Failed States

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THERE IS

MANY EARLIER CIVILIZATIONS were undone by environmentally induced crises. Typi­cally, they faced one or two destructive environmental trends, most often defor­estation and soil erosion. The Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium B.C. was remarkable for its irrigation system, which supported a highly pro-

ductive agriculture. Yet an environmental flaw in the system design brought the civilization down. Water from behind dams was diverted onto the land, raising crop yields. Some of the water was used by the crops, some evaporated into the atmosphere and some percolated downward. Over time, this percolation raised the water table. As the water climbed near the surface, it began to evap­orate, leaving the mineral salts behind. The accumula­tion of salt in turn reduced the productivity of the land. The Sumerians shifted to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant. But eventually bar­ley yields also declined. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined the economic foundation of this great civilization.

We environmentalists have been saying for decades that we want to save the planet, but the planet is likely to be around for some time. It is civilization we need to save. As more states fail, we face a disturbing question: How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?

The term failing state has been in use for only a decade or two, but these coun­tries are now a prominent feature of the international political landscape. After a half century of states forming from for­mer colonies and from the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world is now faced with the opposite situation: the disinte­gration of states. As an article in Foreign Policy observes, "Failed states have made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very center of global politics."

In the past, governments worried about the concentration of too much power in one state. But today, failing states pose the greatest threat to global order and stability. As Foreign Policy notes, "World leaders once worried about who was amassing power; now they worry about the absence of it." Or, as The Economist notes, "Like a severely disturbed individual, a failed state is a danger not just to itself but to those around it and beyond."

The Central Intelligence Agency funds the Political Instability Task Force to track political risk factors. The British government's international development arm has identified 46 "fragile states." The World Bank focuses its attention

on some 30 low-income "fragile and conflict-affected countries." But the most systematic effort to analyze coun­tries according to their vulnerability to failure is one undertaken annually by the Washington, D.C.-based Fund for Peace and published each year in the July/August issue of Foreign Policy. This invaluable assessment not only offers insights into changes under way in the world but also tells us where we are heading.

The Fund for Peace's research team ana­lyzes data for 177 countries and ranks them according to "their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration." Somalia is at the top of the 2010 Failed States Index, followed by Chad, Sudan, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Three key oil-exporting coun­tries are among the top 20: Sudan, Iraq and Nigeria. Pakistan, now ranked number 10, is the only failing state with a nuclear arse­nal, but North Korea—19th on the list—is developing a nuclear capability

What is a failed state? It is a country whose government has lost control of its territory. The governmental function

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Environmental degradation contributes to political instability and leads to social collapse. Here are six reasons for concern

. India's Gangotri glacier, which helps keep the Ganges flowing during the dry season, is retreat­ing. If this melting continues to accelerate, the Gangotri's life expectancy will be measured in decades, and the Ganges will eventually flow only during the rainy season. For the 4D7 million Indians and Bangladeshis who live in the Ganges basin, this could be a life-threatening loss of water. (B Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong predicts that two thirds of China's glaciers could be gone by 2060. "The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region," Yao says, "will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe." C Tanzania's snowcapped Kilimanjaro may soon be free of snow and ice. Africa's tallest mountain lost 85 percent of its ice mass between 1912 and 2QQ7. The gla­ciers on Kilimanjaro may soon be relegated to photographs in museums. Not far away, Mount Kenya has lost seven of its IS glaciers. Local riv­ers fed by these glaciers are becoming seasonal

waterways, generating conflict among the 2 mil­lion people who depend on them for water during the dry season. 0 Peru stretches same 1,000 miles along the Andes and is home to 70 percent of the earth's tropical glaciers. Some 22 percent of its glacial endowment, which supplies water to the cities in the coastal regions, has disappeared. The Quelccaya glacier in southern Peru, which was retreating by 20 feet a year in the 1960s, is now retreating by 200 feet annually. E Two deserts in north-central China are expanding and merging to form a single desert that overlaps Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west, in Xinjiang prov­ince, two even larger deserts-the Taklimakan and the Kumtag-are also merging. Highways running through the shrinking area between them are reg­ularly inundated by sand dunes. ^ The Bodele Depression in Chad is the source of an estimated 1.3 billion tons of wind-borne soil a year, up tenfold since measurements began in 1947.

breaks down and in some cases even disappears. Such states cannot protect their citizens.

The most conspicuous indication of state failure is a breakdown in law and order and the related loss of personal security. When governments lose their monopoly

on power, the rule of law begins to disintegrate. Civil wars break out as opposing groups vie for power. At this point, govern ments often turn to the United Nations for help. In fact, UN peacekeep­ing forces are assisting roughly a third of the top 20 failing states, including Haiti,

Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The number of security per­sonnel in peacekeeping missions doubled between 2003 and 2010.

In Haiti, armed gangs ruled the streets until a UN peacekeeping force arrived in

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2004. In Afghanistan, local warlords and the Taliban, not the central government, con­trol most of the country outside of Kabul.

Environmental stress is an underlying pressure. Weaker nations find themselves unable to cope with food and water shortages. Food becomes the weak link in our 21st century civilization.

Failed states can't provide food security. This isn't nec­essarily because governments have become less competent but because it has become more difficult to obtain enough food. World grain prices have been roughly dou­ble their historical levels since early 2007. The UN world food price index reached an all-time high in February 2011 after climbing for seven consecutive months. For low-income food-deficit countries, finding enough food is a chal­lenge. And to make matters worse, temperatures are ris­ing as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise. For each one-degree-Celsius rise in temperature during the growing season, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields.

With food security, as with personal security, the United Nations is a fallback. The food equivalent of the peacekeeping forces is the World Food Pro­gramme, a UN agency that provides emergency food aid in more than 70 countries. Some countries, such as Haiti, depend on a UN peacekeep­ing force to maintain law and order and on the WFP for part of its food. Haiti is, in effect, a ward of the United Nations.

Failing states are rarely iso­lated phenomena. Conflicts can easily spread to neighboring countries, as when the geno­cide in Rwanda spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an ongo­ing civil conflict claimed more than 5 million lives between 1998 and 2007. The vast majority of the deaths in the DRC were due to war's indi­rect effects, including hunger, dysentery and respiratory ill­nesses. Similarly, the killings in Sudan's Darfur region quickly spread into Chad as victims fled across the border.

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Failed States

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Failing states such as Afghanistan and Myanmar have become sources of illegal drugs. In 2009 Afghanistan supplied 89 per­cent of the world's opium, much of it made into heroin. Myanmar, though a distant sec­ond, is a major heroin supplier for China.

The conditions of state failure may be a long time in the making, but the collapse itself can come quickly. Yemen, for example, is fac­ing several threatening trends. It is running out of both oil and water. The underground basin that supplies the capital city of Sanaa with water may be fully depleted by 2015. Oil production, which accounts for 75 percent of government revenue and an even larger share of export earnings, fell by nearly 40 percent from 2003 to 2009. And with the country's two main oil fields seriously depleted, there is nothing in sight to reverse the decline.

Underlying these stresses is a fast-growing, poverty-stricken population, one of the poor­est among the Arab countries. On die political front, the shaky Yemeni government faces a Shiite insurgency in the north and a deepening of the long-standing conflict between the north and the south. As the Arab Spring spread to Yemen, efforts to oust President Ali Abdullah Saleh had the country on the brink of civil war as of mid-2011. With its long, porous bor­der with Saudi Arabia, Yemen could become a staging ground and gateway for Al Qaeda to move into Saudi Arabia. Could the ultimate Al Qaeda goal of controlling Saudi Arabia, both a center of Islam and the world's leading exporter of oil, finally be within reach?

Ranking on the Failed States Index is closely linked with demographic indicators. The populations in 15 of the top 20 failing states are growing between two percent and four percent a year. Niger tops this list at 3.9 percent, and Afghanistan's population is growing by 3.4 percent. Yemen is 2.9 per­cent. A population growing at three percent a year may not sound overwhelming, but it will expand 20-fold in a century. In failing states, big families are the norm, not the exception, with women in a number of countries bear­ing an average of six or more children.

In 14 of the top 20 failing states at least 40 percent of the population is under the age of 15, a demographic indicator mat raises the like­lihood of political instability. Young men lacking employment opportunities often become disaf­fected and ready recruits for insurgencies.

In many countries with several decades of rapid population growth, governments suffer from demographic fatigue and are unable to cope with the steady shrinkage in cropland and freshwater supply per person. They can­not build schools fast enough to educate the swelling ranks of children.

Sudan is a classic case of a country caught in the demographic trap. Like many failing states, it has developed far enough economi­cally and socially to reduce mortality but not far enough to lower fertility. As a result, large families beget poverty and poverty begets large families. Women in Sudan have on aver­age four children, double the number needed for replacement. This expands the popula­tion of 42 million by 2,000 a day. Under this pressure, Sudan—like other countries in simi­lar situations—is breaking down.

All but four of the 20 countries that lead the list of failing states are caught in this demo­graphic trap. Realistically, they probably cannot break out of it on their own. They will need outside help to raise education levels, especially of girls. In every society for which we have data, the more education women have, the smaller their families. And the smaller the fam­ilies, the easier it is to break out of poverty.

Failed states are losing the race between food production and population growth. Even getting food relief to failing states can be a chal­lenge. In Somalia, threats from Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-affiliated radical group, and the killing of food relief workers effectively ended efforts to provide food assistance in the south­ern part of the hunger-stricken country.

Another characteristic of failing states is the deterioration of the economic infrastructure—roads, power, water and sewage systems. For example, a lack of maintenance has left many irrigation canal net­works in an advanced state of disrepair, often no longer able to deliver water to farmers.

Virtually all the top 20 countries are deplet­ing their natural assets—forests, grasslands, soils and aquifers—to sustain their rapidly growing populations. The three countries at the top of the list—Somalia, Chad and Sudan—are losing topsoil to wind erosion, thus undermining the productivity of their land. Several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, are water-stressed and are overpumping their aquifers.

After a point, as rapid population growdi, deteriorating environmental support sys­tems and poverty reinforce one another, the resulting instability makes it difficult to attract investment from abroad. A drying up of foreign investment and an associated rise in unemploy­ment are also part of die decline syndrome.

In an age of increasing globalization, a func­tioning global society depends on a cooperative network of stable nation-states. When govern­ments lose their capacity to govern, they can no longer collect taxes, much less be responsible for their international debts. More failing states mean more bad debt. Efforts to control inter­national terrorism also depend on cooperation among functioning nation-states. As more states fail, such cooperation becomes less effective.

Failing states may lack health care sys­tems sophisticated enough to participate in international efforts to control the spread of infectious diseases, such as polio, avian flu, swine flu and mad cow disease. In 1988 the international community launched an effort to eradicate polio, a campaign patterned on the one that eliminated smallpox. The goal was to eliminate the disease that used to par­alyze an average of 1,000 children each day. By 2003 polio had been eradicated in all but a few countries, among them Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

But that year mullahs in northern Nigeria, now 14th on the failing-states list, began to oppose the vaccination program, claiming it was a plot to spread AIDS and sterility. As a result, the local vaccination effort broke down, and polio cases in Nigeria tripled over the next three years. Meanwhile, Nigerian Muslims making their annual pilgrimage to Mecca may have spread the disease, reintro-ducing the virus in some Muslim countries that had been polio-free—such as Indone­sia, Chad and Somalia. In response, Saudi

officials imposed a polio vaccination require­ment on all younger visitors from countries with reported cases of polio.

In early 2007, when eradication again appeared to be in sight, violent opposition to vaccinations arose in Pakistan's North­west Frontier Province, where a doctor and a health worker in the Polio Eradication Pro­gram were killed. More recently, the Taliban has refused to let health officials administer polio vaccinations in the Swat Valley, further delaying the campaign. This raises a trou­bling question: In a world of failing states, is the goal of eradicating polio, once so close at hand, now slipping beyond our reach?

So far, failing states have been mostly smaller ones. But some countries with more than 100 million people, such as Pakistan and Nige­ria, are working their way up the list. So is Mexico, where both oil production and exports have peaked, lowering the government's tax revenue and foreign exchange. Beyond this, a criminal organization called the Zetas taps gov­ernment oil pipelines in areas it controls. In 2008 and 2009, the Zetas withdrew more than $ 1 billion worth of oil. The government's war with the drug cartels has claimed more than 34,600 lives since 2006, a number that dwarfs American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade. With income from oil and tourism shrinking—and with foreign investors becoming nervous—the Mexican government is being seriously challenged.

For India, where 15 percent of the people are being fed with grain produced by over-pumping of groundwater, emerging water shortages could trigger its decline. As local conflicts over water multiply and intensify, tension between Hindus and Muslims could reignite, leading to instability.

Fortunately, state failure is not always a one-way street. South Africa, which could

have erupted into a race war a genera­tion ago, is now a functioning democracy. Liberia and Colombia, both of which once had high Failed States Index scores, have made remarkable turnarounds.

Nevertheless, as the number of failing states grows, it becomes more difficult to deal with various international crises. Situations that may be manageable in a healthy world order—such as maintain­ing monetary stability or controlling the outbreak of an infectious disease—become difficult and sometimes impossible in a world with many disintegrating states. Even maintaining international flows of raw materials could become a chal­lenge. At some point, spreading political instability could disrupt global economic progress, which underscores the need to address the causes of state failure with a heightened sense of urgency.

The world is moving into uncharted ter­ritory as human demands override the sustainable yield of natural systems. The risk is that people will lose confidence in the capacity of their governments to cope with such problems, leading to social breakdown. The shift to anarchy is already evident in Somalia, Afghanistan and the DRC.

How can we save civilization? We need an economy in sync with the earth and its natural support systems, not one that destroys them. The fossil-fuel-based, auto­mobile-centered throwaway economy that evolved in Western industrial societies is no longer a viable model—not for the countries that shaped it or for the coun­tries that emulate them. In short, we need to build a new economy, one powered with carbon-free sources of energy—wind, solar and geothermal—one that has a diversi­fied transport system and that reuses and recycles everything.

We cannot afford to do otherwise.