Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

At the summit meeting that opens in Italy on Wednesday, the leaders of the G8 are expected to announce a food security initiative—an effort to reverse “the tendency of decreasing official development aid to agriculture” and, instead, to increase investment in food production in the developing world. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Washington spends 20 times more on short-term food aid in Africa than it does on long-term agricultural programs to develop local food production. A similar bias exists in the policies of the European Union, which uses the guise of food aid to dump production surpluses in developing nations. Nothing may come of the new promises, as nothing came of the big hoo-ha at the G8 summit four years ago when a massive increase in aid, especially to Africa, was agreed upon. But long-term investment in food production is just what poorer countries need. Most of the world’s poor live in the rural backwaters of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; most are small farmers or landless farm workers. Despite the cries in 2007-08 when world food prices suddenly shot up to historic highs, there was actual benefit, albeit long term, for the global poor. Last summer's price spike was a long-overdue correction in the terms of trade. For too long, the world's urban minority (whether they be shanty-town dwellers in Lagos or the inhabitants of middle-class suburb in Mumbai) has been subsidized by the cheap food produced by the poorest of the poor—those left behind in the remote reaches of the countryside. For the majority of the world's rural poor, there exist far too few schools, agricultural advisers, or health clinics; a lack of investment has not even fixed the rutted roads and battered trucks that bring their produce to market. I was in the Nigerian countryside in 2007, as prices were beginning to skyrocket. The peasants I talked to, who were largely growing the local staple crop, cassava, were happy about the turn in events. It meant they could sell their produce at a substantially higher price than before. They planned to expand their seeding the following year, and have done so, though prices have now fallen. Fortunately for the farmers, the prices have not yet hit bottom.

The irony—and the tragedy—is that the solution to the Arab-Israeli problem has been known for the last 40 years. Always, the answer is the same, as shown in the following commentary from The Economist in May 2007: “To arrive at peace, Israel would have to give up the West Bank and share Jerusalem; the Palestinians would have to give up their dream of the right of return and assure the security of Israel as a Jewish state. All the rest is detail.”

There is one detail that should be added to this tableau: the settlement must be accompanied by an international security force, including American and European troops. It would be unthinkable, given Israel’s territorial exiguity, that an international force run by troops from the West would not remain for many years in order to protect against Arab irredentism and Israeli expansionism.

Allowing the Palestinians to return to Israel, even in small numbers, would have a harmful effect on the state of Israel and on the future of that country. Just as the Germans are not going to return to East Prussia, and Mexico is not going to retake California, the Palestinians should not expect to return inside the armistice lines concluded as a result of the 1948–49 War.

The Six Day War of June 1967 constituted a clear break in American policy towards Israel. Before then, American aid to Israel was not excessive. Afterward, the situation was completely reversed, notably in the War of 1973 when the United States, faced with a desperate situation in Israel, sent in extremis and in plain sight a massive resupply of arms and ammunition into Lod Airport, in Tel Aviv, putting paid to the already tattered image of American even-handedness in the Middle East.

For Israel too, 1967 constituted a break with the past.

These days, throughout northern Wayne County, PA, farmers are talking less about livestock and dairy prices and more about Norwegian oil policy, Devonian geology, market capitalization, and seismic thumper trucks. Wayne County sits atop part of the enormous Marcellus Shale gas field, and each farmer is looking at a small fortune in future leasing royalties and bonuses. They are also in the process of solving a problem that has stumped the World Bank, the United Nations, and governments around the world. The problem is the so-called resource curse. Usually, when countries discover oil, gas, or minerals, most nationalistic governments in the developing world seek to keep all the wealth that comes from such extraction by claiming exclusive rights to everything below the topsoil. Instead of economic development, what they get is corruption, environmental destruction, violent conflict, a worsening economy, and hoards of angry local people. The resource curse’s current poster child is Nigeria, where corrupt government officials—on all levels—stole hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands died from ethnic conflict and environmental devastation in the oil-producing zones, and the majority of people throughout the country live on less than $1 a day. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Map of the Marcellus Shale"][/caption] In Wayne County (as elsewhere in the United States), it’s the locals who will decide the terms of how the gas is extracted from the ground. Here, the farmers who have farmed the land for generations formed a collective bargaining group, hired lawyers and environmental consultants, and are negotiating with several gas companies on the financial details and the local environmental risks. Drilling for oil or gas has a long, ugly record of contaminating land and water—a potential catastrophe since this area is an aquifer for New York City and Philadelphia. So, many newly arrived former city dwellers in Wayne County are, at best, doubtful and are demanding that regulatory commissions provide even broader environmental protections. They point to people in central Pennsylvania and in the West who signed bad leases and found themselves with environmental nightmares like noise pollution, ruined land, contaminated water supplies, and leaky holding pools full of toxic chemicals.