Head of World Bank Fraud Unit Resigns

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: January 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — Six months after taking over as president of the World Bank, Robert B. Zoellick faced new turmoil on Wednesday over a campaign against corruption in bank lending, with the resignation of the chief of the bank’s antifraud unit.

Bank officials said that despite Mr. Zoellick’s efforts to heal the wounds left from the stormy tenure of his predecessor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the resignation of Suzanne Rich Folsom, Mr. Wolfowitz’s top deputy in his anticorruption campaign, was stirring new bitterness. They said that several of Ms. Folsom’s aides were also resigning.

Mr. Wolfowitz, who had made the battle against corruption a priority, was ousted as bank president last year after the disclosure that he had arranged a pay increase and promotion for his companion, a bank employee, in 2005.

“There is just a lot of bad blood,” said a bank official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters. He added that many in the bank remained “allergic” to efforts to prosecute cases of fraud. Another official said that ties between Ms. Folsom and the bank had been on a “downward spiral” in recent months.

Associates of Ms. Folsom said she had decided to leave her job because she had accomplished the goal of making the battle against corruption a major priority, but realized that opposition to her work by others had made it difficult for her to go on.

News of her departure stirred mixed reactions within the bank, where many welcomed her decision, saying she had been selective in her prosecutions or overly aggressive, while others said she had done much to combat complacency.

Relations between Mr. Zoellick and Ms. Folsom, which were positive in the beginning, were described by many inside the bank as increasingly frayed in recent weeks, especially after editorials in The Wall Street Journal cited internal investigations and suggested that Ms. Folsom was being undercut and driven out.

A spokesman for Mr. Zoellick, Marwan Muasher, a senior vice president for external affairs, said that Ms. Folsom had not been pushed out and that Mr. Zoellick had been entirely supportive.

“He did not force her out in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Muasher said of Mr. Zoellick, adding that when Ms. Folsom told Mr. Zoellick last year that she wanted to leave for a job in private business, he offered her a different job at the bank and then asked her to stay until the bank completed its investigation of corruption in India.

The report on India was released Friday, and it found extensive corruption in several Indian lending programs. The report was filled with pictures of shoddy construction work at hospitals, clinics and other facilities that had been certified as adequate. It also contained pledges by India to work with the bank on improving its procedures, but some officials in the bank said these were similar to ones made and not kept in the past.

Ms. Folsom’s resignation was announced Wednesday morning in a posting in the bank’s internal Web site, without a statement praising her from Mr. Zoellick.

Mr. Zoellick’s office initially said he would make no comment about her departure so as not to interject himself into the matter, but later in the afternoon an aide issued a statement from him saying: “Suzanne has done a tremendous amount to push the anticorruption agenda forward, and I’m grateful for her service.”

Mr. Zoellick’s aides say that, like Mr. Wolfowitz, he believes corruption is a high priority but that he intends to pursue the issue in a less divisive or confrontational way than had been the case in the past.

Corruption is widely described as a problem in the bank’s $30 billion annual lending programs for poor countries, but the extent is in dispute. Last September, an outside panel led by Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, found weak management, distrust and internal resistance to combating fraud at the bank.

Mr. Zoellick, according to his aides, has sought to carry out broad changes in the way Ms. Folsom’s unit interacts with other bank officials, and to install procedures on competitive bidding, inspections and disclosure that would prevent corruption instead of just prosecuting cases after the fact.

“It’s all very well to talk about corruption and to have these reports,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director at the bank and former finance minister of Nigeria, who negotiated the India agreement. “Bob Zoellick is geared toward implementation, and how we sustain this and embed it in a country.”

Ms. Okonjo-Iweala negotiated the arrangement with India to set up ways to rid programs of fraud. By contrast, Mr. Wolfowitz abruptly suspended aid to India after accusations of fraud in 2005, and that suspension angered board members and helped pave the way for his downfall, many bank officials say.

Mr. Volcker praised Ms. Folsom and the integrity unit she headed last year, when he issued his report, but he also recommended changes in the way the unit functioned.

Several bank officials said, however, that Mr. Volcker privately recommended to Ms. Folsom that since her work had been largely vindicated, she should consider resigning as a way of easing the toxic atmosphere left behind by Mr. Wolfowitz and by the fights between her department and others at the bank.

Instead, Ms. Folsom stayed on, though associates say she had been pursuing possibilities of working outside the bank. Ms. Folsom declined to comment.

Mr. Zoellick appointed an acting director to run the integrity unit, and his office said he would conduct a thorough search for a successor. One reason Ms. Folsom incurred the anger of bank staff was that she had served as an adviser to Mr. Wolfowitz before he appointed her over others recommended by a search committee.

Ms. Folsom, a onetime activist in Republican Party politics, had been a partner in a law firm specializing in ethics issues. Defenders and critics said that she had considerable difficulties overcoming the perception in the bank, where employees tend to be liberal in their politics, that she was part of a coterie of conservative advisers around Mr. Wolfowitz.

Bankers go to Baghdad

By Patrick Bond

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund's annual meeting in Washington earlier this month witnessed the members' rejection of two big ideas - debt cancellation and institutional democratisation. No surprise. There wasn't much pressure from either Third World finance ministers or the US branch of the global justice movement (apparently in hibernation until 3 November).

However, important financial developments are now unfolding, reflective of Washington's geopolitical imperatives in Iraq. Bank and IMF activity there was relegitimised at the annual meeting, but in a contradictory and untenable manner.

A recent IMF report on Iraq claimed that 'macroeconomic stability' has been achieved and the economy will have grown 52% in 2004. This was in part justification for the IMF's recent $436 million loan to the Washington-imposed Baghdad regime. The report also revealed that the IMF has been coordinating macroeconomic technical assistance, drawing together a team from the Bank, US Treasury, US AID, the British Department for International Development and the Bank of England.

Another IMF justification was that after the invasion, 'A number of important policy reforms then began to be implemented to facilitate progress toward a more market-oriented economy. These reforms included the completion of a national currency exchange, the approval of new central bank and commercial bank laws, the liberalization of interest rates, approval of a foreign direct investment law, the establishment of the Trade Bank of Iraq, the passage of the Financial Management Law and a new tax law, and the simplification of the trade regime.'

These measures, introduced by viceroy Paul Bremer, not only represent legalized looting, but also appear totally ineffectual for the attraction of foreign investment, as is brilliantly documented in Naomi Klein's new Harpers magazine article 'Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia' (http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html).

Also last week, speaking at the UN Economic Commission on Africa in Addis Ababa, Bank president James Wolfensohn predicted his institution would push more than $400 million to the US-imposed Baghdad regime by the end of 2004: 'Obviously all of this is to some extent held up by the situation on the ground because it is not easy to operate. So far as the lending from the Bank is concerned, which will be $5 billion, the Iraqis are looking at grants first because if they can get grants, it is money for nothing and does not increase the debt burden, which is already very high at about $120 billion.'

As an aside, that vast debt burden was being unevenly reduced by the efforts of US special envoy James Baker - until, that is, Klein blew the whistle through her investigative report in Britain's Guardian newspaper, also last week. Baker's Carlyle Group was then forced to withdraw from a consortium which sneakily offered to help Kuwait reclaim $27 billion from the Iraqi people at the same time Baker was trying to get French, German and Russian debt relief for Iraq. A more blatant scam could hardly be found, outside a Paul Erdman novel.

Does the Bank have anyone as unethical and hardnosed as a Baker, Richard Armitage or John Negroponte to guide the vast sums of new loans to their primary destination: US contractor profits? And will a future democratic government in Baghdad have the guts to formally declare today's Bank and IMF loans 'odious' - just as odious as Saddam's debts - and hence not liable for repayment?

(Notwithstanding South African president Thabo Mbeki's stance against reparations for odious apartheid-era lending, the country's Jubilee campaigners continue making the same plea, in the ongoing lawsuits against US and European bankers.)

Hypocrisy on debt relief - Iraq gets waves, Africa only trickles - worries not only excellent groups like Jubilee South and the 50 Years is Enough network, who insist on 100% cancellation. In early October even Malawi's neoliberal finance minister Goodal Gondwe complained of double standards during the IMF/Bank meetings: 'What I am afraid of is that putting Nigeria together with Iraq we may emphasize for sentimental reasons that are currently in the air politically, that talking about Iraq could be at the expense of Nigeria.'

The man the Bank chose for loan-pushing in a highly risky Baghdad environment is Christiaan Poortman, vice president for the Middle East and North Africa region, and a former Bank country director in the Balkans. I came across Poortman in Zimbabwe, and am compelled to pass along some warnings to Iraqi readers of ZNet about his work there as Resident Representative during the early 1990s, especially if the Bank also takes on more 'donor coordination' functions.

Poortman, after all, already runs the multi-donor Iraq Trust Fund and disbursed $60 million in grants for school building and repair last week. He pledged $150 million in resources for water and sanitation, and, according to the Bank press office, 'also said he wants to turn some of the money pledged into financing for electrical and water projects that will be left unfunded because of the transfer of funds earmarked by the US for reconstruction to security spending.'

A year ago, the Bank and United Nations estimated that $35.8 billion would be required to meet Iraqi needs. Typical advice in their 'Joint Iraq Needs Assessment' was 'to encourage private sector participation in the State Owned Enterpises (SOEs) along with separating the ownership responsibilities of government from its policy and operating responsibilities. SOEs that are internationally viable will eventually be able to shoulder higher input prices as trade liberalization frees controls on their output prices. Other

SOEs will ultimately face adjustment pressures from the hardened budget constraints.'

Zimbabweans will recognise this sort of language. The country's health minister during the 1990s, Dr Timothy Stamps, reported that spending on health was down by 37% per person from 1990-93, because Poortman considered health a social expenditure which 'had to be cut'. The government of Robert Mugabe had become 'so miserly that we are killing ourselves because we want to save a few cents,' Stamps admitted.

This was just one of several problems Poortman faced winning hearts and minds in Harare. When the IMF and World Bank insisted on tighter monetary policy in 1991, interest rates on certain government securities rose from 27% to 44% in a single day, which shattered business confidence and caused stock market and property sector crashes.

Hence even conservatives grew fed up with the ineffectual 'economic structural adjustment policy' (termed ESAP) imposed from Washington. Financial Times correspondent Tony Hawkins - also head of the local university's business school - condemned Poortman's dubious macroeconomic analysis in 1993: 'Every year, the World Bank officials dutifully prepare invariably over-optimistic assessments designed to show the worst is past and that the client state, whose economy is under the microscope, is on the brink of sustained recovery.'

Hawkins renewed his criticism in 1995: 'The World Bank's conduct in the Zimbabwean case raises a very serious issue. If the Bank had done its job properly, then Zimbabwe's budget and public sector crises need not have reached the dimensions that they have since. The debt burden would be less; the new taxes to be imposed would be less severe and the public spending cuts less drastic... The Bank has needlessly delivered 11 million Zimbabweans into the hands of harsher austerity than should have been necessary'.

The editor of a local business paper, Iden Wetherell, agreed: 'Everybody repeats the official mythology that the recent drought has slightly derailed ESAP, while insisting (the wish being father to the thought) that economic reform is otherwise on course. The most notable representative of this starry-eyed approach is the World Bank's chief in Harare, Mr Christiaan Poortman. His emollient statements over the past 18 months reflect the devotion of a faith unmoved by facts.'

Myopically, in a review of the Bank's impact during Poortman's stint, an internal reported boasted that Poortman had 'fostered an awareness of the need for a broad-based economic policy reform'. Indeed, 'informal work and advice provided by the Resident Mission was instrumental' in shaping ESAP even prior to Poortman's arrival.

The following promises were extracted from Mugabe by the Bank and IMF in the 1991 design of ESAP: by the end of 1995 there would be a 25% cut in the civil service, and the demise of all labour restrictions, price controls, exchange controls, interest rate controls, investment regulations, import restrictions, and government subsidies. Most were accomplished. By 1995 'rapid privatisation of the key parastatals' providing telecommunications, electricity, water and transportation had become one of the Bank's central demands.

The Bank's 1995 Project Completion Report for ESAP gave the best possible final grade for the first stage of the utterly failed programme: 'highly satisfactory.' The Bank acknowledged playing 'a key role in the dissemination of the programme and in building support amongst the wider donor community.' Hence Bank staff also rated their own performance as 'highly satisfactory' (again, top marks) for identification and appraisal, and 'satisfactory' for preparation assistance and supervision.

In the book Zimbabwe's Plunge (Merlin Press, 2003), my coauthor Simba Manyanya and I looked back a decade on Poortman's role, and argued that ESAP fatally weakened the state's developmental capacities. Social desperation worsened - Poortman's reign included the first of several major 'IMF Riots' in Harare - and ESAP was, in any case, unsuccessful in stimulating investment and capital accumulation.

All indicators of economic activity and social progress worsened during Poortman's stay. Zimbabwe's exemplary social policy during the 1980s - reducing infant mortality from 86 to 49 per 1,000 live births, raising the immunisation rate from 25% to 80% and life expectancy from 56 to 62 years, doubling primary school enrollment, etc - witnessed ominous reversals.

In turn, Poortman and his colleagues created the conditions under which an official opposition based on the urban poor and workers emerged finally in 1999, leading Mugabe to zig-zag into left-rhetorical authoritarianism in early 2000, as he desperately sought to retain power and patronage within a crumbling economy.

Simba was chief economist in Zimbabwe's finance ministry but by the end of the 1990s became so fed up with Mugabe's blunders and awful 'advice' imposed from Washington that he quit to work for Morgan Tsvangirai's Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union Unions. (Framed by Mugabe allies in early 2002, Tsvangirai was acquitted on a trumped up treason charge last week. But his Movement for Democratic Change appears still intent on boycotting the March 2005 parliamentary vote due to Zimbabwe's Florida-style electoral conditions.)

What was the popular reaction to Poortman and ESAP? Sidney Malunga, a progressive ruling-party MP until his suspicious 1994 death in a car accident, was brutally honest: 'To the masses of Zimbabwe, the poor people of Zimbabwe, the sum total of ESAP can best be described as a loathsome economic monster which is ravaging and destroying decent lives by incapacitating the poor and further condemning them to abject poverty.'

According to a survey of 200 poor people by the Africa Community Publishing and Development Trust at the end of Poortman's Harare gig, 'ESAP was listed as a cause of poverty even more often than drought and the shortage of land. The combination of retrenchment on a large scale, with a sharp increase in the price of basic goods and having to pay for health and education, has driven many families into poverty.'

'Deep down,' Zimbabwe's great novelist Chengerai Hove divulged in 1994, 'I harbour fear, a persistent fear which, like an ominous shadow, refused to abandon me. There is the smell of the Structural Adjustment Programme in the wind, with its flags swamping those of political independence. "Sure Advice to Poverty" local pub humorists have nicknamed this World Bank-IMF economic beverage. It tastes sour from the beginning, a cartoonist once wrote as he watched friends and foes losing jobs in Harare's industries under the banner of die today so as to live tomorrow.'

It's a fear that the wretched people of Iraq can now add to so many others.

Read more!

Chaos and U.S. Power

Gilbert Achcar on U.S. foreign policy and violence in the Middle East; Jack Miles on Iraqi oil; Syed Saleem Shahzad on Musharraf's predicament; Alain Gresh on America's New Backyard

Read together, these three commentaries suggest how fragile things are becoming in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon, countries which are regarded in decreasing order of importance by U.S. planners. The strategic challenge they are faced with, like the British a century ago in the same region, is maintaining a level of conflict between clients and non-clients that is high enough to prevent broad alliances against foreign influence from forming, but low enough to prevent total chaos.

But as Alain Gresh shows in the above article, U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (like Soviet-occupied Afghanistan) are becoming magnets for multinational, multiethnic coalitions of pan-Muslim nationalists, many from countries thousands of miles away. The indirect U.S. backing of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, direct U.S. involvement (including air and naval deployments) in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last winter, the expansion of the Afghan war into Pakistani Waziristan, and threats war against Iran from Republicans and Democrats alike have involved the U.S. in armed conflicts and local struggles from the Horn of Africa to South Asia. (One might add that, with U.S.-Malian and U.S.-Filipino joint military exercises and operations taking place in the last year, the U.S. is at war across the entire Muslim world.)

An excerpt from Gresh's article:

The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war.

Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat" in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel.

A self-fulfilling prophecy
All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.

This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords–persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6). Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”. As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria).

This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).

This sense of overspilling regional violence is confirmed by these news reports:

Dozens feared dead in suicide bomb blasts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Fifteen people killed in seven coordinated bomb blasts in Uttar Pradesh, India. The blasts took place near court complexes in three different cities: Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad.

And look at the violence in Iraq from the just the last few days:

Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/24/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/23/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/22/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/21/07
Twin Bombings Kill at Least 26 in Iraq

In other news: Human rights organizations call for a halt to the demolition of 3,000 public housing units in New Orleans. The same cynicism and greed that leads rich countries to push liberalization on the poorest ones is also leading developers to see dollar bills in the "whitening" of New Orleans. This is just another example. Read more!

Green Capitalism, Climate Change, GMOs

Against all historical evidence, the EU is claiming that rapid liberalization will "help Africa develop." In a new draft agreement on Economic Partnership Agreements with the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), Brussels is asking the EAC to remove tariffs on 80% of products within 15 years. Kenyan farmers have attempted to file a lawsuit in Kenyan courts to prevent the government from signing the agreement.

The greed and cynicism of the EU, which is matched by the US in its dealings with Latin America, Asia and Africa, is all the more striking in the context of climate change. Right now, a bevy of forecasts from NGOs and governments alike are predicting agricultural declines in the southern hemiphere due to climate change; hundreds of millions of farmers could be driven off the land in the next half-century.

But the loudest European and North American voices on the subject of agriculture in the South are the agribusiness lobbies clamoring for easy access to overseas markets, followed by think tanks and research foundations arguing for a "second Green Revolution." The latter claim that genetically engineered drought- and salt-resistant crops will be the answer to climate-induced agricultural declines. But one has to ask whether the forces driving this research are altruism and contrition over past exploitation, or a coalition of "green capitalists," such as those pushing biofuels like jatropha.

The following article, published earlier this week in the Washington Post, makes truly chilling reading on several levels: the genocidal scenarios bandied about like movie plots; the GMO schemes discussed without mention of possible ecosystemic side effects.

Facing a Threat to Farming and Food Supply

By Rick Weiss Monday, November 19, 2007
Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture. Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years--along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts-- will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live. India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger. Africa--where four out of five people make their liviing directly from the land--could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice.

Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent. Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago. And those estimates do not count the effects of new plant pests and diseases, which are widely expected to come with climate change and could cancel out the positive "fertilizing" effects that higher carbon dioxide levels may offer some plants. Scenarios like these--and the recognition that even less-affected countries such as the United States will experience significant regional shifts in growing seasons, forcing new and sometimes disruptive changes in crop choices--are providing the impetus for a new "green revolution." It is aimed not simply at boosting production, as the first revolution did with fertilizers, but at creating crops that can handle the heat, suck up the salt, not desiccate in a drought and even grow swimmingly while submerged. The work involves conventional breeding of new varieties as well as genetic engineering to transfer specific traits from more resilient species.

As part of those efforts, scientists are also busily preserving seeds from thousands of varieties of the 150 crops that make upmost of the world's agricultural diversity, as well as wild relatives of those crops that may harbor useful but still unidentified genes."For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt," said Ren Wang, director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of agricultural research centers. "It's important that we have a wide pool of genetic diversity from which to develop crops with these unique traits."At the same time, scientists are finding that agriculture and related land uses, which today account for about one-third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, can be conducted in much more climate-friendly ways.

But time is of the essence if a worldwide crisis in food security is to be avoided, said William R. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington-based nonpartisan economic think tanks."You'll have a tripling of world food demand by 2085 because of higher population and bigger economies, and I would not be surprised to see as much as one-third of today's agricultural land devoted to plants for ethanol," Cline said. "So it's going to be a tight race between food supply and demand."The work of developing adaptive plants has begun to pay off. Researchers have discovered ancient varieties of Persian grasses, for example, that have an incredible tolerance for salt water. The scientists are breeding the grasses with commercial varieties of wheat and have found they are growing well in Australia's increasingly salty soils.

Other research is building on the recent discovery of a gene that helps plants survive prolonged periods underwater. Even rice, which grows in wet paddies, will die if it is fully submerged for more than three or four days, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. But recent tests on farms in Bangladesh show that a new line of rice containing the flood-resistance gene can live underwater for two weeks. That's going to be important, Zeigler said, because 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia -- most of them in south Asia -- where rice is the staple. Yet 50 million acres of that region are already subject to seasonal flooding that can temporarily submerge plants under 10 to 12 feet of water. And the problem is predicted to worsen as climate change brings more intense rainfall there."Crops grow in weather, not in climate," Zeigler said, meaning they must be able to survive not only the anticipated average rises in temperature but also the day-to-day extremes that come with climate change.

Corn is another staple that is getting gussied up to party with the hardy--in this case in preparation for dry spells, which are predicted to increase in Latin America and other corn-growing regions, with a potential 20 percent drop in production over the next 25 years. Recent tests in South Africa showed that drought-resistant maize plants, created by breeding, produced 30 percent to 50 percent more corn than traditional varieties under arid conditions.

But the real test, scientists say, will be to splice in potent drought-resistance genes from plants such as sorghum and millet, which are famously productive even in parched, sub-Saharan Africa. That assumes consumers and regulators will accept such engineered crops, which have been shunned in many countries because of economic and environmental concerns. To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity. In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic bridge across hard times.

Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say. A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Cape Harrison, Labrador. That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt. By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed--important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide. Studies also show that by plowing or tilling less frequently -- planting seeds in the stubble of a previous crop, for example --farmers can significantly reduce evaporation in dry areas and also cut the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil (and from the exhaust of their tractors, if they have them). Crops grown this way also trap carbon more effectively, becoming part of the solution instead of adding to the problem.

For the truly pessimistic, there is always the "doomsday vault," a seed bank being constructed in a Norwegian mountainside that nations around the world are stocking with every kind of seed imaginable. After all, you never know what kind of plant trait is going to save humanity if the climate makes an unexpected turn, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is leading the effort and who has boasted that the vault will be protected in part by the region's polar bears.That is assuming, of course, that rising temperatures or the newly arrived wheat farmers will not have driven them away.

Meanwhile, new social science research suggests a persistent historical correlation between climate, war and population declines. Building on the work of University of Hong Kong geographer David Zhang, Georgia Tech political scientist Peter Brecke and a team of researchers compared a database of 4,500 wars between 1400 and 1900 with climate change records assembled by paleo-climatologists. They found a persistent pattern of turbulence and warfare during colder periods, followed by migration and population declines, and relative calm in warmer periods. But the researchers argue that the effect of climate change could be analogous to temperature declines in the past, as extreme heat, like extreme cold, will disrupt agriculture and increasing migration pressures. I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to read the paper. But their conclusions are interesting. Read more!