Mexican telecommunications titan Carlos Slim Helu now tops Forbes’ list of world’s richest people, with a net worth of $53.5 billion.
For the second time since 1995, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ name was not at the top of the list. Gates came in second with a net worth of $53.0 billion.
Icelanders vote in a referendum on Saturday on a $5 billion deal to repay Anglo-Dutch loans, with an expected resounding “No” set to further delay foreign aid and hopes for economic recovery. Despite the consequences of rejecting the standing deal, Icelanders are angry about what they see as harsh repayment terms from Britain and the Netherlands and they are now certain they can get a much better deal. The referendum looks like a one-way bet with no political parties backing the deal agreed in late 2009, not even Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir who brokered the agreement.
Sigurdardottir has vowed to stay on after the near certain referendum defeat and said that a quick solution to the Icesave saga was “a matter of life or death for the Icelandic economy.”
“The bill is literally an ‘orphaned’ law since there is nobody fighting for it,” she told reporters on Friday, adding that “it is quite clear it will be rejected.”
Britain and the Netherlands have offered easier terms, so there is no reason for voters to back the old deal.
“It’s of utmost importance that we don’t over-interpret whatever message comes out of this. We want to be perfectly clear that a ‘No’ vote does not mean we are refusing to pay,” Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson told reporters.
“We will honor our obligations. To maintain anything else is highly dangerous for the economy of this country.”
Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphethinsson told Reuters that he expected a new Icesave deal “in the next weeks, perhaps sooner. The economy minister said a several month delay would shave 2-3 points off GDP in 2010.
Venting Anger
The ballot gives Icelanders, who have lost 30 percent of their disposable income since 2007, an opportunity to vent anger at the bankers and politicians in Reykjavik who they blame for the island’s meltdown.
In the referendum, Iceland’s 230,000 voters will be asked whether to approve a deal on paying money back to Britain and the Netherlands, after they compensated savers in their countries who had lost money in Icesave accounts.
Sigurdardottir said Britain and the Netherlands were holding Iceland “hostage” by linking the Icesave issue to Reykjavik receiving the next tranche of aid from the International Monetary Fund. With the cash in its coffers, Iceland would be able to open its borders to capital flows that feed investments.
The Icesave debt amounts to more than $15,000 for every one of Iceland’s 320,000 people, though most of the money is likely to be raised eventually by the sale of assets of Landsbanki, which operated Icesave accounts before folding late in 2008.
The Icesave row with the two European Union countries has also rekindled anti-EU sentiment at a time when Brussels has invited Reykjavik to begin accession negotiations.
Support for membership has been falling in past months and is now opposed by more than half of Icelanders, nearly twice the level seen just after the 2008 collapse.
From Raw Story:
Prolific Mexican politician and intellectual Jorge Castañeda believes that a greater North American community — a “North American Union” — with economies tied together under a European Union-style system, complete with open borders and a unified currency, is the wave of the future.
In a new interview with Web site BigThink.com, Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000-2003 and a global distinguished professor of politics at New York University, said that with nearly 11 percent of Mexicans living in the United States, he has stopped seeing his nation as a Latin American country.
“Well, my sense is that we’re moving closer and closer to forms of economic integration with the United States and Canada and conceivably Central America and Caribbean could become part of that in the coming years,” he said. “I don’t see Mexico as a Latin American country. Too much of trade, investment, tourism, immigration, remittances, absolutely everything is concentrated exclusively with the United States. So, Mexico has to be part of a North American community, a North American union, which at some point probably should include some type of monetary union along European lines with a free flow of labor, with energy being on the table, etc.”
Often demonized as some type of “conspiracy theory” in mainstream American press, the so-called North American Union proposals have actually existed for some time. In May of 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled “Building a North American Community” in which it calls for an EU-like integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico.
While the document does not specifically call for the ceding of sovereignty between the three nations — as some vocal opponents of the idea have suggested — it does recommend the formation of a North American Advisory Council and a multinational inter-parliamentary group to facilitate mutual cooperation. Though the group originally set out to achieve this goal by 2010, few in mainstream America are even aware of it today.
The CFR’s full proposal is available online. [PDF link]
“Economic and social citizenship in North America implies the ability of citizens to exert pressure for the implementation of an inclusive economic policy at home and to be engaged in the international economy,” wrote CFR member Carlos Heredia. “To the extent that citizens of the three partner countries see that North American integration brings concrete benefits, a new constituency will be galvanized to support these efforts in the years to come.”
“How far away are we from that?” Castañeda asked, rhetorically. “Quite far, but so did it seem back in Europe in the 1950’s and very little time later they came around and understood that that was their future lay. My sense is that the Mexican society is voting with its feet. We have a higher share of Mexicans living in the United States than we have ever had in our history. One out of every nine Mexicans, Mexican citizens, people born in Mexico, live in the United States today.”
In recent weeks, Castañeda also appeared on CNN’s Amanpour for a debate about the drug war. He explained that in his view, marijuana should be legalized in order to take away the drug cartels’ primary revenue source. However, “we can’t do it in Mexico if the U.S. doesn’t do it at the same time,” he said.
Speaking to BigThink, he carried a similar message.
“Having recklessly plunged the country into [the drug war] now, I think what Calderón and the United States should do is to sort of sit back for a second, think this through, see what they really want to achieve, what is achievable and what should be done that’s new,” he said. “For example, there are more and more states in the US that are moving towards decriminalization at least of marijuana. Mexico is still a very important producer of marijuana. Some people say that up to 60 percent of the profits of Mexico’s cartels come from marijuana. Well, if the United States or California’s de facto legalizing it through medical marijuana, what sense does it make for Mexicans to die to stop marijuana from entering the US when once it enters it can be sold legally at over 1,000 dispensaries in Los Angeles, more than the number of public schools there are in Los Angeles. That’s certainly one thing that we can do.”
Mexicans abroad are sending less money home to their families as a result of the global financial downturn and rising unemployment levels. These remittances are the country’s second largest source of foreign currency — after oil sales- – and their rapid decline has hit the Mexican economy particularly hard.
More background from CBS News:
Money sent home by Mexicans abroad plunged a record 15.7 percent in 2009 as migrants worldwide struggled to find work during the global economic slowdown, the central bank reported Wednesday.
Remittances – Mexico’s No. 2 source of foreign income after oil exports – totaled $21.2 billion in 2009, compared with $25.1 billion in 2008, the bank said.
Since the bank began tracking remittances in 1996, it has recorded just one other annual decline – a 3.6 percent decrease in 2008, as the world financial crisis exploded.
Central bank president Agustin Carstens attributed the latest drop to the weak economy in the United States and the increased difficulty Mexicans are having securing employment there. More than 11.8 million Mexicans live in the U.S.
Carstens said a 1.3 percent uptick in remittances in December, compared to the previous month, gave some hope for a recovery.
“It is just one figure, but it could indicate the beginning of a relative stabilization in the drop in remittances, and it would be congruent with the fact that economic activity in the United States is about to go from negative to positive,” Carstens said.
An analyst was less optimistic, saying that employment levels in the United States “remain very bad” and remittances to Mexico will probably continue to decline through the first half of 2010 when compared to the same period of 2009.
“It is important to remember that many Mexicans are employed in very volatile sectors that remain depressed, like construction, manufacturing, restaurants,” said Hector Rodriguez, a researcher at the Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey.
Experts blame a crackdown on illegal immigration that has stemmed the flow of those heading north to seek work as well as the U.S. recession, in which many Mexicans, especially construction workers, have been laid off.
Mexico receives the largest amount of remittances in Latin America and the third largest in the world, after India and China. The country was also the hardest hit in Latin America by the U.S. economic slump with a drop of about 7 percent in Mexico’s GDP.
While remittances represent less than 4 percent of GDP, their decline is being felt in towns across Mexico, where lines at Western Union counters have all but disappeared. New businesses financed by migrant money are no longer opening and construction has stopped on homes that have been built in stages as cash arrived from those working abroad.
In the first part of the decade, Mexico’s remittances grew rapidly – from $9 billion in 2001 to $26 billion in 2007 – because of swelling migration and better record-keeping.
On January 19th, Ambassador Carolina Barco of Colombia addressed an audience at NDN and the New Policy Institute about advancements in Colombia and progress in their relationship with the United States.
The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.
There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.
The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.
The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.
“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.
According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.
“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.
She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don’t run away or move.”
There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.
Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.
Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.
About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.
Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich warns easy money and stimulative policies may be creating the next global economic bubbles. He speculates that the two most worrisome candidates within the next year are commodities and China.
Is the U.S. economy showing signs of recovery, as some indicators suggest, or are these assertions dangerously premature?
Having served in three administrations, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is uniquely positioned to share his take on the 2010 economic outlook for California, the U.S., and the rest of the world in this year’s annual installment of the Walter E. Hoadley Economic Forecast. – Commonwealth Club
Robert Reich is professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He served in three national administrations; his articles appear frequently in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he is a commentator for American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” heard on NPR.
The Empathic Civilization is the first book to explore how empathetic consciousness restructures the ways we organize our personal lives, approach knowledge, pursue science and technology, conduct commerce and governance, and orchestrate civil society. The development of this empathetic consciousness is essential to creating a future where we think and behave like the whole world matter.
Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. One of the most popular social thinkers of our time, Rifkin is the bestselling author of The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work.
This lecture is part of the @Google series of talks and took place on January 25, 2010.
Global food demand will double between now and 2050 as the world’s population reaches 9.2 billion.
How can the increased demand for food be met in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner?
The Panelists
William H. Gates III, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USA
Ellen Kullman, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, DuPont, USA
Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of Vietnam; Chair, 2010 ASEAN
Patricia A. Woertz, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), USA; Co-Chair of the Governors Meeting for Consumer Industries 2010; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010
This panel is moderated by Prannoy Roy, Chairman, New Delhi Television (NDTV), India.
Economist Felix Salmon of Reuters has a compelling article based on a conversation with Dan Barber, a leader in the locavore movement and the chef of the Blue Hill Farm.
Every so often at Davos you have a short, startling conversation which completely changes the way you think about a subject — and I just had one of those standing next to Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill Farm. He’s a very smart, very funny guy, who’s passionate about food on every level from preparing the ingredients of the dishes in his restaurants to the logistics of feeding the planet.
I bumped into Barber as we were milling around the Davos conference center, waiting for the panel on “rethinking how to feed the world” to begin. I asked him what he thought of the food in Switzerland; he compared in unfavorably to what he was fed by the airline on the way over here. “I haven’t seen a vegetable since Thursday,” he added, looking a bit overwhelmed by the number of things that the Swiss seem to be able to do with bread, cheese, and bit of veal.
When the panel started, I could almost see the steam coming out of Barber’s ears. It featured two heads of state; two agribusiness CEOs; a representative from the World Bank; and Bill Gates. All of them looked at food mainly as a matter of logistics and problem-solving, and they seemed to do so with real good will and good motives. (Well, maybe not the CEO of ADM.) But they were all very much bought into a model which looks, to Barber’s eyes, incredibly shaky.
Essentially the problem is that the people on the panel have internalized the principles of comparative advantage and free trade to the point at which they are more or less incapable of thinking any other way. In a Ricardian world it makes sense for Ohio to overwhelmingly grow corn and soy, since growing corn and soy is what it does best. And because of economies of scale, it makes sense to grow just one type of each, on farms of mind-boggling size. Ohio can then trade all that corn and soy for the food it wants to eat, and everybody is better off.
Except in reality it doesn’t work like that. Monocultures are naturally prone to disastrous outbreaks of disease, which can wipe out an entire crop. The panel at Davos has a favored method of dealing with such things: the development of disease-resistant crop strains, often through high-tech and patentable genetic modification. Bright research scientists create clever transgenic crops, and then people like Bill Gates and the World Bank try to get them broadly adopted while setting well-intentioned staffers to work minimizing potential problems with IP licensing. Innovation through agricultural technology is the obvious and necessary solution to the problem of global hunger.
Barber isn’t anti-science, nor is he anti-innovation. But he knows (and the panelists know too) that a system of globalized agriculture can break down, as we saw during the commodity boom of 2008. As the price of soy and rice and wheat soared, exporters started hoarding rather than selling, and importers couldn’t obtain necessary supplies at any price. As the World Bank’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala noted, Ukraine had 5 million tons of surplus wheat, but the international food markets were very thin, and it was extremely difficult to get that wheat exported. The system didn’t work like it was meant to: when put to a real-world test, it broke down.
The International Monetary Fund is forecasting positive growth in 2010; yet, it warns the pace of growth will be too sluggish to prevent further increases in unemployment across the global economy.
Martin Wolf notes the global economic recovery might be described by the acronym L-U-V. The recovery has been L-shaped in the European Union, U-shaped in the United States and V-shaped in East Asia (ex-Japan).
What is the outlook for the global economy in 2010?
The Panelists
Josef Ackermann, Chairman of the Management Board and the Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank, Germany; Member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum; Chair of the Governors Meeting for Financial Services 2010; Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010
Montek S. Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, India
Christine Lagarde, Minister of Economy, Industry and Employment of France; Member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Washington DC
Lawrence H. Summers, Director, National Economic Council (NEC), Executive Office of the President, USA
Zhu Min, Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China, People’s Republic of China; Global Agenda Council on the International Monetary System
The panel is chaired by Martin Wolf, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times, United Kingdom; Global Agenda Council on Systemic Financial Risk.