Ganga Needs Water, Not Money

Sunita Narain

Cross-posted from Center for Science and Environment.

It was way back in 1986 that Rajiv Gandhi had launched the Ganga Action Plan. But years later, after much water (sewage) and money has flowed down the river, it is as bad as it could get. Why are we failing and what needs to be done differently to clean this and many other rivers?

Pollution in the Ganga remains a tough challenge. According to recent estimates of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), faecal coliform levels in the mainstream of the river—some 2,500 km from Gangotri to Diamond Harbour—remain above the acceptable level in all stretches, other than its upper reaches. Even in the highly oxygenated upper stretches, faecal coliform levels, though within acceptable levels, are increasing in places like Rudraprayag and Devprayag, suggesting inadequate flow for dilution.

Pollution hot spots, the mega and fast-growing cities along the river, present a grimmer picture. According to CPCB monitoring data, BOD levels are high downstream of Haridwar, Kannauj and Kanpur, and peak at Varanasi. But what is worrying is that in all the stretches pollution is getting worse. This is not surprising given that all along this heavily populated stretch fresh water intake from the river is increasing. Water is drawn for agriculture, industry and cities but only waste is returned to the river.

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Turning the 'Tied'? 2014 Farm Bill and the Future of U.S. Food Aid

Jennifer Clapp

After years of delay, the U.S. Senate voted yesterday in favor of the 2014 Farm Bill, which passed easily in the House or Representatives last week. President Obama is widely expected to sign the bill into law. The bill’s provisions on food aid, though not as far reaching in the end as many had hoped for a year ago, are being hailed as a first step toward more major reform in the future. But newly emerging donors mimicking outdated U.S. food aid practices may muddy the reform efforts.

U.S. food aid policy has seen remarkably few major changes since it was initiated 60 years ago, in 1954. Donated food is still required to be primarily grown in the United States, and at least half must still be transported on U.S. flag ships. The United States also remains by far the largest donor of food aid on the global stage, carrying significant weight in setting food aid trends.

But in these past 60 years, the world has changed a great deal, making U.S. food aid policy arcane and outdated. NGOs such as Oxfam and others pushing for reform have emphasized these points.

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Turning the ‘Tied’? 2014 Farm Bill and the Future of U.S. Food Aid

Jennifer Clapp

After years of delay, the U.S. Senate voted yesterday in favor of the 2014 Farm Bill, which passed easily in the House or Representatives last week. President Obama is widely expected to sign the bill into law. The bill’s provisions on food aid, though not as far reaching in the end as many had hoped for a year ago, are being hailed as a first step toward more major reform in the future. But newly emerging donors mimicking outdated U.S. food aid practices may muddy the reform efforts.

U.S. food aid policy has seen remarkably few major changes since it was initiated 60 years ago, in 1954. Donated food is still required to be primarily grown in the United States, and at least half must still be transported on U.S. flag ships. The United States also remains by far the largest donor of food aid on the global stage, carrying significant weight in setting food aid trends.

But in these past 60 years, the world has changed a great deal, making U.S. food aid policy arcane and outdated. NGOs such as Oxfam and others pushing for reform have emphasized these points.

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Global Dollar-Based Financial Fragility in the 2000s, Part 2

This is the second in a four-part series excerpted from the Political Economy Research Institute (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) working paper “The Endogenous Finance of Global Dollar-Based Financial Fragility in the 2000s: A Minskian Approach,” by Junji Tokunaga and Gerald Epstein. Tokunaga is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Management, Wako University, Tokyo. Gerald Epstein is a Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Part 1 is available here. The full paper is available here.

The Supreme Position of the U.S. Dollar in New Financial Innovations and Instruments

Junji Tokunaga and Gerald Epstein

Importantly, the supreme position of U.S. dollar in new financial innovations and instruments contributed to halting the declining trend of the dollar as a debt-financing currency and reversed the falling role of the dollar in the 2000s.

First of all, an unprecedented increase in U.S. dollar-denominated asset-backed security (ABS) issuance contributed to the revival of the dollar as a debt-financing currency in the 2000s. Currency shares in ABS and non-convertible bond issuance is provided in Figure 7. The share of U.S. dollar in ABS issuance rose from around 65 percent in 1999 to 75-80 percent on the eve of the financial crisis (as shown in Panel B), while the share of euro increased gradually from around 15% to in 1999 to about 20 percent, respectively (as demonstrated in Panel A).

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Emerging Markets: Deja vu all over again

Jayati Ghosh

So now we have witnessed yet another sell-off of emerging market assets in global financial markets in the last week of January, which has caused currencies to depreciate from Argentina to Indonesia and many countries in between. For those who had seen it coming,  it was one more reminder of the extreme fragility generated by global financial integration, and the problems that such exposure can create for developing countries whether or not they also have specifically domestic economic concerns. Essentially, these markets are now so peculiarly integrated into the global financial system that they are part of the collateral damage whenever U.S. monetary or fiscal policy changes.

Indeed, the first round of such capital flight in the middle of 2013 did not even require any actual policy change in the United States. Rather it was generated simply by talk, when U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced the likely possibility of tapering down the massive monetary stimulus that had been feeding capital markets with huge amounts of liquidity since 2009. Suddenly, “taper” entered the financial lexicon of developing countries with an extremely adverse connotation, as the fear of capital inflows to emerging markets reducing or even reversing in the wake of such a move caused anticipatory movements, often by residents of the countries themselves rather than only external investors.

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