President Obama’s speech in Cairo last Thursday was a remarkable achievement.
It was also a lesson in America’s ability to produce a foreign policy U-turn in a short space of time. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that President Bush was given a standing ovation by Israel’s legislature, as he spoke of risks of terrorism.
So, where does this leave China? The country had benefited from growing mistrust between America and the Middle East. Riyadh’s warming relationship with Beijing, for instance, was in part a hedge against its deteriorating relationship with Washington.
Critics will argue the speech puts Beijing on the back foot. And it perhaps isn’t a surprise that the People’s Daily, China’s official newspaper, referenced the speech, not on the front page like other major dailies, but instead on page three.
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Land is the new oil, just ask Saudi Arabia.
O.K., Saudi Arabia has plenty of land, but it isn’t easy growing wheat and rice on largely rocky desert. So, the country has to import a large share of the food it consumes, and that’s a problem when the price of food soars.
Saudi Arabia has responded by buying wheat fields and banana plantations in places like Sudan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and using it to grow food for dinner tables in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dhahran. In short, it’s using its oil exports to buy food imports.
It isn’t alone. In fact, the Silk Road countries rank among the world’s largest buyers of foreign farmland.
A recent report by Grain, a non-profit organization, highlights this point: the report cites 13 countries as large buyers of foreign farmland―12 of the 13 are Silk Road countries, including, China, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
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Who’s to blame for this economic crisis? It’s an important question for governments in Cairo, Islamabad, and Manila: as I wrote last week, they face the challenge of finding jobs for the rising number of migrant workers returning home.
So it’s no surprise many governments are pointing to the West, in particular America, as responsible for factory closures and job losses. This is what makes today’s crisis different, for example, to the Asian crisis a decade ago.
I’ve been looking for evidence of “finger-pointing” in the Arabic and Chinese media. But it strikes me that not everyone is behaving in the same way.
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