As in March, the media in April featured prominent coverage of the global food crisis. In a story titled "Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders" on April 14, the Wall Street Journal summed up the situation, reporting, "Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia," and noting that World Bank President Robert Zoellick has warned that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval due to food inflation. The WSJ also touched on the new wave of food protectionism, reporting that at least a dozen countries have cut tariffs on food imports and set up export barriers in hopes of holding down domestic food prices and promoting self-sufficiency.

The rising wave of "food protectionism"

In an editorial on April 10, the Nation, an English-language daily published in Thailand, which is the world's biggest rice exporter, called for the government to protect the country's rice market with steps including a requirement that millers and exporters report their rice inventories on a regular basis. The price of rice has almost doubled globally over the past year, and as the daily observes, decisions by India and Vietnam to curb their rice exports have exacerbated the crisis. The Nation stops just short of calling on Thailand to impose its own export controls. Higher rice prices are good news for farming communities, but matters could get out of hand at any point. The daily urges the government to stabilize the situation by imposing price controls.

How about Vietnam, the next-biggest rice exporter? An opinion piece titled "Food Crisis Reaffirms Importance of Agriculture," published in the English-language daily Viet Nam News sounds the alarm over the conversion of farmland in Vietnam to industrial and other non-agricultural uses. The article asks, "Who would have thought that in the age of high technology, the world would go hungry?" and cites a World Bank forecast that "evolving diets among the burgeoning middle classes of India, China and Southeast Asia will help double demand for food—particularly grain-intensive meat and dairy products—by 2030." These newly well-off consumers seek not grain itself but meat and dairy products from grain-fed animals. Last month we referred to a Wall Street Journal article pointing out that it takes 10 pounds of grain to produce a pound of pork and more than 20 to produce a pound of beef. Rising standards of living (and eating) thus mean exponential growth in grain consumption. The article cites official figures showing that more than 360,000 hectares, some 3.9% of Vietnam's arable land, was switched to non-agricultural use, such as industrial parks and urban development, over the five years from 2001 to 2005, and it urges that the loss of rice paddy land be halted.

Also in Southeast Asia, meanwhile, the Philippines has been importing rice since 1995 and has now become the world's biggest rice importer. In an article titled "Why RP, Home to IRRI, Is Now the World's Top Rice Importer," the Philippine daily Inquirer reports that the country is seeking to import as much as 2.2 million metric tons of rice this year, and it observes that the price of imported rice in April came to $1,136 a ton, nearly triple the $430 per ton price in January. As the paper writes, "It is ironic that the Philippines, home to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and some of the world's best agriculture schools, has become the world's top importer of rice." It pins blame on the government for failing to properly implement the 1997 Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act: "Now the country is literally paying the consequence of neglect."

The above pieces are representative of the April coverage of the food crisis in Asia's top rice-exporting and -importing countries.

The irony of the biofuel boom

One of the causes of the surge in food prices is the drive to produce biofuel. The April 7 issue of the weekly Time addresses this topic in a special feature titled "The Clean Energy Scam." This offers some interesting insights relating to the broader topic of globalization.

"Worldwide investment in biofuels," according to Time, "rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010." Use of biofuels was seen as a way of fighting global warming, but in addition to driving up the price of the grain used to make ethanol (a gasoline substitute made with plants like corn and sugar cane, the biofuel boom is actually accelerating global warning, the article declares.

In the United States, ethanol demand has caused the price of corn to rise sharply, and soybean farmers have been switching to corn, causing soybean prices to surge too. This has encouraged farmers in Brazil to switch cattle pastures into soybean fields, which in turn makes cattle raisers move to the Amazon, cutting down the rain forest there to open up new pastures. The Amazon helps limit global warming by sequestering tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, but its ability to do so is being lost. Just in the second half of 2007, Time reports, an area the size of Rhode Island (about 2,000 square kilometers, roughly equivalent to the metropolis of Tokyo) was deforested.

It is truly astounding to be told that the biofuels intended to counter global warming are actually promoting it—and setting off a food crisis to boot. But the biofuel drive has built up momentum. In the state of Iowa alone, production of ethanol from corn already accounts for 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income, with more ethanol distilleries under construction. It will not be easy to change course.

On a related note involving the linkage between global warming and food, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon wrote a cogent article titled "The Right War" that appeared in the April 28 issue of Time magazine. According to the secretary general, the UN is the "global crossroads of politics and diplomacy," and as such, it is where the problems come together, and "so do the often hidden connections among them—and through those connections, the ways to real solutions." He cites the issue of Darfur, where "violence began with the onset of a decades-long drought" that brought farmers and herders into conflict over land and water. "More than ever," Ban declares, "solutions must bridge the local and the global"; he notes that the issues of poverty are tied in with the issues of the environment, including climate change. And he quotes approvingly from a 1963 address to the UN General Assembly by US President John F. Kennedy: "The effort to improve the conditions of man . . . is the task of all—acting alone, acting in groups, acting in the United Nations."

The superclass pulls the world's strings

In "The Politics of Practical Nostalgia" (April 7), Newsweek reports on the election of pragmatic new leaders in a number of Asian countries, and it links this phenomenon to the process of globalization. Pragmatism is the common thread linking South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak and Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou, both inaugurated this year, and Malaysia's former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who led the opposition coalition that scored a major advance in that country's latest general election this March, as well as Thailand's former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose backers won power last December.

In these countries, authoritarian governments in earlier days directed the process of rapid economic development and protected domestic industries from the waves of internationalization, but this approach is not feasible in an age of globalization. The new leaders, while conservative, are thus taking a different approach. Newsweek quotes the comment of one academic, who observes, "All of these leaders have to cope with a new world where they have much less power over their own economies. You can't be ideological when confronted with globalization, you have to be pragmatic."

In another interesting development, David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has published a book titled Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. He introduces his thinking in articles published in Newsweek on April 14 and the Washington Post on May 4. According to Rothkopf, in today's global era the shots are being called by the members of the "superclass," an international network of about 6,000 elite figures. As he notes in his Washington Post article, these business, financial, government, cultural, and military leaders have the "power and ability to regularly influence millions of lives across international borders." One source of their strength is their "convening power"—the fact that the key players can be brought together to deal with a crisis. The superclass controls a tremendous concentration of assets. Rothkopf observes that the world's top 50 financial institutions "control almost $50 trillion in assets, by one measure nearly a third of all assets worldwide" and that the top 250 companies "have sales equal to about a third of global GDP. " On the individual level, meanwhile, "the world's more than 1,100 billionaires have a net worth that's roughly double that of the bottom 2.5 billion people on the planet." Though they are not wealthy, Rothkopf also counts religious leaders with global reach among the superclass. The members of this select group get together at venues like the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and keep in touch with each other. In his Newsweek article, Rothkopf concludes with this assessment: "Until the people of the world are more comfortable with creating the kind of strong global governance mechanisms that can contain and regulate many of their activities, the 6,000 will continue to play the greatest role of any group on the planet in defining our times."

Where does Osama bin Laden fit in to this picture? Was he aiming to destroy this superclass with the 9/11 attacks he masterminded? Or is he himself a member, albeit an errant one? In view of his origins, one cannot easily judge whether he is an insider or outsider.