But are agricultural ministers, who usually see their job as helping their own farmers, up to the task?

TO BE NOTED: From the FT:

"The world must feed its hungry

Published: April 16 2009 19:48 | Last updated: April 16 2009 19:48

As we agonise about the recession, we should remember that humanity’s greatest economic problem is more basic: how to get enough food, a challenge still faced by millions.

This weekend the Group of Eight leading countries gathers in Italy for its first ever meeting of agriculture ministers. Their goal must be to move food policy up the global political agenda to a position where it is treated as the vital international security matter it is.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

In depth: Global food crisis - Mar-31

Saudis set aside $800m for foreign food - Apr-14

Hyundai to lease Russian farmland - Apr-14

G8 warns of hunger threat to stability - Apr-06

Tea prices to soar after droughts - Mar-30

Record numbers of Americans apply for government food aid - Mar-26

Last year’s record-high food commodity prices sparked riots as 100m people needed help from the World Food Programme. Thousands of desperate people in dozens of countries took to the streets in upheavals potentially far more destabilising than any reactions the financial meltdown has yet provoked. This danger will not go away.

Prices have come down, but remain higher than in decades. Even short disruptions cast long shadows: malnutrition in infancy can permanently impair children’s physical and cognitive development. Climate change, decades of declining investment in agriculture, and current policy mistakes conspire to make the crisis structural.

All countries share an interest in food security – their own, and for the sake of stability, that of others. But they must not confuse security with self-sufficiency. The world can produce enough food for all: as the economist Amartya Sen points out, famines are caused not by lack of food but by income inequality. The poor must get help – in ways that do not undermine food production.

Food exporters and importers alike need well-functioning international markets in food, which encourage efficient global production patterns. The responses to the crisis, sadly, have been in the opposite direction: export bans, land grabs of arable territory and secretive bilateral barter deals. These policies must stop. They are self-destructive and costly, and for poor countries ruinous. They do harm to others, as they undermine trading systems that benefit all.

Governments must provide global public goods. Research is needed to boost productivity, especially for African crops, and must not be hampered by opposition to genetically modified food. Mechanisms must be found to hedge against price volatility that discourages production even when prices are high.

The G8 has rightly invited important emerging countries to the table. But are agricultural ministers, who usually see their job as helping their own farmers, up to the task? Food security is the greatest threat to human well-being today. It should not be lost in quibbles about the branding of Parma ham.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009"

"consumers in the west do have the power to limit their funds."

Caroline Sourt in the Guardian about the East Congo, and what we can do about it ( which isn't much ):

"Caroline Sourt

• 
  
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 December 2008 17.00 GMT
• Article history

As Simon Tisdall has pointed out on Comment is Free, the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo looks intractable – and there is little appetite, in Britain or elsewhere, to send more troops there. But while the fighting is not going to stop as long as militias control the region's natural resources, consumers in the west do have the power to limit their funds( GOOD ).

One of the precious metals mined in eastern Congo is coltan. It is used in many common products: mobiles, computers, digital cameras, GPS equipment, airbags, hearing aids and even pacemakers. While 80% of the world's known coltan reserves are in eastern Congo, only about 1% of the metal sold on the open market is Congolese.

The reality is that most of Congo's coltan is sold illegally and the revenue, instead of going towards the country's development, is helping to fund the ongoing violence. The coltan mines in the east are controlled by various armed groups. One of the consequences is that civilians, including children, are recruited as forced labour. The mortality rate in these mines is high.

In a UN report discussed yesterday by the security council, the Congolese and Rwandan governments are accused of backing militias to fight a "war by proxy". All the groups, including the Congolese army, are accused of human rights violations that range from massacres and torture to widespread rape of women and children. In this on-off war, it's estimated that 45,000 people die each month( 45,000 ); since August, 250,000( 250,000 ) have been displaced.

The UN's force in Congo, Monuc, has so far failed to stop the fighting, despite being the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in the world( COME ON ). Democratic Republic of the Congo is the size of western Europe: 17,000 troops, or even the proposed increase to 20,000-strong force, are insufficient. The EU recently refused to send in soldiers, preferring to try political negotiations. What it should be doing is to regulate the international sales of Congolese minerals more efficiently( TRUE ).

Just as blood diamonds fuelled the civil war in Sierra Leone, the illegal trade fuels the DRC conflict. As long as militias and politicians continue to make money from minerals, there is no real incentive to find a lasting peace( I SUPPOSE THAT'S TRUE ). The companies involved in buying Sierra Leone's diamonds only located their consciences when consumers started asking questions about where their gems were coming from, and profits were threatened.

A certificate systemis supposed to detail the origins of any coltan, but it is not strictly adhered to. Many companies don't ask and if they do, they settle for vague answers and fraudulent papers because Congo's coltan is abundant and much cheaper than that of rival exporters.

Now, a break. From Reuters:

"By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo hopes to set up a scheme to certify columbite-tantalite produced within its borders in 2009, the country's Deputy Mines Minister Victor Kasongo said on Tuesday.

The illegal traffic of the rare metal, used in mobile phone chips and commonly referred to as coltan, helped fuel a 1998-2003 war and resulting humanitarian crisis in the central African country that killed an estimated 5.4 million people.

But a new G8-backed and German-financed pilot initiative aimed at creating a mineral fingerprint for coltan could soon help developing countries trace ore that is illegally exported and boost their profits from legal exports.

Kasongo said he hoped a global certification process aimed at ethically-minded consumers would follow.

"All the large companies are fighting for this. They'll be able to display a certificate to prove fair trade. You'll begin seeing many machines, many iPods, that are certified," he said.

Congo plans to use the data to set up its own certification process within the next eight months, which should help the creation of a global system similar to the Kimberley Process set up to end the trade in "blood diamonds" from war zones.

"We believe that in 2009 we should be able to enforce certification ... early next year," Kasongo told Reuters in an interview. "Licences. Centralised control. Certification. More revenues to Congo. More peace and stability. Those are the things we are aiming for."

A team from Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources is due to arrive in Congo on April 2.

Researchers will map the country's coltan producing areas and isolate unique characteristics of local ore samples to create mechanisms for tracing ore to its origin.

"BLOOD COLTAN"

Congo, believed by many experts to possess the world's largest coltan reserves, was one of the principal suppliers of the ore as demand from the mobile phone and electronics industries spiked in the late 1990s.

Much of the so-called "blood coltan" originating in Congo was illegally smuggled into Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi during a five-year war that saw the plunder of its natural resources by neighbours and foreign-backed militias.

Congo's coltan-rich eastern borderlands remain a patchwork of militia-controlled zones and rebel fiefdoms, where a United Nations Security Council-commissioned report recently said illegal armed groups still buy weapons with mining revenues.

Ethical concerns and more efficient industrialised mining have now made Australia the world's leading producer and exporter of coltan.

Congo hopes the certification process will rehabilitate the image of its coltan and help to stabilise its eastern reaches.

"We'll make sure that the coltan is not linked to any military activities. We understand that once we have control of the coltan itself, we'll have some control over the stability of the area," Kasongo said."

Back to our post:

The vast majority of those who donate to charitable appeals for Congo are unaware that their Christmas present purchases are probably feeding the conflict as fast as charities can alleviate it. Asking a few more questions about the gifts we buy would force the suppliers to come clean about their origins."

It's the least that we can do.

It Becomes Even More Obvious Where We're Going

From the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The United States and Britain appear to be converging on a similar blueprint for stemming the financial chaos sweeping the world, one day before a crucial meeting of leaders begins in Washington that the White House hopes will result in a more coordinated response.

The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans...

“As this thing has spread, the opportunities for cooperation have risen,” David H. McCormick, the under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said. “We need to promote and highlight these common areas.”

With credit markets still frozen and stock markets around the world in a deep swoon, there is a growing consensus that the crisis is now so fast-moving and harmful to the global economy that it demands an unprecedented degree of worldwide coordination.

The Treasury’s openness to direct infusions of cash is a remarkable change in tone from a few weeks ago, when the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, discouraged such actions in testimony before Congress. “Putting capital in institutions is about failure,” Mr. Paulson declared on Sept. 23. “This is about success.”...

“At a maximum,” she continued, “you can get general principles — the need for a swift recapitalization of the banks, the need for liquidity — so we don’t get an even bigger credit crunch.”...

The direct injections of cash would be for comparatively healthy banks. If a bank is failing and needs to be rescued or shut down, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would handle it through its own procedures.

The Treasury proposal to recapitalize banks stems from the realization that as the stock market keeps tumbling, and as mortgage-related securities on banks’ balance sheets also plummet, it has become harder for banks to raise fresh capital from investors.

The government concluded it would be able to deliver capital faster and with greater assurance if it did so directly....

Another advantage of the recapitalization plan is more subtle: the Treasury would get more bang for the buck. Because banks have debt-to-equity ratios of 10 to one or higher, a dollar spent buying an equity stake would support 10 times as many assets as a dollar spent buying up individual securities.

Administration officials said the government could acquire stakes in the form of common stock, preferred shares paying a specific dividend or some other form of equity. But officials said the government’s offer of additional capital should be made in a uniform way to all banks...

“Only coordinated action by central banks and governments is able to stop the systemic risk and ensure the financing of economies,” Mr. Sarkozy said. He suggested a special meeting of the leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized nations before year-end."

I posted all of these comments because the themes I've being talking about are all there:

Recapitalization
Nationalization
Coordination
Globalization
Total Government Involvement In Crisis

My reason for saying that we should go there has to do with properties of the proposals which I have argued for earlier, but also because it seemed obvious by the reactions of the markets that investors were counting on this scenario, and aren't getting back in until they see it enacted. It doesn't matter what they say in public, look at how they've been behaving.

I understand and agree with Mankiw, Becker, Flynn, etc., that this trend is worrisome, but I see in as inevitable and leading to an easier path to government eventually getting back out.

In any case, it's obvious where this train is heading, and has been for at least a week, if not longer.