Water in the 21st Century

Water is a common pool resource in the 21st Century

From the water wars and the pumping races in California in the 1950s to irrigation systems in Spain and mountain villages in Switzerland, all have demonstrated that people are able to draw up sensible rules for the use of common-pool resources like water. Water in the 21st century will increasingly need its own set of sensible rules to meet the new political, economic and environmental realities of the 21st century.

The Colorado River in the US

The Colorado River provides much of the water for many cities and farms in seven states in the US including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California before it reaches México. But flows of water on the Colorado River in the US have been forecast to decrease by up to 30pc by 2050. In the Northern States its water supports cattle empires. In the Southern States especially in California, the river irrigates deserts to produce much of the US' agricultural products, fruit and winter vegetables. And all along the way, aqueducts branch off to supply cities from Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles. Interestingly, the Metropolis closest to Lake Mead, Las Vegas, gets 90pc of its water from this one source. 

Map of Colorado River in US West

Arguments over water tend to have four dimensions – physical, legal, political and cultural. For the physical the standard response is to summon the engineers. In the case of the Colorado River, engineers are already digging a new intake at 890 feet (lower than the current intakes as the water level in Lake Mead has decreased to ensure a guaranteed water supply to Las Vegas). Another response is to call in the lawyers. This was the preferred approach in the 20th century, in the era of the so called “water wars”. Starting with the the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and continuing with statutes, a treaty with México and case law until the 1960s, a truce was achieved. Called the Law of the River, the resulting regime determines who along the river has what right to how much water. 

At least, it does in theory. The problem is that the law took shape after two decades of record water flows, which became the basis for allocation. As a result it apportions more water than there is in the river. For decades that did not matter, since there was so few people. Then the cattle, fruit and people multiplied. The law's seniority rules theoretically mean that, for example, the taps to Las Vegas would be shut completely before agriculture in California were to loose a drop of water. This gives rise to the political dimension.

In the 21st century, cooperation has mostly replaced the old rivalries among agricultural and urban users among the seven river states. Nevada and Arizona have a water banking partnership and Arizona stores excess water in its aquifers to share with Nevada if needed. In California, the water utility of Los Angeles has bought water rights from some farmers. But inevitably arguments still persist. 

This leads into the final dimension which is the cultural dimension. The argument here is directly related to the culture of the US West. For example, does every middle-class household really need a lawn in a desert? In some cases, counties have begun paying their citizens to rip out their turf and opt for a desert landscape garden instead that can be just as chic. 

Egypt and Ethiopia are fighting for the Nile's water too

Most of the water that flows down the lower reaches of the Nile, the world's longest river, comes from the Ethiopian highlands. Up until recently the Ethiopian Government had been content to abide by a Nile River Water Treaty negotiated in 1959. The trouble is the current treaty has strongly favoured the biggest and most influential consumer of Nile water, Egypt. Ethiopia, which has recently overtaken Egypt as Africa's second-most populous nation has joined together with the other upstream Nile nations including Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to re-write the 1959 Nile River Water treaty taking advantage of the power vaccuum in Egypt's leadership after the Arab Spring. 

The combined population of the upstream countries along the Nile is 240m against Egypt (85m) and Sudan (30m) and South Sudan (14m). There are also plans afoot for Ethiopia to dam its bit of the Blue Nile and to build a large hydro-power capacity that would be the centrepiece of a plan to increase the country's electricity supply five fold over the next five years. These plans will undoubtedly have a big impact on other Nile countries downstream and have the potential to provoke cross-border water conflicts.

 And what about fracking and high water use it requires

In order to extract gas held in the hard shale rock, it is necessary to break up small sections by firing large quantities of water mixed with fine sand and fracking chemicals at a very high pressure to make the shale rock give up its gas. Water has been identified as a serious problem for mining shale gas mainly because of the quantities of it that are needed to successfully frack wells. But worse of all there have already been cases where local ground water aquifiers have been polluted by the harsh chemicals used in the fracking process. It is estimated that the average shale well uses around of 22m litres of water to extract the gas. If as predicted by many energy experts, shale gas extraction goes ahead at full speed, worldwide gas could make up around 25pc of primary energy by 2035 adding further pressure to the common pool resource of water.

So what does the future hold

The Geo-Trade Blog believes there is an increasing awareness of the need to act on the world’s impending water challenge in the 21st Century. Nevertheless growing global resource use highlights the complex interdependencies between water and energy, agriculture, industry, urban growth and ecosystems.

Governments and business need to prepare for long term water scarcity and to consider a framework to share the world's water - a common pool resource. Of particular importance are the challenges to addressing water issues at policy level nationally and internationally, to avoid cross-border water conflict. The Geo-Trade Blog believes that people do have the capacity to  draw up sensible rules for water use in the 21st Century but consideration needs to start now.

Life in the Universe - why do living things die?

Living things glow in the dark

Is there life outside Earth?

By far the strongest driving force for the exploration of the Mars is the question: Is it alive? From thousands of images and measurements we have already ruled out the presence of large surface plants and animals. What we cannot entirely dismiss, however, is the possibility of “invisible” Martians such as micro-organisms or anything that could exist below the surface. What makes this question so important is that from a “Yes” we can infer that life is probably prevalent throughout the universe. And there is nothing that an astrobiologist would love more than to be able to analyse the sequence of alien DNA (or other genetic code) to compare with terrestrial organisms.

Given the hostile Martian surface environment, if we are going to detect  traces of life, we will need highly sensitive instruments that look for the faintest possible biological signatures such as organic molecules. This is where the story begins to sound more like something out of science fiction. In order for an astronaut to step down onto the surface, they will need to step out of an airlock from their spaceship. By necessity, the volume of this airlock will first be exposed to the inside of the spacecraft, and then to the Martian atmosphere. Even clever designs like the lunar electric rover suitport suffer from this inherent limitation. Living on the surface of each astronaut will be one trillion microorganisms, representing more than 1,000 species of skin flora. Combined with microorganisms from other parts of the body, every single astronaut will bring along to Mars a soup of Earth micro-organisms that will be released into the atmosphere every time they climb out of the hatch. These micro-organisms can, under favorable conditions, multiply every 20 minutes, allowing them to rapidly grow, mutate, and adapt to adverse environmental conditions. 

One of the adversities on Mars is the high level of UV radiation, which will kill off many of the bacteria that remain exposed on the surface. The organic remnants from these bacteria and viruses could potentially fool ultra-sensitive instruments. Some bacteria will become shielded from the UV, buried just below the surface by footsteps and wheels. And for some, such as a strain that has come to be known as Conan the Bacterium, radiation is not a problem. Through an elaborate collection of repair mechanisms, it is capable of withstanding radiation more than 1,000 times greater than any other known living organism. And beyond that, there is the concern of reverse contamination. With each return of an astronaut to the ship, the airlock would introduce Martian biological remnants to the crew, and subsequently, to Earth. We don’t know how serious this might be, but, historically, human exploration has frequently resulted in epidemics.

Why do living things die?

Every single-celled organism alive today has been in existence since life began over 3 billion years ago. This is because individual cells do not give birth, they divide. After cell division, the two cells that result are each as old as the single cell that preceded them. The cell does not become younger by dividing. Hence every cell in your body is over 3 billion years old.

The strategy that multicellular organisms such as humans use to project themselves into the future is to create new cell colonies from a single undifferentiated cell rather than maintaining existing colonies indefinitely. The main reason is that reproduction is more flexible and robust than maintenance, and it provides a way of starting over with a "clean slate" and slightly different genes. Complex organisms accumulate billions of errors and problems over their lifetime. Most of these errors are fixed as fast as they happen, but life takes a toll and not all problems are reversible. Just as reinstalling Microsoft Windows every so often fixes accumulated system issues, so does generating a new organism every so often from a single cell.

Given that biology has selected this strategy, evolution has optimized for producing the most successful offspring. Once the individual has reproduced, its only evolutionary role is to support the success of its offspring. Aging longer is just not something evolution has had a reason to optimize. And in fact given limited environmental resources, the offspring often do better if the older generation doesn't stay around forever competing with younger generations for scarce resources.

In terms of what happens physiologically, there are two main contributors to aging. The first is the accumulation of biological defects. Viruses and disease take a toll even after healing; UV rays slowly but inevitably damage DNA; and proteins, cell structure, and the neurons which hold memories all degrade over time due to thermodynamic molecular disruptions and invasions by other species.

The second is the aging process itself. The organism develops to maturity and ages in stages according to a genetically determined life plan. Muscles atrophy, bones brittle, and metabolism changes. But the life plan has never run more than 80 years until recently, and evolution only ever optimized the first 40 years or so. So humans are in new territory that is poorly understood, and which evolution has never had a reason to fine tune.

It may be possible to slow or stop some of the genetically determined aging processes. While this may not be good for an overpopulated planet, it will be popular with ageing populations in many developed countries.

The inner workings of the brain and mind

Real time brain scanning technology

The idea of the unconscious, a second level of the mind that is inaccessible to rational thought, but which nevertheless influences people’s behaviour was drawn from Freud's idea of psychoanalysis. During the 20th century, the idea of the unconscious lost its appeal due to the rise of more scientific approaches to psychology. These focused purely on studying behaviour and refrained from theorising about the inner workings of the brain and mind.

A new book on the "unconscious"

 

In a new book entitled “Subliminal”, its author, Leonard Mlodinow shows how the idea of the unconscious has become fashionable again in the 21st century. It has been helped by rigorous experimental evidence of the effects of the subconscious and, especially, by real-time brain-scanning technology that allows researchers to examine what is going on in their subjects’ heads.

This experimental evidence suggests that, as Freud suspected, conscious reasoning makes up a comparatively small part of the activity in the human brains, with most of the work taking place where we are not able to tap into it. However, unlike Freud’s unconscious, the modern unconscious is a place of super-fast data processing, useful survival mechanisms and rules of thumb about the world that have been honed by millions of years of evolution.

It is the unconscious, for instance, that pulls together data on colour, shape, movement and perspective to create the sight enjoyed by the conscious part of the mind. Experiments on people with certain specific forms of brain damage, which remove the ability to perform some of these tasks, can reveal something about what is going on in the unconscious. People with “blindsight” can respond to some visual stimuli even when they are not conscious of being able to see. For example, asked to walk down an obstacle-strewn corridor, they will dodge and weave and arrive at their destination unharmed because some residual data is still making its way into their brains, although at a level that is beneath the notice of their conscious minds.

The modern view of the unconscious mind may be more benign than Freud’s, but it can still generate unwelcome impulses. Psychologists theorise that the well-documented tendency of humans to categorise almost every piece of information they come across is a survival mechanism that evolved to aid quick decision making. Yet it may also lie behind the tendency for human beings to group people into races, genders, creeds and the like, and then to apply certain characteristics, often unjustifiably, to every member of that group.

The insights offered by modern science into the workings of the human mind are fascinating in their own right. But they also suggest that plenty of conventional wisdom about how humans behave may need rethinking. In his new book, Mlodinow notes that economic models, for instance, are built on the assumption that people make decisions by consciously weighing the relevant factors, whereas the psychological research suggests that, most of the time, they do no such thing. Instead, they act on the basis of simple, unconscious rules that can sometimes produce completely irrational results. 

Consciousness and Self

Consciousness is the core of an individual's sense of self, yet, paradoxically, it is the most elusive concept in biology. One feature of human consciousness that students of the field suggest might be unique is an awareness of self. The idea that self-awareness might be specific to humans and a few close relatives resulted from an experiment done three decades ago by Gordon Gallup, who now works at the University of Albany in New York state. This showed that chimpanzees (and, as subsequently emerged, other great apes) share with humans the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror, whereas monkeys and various other reasonably intelligent species, such as dogs, do not. A few species that are not apes have also passed the mirror test, including elephants and dolphins. But most animals fail it. All the species that have passed have something in common: abnormally large cerebral cortices relative to the rest of their brains. Whether selfawareness simply emerges from a large cortex or whether selection for it necessarily results in one is unclear. 

What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex. An even more obvious discord between reality and perception is colour. The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should, so the retina has cells that are particularly sensitive to three different wavelengths of light, and the brain weaves the signals from them together to create the phenomenon called colour.

For some time we have believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. But one way of interpreting the inner workings of the brain and mind is that it is possible, that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. But the truth, unsatisfactory though it is, is that no one really knows. But one thing we can be sure of is that neuroscience is one area where big concepts almost certainly remain to be discovered. And when they are, they are likely to upend humanity's understanding of itself.

 

 

 

The Future of the Nation State in the 21st Century

Flag Map of the World

The idea of the territorial state’s sovereignty goes back to 1555, when at a meeting in Augsburg called by the warring dynastic rulers desperately seeking an exit or at least a respite from the devastating religious wars tearing the Christian Europe apart coined the formula cuius regio, eius religio (he who rules, determines religion of the ruled). 

 

Sovereignty meant supreme – unconstrained by external interference and indivisible – authority within a territory: Since its inclusion into the political vocabulary the concept of sovereignty referred to a territorially confined state of affairs and territorially fixed entitlements. 

 

Any attempt to meddle with the order of things established by the sovereign on the territory of his rule was therefore illegal, condemnable, a casus belli; the Augsburg formula may be read as much as the founding act of the modern phenomenon of state sovereignty as well as it is read, simultaneously and necessarily, as the textual source of the modern concept of state borders.

It then took almost 100 years more until 1648 when the “Westphalian Sovereignty” agreement was negotiated and signed in Osnabrück and Münster, this allowed the principle recommended by the Augsburg formula to take hold of European social and political reality: a full sovereignty of every ruler on the territory they ruled and over its residents – that is, the ruler’s entitlement to impose “positive” laws of their choice that may override the choices made individually by the subjects, including the choice of God they ought to believe in and must worship.

By a simple expedient of substituting “natio” for “religio”, the mental frame was used to create and operate the (secular) political order of the emergent modern Europe: the pattern of nation-state – that is, of a nation using the state’s sovereignty to set apart “us” from “them” and reserving for itself the monopolistic, inalienable and indivisible right to design the order binding for the country as a whole, and of a state claiming its right to the subjects’ discipline through invoking the commonality of national history, destiny and well-being.

The Westphalian Model in the 21st Century

After the two world wars in the 20th century the Westphalian model of sovereignty was once again the basis on which the Charter of the United Nations was founded - an assembly for the rulers of sovereign states called to collectively monitor, supervise and defend the state of peaceful coexistence. In fact, Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibits attacks on “political independence and territorial integrity”, whereas the article 2(7) sharply restricts the eventuality of an intervention from outside into affairs of a sovereign state. 

 

So far the United Nations is still the closest we have to an idea of a “global political body”. But it clearly has the entrenchment and defence of the Westphalian principle written into its charter.  While many powers (finances, commercial interests, information, drug and weapon trade, criminality and terrorism) have already obtained in practice the freedom to operate on a global level. The absence of global political agencies capable of catching up with the already global reach is held back by the grip of the nation-state and the rhetoric of state sovereignty. We live still in a “post-Westphalian era”. The process of emancipation from the shadows cast by “Westphalian sovereignty” is increasingly protracted.

 

A recent example of this is the fate of euro: the absurdity of a common currency served by seventeen finance ministers, each bound to represent and defend their country’s sovereign rights. The plight of the euro highlights the limits of local (nation-state) politics under pressures coming from two distinct, uncoordinated and thereby not easily reconcilable authoritative centres, the nationally confined electorate and supra-national European institutions, all too often instructed to act at cross-purposes. This is just one of many manifestations of a double bind: the condition of being clenched between the ghost of the Westphalian state sovereignty on one side and the realities of the global, or regional nonetheless supra-national, dependency on the other.

The essential problem of nation-state sovereignty in a global world

During the 17th, 18th and possibly 19th centuries, the nation-state was relatively well attuned to the realities of the time, but the Geo-Trade blog believes this is no longer the case. In the 21st century, our interdependence is already global, whereas our instruments of collective action and will-expression are as before local and resisting extension, infringement and/or limitation.

 

In the 21st century much of the power has evaporated from the nation-state into the supra-national, global space – while politics remains, as before, local: confined to the boundaries of the state’s territorial sovereignty. What we confront therefore is, on one hand, a free-floating power cut off from political supervision and guidance and on the other fixed and territorially-limited politics that in addition is bound to suffer from a perpetual deficit of power. 

 

Hence the essential problem is that the two abilities, power (that is, the ability to have things done), and politics (that is, the ability to decide which things need/ought to be done), conjoined for a few centuries in the institutions of the nation-state, now inhabit, as the result of globalisation processes, two different spaces.

The European Union and the Euro

Euro symbol with 12 EU Stars outside European Central Bank

The view from Asia

Europe plays little strategic role in the Asian region apart from its trade relations. Nevertheless in a globalized world everything is interconnected. Should the euro fail, or the EU break apart, the pain would be felt all over the globe, not least in Asia, where economies are seemingly going from strength to strength.

Interestingly one feature of European politics is very much the envy of many Asian countries: the continent's institutional and procedural framework that allows the countries of Europe to feed their problems, conflicts, and crises into an existing mechanism with established rules to have them fixed. However inefficient and underdeveloped that structure might often seem to Europeans themselves, the fact that Europe has both the EU and NATO is seen as a huge plus. 

 

For Europeans, this view is a big reminder of just how big the achievements of the european integration process really are. To be sure, Europe is flawed in many ways, and the price of being in such a closely-knit union might appear very high at times. But essentially, no one is out there alone. By comparison, in Asia, all existing forums, such as APEC, ASEAN and the like, are more loosely organised with very little binding power. 

 

The loneliness of nations in Asia's un-integrated region, and the insecurity and fear it breeds, should serve as a reminder to Europeans in this crisis of just how valuable the system they have created for themselves is. It should also remind people that underneath the economic narrative that so dominates the European debate at the moment lurks a much deeper story: a story of peace and freedom from fear, and how the European Union was the key to creating both.

What is needed to make the Euro work?

The Euro will not be safe until Europe answers some fundamental questions that it has run away from for many years. At their root is how nations should respond to a world that is rapidlly changing around them. What will it do as globalisation strips Europe and the US of the monopoly over the technologies that have made it rich.

Creditor countries want the thrust to be on national responsibility and penalties for rule breakers. Debtors want mutual solidarity; if not direct transfers from rich to poor then at least Eurobonds to pool debt (the European Commission is currently studying options for this). In short, the eurozone is badly in need of its own "Hamiltonian moment" that is the point when Alexander Hamilton committed the US federal government to assume the debts of the individual states. After the adoption of America’s constitution, Hamilton became treasury secretary. The federal government assumed the war debts of the ex-colonies, issued new national bonds backed by direct taxes and minted its own currency. Hamilton’s new financial system helped transform the young republic from a basket-case into an economic powerhouse.

America in Hamilton’s time was a young, post-revolutionary republic. Its founding fathers had the prestige to refashion the nation to confront military and economic threats. Hamilton’s assumption of state debt was contentious: virtuous states did not think they should pay for lax ones. Allowing speculators to make fortunes from the junk debt they had bought, often from destitute revolutionary warriors, rankled. This all sounds rather familiar. Yet for Hamilton, assuming the debt was a necessary price of liberty. America created political union followed by fiscal union. The reforms of 1789 were followed by a “no-bail-out” policy in 1840 that forced some states into default. The Federal Reserve was set up in 1913 to act as lender of last resort. The 1930s slump led to much-expanded federal spending under Roosevelt. American states are now constrained by balanced-budget rules, but the federal government borrows hugely to bolster demand. But Europe is doing things backwards, creating the euro partly in the hope of fostering political union. So fiscal integration is being pushed not to preserve freedom and a new nation, but to save a failing currency.

The Role of Big European Countries

Restoring Europe to health will take many years. That is because the troubled countries need to control their government deficits and to re-establish sound current accounts by improving their competitiveness. The true test will be in the content of the reforms. Germany will want to replicate its federal system, with more tough fiscal rules and more power for the European Parliament; the French will want a mirror of the Fifth Republic, with joint bonds issued by the euro zone and executive power (and much discretion) left in the hands of leaders.

Interestingly, the German word for debt, Schulden, is the plural of Schuld meaning guilt or default. Germany is firmly opposed to any solution that would imply open-ended transfers to less wealthy southerners; so are several other northern European countries, not least because guaranteeing others may raise their borrowing costs. But the alternative could be the end of the euro. In reality Europe needs to become more like the US which practices seamless fiscal transfers between the rich California-Connecticut-Illinois-New Jersey-New York quintuple and poorer states like Tennessee. If similar, transfers in the form of Medicaid and unemployment insurance were passed on to the weaker peripheral states, the comparable fiscal transfers may look similar to the graphic below:

Whereas the European Union exists – somewhat superficially – as a contractual union, in the United Kingdom, three centuries of shared experience and a common set of values has meant that English voters never questioned why English taxpayers’ money was used to prop up Scottish banks in the recent banking crisis. This essentially is the challenge for the EU to create a similar union in a relatively young Union where nation states remain considerable clout - to create a Union of belonging.

But that still doesn't resolve the big question what does globalisation mean for Europe? Does it mean Europe becoming more like Germany? (Global banking and trade, high productivity, high taxes, high welfare). Or more like say Texas? (Small budget, low pay, poor welfare). Given the shift in relative wealth and cost advantage away from Europe and the US, trying to make France, Spain, Italy and even the UK more like Germany is improbable. Making them like Texas is doable, but at heavy political cost. Austerity seems likely to be with Europe for years to come, on any policy setting. Globalisation alone will not be suffient to increase growth. Strapped as it is Europe embodies liberal and democratic values – respect for persons, a voice for all, some sense of social equity hence maybe the big questions really are: does embracing globalisation mean dropping these tiresome constraints to unfettered economic growth? And can growth alone be counted on to spread and sustain liberal democracy in 21st century?

Dubai's Dragon Mart - selling to the emerging middle classes of the world

Aerial view of the Dragon Mart Shopping Centre, Dubai

Dragon Mart provides an insight into a different world. It is a mall that is 1.2km  long and contains 3,950 shops. Both the shops that fill the mall and the products that fill the shops do not bear US and European familiar brand names as most of the world's shopping malls do. Dragonmart is dedicated to efficiency and cheapness. The China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) has a huge logistics centre next to the mall allowing new goods to be brought straight off the ship from China and wholesale purchases to be exported anywhere in the world.

Who are the customers and what are they buying?

 

To a large extent, the customers are wholesalers and bargain-hunting migrant workers in Dubai. The bargains are attractive, for example, a digital camera for 99 dirhams ($27) or a treadmill for 700 ($190) dirhams.The Dragon Mart may not be everyone's cup of tea, that is, not everyone may be attracted to polyester Persian carpets or plastic executive desks. Many companies specialise in producing cheap imitations of popular US and European brands. Yet Dragon Mart (and its Chinese manufacturers) cannot be dismissed. Dragon Mart caters for what many believe is the world’s most exciting group of consumers, the emerging middle class. The Consultancy Mckinsey estimates that this group could include 2bn people who spend $6.9 trillion a year. These people cannot afford to shop buying expensive branded US and European products, yet they too are seeking the status symbols of middle-class life. For them, many of the goods displayed represent the dream of upward mobility. The below video shows some of the products on offer at the Dubai Dragon Mart.

Dubai Dragon Mart is also evidence of the rebirth of one of the world’s oldest trading routes, the silk road. The old silk road specialised in luxuries like silk. The new silk road specialises in everything, interestingly with a stress on plastic. Furthermore, Dubai boasts two of the most important transport hubs on this road: the world’s ninth-biggest container port and one of its busiest airports. The rebirth of the new silk route will increasingly branch out to the emerging economies of the world by sea and air bringing affordable consumer goods to the new emerging middle classes in the Américas and Africa.

The Rise of Las Américas in the 21st Century

Panamá City Skyline in the 21st Century

The Decade of América Latina

The market orientated reforms of the 1980s and the 1990s combined with several years of commodity-driven prosperity have been transforming América Latina into a region of wealth and prosperity over the last decade. The commodity boom together with more progressive social policies has started to create more dynamic and less unequal societies across the region.

Thanks to the commodity boom and rising revenues, governments have presided over a time of rising incomes for the new emerging middle classes in many countries in América Latina. However the increase in wealth has been occurring against a background of an ideological battle between reformers (mostly liberals and social democrat politicians) and those such as Mr Chávez (Venezuela) and potentially President Christina Kirchner (Argentina) and others of the ALBA grouping who would rather return to the authoritarian and populist past. At present the reformers appear to be winning the debate. This is illustrated below in the Economist's Latinobarómetro published in October 2011. Even so there has been a slight fall in optimism over the last year. This chart clearly shows Panamá with the most ongoing optimistic outlook. 

Latinobarómetro Source: The Economist Oct. 2011

 

What of the northern neighbours – the US

The US, América Latina's northern neighbour on the same continent has so far failed to appreciate the rising importance of América Latina with its expanding market for the north's exports, its huge investment opportunities, its enormous reserves of energy and minerals and its continuing supply of needed labour. However at the same time and despite their recent growth and globalisation, the economies of América Latina still depend on the US for capital, know-how, technology and remittances.

If geography is destiny and the US and América Latina need one another so much, the obvious question is why are the two not pursuing a more joint approach to consolidate their relations in a meaningful way? The answer to this question turns on key policy differences on three main areas. Firstly, immigration, many in América Latina find the idea of building a wall between the México and the US particularly offensive. Secondly, the war on drugs, the North's war on drug trafficking serves mainly to spread corruption, increase criminal violence and generally undermine the rule of law. Finally, the embargo on Cuba imposed by the US is seen as counter-productive and likely to have prolonged the repressive rule of the Castro brothers rather than ending it. However none of these policy issues is easily resolved due to domestic US politics and less so in an election year. Immigration has been a particularly toxic issue in the Republican primaries. To make progress in the war on drugs, the US needs to curb demand for illegal narcotics at home, but US politicians are loathe broach the the idea of decriminalisation. And the Cuba policy is held hostage by the swing state of Florida and its residents of Cuban origen.

Panamá, the Singapore of the Americas

Panamá is the success story of the first decade of the 21st century. Business of all kinds continues to grow, in a land coveted in the late 17th century by the pirate Henry Morgan and occupied since the beginning of the 20th century by the US President Roosevelt, to build the Panamá canal and link the Pacific with the Atlantic on the narrow isthmus. During many decades, the country has served as a hiding place for multiple legal and illegal dealings, from drugs to weapons and political conspiracies and money laundering.

Nevertheless the Panamá of the 21^st century has many feathers to its bow: a chanel, an international banking center, the world's first merchant fleet, a free trade area which is one of the main bases for the collection and re-export of inland freight, an interoceanic railway, seven private ports and dozens of casinos and property developments (as the above picture shows). Panama in 2011 was placed at the head of economic growth in Las Américas, an increase of 10.6pc of GDP, against 9.2pc in 2010, according to the Statistics and Census Institute (INEC) of Panamá which likely explains the optimism in the Latinobarómetro above too. 

But the Elephant in the room is still... la droga

US President Nixon declared the war on drugs 40 years ago, interestingly the front that he opened in 1971 has survived all his successors up until now.

The Presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico were the first to speak out on the failure of the war on drugs, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo respectively. Recently, the current president of Guatemala, Otto Perez, and the former President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, have also spoken out to demand the opening of a debate on the decriminalization of drugs using the legitimacy granted to countries suffering the most tragic consequences of victims of the war on drugs. Honduras topped the global homicide rate, with 82.1 homicides per 100,000 population, followed by El Salvador. México has also been immersed in the drug war for the last six years, with almost 50,000 people dead and the homicide rate has increased by 65% since 2005 according to UN data.
 

The legitimacy of key leaders of América Latina speaking out, coupled with the figures of the dead has forced the US president, Barack Obama, to finally address the issue. In the US in April 2012 Obama said "We recognize our responsibility in this matter and I think it is entirely legitimate to engage in a discussion about whether the laws now in force are laws that perhaps are causing more harm than good in some areas." When Obama spoke, everyone understood: it is time to talk about drugs. The issue that is a constant drag on América Latina has finally reached the international agenda, a further sign of the América Latina's rise. 

 

The Indian Sub-Continent – marked by geography and hinduism

Map of the land mass of the Indian Sub-Continent

It is interesting to note that Indian Sub-Continent has remained, very nearly, the land bordered by the Himalayas to the north, the Indian Ocean to the south and the great rivers the Indus and the Ganges on either side. Many of the modern maps of the Indian Sub-Continent area came from traders travelling to the Moghul empire in the early 16th century. Traders sketched small-scale maps of the India Intra Gangem—the land between the Indus and Ganges rivers as the map below shows along with the earliest civilizations around the Indus River. 

Natural Geographical Features of India

But mapping the Indian Sub-Continent has not been limited to the natural geographical features of the land, in fact, many earlier maps exist of the Indian Sub-Continent were made to mark the lay out of the routes to popular pilgrimage centres known as dhams from as early as the 8th century AD. These maps provide an interesting lens through which to view the Indian Sub-Continent by combining the natural features that delimit the geographical area of the Sub-Continent with the marks that Hinduism has made on the land.

Hinduism in the Indian Sub-Continent

Many of the Hindu pilgrimages have been around for centuries. This point is illustrated by the fact that the land is filled with holy places. There are seven sacred rivers, including the Ganges. On its banks is Varanasi, one of seven holy cities, which itself is guarded by 56 shrines to Ganesha, the popular elephant-headed god. The body of Sati, a goddess, is said to be scattered at 108 sites throughout India. And 12 places across the country claim to have one of Shiva’s jyotirlingas—an immeasurable column of the Hindu god’s light.

Interestingly the word "Hindu" is derived from the name of the river Indus, which flows through northern India. In ancient times the river was called the 'Sindhu', but the Persians who migrated to India called the river 'Hindu', the land 'Hindustan' and its inhabitants 'Hindus'. Hence the religion followed by the Hindus came to be known as 'Hinduism'. According to historians, the origin of Hinduism dates back more than 5000 years. Hinduism is commonly thought to be the oldest religion in the history of human civilization.

 

It is generally believed that the basic tenets of Hinduism were brought to India by the Aryans who settled along the banks of the Indus river about 2000 BC. Hinduism does not have any one founder or any one core doctrine that is used to resolve controversies. Furthermore, it does not require its adherents to accept any one idea. It is marked by an attitude which is able to accommodate many different religious and cultural perspectives other than ones own. It is also characterised by a rich variety of ideas and practices resulting in what appears as a multiplicity of religions under one term 'Hinduism'. 

Perhaps one of the most important legacies of Hinduism is to allow the geographical area of the Indian Sub-Continent with its immense ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity to be joined together.  

New York's Manhattan Grid - a blueprint for the US' biggest city

Aerial view in 21st century of the Manhattan Grid started in 1811

Before it could rise into the sky, Manhattan had to first create the streets, avenues and blocks that would later support the 20th century skyscrapers. In the early 19th century, New York's population was continuing to increase having tripled to 96,373 since 1790 mostly due to the growing port. It was then predicted that 400,000 people would live in the city by 1860. The City planners were entrusted with planning the city in 1811. They proposed a grid for the future city stretching northward from roughly Houston Street to 155th Street in the faraway heights of Harlem as the layout in the photo (above) and map (below) show.

Manhattan Grid Plan

 

The Grid Plan

The grid plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other to form a grid. The Greeks and Romans used City Grids as did the Chinese from 1500 BC onwards. The Chinese Tang 唐 Dynasty laid out their capital city in a grid plan.

The Roman model was also used in Spanish settlements during the exploration of the Americas. In 1573, Felipe II compiled the Laws of the Indies to guide the construction and administration of cities in the Americas. The Laws specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza's corners. The grid plan became popular with the start of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. In 1606, the newly founded city of Mannheim in Germany was the first Renaissance city laid out in the grid plan as the map below shows. 

Mannheim Grid Plan

 

Why use grids?

An inherent advantage of the geometry of a proper grid is its tendency to provide regular building space in well-spaced sequences. This maximises the use of the land of a block without affecting street frequency - any frequency of streets produces the same packing effect. Furthermore geometry also minimises disputes over lot boundaries and maximises the number of lots that can front a given street.

Another important aspect of street grids is that traffic flows of either pedestrians, cars, or both, only cross at right angles. This is an important safety feature, since no one entering the intersection needs to look over their shoulder to see oncoming traffic. Hence the grid is a geometric response to our human physiology. It is highly likely that the original purpose of grid layouts comes from the Athenian Agora where the laying out of market stalls into regularised rows at right angles solved the problem of frequent wagon collisions that occurred when the markets were laid out randomly in a field with traffic approaches at odd angles.

New York's Manhattan Grid

The Manhattan grid plan was a far-reaching, visionary and daring plan to urbanize the geographical limits of the Island of Manhattan.The plan called for a regular grid of streets and property lines without regard to the topography of the island itself. This included numbered avenues running north and south roughly parallel to the shore of the Hudson River. The avenues would begin with First Avenue on the east side and run through Twelfth Avenue in the west. There would also be 155 orthogonal cross streets. 

Interestingly, Manhattan’s grid is not perfectly regular. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street. Some avenues are wider. Broadway cuts diagonally across the north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces (Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Verdi Square). 

New York’s grid has proved flexible enough to adapt when the city’s orientation has shifted north-south, and flexible enough to accommodate the creation of Central Park which interestingly was not a part of the original grid plan. It was not until 1853 that the idea for a large area of green space for leisure activities was envisioned.
 

One of the advantages of the Manhattan city grid is that it makes a complex place instantly navigable. Manhattan invites long walks, because walkers can judge distances easily and always know where they are. In contrast other cities such as London which are formed from historic agglomerations of villages, often include vast stretches of nowhere land as they sprawl in ways that discourage easy comprehension and walking. 

 

Finally, perhaps one of the greatest benefits of the Manhattan grid is that it gives order through physical form to a city filled with a diversity of ideas, concepts and people from so many different places. It is not likely that this is exactly what the original city planners had in mind back when they proposed that the Manhattan Grid should "promote the health of the City" back in 1811.  

Kazakhstan - a booming Central Asian Republic

New Foster designed Entertainment Centre in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital.

The five Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have collectively gained an immense strategic importance over the last two decades, thanks to their geography and vast deposits of natural resources including oil, gas, uranium and gold.

The 16m citizens of the oil-rich Kazakhstan have plenty to be proud of. Growth has averaged 8pc a year for the past decade, a far better performance than the other Central Asian economies. Average income per person is now over $11,000 a year, twice as much as Turkmenistan and six times more than Uzbekistan, which, with 28m people, is the region’s most populous country. This puts Kazakhstan among the ranks of middle-income nations.

Kazakhstan is already the world’s biggest producer of uranium. It is set to join the world’s top ten oil-producing countries, when the giant Kashagan oilfield in the Caspian Sea comes on stream soon. So far the country has managed to balance cleverly between its giant neighbours, Russia and China, and the US and Europe.

But who are the Kazakhs and what of their ancient nomadic culture?

Map of regions of Kazakhstan

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian land area stretching from the Caspian Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.

 

As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. In any case, historical records show that their literate neighbours looked down on the nomads and considered them to be in an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town. But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past. Findings in graves from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that the Kazakhs maintained networks of cultural exchange with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese. 

 

The first US exhibition devoted entirely to the nomadic culture of ancient Kazakhstan opened in March 2012 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in New York. Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan focuses on the people of the Altai and Tianshan Mountain regions, located in the eastern part of the country, from roughly the eighth to first centuries B.C. Featuring around 250 artifacts, the exhibition dispels the notion that nomadic societies were less developed than sedentary ones. Rather, they are revealed to have been highly sophisticated, with strategic migratory routes, active networks of communication and cultural exchange with their neighbors. 

 

Artifacts range from bronze openwork stands, superbly decorated with animal and human figures; to “petroglyphs” or rudimentary drawings, which marked important places in the landscape; to dazzling gold adornments that signified the social status of those who wore them. One of the highlights is the recently excavated, but never-displayed material from a fourth–third century upper-class burial-site in Berel, near the Russian/Chinese border, where permafrost conditions enabled the preservation of organic materials. The exhibition contains some 120 artifacts from this rich site.

Beginning in the third century B.C., Chinese luxury items, like the Wusun diadem, appeared in nomad burials, mainly associated with Han dynasty. According to Chinese accounts, the Wusun nomads may have furthered contacts between Central Asian nomads and Han China, at the time expanding westward and in need of horses in its campaign against borderland rivals. The below video provides more insight on the Central Asian nomads and images from the exhibition.

 

Here come the BRICS 金砖 – the new economic powers in the 21st Century

3rd BRICS Leaders Meeting in 三亚, China, 14 April 2011

4th BRICS Leaders Meeting in New Delhi, India, 29-30 March 2012

In 2011 the BRIC Group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became BRICS with the addition of South Africa. The BRIC concept, conceived in 2001 by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, was embraced by the four original countries in 2008, when their foreign ministers met on the sidelines of a Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral meeting. The addition of Brazil paved the way for the first BRIC summit in 2009

21st  Century economic powers

The BRICS economies are likely to be the most important source of future global growth. They represent more than a quarter of the Earth’s landmass, over 41pc of its population, almost 25pc of world GDP, and nearly half of all foreign-exchange and gold reserves. In 2030, of the world’s four largest economies, three will be BRICS countries. This has important implications for the developed countries in Europe and the US. For example, you cannot solve climate change without the BRICS. You cannot deal with global financial instability effectively without the BRICS. Even if the BRICS are unable to find common ground on a certain topic, it is likely that their views will strongly influence the attempt to find solutions.

The big challenge for the BRICS

The challenge at the moment for the BRICS is to articulate a common vision that will show the rest of the world that it is a powerful alliance. One of the biggest challenges it faces is to think outside of the box and to consider new ideas and to create something that doesn’t yet exist and doesn’t fall apart as soon as a bilateral problem comes up. There are very few powerful alliances in the world without any European or American participation. In this sense the BRICS is unique.

If the BRICS were able to speak with one voice on any issue in global affairs, they would immediately turn into an agenda-setter and a very powerful voice that neither the US nor Europe could ignore. They would provide a serious alternative to the established powers narrative in how to view the world. The US control of the public discourse globally is still quite strong because the emerging countries have not yet articulated an alternative vision.

 

How homogeneous are the BRICS

The BRICS were basically three countries (China, Russia and India) that were part of the Eurasian land mass plus Brazil which is geographically very far away from Eurasia. Russia, India and China have a lot of common history and have known each other for a long time meaning that, until South Africa joined, Brazil was a bit of the odd man out. Therefore the inclusion of South Africa has helped the BRICS become more of a global brand, capable of representing more continents and has also helped Brazil feel less excluded.

For Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa, the BRICS grouping serves as a forum to underscore their rising economic strength and showcase their emergence as global players. But, for China, which is already recognised as a rising world power, the BRICS offers tangible – not just symbolic – benefits. Consequently, China is seeking, for example, to bring to birth a new common development bank that can help to mobilise savings between the BRICS countries. This proposal will be discussed at the New Delhi meeting this week. The Geo-Trade Blog will follow developments on the proposed new bank.

In terms of Brazil, the Brazilian Government continues to focus on its own region. There is strong acknowledgement in Brazil that it will always be part of the Americas region and that the economic and political ties with that region will always be a priority. Hence under the Rousseff and Lula administrations, the Government has sought to balance the BRICS with the US and other regional groupings such as MERCOSUR. 

 

Furthermore, China has shown itself so far to be a status quo power with respect to the UN system, it opposes enlargement of the Security Council’s permanent membership. It wishes to remain Asia’s sole country with a permanent seat – a stance that places it at odds with India. 

 

Finally how important economically are the BRICS at present

To get some idea of the magnitude of the BRICS compared with overall world exports. Trade within BRICS rose 15 fold from 2001-2010 to $230bn, a big rise of 28pc annual growth but in world terms this volume is still modest when compared with overall world exports in 2011 that amounted to $17.8trn.