Most large exporters of energy are LDCs (less democratic countries). Oil seems to do that to countries. Venezuela for example, a nation that had been a democracy for decades is now more and more an LDC. How does this happen? Easy, a democratically elected president gets control over growing oil revenues and buys himself political power. Fast forward to Argentina. Argentina is a modest energy exporter nowhere near the ranks of Venezuela. Argentina however is a very large agricultural commodity exporter. Now that energy importing democracies (EU, USA) are beginning to use food to fuel their cars, namely biodiesel, and now that the prices of some agricultural commodities are beginning to track the price of oil, will we see the same tendency to power concentration in Argentina? Will we see Argentina joining the ranks of the LDCs thanks to Kirchner´s ability to control a few exports? Hopefully not but the combination of the autocratic tendencies of Kirchner with a very high price of agricultural commodities concerns me. The temptation to buy votes using state resources becomes hard to resist. And at a global scale I have another concern with biodiesel. I used to wonder about how was it possible that Argentina, one of the largest food exporters in the world, and Brazil, another one, had starving children. The question then was, should a country with starving citizens export food to other countries? But now the moral dilemma is even worse. Should a country with starving citizens export food so others in rich countries feed…. their SUVs?

Last month I blogged about how the Blackberry became the Redberry in China. Basically what I said is that China Unicom decided that instead of making a deal with RIM, the company behind the Blackberry it would simply copy the Blackberry but make it more Chinese and launch the RedBerry. So what is the RedBerry? It´s a push e mail device that with Chinese servers and Chinese controls included that pays no royalties to RIM nor accepts any direction from this Canadian company. And what is the VaticanBerry? Well, the VaticanBerry seems to be the same solution applied to Catholicism. Catholicism has its own system of patents and trademarks. As opposed to other religions you can´t call yourself a Catholic if the Vatican does not want you to. The Vatican owns the brand, or does it? China went for its own bishops. Welcome to the VaticanBerry.

Hugo Chavez has recently been a very good OPEC member. He´s been keeping oil production down. But this reduction has not taken place because Hugo Chavez wants to be a good OPEC member. The paradox of authoritarian leaders who nationalize oil production is that oil production goes down simply because they are bad at running their own, inefficient state oil companies. And the price of oil goes up. Personally I don´t believe that oil multinationals are the solution either. The best way for a country to get the most for its citizens is to blend well regulated intervention by multinationals with a very good schooling of local energy professionals. Rushed decisions a la Chavez simply fail.

Global conflicts tend to start in small places over relatively small issues that somehow get out of hand when other countries divide themselves along different sides of the dispute in question. Unfortunately this is happening with Iran. Iran could be just another country that goes nuclear, like Pakistan, or Israel, but because of Iran´s aggresive foreign policy which directly clashes with America´s plans for the Middle East, the Iranian violation of the nuclear proliferation treaty is dangerously dividing the world in two. These two blocks could potentially be the two sides of WWIII. All the authoritarian countries are on one side, the democratic countries on the other. Democracies are strongly opposing Iran becoming a nuclear power. These include USA, the European Union, Japan, India and others. Authoritarian countries including most Muslim countries, Russia, China, and the authoritarian countries of Latin America, are with Iran. This division is dangerous for the world. How did we get to this point? The US invasion of Iraq combined with the respect that North Korea got out of developing nuclear weapons made it clear to Iran that if the Bush Administration was going to call them names (axis of evil) they better be evil….and smart. By destroying Iraq and ignoring North Korea America rewarded the nuclear power. As a result the Iranians want nuclear weapons and they want them now. The Bush administration seems to have a tragic ability for escalating conflict into war.

We generally understand hemispheres as the two halves of the world that end up North and South of the Equator. But having grown up in Argentina surrounded mostly by water, I started thinking of a different way to split the world namely into an acquatic hemisphere and a land hemisphere. As it usually happens nowadays even ideas that seem very original are not and googling I discovered that somebody had already developed this concept. He calls it the continental hemisphere and the oceanic hemisphere. When I was a child I used to think that if you sailed East from Argentina you could go all the way around the world and after endless miles over water you would end up next door… in Chile. Never going over any other country. In the Southern Hemisphere, water is almost all there is.