February 10th marked the launch of the Program on Food Security and the Environment's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series. Setting the stage for the two-year series were Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Greg Page, CEO and Chairman of Cargill Inc. As CEOs from the largest foundation and the largest agricultural firm in the world they provided important perspectives on global food security in these particularly volatile times. Full video and clips of the event are now available - Improving Food Security in the 21st Century: What are the Roles for Firms and Foundations.

Jeff Raikes: A Perspective from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Catalytic philanthropy

The Gates Foundation, through its Agricultural Development Initiative, has been a leader in addressing global food security issues. The Foundation allocates 25% of its resources to global development and to addressing the needs of the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty ($1/day). 70-75% of those people live in rural areas and are dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods.

The Gates Foundation is driven by the principle: how can it invest its resources in ways that can leverage performance and address market failures? Its approach embodies a novel concept driven by both private sector motives and public responsibilities. Raikes describes this as catalytic philanthropy.

"The Foundation identifies where its investments can create an innovation, a new intervention that can really raise the quality of lives for people," said Raikes. "If successful, it can be scaled up and sustained by the private sector if we can show that there is a profit opportunity or the public sector if we can show that this is a better way to improve the overall quality of society through investment in public dollars."

Image Photo credit: Michael Prince

In the realm of agriculture, allocating resources across the agricultural value chain has proven to be the most effective approach. As an example of this strategy, Raikes talked about a farmer-owned, Gates-supported dairy chilling plant in Kenya. The cooling facility provided the storage necessary to provide a predictable price at which to sell farmers' milk. This price knowledge and market access gave farmers the confidence to invest in better technology and better dairy cattle. The plant also provided artificial insemination services and extension services to teach farmers how to get greater amounts of milk from the cattle.

"I love the concept. I also love the numbers," said Raikes. "In just two or three years there were now 3,000 farmers in a 25 kilometer radius that were able to access this dairy chilling plant and able to sell their milk."

In addition to improving incomes, Raikes remarked that very consistently what he hears is when farmers are able to improve their incomes the first thing they do with the money is invest in the education of their children.

Upcoming challenges to food security

During the next 40 years or so, global food production must double to accommodate a growing and richer population. Climate change and water scarcity contribute to this challenge. The places that will suffer the most severe weather are also the places where the poorest farmers live. 95% of sub-Saharan agriculture is rain fed with very little irrigation.

"If we are going to be able to feed the world we are going to have to figure out how to achieve more crop per drop," cautioned Raikes. "This includes trying to breed crop varieties that will better withstand water shortages. Early results show that you can get as much as a 20% increase in yield or more under stressed conditions when you have varieties that are bred for that need."

These challenges are compounded by the current economic crisis that is putting pressure on budgets in both donor and developing countries. In 2009, the G20 committed 22 billion dollars to agricultural development in recognition of the importance of agricultural development to food security. However, of the 22 billion promised, 224 million dollars went to five countries in the first round of grants in June. By November, when 21 additional countries submitted their proposals, just 97 million dollars were available to be dispersed and 17 countries were turned away empty handed.

High- and low-tech solutions

In an effort to alleviate some of this deficit, the Gates Foundation has committed 300 million dollars in six grants that span the value chain. These include investments in science and technology, farm management practices, farmer productivity, and market access as well as the data and policy environment to support the Foundation's work. The grants are intended to support about 5 ½ million farm families in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

"We believe innovative solutions can come from both high-tech and low-tech," said Raikes. "On the high-tech end, submergent genes are allowing rice crops to survive periods of flooding up to 15 days. In areas of rice farming prone to flooding, this can save entire crops traditionally wiped out by such weather disasters."

Image Photo credit IRRI/Ariel Javellana

The sub1gene seeds are now being used by 400,000 farmers and are on track to be used by 20 million rice farmers by 2017. On the low-tech end, the Gates Foundation is providing $2 triple layer bags to farmers to reduce crop loss from pests; an affordable solution that has increased average income per farmer by $150/year.

"We primarily support conventional breeding, but we also support biotechnology breeding. In some cases we think that breeders in Africa and South Asia will want to take advantage of the modern tools we use here in our country to provide better choices for their farmers," explained Raikes.

Reasons for optimism

After years of diminished support, US Agricultural Development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has gone from about 650 million in 2005 to about 1.5 billion in 2009. In developing countries, the Comprehensive Agricultural Development Program (CADP) in Africa has challenged countries to dedicate 10% of their national budgets to agriculture with the goal of improving annual agricultural growth by 6%. 20 countries have signed on to the CADP compacts, and 10 countries are exceeding the 6% growth target. Finally, since 1990, 1.3 billion people worldwide have lifted themselves out of poverty primarily through improvements in agricultural productivity.

Raikes pointed to Ghana as a success story. Since 1990, casaba production, an important staple food for poor smallholder farmers, has increased fivefold. Tomato production increased six fold. The cocoa sector has been revived and hunger has been cut by 75%.

"The key to success in Ghana was a combination of getting the right developing country policy with the right macroeconomic reform, the right institutional reform, smart public investment, and an overall good policy environment," said Raikes.

Supporting good policy is an important part of the Foundation's food security strategy, and was a strong motivation behind its funding of FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium series.

"We see this symposium series as an opportunity to gather policy leaders who will bring new ideas of what will be effective policy approaches and effective economic environments in the countries we care a lot about, in particular sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia," said Raikes.

Raikes concluded his remarks by reminding everyone that the key to improving food security globally is making sure women, who make up at least 70% of the farm labor population, are included in the equation.

Greg Page: Balancing the race to caloric sufficiency with rural sociology

As the largest global agricultural firm, Cargill has an influential role to play in the world of food and agriculture. Cargill is a major supplier of food and crops and a provider of farmer services, inputs, and market access.

Image Photo credit: Olaf Hammelburg

Together with the Gates Foundation, Cargill has reached out and trained 200,000 cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Cameroon. One tribe and one small village at a time the company has helped improve food safety, quality maintenance, and storage; benefiting the farmers, Cargill, and customers further down the supply chain. Cargill has also assisted, through financing and product purchasing, 265,000 farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Can the world feed itself?

A billion people lack sufficient caloric intake on a daily basis. In sub-Saharan Africa, 38% of all children are chronically malnourished, largely the result of inadequate agricultural productivity. While nine of the ten countries that have the highest prevalence of malnourishment are in sub-Saharan Africa, the two countries with the largest absolute number of malnourished people are India and China.

"This points to the difficulty of this problem," said Page. "India exports corn and soybean protein and China has 2.5 trillion dollars of hard currency reserves. These issues aren't necessarily of ability to feed people, but a willingness and commitment to do so."

Can the world feed itself? Yes, said Page.

When you break down the number of calories needed per malnourished person per day and convert that to tons of whole grains required to extinguish that hunger you get 30 million tons; 1/6 the amount of grain we converted to fuel globally last year. In the U.S. alone, 40% of our corn goes to ethanol.

"It isn't an issue of caloric famine-it is an issue of economic famine," stated Page. "In other words, this is not a food supply problem, but rather the lack of purchasing power to pay for a diet. An adequate price must be assured to reward the farmer for his efforts and to provide enough money that she can do it again the following year."

Rural sociology premium

What we face is the need to keep smallholders on the farm-despite the fact that they may not be the low-cost producer of foodstuffs-in order to avoid a rural population migration that would be unsustainable. As a result, the challenge the world faces is who is going to pay that rural sociology premium? If it costs more to raise crops on small farms is that burden going to be borne by the urban poor or is there going to be an alternative funding mechanism that allows smallholders to succeed?

Image Photo credit: Cargill

What is the survival price for a smallholder farmer? Page explained that if you wanted a family of four on a farm in sub-Saharan Africa to receive an income commensurate with the average per capita income of the urban population, you would come up with a price near $400 a ton.

"To put this in context, the highest price for maize that has ever been reached here in the United States is about $275 a ton," said Page. "This rural sociology premium to sustain smallholders is not an insignificant amount of money. How do we achieve fairness between the revenue received by the rural smallholder and the price borne by the urban consumer?"

State of disequilibrium - complacency to crisis

Today we are experiencing incredible price volatility where commodity prices are in a continuous state of disequilibrium. Very small changes in production have outsized impacts on price. This is in contrast to the last two and a half decades when the world operated with fairly robust stocks due to crop subsidies in the United States and Western Europe.

"This period of subsidization was when the western world probably did more harm to sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia than any other period in history," said Page. "We refused to allow price to signal to western farmers to produce less. As a result, the world price of grains fell far below the ability of any smallholder to compete. We then shipped those surpluses to developing countries, which then failed to invest in their agriculture for decades."

Today we are lurching from complacency to crisis. The ability of information and market speculation to be transmitted rapidly is affecting purchasing decisions of thousands to millions of consumers. Rising fuel prices, export restrictions, increasing demand for crops for biofuels, and unpredictable weather have all contributed to higher prices. Some of the drivers of price, however, are good things, such as the increase in per capita income and the capacity of more people to have a more dense and nutritious diet.

"Interestingly, the upside of the ethanol and biofuels program is that it brought prices back to a sufficiency that reinvigorated investment in agriculture," noted Page. "On one level I think a very good argument could be made that the biofuels program brought the world further from famine than it ever had been because of the price."

Critical food security factors

Page concluded by summarizing the elements that Cargill believes are critically important to increase food security. The first is the ability to understand the tradeoffs between a fast path to caloric sufficiency and the needs of rural sociology. Second, that crops be grown in the right soil, with the right technology, and relying on free trade so we can harvest competitive advantage to its fullest.

Another critical factor is rural property rights. Smallholders must have the ability to own the land, have access to it, and transfer it to future generations if you want a farmer to reinvest in his farm, said Page.

"Smallholders in developing countries need some degree of revenue certainty and access to a reliable market if we expect them to do what their countries really need them to do, which is raise productivity," explained Page. "Today they are often forced to sell at harvest, often below the cost of production, and lack the storage capabilities and capital to provide crops sufficiently and continuously."

Open, trust-based markets also play a key role in ensuring food security. Governments need to support trade. When Russia, Ukraine, and Argentina turned to embargos as a way to protect domestic food prices open markets were jeopardized and price volatility increased. Finally, there are very important roles for the world's governments in the creation of infrastructure that is vital to provide access to markets.

"I believe fully and completely in the world's capacity to harvest photosynthesis to feed every single person and to do it at prices that can be borne by all," concluded Page.

Warren M. Christopher, a highly respected attorney, former Secretary of State and former chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees died on March 18, 2011, at the age of 85.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Warren Christopher attended Stanford Law School, where he was president of the Law Review and was a member of the Order of the Coif.

Upon graduation, Mr. Christopher joined the Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny& Myers LLP. He would blend a highly regarded and very distinguished law career with an equally distinguished record of public service to several American presidents.

From 1997 to 1982, Mr. Christopher served President Jimmy Carter as Deputy Secretary of State of the United States. President Carter awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in January of 1981 for his role in negotiating the release of 52 Americans hostages in Iran. Mr. Christopher then rejoined O'Melveny & Myers in 1981, serving as chairman of the firm until 1992.

In 1991, Mr. Christopher was Chairman of the Independent Commission of the Los Angeles Police Department, which proposed significant reforms in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident. Mr. Christopher headed the search for a running mate for both Governor Clinton's and Vice President Gore's presidential campaigns and served as Director of the Presidential Transition Process for President Clinton.

Mr. Christopher was called on by President Clinton to serve as Secretary of State. He was sworn in as the 63rd Secretary in January of 1993 and served until January 1997. As Secretary of State, he helped bring peace to Bosnia and to parts of the Middle East. He rejoined his firm, O'Melveny & Myers, as its senior partner in 1997.

Mr. Christopher's activities have included service as President of the Board of Trustees of Stanford and as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has been a Director and Vice Chairman of the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a co-chair, with James Baker, of the National War Powers Commission, convened to determine the respective roles of the president and the congress in taking the nation to war.

He authored four books: In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (Stanford, 1998), Chances of a Lifetime (Scriber 2001), Diplomacy, the Neglected Imperative (published privately in 1981) and Random Harvest (published privately in 2005).

"Warren Christopher was a distinguished attorney, an outstanding diplomat, an astute statesman and a wonderful person,"In 2008, O'Melveny & Myers and a number of its current and retired partners committed $1.5 million to endow the Warren Christopher Professorship of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, a joint appointment between Stanford Law School and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"Warren Christopher was a unique and a very special person," said Law School Dean Larry Kramer. "He was brilliant and thoughtful, generous, modest, and unselfish to the core. In everything he said and did, he embodied what we mean when we talk of someone as classy.

 "Warren Christopher was a distinguished attorney, an outstanding diplomat, an astute statesman and a wonderful person," said Coit D. Blacker, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. "How appropriate it is to have a gift that lives on for the next generation of leaders and public servants that honors his talent, his prescience, his leadership and his remarkable career in both the law and diplomacy. We will miss him and his wise counsel."

Earlier this year U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the appointment of 28 education advocates, civil rights leaders, scholars, and corporate leaders to the Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission. Among them: CISAC's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. He talked with CISAC about educational inequality, America's standing in the world, and the relationship between education and moral leadership.

CISAC: Can you give a little background about the commission and why it was convened?

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar: Education inequity is growing, and is considered increasingly problematic, and people have different ideas about how to solve that problem. Several members of Congress as well as the administration decided it would be useful to have a group of people come together to think about the problem in the long term, to think hard about what the solutions might be, and to think about what the consequences would be if America fails to address the worsening problem of inequality in schools.

CISAC: You've been to one meeting so far. What were some of the initial thoughts or discussion points about what these problems are and how we might address them?

CUELLAR: It was a lively conversation from people who had very different views and perspectives but who came together around two basic propositions: One was that America cannot afford to ignore the problem of its educational system and how poorly it's performing relative to expectations. And two is that there's a link between equity and education. This is an important point because there are many schools in America in our K through 12 system that are performing quite well, that manage to prepare kids well, that manage to teach them what they need to learn, that manage to instill a sense of creativity and a capacity for learning. But there's an achievement gap that's affecting a huge proportion of the population. So if we think about the goal being our ability to train the next generation, and have a country that has the capacity to lead in the world, that achievement gap is really what's getting in the way.

CISAC: What is the ultimate goal of the commission? You'll make recommendations, ultimately, to Congress, to policymakers, and then what?

CUELLAR: We spent some time discussing exactly how to approach the goal. The challenge is that on the one hand, we all have a desire to affect this issue in the medium to short term because it's so urgent, and because we have the ear of the Department of Education and the administration, and many people in Congress. They want to know what can be done as soon as possible. That leads to the idea that as we prepare this report, which will take a year, that we should think hard about what can be done sooner rather than later. By the same token, the problem is so important and staggering in scope, and has such an historical context, that it's important to also think medium to long term. And in particular, given the constraints the country is facing fiscally, we want to make sure we can think about placing this in the broader arc of history. We want to make sure that part of the focus on the report is on steps that can be taken in the short term and part of it focuses on where we will want to be 20 to 30 years from now, and how we would get there.

CISAC: Can you put in context where we are now versus some of the history you mentioned?

CUELLAR: I'll mention three things: First, we can think about the capacity of the country to prepare people to go to college. Certainly for a very long time, America led the world in terms of college graduation rates. Now we're falling behind. Second, you can think about achievement in school districts and kids who are going through elementary school, junior high school and high school. Their achievement levels relative to their counterparts in the OECD have suffered. Third, you can think about the role of the federal government. Clearly the federal government is not the solution to every problem. But if you look at the share of education spending that comes from the federal government, that has declined fairly starkly, from a high of, I believe, 12 or 13 percent to as low as 6 percent. Now it's inching back up. But it's never gotten to the level that it was during the Nixon and Carter administrations.

CISAC: There are a lot of fiscal constraints right now in the state governments. How does what you're trying to do tie in or not tie in with that?

CUELLAR: We want to take a step back and ask the education-focused question: How do you get quality education in this country, and how do you make sure that people are not getting a better or a worse education on the basis of completely arbitrary factors? Obviously, any solution to the problem needs to be put in context of the broader fiscal situation of the country. But it's also helpful to have people who are asking the question based on what works for education, and what works in education. I should add that part of what I would like us to document is not only the cost of doing something, but what the costs of inaction are as well. Certainly money is not the solution to every problem in education, far from it, but it is important to recognize that if we fail to deal with this problem we will face a great deal of tangible and less tangible costs, including, and this is something that did come up several times in the meeting, the effect on America's ability to lead in the world.

CISAC: What is that effect?

CUELLAR: Let me start with the most basic: We have an all-volunteer army and we depend on people who are qualified and talented and willing to serve their country to assure our security. A recent report from the Education Trust documents that fully one-fifth of American high school students who took the exam to join the military are not even eligible to serve because they don't have the academic preparation to do so. It gets even more staggering if you look at the breakdown by race and ethnicity, where almost 40 percent of African Americans would be ineligible and 29 percent of Latinos.

Beyond that, we have an economy and a society that is based on our ability to grow our economy and innovate. It's hard to see how we can do so when the population is growing increasingly unequal in its education levels and its capacity to participate constructively in our economy. There's also the issue of what kind of a stake people feel they have in their country and whether they can share the American dream. This is not only important to give people a sense of ownership of the country, but it is also some of what enhances our soft power around the world. If we can offer a promising place in the American system to people who are part of our society we're better able to hold ourselves out to the world as a promising model. If we lose that, its very hard for us to exercise the kind of moral leadership we've all come to expect of the United States.

Yes, Mohammed VI’s March 9 speech was indeed historic. But no, it is not because it announced a major constitutional reform. If this speech is to be marked, it is because, by delivering it, a Moroccan King surrendered to popular pressure – a spectacular first since the country’s independence in 1956. This alone demonstrates that history, in Morocco, is already in the making.

The monarchy and the people engaged in arm wrestling on February 20. That day, 120,000 Moroccans prompted by young Facebook activists hit the streets of no less than 53 cities and villages in Morocco, claiming – among other things – a democratic constitution. In order to avoid Arabic revolutions’ contagion, the government let the demonstrations go unchallenged. As a consequence, the demonstrators realized how numerous they were, and the wall of fear suddenly collapsed.

Since then, numerous sit-ins were held in the four corners of the Kingdom and abundant op-eds were published in the press and on the Internet, all of which increased the democratic pressure--from substantial in February, to intolerable in March. On the 9th, the King appeared on television announcing a spectacular constitutional reform. Among his many promises: the “rule of law”, an “independent judiciary” and an "elected government that reflects the will of the people, through the ballot box." Go for democratic victory chants? Wait a minute…

Whoever reads the speech carefully will notice the devil in the details. Boldest case: by promising to “consolidate the status of the Prime Minister”, the King envisions the latter as the head of “an” executive branch, rather than “the” executive branch. Meaning: there will be another one elsewhere – in the royal Palace, for example. With or without constitutional reform, the “executive monarchy” (as King Mohammed himself puts it) is not done encroaching on the government’s territory. It’s as if you were stepping on somebody’s feet and instead of stepping aside, you promise this person new shoes…

The problem is obviously not with the Prime Minister’s powers. It is with the King’s – especially his spiritual powers, given that Islam is Morocco’s state religion. During his March 9 speech, King Mohammed firmly stated that those “immutable values of sacred character” shall not be debated. The Constitution’s articles 19 and 23 assert that the monarch is the “Commander of the faithful” and that his person in “sacred”. Add to this that article 29 gives him the right to govern by issuing dahirs, which are non-questionable and non-opposable royal decrees.

Long story short: the King of Morocco can do absolutely anything he wants, and no one is granted the slightest power to stop him – all of this in the name of Islam. In 1994, late King Hassan, who crafted this unanswerable argument (pretending it was “immemorial tradition”), once justified it by quoting the Prophet Muhammad: “Those who obey me obey God, and those who disobey me disobey God”. How clearer could that be? Said Mohammed VI: democracy supposes that people in charge are accountable. Yet this doesn’t apply to him. You can’t really ask for accounts from the “representative of God on his land” – as the allegiance act to the King of Morocco puts it.

On another hand, the reform’s scope is likely to be lessened by the identity of its enforcers. The day after his speech, the King appointed a constitutional reform commission formed by 18 local experts, the overwhelming majority of whom are loyal civil servants. Little independent spirit is consequently expected.  The commission’s president, Abdeltif Menouni, 67, is a member of this flock of law experts that was hired in the 1980s by former regime strongman Driss Basri in order to provide some legal justification to King Hassan’s autocracy. A fine connoisseur of constitutional law, Mr. Menouni proved skilled in this exercise. He once explained the notion of “royal prerogative” as “the monarch’s discretionary privilege to act for the good of the country in the absence of constitutional provisions or by his personal interpretation of any.[1]” It is hardly imaginable that this man, who just reached the peak of his career, would dismantle the autocratic “prerogatives” he himself defined.

Yet, despite his ensnared speech and his barely credible commission, Mohammed VI has put himself in a difficult position. Whatever the final draft constitution looks like, it will have to be validated through a referendum. If only because of that, the King will be forced to open the system one way or another. Having the “No” campaigners speak on public TV would already greatly challenge the supposedly untouchable “sacredness” paradigm. How can the royal palace admit that some Moroccans may reject a proposition from the Commander of the faithful? Put under pressure, the monarchy is reaching its ultimate contradiction: Sacred or democratic? It is now time to choose.

The protesters, who are not necessarily aware of these profound political stakes, are waiting on their part for tangible signs of change. The repression of a Casablanca March 13 peaceful protest already casted doubts on the regime’s intentions. Why such violence, only days after the King promised democracy? What if he was not sincere?

Bigger scale protests are scheduled starting March 20. It seems that the government has no good options. Dropping the mask by meeting the demonstrators with brutal repression may well escalate their anger. Up until now, the King himself was spared by the street slogans. This could change, paving the way to an Egyptian-style scenario, indeed the authorities’ worst nightmare. On the other hand, allowing the demonstrations to happen freely would empower the people and encourage them to hit the streets more, thus increasing pressure on the monarchy.

Sooner or later, Mohammed VI will have to make new concessions. When and to what extent? The highly unstable situation makes that hard to predict. One thing is certain: the democratic Pandora’s box is open, and will not be closed again.

[1] A. Menouni in Revue juridique, politique et économique du Maroc, Mohammed V University, Rabat, January 1984 (p. 42)

Original article (in French): Le Monde: "La sacralité de la monarchie marocaine est un frein à la démocratisation"

On February 25 and 26, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, in partnership with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, hosted a symposium titled, "Addressing the Accountability Gap in Statebuilding: The Case of Afghanistan." This event brought together leading experts, government officials, diplomats, practitioners, and academics to examine the problems of accountability, corruption, and election fraud that have risen in the wake of international statebuilding efforts in Afghanistan.

This unique forum allowed participants-both Afghan actors and members of the international community- who are heavily involved in building the institutions of the Afghan state, to participate in an honest exchange with their peers to surface challenges and generate recommendations to improve the practice of statebuilding moving forward. 

Panels were designed around the following questions: how to establish accountability in statebuilding, address electoral fraud evidenced in 2009 and 2010, manage powerbrokers who monopolize informal governance networks, coordinate anti-corruption efforts, and develop a political strategy for Afghanistan's future. What surfaced throughout these presentations and discussion was the issue of the "double compact" in Afghanistan-the failure of Afghans to self-govern and the failure of the international community to construct the institutions of a functioning state.

Participants proposed a new framework for governance that adopts a more participatory approach with the international community, Afghan government, and the public as equal partners in statebuilding endeavors. While challenges emerged there were also a number of key recommendations and strategies proposed  that can be pioneered by this influential group of policymakers and practitioners to ease the transition of responsibility to the Afghan government in 2014.  

The keynote address was delivered by former Afghan Minster of Finance and 2009 presidential candidate Dr. Ashraf Ghani, to an audience of more than 100 students and members of the local community. Dr. Ghani provided an honest and pragmatic account of the parallel and conflicting systems driven by the international community, which have given rise to systemic failure and corruption in Afghanistan.

"We are dealing with a crooked playing field," Dr. Ghani said recognizing that both the Afghan and international community were jointly responsible for this outcome. "When the field itself is crooked the nature of reform and change that we must initiate are very different. "

Dr. Ghani spent considerable time discussing the outsourcing of development to Washington-based firms that manage million dollar contracts and outsource technical work to foreign technocrats. This in Dr. Ghani's opinion does little to strengthen the internal capacities of the state, provide training opportunities to Afghans or allocate resources effectively to the general public.

Dr. Ghani stressed the importance of speaking honestly about these dysfunctions in the development system, "We need to start talking truth to each other if we are going to deal with this phenomenon. This double failure now is the genesis of the present."

Dr. Ghani channeled the sentiments of the Afghan public into the room by emphasizing the uncertainty that defines their lives. "Today it is the sense of injustice that drives conflict," Dr. Ghani said. "The level of conflict is driven by injustice. What Afghans yearn for is normalcy-the sense that the lives of our children and grandchildren will be better and what my generation endured will not be repeated."

The level of conflict is driven by injustice. What Afghans yearn for is normalcy-the sense that the lives of our children and grandchildren will be better and what my generation endured will  not be repeated.                    -Dr. Ashraf Ghani 

 Looking forward, Dr. Ghani advised that accountability mechanisms and feedback loops must be implemented to ensure that the necessary auditing and accounting mechanisms are in place to control corruption and ensure transparency. In addition, he called for one coherent system of rules that must be developed and agreed upon to govern development and prevent parallel systems from circumventing these rules. Finally, he advised adopting national programs that model the success of the National Solidarity Program, which reduced child mortality rates by 16%.

Dr. Ghani commented on the unique position that Afghanistan occupies at the crossroads of Asia, in the middle of "four huge hubs of change," China, India, Russia, and the Gulf. "A new regional era has to be created, if France and Germany could overcome hundreds of years of conflict we must create another sense of opportunity."

Dr. Ghani concluded by placing the hope and responsibility for Afghanistan's future in the hands of its younger generation, "We must talk about the generation compact in Afghanistan, our sons and daughters-both literal and figurative-are the source of growth and the source of dynamism...The women of Afghanistan, the youth of Afghanistan, and the poor of Afghanistan are the three numerical majorities that have been reduced to political and economic minority. Without investing in women, investing in youth and tackling the challenge of poverty, we are not going to have stability."

At the end of the two day symposium, participants collectively called for a comprehensive political strategy to facilitate the peaceful and legal transfer of power in 2014, which marks the end of President Karzai's term in office. With this important milestone in the near future, the international community remains committed to working with their Afghan counterparts to introduce political reform measures that will strengthen accountability mechanisms between the Afghan state and society. 

As Dr. Ghani eloquently stated at the end of his presentation, "We have to have an agenda of the future, we must engage in writing the history of the future."

Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?  

The Communist government in Beijing is clearly worried. It has limited news coverage of the recent uprisings and has clamped down on democratic activists and foreign reporters, acting pre-emptively against anonymous calls on the Internet for China to have its own "Jasmine Revolution." A recent front-page editorial in the Beijing Daily, an organ of the city's party committee, declared that most people in the Middle East were unhappy with the protests in their countries, which were a "self-delusional ruckus" orchestrated by a small minority. For his part, President Hu Jintao has urged the strengthening of what has been dubbed the "Great Firewall"-the sophisticated apparatus of censorship and surveillance that the regime uses to control access to the Internet.

No social scientist or intelligence analyst predicted the specific timing or spread of the Arab uprising-the fact that it would start in Tunisia, of all places, that it would be triggered by an event like the self-immolation of a vegetable seller, or that protests would force the mighty Egyptian army to abandon Hosni Mubarak. Over the past generation, Arab societies have appeared stolidly stable. Why they suddenly exploded in 2011 is something that can be understood only in retrospect, if at all.

But this doesn't mean that we can't think about social revolutions in a more structured way. Even unpredictable things take place in a certain context, and the present-day situations of China and the Middle East are radically different. Most of the evidence suggests that China is pretty safe from the democratic wave sweeping other parts of the world-at least for now.

Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington-not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."

Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system-that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity.

All of these observations would seem to apply to Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have made substantial social progress in recent decades. The Human Development Indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite measure of health, education and income) increased by 28% for Egypt and 30% for Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The number of people going to school has grown substantially; Tunisia especially has produced large numbers of college graduates. And indeed, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were led in the first instance by educated, tech-savvy middle-class young people, who expressed to anyone who would listen their frustrations with societies in which they were not allowed to express their views, hold leaders accountable for corruption and incompetence, or get a job without political connections.

Mr. Huntington stressed the destabilizing power of new social groups seeking political participation. People used to be mobilized by newspapers and radio; today they are spurred to action by cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, which allow them to share their grievances about the existing system and to learn about the possibilities of the larger world. This change in the Middle East has been incredibly rapid, and it has trumped, for now, old verities about the supposed passivity of Arab culture and the resistance of Islam to modernization.

But do these remarkable developments tell us anything about the possibility for future instability in China?

It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented.

This is a huge problem throughout China. A recent report from Jiao Tong University found that there were 72 "major" incidents of social unrest in China in 2010, up 20% over the previous year. Most outside observers would argue that this understates the real number of cases by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. Such incidents are hard to count because they often occur in rural areas where reporting is strictly controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The most typical case of outraged dignity in contemporary China is a local government that works in collusion with a private developer to take away the land of peasants or poor workers to make way for a glittery new project, or a company that dumps pollutants into a town's water supply and gets away with it because the local party boss stands to profit personally. Though corruption in China does not reach the predatory levels of certain African or Middle Eastern countries, it is nonetheless pervasive. People see and resent the privileged lives of the nation's elite and their children. The movie "Avatar" was a big hit in China in part because so many ordinary Chinese identified with the indigenous people it portrayed whose land was being stolen by a giant, faceless corporation.

There is, moreover, a huge and growing problem of inequality in China. The gains from China's remarkable growth have gone disproportionately to the country's coastal regions, leaving many rural areas far behind. China's Gini index-a standard measure of income inequality across a society-has increased to almost Latin American levels over the past generation. By comparison, Egypt and Tunisia have a much more equal income distribution.

According to Mr. Huntington, however, revolutions are made not by the poor but by upwardly mobile middle-class people who find their aspirations stymied, and there are lots of them in China. Depending on how you define it, China's middle class may outnumber the whole population of the United States. Like the middle-class people of Tunisia and Egypt, those in China have no opportunities for political participation. But unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, they have benefited from a dramatically improving economy and a government that has focused like a laser beam on creating employment for exactly this group.

To the extent that we can gauge Chinese public opinion through surveys like Asia Barometer, a very large majority of Chinese feel that their lives have gotten better economically in recent years. A majority of Chinese also believe that democracy is the best form of government, but in a curious twist, they think that China is already democratic and profess to be satisfied with this state of affairs. This translates into a relatively low degree of support for any short-term transition to genuine liberal democracy.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the middle class in China may fear multiparty democracy in the short run, because it would unleash huge demands for redistribution precisely from those who have been left behind. Prosperous Chinese see the recent populist polarization of politics in Thailand as a warning of what democracy may bring.

The fact is that authoritarianism in China is of a far higher quality than in the Middle East. Though not formally accountable to its people through elections, the Chinese government keeps careful track of popular discontents and often responds through appeasement rather than repression. Beijing is forthright, for example, in acknowledging the country's growing income disparities and for the past few years has sought to mitigate the problem by shifting new investments to the poor interior of the country. When flagrant cases of corruption or abuse appear, like melamine-tainted baby formula or the shoddy school construction revealed by the Sichuan earthquake, the government holds local officials brutally accountable-sometimes by executing them.

Another notable feature of Chinese government is self-enforced leadership turnover. Arab leaders like Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Mr. Mubarak and Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi never knew when to quit, hanging on 23, 30 and 41 years, respectively. Since Mao, the Chinese leadership has rigidly adhered to terms of about a decade. Mr. Hu, the current president, is scheduled to step down in 2012, when he is likely to be replaced by Vice President Xi Jinping. Leadership turnover means that there is more policy innovation, in sharp contrast to countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which have been stuck for decades in the rut of crony capitalism.

The Chinese government is also more clever and ruthless in its approach to repression. Sensing a clear threat, the authorities never let Western social media spread in the first place. Facebook and Twitter are banned, and content on websites and on China-based social media is screened by an army of censors. It is possible, of course, for word of government misdeeds to get out in the time between its first posting by a micro-blogger and its removal by a censor, but this cat-and-mouse game makes it hard for a unified social space to emerge.

A final critical way in which China's situation differs from that of the Middle East lies in the nature of its military. The fate of authoritarian regimes facing popular protests ultimately depends on the cohesiveness and loyalty of its military, police and intelligence organizations. The Tunisian army failed to back Mr. Ben Ali early on; after some waffling, the Egyptian army decided it would not fire on protesters and pushed Mr. Mubarak out of power.

In China, the People's Liberation Army is a huge and increasingly autonomous organization with strong economic interests that give it a stake in the status quo. As in the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, it has plenty of loyal units around the country that it could bring into Beijing or Shanghai, and they would not hesitate to fire on demonstrators. The PLA also regards itself as the custodian of Chinese nationalism. It has developed an alternative narrative of 20th-century history that places itself at the center of events like the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war and the rise of a modern China. It is very unlikely that the PLA would switch sides and support a democratic uprising.

The bottom line is that China will not catch the Middle Eastern contagion anytime soon. But it could easily face problems down the road. China has not experienced a major recession or economic setback since it set out on its course of economic reform in 1978. If the country's current property bubble bursts and tens of millions of people are thrown out of work, the government's legitimacy, which rests on its management of the economy, would be seriously undermined.

Moreover, Mr. Huntington's scenario of rising but unfulfilled expectations among the middle class may still play out. Though there is a labor shortage among low-skill workers in China today, there is a glut of the college educated. Every year into the future, China will graduate more than seven million people from its universities, up from fewer than a million in 1998, and many of them are struggling to find work suitable to their self-perceived status. Several million unemployed college graduates are far more dangerous to a modernizing regime than hundreds of millions of poor peasants.

There is also what the Chinese themselves call the "bad emperor" problem. China's historical achievement over the centuries has been the creation of high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. When authoritarian rulers are competent and reasonably responsible, things can go very well. Indeed, such decision-making is often more efficient than in a democracy. But there is no guarantee that the system will always produce good rulers, and in the absence of the rule of law and electoral checks on executive power, there is no way to get rid of a bad emperor. The last bad emperor, commonly (if quietly) acknowledged as such, was Mao. We can't know what future tyrant, or corrupt kleptocrat, may be waiting in the wings in China's future.

The truth is that, much as we might theorize about the causes of social revolution, human societies are far too complex, and change too rapidly, for any simple theory to provide a reliable guide. Any number of observers dismissed the power of the "Arab street" to bring about political change, based on their deep knowledge of the Middle East, and they were right every year-up until 2011.

The hardest thing for any political observer to predict is the moral element. All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community. We can quote statistics on education or job growth, or dig into our knowledge of a society's history and culture, and yet completely miss the way that social consciousness is swiftly evolving through a myriad of text messages, shared videos or simple conversations.

The central moral imponderable with regard to China is the middle class, which up to now has seemed content to trade political freedom for rising incomes and stability. But at some point this trade-off is likely to fail; the regime will find itself unable to deliver the goods, or the insult to the dignity of the Chinese people will become too great to tolerate. We shouldn't pretend that we can predict when this tipping point will occur, but its eventual arrival, as Samuel Huntington might have suggested, is bound up with the very logic of modernization itself.