The U.S. ranks #2 in the world’s worst environmental offenders, according to environmental groups at the global warming conference in Bali . Our greenhouse gas emissions and environmental policies contribute to this ranking. Saudi Arabia snags the gold at #1 worst environmental offender. Australia trails just behind the U.S. at #3—however, they just signed the Kyoto Protocol, so they may be on their way to a ranking that contributes to environmental well-being.

We are the only industrialized nation that hasn’t yet signed the Kyoto Protocol. If we add our name, we could make great strides in global development–since climate change affects developing countries first and worst.

Read the entire article here.

Yesterday’s NPR Democratic Debate covered only three topics: Iran, China, and Immigration.

As you know, immigration has a great affect on global development. Here are some boiled down points from the candidates:

Biden said that employers have an obligation during their hiring process to know whether or not the job is being given to an American versus an illegal immigrant.

Clinton said we need better enforcement against those who hire undocumented workers, but that we should have some sympathy for them—and that if the US produces enough jobs, immigration isn’t as much on an issue.

Dodd thought that immigration could be used as a wedge issue by Republicans.

Edwards defended a previous statement that immigration doesn’t drive down wages by turning the discussion towards the loss of good middle class jobs. He also called for comprehensive immigration reform.

Gravel said that the way we’ve been approaching the problem is not going to solve anything. He also said that we should open our doors and if we have jobs for immigrants, they’ll get them and if not, they’ll go home.

Kucinich said that we should cancel Nafta and provide a path to legalization for undocumented workers.

Obama thought that employers who hire illegal immigrants should be penalized, but immigrants should have also a chance to acquire legal status.

Read the full article or the transcript for more.

Popping up in the candidates’ discourse is the issue of trade, especially fair trade, U.S. policy concerning African and Latin American economies, and labor standards enforcement. Here are some things the candidates have said about trade:

Clinton, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“I believe in smart trade. I’ve said that for years. Pro- American trade; trade that has labor and environmental standards; that’s not a race to the bottom, but tries to lift up not only American workers but also workers around the world.”
Read more.

Dodd, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“I agree [NAFTA] requires modification, but we also need to do something else here. In addition to having trading agreements that include labor, environmental health provisions in them and insisting upon those provisions in any trading agreement here, we need to stop exporting the jobs in the country that already are here.”
Read more.

Edwards, from speech on Trade Policy in Iowa: August 6, 2007
“As president, I will seek to restore America’s moral leadership of the world, and our trade policies with these countries can help. But we are going to be tough in our negotiations because the overriding obligation of the president of the United States is to put America’s workers, economy and national interests first.”
Read more.

Gravel, from Democratic Debate at Howard University: June 28, 2007
“No, outsourcing is not the problem. What is the problem is our trade agreements that we have that benefit the management and, of course, the shareholders, and have neglected on either side of the issue, whether it’s in Mexico or in other countries or the United States. That’s the problem that must be addressed.”
Read more.

Guiliani, from his “12 Commitment’s Pledge”:
Aggressively Advance Free Trade: Rudy will tear down the walls to free trade and create new markets for American-made products. He will protect America’s innovations and intellectual property by enforcing our trade agreements aggressively.
* Reduce corporate tax rates and regulatory burden so that Americans can better compete in the global economy.
* Reform the excesses of Sarbanes-Oxley that are driving our corporations overseas to list on foreign exchanges.
* Reenact the Presidential Fast-Track Trade Promotion Authority and complete the Doha Development Round.
Read more.

Huckabee, from speech in Iowa, April 28th, 2007
“If somebody in the presidency doesn’t begin to understand that we can’t have free trade if it’s not fair trade, we’re going to continually see people who have worked for 20 and 30 years for companies one day walk in and get the pink slip and told ‘I’m sorry but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here.”
Read more.

Kucinich, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“In my first week in office, I will notify Mexico and Canada that the United States is withdrawing from NAFTA. I will notify the WTO we’re withdrawing from the WTO.”
Read more.

McCain, from Conference on Bio Economy in Ames, IA November 5, 2007
“Our future prosperity depends on our competitiveness. Globalization is here and globalization is an opportunity not a threat. The American farmer is the most productive and innovative farmer on the planet and can compete with anyone. Period. But farmers can’t compete if they can’t get into the game. My friends, 95 percent of the world’s customers live outside the borders of the United States. While my Democratic opponents play politics with trade — using words like a trade “time out” to disguise their protectionism — I don’t intend to sit out opportunities and challenges of the world’s economy. I intend to seize those opportunities to ensure, as every American generation has done, that our children’s lives will be even more prosperous than were ours.”
Read more.

Obama, from his paper, “Connecting and Empowering all Americans through Technology and Innovation”:

Promote American Businesses Abroad: Trade can create wealth and drive innovation through competition. Barack Obama supports a trade policy that ensures our goods and services are treated fairly in foreign markets. At the same time, trade policy must stay consistent with our commitment to demand improved labor and environmental practices worldwide. In its first six years, the Bush Administration has filed only 16 cases to enforce its rights under WTO agreements. This compares to 68 cases filed during the first six years of the Clinton Administration. President Bush has failed to address the fact that China has engaged in ongoing currency manipulation that undercuts US exports; that China fails to enforce U.S. copyrights and trademarks and that some of our competitors create regulatory and tax barriers to the delivery and sale of technology goods and services abroad. Barack Obama will fight for fair treatment of our companies abroad.
Read more.

Richardson, from speech at UCLA: October 24, 2007
”We must promote trade agreements that include strong and enforceable labor, environmental, and human rights standards. Free and fair trade can benefit both Latin American and US workers. It will benefit consumers throughout the region. And it will bind closer the nations of the entire hemisphere.”
Read more.

Romney, from Trade Advisory Group Press Release: October 31, 2007
”Opening markets to our goods and services is key to expanding opportunity here at home. Expanding trade is pro-growth, pro-industry, pro-agriculture, and pro-American leadership in the world,” said Governor Romney. “With years of public and private sector experience working on trade related issues, this group will provide valuable insight into what we can do as a nation to expand trade opportunities around the world.”
Read more.

Many of the above quotations are from the Center for Global Engagment’s Candidate Position Tracker.

You can also learn more about the candidates’ stances on trade at the Council on Foreign Relations website.

The following post also appears today in the Center for Global Development’s blog, Views from the Center.

The security and well-being of each and every American is tied to the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders, according to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The theme of global interdependence is the bedrock of Obama’s new strategy for America’s engagement in the world, in which global development matters, a lot.

Obama unveiled his new strategy (download full strategy document, PDF, 71k) for “Strengthening Our Common Security by Investing in Our Common Humanity” at a foreign policy forum in New Hampshire last week (video footage available here and news coverage in the Concord Monitor). The new strategy explains:

The United States should provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and common humanity. We must lead not in the spirit of a patron, but the spirit of a partner. Extending an outstretched hand to others must ultimately be more than just a matter of expedience or even charity. It must be about recognizing the inherent equality, dignity, and worth of all people. It will require American leadership that leverages engagement and resources from our traditional allies in the G-8 as well as new actors, including emerging economies (e.g. India, China, Brazil and South Africa), the private sector and global philanthropy. Yet, while America and our friends and allies can help developing countries build more secure and prosperous societies, we much never forget that only the citizens of these nations can sustain them.

Obama’s strategy reiterates a promise to double U.S. foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012 that my colleague Steve Radelet discussed in a CGD blog several months ago. Also of note are commitments to:

* Expand prosperity through investments in agriculture, infrastructure and economic growth so the benefits and burdens of globalization are shared equally and economic policy is seen as central to security policy;
* Create an Add Value to Agriculture Initiative to promote a Green Revolution in Africa in addition to other measures to increase poor farmers’ access to agricultural markets;
* Establish a $2 billion Global Education Fund for primary education to help eliminate the “global education deficit”;
* Launch a Global Energy and Environment Initiative, create an Emerging Market Energy Fund, and spur the creation of an open-source, real-time mapping system to forecast the impacts of climate change country-by-county to address climate change and other global environmental challenges;
* Lead efforts to reform the International Monetary Fund and World Bank;
* Develop a rapid response fund for societies in transition;
* Invest in global health infrastructure, including creating health care systems that train and retain health care workers; and (last but not least)
* Coordinate and consolidate the twenty-some U.S. agencies currently involved in U.S. foreign assistance (including the Millennium Challenge Account and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in a restructured and empowered U.S. Agency for International Development.

Obama was joined at the forum by his foreign policy advisers including Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy; Tony Lake, former national security adviser; Adm, John Hutson, former U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General; Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of human rights and foreign policy; and Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs. Together they discussed these and other ideas for U.S. global engagement should Obama become the next president.

Long before Obama’s speech, the Center for Global Development and many other organizations including the ONE Campaign and Center for U.S. Global Engagement have been working to put global development onto the agenda of the 2008 presidential campaigns. This is indeed the focus of our Global Development Matters website and the documentary film footage it uses to tell the story of why global development matters for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I encourage my CGD colleagues and others to comment further on the details of Obama’s proposals and extend my own applause for the Obama campaign’s vision and as yet uncommon commitment to addressing global development in the 2008 presidential campaigns. Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy goals are no longer the headline on his campaign website, nor did they seem to make national press coverage this weekend. Here’s hoping that other candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, start saying as much and more about their commitment to global development and their vision for America’s role in the world, and that the media and others start taking notice.

Today, students from Swarthmore College participated in a Hunger Banquet, an interactive event hosted by Amnesty International. Tim Burke, associate professor of history, moderated a discussion about world hunger and global inequality. Students also gave short presentations encouraging others to take action. They spoke about efforts–such as microcredit–that have made strides in advancing global development. The main goal of the Hunger Banquet was to offer students an interactive lesson and encourage the students to experience an emotional connection with the global poor, without the usual roster of starving children imagery. Representatives from Oxfam, an international relief group that works towards solving hunger, poverty and injustice, also attended the event.

Amnesty campus chapter president Linda Wang said, “I got involved with Oxfam in high school…and organized a successful hunger banquet at my high school, and have wanted to see it done on campus.”

Sound like a great idea for your community? Visit Oxfam’s website to find out how you can host your own Hunger Banquet.

Read more about Swarthmore’s event in their online newspaper.

A new report found that poor countries are more likely to experience health problems due to climate change than rich countries.

Kevin Watkins, from the UN Development Program and author of this new report, spoke briefly on NPR this morning. His report concentrates on the immediate effects of climate change on poor countries. The report found that developing countries will be hit particularly hard by health problems, since they don’t have the resources to deal with environmental disasters, such as droughts and floods.

For example, people in Northern Ethiopia living in drought zones have no protection should one occur. This study looks at two groups of Ethiopian children, some born in an area experiencing a drought and others that weren’t. Guess what? Five years later, those who were born in the drought-affected area were far more malnourished—by 36% percent.

This drought also led to long-term malnourishment to over 2 million children in the country. This backed their parents into a corner. They had to sell their farming equipment to take care of the immediate needs of their children—but this left them no way to feed their families when the draught was over. Desmond Tutu refers to this as “Adaptation Apartheid,” which means that when something bad happens, rich countries are able to use their resources to withstand it, but poor countries are left high and dry.

Watkins’ solution to this problem is that rich countries should change the way they give aid, for example, giving more money to improve flood control and early warning systems. We should keep in mind the effects of climate change whenever we give aid money.

Want to listen to full story? Check it out on NPR.

When you think about Global Development, you might not first think about Western Union. But you should. Migrants from poor countries sent home $300 billion last year via Western Union, which is almost three times more than all foreign aid budgets combined.

Western Union has positioned itself as an advocate of migrant workers, who make up a large portion of their customer base. Such a large portion, in fact, that Western Union’s stock is driven by border migration forecasts. Western Union’s chief executive, Christina A. Gold, said “Global migration is the cornerstone of how we’ve grown.”

Some say that Western Union is providing an important service to migrants, giving them a safe way to send money home. There are critics, too. The hefty fees associated with sending the money have drawn complaints that they are taking advantage of the poor. Also, other critics are uneasy about the company’s role in profiting from and even encouraging illegal immigration.

Either way, it’s hard to deny Western Union’s influence on development economics and the current immigration debates.

Read the New York Times article to learn more about it.