For nearly a decade, Goldcorp’s Marlin gold and silver mine in the Guatemalan altiplano has been at the center of intense local conflict and international scrutiny. The conflict was ignited in 2005 when local Mayan communities overwhelmingly rejected mining in popular plebiscites called consultas. Chief among their concerns was the potential for water contamination in the agricultural areas.
Virtually every international human rights organization—from the ILO to the UN Special Rapporteur – has weighed in, urging Goldcorp and the Guatemalan government to suspend mine operations to ensure protection of the rights, health and livelihoods of the indigenous people. In mid-2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (IACHR) went one step further and issued precautionary measures ordering the Guatemalan government to suspend operations at the Marlin mine.
The spikes in global food prices in 2007-8 served as a wake-up call to the global community on the inadequacies of our global food system. Commodity prices doubled, the estimated number of hungry people topped one billion, and food riots spread through the developing world. A second price spike in 2010-11, which drove the global food import bill for 2011 to an estimated $1.3 trillion, showed that while global leaders may now be alert to the problems, our agricultural systems remain deeply flawed.
Various inter-governmental institutions responded with alacrity to the food price alarms. But the most powerful governments remain resistant to reform. In the final two months of last year alone, the G20, the WTO, and the Durban Climate Summit all turned big opportunities for action into small communiqués of little import.
In our new report, “Resolving the Food Crisis: Assessing Global Policy Reforms Since 2007,” we find that the recent crisis has been a catalyst for important policy reforms, but governments have yet to address its underlying causes. By avoiding deeper structural reforms, the countries that dominate international agricultural markets leave the world at risk of another devastating food crisis.
On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government spending and higher taxes. The European debt crisis began with Greece, and that nation remains the European Union’s most stricken economy. But it has spread inexorably to Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and even threatens France and possibly the UK. It need not have done so. Rarely do we get so stark an example of bad—arguably even perverse—economic thinking in action.
Triple Crisis blogger Sanjay Reddy was recently interviewed by Perry Mehrling of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) on why economists should explicitly acknowledge the normative values underlying their theories and models.
The concept of competitiveness has attracted a lot of attention by scholars, policy makers and international economic institutions in recent decades. But it suffers from some misconception when applied to developing countries. In a forthcoming book, Competitiveness and Development: Myth and Realities(Anthem Press),I have explained that developed countries have been concerned with competitiveness at the high level of development by undertaking, inter alia, technological development and upgrading of their industrial and service activities. Yet, they have been imposing competitiveness at the low level of development on developing countries. They have been doing so, by advocating neo-liberal views, e.g. through Washington Consensus, and imposing across-the-board and universal trade liberalization on developing countries through International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and WTO, and regional and bilateral trade agreements.
As members of the Eurozone are now acutely aware, the lack of a sovereign debt restructuring regime is one of the most glaring gaps in the international financial architecture. That said, this summer’s decision by a tribunal of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which grants a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) jurisdiction over Argentina’s restructuring of its sovereign debt in the wake of its 2001 financial crisis, shows that a de-facto regime may be arising whereby international investment agreements (IIAs) can serve as a way for disgruntled investors to circumvent debt restructuring. This amounts to mission creep on the part of IIAs. Creeping into such territory is too much to take on for the world of IIAs. Sovereign debt restructuring should be left to national governments and international financial and monetary authorities.
At this time 12 months ago, this column had highlighted how the dying year 2010 could be labeled the year of natural calamities, and predicted more on the way.
Sure enough, the year that has just passed witnessed even worse disasters. If 2010 was marked by the Haiti earthquake, 2011 surpassed that in impact (if not in deaths) by the Fukushima triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.
But Fukushima was only the worst of the calamities that included hurricanes in Central and Latin America, drought in parts of Africa, massive floods in Thailand and elsewhere, and many typhoons and storms in the Philippines.