By Alan Beattie, the FT’s world trade editor

“Food security”: one of those infinitely malleable concepts, now to be defined at a UN summit next week. Does it mean self-sufficiency? No, say companies that make lots of money shipping food. Yes, up to a point, say governments with truculent subsidy-guzzling farmers to placate. (The whispering voice of self-interest can be very persuasive.) Meanwhile no doubt the GMO people will say food security means lots more biotech, the greenies will say it’s all to do with the environment and everyone will leave the Rome summit after a frank, robust and (ahem) fruitless exchange of views. If only warm words were edible.

As for all this money supposedly needed (and now apparently going) for agricultural development aid, I must say I’m a touch suspicious, since 1. money is fungible; 2. earmarking assistance for a particular purpose has rightly been going out of fashion in any case. Relabelling existing aid has been raised to such a high art it could almost qualify for a cultural subsidy itself. Continue reading "Food security: Feeling insecure?"

A writer who projects emotions on to the weather is guilty of the “pathetic fallacy”. But, at the risk of sounding both pathetic and fallacious, it was entirely appropriate that the sky darkened and the thunder cracked as I approached the office of the Latvian prime minister in Riga last week. The gloomy atmosphere reflected the dark mood in a small, embattled country of 2.2m people. While business headlines in the rest of the world speak of clearing skies and rays of sunshine, the Baltic states are still in the midst of a howling economic gale.

Despite the region’s small size, the intensifying crisis in the Baltics cannot be treated as a freakish local squall of little concern to outsiders. Bank failures or plunging currencies in the three Baltic nations – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – could threaten the fragile prospect of recovery in the rest of Europe. These countries also sit on one of the world’s most sensitive political fault-lines. They are the European Union’s frontier states, bordering Russia.

The economic downturns in the region are shocking. Last week, Lithuania announced that its economy had shrunk by 22.4 per cent, at an annual rate, during the second quarter of 2009. Latvia and Estonia are likely to record similar falls when they announce their figures. Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president, told me last week that her country might have to apply to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Latvia has already trodden that path. Last week it agreed its second loan in eight months from the IMF and the EU.

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Most days I get an e-mail informing me that somebody or other is “now following you on Twitter!” I find this slightly baffling, since I hardly ever tweet – that is, broadcast my every thought and deed to the world, using 140 characters or fewer. I tried Twitter out on the night of the US presidential election in November and did not like it much. One of my very last tweets was: “This is possibly the most moronic form of journalism I have ever done.” Since then, I have fallen largely silent.

But now I am having to rethink my disdain. Twitter is the most fashionable political medium of the moment, widely hailed for the role it played in allowing Iranian demonstrators to stay in touch with each other and avoid censorship. The US state department was so impressed by the role the microblogging service was playing it asked Twitter to delay an update that would have taken it off air. A headline in the Los Angeles Times summarised the conventional wisdom when it roared: “Tyranny’s new nightmare: Twitter”.

Even before Iran, Twitter was becoming increasingly trendy. Everybody from Senator John McCain to Britain’s Foreign Office was tweeting. The whole phenomenon has made me belatedly accept that the most important and profound political messages can, in fact, usually be encapsulated in 140 characters.

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There was a moment, a few months ago, when sensible people in rich countries were considering pulling all their money out of the bank, buying gold ingots and hiding them under the bed. But now that the panic has passed, something less frightening and rather bleaker is beckoning. Welcome to the politics of austerity.

Across the developed world, unemployment, public debt and taxes are rising. When the global economic crisis first hit, it was natural to assume that the poorer and more recent democracies would be most vulnerable to a political backlash. Without the accumulated wealth or the welfare systems to cushion the blow, their populations looked vulnerable. Most countries in central Europe or Latin America only made the transition to democracy in the 1980s, so authoritarian nasties might still be lurking in the shadows.

But perhaps we are looking for trouble in the wrong places. It could be that it will be the richer democracies, such as Britain and the US, that find it most difficult to adapt to the politics of austerity.

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“Everything I say is a lie” has long been a favourite puzzle for philosophy students. But it took a Hungarian politician to turn a logical conundrum into a political strategy. Ferenc Gyurcsány’s admission in 2006 to a closed session of the Hungarian Socialist party that he had “lied morning, noon and night” to win the election, was swiftly leaked. It provoked riots in Hungary.

Amazingly Mr Gyurcsány managed to soldier on as prime minister and only stepped down a couple of months ago. But Hungary, a country of just 10m people, now faces an economic and social crisis so deep that its fate is being watched with interest and alarm from Washington to Brussels.

At the Group of 20 leading nations’ summit in London last month, the country’s name was whispered in the corridors, as world leaders scanned the horizon for the next stage of the global economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund had put together a rescue package for Hungary last October – but many feared it would not be enough. Barack Obama, the US president, even spoke out, warning Americans in March to ensure that “problems that exist in emerging markets like Hungary or Ukraine don’t have these enormous ripple effects that wash back on to our shores”. (This statement was greeted with a certain irritation in Hungary, where many are under the impression that their economy is underwater because of a tidal wave that started from American shores.)

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“I will never apologise for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” President George H.W. Bush’s statement in 1988 was more than just a “Bushism”, of the sort that his son later made famous. It was also a pithy summary of a whole school of thought in the US.

For many conservative Americans, one of the besetting sins of their liberal rivals is a tendency to go around apologising for their country. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative, memorably excoriated liberals as the “blame America first” crowd.

Now conservatives are complaining loudly that one of those namby-pamby, self-flagellating liberals is sitting in the Oval Office – abasing himself and the country before foreigners. President Barack Obama, they complain, has turned himself into “global apologiser-in-chief”. Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of conservative talk radio, rages that “everywhere he goes, he’s just apologising for the United States”.

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“The British people had given up on socialism. The 30-year experiment had plainly failed – and they were ready to try something else.”

So mused Margaret Thatcher on the eve of her first general election victory on May 3 1979. But as we approach the 30th anniversary this weekend of the Iron Lady’s arrival in Downing Street, many British people have concluded that once again “a 30-year experiment” has “plainly failed”. This time, however, it is the experiment with Thatcherism.

The closing of the Thatcher era is an event of global significance. Many of the policies pioneered by her government in Britain were copied in the rest of the world: privatisation, deregulation, tax cutting, the abolition of exchange controls, an assault on the power of the trade unions, the celebration of wealth creation rather than wealth redistribution.

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Europeans have long worshipped Barack Obama from afar. Now the beloved one is paying his first visit as US president to the old continent. Yet there is every indication that Europe’s leaders are about to stiff him.

Mr Obama is on a rapid-fire tour that will take him from the Group of 20 meeting in London to a Nato summit in Strasbourg, then on to a US-European Union meeting in Prague and, finally, a state visit in Turkey. But he will be lucky to return from Europe with much more than commemorative photos and some presents for the kids. (“I went to the G20 summit in London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”)

If you look at Mr Obama’s top priorities, you get a sense of just how little the Europeans are prepared to give him. More help in Afghanistan? Most Europeans will do the bare minimum. A co-ordinated fiscal stimulus? Sorry, Europe is out of cash as well as troops.

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