By moving to a higher target, the European Union will have a direct impact on the carbon price through to 2020 and deliver the economic signals that companies need if they are to continue investing billions of euros in low-carbon products, services, technologies and infrastructure. European leadership will also help rebuild the international momentum towards an ambitious, robust and equitable global deal on climate change.  The EU’s future competitive advantage lies in encouraging and enabling its businesses to help drive the transformational change that will occur in the world economy within the next couple of decades, not to hide from it.

The article quotes Neil Carson, chief executive of Johnson Matthey:  “In these uncertain times, if industry is to risk investing in new low-carbon technologies, it’s even more important that governments show that reducing carbon emissions is a non-negotiable requirement and that it will be supported by strong ­policies.”

Business is, to a very great extent, on board.  Many of the companies involved in the letter are members of the Corporate Leaders Group On Climate Change, an entity convened by the Prince of Wales.  (See Bonnie Prince Charlie’s recent speech to this group.  He notes the “…necessity of understanding the potential for genuinely sustainable practices both to provide resilience to our changing climate as well as delivering true economic development.”)

I’ve written about a number of these business coalitions working toward GHG reductions and sustainability, among them The °Climate Group, USCAP, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).  Climate change is bad business in its massive impacts, now and in the future, and there is growing recognition of the business opportunities in transformational change.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad to start a two-day visit aimed at improving U.S./Pakistan relations and to solidify Pakistan’s support of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. A major part of Secretary Clinton’s strategy is a $500 million package in economic and development aid, particularly for hospitals, hydroelectric plants, and clean drinking water projects.

Secretary Clinton noted, ”We know that there is some questioning, even suspicion, about what the United States is doing today and I can only respond by saying that very clearly we have a commitment that is much broader and deeper than it has ever been.”

The reaction across the Muslim world has been less enthusiastic:

Pakistan’s The Nation: “We are told she has come with a $500 million aid package and apparently the aid will go into power, agriculture, health and dams also – but as we all know for the Americans there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch’ – and already our country is bleeding because of the alliance with the US so we are going to be bled some more with this aid package.”

Lebanon’s Daily Star: “The aid money for Pakistan, meanwhile, aims at funding projects such as hospitals and dams which would burnish American soft power, as the US still fights an overwhelmingly negative perception in the Middle East and Muslim world despite Obama’s successes in rescusitating the US image elsewhere.” (Read the editorial here.)

Despite these protestations, it seems clear that Pakistan does need the help: Pakistan has faced a series of serious power outages in recent months, and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said Pakistan faces electrical outages of 6 to 8 hours in urban areas and 10 to 12 hours in rural areas, noting that the country’s economic growth has been adversely affected. The U.S. aid package includes seven projects designed to improve Pakistan’s hydroelectric power system, including improvements to the Gomal Zam and the Satpara dams, each intended to provide 17.4 megawatts of power, as well as plans to develop the country’s natural gas distribution systems.

It seems increasingly common that U.S. development projects abroad are seen as forms of “soft power” (as mentioned in the Lebanese editorial)- a way to increase influence and power in a region where the U.S. is less than welcome. But what if the need for development is actually there? Do plans like “improving energy systems” in Pakistan come from the purely altruistic view of bettering the worse off, or are they Trojan Horse projects for military activities and foreign influence, the way much of the Muslim world seems to believe? Is it possible for U.S. aid projects to be both?

Thoughts?

JakartaGlobe: WTO Set to Step In Over US Clove Cigarette Ban

The Daily Caller: WTO probes US ban on clove cigarettes

Forbes has an article making the case to reform the WTO’s consensus rule. They argue this “could restore the WTO back to full working order.”

NYTimes: E.U. Appeals W.T.O. Ruling on Airbus Subsidies

Bloomberg: European Union Will Appeal WTO Ruling That Some Aid to Airbus Was Illegal

Airwise: Airbus Nations Urge WTO Appeal

S. 3518 the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act or SPEECH Act, would prohibit a domestic court from recognizing or enforcing a foreign judgment for defamation against an American.

According to a summary of the bill, it:

Provides that any U.S. person, against whom a foreign judgment is entered on the basis of the content of any writing, utterance, or other speech by that person that has been published, may bring an action in district court for a declaration that the foreign judgment is repugnant to the Constitution or laws of the United States.

Senators Leahy and Sessions said in a statement that they authored the bill, which now goes to the House, “to protect American authors, journalists and publishers from foreign libel lawsuits that undermine the First Amendment.”

The legislation had the support of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a DC non-profit that provides free legal assistance to reporters.

…[L]et me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counterinsurgency, don’t do it.”

But let’s be fair to the Field Manual.  Its prescriptions are not being implemented.  For one, the Field Manual preaches the importance of the rule of law, which is apparently not a fundamental U.S. concern (see my earlier post on Bagram).  But also, the Field Manual’s proposed “troop to population” ratio has been ignored.  The Field Manual recommends a ratio of 1 soldier per 50 inhabitants, which means we’d need 672,000 troops in Afghanistan.  Other analysts offer lower ratios, but the Field Manual is clear on the matter.

We should by all means feel free to tear into the very idea of counterinsurgency, as Engelhardt does.  We should feel free to criticise it as fundamentally neocolonial, as Engelhardt also does.  But we should acknowledge that COIN’s failures may arise from flawed implementation rather than flawed Field Manual prescriptions.  Or we should debate it.  It won’t be the first time such a thing has been debated (see the historical debate on the Schlieffen Plan, for one).  But the divide between what the Field Manual proposes and what we’re actually doing in Afghanistan is an important aspect of the discussion that shouldn’t be ignored.

The numbers suggests– and it is true: Bangladeshis are a young people and the country can succeed socio-economically if and only if the sitting government and its successors can solve the scourge of severe malnourishment.

Consider this intergenerational story: Malnourished babies, in quick succession, become malnourished young mothers, as if they were replacements on some toxic assembly plant, who then bore through the experience of watching their own hungry babies die.  Both the sitting government and its opposition throw around some ad-jingle about the politics of hope.  Can a people ‘hope’ themselves out of quicksand?

So it goes. But please pay attention. Watch the excellent set of short documentaries on global malnutrition in Bangladesh and elsewhere, produced collaboratively by Doctors Without Borders and VII Photo Agency.  Witness a child’s hunger and a mother’s confusion. And do something to staunch it.

At least sign a petition.

The short documentary you’ll see below is excellent, humane.  After you’ve seen the video below please watch the other 6 videos, documenting similar, though no less heartbreaking stories in Djibouti, India, Mexico, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo and-I am distressed and ashamed that this is so–the United States of America.

Ok. Fair enough. Africa’s porous borders, loads of corruption among the various people tasked with policing those borders, and a lack of resources certainly means that the drug trade is a problem that could get worse. But this paragraph strikes me as a bridge of generalization too far:

The 1960s were a decade of hope for Africa. The 1970s were a decade of coups. The 1980s a decade of financial collapse. The 1990s a decade of civil war. The last ten years, hope has come back. Peace and prosperity are returning, and one easily envisions, twenty years from now, a host of nations with four times their current wealth.

The 60s were a decade of hope for Africa, except for those places where it was not (think South Africa, the Portuguese colonies). The 70s were a decade of coups except for the (vast?) majority of places where there were no coups. And so forth. I’m sympathetic with the larger argument, but the analytical process just seems so needlessly shallow. After all, the 1990s might have been “a decade of civil war,” except that almost inarguably the biggest story that came out of Africa in the 1990s was the release of Mandela and the end of Apartheid and the relative peace of the southern tier of the continent that emerged as a result.

And of course the porousness of borders transcends drug smuggling and provides us with an even larger concern, which is varying forms of terrorism, as evidenced by al Shabaab’s terrible attacks in Uganda on the night of the World Cup finals. But as important as this issue and others is and may continue to be, it seems rather reductionist to define an entire continent by just one node of thousands that will help define the continent for the next ten years.

To preface today’s post, I’ll be honest…there haven’t been a lot of “glass-is-half-full” stories coming out of Iraq, recently. Between the political impasse, and the precipitous rise in sectarian violence, it seems like forever since there’s been a plain-old feel good story to put the focus back on the good and decent Iraqi people who are facing this carnage. So let’s take a break from car-bombs, football scandals, and the ever-increasing PKK conflict along the Turkish border and manufacture some emotional uplift…

A little over a month ago, the Washington Post ran front-page feature on Iraq’s difficulty dealing with a rising epidemic of mental illness brought on by decades of conflict, psychological trauma and a severely withered health infrastructure. The article introduced us to Dhia Hardan, who is dealing with his manic depression through music. The Post presented a video of Hardan playing his oud, a pear-shaped string instrument that’s helped him self-medicate his melancholy.

This got me thinking about the music of Mesopotamia – a subject I knew little about…

A quick survey informed me that Iraq’s music belongs to that of the Arab world, but due to its proximity has been widely influenced by Persian musical tradition. Naturally, poetry has always played an important role. As a genre, it’s evolved from a classical period, through maqam melodic modes played on qanum, rig, santur, darbuka, naggara, ney, dhose and the popular oud. Now in its modern period, the music of Mesopotamia has advanced into pop territory, characterized by traditional themes and the reinterpretation of age-old folk ballads performed with modern instruments.

So, without further ado, allow me to present my very brief and entirely unacquainted survey of the music of Iraq…

Let’s start with some classical oud played by Jamil Bashir, born in Basra in 1921, the former head of the Baghdad Radio Orchestra and later the Baghdad Radio Music Orchestra…

Jamil Bashir on the oud

To be honest, I’m picking up that hint of flamenco…but let’s really see the master at work. Next up, Jamil Bashir jams rhythm and blues in a nod to the modern. This is not to be missed.

Jamil Bashir Plays Rhythm and Blues with Reckless Abandon

Here’s another throwback to the classical maqam, courtesy of master maqamster, Hussain Al-Adhami, ofBaghdad.

Hussain Al-Adhami/Maqam Jammaal and Pasta

From the past to the present, with Dalli Haddad (aka Dalli), Iraq’s answer to Miley, whose rise to super-stardom coincided with her performance of Iraq’s 2007 Asian Cup anthem and the team’s success in the tournament…

Soccer Anthem, as sung by Dali, Complete with Highlights

So, clearly, I have a lot yet to learn about music in Iraq and I’ll be updating this post as I make headway…but here’s to a the hidden talent and treasure of a country making headlines for all the wrong reason. Any musical suggestions, please send along…

Stephen Schneider was one of the most influential climate scientists in the world.  His career covered four decades.  He did both the very heavy lifting of research and served to help the public understand the complexities of the subject and the stark reality that the science has been telling us for decades.  He has been characterized as not only a brilliant mind but a courageous soul, a “climate warrior” and a “scientific pugilist.”  He passed away yesterday.  This release from Stanford University, his research home, says he “…had long been in the midst of political and scientific debates over global warming, tirelessly urging political leaders and the public to take action…”

RealClimate has posted a eulogy from another important climate scientist, Ben Santer, here which says:  “His voice was clear and consistent, despite serious illness, and despite encountering vocal opposition by powerful forces - individuals who seek to make policy on the basis of wishful thinking and disinformation rather than sound science.”

For an in-depth interview with Schneider, see this from Frontline, from the excellent documentary “Heat” of a couple of years ago.  See also this short, punchy statement from him from 2007.

The semi-retired Cuban leader got some attention and aroused a good deal of surprise in recent weeks with intemperate remarks about Iran and Korea, suggesting that the United States was pushing the crises headlong toward all-out war. What’s prompted the press to take notice, of course, is not his opinion of the twin nuclear crises, which is ridiculous. (Could Castro have been imagining that Obama was going to emulate Putin, who seized on Georgian provocations to attack just as leaders were assembling in Beijing for the Olympics?) What’s interested reporters and commentators is that Fidel still has the strength and wit to closely follow world events, and to comment on them trenchantly, however perverse his perspective may be.
I for one was not surprised–but only because last December, shortly after the Copenhagen climate conference ended, a friend forwarded a scathing commentary on the final accord by Fidel. It, as it happened, was not ridiculous. Speaking for all those who felt left out and neglected by the paper-thin agreement, Castro denounced the Copenhagen conference for failing to produce a binding accord, for bypassing the Kyoto Protocol and Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change, and for not yielding greenhouse gas reduction requirements consistent with what scientists generally deem necessary. He castigated the United States of having tried to railroad the conference–which it most certainly did–and lauded the Group of 77 for standing up to it and refusing to do anything more than “take note” of the final accord.
Though my own take on the Copenhagen Accord, which I produced the Tuesday after the conference ended, three days after returning from Denmark, was considerably more sanguine, Fidel’s complaints were all valid and no doubt better reflected wide world opinion than my own wimpy words did.
What what particularly impressed me, however, was Fidel’s speed and acuity as a blogger. He posted his commentary on Saturday, Dec. 19 at 8:17 pm, less than a day after the conference ended. He didn’t wait to find out what everybody else was saying or spend days poring over conference documents; like lightning, he sized up what had happened in Copenhagen and immediately produced a credible take on the outcome–exactly what a blogger is supposed to do.
It took this humble blogger until the following Tuesday, at 1:22 pm, to post his much weaker take.
That said, the life of the blogger extraordinaire has its risks. This time around, Fidel has been blaming his faulty prediction that war would break out in Iran or Korea before the World Cup ended on his over-reliance on an outdated report from the Cuban mission to the United Nations. Spoken like a true blogger.

A common sight on the road to Nazret

I’ve been thinking a lot about a New York Times article from last November about land acquisition in Africa. At the time the article was published, I was nearing the end of a six-month stay in Ethiopia, where I was working for a Johns Hopkins affiliated NGO providing technical assistance to HIV/AIDS programs in the public hospitals. Though I spent much of my time in the office, I did get to make several work-related trips to Nazret, Ziway, and one of our satellite offices in Awassa.

Nazret is east of Addis Ababa, several hours along the road linking Addis to the Port of Djibouti. This road is heavily used by truck drivers carrying logs, oil and camels back and forth to the Port and is extremely dangerous for drivers. The trucks fly down the road at breakneck speeds, blasting melodic horns and stopping every few towns for the drivers to buy chat. I remember very little of the trip, since I spent most of the time with my eyes closed listening to (and feeling) the trucks whiz by our tiny Toyota filling the cab with dust and forcing us onto the shoulder to avoid being crushed, so I was excited to try a different trip outside Addis that would hopefully involve fewer brushes with death.

The road I took to Awassa follows the same route taken by New York Times author Andrew Rice when he wrote the piece I referenced earlier. My trip occurred in late November, and I was on the alert for any sign of the buy up of Ethiopian land by Middle Eastern companies that seemed so worrying in his article. I wasn’t disappointed: they were everywhere! All of a sudden the tef gave way to gigantic, shadecloth-covered greenhouses advertising melon and strawberry farms and “famous vineyards” of Southern Ethiopia (the propagation of these is particularly worrying: I’ve tried Ethiopian wine before – appropriately named “Gouder” – and can only describe it as a type of industrial cleaning solution that can strip the enamel off your teeth in one sip).

Having read Andrew Rice’s article and seeing all the greenhouses for myself, I started to get really annoyed. What did the Arabian companies think they were doing, coming into a developing country, buying up all the arable land and exporting the products without a thought to the local people? How could this be sustainable, especially in a place like Ethiopia that has a difficult enough time trying to feed its own population? Is it even meant to be sustainable?

It’s easy to take a situation like this and use it to get yourself worked up about the failure of development in Africa and the continued exploitation of weak nations to the benefit of rich ones, whether former colonial powers or emerging players on the development scene from the Middle East or Asia. I certainly felt this way for the duration of my trip to the South, and found it easy to keep myself worked up when I talked to my Ethiopian colleagues, none of whom liked the idea of foreign companies buying their farmland. I had a long discussion about this with one of the doctors from Awassa Hospital at breakfast one morning, where we took turns using a large stick to keep vervet monkeys away from our morning firfir. His main concern was the domination of cash crops in the South, and chat in particular. The demand for chat is growing across the Horn of Africa and brings in much more than growing other food crops like corn, tomatoes, beans or tef. Just as farmland is being lost to agribusiness companies from the Middle East, it is also being lost to huge chat farms, further decreasing the amount of land available for food crops.

I’m trying to be more open minded about development assistance, and understand that aid projects that seem damaging for developing nations may have benefits that aren’t immediately clear. Andrew Rice makes a good point when he says that foreign investors can bring in new technologies and boost the productivity of underused land to feed not only foreign investors but Africans as well (though the question that follows is whether foreign investors view subsistence farming as “underuse” of land).

I have a natural distrust of this kind of corporate-driven development aid, but I haven’t written it off entirely. It’s too soon to see whether investors have kept their promises to the Ethiopians, but it will be worth following up. If the investment companies are to be believed, agricultural development of “underused” African land could be the answer to world hunger. Whether this is true or not, I expect the strawberries, melons, and repulsive vintages of Southern Ethiopia to be around for quite a while.

To elaborate, as I see it, the case against South Korean reprocessing is best made strictly in terms of energy policy and spent fuel management. Von Hippel has shown convincingly that South Korean utilities are pushing for reprocessing, like Japanese nuclear utilities before them, basically because localities will not permit medium-term storage of spent fuel at reactor sites. Taking the spent fuel to a reprocessing facility creates the illusion that the nuclear fuel disposal problem is being solved, but in fact, a permanent repository for the most highly radioactive spent fuel components is still needed.

Von Hippel points out that in Japan, the prefecture that’s home to the country’s major reprocessing facility has been paid a huge subsidy to perform that national service; so why shouldn’t South Korean utilities, he suggests very reasonably, pay the same kind of very generous subsidy to localities willing to host an interim spent fuel storage facilities or facilities? That would obviate the need for a reprocessing complex, and almost certainly would be a much less expensive spent fuel management strategy, net.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to suggest to the South Koreans that they don’t need to repeat the very costly and unfortunate mistakes their arch-rival and traditional blood enemy Japan has made in spent fuel management.

What doesn’t seem useful to me, to repeat the main message of my previous post, is to argue with the South Koreans about reprocessing as an arms control issue. At a time when North Korea has violated all nonproliferation agreements and is busily building up its arsenal of atomic bombs, focusing South Korean attention on this aspect of the problem is not likely to dissuade them from reprocessing and might very well do the opposite.

Of course a permanent ban on South Korean reprocessing could and should be a part of a comprehensive settlement on the peninsula that also denuclearizes the North. But that remains a distant–albeit absolutely necessary–prospect.

I learned about Falun Gong from newspapers, first in one of Ian Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Wall Street Journal.

Johnson wrote a series of 10 articles (which you can see here) of which I only read one, but they were compelling enough to win the Pulitzer.

Here is part of Johnson’s article that I read 10 years ago from a piece called “Brother Li Love“:

As the campaign against Falun Dafa enters its second year, many wonder how the group has withstood the government’s security onslaught. The crackdown has involved a deployment of uniformed and undercover security agents not seen since the massacre of antigovernment protesters near Tiananmen Square 11 years ago.

Johnson’s work represented an incredible effort to pursue the truth. As the years have worn on, though, media coverage of the July 20 anniversary of the start of the persecution against Falun Gong has dimmed. Other dramas have occupied the global consciousness–namely for Americans, 9/11 and the ongoing battle against terrorists.

At a newspaper where I work as an editor, The Epoch Times, I have seen a completely different chain of events, however.

In the English edition where I work, the commitment to reporting openly and truthfully about the persecution of Falun Gong has remained strong. In fact, if you search the term, “Falun Gong” in Google news today you’ll see what I mean.

In an article from The Epoch Times Editorial Board, they state:

In the past 11 years, the world has witnessed the pain and suffering Falun Gong practitioners have gone through. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party], in addition to spreading outrageous lies, has tortured Falun Gong practitioners with means of torture used only in the darkest eras of humankind, such as the needle club, steel wire, copper whip, bramble whip, genital beating, rape, and the like. A report by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture listed at least 40 types of torture used by the CCP against Falun Gong practitioners. According to reports on Clearwisdom, a website run by Falun Gong practitioners, there have been at least 3,300 confirmed deaths of Falun Gong practitioners; over 100,000 have been sentenced to labor camps; thousands more have been sent to mental hospitals where the tortures may include nerve-damaging drugs. Untold numbers of practitioners have been forced to attend brainwashing classes, and untold numbers have been beaten, made to stand for hours or days on end, and extorted by law- enforcement officials. Because of the CCP’s information blockade, only a fraction of the abuses suffered in the ongoing persecution are known.

Despite such a severe persecution, though, the practice has not been crushed, as Jiang Zemin wanted it to be 11 long years ago. It has spread far and wide to every corner of the world. Reports the Epoch Times:

Eleven years ago, Falun Gong was practiced in 30 countries. Since then, Falun Gong has been calmly and peacefully spreading and is now practiced in 114 countries. Today, Falun Gong can be found in most areas in Asia, North America, South America, and Europe, and in some African countries. Falun Gong books have been translated into over 40 languages.

In another Epoch Times article, staff reporters interviewed international supporters who have fought over the years to help end the persecution. One of them, Edward McMillan-Scott, is Vice-President of the European Parliament. Scott told The Epoch Times:

“I think it’s really important for people to understand just what in the world does really take place in China—the prison camps, re-education through labor, child labor, forced labor, torture. This is the real China,” he said. “The worst thing they’ve done is choose a totally innocent group of people [Falun Gong practitioners], and torture them to death, and this has got to stop.”

In my opinion as a professional journalist, that’s something worth reporting at least once a year.

Israel has been embroiled in, what is turning into, a years-long dispute with Turkey. Since the ascension of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the two countries have clashed, trading barbs and insults on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the Armenian genocide. While tension between the two allies accelerated after Operation Cast Lead, Turkey colluded with a terror-linked organization to send aide to Gaza and chastised Israel for preventing the flotilla to break the naval blockade.

Since the creation of the modern Turkish state, the secular party has generally wielded significant power — that is until Erdogan rose to power and decided to align Turkey with the Muslim world by distancing itself from Israel.

While officials from around the world regularly meet with Hamas chief Khaled Mash’al, a recent meeting between the terror leader and a Turkish Foreign Ministry official indicates increased ties between (former) ally of Israel with one of its enemies. Officials discussed Palestinian reconciliation efforts and the Israeli blockade on Gaza, with the Hamas chief applauding recent Turkish efforts.

The congenial nature of the meeting between a terror group and a country seeking entry into the European Union runs in direct juxtaposition to another meeting between Turkey and Israel. Instead of demonstrating friendly relations, a top Israeli Foreign Ministry official made news earlier this year for refusing to shake hands with a Turkish counterpart, resulting in apologies from the Israeli government for insulting a supposed ally.

While Turkey seems to be getting along just fine with a terror group, the countries relations with a democratic country continue to strain.

But, that tension is in no part solely Turkey’s fault, as a rift in the Israeli government has also fueled internal disputes that have the Israeli government speaking with several different heads. Relations between Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman have been increasingly tense lately, especially following the Prime Minister’s circumvention of Leiberman in a recent high profile meeting. Moreover, support from Leiberman’s party is keeping Netanyahu’s coalition together, and additional tension could, at least temporarily, threaten Likud’s hold on the government.

The two Israeli leaders held a long meeting this week to sort through their disputes and, at least for now, it appears that the Likud-led coalition will not fall. That said, Leiberman’s wrangling of foreign policy, particularly regarding the Turks, has riled Netanyahu and accelerated tension between Israel and Turkey could further widen the gap between the two Israeli leaders.

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Julian Ku of Opinio Juris notes that actually it’s a little more complicated:

For one thing, the E.U. does not itself necessarily consider itself a state, and it is not exactly clear if other states recognize the E.U. as a state.  And if the E.U. is a state, what happens to all those member nations (with all those great soccer teams)?

All good questions, and others elaborate in the comments section.  To me, the most interesting question is the last one.  Not because of the soccer team element.  As one commenter noted, legal statehood is not a FIFA prerequisite for having a soccer team.  But because the EU’s members also consider themselves states and are recognized by others as states.  Can there be a state whose components are also states?  The EU can sign treaties, but so can its member states.  The Lisbon Treaty is, of course, itself a treaty.  The Lisbon Treaty actually assures the statehood of its members.  See Article 3a(2):

The Union shall respect the equality of Member States before the Treaties as well as their national identities, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional, inclusive of regional and local self-government. It shall respect their essential State functions, including ensuring the territorial integrity of the State, maintaining law and order and safeguarding national security. In particular, national security remains the sole responsibility of each Member State.

If we accept Hannan’s conclusion, we accept a “Russian Doll” notion of European statehood - within one state you find many other states.

The question of what consitutes statehood is important.  The arguments for the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade are premised on Gaza being a state.  And yet there’s ambiguity over the issue, as the disagreements over the EU and Gaza demonstrate.

Tired of the erosion of the social fabric caused by the proliferation of organized crime heists and other social misfortunes in Mexico? Televisa, one of the country’s largest TV consortiums, thinks it has an American Idol-style answer for you! It is indeed quite a contest.

Last June, it introduced Iniciativa México, a program that calls for projects from NGOs and individuals highlighting Mexican achievement, just in time to celebrate country’s less-than-enthusiastically observed 200 years of independence and centennial of the Mexican Revolution. The solicited projects seek improvement in five areas: quality of life, development, ecology, justice and human rights, and government and accountability.

The response has been impressive: Tens of thousands of entries have been submitted so far. There will be a pre-selection of 20, from which five will be voted by the public and five by a group of experts, including National Autonomous University of Mexico Rector José Narro (who has been heavily criticized by his peers for his participation). The top five from these 10 will be selected by the audience and awarded one million pesos (around $77,388) each in funding. The top vote-getter will receive an additional million pesos.

Televisa has compared the project to the force that motivated the Mexican Revolution itself. Indeed, Televisa’s PR makes it seem as if Iniciativa México is inaugurating a new era in the way Mexicans see their country, as if Mexicans are so distraught by the current problems that they are unaware of what is worthy of praise. The project itself is not particularly new, for it stems from India’s successful Lead India, which was launched on 2007 and also profiles those already doing something positive for their country.

Televisa’s viewers, however, shouldn’t be fooled. It is Televisa itself that has been paramount in promoting irrationality and a sense of a rigid social order through its telenovelas, Mexican soap operas, La rosa de Guadalupe, a show centering around the belief that miracles can solve all of the audience’s problems, and biased political coverage. For decades, it has highlighted the abnegation of the poor as a virtue, promoting a passive attitude towards social adversity. Audiences even call the consortium “telerisa”, ridiculing its style of portraying reality. The truth is that Televisa holds the Mexican public in shamelessly low esteem and encourages a way of thinking that makes the public resigned to abuses of power. Iniciativa México won’t magically change those decades of damage overnight.

Federal deputies in the House’s special committee on forestry (where deforestation legislation is made) approved by a vote of 13 to five the opportunity for the equivalent of a Get Out of Jail Free card for land owners who illegally cut back forest for cattle and crops as late as 2008.  If you broke the law up to then, you could be forgiven.  The new policy, if approved as is, will allow land owners in the Cerrado region (center-west to northeast) to reduce current free standing forest to 20% of acreage owned from 35% currently. It also would allow for recuperation of deforested areas to be made with exotic plant life (like eucaplytus or pine for the paper and pulp industry), rather than native species plants.  Another proposed changed would allow property owners to dig up land a little closer to river beds. Current law bans deforesting from 30 meters away from rivers and lakes to 15%, and would allow states to decide if the number can be as low as 7.5%.

Proposals are just that, ideas for a future that never comes.  As it is, present-day policies are rarely enforced. There have been numerous stories in the press about the lack of manpower at Environmental Protection Agency, Ibama.

Brazil’s forestry policy matters to farmers and environmentalists alike. Farmers, especially large commercial operations, are nearly all against deforestation in the Amazon because they have taken a beating from European NGOs for the last five years, which has led to embargoes and export restrictions for Brazilian agriculture.  Meanwhile, farm lobbies like the National Agriculture Confederation argue that commercial farmers should be given more leeway regardless of what the Europeans think, and that current policies to preserve at least 30% (80% in Amazon) of the property to free-standing forest is not working because smaller subsistence farmers — which are greater in number — are not abiding by the rules.  Most of the deforestation in Brazil over the last three years has been caused by small stakeholders in the north, according to studies by the Brazilian Census Institute, IBGE.  The land is usually cleared for cattle and some row crops.  Yet, new policies will only work if they can be enforced.  Brazil’s Amazon deforestation saw a 45% drop  — still to a whopping 7,000 square miles — last year, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, INPE.  Overall, Brazilian leaders see the Amazon as sovereign turf, naturally, and do not take kindly to foreign pressures to protect it. It has set up its own funding mechanism called The Amazon Fund, run by the National Development Bank, BNDES, to allocate funds (over $40 million last year) to groups in the region that preserve forest. It’s been one of Brazil’s main policy sales pitches over the last several years actually: if you want to save the Amazon from local deforesters, pay them not to cut it down. Most people see it as a short term solution. It’s better than nothing. Now if they can only enforce the law without hamstringing farmers — largely seen around the world as having clorophyl on their hands. And if they are allowed to reduce the amount of area they need to keep in preserve on their properties by as much as 50%, deforestation under the new rules will see a marked increase in the years ahead.

Brazil will host to 2nd International Conference on Climate, Sustainability and Sustainable Development in mid-August. The conferece, scheduled for August 16th to 20th, will try to turn people away from the Amazon and onto the Cerrado plains, where a sizeable portion of Brazil’s commercial farming takes place.  Around 60% of Brazil’s coffee production and 55% of its cattle ranches are located in this area, according to Embrapa, Brazil’s Agricultural Research Corporation. (Coffee areas have not expanded in at least five years, but cattle ranching has. Brazil is the world’s lead exporter of both coffee and beef.)