million metric tons, will be delayed until next year instead of starting in the second half. Supplies will be limited "just as South Korea increases imports 3.5 percent and Japan boosts purchases after an earthquake shut down its largest nuclear plant."

Thus, while the dismal Clegg is soaring into his fantasy of a bright new 2050 - by which time his nascent Alzheimer's will be fully established – Andy Flowers, a former executive at BP's LNG business is telling us that this winter "can be very tight," adding that, "There's not going to be much supply available."

This is borne out by other reports. For instance, the Indonesian LNG plant at Bontang is lagging behind its contracted volume, with the authorities deciding to divert some production to fertiliser manufacture. So tight is production here that Pertamina, Indonesia's state oil company, is planning to cut supplies to a group in Japan by 75 percent after its contract expires in 2010.

Yet Japan's imports rose 6.2 percent to 34.67 million tons in the first six months, according to data compiled by the Finance Ministry. The country, which imports almost all its gas, bought 66.8 million tons of LNG in 2007.

Furthermore, Japan, already the world's biggest LNG user, is taking an even bigger volume. It grew in July by 7.4 percent to 1.75 million tons from a year earlier. Now, in the shape of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, it wants still more, having increased its consumption by about 18 percent to 19.9 million tons in the year ended 31 March after an earthquake last July shut its Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant.

The Korea Gas Corp., which imports about 95 percent of South Korea's needs, is also on the look-out for more LNG and plans to increase its purchases to 26.4 million tons this year, leaving commentators to observe that Japan and South Korea "will pay whatever it takes to get the fuel." They do not have access to pipeline gas and the alternative is oil-based fuel.

This is just one tiny snapshot of a deteriorating global energy supply situation which comes to a head this winter just as the UK will be forced to acquire additional stocks on the spot market, at a price which is likely to make the current inflated prices look like a fond memory.

Yet, imbued with an ego that exceeds his intelligence quotient by many magnitudes, the sorry apology for a human being that is the leader of the Lib-Dims is so far from the land of the living that he has not the first idea of the nature of the crisis screaming down on us like a steam engine on fire. One can, therefore, only indulge in one's own fantasies, usually based on imaginative things to do with the wind farms that Clegg would wish to foist upon us all.

These fantasies may not keep us warm, or even make us feel better, but the prospect of causing that much pain at least affords us some small compensation, the only regret being that it will not be real.

COMMENT THREAD

Harvest blues

After the wash-out summer – where hardly a day seems to have passed without rain – harvest-watchers will be unsurprised to learn that wheat futures for December delivery on the Chicago exchange are up to $8.99 a bushel (although still down from the February peak of $13.50).

However, the issue is not quantity, per se, after record global plantings, but quality, the late harvests – delayed by the weather – reducing the amount of milling quality wheat. This is affecting some producers in the United States, but is also getting to be a major problem in the UK and affects even Black Sea producers.

More recently in the UK, Northern Irish farmers have suffered extensive flooding (pictured) in what is slated as the wettest August for a hundred years, although even Devon farmers are complaining as their wheat starts to sprout in the fields. One farmer even lamented that he was depressed than he was during foot-and-mouth.

Throughout the country, farmers are facing a race against time as waterlogged fields prevent them getting the combine harvesters into action and, although the situation is not irretrievable, some are warning that it is getting that way.

Unless we have some prolonged dry spells in the next two weeks, many farmers are in trouble – and so are we, with the price of bread reckoned to soar as much as 30 percent as shortages bite.

But just to show that, sometimes, Mother Nature is the least of our problems, a Bloomberg report tells us that Russia is enjoying its best wheat and barley harvest for 15 years – and is rapidly running out of storage, putting much of the crop at risk and limiting exports.

Apparently, Russia has about 95 million metric tons silo capacity, against a forecast grain harvest of at least 85 million tons – although some estimates put it at 97 million tons.

Of course, that is only part of the picture. By no means all the silos are in the right place. More are needed in the southern and central parts of the country, where most grain is produced and exported.

Building 100,000 tons of silo capacity in Russia costs about $50 million, including costs for rail, road and power connections and, while Russia seems to be able to find the money to finance its mad adventures in Georgia, it has been reluctant to invest in infrastructure.

This does not only extend to bulk storage. The country has only 12,500 specialist rail trucks needed to transport grain, more than a third fewer than are needed. For exports, Russia's total port capacity for exports stands at about 15 million to 18 million tons a year, only just enough to meet demand if there are no problems. The government is forecasting grain exports of about 15 million tons this season.

Russia, therefore, is in a position not so very different from less developed economies like Egypt and Afghanistan, where it needs to develop infrastructure in order to exploit its production potential.

By contrast, the US has about three times more silo capacity than it can produce in a single harvest, and can easily cope with fluctuations in supply and demand. But then, this is a free-enterprise system, whereas, even now, much of the Russian trading system is in State hands.

If we are going to suffer food shortages, therefore, this is going to be as much due to inadequate governance as it will be Mother Nature, although bad weather and bad government is a formidable combination.

COMMENT THREAD

The decay of a nation

Having for the last week enjoyed the Wall Street Journal as breakfast reading, returning now to trivial venality of the British press, I am warming to my co-editor's view that the WSJ is definitely the paper to read.

Even without the print copy though, much of the content is still available in the online version and yesterday saw a superb article by Edward Gresser and Marc Dunkelman highlighting how "Free Trade Can Fight Terror".

What warms us to the thesis, of course, is that we made precisely that point in June, arguing that the best way forward to long-term peace in Afghanistan was by developing trade, and in particular the country's exports.

Gresser and Dunkelman, however, take this further, noting that there is a fierce competition among foreign countries to sell their products in the United States – "the largest commercial market in the world".

By opening up the US market to Muslim countries, they argue that this could not only help American consumers, "but also serve a larger strategic goal: that of boosting the economies which now produce large pools of unemployed, embittered youth." We can, they add, make trade an effective weapon against terrorism.

As always, at the heart of the problem is the tariff regime. This puts many nations in the Middle East, whose young people are susceptible to the sirens of Islamic fundamentalism, at an unintended disadvantage and works against our efforts to stamp out jihadism.

Fortunately, write Gresser and Dunkelman, the problem is easy to fix. The US buys about a fifth of all the goods and services traded world-wide - importing $2.63 trillion worth of the world's products last year alone. Socks come in from the Caribbean, towels from Pakistan, cheese from France, and oil from Saudi Arabia.

But apart from oil, the pair tell us, very little comes from the Muslim world. The 30 majority-Muslim states of the greater Middle East, from Morocco through Egypt to Pakistan and Central Asia, account for about 10 percent of the world's population. Yet they provide only about one percent of US manufactured imports, and an even smaller fraction of US farm imports.

These statistics, they say:

… hint at one of the least-studied but most ominous aspects of the modern global economy. Most of us frame the last quarter-century with narratives about globalisation, the rise of China and the spread of the Internet. But for the Muslim countries of the Middle East, and their neighbours in Pakistan and Central Asia, it was a period of economic disaster rivalling our Great Depression.

Between 1980 and 2000, their share of world trade fell by 75 percent, and their share of investment fell even faster. The region's unemployment rate became the world's highest, rising to an average of 25 percent for young people. With the region's population rising by nearly a quarter-billion, the high unemployment rates mean a pool of perhaps 25 million jobless and sometimes hopeless young people, often easy targets for fundamentalists.

The relationship between unemployment and insurgency recruitment has been well established. In Kabul, for instance – where displaced rural workers are flooding into the capital – it is well known that the Taleban hire young, unemployed men to engage in terrorist activities

At last, however, the problem is being recognised – in part. Democratic senator Maria Cantwell has introducing a bill called the Afghanistan and Pakistan Reconstruction Opportunity Zones Act of 2008. It aims to waive tariffs on many goods from Afghanistan and Pakistan's frontier provinces, so promoting trade from those regions.

But, with trade inevitably featuring large in the continuing presidential campaign, Gresser and Dunkelman argue that the next president should follow up with a broad, tariff-exemption initiative to help the Muslim world break its downwards spiral, revive trade and put its young people back to work.

They accept that a comprehensive solution to Middle East economic problems will require efforts to stamp out corruption, improve schooling and end political oppression. But few things, they declare, could do more to combat terrorist recruitment than draining the pools of angry and unemployed youth that are spread across this region. "Fixing American trade policy would be a good start."

Apart from agreeing completely, we would argue that that should include fixing the Bumpers amendment, the malign effect of which we noted in our piece. Support for rebuilding the Afghan cotton industry (cotton trading pictured above) could then be permitted.

That apart though, the key issue here is that the United States is capable of having a meaningful debate about trade policy during its presidential election campaign. Not so the UK where the Gresser/Dunkelman argument applies with equal force to our involvement in Muslim countries. In our benighted country, trade policy is a matter for the European Union.

So, while we still have the residual powers to send troops on combat operations, we do not have the wherewithal to fix the underlying conditions which give rise to – or perpetuate – terrorism. These could never become an issue in a general election. In this, therefore, we are no longer a complete nation, and thus become part of the problem which must be resolved by others.

Few people – and especially the British media – understand or accept how much thereby we have lost our independence but, at least, the WSJ in providing a contrast, gives those who wish to see it the opportunity to understand how deep-rooted has become the decay in our body politic and our nation.

COMMENT THREAD

Re-learning every lesson

By now I have lost count of the number of talks I have heard from people who should know something about the subject (one of them was Peter Clarke, until recently in charge of the Metropolitan Police Service's section on counter-terrorism), which all come up with the same point. It is so difficult to deal with Islamists and their supporters because we are not used to the way they think, act and organize themselves.

In particular, they tell us, the Islamist groups are not like the IRA. Well, no, they are not. But then, the IRA was a relatively untypical terrorist organization in that its aims were limited and clearly stated; they organized themselves as an army with a command structure; and if they infiltrated any other organization it was for a specific purpose, be that gathering of information or terrorist activity.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of political and terrorist organizations in the past whom our present-day enemy does resemble. These thoughts were once again going through my mind as I was reading Caroline Fourest's "Brother Tariq - The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan", a book I can sincerely recommend to anyone who is interested both in the eponymous hero and in the swirling movements around him.

Tariq Ramadan, who is, to my great embarrassment but no suprise, a fellow of my old college at Oxford, is a very dangerous man. He confuses many of his Western interlocutors because he appears to be a steady follower of the rules of action laid down by his maternal grandfather, Hassan al-Bana, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is what Ms Fourest, a highly regarded French writer and journalist and a woman of the left, says about the Muslim Brotherhood:

From the very start, the Muslim Brotherhood has been based on an ambiguity: that of being at one and the same time an organized movement and a way of thinking. The movement's founding law, which dates from 1945, defines an 'active member' as someone who has pledged allegiance to the Guide, but the great majority of those committed to serve the Brotherhood's ideology do so on an informal basis. These agents spread al-Banna's message and his methods, without being an integral part of the organization.

The movement had, to be sure, an official structure that represented it in political dealings with institutions. The Brotherhood even ahd a flag: two crossed swords with the Koran as a background. The organization's officers intoduced themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood if, in so doing, negotiations with the Egyptian government or other administrations were facilitated.

But the Brotherhood consisted of much more than this official façade. Some sections were engaged in infiltration operations that were of necessity undercover. Other sections organized terrorist attacks that had to be publicly condemned so as not to discredit the official line taken by the head office.

Steps were taken to separate, as far as possible, the sections that were in the public eye from the undercover cells, either because the latter were more radical or because their mission had to remain confidential.

This led to the creation of an unofficial branch, knowns as the Secret Organization, in charge of the most sensitive operations.

Well, well, I thought, now who does that remind me of? Could it be the Communist Party and the Communist International, who created parallel structures in most countries where it was possible, from the very beginning? Not much changed between the early days of 1920 - 21 when gold was exported from starving Russia (famine caused, naturally enough, by the Bolshevik government's policies) not to buy in grain but to fund subversive organizations in the United States and Britain and the situation in the seventies and eighties when the mighty Soviet Union secretly sent funds to such organizations as the German "Generals for Peace".

Why do we have to re-learn the same lesson over and over again? It is bad enough that the powers that be refused to deal with that "unknown unknown" the need for anti-subversion. That has damaged the West and this country in particular a great deal. Our refusal to learn those lessons will harm us again now and in the future.

Perhaps they insist on organic milk

I picked up this story on Little Green Footballs but Charles Johnson, its online begetter, had it from some of his readers. There are some sharp cookies out there reading blogs and websites. Anyway, the story comes in Israel Today together with some highly entertaining pictures, issued by Hamas. For once, our own journalists did not get to the pictures in time to present them as the gospel truth (a particularly apposite phrase as we are talking about that part of the world).

The story and the pictures purport to prove that the so-called smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza (a wall runs along that border but that is rarely mentioned by the reporters) are not used for guns, explosives and "heavy mortar shells, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft missiles". Goodness me, how could you think that? Whatever next?

No, they are used by selfless and dedicated Hamas fighters, pictured with their faces hidden, to bring in milk and babyfood. What else could you possibly use such tunnels for?

The Israelis have demanded that the Hamas leadership shut those tunnels down but Ismail Haniyeh, the Prime Minister, refused in a refreshingly honest fashion:

"We cannot talk about stopping smuggling because it is something beyond our ability as a government and we did not give a commitment in this regard," Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told worshippers at a Gaza City mosque on June 25 as the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was being finalized.

It would appear that Hamas is no more in control of its territory, despite the periodic purge of Fatah supporters, than the latter is in the West Bank where there are also periodic purges.

Egypt has never denied that the tunnels exist and has, every now and then, shut a few down.

But we were all wrong. The tunnels quite clearly exist for humanitarian purposes. Understandably, Israel is a little sceptical. Israelies tend to be sceptical about most things, especially their own leaders, but this time they go beyond that and pronounce themselves to be extremely dubious.

Between 100 and 150 trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Israel and international aid organizations enter Gaza on a daily basis. Out of that number, the 50 or so daily shipments that enter via Gaza's central Sufa Crossing contain milk and baby food, according to the manifests.

A long way from the humanitarian disaster we keep hearing about but, of course, this all contributes to the social and political disaster that Gaza remains. What of the smuggled milk, though? I can only suggest that the Gazans prefer the organic stuff and the nasty Israelis insist on providing them with Longlife milk. Enough to make anyone's blood boil.

ADDENDUM: Actually I wrote "onlie begetter" about Charles Johnson, getting a little carried away with the Shakespearian references but the boss changed that. He doesn't like me getting all greenery-yallery.

About time, too

The United States has finally and very sensibly abandoned its observer status on the ludicrous and poisonous UN Human Rights Council. According to Reuters:

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the decision, taken recently by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, reflected mistrust of the 47-member state forum, at which the United States currently has observer status.

"Our skepticism regarding the function of the U.N. Council on Human Rights in terms of fulfilling its mandate and its mission is well known. It has a rather pathetic record," McCormack told reporters.

"We will engage the Human Rights Council really only when we believe that there are matters of deep national interest before the council ... We are going to take a more reserved approach," he added.

There is, naturally enough, much wailing and gnashing of teeth in tranzi-land.

There was widespread consternation on Friday at the Palais des Nations in Geneva when the US mission gave up his observer status - a step backwards for human rights around the world, says Human Rights Watch.

It was all going so well, they sobbed. Belarus was was not re-elected to membership in 2007, nor was Sri Lanka this year. There were all sorts of "recommendations were made regarding Romania, Japan, Guatemala, Peru, Tunisia, Ukraine, Indonesia and others". And now there is this terrible set-back for human rights across the world.

Before we get too carried away with the horror of it all, perhaps we should look at who is who on the UN Human Rights Council. We have written about the organization before, some of its personnel and its attempts to stifle free speech, when it involves criticism of, for instance, Islamic countries.

We have written about the committee it has selected to organize the next anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Western hatefest in Durban in 2009.

We listed the odd problem or two with the organization, such as the bullying of UN Watch Director Hillel Neuer when he presents evidence of bias in the organization.

Above all, it is necessary to look at the membership of the Council and the countries that are in it. A few random examples: Nigeria, Zambia, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Bangladesh, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Romania. Well, naturally, it is the American virtual withdrawal from observer status after prolonged abuse from representatives of some of the worst regimes on earth that is going to set back human rights in the world.

A beneficial (food) crisis

Like vultures waiting for the dying man to expire, the great and the good of the tranzie world have been gathering in Rome today under the auspices of the chief tranzi kingdom, the United Nations, prop. Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon (pictured).

And, true to form, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) immediately launched an appeal for $30 billion a year to "re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food".

This came from FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, opening the beanfest summit on the "world food crisis", who wanted his budget increased tenfold so that his munificent organisation could "buy poor rural farmers the seeds, fertilisers, animal feed, infrastructure and irrigation they need to feed themselves, their communities and their countries."

There followed a discussion on the factors which had caused the crisis, amongst which were cited low stocks and a weak dollar, soaring energy prices, a hunger for richer foods and the thirst for biofuels – and, of course, global warming.

Inevitably, the United States took a hit for its biofuels policy, unsurprising given the FAO's previous pronouncements.

As the day developed, this developed into something of an anti-American rant, with US subsidies for biofuel – estimated at $11-12bn for corn ethanol – roundly condemned by Diouf, who said they were depriving people of food.

But the most fatuous comments of the day, relayed by the BBC were from Joachim van Braun, of the Washington-based agricultural think-tank the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

He complains about the lack of a "single, efficient mechanism" to deal with the challenges of a volatile international commodities system remains an unresolved problem, criticising the current "global governance architecture for agriculture" which, he says, "is not what the world needs".

There, writ large, is the tranzie agenda – global governance on the coat-tails of the global food crisis, with the UN at the centre in its "coordination" role, masterminding the "single, efficient mechanism" to deal with the crisis.

The problem though, is that there is not so much one crises, as many different crises. And, as we have pointed out, while in many cases, local food shortages are the proximate cause of the episodes of unrest currently being exploited by the tranzies, often these are the symptoms of wider problems, usually related to poor economic management and structural problems.

Equally to the point, while nations with food supply problems often have similar problems, it is most often the combination of different failures or inadequacies which do the damage and, in each country, the particular combinations are unique.

Progressively, we have looked at some of those countries, specifically Colombia, Afghanistan, Egypt and Malawi, and what comes over is precisely the phenomenon upon which we remark – that each country is unique. Each, therefore, must be treated differently and needs a different range of solutions. The idea of a "single, efficient mechanism" to deal with the complexity and variety of problems encountered is so unrealistic as to be laughable.

Adding further to our thesis, we have been looking at the interesting situation developing in Thailand, where farmers are protesting about the low prices they are getting for their rice.

Here, the government's support system is to set a minimum price which the millers must pay farmers. But, not only do the farmers complain that this is set too low to cover rising input costs – not least of fuel and fertiliser – they are finding that millers are refusing to buy at the "guaranteed" price and are offering considerably less.

To add to the farmers' discontent, a government "crop mortgage scheme" has also been abandoned – a system where farmers can borrow against the coming harvest, in order to finance their production. This is having the effect of forcing farmers sell their crops to millers early, who are able to drive down prices still further.

However, the government is responding to farmers' demands to raise the guaranteed price, raising it to £220 per ton - compared with £100 in 2004/2005 – to allow financing of increasing input costs. However, as an added twist, this is leading to fears that this could lead to "additional government financial burdens to offset loss to state-owned banks" who lend money to farmers.

This is because an expected fall in rice market price caused by an inventory release by Japan and US in the near future could lead farmers to default on their loans.

As we wrote when we discussed this "inventory release", if market mechanisms are allowed to work, agriculture is well able to feed the current world population, and accommodate population growth for the foreseeable future. The only thing standing in the way of that are the politicians. We do not have a food crisis – we have a political crisis.

In fact, we have political crises - and the tranzies are not even on the same planet when it comes to understanding – much less dealing with – their complexities. But then, solving problems was never really on the agenda.

COMMENT THREAD

Understanding, not grandstanding

In common with the EU, the United Nations likes nothing better than a crisis, the dynamic of the "beneficial crisis" creating ideal opportunities for increasing power, influence and cash.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that The Daily Telegraph should be reporting: "World food price crisis 'here to stay'", conveying the views of Sir John Holmes, Britain's former ambassador to Paris who now serves as the UN's under-secretary for humanitarian affairs.

Holmes concedes that, "It is possible that in the next two or three years prices will come down a bit from the peaks we've seen in the last few months …" but he does not think they will revert to previous levels. As a result, he says, the world needs a "green revolution" to feed its rising population.

His argues that the emergence of hundreds of millions of middle class consumers in China and India has increased demand for food, high oil prices have made transporting it more expensive and the supply of grain has been hit by bad weather and the transfer of land to grow biofuels instead of food crops.

However, Sir John clearly has not caught up with the latest developments in the rice market, where prices are plummeting, or with the recent price history of wheat, where it has dropped from its record February level of $13 to around $9 a bushel.

Given reasonable weather over the next few months (in both hemispheres), wheat prices are likely to remain stable over the short-term, while rice has a way to fall yet. Thus, prices are already falling from their record peaks and, with the volatility of the commodity market, next year's prices are anyone's guess.

The great uncertainty is the price of energy. Here, while some are looking to the $200 barrel of oil, others are still maintaining that the current price level cannot be sustained and, sooner rather than later, the bubble will burst.

Either way, the big driver of food commodity prices will be the diversion of land to biofuel production, in which case, it is not so much a "green revolution" that is required, but a "common sense revolution". That, unfortunately, is the less likely of the two events – especially when the spectre of food shortages offers such good opportunities for exploiting the crisis.

It would also help if the media and the collected pundits learnt some economics and, for want of such knowledge, desisted from indulging in economically illiterate drivel.

Such an injunction should apply to The Daily Telegraph which, on top of a emotive piece on Haiti, calculated to tug at the heart strings, then goes on to publish an editorial of stunning vapidity.

Its prescription for "curing" the food crisis is "to stop imposing restrictions on genetic manipulation" and to scrap the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, substituting direct payments made by each state.

The former, of course, would only have a marginal impact - if any. Many of the GM seeds, in fact, require high inputs and intesive cultivation to deliver any benefits, which makes them inappropriate for many developing country agricultural systems. Much more helpful would be a sensible approach to pesticides and other argo-chemicals, in a bid to deal with the massive losses arising from pest attack and plant disease.

As to the CAP, the writer of the piece has cotton-wool for brains. At a time when grain prices are at a record high, and arable farmers are actually making money, what on earth is the point of intoducing a system of "direct payments" to farmers? The market, at this time, is perfectly capable of addressing commodity shortages.

Above all, though, the paper - like Sir John Holmes - needs to recognise that there are no "magic wands" which will deal with what, in fact, are multifarious problems. There needs to be a recognition that the problems in Egypt and not the same as those in Malawi, which are not the same as those in Haiti or the Philippines.

Crucially, most often, local food shortages stem from economic mismanagement - which is certainly the case in Haiti - or stem from structural problems relating to land ownership and the availability of cheap credit at local level, and are exacerbated by trade distortions arising from protectionism.

In a grown-up newspaper, some of these issues might actually be addressed. Instead, this particular paper simply contents itself with a puerile pay-off line: "The time has come to scrap the CAP", which does not even begin to demonstrate and understanding of the issues. Like Sir John's input, it smells more of grandstanding than understanding.

What we need is definitely less of the former and more of the latter.

COMMENT THREAD

Complexity upon complexity

Diving in to a subject when blessed with supreme ignorance is very easy and rewarding. Fortified with indignation and innate prejudice, one can so easily come up with solutions that all the other idiots – the so-called "experts" – have missed, and then rail at their inability to see the obvious.

That is something to which this blogger is particuarly prone and is beginning to happen with the "global food crisis" where, as the issue climbs up the political agenda, various pundits – not least this one - are offering their own nostrums to solve the problems.

Invariably, in support of the "global" part of the crisis thesis, authors – including myself - list the areas which have recently suffered food riots, lumping them together as having that one thing in common (either rising food prices or shortages), as if they are part of one global phenomenon.

A more sanguine look at the situation, however, will tell you that, while civil disturbances may be the common feature of these disparate events - ranging geographically from Egypt to Bangladesh and China – the actual causes are many and varied. In many instances, food shortages and prices may be only incidental to the problem, and are most often symptoms of underlying defects or stresses in the system.

Bringing on this reflection is a recent article in the Egyptian Daily Press (via the blog Subalternate), which points to corruption in an already creaking and inefficient food supply system as the proximate cause of the riots.

The article, written by Daanish Faruqi, a Senior Researcher and Editor, at the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, suggests that the problem which triggered the riots stemmed from the corrupt management of government wheat flour subsidies.

What was happening was that, as the international price of wheat rose to record levels last month, heavily subsidised wheat supplied to government-owned bakeries – and used to make cheap country, or baladi bread, at a very marginal profit – was siphoned off into the black market and thence to private bakeries to service communities which could well afford the price rises.

Badly-paid government inspectors were easily – and cheaply – bribed to turn a blind eye, as a result of which the poorer workers in the industrial towns, and their families, found that they could no longer get supplies of cheap bread and were forced to buy higher-priced bread elsewhere. From that, the riots developed and the poor - who could least afford to do so - were forced to bear the brunt of the price rises.

Of course, the increasing price of wheat was a factor in this, but there are other, more complex issues. Not least is the extraordinary structure of the Egyptian farming sector, illustrated in a detailed study. Although the sector, dominated by very small farms, produces nearly half of Egypt's wheat (and could grow considerably more) most of the product is consumed by the farmers themselves or absorbed by the rural communities.

In fact, one half of Egyptian wheat farmers are net buyers, whose wheat purchases (expressed in grain equivalent) exceed their sales. Most of these households are wheat farmers that do not sell wheat at all and supplement their wheat production with purchases of bread and other wheat products.

As a result, the urban poor are fed not by home-grown product but by government-subsidised wheat bought on the international market, while the private sector also relies on imports, but bought on the open market without subsidy. Where corruption abounds, the situation was always going to be fraught.

In this case, it was exacerbated by the fact that Egypt has one of the highest wheat per capita consumption levels in the world and, out of a total consumption of wheat in 2005/2006 estimated at 13.9 million tons, nearly seven million tons was imported, of which the government controlled (i.e., subsidised) wheat was only about 2.5 million tons.

Egypt is also chronically short of storage capacity and keeps minimal strategic stocks, making the country especially vulnerable to sudden upwards shifts in the international grain price.

Thus, it is fair to say that the recent "food riots" were triggered by a combination of local factors, that combination being unique to Egypt. Some elements will undoubtedly exist in other countries, especially the endemic corruption and government intervention.

Examining each of the different areas where there have been civil disturbances, it is undoubtedly the case that multiple (but different) factors will have been at play. Food prices or local shortages may have been only a small factor, or symptomatic of more profound, long-standing structural problems.

All this goes to say that there is no magic wand when it comes to resolving issues in the developing world. Nor can it be said that aid, per se is always (or ever) the answer.

Egypt is a country with a growing economy and record-breaking foreign investment. But it also receives massive US aid. It gets $1.3 billion annually in military aid and, in addition, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided over $25 billion in economic and development assistance to Egypt between 1975 and 2002, a sum now increased to over $28 billion.

Simple nostrums, therefore, are not always the right ones. The "global food crisis" brought on by higher prices and local shortages is an issue, but there are other factors which may be as important, or even more so.

COMMENT THREAD

Three meals from a revolution?

In what could be either a temporary market distortion, or a harbinger of a greater crisis, The Times reports today that food rationing has been introduced in the US giant Wal-Mart and in British stores, in bid to protect rice supplies.

With supplies dwindling and customers hoarding stocks, says The Times, multiple outlets are starting to restrict sales. Wal-Mart has said that its wholesale business had limited each customer to four bags of long-grain white rice per visit because of a shortage in supplies.

We are told that the move by the world's biggest retailer, which owns Asda, "constitutes the first time that food rationing has been introduced in the US". While Americans suffered some rationing during the Second World War for items such as petrol, light bulbs and stockings, they have never had to limit consumption of a key food item.

In Britain rice is being rationed by shopkeepers in Asian neighbourhoods to prevent hoarding. Tilda, the biggest importer of basmati rice, said that its buyers - who sell to the curry and Chinese restaurant trade as well as to families - were restricting customers to two bags per person. "It is happening in the cash-and-carries," said Jonathan Calland, a company executive. "I heard from our sales force that one lady went into a cash-and-carry and tried to buy eight 20kg bags."

Of course, local restrictions do not a shortage make. Panic-buying and hoarding by retail customers can drive any product off the shelves, even when there is a plentiful supply. But these events do coincide with a doubling of global rice prices and bans on the exports of rice by India, China, Vietnam and Egypt.

This has put increased pressure in the United States, as a major producer of rice, leaving Costco Wholesale, the largest warehouse operator in America, said this week that demand for rice and flour had risen, with customers panicking about shortages and hoarded produce.

The Times offers an interesting comment from Tim Johnson, of the California Rice Commission, who says: "This is unprecedented. Americans - particularly in states such as California - have on occasion walked into a supermarket after a natural disaster and seen that the shelves are less full than usual, but we have never experienced this."

Panic buttons we do not need yet but, as science fiction authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote in their 1977 cult book, Lucifer's Hammer, civilisation is "only three meals removed from savagery".

This has morphed into the phrase: "no government is more than three meals from a revolution", which is variously attributed to Mao, Marx and sundry others – without any reliable source. But the message conveyed is clear enough.

If, as many argue, the global food market is undergoing structural change, with in-built production deficits, then many of the current political preoccupations will fade into insignificance as the struggle for survival – of peoples and governments – begins to dominate.

In a year's time – or maybe not – politics could look very different from what we see now.

COMMENT THREAD

Looking in the wrong direction (again)

We debated whether to have a go at the RUSI report, as puffed by yesterday by Charles Clover, environment editor of The Daily Telegraph and a few others.

This is the one that says that climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two World Wars which will last for centuries unless it (climate change) is controlled. Thus does the Royal United Services Institute say that a tenfold increase in research spending, comparable to the amount spent on the Apollo space programme, will be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.

However, other bloggers, like Tim Worstall had done it, and there was not – at first sight – much to add. However, it cannot pass without saying that if this RUSI report represents the height of UK strategic thinking on defence, then we are really in trouble.

The author, Nick Mabey, a former senior member of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, is now chief executive of the environmental group E3G and, like many of his ilk, is obsessed with the prospect of global warming – and its effects some time in the distant future.

What is disturbing is that if you accept, like American Thinker, that a period of global cooling is a distinct possibility which, on current data, cannot be ruled out, then there are much more immediate threats.

Basically, there is no dispute that moderate global warming (such as we have been experiencing up to 1998) is broadly beneficial, especially in terms of agricultural production.

Without acknowledging it, the world has been enjoying a "global warming dividend" which is worth perhaps as much as a 10-15 percent increase in crop yield. If we are to suffer a period of cooling, we lose that dividend, just at a time when the global agricultural system is being stretched to meet the various demands of increased prosperity, larger populations, and the need for biofuel production.

One only has to recall recent events in Egypt (pictured), Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia and Bangladesh (and well as China and possibly Tibet), where there has been instability arising from local food shortages and price increases, to appreciate that a run of bad winters causing a downturn in global food production could have very serious consequences.

That is not to posit an Armageddon scenario – a market-driven economy can cope over the medium to long-term by increasing yields, and production is already being dragged upwards by the promise of sustained high prices. But that does leave room for local and regional crises which could have effects far more devastating than the notional adverse effects of global warming.

Any strategic appreciation which completely ignores this possibility, and focuses entirely on global warming, has to be seriously flawed. The whole point of "blue sky thinking" of the type which RUSI claims to offer is that you take into account all the realistically possible scenarios.

With Mr Mabey and his ilk quite possibly looking in completely the wrong direction, there is a danger that, for want of planning and appreciation, manageable situations will spiral out of control and become far more dangerous than they should.

That, in the final analysis, may be the real danger of "global warming" – that it has blinded our thinkers (and politicians) to the more immediate dangers as they hare off after their fantasies of an overheating world.

COMMENT THREAD

Are the MSM listening to themselves - open thread for Friday

The thread on anti-Americanism was running well enough for me to let it go for an extra 24 hours, which may have been a mistake. So far, so good. However, it is time (not a pun despite the picture) to move on (also not a pun on that egregious Soros-funded American organization).

Time Magazine has excelled itself in tastelessness, as Michelle Malkin points out. As North America starts recovering from one of the hardest winters for a long time; as we just begin to count the human and animal costs of an extraordinarily cold winter in Asia; as the world adjusts to the notion that the ethanol scam will have to be stopped because quite predictably it is helping to raise food prices in poor countries (though controlling the price of bread as the Egyptian government has done for decades is hardly helpful) this no longer respectable publication has decided to raise the flag for the war against global warming.

One does not quite know where to start. In the first place, what is the point in annoying so many of your readers by misusing an iconic picture of the Iwo Jima flag? Secondly, given the severity of the winter and the hardship that is causing, not to mention the figures that show a lack of global temperature rise in the last seven years, is this a war that anybody should be fighting?

Thirdly, exactly how can we wage war on global warming? There is no parallel here with the war on terror as that obviously implies war on terrorists, both state and individual. But a war on climate change? What these people need is King Canute who demonstrated to his sycophantic courtiers that he could do nothing about the waves.

Finally, there is another issue. (Oh dear, not another pun, honest.) Time Magazine has four different issues across the world. Three of them carry the stupid and tasteless cover demonstrated above. The fourth one, for Europe, carries a picture of Gordon Brown. Can someone explain this?

So there we are, forum. Are the MSM listening to themselves. Discuss.

OK, once again, let's roll.

COMMENT THREAD