Globalaffairs

Issue 16/ August-September 2009
by Andrea Bonzanni

At a summit in Ankara on 13 July, the Nabucco consortium stroke an unexpected yet very important deal, securing gas supplies from Iraq and convincing Turkey to give up its project of buying 15% of the gas transiting on Turkish territory. The reaction of European media and the international networks has been mixed and it fluctuates with indecisiveness between the jubilant comments of politicians (Barroso declared that the project is now “inevitable, rather than just probable”) and the calmer statements of industry analysts.

Launched in 2002 by five gas companies (OMV of Austria, MOL of Hungary, Bulgargaz of Bulgaria, Transgaz of Romania and BOTAŞ of Turkey) [1] and officially backed by the European Union and the United States, the project has surely accomplished a giant leap forward and its completion has never been closer. However, as the declared objective of the pipeline running from Eastern Turkey to the Baumgarten hub in Austria is to reduce European dependence on Russian gas and to finally guarantee security of energy supplies, a lot more must be done and the construction of Nabucco may not even be the priority.

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Issue 15 / June-July 2009
By Aurora M. Alcojor

For years there has been much ado about the global importance of limited natural resources such as fossil fuels and coltan and how their importance influences geopolitical maneuvering of world powers, their leaders and their wars. But what would happen if at the end of the day all we managed to maneuver was land for cultivating the food that people need for basic survival?

From the time that Thomas Robert Malthus published his Principle of Population in the 18th century pointing out that population growth generally preceded expansion of the population’s resources, in particular the primary resource of food, research has proven to the contrary showing that the Earth is sufficiently capable of accommodating all her inhabitants and that scientific advances in agriculture allow us to achieve sustainable crop levels. The real question-and the one that always begs to be asked-is: at what cost?

While it’s obviously possible to grow life-sustaining crops on the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia’s leaders want to know if it’s economically viable. Of course they can easily import cheap food from other countries, but what happens when these “cheap” imports suddenly increase 78% in price, just like they did in the first half of 2008? That’s a question that leaders of smaller, hyper populated countries like Japan and South Korea want to know.

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