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	What’s Your Consumption Factor? by Jared Diamond USA   January 2, 2008   To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.   To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.   If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.   The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.   The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.   People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.   People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32.   Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.   Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption - that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.   If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).   Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies - for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy - they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.   We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we already have. To tell them not to try would be futile.   The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster?   No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.   Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.   Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields - even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.   The same is true of forests: we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.   Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.   * Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
	Subsidies Harvest Of Misery by Johann Hari, Jimmy Carter The Independent / Washington Post USA   24 December 2007   Charity is fine, but the real issue is trade, by Johann Hai. (The Independent)   Christmas time, is when some 40 per cent of our charitable giving takes place. This week alone, millions of people will give money to help the poorest people alive – and from the barrios of Latin America to the mud-towns of sub-Saharan Africa, I"ve seen how this cash keeps people alive.   But as we give money to help the world"s poor on to their feet, this month the European Union – acting on demands from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – is kicking millions of them back to the ground. We are in the middle of a trade negotiation that is undoing our charity and setting great swaths of Africa up to fail.   The story of how this came to pass begins 50 years ago, as the European colonial powers were being forced to leave the African colonies they had pillaged and ruined. In a parting spasm of guilt, we Europeans gave our ex-colonies a handful of special trade deals. We agreed, for example, to let Kenya sell us its green beans without charging any tariffs or taxes. Over time, these niches collectively became some of the most thriving parts of Africa"s economy, employing hundreds of millions of people. These special deals continued uncontested until the year 2000 – when the WTO demanded they be axed forever, by the deadline of 1 January 2008.   Why? The WTO was following a tightly-prescribed and blinkered ideology. Since the 1980s, it has enforced the market fundamentalist belief that all tariffs, all subsidies and all protections for poor countries are "market distortions" that need to be abolished. Never mind that every rich country protected its own industries while they were taking their baby-steps. Never mind that the electorates in poor countries democratically oppose this premature crow-barring open of their economies. The WTO – backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – demands they must go, for all but the impossibly weak.   The practical effects of forcing this ideology down the throats of poor countries has been plain for decades now. It kills. Look at Malawi"s recent experience. The country"s soil has been depleted and corroded by desperate overuse, so the government adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The country"s desperately poor farmers were given sacks of fertiliser at a third of the real cost, because without it their plants couldn"t grow. Then the market fundamentalists of the World Bank arrived, and announced this was a "market distortion" that had to stop if Malawi wanted to continue receiving loans and aid. So the subsidies were ended – and the crops began to fail in feeble soil, en masse, year after year. The country descended into famine. Mothers watched their children starve.   Then, two years ago, the Malawian government finally had enough. It told the World Bank and IMF and WTO to stick their conditions and their loans, and began to subsidise fertiliser once again. The result? Malawi is now the single biggest seller of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa, and so successful it is actually giving hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe. The nightmare of famine has been replaced by an embarrassment of plenty, showing once again that mixed social democratic economies work best.   We all know about the famines caused by communism – Stalin"s starvation of Ukraine, Mao"s 30 million murdered by collectivisation, and Mengistu"s Ethiopian sequel to them both. But who knows about these, the famines of market fundamentalism?   And yet this month, the WTO has forced the EU to ram this failed ideology further into Africa. For hardline free traders, there is no difference between the poor world protecting its feeble industries and the rich world protecting its fattened lobbies. They demand there has to be parity between the two – as if they are competing as equals. So they have ruled that if the African countries are to be allowed to retain their protected access to European markets, they have to give something equally precious in return: they have to "liberalise" their economies by a whopping 80 per cent, allowing EU goods in untariffed and untaxed. Only the very poorest are exempt.   This leaves African countries with a vicious dilemma. If (say) Kenya wants to save its green beans and flower-growing industries – whose protected export to Europe employs millions – it has to now allow European industrial goods to flood into their country in return. This will crush any attempt to develop an industrial base of its own, because there is no way fledgling Kenyan companies can compete with the swish products churned out cheap by Europe. This isn"t even a Hobson"s choice, it"s Sophie"s choice – which of your children do you condemn to economic death? The farmers, or the industrial workers?   As if that was not harsh enough, the victim-countries are also being forced rapidly to abolish their tariffs on incoming European goods. For Ghana and Cape Verde, this is 20 per cent of their income – more than their entire health budget.   A few African countries are independent enough of Europe to resist. Nigeria has oil, so it can say no. South Africa has enough trade with other developed parts of the world to hold out. But most African countries have been forced – with the gun of being locked out of European markets after the 1 January deadline at their heads – to give in and sign. Tetteh Hormeku, one of Africa"s most distinguished trade campaigners, says: "The EU is a bandit in international negotiations. It is no different to the Americans. The Americans say, "Give me your beer, or I"ll shoot you. "The Europeans say, "Give me your beer, it is for your own good".   The result will be more poverty and more hunger – and you will end up guiltily sending some cash to the victims in Christmases to come. But it makes no sense to give to charity this way and yet not campaign against the acts of economic mutilation by our own governments that make that charity necessary.   I"m not saying you shouldn"t give to charity, but it"s not enough. We need a global movement, building on Make Poverty History, to replace this WTO-led market fundamentalism of free trade. The alternative is fair trade: an end to subsidies and tariff walls protecting the rich, but a careful extension of them to the poor, where their governments ask for it. Now that would make for a very merry Christmas present – instead of the stinking package Europe has left under Africa"s bare and battered tree.   December 10, 2007   Subsidies Harvest Of Misery, by Jimmy Carter.   Congress can still act decisively this year to right a wrong that is hurting both small American farmers and the poorest people on the planet. A long-overdue debate is taking place on reform of the 1933 farm bill, passed during the Great Depression to alleviate the suffering of America"s family farmers. I was a farm boy then, and the primary cash crops on my father"s farm were peanuts and cotton. My first paying job was working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, measuring farmers fields to ensure that they limited their acreage and total production in order to qualify for the life-sustaining farm subsidy prices. Tragically, in its current form this legislation does not fulfill its original purposes but instead encourages excess production while channeling enormous government payments to the biggest producers. This product of powerful lobbyists now punishes small-scale farmers in the United States and is devastating to families in many of the world"s least affluent countries.   It is embarrassing to note that, from 1995 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of cotton growers received more than 80 percent of total subsidies. The wealthiest 1 percent of American cotton farmers continues to receive over 25 percent of payouts for cotton, while more than half of America"s cotton farmers receive no subsidies at all. American farmers are not dependent on the global market because they are guaranteed a minimum selling price by the federal government. American producers of cotton received more than $18 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2005, while market value of the cotton was $23 billion. That"s a subsidy of 86 percent!   The Carter Center works primarily among the world"s poorest people, including those in West Africa whose scant livelihood depends on cotton production. For instance, in 2002 Burkina Faso received 57 percent of its total export revenue from cotton, while Benin depended on cotton exports for more than 75 percent of its national export revenue. Overproduction in the United States leads to the dumping of U.S. cotton on global markets, which drives prices down. In recent years, cotton exported from the United States has been sold 61 percent below its cost of production.   Fragile African economies that depend on agricultural exports, especially cotton, are sometimes devastated by these practices. A 2002 report by Oxfam International estimates that in 2001 sub-Saharan Africa lost $302 million as a direct result of U.S. cotton subsidies, with two-thirds of the loss sustained in eight countries -- Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Chad and Togo. Compared with American humanitarian assistance, the subsidies to U.S. cotton farmers amount to more than the U.S. Agency for International Development"s total annual budget for all of sub-Saharan Africa.   I am still a cotton farmer, and I have been in the fields in Mali, where all the work is done by families with small land holdings. Cotton production costs 73 cents per pound in the United States and only 21 cents per pound in West Africa, so American farmers do need protection in the international marketplace. But Congress has a moral obligation to protect American agriculture with legislation that will serve our national interests, that will feed hungry people and that does not suppress the ability of the poor to work their way out of poverty.   * Former president Jimmy Carter founded the not-for-profit Carter Center, an international nongovernmental organization based in Atlanta.
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