Featured Items
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PMSC report
GPF's report on UN use of PMSCs has received wide media coverage and created quite a stir at the UN.
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Internship
The end of the summer team brings the number of GPF alumni to 200. We try to keep track of all of them.
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What GPF is Reading
This new section of the update looks at books recommended by the GPF team.
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Food & Hunger
GPF is closely following the drafting process of the General Assembly's resolution on food security.
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What GPF is Working on
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Private Military and Security Companies
On July 10, GPF published a major investigative report by Lou Pingeot on the UN’s use of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs). The report reveals how the UN has dramatically increased its use of PMSCs in recent years, hiring them for a wide array of “security services” and giving them considerable influence over its security policies.
The report also reveals that the UN has no process to vet the companies and that UN leadership has been closing its eyes to company misconduct for more than twenty years. GPF believes that these companies drive a UN policy of “bunkerization” in field missions, cutting the organization off from the people it is supposed to serve. In the end, the companies not only discredit the UN and harm its work, they also are likely to create more insecurity.
More than 100 articles covered the story and there has been much discussion of the report within the UN and beyond. Many staff of the UN and its agencies have thanked us for opening the political space for this much-needed challenge to security orthodoxy. A recent article by the MediaGlobal newswire says that “attention swirls around the issue” as these companies come under broad criticism. For more on the media coverage as well as responses from the UN and the companies, click here.
GPF is grateful for the support it received for the research, writing and publication of this report – from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Samuel Rubin Foundation, and a number of generous individual donors, in particular Gordon Gray, Jr. (a longtime GPF supporter) who provided a lead contribution for the project.
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Food & Hunger
During the summer, the NGO Working Group on Food and Hunger met with key diplomats to discuss an upcoming resolution on food security. GPF convenes this Working Group, organizes its meetings and drafts its reports. Every year since 2009, the UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution on “Agriculture, Development and Food Security,” prepared by the Assembly’s Second Committee. GPF and its Working Group partners cooperate with friendly delegations to insert new ideas and progressive language into the text.
This year, we are focusing on “land-grabbing,” a worldwide trend in which big investors take land away (often by force) from millions of small producers. In May, the Rome-based Committee on World Food Security (CFS) adopted guidelines on land tenure that address expropriation of small holders and foreign ownership of land. The guidelines provide a positive basis to fight land-grabbing, so GPF is pushing to include CFS language in the new GA resolution. We will also give priority to climate change, seeking to lessen the sizeable greenhouse gas emissions that come from agriculture.
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Internship News
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GPF’s summer intern team included Sumire Doi (Japan), Mriganka Lulla (India), Anais De Meulder (Belgium), and Mai Nguyen (Vietnam). The departure of Sumire and Mai in late August brings the number of intern alumni to over 200. Though we have contact details on the majority of our alumni, we have lost track of many. Mriganka has been seeking information for those who are missing, a process made easier these days by the internet. Many of these talented young people are working in the international relations field – some for the United Nations and its funds, programs and agencies, others for NGOs, think tanks and universities.
In June, we had a visit from Simone Koring (’98), a German foreign service officer who has been serving in Washington to bring information about her country’s environmental programs and policies to the attention of US policy makers. She joined us for lunch at the office and gave a fascinating account of her work and the previous steps in her career. She told us a surprising fact about Germany’s electricity grid: on a day with the right conditions, Germany meets all it electricity needs through alternative energy sources – wind and solar. We wish Washington policy makers listened more closely! Salvatore Cusimano (’10) joined us for lunch in July. A recent graduate of the University of Toronto, he is serving as an intern at the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. He told us about his work at DPKO, his research work in Uganda last summer and his quest for the ideal graduate program. He will be off in September to study refugees and migration at Oxford University.
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What GPF is Reading
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Herman Daly - Beyond Growth (1996)
Donella Meadows et al - The Limits to Growth: 30 year update (2002)
These days, debates rage over how to achieve “renewed growth” to promote prosperity. Neo-Keynesians like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz are especially strong supporters of growth (through government stimulus) as a path to future well-being. Unfortunately, few economists are thinking about the questions that growth poses: does growth bring well-being? And especially: is future growth possible and sustainable?
Herman Daly addresses these issues directly in his seminal 1996 book “Beyond Growth.” He demonstrates that growth faces physical limits – the limits of finite planetary resources. The laws of physics define these limits, not the laws of economics. Economists ignore natural limits at the peril of irrelevance. Key resources such as agricultural land, fresh water and petroleum are no longer available in seemingly-unlimited supply. Daly was on the right track but he was fired from the World Bank (where he served as the first environmental economist) for speaking the truth.
The classic “Limits to Growth,” by Donella Meadows and colleagues, also considers the theme of pernicious growth. Published in 1972 by the Club of Rome, the book made an enormous impact when it first appeared but it has since been nearly forgotten. The study came out of the computer labs of MIT and it tried to model basic planetary variables. It concluded that food supplies are going to run short as physical limits are reached. An expanded update in 2002 predicted that a serious food shortage was close at hand. That prediction has since proven correct, as production increases have slowed and demand has soared, creating market scarcity and sharply rising prices. A billion people are now hungry and the number is growing.
It is time that we re-visit these visionary works, consider the power of their predictions and draw the necessary conclusions. We must shift out of the "growth" paradigm. De-growth or even collapse could happen with great suffering -- unless we work toward planned economic shrinkage and seek balance with the natural world. This is the greatest challenge today for all economic thinking and for the UN and global institutions to put into practice.
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