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Economics

What’s going on with wheat?

Increases in the price of wheat are really putting the pinch on a lot of people here in Yemen. I just read an article that talks about Jordan feeling the pinch as well. Everyone knows that the price of wheat world wide has gone up, but both of these countries claim that the prices are rising faster than the world wide price. I’ve talked about wheat prices in Yemen here, here, and here. I’m sure that the problems plaguing Jordan are similar to the ones in Yemen. My question is, “Why is the price of wheat going up world wide?” Well, you might throw back at me, either demand has increased or supply has dropped. Yes, yes of course (that did pop into your mind, right?) but I’m wondering about the mechanism. The prices have risen by 30% or so, I can’t imagine that demand has risen that much, that fast. I’m leaning more towards the supply side. The traditional culprit of wheat shortages has always been bad crops due to weather, pestilence, locusts, or something. That could have happened, but I haven’t heard of any widespread problems like that. I have no evidence right now (I’m away from the internet and my friend Google right now) but I am eyeing some government interference as a likely problem. No, I am not a broken record, I just sound that way… The new subsidies for corn ethanol have really screwed up the corn markets, and we may be seeing it’s effects on the wheat market as well. Here’s my theory, the subsidies given to corn growers made corn a much more attractive crop to plant, so more people planted corn instead of wheat. And voila! much less wheat gets produced.

The hell of it is that if it weren’t for another subsidy (or more correctly, price control) we could make better ethanol cheaper from sugar. The problem is that the sugar lobby has managed to keep the price of sugar artificially high for the last 30 years or so. I do believe that only two families control all of the sugar production in the US… The government has kept the price of sugar at about twice what it should be for the last 30 years, in other words, we have been forced to pay twice as much for sugar and it has gone directly into the pockets of a couple of families. “That’s not a big deal, I hardly buy any sugar at all,” actually, you buy quite a bit, mostly in the foods that you buy. Sugar is used in many, many prepared foods, and all of them cost more because of the price controls. Now, not only is our food more expensive, but the price control is making us pursue a worse alternative for ethanol. Aren’t subsidies and price controls great?

If anyone has any information and/or links about my wheat scarcity due to corn subsidies theory, I’d love to see them, maybe especially if I’m wrong…

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Yemen

Yemen’s nuclear power..

OK, I’ve got a little more info about the proposed nuclear power plants to be built here in Yemen. Apparently it is a company called “Powered” based in Houston, Texas that is doing the construction and also arranging the financing of the 5(!) nuclear power plants. A member of the Yemeni government talked with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and according to the paper (Yemen Times), the only worry raised was how to dispose of the nuclear waste. Huh? Granted, that’s a serious problem, but first I would worry about the government’s ability to run and maintain the plants (Chernobyl anyone?) not to mention securing the things. Greenpeace of all things is the only organization that I have heard to raise the issues of political stability as being a problem with uranium in Yemen. It isn’t just Yemen’s stability, but the entire area’s that has some people worried. Now I just wish that someone that people can take seriously would raise these issues…

I’m still confused why they want nuclear plants here. I assume that they would be the most expensive to build. And even if they can provide electricity at lower costs, getting uranium to Yemen will always be a dicy proposition. Things can change, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if within the next 10 years people will refuse to make that kind of shipment to this part of the world at all. Yemen has decent natural gas supplies, why not build more power plants based on that? They just started one in Marib based on LNG last month. In addition, they are in the heart of one of the most oil rich areas of the world, surely some sort of deal could be worked out with one of their friendly neighbors. They don’t even need the “light sweet” crude for this, they could use the worse qualities with no problem… Yemen says that it has plans for the extra power, including desalinization plants. I don’t know why any type of power would be better than any other…

In any case, I find this rather alarming. The first plant is supposed to go online in 2012, is everyone just going to let it happen?

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Yemen

Women in parliament

One of the English language papers recently had a really frustrating article in it. The headline was “President proposes 15% of seats in parliament be given to women.” Unfortunately, the article only gives 2 or 3 sentences about that headline, the rest of the article is about how the opposition refused to talk with the president. I had heard some rumblings about setting a quota for women in parliament before, but I had never heard the president backing it before.

Women in politics here is a rather strange subject. Women can vote and hold any office. As a matter of fact, there were several woman candidates for president during the last election. They hardly got any votes, but still, they ran. Their election posters were hilarious, there they were (I assume) in full nikab, it could have been any woman under there… I don’t think that there are any women in parliament currently, plenty have run for it though. Yemen’s history has a couple of queens (the Queen of Sheba being the most famous) and Pakistan has elected a female president in the not so distant past, so a female political leader isn’t unheard of here…

I am against quotas in general, I think that they set up incentive problems and tend to warp the general quality of whatever population that is subject to the quota. I do think that on strictly utilitarian grounds, a short term quota for women in government could be argued for. Many people here (although certainly not all) think that there are some serious issues that pertain to women that are getting scant notice from the government. Things like FGM (female genital mutilation), childhood marriages, and the staggering amount of illiteracy in women don’t seem to be getting the attention that they deserve. If women controlled 15% of parliament, they could really shake things up, regardless of their party affiliation. In parliamentary procedures, coalitions are everything. A 15% block will wield significant power.

There are a bunch of practical issues to be dealt with. How you can have an election AND quotas is a bit beyond me, what if not enough people want women in there to meet the quotas? You can imagine how much this would warp party politics. If this is left in place for too long, it may actually limit women’s power in the parliament. If people feel that there is a quota, they may come to the feeling that 15% is the correct number and not vote additional women in. Or even more likely, the parliament will use the quota as a de-facto limit as a way of keeping the old order in power. In any case, it sure will be interesting to see what happens, the idea of a quota seems to have popularity across party lines so it may actually come to pass. I wonder what kind of an impact it’ll have here…

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Religion

More on religions and "tolerance"

My last post on religious tolerance had a couple of comments that amounted to, “But Christians are jerks too!” There’s no question that all religions tend to breed intolerance, but I do think that it’s important to keep things in perspective. Randy said that the attitude that I ascribed to Christians as letting people make their own decisions and facing the consequences was “magnanimous” and wondered where those Christians were. Well, you’re probably surrounded by them every day, even in Ithaca. The US is overwhelmingly a Christian nation. People are, in general, pretty reasonable and in day to day interactions questions about divinity and belief just don’t come up that often. Of course the exceptions really stand out. We’ve all had some nutjob trying to cram literature down our throat all in the hope of “saving” us.

It’s basically the same way over here. The vast majority of people leave you alone and some may ask if you are a muslim. I’ve never had a really bad reaction to the news that I am a Christian. I’ve faced some incredulity. One guy asked how I could possibly believe in that, I couldn’t help but think that I take that question much more seriously from agnostics and atheists, Muslims’ beliefs are just as wacky as mine… I have gotten some literature given to me. It was, without exception, dreadful. The stuff I get in the States is pretty bad, but these make an effort to seem in depth and scholarly. It really backfires, if I had any leanings towards Islam, those pamphlets would have driven me away…

Anyway, my experiences here go a long ways towards the “people are people all over the world,” theory, but they don’t prove it. There are some huge differences of course, and my last post on religious freedom was meant to highlight one of them. No serious follower of any religion is happy when people stop believing in it, or turn to something that is considered evil, or just wrong. I have yet to make any casual acquaintances that consider me a “serious” Christian, so maybe I’m exempt:-) My last post on the subject was trying to highlight the difference between any Christians that I can think of and muslims in this part of the world when it comes to apostasy. If a Christian makes a declaration of not believing anymore, or changes to another sect or religion entirely, there may be some personal contact (and family) issues, but nothing that can’t be dealt with. Here (in Yemen, KSA, and probably places like Afghanistan), if someone makes the statement that they are no longer a muslim and/or converts to another religion, people expect that person to be killed.

Islam is practiced differently in many different places, but here, apostasy is a capital crime. It’s funny, in the US both atheists and Christians feel that they are “under attack” from all angles. Each side thinks that the other side is “winning.” Neither really knows what it is like to be “under attack” for religious beliefs. No one in the US fears for their life because of what they believe or what they say about it. People here that become disillusioned with Islam and become atheists or people that convert (I assume that if there’s any conversion going on at all, it is to Christianity) have to stay quiet and keep it hidden from friends and family. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had to keep pretending to be a good muslim, it’s funny what the threat of death can do to a person.

You can say what you want about Christian hypocrites and their intolerance, Lord knows there’s plenty of them around, but they don’t kill people for religion’s sake any more. The US’s report about religious freedom in Yemen was right to criticize Yemen on the inability to convert. Certainly, not all muslims share that opinion, maybe not even all here, but enough do to make conversion a decidedly dangerous proposition. Compared to this part of the world, I do call Christians “magnanimous” and yes, tolerant…

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odds and ends

Books going pretty fast

Well, I’ve finished two of the three books I brought with me from Greece. I’ve already read 1000+ pages in the last 3 days, it doesn’t look like they’ll last me until I go home. I’ll start rooting around, asking if any of the students have any books that they don’t want to take with them when they leave. I’m also surprised how much I’ve been enjoying reading fiction again. I do think that after this next novel, I’ll go back to some more nonfiction but I’ll try to intersperse more fiction along the way…

Categories
Yemen

Power problems

Before Ramadan, there was a lot of worry about the ongoing power problems. Yemen does not have the generating capacity to supply all of the energy demanded. Eventually, they will build new power plants (they want nuclear, God help us), but for now we have rolling blackouts. The government claimed that they would be buying more power from “neighboring” countries for Ramadan, but it asked people “not to use too much electricity.” I am a little dubious about the buying more power claim, as least for Sana’a power generating plants in KSA or Oman are a long ways away, and there’s a lot nothing at all in between them in Yemen. Asking people to conserve never works, we all know that. Unfortunately, one of Yemen’s many problems prevents them from doing what they should. In a functioning market, if the demand outstrips supply, you just raise the price until there is just enough supply to meet demand. This works, it makes sure that there aren’t any shortages and the profit is high enough that there is a powerful incentive to create more of the commodity in short supply. The usual complaint, that the poor will suffer more than anyone else isn’t too much of a problem here in Yemen. Everyone cooks on gas, and the poor here have very little to power with electricity… The problem here is the electrical utility does not seem to have to ability to cut people off for not paying bills. There are many reports of people owing vast sums of money to the electrical company, but if you know the right people, your electricity keeps coming. The other problem is obvious with just a look around Sana’a. The wiring here is a mess. People routinely tie into main power lines whenever they need electricity. It doesn’t seem likely that the power company really has any idea who is using the electricity. The first step in solving Yemen’s power issues is to clean up the distribution. If they know who is getting the power and they have the ability to turn off the power for nonpayment, I think we’d see a big improvement. Instead, everyone is holding out for Yemen’s nuclear power plants to come along. I really hope they don’t come into being, I can’t imagine many things more dangerous than this government with uranium…

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Religion

Name of the Rose

I just finished “The Name of the Rose” this morning. It was good, but you have to be in the mood for really Catholic book. A lot of the plot revolves around different orders (Benedictines, Franciscans), heretical movements, and various political intrigues involving the papacy, emperors, and various power bases in the cities. There is a fair amount of theological discussion, at times the characters break down and argue and fight about them. The main theological issue that dominates the book and drives the plot reminds me a bit of a book that I only read a part of during my trip to Greece.

I found “The Principles of Orthodox Spirituality” in a bookstore in Athens. It was a religious bookstore with about two shelves of English titles on it, this being one of them. Seeing it, I thought that my friend Dana would enjoy it. She’s an Episcopal that is fascinated by Catholics. She also studied Russian for a while and so I figured she might be intrigued by the Orthodox churches as well. I read a few chapters while I was in Greece. It was a bit of a struggle to read since I’m not used to reading theology, but I did get a few interesting tidbits from it. The thing that struck me was the quick differentiation that the book made between the Catholic churches (Roman and otherwise) and the Orthodox ones. In a nutshell, the author claimed that the Orthodox fathers had, unlike the Romans, rejected the Aristotelian approach to theology and God. I consider it kind of odd since this particular church started in Greece… I don’t think that they rejected logic all together, but they do not depend on it to make their theology coherent. I could be wrong about this, but it was the general gist of what I read. Anyway, that struck me because I had never really thought that there was much difference between Catholics and the Orthodox churches, but I guess there is. It intrigued me because as much as I admire Catholics (most of the people that I have known that I could call exemplary Christians have been Catholic), their theology, as coherent as it is, relies on some sometimes torturous logic. In addition, in years past many of the decisions to label things as heresies (when not motivated by political issues) were based on exacting logical arguments on what was and was not logically consistent with church teachings. If the Orthodox theology could avoid some of that, I would find it much more appealing.

“The Name of the Rose” certainly highlights the dangers of logic mixed with religion. Granted, it was only a danger to people that were extremely well read in not only the early church fathers, but in the classic philosophers as well. In addition, their position in the church and their placement in the timeline of church history also were determining factors when it came to how “dangerous” these ideas were. The worldwide impact of these ideas has long since past, but it can still crop up in the thoughts of thoughtful people who may be overeducated. I, of course, have no idea who those people could be (ahem), but I think that it could be a good read for people that are interested in that sort of thing…

Oh, one other thing. About 4/5ths of the way through it, I realized that I had been told, or had read how the people were dying in the book years before. That kind of pissed me off as the murder mystery element had been ruined for me. Still, I knew the how, which allowed me to figure out the who, but I still didn’t know why. I won’t ruin the ending for anyone, but even if you do know the how, it takes the entire book to explain the why…

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Yemen

Religious freedom in Yemen

There are some people criticizing a recent report from the US about religious freedom here in Yemen. The Yemenis point to the fact that you can practice any religion you want here. In fact, down in Aden there are 3 Catholic churches, an Anglican church, and a hindu(!) temple. The report points out that there aren’t any churches in the former North Yemen, including Sana’a. The thing that really gets people here is that the report criticized Yemen for making conversion from Islam and proselytizing muslims illegal. I’m pretty sure that converting from Islam is a capital offense, it is by Sharia law certainly. People here have various lame excuses like, “But no one is coerced into becoming a muslim here,” which may be true enough, but God help anyone here that grew up muslim and finds Jesus somehow… All of the defenses basically boil down to, “But we have the correct religion…”Seriously, how can people defend this? I know, it’s in the Koran. I’m sorry, but anyone with any critical reasoning skills can see what a transparent power play this is. Christians gave this up a long time ago. They now have what I believe to be the “correct” view, “Do whatever you like, but you better choose well cause God’s got the final say…” To me, this is the essence of religious freedom, you choose, and you (like everyone) will eventually pay for whatever bad decisions you make throughout life. Why can’t they leave religious “justice” up to God?

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Economics

I hate to say, "I told you so…"

.. but you know, I did. Here as a matter of fact. It turns out that prices of wheat have continued to rise despite the fact that the government has fixed the price. Not only that, but the government, who is selling wheat for well below the going rate, has run out of it in some areas. The places that have not have very long lines for the wheat. The upshot? Dealers are charging, and getting a much higher price, sometimes twice the government’s price… Surprise surprise. You mean that prices can’t be arbitrarily set without consequences?

But wait, there’s hope! The cabinet has amended a law and now allows foreign companies to import food directly into Yemen! This goes along with another change that they made 3 or 4 months ago allowing a company not owned by a Yemeni to operate within Yemen. Imagine! This is huge, and while it won’t help Yemen this Ramadan, it surely will next time around. Of course there are people that caution that the foreign companies will monopolize the food market and may be put local companies out of business. We’ll ignore their probable monetary interest and lack of evidence from around the world (concerning the negative impact of a foreign monopoly) and point out the obvious. If all the local companies did was to collude and artificially inflate the prices to consumers, why would you want to protect them? The editor of the Yemen Times said as much in their op-ed, it’s good to see some common sense starting to spread. 2 months ago, you never heard of anyone talking about free trade, and now the promise of it has arrived, Hamdillila!

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travel

My new airline

Score! Qatar airways now flies from Doha to DC direct. A Sana’a-Doha-DC trip sounds much more appealing than a Sana’a-Dubai-NYC-DC trip. Plus, it’s about $600 cheaper round trip! Oh this is good news, think I’ll go down to their office pretty soon…