TERRORISM & THE BUSINESS WORLD —AN UPDATE

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR—PAPER NO.481

Global Intelligence News

by B. Raman

( A talk delivered at a symposium organised by the Birla Institute of Management Technology at Delhi on December 13,2008)

Terrorists target human beings—combatants and non-combatants (civilians)— as well as capabilities—economic and strategic.

2. Till the 1980s, they focused more on targeting human beings. Targeting of capabilities—-which may or may not cause human fatalities—- came into vogue in the 1980s, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) carried out explosions in London’s financial district.

3. Targeting of capabilities does not create the same kind of public revulsion against the terrorists as the targeting of human beings does. Whereas the after-effects of the targeting of human beings remain localised in the area where they were targeted, the impact of the targeting of capabilities has a ripple effect far beyond the area where the act of terrorism was carried out.
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Popularity: 90% [?]

RIGHTS-LIBERIA: ‘We Will Use Our Children as Shields’

Global Intelligence News / IPS

By Rebecca Murray

Children play at the Harbel marketplace.

HARBEL, Liberia, Dec 9 (IPS) – “We are not just going to let a bulldozer come in and demolish our land. If possible we will use our children as shields. We will have to do that,” exclaims Eric Lavella, a middle-aged Firestone factory worker living in the heart of Liberia’s largest rubber plantation, 60 kilometres south of the capital Monrovia.

Lavella’s neighbourhood of Firestone contractors, retirees, marketers and squatters — estimated by community leader, Reverend Johnson Flumo, to be around 3,000 — is crowded into breezeblock and corrugated metal shacks haphazardly built in the town of Harbel’s marketplace.

But after more than two decades of selling food, clothing and plastic Chinese goods, the market dwellers’ days are numbered. Firestone intends to shift the vendors to a newly constructed market next month and tear down the old commercial lot. The new location will have over 1000 stalls, but no housing. Both sites are on land Firestone says is theirs until their lease runs out in 2041.
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Re-Envisioning Defense: An Agenda for US Policy Debate and Transition

Republished with permission on the Global Intelligence News
A Global Geopolitics Net Site

PDA, Project on Defense Alternatives
5 December 2008

Read the full article in pdf format with graphs and charts on the PDA site.

The US defense policy paradox: less security at increasing cost

The United States is entering a critical period of policy transition. Beginning with the advent of the Obama administration, and continuing through the end of 2010, all of America’s national security and defense planning guidance will be revised. Certainly the need for change is broadly felt by the public. And it is not difficult to understand why.

Recent defense policy evinces a disturbing paradox: it has been delivering less and less security at ever increasing cost. With national defense expenditures approaching $700 billion per year, the United States today accounts for about 46 percent of all military spending worldwide – up from 28 percent in 1986. Approximately 440,000 US troops are presently stationed or deployed overseas, which is close to the number overseas at the end of the Cold War. But, in no area of concern has this prodigious effort produced substantial or sure progress – not in the “war on terrorism”, weapon proliferation, relations with allies, relations with China and Russia, or in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Mideast, or Africa. Indeed, the world seems less stable and more polarized today than it did in 2001. And anti-Americanism is at a level not seen since the Vietnam war years.

On a world scale, what parallels the present paradox in US security policy is a process of global re-polarization and re-militarization. If unchecked, this portends a return to conditions reminiscent of the Cold War, with the world consciously divided into contesting nation-state and “civilizational” blocks. Such an eventuality would fuel arms races, weapon proliferation, and conflict potentials. In this light, the process of re-polarization and re-militarization might be considered the greatest threat to our security and global peace over the next 50 years. The challenge this poses for US policy makers is to find ways to address current security problems that do not inadvertently or unnecessarily feed re-polarization and re-militarization.

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DEVELOPMENT: New Food Must Go Nuclear

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Dec 2 (IPS) – Better crops on the one hand, and nuclear power on the other might be, you would think, at extreme ends of the technological, and for some, even the moral spectrum. But it could be time to make agriculture more nuclear.

A lot of it is, already. Hundreds of millions of hectares of cultivation around the world is already nuclear assisted. And this technology goes back all of 80 years. Now the world needs this as never before, nuclear and agricultural scientists say.

”Currently there are over 3,000 officially released crop varieties that have involved radiation induced mutations, and over 100 countries routinely make use of this technology, which is one of their favourite strategies for crop improvement,” Pierre Lagoda, head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) joint plant breeding and genetics section told IPS in an interview in London.

”These crops, grown all over the world, now form an integral part of our daily diet. They are raw materials in industries, and give countries billions of dollars in additional income for farmers.”

Essentially, the technique treats seeds with x-rays and gamma rays to produce new mutations of crops that are better resistant to difficult conditions and changing climate. Nature would of itself produce new mutations of crops to adapt to changing conditions, but only in time, and a long time at that. But this technique can speed up that change dramatically, here and now.

”Once seeds have been irradiated, the seedlings are integrated into normal crop breeding procedures of the countries,” says Lagoda. ”Compared to any other technology you could think about, this is cheap, cost effective, robust, environmentally friendly, and based on results. It is proven, and it is applicable anywhere in the world.”

But a frightening thought, nevertheless, to think of a meal made possible by something nuclear. And the thought raises the ghost of genetically modified (GM) crops, that this could be another, and far bigger instance of misusing science to fool around with nature.

Lagoda says the world can rest — and eat — assured.

”There is nothing that can be produced through radiation induced mutation that is not within the spectrum of possibilities of what nature can bring out in that crop, given sufficient space and time. All radiation induced mutation is doing is to facilitate a naturally occurring phenomenon.” And there is no residual radiation left in a plant after the mutation induction, he says.

Dinner can include a newly developed strain of rice using nuclear induced mutation, but the ingredients in the rice preparation will not be nuclear.

This technology can be critical in addressing world hunger and food security, the IAEA says. It leads to plant varieties that are not just high yielding but adapt to harsh climate conditions and are resistant to certain diseases and insect pests. ”The IAEA is urging a revival of nuclear crop breeding technologies to help tackle world hunger,” IAEA director general Dr Mohamed ElBaradei said in a statement. He has asked for allocation of more resources around the world for use and development of this technology.

The IAEA and the FAO together say that in addition to 850 million people worldwide already going hungry, a million more are being pushed below the one-dollar-a-day poverty level. Increased use of this new technology can improve health and livelihood, they say.

In Japan, the Institute of Radiation Breeding has figured that crops developed with radiation induced mutations have yielded 62 billion dollars in returns, for an investment of 69 million dollars between 1959 and 2001. That amounts to a 900 fold return. In Pakistan, use of the technique quadrupled cotton production in ten years. China and the U.S. are the other countries where the technology is in widespread use.

But the technology has still not been used as widely as it ought to be, scientists say. ”In 1928 it was found that x-rays would change the blueprint of plants in a manner in which that which is hidden can become obvious and be used to create new crop varieties,” says Lagoda. And it was in 1964 that the IAEA and the FAO came together and set up a joint programme for using nuclear techniques in food and agriculture to ”mimic nature.” Now, he says, given the recent agricultural shocks, ”we can no longer wait for chance discoveries to give us new crop varieties.”

The IAEA, he said, is calling the attention of the world to the looming threat of global climate change and variation. ”This year, prices of all basic foodstuff went to their highest level in the past 50 years, and this situation is only going to get worse,” Lagoda says.

”The countries most at risk are their developing countries, with their fragile ecosystems, with their agriculture that is rudimentary, no effective irrigation, where farmers do not have enough resources to buy fertilisers. So when the environment changes so much, there will not be enough resilience in the crops to withstand these new conditions.”

The IAEA, he said, is ”calling for a revival of culture, if you may, of supporting agriculture.”
All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Popularity: 23% [?]

ECONOMY-US: Past Crises Could Inform or Haunt Team Obama

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, NOv 29 (IPS) – Faced with the worst crisis since the Great Depression, President-elect Barack Obama ditched tradition this week, naming his economic team before anointing a secretary of state — by custom the first and senior-most cabinet appointment.

His choices will marshal an unprecedented government effort to revive the economy and right the financial system. They include key figures familiar with both crisis and controversy.

Paul Volcker, central bank chief under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, is to head the new Economic Recovery Advisory Board modeled on an Eisenhower-era panel of nonpartisan national security advisers. He is credited with quashing U.S. inflation in the 1980s — but with policies also blamed for a severe recession.

Volcker recently blamed the world’s ”broken financial system” on Wall Street executive pay schemes that provide ”tremendous rewards and payments of magnitude for presumed success and not much penalty for failure.” No wonder, he added, that they turned into ”alchemists”, using exotic derivatives in a ruinous attempt ”to turn dross into gold.” He favoured breaking up banks into smaller units ”so that the failure of one can’t upset things.”
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TRADE-WEST AFRICA: Swollen Shoot Disease Devastating Cocoa Trees

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Francis Kokutse

ACCRA, Nov 27 (IPS) – On a hot November afternoon, Opanin Owusu Adu showed me around his farm on the outskirts of Suhum, a town in the Eastern Region in Ghana.

He pointed out what has happened to the cocoa trees that he had hoped to make a living from. With a sad voice he said, ‘‘my son, that is what the people say swollen shoot disease does to the cocoa trees”.

What should have been golden pods, have become blackened, dried up and withered. ‘‘You cannot cultivate these ones. It means no money.”

Swollen shoot disease is a problem across the West African region. Farmers in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo and Nigeria have not been spared the devastation.

Worried by its long-term effect, Ghana’s President John Kufuor early this year called on the regional grouping the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to take steps to fight the disease.
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CHINESE ECONOMY MONITOR—-NOTE NO.4

Global Intelligence News

B.RAMAN

(What will be the impact of the global financial and economic melt-down on the Chinese economy? This question should be of interest to the other countries of the South and the South-East Asian region. If the Chinese economy is badly affected, they too are likely to feel the negative consequences of the down-turn in the Chinese economy. Keeping this in view, we have been bringing out a periodic “Chinese Economy Monitor” based on open information. This is the fourth in the series—B. Raman)
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TRADE: Report Sees Bonanza for U.S., Iran if Sanctions Scrapped

Global Intelligence News / IPS

Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, Nov 24 (IPS) – Think of it as a stimulus package without deficit spending: Were the United States to normalise trade relations with Iran and were the Islamic Republic to liberalise its economy, Washington could cut its fuel costs and add tens of billions of dollars to its economy, say U.S. exporters.

Such moves could lower world oil prices by as much as 10 percent, the National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) says in a report aimed at the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama, who is to take office in January, has signaled willingness to explore new approaches to his country’s long standoff with Iran. During his election campaign, opponents lambasted Obama for favouring appeasement at a time when Washington seeks to tighten the screws on Tehran for its alleged support of terrorism and nuclear ambitions.
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Popularity: 27% [?]

HEALTH-AFRICA: Who Is To Blame for the Crisis?

Global Intel Net / IPS

Kristin Palitza

BAMAKO, Nov 18 (IPS) – Health systems on the continent are riddled with inadequate policies, strategies, lack of institutional capacity, poor scientific review mechanisms and weak funding for research in the public and private sector, said Luis Sambo, regional director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in of Africa.

What makes matters worse is a ”human resource crisis throughout the continent, based on lack of training, capacity shortages and migration of skilled health carers, Sambo further explained. Other challenges are limited access to technologies, such as Information Communication Technology (ICT), and weak physical infrastructure,” he added.

Sambo was speaking at the WHO Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health which opened in Bamako, Mali, on Monday.

Although African health experts generally agree with Sambo that the continent’s health systems face many challenges, many place the blame for the situation not on a ”knowledge gap”, as Sambo put it, but on the control of international institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), on national policy making in developing countries.
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Popularity: 18% [?]

ECONOMY: Don’t Bank On Them

Global Intel Net / IPS

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 18 (IPS) – Public confidence in Belgian banks has eroded considerably over the past few months. A series of multi-billion euro rescue plans, reports of lavish executive bonuses and investigations into whether shareholders were misled about solvency levels have fuelled fears that the savings of the hard-pressed ordinary citizen are anything but safe.

Less noticed, though arguably more disturbing, are revelations that the country’s banks invest in projects that damage the environment and abuse elementary human rights.

By visiting the ‘Bank Secrets’ website (www.bankgeheimen.be), savers can monitor what is done with the money they lodge in their accounts. It says that there is a ”very high” chance that Fortis, Citibank and ING invest in harmful projects, and a ”high” risk that Dexia and KBC do.

Netwerk Vlaanderen, the Flemish human rights organisation which set up the website, has used four main criteria to assess projects that banks finance: if they involve the manufacture of weapons; if they respect the employment standards recommended by the International Labour Organisation; if they are ecologically destructive and; if they involve cooperation with repressive regimes.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

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