Thursday, July 12, 2012

US drought threatens food prices; Qatar taking on the world; A new poverty map; Questioning Alpha leadership; And the award goes to...; No wonder Gurgaon is revolting

1 US drought threatens food prices (The Guardian) The worst drought to hit the US in nearly 25 years is threatening to drive up food prices around the world. The price of corn, the staple crop of much of the midwest and the prairies, has risen by a third in the past month and rose again after a US government report said farmers would not yield as much from their parched fields as expected. Almost a third of America's corn crop is already showing signs of damage and a report released by the US Department of Agriculture forecast that farmers would only reap a fraction of the corn expected last spring when they planted 96.4m acres, the most since 1937.

The USDA now predicts that the corn crop will average just 146 bushels an acre, down 20 bushels from its previous forecast. It estimates the harvest at 12.97bn bushels of grain, down 12% from the 14.79bn bushels forecast in June. One bushel of corn equals 25.4kg. "To see something on this continental scale where we're seeing such a large portion of the country in drought you have to go back to 1988," said Brad Rippey, a USDA agricultural meteorologist. That year saw corn yield drop by nearly a third.

2 How Qatar is taking on the world (Peter Beaumont in The Guardian) On Thursday evening Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who combines the roles of Qatar's prime minister and foreign minister, stood with the Duke of York and mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to watch the inauguration of the Shard. As lasers lit up a London skyline now dominated by the 310m skyscraper, the performance was streamed live around the world.

If the opening of western Europe's tallest building presided over by Hamad, whose country's sovereign wealth fund owns 95% of the development was a demonstration of Qatar's rapidly growing global visibility and influence, a few days before, in an equally vast but older building, that influence was being exercised far more discreetly. The building was the UN's Palais des Nations in Geneva, where last Saturday Hamad met the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and other foreign ministers to press his country's case for firmer international action over Syria.

A generation ago Qatar whose people are the world's wealthiest by virtue of its oil and natural gas reserves barely registered on the global radar. It is a former British protectorate ruled by the al-Thani family since the 19th century; its present emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, seized power in 1995 from his father in a bloodless palace coup. Today it is difficult to avoid its money and influence.

3 A new poverty map (The Guardian) By 2025, most of the world's poorest people will live in fragile and conflict-affected states in Africa, posing challenges to aid donors who have usually focused on helping well-governed countries, according to a new report, Horizon 2025. As a result, even though currently MICs may have more poor people than the world's poorest countries, this will be a temporary phenomenon. By 2025, the number of poor people in MICs could be as low as 100 million out of a global total of 560 million.

A consequence of the dramatic fall in the number of poor people is that the notional cost of eradicating poverty has fallen in absolute terms, and even more so as a share of industrialised country income. The report says the poverty gap looks affordable at only one-third of one per cent of global GDP. The report estimates the poverty gap to be $166bn by 2025, of which $35bn could be filled by the domestic resources of recipient countries, leaving $131bn to come from the rich OECD Development Assistance Committee.

Falling poverty numbers coupled with aid increases since 2002 mean official development assistance per poor person has started to rise sharply, reaching $80 per poor person in 2010 with an inexorable upward trend, according to the report. By 2025, official aid could rise to more than $300 per poor person a year.

4 Questioning Alpha leadership (The New York Times) Just as we thought our attention spans were collapsing and our thoughts reducing themselves to what could be texted or tweeted, the magazine The Atlantic published a nearly 13,000-word cover story by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University scholar and former Obama administration official. It was about whether educated professional women can still have it all: Can they be involved mothers and superstar workers and perfect wives? And it concluded that, in the world we inhabit in America, they can't.

The controversial crux of Ms. Slaughter's argument is this: that alpha women with alpha opportunities should, if they wish also to be mothers, accept beta careers. This is not to say that women should aim lower, Ms. Slaughter says. Rather, women should become content with peaking later (but still peaking at the top) and with a leadership trajectory of irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when needs and impulses beyond work require it.

5 Austerity may cost 4.5m jobs in eurozone (BBC) The eurozone could lose 4.5 million more jobs in the next four years unless the region shifts away from austerity, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned. That rise would take unemployment in the 17-nation bloc to 22 million. "It's not only the eurozone that's in trouble, the entire global economy is at risk of contagion," it said. The report said that all 17 countries in the eurozone would suffer, both those currently under stress and their healthier counterparts.
In Spain, which has the highest unemployment rate in the eurozone, one in four people is now out of work. The youth unemployment rate in the eurozone stood at 22.6% in May, meaning 3.4 million people under the age of 25 were jobless.

6 Wrestler-actor Dara Singh no more (BBC) Wrestler-turned-actor Dara Singh has died in Mumbai after a long illness, his doctors say. The 83-year-old had been admitted to hospital last week after a heart attack. Singh, who won the world wrestling championship in 1960, acted in several Bollywood films and television serials. He gained huge popularity while playing Hanuman, the monkey god, in the television adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana. He was also an member of parliament from 2003 to 2009 when he was appointed to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Indian parliament.

7 And the award goes to... (Dawn) Irrespective of their backgrounds or their parent companies, almost all film awards in India are the same. Most of them are nothing more than a gala event where everyone's expected to dress their best and do the same thing every year till they are invited. The only thing international in IIFA or International Indian Film Academy Award is the venue it chooses every year. The award claims to honor Indian cinema but since when did a segment of Bollywood become Indian cinema? IIFA is a paid vacation where stars land up in exotic locations with their families and maids, shake a leg, pose for some pictures and think they have done Hindi cinema a great service before picking up their statuette.

Bollywood's love for film awards is beyond any logic. Rather than saluting the year's best awards it simply hands out an award to everyone present. Sometimes it ends up creating a category like 'Most Powerful Scene' just to ensure that the bigwigs don't go home empty handed.

8 Child military slavery (Dawn) More than 11,000 child soldiers were freed from military slavery last year, but the United Nations believes hundreds of thousands around the world remain at the mercy of warlords like Thomas Lubanga. The 14-year jail term ordered against Lubanga by the International Criminal Court is a historic" signal, according to Radhika Coomaraswamy, who ends a six-year term this month as UN special representative on children in conflict. The UN believes hundreds of thousands of children are forced to fight at gunpoint by the likes of the Taliban in Afghanistan, notorious Congo warlord Bosco Ntaganda, the Shebab in Somalia, Ansar Dine in Mali and other terror groups and private armies around the world.

9 No wonder Gurgaon is revolting (The Wall Street Journal) Last week, fueled by a long and brutal summer with temperatures regularly crossing 40 degrees Celsius and power cuts of more than eight hours a day, residents in the suburbs of Delhi erupted in anger. Finally, on July 6, monsoon clouds burst over the region, bringing down temperatures (significantly) and tempers (moderately).

If Gurgaon's history is anything to go by, this respite is going to be short-lived. Flooding and potholes will soon replace our daily battles with the heat and dust. Here, population growth is outpacing infrastructure development. According to the Census of India, between 2001 and 2011, Gurgaon district's population grew 73.9% to 1.5 million people. The results of this are all too clear: hours spent in traffic, pigs rummaging through uncollected garbage, reports of sewage-laced tap water, and relentless struggles with water and electricity supply. There is also an unhealthy reliance on the private sector, even for the provision of basic services. It is a story of unsustainable urban development, and a harbinger of what is brewing in medium-sized cities all across India.

10 India sans policy stability (The Economic Times) Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong says the Indian business environment is "complicated" for investors who want policy stability.

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