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Ed Webb

Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before. Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons sales in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year — down considerably from the $10.8 billion in weapons deals signed by Moscow in 2007.
  • The United States was the leader not only in arms sales worldwide, but also in sales to nations in the developing world, signing $29.6 billion in weapons agreements with these nations, or 70.1 percent of all such deals.The study found that the larger arms deals concluded by the United States with developing nations last year included a $6.5 billion air defense system for the United Arab Emirates, a $2.1 billion jet fighter deal with Morocco and a $2 billion attack helicopter agreement with Taiwan. Other large weapons agreements were reached between the United States and India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Korea and Brazil.
  • The top buyers in the developing world in 2008 were the United Arab Emirates, which signed $9.7 billion in arms deals; Saudi Arabia, which signed $8.7 billion in weapons agreements; and Morocco, with $5.4 billion in arms purchases.
Ed Webb

Mali rebels melt away in face of French advance | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Western governments have treated the problem of growing Islamist extremism across North Africa as one of "terrorism". David Cameron has talked of an "existential struggle", warning it will take decades to defeat.But in reality, the rebels' earlier successes had less to do with hardline jihadist doctrine than with organised crime and drug smuggling. There is strong evidence, moreover, of collusion between the previous and possibly current Mali government and radical Islamist groups.In recent years, western nations have secretly paid millions of dollars in ransom to various Al-Qaida-allied factions for the release of kidnapped nationals. Since 2008, around 50 westerners have been abducted in the region. Eleven are still being held. The biggest beneficiary of this lucrative industry has undoubtedly been AQIM.It is this western cash – $40m to $65m since 2008 – that has enabled AQIM and other factions to capture the north. They bought weapons, especially after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi, and political allies. The weapons facilitated their capture of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu; the Malian army fled in disarray.
  • Since 2005-7, South American drug cartels have been using west Africa as a major transit route. Typically, the drugs arrive in small, dysfunctional west African coastal states, such as Guinea or Guinea Bissau, and are then shipped overland across the Sahel and Sahara to Europe. The route goes through Morocco, Algeria and Libya, often using ancient camel trails.
  • "It would be difficult for the [Mali] government to fully pursue AQIM, as there were a number of powerful and well-connected individuals who were profiting from Al-Qaida's smuggling activities."
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  • For now, France is winning. But destroying a couple of AQIM bases and driving the rebels from Mali's northern cities is the easy bit. The challenge will be holding on to the territory against a nebulous and cunning foe and, perhaps, somehow incorporating the rebels into a lasting political solution. That won't be easy.
Ed Webb

'Five years ago there was nothing': inside Duqm, the city rising from the sand | Cities... - 0 views

  • a long line of plans stretching back to the 1980s aimed at developing and populating barren parts of Oman. Around 70% of the country’s population resides within a thin 150-mile-long coastal strip in the north near Muscat. The government now sees its hundreds of miles of unused coastline as full of economic potential.
  • “Duqm is a huge industrial city being built out of thin air,” says Manishankar Prasad, a local researcher who worked on the new city’s environmental and cultural impact assessments. “It will essentially change the locus of industrial activity from the northern parts of the country, which are heavily urbanised. [Having this] huge geographical expanse with this sparse population and no industrial activity is really not the way forward.”
  • We are in the midst of an era of new cities – with more than 200 currently under construction. Remote deserts all over east Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa are being urbanised. There’s Nurkent in Kazakhstan, Aylat in Azerbaijan, New Kabul City in Afghanistan, New Baghdad in Iraq, Rawabi in Palestine, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, New Cairo in Egypt … Morocco has nine new cities in the works, and Kuwait has 12.
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  • Oman is desperate to diversify away from its oil and gas dependency. Research by the US Energy Information Administration puts Oman’s known crude oil reserves at 5.6bn barrels. While this is only enough to rank the country 21st in the world, its economy is disproportionately dependent: oil and gas accounts for nearly half of the country’s GDP, 70% of exports and between 68% and 85% of government revenue.
  • “Several dozen new cities are being constructed in the Middle East, mainly to transition away from the petroleum industry to a variety of other industries, including tourism, manufacturing, education and hi-tech,” says Dr Sarah Moser, a McGill University geography professor and author of an upcoming atlas of new cities.
  • Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea near the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf – and the world’s most glaring oil supply chokepoint. Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil currently flows through this passage, ever prone to disruption. If the Duqm project succeeds, the shipping industry would be able to dock at the gates of the Middle East without needing to go all the way inside.
  • attracted the attention of Beijing’s much heralded Maritime Silk Road. More than three-quarters of Oman’s crude oil exports go directly to China.
  • While Duqm was never very densely populated, around 3,000 Bedouin – mostly fishermen and semi-nomadic herders – called the area home before the bulldozers arrived. These villages have now been demolished and the Oman government has built a new, modern town for them to relocate to. The houses look as if they were copied and pasted from Muscat – bright, white buildings two storeys high with garages and ornate gateways. There is a mosque in the centre. The houses stand empty. The local Bedouin prefer their traditional way of life – and want space to keep camels.
Ed Webb

To Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the World Will Have to Think Local - 1 views

  • the post-World War II architecture is reaching its structural limits. In particular, it is incompatible with the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which are 17 objectives designed to bring sustainable development to every part of the world—notably the world’s developing nations and, in particular, the world’s least-developed countries. The new goals include completely eliminating global extreme poverty, managing sustainable production and consumption cycles, ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls, and strengthening resilience and adaptivity to hazards tied to climate change.
  • the current global financial architecture centers on sovereign states, with international credit and the benefits of such credit—notably the ability to raise capital in order to fund projects, including infrastructure—tending to flow to countries rather than to the neediest local communities themselves.
  • even if international donors and investors encourage better national governance, and they should, funding for local projects still competes, often unfavorably, with national government priorities—such as national defense, foreign affairs operations, government salaries, and national budget deficits
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  • In the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, local communities are almost always the lead development actor. In fact, a deeper examination of the goals’ underlying targets shows that almost 65 percent of them are supposed to be implemented by local governments. And yet the global financial architecture does not operate on that basis.
  • Around 80 percent of global GDP is already being generated in cities, while 68 percent of the total global population will be made up of urban residents by 2050, according to World Bank data
  • of the 1.4 billion-person increase in population projected to occur within developing countries by 2030, 96 percent are expected to live in urban areas. And 30 of the world’s 35 most rapidly growing cities are in the least-developed countries.
  • Relative to national governments, local governments are singularly positioned to advance projects to address climate change, including infrastructure projects for climate adaptation and resilience: They have the clearest understanding of local needs, they are able to convene local stakeholders to democratize the creation of a climate action plan, for example, and they can pass appropriate policies in much easier fashion than central governments.
  • cities are stuck between hoping that more money trickles down from the central government or accessing international credit. But in a nation-centric system, the second is often impossible
  • Under this nation-centric architecture, national debt determines whether cities can access international credit almost regardless of that city’s own debt profile
  • In Bangladesh, when cities were graded for credit at the local level, over a third of them attained a rating that was above investment grade. Yet those ratings make no difference, because Bangladeshi capital markets are not accessible by municipalities. The same is true for many cities in developing and least-developed countries, such as Kenya, Morocco, Botswana, and Indonesia.
  • between now and 2050, the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to more than triple, reaching approximately 1.3 billion people. Yet, barring fundamental changes, the region will likely lack the levels of capital investment necessary to finance development to support this population growth—including investment in infrastructure and urban planning, as well as commercial and residential real estate. If financing is not able to reach the local level, this will practically assure that the rise in urbanization in this part of the world, as well as others, will coincide with a rise in poverty—especially urban poverty and the growth of slums and unplanned communities—and its attendant consequences.
  • Urban areas can leverage their new capability and financial strength to help rural areas access international credit, whether by creating a pooled fund where urban and rural areas can issue a single bond or by collectively accessing thematic funds that focus on specific interests like climate change, women’s economic empowerment, or financial inclusion.
  • an independent municipal investment fund that will exclusively focus on delivering investment to local projects, notably in developing countries and particularly in the least-developed countries—the creation of which was supported by the United Nations Capital Development Fund, United Cities and Local Governments (an umbrella organization for local and regional governments around the world), and the Global Fund for Cities Development (their technical partner). The hope is that the successful investments will create demonstration effects that will incentivize public and private lenders to expand financing of the municipal finance space.
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