Center for a New American Security

• According to Business Week, Turkmenistan will begin production of a $2billion gas pipeline to the West to provide an alternative to Russian energy.
• Pakistan and India are looking to establish a deal over two large hydroelectric plants in Kashmir, according to the Daily Times.
• Though the reference may be a bit outdated, San Fransisco's Bay News uses Avatar to frame conflict minerals in the Congo.
• China has announced even tighter controls on their strategic rare earth resources, reports China's own People's Daily.
• Reuters reports that Iran may have plans to cut national subsidies on electricity, water and food to Afghan refugees who have moved into Iran. 

• According to the Associated Press, China and Brazil may establish a bond over Chinese assistance exploiting Brazilian Coltan mines.
• USAID's Famine Early Warning System Network released its 2010 April through September outlook for food security in Somalia.
• Check out BBC's audio track discussing the role rare earth metals play in the economy, the environment and technology.
• The New York Times' Green blog discusses the release of the United Nations's Biodiversity Outlook 3, which shows declines across the board.
• The nine Nile states of Africa are likely to come to an agreement over water usage, reports The National.

Last week Stratfor issued a cool piece, “Niger: The Coup and Uranium.” This is straight up natural security reading for you, dear readers. You can get the full article in exchange for your email address, which I’d suggest is worth the price for the map and chart they provide. A few brief highlights:

Niger contains one of the largest deposits of uranium in the world and was the world’s sixth-largest producer in 2008...France maintained a monopoly on Niger’s uranium production for more than three decades following the beginning of commercial production in 1971. But Niamey has begun to open its doors to other countries — most notably China, which has been increasingly active on the African continent in recent years.

 

...While uranium does not form as high of a percentage of Niger’s gross domestic product as might be expected (roughly 7 percent in 2008), the junta nonetheless has a financial incentive to keep these operations running smoothly. Uranium constitutes roughly half of Niger’s exports and the lion’s share of foreign direct investment — meaning that whoever controls the purse strings of the government has access to big money.

A tip of the hat to our Senior Military Fellow from the Marine Corps for this one!

Our colleagues in the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars recently released a comprehensive report, Land Grab? The Race for the World’s Farmlands, that looks at the increasing frequency of food-importing developed nations and private companies investing in huge tracts of arable farmland in less developed countries.

This is an area that, while we haven’t explored deeply, we are beginning to study more and more here in the Natural Security program. We’re particularly interested in the ways that these emerging economic trends are engaging other socioeconomic and political trends in developing countries, which could lead to instability in countries of geostrategic importance to the United States (e.g. Pakistan).

According to the report’s authors:

Large-scale land acquisitions may have a negative effect on the wider sociopolitical and economic context of the host country. There are documented cases, such as the Daewoo Logistics Corporation’s (ultimately unsuccessful) plan to lease 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar, where negotiations over deals have contributed to political instability and internal social conflict. These deals touch on the already politically contentious issue of land allocation and land rights, so they carry a possibility of exacerbating existing tensions.
…
Granted, to this point Madagascar is the only case where a land deal has contributed to widespread political instability. However, the factors at play in most host countries—land, food insecurity, and poverty—make up a combustible mix that could easily explode. In countries—such as Pakistan—where violent, extremist anti-government movements have mastered the ability to exploit land- based class divisions, the political risks are particularly high.

The report is intended for a much broader (global) audience and, rightly so, is not explicit about how these trends might engage U.S. national security interests. But for researchers like us who study natural resources and economic trends and analyze their engagement with national security, the report is robust and offers useful case studies in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe that are a great jumping off point for our further research. You should read this now!

Yesterday I took a virtual trip to check out the U.S. Institute of Peace event, Natural Resources: Plunder or Peace, via live webcast. The event featured Paul Collier, director of the Centre of African Economies at Oxford University, and Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, and focused primarily on natural resources beneath the ground (or subsoil assets, as they were commonly referred to during the event).
 
Paul Collier began his discussion with fun question to the audience. According to Collier, an average square kilometer of land in the richest countries in the world was valued to have $120,000 worth of subsoil assets. The statistics game started when he asked the audience whether they thought that the value of subsoil assets beneath an average square kilometer of African land would be more than that average. By a show of hands (save my own, as webcasts are only projected one-way), it seemed most everyone indicated a vote of “yes.” But according to Collier, everyone was wrong; the average in Africa amounts to roughly $23,000. By his assessment, this pointed to one obvious conclusion: we simply haven’t discovered the other assets to make up for the nearly $100,000 disparity. I temporarily accepted this fact and listened on.

• PR Newswire cites a poll that indicates that the Chinese people worry more about climate change and food and water security than traditional military threats.
• The United Nations renewed sanctions on the Congo preventing the export of minerals despite misgivings about their effectiveness, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Uzbekistan withdrew from the Central Asian power grid citing energy security concerns, Xinhua reports.
• The U.S. Air Force has announced that they will abandon their efforts to drive the market of coal-to-liquid technology, according to the Guardian.
• According to The Washington Post, China and the United States are pressuring India to set commitments in advance of Copenhagen.

Major news sources are reporting on the importance of energy and climate change during President Obama’s trip to China. Check out Scientific American, The New York Times, or The Washington Post for some good commentary, as well as the Department of Energy’s announcement for a list of projects.

The Financial Times gives a great run down of the problem of food insecurity and cautions against a monolithic solution.

Alternative Energy reports on the role fiber optics could play in photovoltaics.

The BBC reports that following a summit of African leaders minimum demands for compensation for climate change damages have been determined but will be kept secret until Copenhagen.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the debate around what role the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could play in analyzing climate change.  As I noted in that post, the CIA has already been playing a role since the mid-1990s. That got me thinking about the debate back when the CIA first stood up its Environment Center and started using its satellites to collect climate data. For this week’s Reading Old Magazines I took a look at an October 17, 1995 op-ed in The Washington Times, “Is the CIA being led astray?” While this is a newspaper article and not our usual old magazine, author Bruce Fein, a lawyer and free-lance writer with The Washington Times, offers some interesting points that help one understand the debate back when the CIA firsts began integrating climate change into its work.

During that time opponents seemed to bemoan looking beyond traditional security threats to include environmental concerns and climate change into intelligence assessments. “The national security of the United States is ill-served…by an agency without personnel made of sterner and less starry-eyed stuff,” Fein wrote. His suggestion that incorporating these concerns might pacify national security experts and intelligence analysts is indicative of the attitude at this time that including threats other than war was a luxury that could undermine hard security priorities.

• Egypt and Sudan are in tense negotiations with other Nile nations over water rights and water security, according to Xinhua.
• An abundant supply of natural gas will likely drive down prices and reduce Russia's ability to blackmail its customers, according to The Financial Times. FT also reports on one gas industry spokesman's insistence that climate change action and energy security are linked.
• Green Inc. reports that economists overwhelmingly agree that climate change poses threats to the economy of the United States—which naturally affects U.S. security as well.
• When President Obama visits next week, Japan will not have reached a decision on moving the U.S. military base on Okinawa, according to Stars and Stripes. As we have noted before, this base closure issue is partly about environmental concerns.
• The Iraqi government has awarded the West Qurna-1 oil field to a consortium led by Exxon Mobile and Royal Dutch Shell and is seen as another crucial step for Iraq in opening up its oil fields to international companies, The Wall Street Journal reports.