Starting Points

Sep 13, 2009

America Out of Work: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay? - Time

By Joshua Cooper Ramo

It was not a lesson Lawrence Summers mastered with great ease. But after nearly a decade working beside sphinxlike Alan Greenspan, and having watched his own tenure as president of Harvard cut short by a phrase that slipped too nimbly from brain to mouth, Summers, director of the President's National Economic Council, has become a restrained public man. Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that ran through the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in July when Summers looked up from his prepared speech, flashed a grin and loosed the sort of utterance that once upon a time marked imminent indiscretion. "There was," he told the room, "a fight about whether I was allowed to say this now that I work in the White House." (See how Americans are spending now.)

What Summers proceeded to offer was, in fact, an unusually candid insight. And though couched in jargon, it was an insider's confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun's law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it's really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It's a labor version of how the accelerator on your car works: add gas, go faster; less gas, go slower.

What made Summers' frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd — deviating again from his text — "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that much slower too? Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession? Has the idea of full employment rather suddenly become antiquated? Is there something fundamentally broken in the heart of our economy? And if so, how can we fix it?

See which businesses are bucking the recession.

Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up."

The Labor Conundrum
The speed of America's now historic employment contraction reflects how puzzling this economic slide has been. Recall that the crisis has included assurances from the chairman of the Federal Reserve that it was over when in fact it was just getting started and a confession from a former Fed chairman that much of what he thought was true for decades now appears to be wrong. Nowhere is this bafflement clearer than in the area of employment. (See 10 things to buy during the recession.)

When compiling the "worst case" for stress-testing American banks last winter, policymakers figured the most chilling scenario for unemployment in 2009 was 8.9% — a figure we breezed past in May. From December 2007 to August 2009, the economy jettisoned nearly 7 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a 5% decrease in the total number of jobs, a drop that hasn't occurred since the end of World War II. The number of long-term unemployed, people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, was the highest since the BLS began recording the number in 1948. Jobless figures released Sept. 4 showed a 9.7% unemployment rate, pushing the U.S. — unthinkably — ahead of Europe, with 9.5%.

America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression. It's troubling not simply for its sheer scale but also because the labor market, shaped by globalization and technology and financial meltdown, may be fundamentally different from anything we've seen before. And if the result is that we're stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while — a range whose mathematical congruence with that other 9/11 is impossible to miss — we may be looking at a problem that will define the first term of Barack Obama's presidency the way the original 9/11 defined George W. Bush's. Like that 9/11, this one demands a careful refiguring of some of the most basic tenets of national policy. And just as the shock of Sept. 11 prompted long-overdue (and still not cemented) reforms in intelligence and defense, the jobs crisis will force us to examine a climate that has been deteriorating for years. The total number of nonfarm jobs in the U.S. economy is about the same now — roughly 131 million — as it was in 1999. And the Federal Reserve is predicting moderate growth at best. That means more than a decade without real employment expansion.

We're a long way from Hoovervilles, of course. But it's not hard to imagine, if we're not careful, a country sprouting listless Obamavilles: idled workers minivanning aimlessly through overleveraged cul-de-sacs with no way to pay their mortgages, no health care, little hope of meaningful work and only the hot comfort of angry politics.

This is why the problem of how America works needs to become the focus of an urgent national debate. The jobs crisis offers an opportunity to think in profound ways about how and why we work, about what makes employment satisfying, about the jobs Americans can and should do best. But the ideas Washington has delivered so far are insufficient. They reflect a pre–9%-11% way of thinking as much as old defense policy reflected a pre-9/11 notion of who our enemies were. The funding for job creation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was based on an assumed 8.9% unemployment rate. Now 15% is a realistic possibility. And yet we're hearing few interesting ideas about how to enhance America's already groaning unemployment support system as millions of Americans sit idle. Tangled in the debate over health care — and bleeding political capital — the White House may find itself too weak and distracted to deal with the danger of joblessness.

We can't afford to wait. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is to get back to work, a fact as true for the nation as it is for you and me. As the Peterson Institute's Jacob Kirkegaard explains, "It is entirely possible that what started as a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem." Past crises have illustrated that lesson: the longer you wait, the harder it is to contain. This is as true for joblessness as it was for subprime mortgages, al-Qaeda and computer viruses.

Watch TIME's video of Peter Schiff trash-talking the markets.

See 10 ways your job will change.

Right Man, Right Time
By one of those strange Sully Sullenberger collisions of preparation and crisis — the sort that put Depression expert Ben Bernanke in at the Fed at the moment of a flameout of 1930s magnitude — Larry Summers made his reputation as an employment theorist. Summers is the nephew of two Nobel economists and was regarded as the smartest undergrad anyone knew, but as he surveyed his research options 30 years ago, he settled on the then relatively unsexy specialty of labor. The subject tickled his sense of skepticism. "The view that was taking hold at that time, a view that unemployment wasn't a terribly serious problem, was importantly wrong," Summers says. "I thought if you could have areas where there was long-term substantial unemployment, then that raised some questions about the functioning of markets." In essence, Summers saw in unemployment a chance to explore how markets don't work — and to think about policies that could correct for the failures. Perfect training for 2009.

Many of the ideas Summers developed were codified in a 1986 article titled "Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem." Even today it's a piece he's proud of: "Ah, yeah, the hysteresis article," he interjects when it's mentioned. Hysteresis is a word that you (and the rest of us) should hope we don't hear too much of in the coming months. It comes from the Greek husteros, which means late. It refers to what happens when something snaps in such a way that it can never be put back together. Bend a plastic ruler too far, drop that lightbulb — that cracking sound you hear is the marker of hysteresis. There's no way to restore what has just been smashed. (See the top 10 bankruptcies.)

The idea that hysteresis happens to economies is one that economists don't like to think about. They prefer to consider economies as yo-yos tethered to the sturdy string of the business cycle, moving up and down from growth to slowdown and back. But from time to time, things do snap. And Summers' argument in 1986 was that unemployment in Europe, the sort that might persist in the face of growth, was an expression of an economy that had snapped. Europe's economy was hit not only by shocks like an oil-price spike, a productivity collapse and rocketing tax rates but also by stubborn unions that made hiring, firing and adjusting payrolls near impossible.

Hysteresis, Summers explained, could come from all sorts of shocks like this. And that may be what is playing out in the U.S. If you look at the three great job busts of the past 100 years — the 1930s, the early 1980s and today — you find an important difference. The Reagan recession ended with workers returning to jobs that were the same as or similar to the ones they had lost. But 1930s joblessness was structural. The jobs people lost — largely in agriculture — never came back. Workers had to move to the industrial sector, a transition helped by the demands of a war. It was massive national hysteresis. Sound familiar? "A lot of the jobs that have been lost will never come back," the Peterson Institute's Kirkegaard says. Which means that hiccup in Okun's law is a warning: growth alone won't employ America again.

See pictures of the stock market crash of 1929.

See pictures of the recession of 1958.

Cash for Clunker Careers
What to do? If your goal is to create jobs, you have two choices — and one painful fact — to confront. The painful fact is that the 1930s option, to have the government directly employ millions of people in labor fronts, is not an option today. "There's no way to create real jobs using this approach," says Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the 1930s, you could throw 10,000 people with shovels at dam or road projects. Today the work of 10,000 shovels is done by a few machines — and it was a lot easier to persuade farmers to switch to ditchdigging than it would be to get laid-off hedge-fund traders to switch to sewer repair, appealing as such an idea might be. (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

So if the government can't hire everyone, where will jobs come from? One option would be to rely on traditional strategies: if we create demand through growth, cheap money and massive government spending, then some jobs will return. In the meantime, train people for whatever work they can get — fast food, nursing, you name it. But if we're in a posthysteresis world, then just adding gas to the economy won't be enough, and making cheap low-end jobs won't deliver a workforce capable of sustaining competitive growth. "There's no use making economic change if you don't have human agents who can take advantage of it," Unger explains.

The alternative would involve reshaping what it means to work in America. Such a plan would start by changing what it means to be jobless. To begin with, this would require a massive increase in job retraining, one that assured that every laid-off worker had a chance to learn a new skill and years of funding to master it — instead of the six-month shots now generally offered. The Administration's proposal to increase funding to community colleges is a start. But it's only a start. Ideally, the White House needs to propose an omnibus employment-emergency bill that guarantees jobless workers a basic set of rights for two to three years: health care, access to retraining, subsidized mentoring for careers in high-end manufacturing or health services. Handled well, such a program could be a "cash for clunker careers." Obama should also bring together innovative minds in technology and service — the people who run consumer-driven businesses like Disney and Google — to find ways to make the process of being unemployed less of a bureaucratic and emotional mess.

But we've also got to take a careful look at how jobs are created — and what sorts of jobs Americans want to do. The most likely sources of job growth in the next few years are going to be confined to health care, education and restaurant/hospitality services. But we can't nurse, teach and barista our way to real national power. Service jobs alone can't support growth and innovation — which will be essential as we struggle to pay off a historic national debt and fund the retirement of the baby boomers. So in addition to a retraining push, a sensible set of policies would shift the landscape of job creation. It would transfer money out of Wall Street and into community lending to encourage the formation of new companies. It would create local business pods in which neighbors ask, What do we do well here, and how can we do it better? Some of the world's most skilled machinists live in the American Midwest. But their skills are geared to a dying auto industry, and with no bank credit for start-ups and no way to organize, they have no chance to transform themselves into a workforce for globally competitive precision-manufacturing firms.

Is there really a demand for machinists? Yes — even in a recession. One rough calculation found that about a million high-skilled jobs remain unfilled. This is why a fresh approach to job-making, one that focuses on mastery of skills instead of simple button-pushing, matters. "If we go back to the old ways," says sociologist Richard Sennett, who has probably studied the quality of American working life as thoroughly as any other scholar in the past few decades, "we just go back to a very unsustainable path."

The President's advisers grasp the urgency of the task. "Would I like Americans to be more skilled?" Summers muses. "Yes. Would I like to be able to increase skill faster than is likely to be possible? Sure. Would I like a larger fraction of good entrepreneurial ideas to happen in the U.S.? Of course. There are millions of people who need work." But Summers need only read his own research to recall that traditional government policies are not going to pull us out of the job trap.

One of the tropes about Bush's 9/11 and the wars that followed was that they conveniently allowed him to deal with problems bedeviling his young Administration: a lack of focus, difficulty reforming the U.S. military, trouble articulating a global vision. Obama now faces a host of problems of his own: weakening political will, an inevitable "What next?" after health care, a base that has lost energy. His 9/11 is just the sort of transcendent issue that can reconnect him to the theme of hope and change. A tough challenge? You bet. But as Obama's presidency unfolds, it will be the most vital one for him to meet.

Ramo is managing director of Kissinger Associates and author of The Age of the Unthinkable

See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.

See the top 10 financial collapses of 2008.

Sep 12, 2009

Atlantic Wire - Bin Laden, Beaten and Broken?

Image via Wikipedia

by Carl Frantzen

Support for Al Qaeda is dropping in countries it considers home, yet Bin Laden still walks free. Commentators debate what it means going forward.

Commentators are reacting to a new report showing that support for al-Qaeda and its tactics have dropped in terror hotbeds around the world. With some tentatively hailing this as the end of "Global Jihad," several key questions remain: Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Why hasn't he been apprehended? And how necessary is it to keep up the pursuit?

Hailing the Demise of Al-Qaeda

'Al-Qaeda Has Failed' So claims Tony Karon in Time's lead story for the day. Citing projections that claim al-Qaeda's membership is dropping, Karon makes the case that a combination of local intelligence work and popular resentment within al-Qaeda's base countries have marginalized the organization since 9/11. As he writes: "Not even another 9/11-scale terror attack would succeed in launching al-Qaeda's revolution ... History marches on without them." The security-focused McClatchy blog Nukes & Spook s breathes a sigh of relief: "Even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq rage on, it's nice to have a bit of good news as we prepare to honor the victims of 9/11 and their families."

With Friends Like These... A Guardian report on the present state of al-Qaeda further validates Karon's assessment. The piece contends that the terror-network's international networking efforts are weakening, increasing the possibility of capturing bin Laden: "The most significant recent development is evidence that al-Qaida's alliance with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is fraying, boosting the prospect of acquiring intelligence that will lead to Bin Laden's capture or death."

Fears Dispelled Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Guardian piece by recollecting and refuting the urgent, dire predictions made by counter-terror officials in the aftermath of 9/11: "I remember Richard Clarke saying something like hitting al-Qaeda in 2001 was like smashing a seed pod -- it actually spread the seeds outward, allowing them to germinate. But what if it turns out that the soil just isn't fertile any longer?"

Time to Go Home Democracy Arsenal's Michael Cohen also references the Guardian story to make his case that with al-Qaeda on the retreat, the U.S. should also be pulling its force out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later: "If al Qaeda is having a hard time finding new recruits is a long-term US military intervention in Afghanistan going to help or hinder that process? I tend to think it plays right into AQ's hands, just as nearly everyone agrees the Iraq war did great things for the organization's recruitment efforts."

What To Do About bin Laden?

So Where Is He?, asks CNN's Peter Bergen. Irritated and dismayed that the Obama Administration continues the Bush failure to apprehend bin Laden, he reviews the hunt on his own and discovers that recent videos of the stealthy leader show him looking healthy and clean, not at all what one would expect from someone is supposedly cornered in a cave. Bergen is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for success, but is wary of bin Laden's legacy: "Should bin Laden be captured or killed, that would probably trigger a succession battle within al Qaeda...Yet the ideological movement that he helped spawn -- 'Binladenism' -- will live on long after he is gone."

Still a Threat, cautions an analysis piece from the Strategy Page. The writer examines the continuing radicalization within Pakistani political and security organizations, the very same ones relied upon by the U.S. for support in the fight against al-Qaeda, observing that bin Laden continues to inspire: "Osama bin Laden remains a hero to many Pakistanis, because Osama 'stuck it to the man.' Can’t forget that aspect of all this. The 'East' has been getting stomped by the 'West' for several centuries now. People in the West think nothing of it, but those in the East are obsessed by this lengthy humiliation. Any payback is appreciated, and September 11, 2001 has become something of a guilty pleasure throughout the Moslem [sic] world."

Walking The Talk Analysts quoted by Larry Hertz make the case that while the capture of bin Laden isn't especially critical to U.S. counter-terror efforts as a whole, it remains important on another, more symbolic level: "Killing or capturing him would benefit the United States politically. 'It's a matter of national pride.'"

Give Peace a Chance At the pacifist blog Antiwar, Jason Ditz isn't comforted by the fact that bin Laden is still on the the lamb, but he takes it as proof positive that force just isn't capable of getting the job done. "Bin Laden and his organization appear quite capable of launching attacks, and to the extent that perception remains he will likely continue to loom large in foreign policy discussions. At the same time, it seems that nearly a decade of American warfare focused at least ostensibly around him has done little good, and created many new problems across the world."

The Debate

Why Osama bin Laden is a Failure Tony Karon, Time
Bin Laden's Popular Support Declining Warren Strobel, Nukes & Spooks
Al-Qaida Faces Recruitment Crisis Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian
Remember the 'Long War'? Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman
How Big A Threat is al Qaeda? Michael Cohen, Democracy Arsenal
Where's Osama bin Laden? Peter Bergen, CNN
Bin Laden's Bodyguard of Lies Strategy Page, Strategy Page
Still on the Loose Larry Hertz, Jacksonville Observer
After 9/11, the Trail Has Gone Cold Jason Ditz, Antiwar

Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination - Pew Research Center

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1336/perceptions-of-islam-religious-similarities-differences

Plus --

Note - For some (not all) images or tables which don't quite fit the blog template properly,

you get a full view by right-clicking on them and open in a new tab. For those which don't

open up fully this way, go to the original site by hitting the title of the posting.

_All_ Zemanta add-on images (in other postings) can also be handled the right-click,

open-in-new-tab way

and usually yield additional info about the images' meanings. - John

Here is the URL for the fuller summary of the Pew survey just below --

http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=437

Sept. 9, 2009

Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey

PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)

Religious Similarities and Differences

When asked how much various religions resemble their own, the public cites Protestantism and Catholicism as the faiths most like theirs. Overall, more than four-in-ten non-Protestants in the survey (44%) say that the Protestant religion and their own faith are similar (including 12% saying they are very similar), slightly more than say Protestantism and their own faith are somewhat or very different (38%). Of non-Catholics, 43% see mostly similarities between Catholicism and their own faith, while roughly half (49%) see mostly differences. More than one-third of non-Jews say Judaism is somewhat or very similar to their own faith (35%), while 47% say it is somewhat or very different.

By comparison, the public is even more likely to see differences rather than similarities between their own religion and Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. In fact, majorities say that each of these faiths is different from their own religion, with sizeable numbers saying that these religions are very different from their own (37% say this about Mormonism, 40% about Hinduism, 44% about Buddhism and 45% about Islam).

Public Sees Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism as Different Than Own Beliefs

Protestants see Catholicism as the religion most like their own, followed by Judaism. Among Protestants in the survey, white evangelicals (49%) and white mainline Protestants (50%) are somewhat more likely than black Protestants (39%) to see their religion as similar to Catholicism. But all three groups have roughly the same impression of Judaism's similarity with their own faith (39% similar among white evangelicals, 34% among both white mainline Protestants and black Protestants). Fewer Protestants see Mormonism (22%), Islam (15%), Hinduism (9%) or Buddhism (7%) as similar to their own faith.

Catholics, especially white, non-Hispanic Catholics, name Protestantism as the faith that is most similar to Catholicism. Interestingly, Catholics see greater similarities between Catholicism and Protestantism than do Protestants. After Protestantism, Catholics see Judaism as most like their faith. Indeed, Catholics are slightly more likely than Protestants to say their faith is similar to Judaism. Less than a quarter of Catholics (22%) see Mormonism as similar to their religion, 19% see Islam as similar, 16% see Buddhism as similar, and 12% see Hinduism as similar.

Compared with other groups, fewer of the religiously unaffiliated see their own beliefs as similar to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. However, the religiously unaffiliated are more likely than any other group in the survey to see their own beliefs as similar to Buddhism (26%).

“Similar” Religions More Favorably Viewed

Analysis of the survey reveals that perceptions of similarity with religious groups are linked with more favorable views of these groups. For instance, non-Catholics who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Catholicism are much more likely than those who see mostly differences to view Catholicism favorably (76% vs. 54%). And two-thirds of those who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Islam have a favorable view of Muslims (65%), compared with fewer than half of those who see mostly differences with Islam (37%).

Discrimination and Religious Minorities

Is There a Lot of Discrimination Against…

Americans are more likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims than against any other religious group asked about in the survey. Most people say there is not a lot of discrimination against Jews, atheists, Mormons and evangelical Christians in the U.S., while nearly six-in-ten (58%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims.

The only group that Americans perceive as subject to more discrimination than Muslims is homosexuals; nearly two-thirds of adults (64%) say gays and lesbians face a lot of discrimination. About half say blacks (49%) and Hispanics (52%) suffer from a lot of discrimination, and more than a third (37%) say there is a lot of discrimination against women in the U.S. today.

Young people (ages 18-29) are especially likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims, with nearly three-quarters (73%) expressing this view. Among those older than age 65, by contrast, only 45% say that Muslims face a lot of discrimination.

Is There a Lot of Discrimination Against Muslims?

Across the political spectrum, most people agree that there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. But this perception is most common among liberal Democrats, with eight-in-ten saying there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. This is significantly higher than among all other partisan and ideological groups.

There are only minor differences of opinion between members of the major religious traditions on this question. Black Protestants are most likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims (65%), but majorities of all religious groups say Muslims face a lot of discrimination.

Few Feel Like Part of a Religious Minority

When asked about their own religious status, one-in-five Americans (19%) say they think of themselves as belonging to a minority because of their religious beliefs while 78% do not, numbers that are unchanged since early 2001. Though white evangelicals constitute the single largest religious group in the country, roughly a quarter (24%) identify themselves as part of a religious minority, much more than the 11% of white mainline Protestants and 13% of Catholics who do so. In this regard, evangelicals resemble black Protestants, among whom 22% regard themselves as part of a religious minority. Among the religiously unaffiliated, 18% see themselves as part of a religious minority, a figure significantly higher than among mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

Frequent attendance at religious services is associated with a higher tendency to feel like part of a religious minority. Overall, one-quarter of those who attend religious services at least once a week say they are a minority because of their beliefs, compared with 16% of those who attend less often. And among white evangelicals, nearly three-in-ten regular churchgoers (29%) see themselves as part of a religious minority. Likewise, 23% of those who say religion is very important in their lives think of themselves as minorities, compared with 14% of those who say religion is less important in their lives.

Politically, those in the middle of the ideological spectrum are less likely to consider themselves part of a religious minority. Just 13% of moderates identify as religious minorities, compared with 22% of conservatives and 21% of liberals.

Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey

PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)

More Resources

Pew Forum

Dec. 18, 2008
Survey: Many Americans Say Other Faiths Can Lead to Eternal Life

June 23, 2008
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

May 22, 2007
Survey: Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream

News

Sept. 2, 2009
Students must learn about other religions: judge
National Post

Aug. 16, 2009
Muslims divided on other faiths
The News & Observer

Aug. 15, 2009
We Are All Hindus Now
Newsweek

Pew Research Center

May 21, 2009
Social and Political Attitudes About Race
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

Jan. 7, 2009
Gains Seen On Minority Discrimination - But Little Else
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

Jun 20, 2008
Data and Insights on Minority Populations
Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

U.S., NATO to Overhaul Afghan Training Mission as Violence Spirals - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

Spiraling Violence Puts Pressure on Allies to Build Up Indigenous Forces

By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 12, 2009

The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces, seeking to reverse a trend in which the alliance for years did not invest adequately in Afghan troops and police while the Taliban gained strength, senior U.S. officials said.

The reorganization comes in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to expand Afghan forces and the capacity to train them.

The recommendations, and the additional U.S. and NATO troops they will require, are among the few aspects of President Obama's Afghan strategy likely to have broad bipartisan support in Congress. Democrats, in particular, have expressed anxiety over reports that McChrystal may request more combat troops for the increasingly unpopular war.

Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Friday for the Afghan force to "increase and accelerate dramatically," with a goal of 240,000 Afghan soldiers by 2012. The current target is to increase the existing number of soldiers to 134,000 by the end of 2011. "We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead," he said.

Levin spoke on Capitol Hill after returning from a visit to Afghanistan and talks with McChrystal. "As of right now, it is likely that there will be a request from him for additional combat forces," Levin said.

Levin warned that "a bigger military footprint" in Afghanistan "provides propaganda fodder for the Taliban." The steps he proposed, he said, should be implemented "on an urgent basis before we consider an increase in U.S. ground combat forces beyond what is already planned by the end of this year."

McChrystal's still-secret recommendations are being debated by Obama's national security team. Early this year, Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 additional American troops -- including 4,000 trainers -- to Afghanistan, which will bring the U.S. deployment to 68,000 by the end of 2009.

Under the reorganization, NATO this month will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces. The goal is to "bring more coherence" to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission "is not just America's challenge," one senior official said. The new command will also integrate the U.S.-led training command, the Combined Security Transition Command, led by a two-star Army general, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, while narrowing its responsibilities considerably to building the Afghan Defense and Interior ministries.

In one illustration of how much basic work lies ahead, the U.S. military is seeking 275 contractors to train Afghan Defense Ministry personnel in everything from supply and budget to "diary management, meeting preparation and travel planning" for the minister and chief of general staff, according to the 96-page contract. Contractors will work in dozens of other areas of ministry activity, including operations, intelligence, logistics, force integration, and the offices of the command surgeon and comptroller.

Afghan and U.S. sources in Kabul said boosting the number and visibility of American and NATO advisers at the Afghan Defense Ministry and elsewhere could be unwelcome -- and could play into Taliban propaganda claims that they are part of an occupation force.

In another major change, all the U.S. and allied mentoring and training teams embedded with Afghan military and police units will be placed next month under a new operational command, headed by McChrystal's deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who runs day-to-day military missions in Afghanistan.

Spiraling violence in Afghanistan has added urgency to the effort, as the United States has increased its troops in the country nearly twofold without a commensurate increase in the number of Afghan forces.

"We are building our side of this bridge. The Afghan bridge is not building," said one senior U.S. official, who like others discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. "Having U.S. troops enforcing martial law where they don't understand the people or speak the language -- this is a recipe for disaster."

When about 4,500 U.S. Marines launched an operation in July to push deep into Taliban territory in the southern province of Helmand, they were accompanied by about 400 Afghan security forces. Senior Afghan officials had placed priority on using Afghan troops to secure Kabul and other population centers for the August presidential election, one senior U.S. official said.

"The coalition did a poor job of coordinating with the Afghans our vision for how we were going to employ the Marines," the official said. Dozens of Marines have died fighting in Helmand since July.

For years, the United States and other NATO countries did not provide thousands of required military trainers and mentors for the effort to build up Afghan forces, and Levin said it remains undermanned by 12 percent. The training organization itself is a confusing conglomerate of active-duty, National Guard and Reserve forces from different countries as well as contractors and Afghans.

The growth of the Afghan army has sped up since last year. Still, thousands more trainers would be needed to significantly expand the force, and where they would come from remains uncertain. The Pentagon could mobilize another brigade of about 4,000 National Guard soldiers to devote to the effort, but such a mobilization would take time, officials said. Some senior American officials advocate deploying more 12-man U.S. Special Forces teams to train regular Afghan army battalions, noting that working with indigenous forces is a core mission of the Green Berets.

Given the shortage of mentoring teams, U.S. and other NATO commanders in Afghanistan are increasingly relying on another model in which they use combat units to partner with existing Afghan forces, essentially giving combat forces the dual role of fighting and on-the-job training.

Recruiting Afghans for the army and police in far greater numbers is also likely to be difficult, officials said.

"That is going to be a huge challenge to get the numbers they need from the Afghan population," said Brig. Gen. Steven P. Huber, commander of the 7,500-strong military and civilian task force based in Kabul that is training and mentoring Afghan forces. "Building a national-level army is a hard sell" in Afghanistan's disparate tribal communities, said Huber, commander of the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois National Guard.

Local recruits often quit upon learning they will be sent to southern Afghanistan, citing "deteriorating security," Huber said. Others are expelled because of drug use -- as many as 15 percent per class in some areas.

Given the infrastructure and manpower, time for adequate training is also a challenge because Afghan army and police forces are in such great demand to counter a growing insurgency, said Col. Bill Hix, who until recently led the training effort in the south. Building facilities and obtaining vehicles, radios and weapons can take months, sometimes even more than a year, Hix said. Training leaders for bigger units such as battalions and brigades is "a very slow process," Huber said.

Another problem is that existing Afghan units are being depleted, experts said. "We have been building an army that we are not replenishing, that we are not bringing off-line to train," said Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War and a military historian who served on McChrystal's strategic review team.

"In a country that is larger than Iraq and has a much larger population . . . you are dealing with a tiny security force . . . and one that is not appropriate for the conditions on the ground," Kagan said.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul contributed to this report.

In Africa, Courts Shape Views on AIDS - washingtonpost.com

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By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 12, 2009

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia -- As African countries still struggle to control the deadly AIDS epidemic, they are also grappling with debates over what rights and duties to give those living with the disease -- a growing segment of the population that remains largely hidden.

Across the continent, lawmakers are considering whether to make criminals of those who infect others with HIV, allow bosses to test workers for the virus, punish women who pass it to their babies and give constitutional protections to those with HIV.

Such questions are increasingly landing in courtrooms, presenting judges with cases that mix current science, individual rights and a devastating public health crisis. One, involving two Zambia air force members who say they were unfairly discharged because they have HIV, goes to trial here next month.

Similar questions are raised worldwide, but nowhere do they carry more weight than in a region where as many as one in five adults has HIV and in an era in which anti-retroviral drugs are keeping more people alive. Laws crafted to deal with such a vast constituency, experts say, could help curb the epidemic -- or deepen a stigma that fuels its spread.

"HIV is a systemic issue in southern Africa. It's a huge social problem, and it inevitably becomes a legal one," said Adila Hassim, head of litigation at the AIDS Law Project in Johannesburg. "There's so many ways people with HIV are affected that it does require a whole set of rules."

But those rules are hotly debated. The United Nations and most health and human rights organizations back policies that emphasize rights for people with HIV, an approach that has generally been favored by officials in African nations, at least a dozen of which have passed or are considering HIV-specific legislation. But those officials also face pressure to protect the uninfected.

Laws criminalizing the transmission of HIV have been adopted from western to southern Africa, for example, with backing from some women's groups despite human rights advocates' contention that they deepen stigma. In Botswana, protests by activists have failed to stop employers from testing and excluding infected job applicants. A recent proposal in Rwanda would require HIV tests for many -- an idea supported by observers who say that relying on people to seek testing "can deprive other people of their right to life," as one University of Pretoria researcher wrote in South Africa's Star newspaper.

"It's a very tricky situation, a catch-22," said the attorney general of the island nation of Mauritius, Jayarama Valayden, who successfully lobbied against a proposed HIV criminalization law that had popular support. African nations passing such laws, he said, are "reacting to public opinion."

In some places with unsettled HIV policies, African courts are weighing in, sometimes guided by colonial-era constitutions that never accounted for a large class of people with a deadly infectious disease.

The case of the Zambian airmen, lawyers involved say, could help answer contentious questions in a nation where 15 percent of adults have HIV: Is discrimination on the basis of HIV status unconstitutional? Can the military test recruits or members for HIV and ban those who are positive?

"There are those who feel it's the fault of a person who gets HIV to suffer the consequences . . . others say the best way to deal with HIV is to adopt a human rights approach," said Paul Mulenga, the airmen's attorney. "Zambian society is split."

The two men, Stainley Kingaipe and Charles Chookole, joined the Zambian air force in 1991 and began as members of the band. Kingaipe, 40, eventually transferred to the mechanical fleet, while Chookole, 41, became an academy instructor and armory guard.

Over the next decade, both men said, air force doctors treated them -- Kingaipe for a swollen leg; Chookole for leg pain, a fungal infection and tuberculosis. The men said they and a group of other airmen were summoned in 2001 for a medical checkup where, for the first time, their blood was drawn.

Days later, Kingaipe and Chookole said, doctors instructed them to take three white pills twice a day but did not say what they were for. A year later, they were told they were permanently and medically unfit for service and discharged -- though both felt healthy and said they had been fulfilling their duties as normal. Chookole, in fact, had been promoted to sergeant two months earlier.

"I was confused," recalled Chookole, who said that his boyhood dream was to join the military and that he has been unable to find work since. "Somebody is telling you you are unfit. But I was dressed in full uniform. I did not come before them on a stretcher."

Upon their discharge, the two men said that they discovered the pills were anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV -- and that they were HIV-positive.

They want their jobs back and have filed a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to HIV testing without their knowledge, violating their rights to privacy and protection from inhumane and degrading treatment, and unfairly dismissed.

A military spokesman did not respond to requests for comment, and a Zambian air force lawyer reached by telephone would say only that Kingaipe and Chookole's case is "nonsense." In court filings, the Zambian government said the men were not tested for HIV and were discharged because Kingaipe had Karposi's sarcoma, largely an AIDS-related form of cancer, and Chookole had tuberculosis.

At the time of their discharge, the Zambian military had no policy on HIV. In 2003, it announced a draft policy banning HIV-positive recruits, which one military official called necessary because "defense is not kindergarten or Red Cross. We need people who are fit." The policy, finalized last year, does not allow the military to discharge those who contract the virus after recruitment.

Some Western militaries, including that of the United States, bar potential recruits who are HIV-positive. But the topic of HIV and the military has generated more debate in Africa, where strapped governments offer infrequent medical care. A 2004 study of Zambia's 22,000-member military found a 29 percent prevalence rate, according to a U.S. Defense Department report.

Those kinds of figures have stirred concerns that the virus is weakening African militaries, and that HIV-positive peacekeepers on the continent might fall ill or spread the virus while deployed, either through wounds or sexual activity -- a particularly sensitive subject given accusations of rape that have long plagued U.N. peacekeeping forces.

"My taxpayer money is paying for the defense force, which is supposed to be providing security. That's also a right," said Lindy Heinecken, a military sociologist at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. "The military is a unique organization . . . the circumstances that you are asking them to live and work in are different to going to a factory."

Activists say those arguments are outdated, given the advent of anti-retroviral drugs that can keep people with HIV healthy, and only fuel stigma. Militaries, they say, should not ban all HIV-positive soldiers but should assess fitness for duty through general health exams. That is also the view of the United Nations, which does not require HIV testing for peacekeepers.

"In this society, unless you want to go and look for people from Sweden for your armed forces, you're not going to get away from HIV," said Hassim of the AIDS Law Project. "You must have a nuanced policy."

That view has been backed by recent court rulings in Namibia and South Africa, which found blanket bans unconstitutional. Mulenga said the case of Kingaipe and Chookole could pave the way for a similar challenge to the Zambian military's ban on HIV-positive recruits.

But that would require excluded recruits to come forward, and in a society in which HIV is still considered shameful, he said, few are as brave as Kingaipe and Chookole.

Indeed, the two men said neighbors and acquaintances sometimes whisper that their HIV status makes them "already dead," as Kingaipe put it. He thinks the air force also thought as much.

"Maybe they thought because of my status, I was also hopeless," said Kingaipe, who now works as a security guard, earning half as much as he did in the military. "It's not true."

Ending Africa's Hunger - Nation

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By Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

This article appeared in the September 21, 2009 edition of The Nation.

September 2, 2009

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It's a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama's vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you've got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world's largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It's true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution.

At best, however, the first Green Revolution was an ambiguous success. As John Perkins writes in his magisterial Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, it was instigated by the US government not out of a direct concern for the well-being of the world's hungry but from a worry that a hungry urban poor might take to the streets and demand left-wing changes in the Global South. The term "Green Revolution" was coined by William Gaud, administrator of USAID in the late 1960s. Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, he announced, "Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution." Steeped in the cold war, the first Green Revolution was designed to prevent any other revolutions from happening.

The Green Revolution appeared successful because the global quantity of food produced increased dramatically. From 1970 to 1990 the amount of food available per person rose by 11 percent, and more than 150 million people were lifted from the ranks of the world's hungry. But most of that rise was driven by transformations inside China. Subtract China from the picture and the heyday of the Green Revolution saw global hunger increase by 11 percent. In South America, hunger grew by nearly 20 percent despite impressive gains in output driven, in part, by improved crop varieties. Those varieties required large landholdings in order to be economically efficient, which meant that the peasants working that land had to be kicked off. Those displaced peasants migrated to the hillsides and tropical forests, doubling the area of cultivated land--in other words, the increase in food came not only through technology but also simply by having food growing on a greater area.

Beyond the massive displacement of peasants, the Green Revolution wrought other social damage--urban slums sprawled around cities to house displaced workers, pesticide use went up, groundwater levels fell and industrial agricultural practices began racking up significant environmental debt. Today, because of the Green Revolution's catastrophic economic and ecological consequences, even its strong advocates in India have recommended that up to 70 percent of farmers farm organically.

The architects of Africa's new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation's agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as "smallholders") and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because "if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse."

Nonetheless, the Green Revolution being prepared for Africa bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, in the 1960s the push for a Green Revolution was accompanied by fears about national security and stability; the recent global spate of food rebellions, in dozens of countries from Egypt to Haiti to India, has made food a security concern once again. Furthermore, the first Green Revolution was made possible through the philanthropy of a billionaire American family--the Rockefellers; the second is bankrolled by Gates. This is not a superficial coincidence: the destinies of millions of the world's poorest farmers are again being shaped by the richest Americans, and philanthropic choices are very different from democratic ones.

One of the most important choices involves the role of technology. At the Gates Foundation, Roy Steiner emphasized that "we believe in the power of technology." It's a belief with clout: about a third of the foundation's $1.3 billion in agricultural development grants have been invested in science and technology, with almost 30 percent of the 2008 grants promoting and developing seed biotechnologies. Through a range of investments, the Gates Foundation is turning its faith into reality. This reliance on technology to address a growing political and social problem loudly echoes the thinking behind the first Green Revolution.

Why Africa Is Hungry and Knowledge Is Never Neutral

Some of the changes made possible by Gates's funding are welcome. An African Centre for Crop Improvement has been set up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which is designed to change the way African agricultural scientists work. Rather than carting them off to Europe or North America, where they learn about the pressing agricultural issues facing French or American farmers, the new center encourages African scientists to face African challenges while based in Africa. Other Gates investments are geared toward training more women PhDs and providing an infrastructure to source food aid locally.

These are valuable efforts, but one might pause to ask why the need for such philanthropic intervention arose in the first place. The faltering quality of African agricultural research institutions, and the decline in government spending on agriculture, is a result of the budget austerity imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in the 1980s and '90s. As Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello has noted, Africa exported 1.3 million tons of food a year in the 1960s, but after being subject to international development loans and free-market fundamentalism, today it imports nearly 25 percent of its food. In a 2008 report, the Bank's internal evaluations group lambasted the policies that led to this situation. What the Gates Foundation is doing is using its private money to fund activities that once were in the public domain and were, albeit imperfectly, under democratic control.

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

The first Green Revolution spawned and exacerbated many social divisions, especially around access to land and resources, since the scale required by Green Revolution technologies meant that it was systematically biased against smallholders. The Gates Foundation is clearly aware of the importance of smallholder agriculture; but a leaked internal strategy document suggests that something else is more important: "Over time, this [strategy] will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production." "Land mobility" is an Orwellian term meaning the land stays where it is but the people on it are driven off. The foundation stands behind this idea, saying that peasants will head to cities "because there are a lot of them who don't want to be farmers [and] people make their own choices."

This idea of choice is an integral part of the conventional wisdom about agriculture in Africa. At least until the financial crisis, it was true that young men tended not to want to remain in agriculture if they could avoid it; but that choice was conditioned, in part, by policies that underinvested in rural areas compared with urban ones. One of the consequences of the financial crisis has been to change that field of choices. For the first time in years, men who had migrated to the cities find there's less opportunity in urban than in rural areas.

They're returning to family land that has been farmed by women, who have developed rich knowledge about agriculture. The technologies that the Gates Foundation funds, like hybrid seed and synthetic fertilizer, require much less know-how than some of the diverse traditional systems managed by women. In many African cultures, women grow the majority of food, but men control access to cash. Rather than supporting and building on women's agricultural knowledge systems, cash-based agricultural technology allows men with the economic wherewithal to displace women as farmers.

African farmers' organizations have repeatedly rejected this high-tech approach to agriculture and instead are making their own choices. Since AGRA announced its plans in 2006, groups representing the largest farmer federations in Africa have come together in a series of meetings to organize support for African agroecological solutions to the food crisis.

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

It was innovative ecological technologies like push-pull (and not traditional Green Revolution approaches) that were praised by a recent international effort to assess the future of agriculture. "The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development" (IAASTD), a report modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took more than four years to complete and relied on the expertise of more than 400 scientists. It was adopted by fifty-eight countries in the global North and South (though not the United States, Canada or Australia). The IAASTD found that a focus on small-scale sustainable agriculture, locally adapted seed and ecological farming better address the complexities of climate change, hunger, poverty and productive demands on agriculture in the developing world. That report--the most comprehensive scientific assessment of world agriculture to date--recommended development strategies that are in large part the opposite of those backed by the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation acknowledges the relevance of the IAASTD's insights. But it continues to invest heavily in biotech solutions to the problem of hunger and gives short shrift to the agroecological approaches recommended by the report. What's more, there's empirical reason to doubt whether biotech can deliver what Gates is hoping for. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are expensive, proprietary and contribute to the corporate monopolization of the world's seed supply. Despite extraordinary restrictions on research into the effects of GM products--the industry refuses to allow independent researchers to study patented seed--evidence is finally emerging of the significant environmental and health risks they pose, prompting the American Academy of Environmental Medicine earlier this year to call for an immediate moratorium on GM food.

Prestigious research organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have demonstrated that GM crops (which are legal for commercial use in only three African countries) do not increase intrinsic yields, and, in the developing world especially, can increase costs and risks to smallholders, with mixed, often negative effects on their incomes. Although the Gates Foundation has promised crops genetically engineered for drought tolerance, these crops have yet to outperform traditional varieties, according to an assessment by the Australian government. The foundation has also spent more than $111 million to "biofortify" (genetically engineer) crops to have a higher vitamin content, despite past technical and cultural failures that indicate a diverse diet goes much further than genetically engineered supplements in supporting good nutrition.

Africa's New Poster Child: The Malawi 'Miracle'

One place where the new Green Revolution has gotten a head start is the small East African nation of Malawi. After a severe drought in 2003, more than a third of the country needed food aid to survive. Bucking advice from the World Bank, the country began giving out vouchers on a large scale for subsidized fertilizer in 2005. The rains returned, yields rose, Malawi began exporting grain and the international community declared the hunger crisis over.

The Gates Foundation has been aggressively supporting the funding of fertilizer in Africa through grants to establish a network of private agro-input dealers. While the program doesn't explicitly subsidize the price of fertilizers to farmers, it encourages national policies to increase fertilizer availability. If the problem for African farmers is soil fertility, funding fertilizer seems unimpeachable. A closer examination of the data raises some troubling questions, though. It isn't clear whether it was the fertilizer or the rain that caused yields to increase. Worse yet, according to sources in Malawi, hunger has not abated at anywhere near the levels believed by the international development community.

Indeed, there's reason to think that fertilizer subsidies may render societies more vulnerable to famine. Roland Bunch, a former agronomist at World Neighbors and author of Two Ears of Corn, a handbook on people-centered agricultural development, explains the problem. "The indirect effects of subsidized fertilizer are that farmers stop amending their soils with organic matter because it is easier to apply fertilizer. When the subsidies dry up--as they invariably do--farmers are left with soils that are so inert that they can't even grow a good green manure to restore fertility. At that point, with neither chemical fertilizer nor green manures being feasible, we could easily witness a famine across Africa like nothing we have ever seen before."

This is a concern echoed on the ground. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been working in Malawi for more than a decade. She says that Malawi's fertilizer subsidies are "masking food security problems for the long term." Bezner Kerr works with a project in Malawi that takes a different approach to soil health by relying on local farmer experimenters. One village headman has, for instance, encouraged his village to adopt ecological agriculture, which not only improves yields but produces a diverse diet that has improved the health of the community's children, at a fraction of the cost of Gates's genetically engineered nutrition projects. Much like push-pull, the result of that project, which spread to more than 7,000 households, is that families--and the soil--are better off.

When asked about how AGRA affects projects like hers, Bezner Kerr says, "When farmers get vouchers [for fertilizer], they wonder, Why incorporate crop residues? If AGRA is putting all that money into fertilizer, it is taking away from efforts like ours." Like Bunch, she's concerned about the economic as well as the environmental sustainability of fertilizer giveaways. "What happens when AGRA leaves?" she asks.

Is Bill Gates Africa's Latest Strongman?

The Gates Foundation responds to criticism of its funding decisions by saying that it is learning all the time, with a state-of-the-art system that will soon let the project officers seek feedback through the cellphones of more than 10,000 farmer stakeholders. It's unusual in the world of foundations to have such a strong commitment to correcting mistakes. In its flexibility and openness to reform, the Gates Foundation seems ready to depart from the trajectory of the first Green Revolution.

Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is an important step, the farm leaders are unhappy about being consulted so late in the game. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, recently convened a dialogue on AGRA. There, Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers' Forum expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: "You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!"

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, "If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies." This is feedback that can't so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.

The calls from African organizations to be able to set the agenda for their own agricultural development are heard only faintly in the United States. That's largely because when it comes to African hunger, prejudices about the incompetence of African farmers and the marvels of biotechnology do a lot of the thinking for us. But the Gates Foundation isn't a victim of poor reasoning. It actively promotes an agenda that supports some of the most powerful corporations on earth. Far more than the peer-reviewed IAASTD study, Gates's strategy reflects another report, funded by the foundation itself: "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty" from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Knocked out in a couple of months by a small team led by a Gates Foundation senior fellow and stacked with staff from institutions receiving substantial Gates money, the report, while rightly calling for renewed investment and education, again ignores the structural and political causes of Africa's hunger, ascribing it to a technical deficit. The report concludes that the United States needs to "reassert its leadership" in "spreading new technologies," because it will increase trade and "strengthen American institutions." Worse, the council's solutions--with classic Green Revolution hubris--ignore the successful endogenous solutions that have been spreading across the continent for three decades.

Rarely in the history of philanthropy has one foundation--or more correctly, one man--had this kind of power. When Obama made his remarks on the Green Revolution, one Seattle Times journalist suggested that "President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation." It's not hard to see the paths through which the thinking in Seattle might have made it to Washington, DC. Many AGRA and Gates Foundation employees are former industry and government insiders. Rajiv Shah, a doctor with no previous agricultural experience who was headhunted by the Gates Foundation, is now at the Department of Agriculture, as under secretary for research, education and economics, and also chief scientist.

The foundation's reach extends far beyond Washington. With billions committed to agricultural development, the Gates Foundation has a financial heft equal to that of a government in the global North. In 2007 the United States contributed $60 million to the system of international public agricultural research centers. Gates has pumped $122 million into the system in the past eighteen months alone and given a total of $317 million to the World Bank.

Africa's Green Revolution has another similarity with the first Green Revolution: the technological preferences of the philanthropist shape the approaches on the ground. For the Rockefellers, that meant agricultural technology based on industrial chemistry and oil. For Gates, it's about proprietary intellectual property. Africa's Green Revolution is, in other words, just a new way of doing business as usual.

In its push for technological solutions, its distaste for redistributive social policy and disregard for extant alternatives--as well as in the circumstances that have made food an international security concern--this Green Revolution looks very similar to its predecessor. The biggest issue, however, isn't one of commission but of omission. Just as in India, where peasant demands for land reform in the 1960s that might have led to more sustainable and durable progress (as such reforms did in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) were ignored, African farmers advocating their own solutions to the food crisis are being marginalized. In particular, the vocally articulated demands--for agroecological alternatives, state support for farmer-led research, for land reform, for women's rights in agriculture, and for sharing access to water--all fade into the background when Gates's answers are amplified.

It will take a suite of policies, addressing both the technical and sociopolitical reasons for hunger in Africa, to make lasting change. Technologies for development need to be accompanied by other, political reforms, including canceling debt, removing food and agriculture from the World Trade Organization, investing heavily in farmers' organizations and their proven sustainable agricultural technologies, and supporting the peer-reviewed approaches generated by the science of agroecology.

Models for this kind of change already exist. In Mali, peasant movements have successfully persuaded the government to adopt as a national priority the idea of "food sovereignty," a shorthand for the democratization of the food system. Similar efforts are happening at regional and local levels in other countries. But for those initiatives to register in the United States, the conventional wisdom regarding the Green Revolution needs to be replaced. The tragedy here is not that Africa hasn't had a Green Revolution but that the mistakes of the first may be repeated once more, and that one foundation has the power to make the rest of the world bend to its misguided agenda.

About Raj Patel

Raj Patel is a fellow at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Eric Holt-Gimenez and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...

About Eric Holt-Gimenez

Eric Holt-Gimenez is executive director at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...

About Annie Shattuck

Annie Shattuck is a policy analyst at Food Firstand has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Gimenez) Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice (Food First Books). more...