From Dame Margaret J. Anstee.

Sir, I should like to support the call in P.B.W. Rayment's letter ("UN seen as international equivalent of House of Lords on top jobs", February 3-4) for radical reform of the procedures for appointing top United Nations officials.

This issue has been raised many times by Sir Brian Urquhart, the former highly respected undersecretary-general (who, like me, was not a political appointee but rose through the ranks) and by others.

I would only add that these earlier proposals specified that such reforms should also be applied to the highest posts of all, those of the UN secretary-general and the heads of specialised agencies and other principal UN organisations.

Mr Rayment rightly points out that this aspect is barely mentioned in official reports on UN reform, perhaps because it is politically too hot to handle, given member states' predilection for the present system as a means of exercising influence within the secretariat. Yet better selection procedures, properly devised, could be applied without detriment to the overall balance of geographical representation, and the organisation's improved effectiveness would benefit all member states.

Mr Rayment suggests that Gordon Brown, the chancellor, should address this issue, given his declared intention of giving priority to the reform of UN institutions. I hope he will also do so in the light of his recent role as a member of the former secretary-general's high-level panel on UN system-wide coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment.

This latest report on major UN reform, published last November and entitled Delivering as One, contains important recommendations that, if implemented, would do much to correct current deficiencies. Most are not new. Indeed, the general thrust of the report echoes the themes of the seminal Report on the Capacity of the UN Development System, prepared in 1968 under the leadership of the late Sir Robert Jackson.

Why were those recommendations not implemented 40 years ago? The reason lies in the entrenched vested interests of governments and of UN organisations and agencies, which saw their national, bureaucratic and personal fiefdoms threatened by the proposed changes.

Those same forces will militate against the implementation of these latest proposals, and of any major reforms, unless there is a concerted effort by key governments of both developed and developing countries to generate the collective political will and commitment to see them through, including a radical change in the selection of the top management of the UN system. None of this will happen without effective leadership and I greatly hope that Mr Brown will take up this challenge.

Margaret J. Anstee,
Knill, Powys LD8 2PR
(Former UN Undersecretary-General)

Japan’s Supreme Court on Friday threw out two claims involving compensation for Chinese nationals forced to serve as labourers and prostitutes during the second world war, just as Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, wrestled with the issue of wartime sex slaves during his visit to Washington.

In the first case, the court overturned a landmark 2004 ruling by the Hiroshima high court that ordered Nishimatsu Construction to pay Y27.5m ($231,000, €169,000, £115,000) to two former labourers and the relatives of three deceased workers who claimed they were forced to work in severe conditions at a hydroelectric power plant construction site in Hiroshima prefecture during the war. The high court ruling had marked the biggest victory among a wave of compensation claims – most of which have been dismissed – filed in Japan since 1995 by Chinese nationals.

But Ryoji Nakagawa, presiding justice, said that under the 1972 Japan-China joint communiqué, Chinese individuals lost their right to claim war compensation from Japan, the Japanese people or companies. Under the communiqué, Beijing renounced any right to claim war reparations from Japan.

The plaintiffs claimed that the communiqué did not cover individual claims.

Justice Nakagawa added, however, that the victims of wartime forced labour had suffered “extremely large mental and physical suffering” and called on those ­concerned to “make efforts to provide relief to the ­victims”.

In the second case, the Supreme Court upheld a high court decision that the right of two Chinese women to claim compensation for forced wartime prostitution had lapsed.

The Supreme Court said that the right lapsed under the 1952 peace treaty between Japan and the Nationalist government, which had then fled to ­Taiwan but which Japan ­recognised as the legitimate government of China at the time.

The rulings come as the US Congress debates a resolution on seeking an apology from Japan for forcing young women to work in military brothels during the war.

Mr Abe, who last month ignited ­controversy with his remarks on the forced prostitution issue, expressed regret on Friday over the fate of the women in remarks to congressional leaders.

“I, as an individual and as prime minister, sympathise with the former ‘comfort women’ for their sufferings and feel sorry for the hardships they were put through,” he was quoted as saying in a meeting with 11 US lawmakers.

Taiwan on Thursday rejected mainland China’s plan for the Olympic torch to pass through the island in a foretaste of the likely political tensions between Taipei and the mainland in the run-up to next year’s Olympics.

Beijing said on Thursday that the Olympic torch would enter Taiwan from Ho Chi Minh City and leave it for Hong Kong.

But Tsai Chen-wei, head of the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee, said: “This plan intends to compromise our sovereignty and is unacceptable to us.”

China is likely to argue that its inclusion of Taiwan is a gesture of goodwill to­wards the self-ruled island over which it claims sovereignty. But Taipei said the Olympic torch was being abused as a pro-unification propaganda stunt.

China’s official media listed Taipei as a stop on the torch’s “domestic route” along with Hong Kong and Macao, while cities outside China were listed as part of the “international route”.

“This is the worst-case scenario. They are humiliating us,” said a senior Taiwanese official.

China’s insistence that Taiwan is not a sovereign nation has forced the island to take part in Olympic activities under the name of “Chinese Taipei”.

Taiwan government officials said Beijing now intended to lower its status further by calling it “China, Taipei”.

“The two sides are locked in a propaganda war, and there is no mutual trust,” said George Tsai, an expert on cross-Strait relations. “This is part two of the Panda saga.”

When China offered two giant pandas to Taiwan two years ago, it said they were a symbol of its “goodwill” towards the island, but Taiwan rejected them.

Rejecting the torch will be much more difficult for Taiwan to explain than refusing a pair of pandas.

“No IOC member has ever refused to let the Olympic torch in and I appeal to the government to not let sports fall victim to ideology,” said Huang Chih-hsiung, a Taekwondo silver medallist and lawmaker of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang.

When he was 19 years old, Yan Haichun was dispatched to a bleak stretch of fields just outside Shanghai to work on a collective farm. China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong had decreed that the best education a youngster could receive was back-breaking labour alongside peasants.

In the early 1970s, the farm employed more than 20,000 people to produce modest quantities of rice and cabbage. "Everyone eventually went back to the city, except the stupid ones and me," says the 52-year-old Mr Yan, a chain-smoker who coughs when he chuckles at his own jokes.

The last laugh could be with Mr Yan, however. He is now deputy manager of an agricultural business that operates the very same farm. Instead of cabbage and rice, he is producing premium organic pork to be sold at Carrefour and Wal-Mart.

Mr Yan's company is part of a quiet revolution beginning to spread through Chinese agriculture as farmers try to meet the needs of rapidly expanding supermarket chains. Farms that only a decade ago were merely subsisting are now slowly coming under the influence of agribusiness companies. "Agribusiness is in its infancy at the moment in China but it is going to be one of the big phenomena of the next 10 years," says Jonathan Anderson, Asia economist at UBS. "It is a good time to buy into a pig farm if you can."

China has had a huge impact on companies such as Wal-Mart, which every year sources more than $10bn (£5.1bn, €7.5bn) of goods from the country. But Wal-Mart and other modern retailers are also creating a lasting impression on China, even down on the farm.

The expansion of industrial agriculture has been seen all over the developing world over the last two decades - from the savannahs of central Brazil to Egypt's Nile delta. But it is particularly sensitive in China because of its potential impact on two of the most important political issues. The government of President Hu Jintao has pledged to lift farm incomes and reduce the gap that has opened up between the standard of living in rural areas - where 900m of China's 1.3bn people still live - and the booming coastal cities. Making farms more efficient is central to any long-term effort to reduce poverty.

Greater efficiency can partly be achieved through using the sort of machinery and technology that agribusiness brings. But to boost productivity significantly, farms in China will have to become much bigger and directly employ fewer people.

As a result, the introduction of industrial agriculture raises difficult questions about the status of land ownership in rural China. This has become an explosive issue in recent years as property has been seized to make way for factories and apartments. If farmers are bullied off their land to make way for larger operations, the advance of agribusiness could add to already simmering social tensions and accelerate migration to the fast-growing cities.

The dilemma goes back to the early days of economic reform in China in the late 1970s. One of Deng Xiaoping's first decisions was to break up the system of communal farms and distribute land on an equal basis to rural families. Residents did not gain ownership of the land but typically received a 30-year lease from their village.

The initial results were spectacular. Not only did farm incomes rise quickly but China avoided some of the problems of landless rural workers that have afflicted many developing countries undergoing industrialisation. However, the new land system also had considerable limitations. It left China with millions of tiny, inefficient producers - there are around 200m household farms with an average size of 1.5 acres, which cannot be sold. While incomes in the coastal cities soared in the 1990s, rural incomes rose much more slowly, in part because of the low output per worker on Chinese farms.

This creaking rural system stands in contrast to China's fast-growing modern retail network. Supermarkets and hypermarkets are multiplying rapidly as new middle-class consumers look for higher-quality food and more comfortable surroundings. There are now 16,000 supermarkets and hypermarkets, including both foreign and domestic operators, as well as large restaurant chains - KFC has around 2,000 outlets in China and McDonald's some 800.

Yet supermarkets and restaurant chains have very different requirements from traditional markets. They want specific products, they want quality guarantees and they want to be able to trace the source of the food.

These retailers have had to adapt to circumstances. One of the most dramatic examples is the supply chain that McDonald's has put in place for French fries with the help of Simplot, the private US company that is its main supplier of potatoes. Simplot has an operation in China that can churn out 1bn fries a year to the same quality as the US. The potatoes are mostly grown in Inner Mongolia, a region on the same latitude as Idaho and with a climate similar. But it has been a nearly two decade-long struggle.

According to Dan Cushing, the company's general manager in China, when Simplot arrived in the country in 1988 many potato farms still used a horse and plough. A farm needs around 250 acres to justify investment in tractors and fertiliser machinery, he says, but those in China at the time often had less than one acre. "Just to get a piece of land evened out so that water did not accumulate was a huge exercise in China," says Mr Cushing. "That sort of thing you can get done on a US farm by one phone call."

Many farmers were bemused when Simplot proposed a long-term growing cycle that produces commercial potatoes only at the end of the third calendar year. "We had to change the mentality from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture," says Mr Cushing, who admits that the business was lossmaking for a number of years.

Simplot started by selecting potential candidates, giving them advice on how to grow potatoes to its specifications and trying to convince them of the benefits of long-term supply contracts. Some pulled out, others prospered.

Crucially for Simplot, the effective size of the farms has grown larger. A decade ago the company was dealing with 1,000 potato suppliers: now it does business with just 100. Many are private groups that have leased land from other small farmers, while some are large-scale farms that remained under state control after land reform. "To be successful, you do need some sort of scale," says Mr Cushing.

Supermarkets now rarely deal directly with small farmers. Instead, over the past five years, a new generation of companies has emerged to supply them with food. Some of these producers, such as Chaoda, a vegetable producer that operates farms in 29 different parts of the country, have managed to lease large enough tracts of land to justify big investments.

Aisen, which runs the organic pork farm outside Shanghai, is another such business. It has been operating this stretch of land in the Nanhui district of the city for five years and now has 12 different pig farms.

To qualify as organic, the pigs are given no antibiotics in the last few months of life and receive a diet free of animal fat. There cannot be more than 2cm of fat on a piece of meat, 25 per cent less than conventional pork cuts in Chinese supermarkets. "In the big cities, customers now want to know that the meat is safe and that it is not too fatty," says Mr Yan.

Chinese agribusinesses are also beginning to carve out an export sector, especially in labour-intensive crops such as fruit and vegetables. Exports of these have doubled over the past decade and the country is a big supplier of apple juice and garlic. Anyone tucking into the Asian salad served at McDonald's in the US will be eating snow peas produced in China.

Agribusiness may have grown quickly but it has only begun to nibble at the edges of China's vast farming base. One of the few pieces of academic research on the subject looked at 200 communities in the greater Beijing area last year and found that the farmers had been only marginally affected by the creation of supply chains for the city's supermarkets. "It is happening a little, but so far it is not a huge story," says Scott Rozelle, a Stanford academic and one of the authors of the report.

Some researchers are optimistic that modern retailing will increase productivity by creating the conditions for the consolidation of farms and greater investment in equipment, which they hope will lead to higher rural incomes. "There are more and more opportunities for larger-scale farms to develop," says Hu Dinghuan, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. "Supermarkets are going to be the driving force for agriculture in China. They are going to have a huge impact on farms."

Yet there are also concerns about the impact agribusiness will have on rural life in China, with its patchwork of tiny farms. Experts believe that farms will have to become bigger for yields to rise, yet given the ambiguous property rights in rural China, the introduction of agribusiness could open the way to further abuses of small farmers that might aggravate rural poverty and social tensions.

Farmers are not allowed to buy or sell land and, although in theory they can lease their property, many titles have never been formalised. There is huge scope in the system for local officials to make arbitrary decisions that change the terms of land use without providing adequate compensation.

Indeed, land disputes have been one of the most controversial issues in recent years and the cause of many of the thousands of violent protests that have broken out all across the country. According to the Land Ministry in Beijing, there were more than a million illegal seizures between 1998 and 2005, usually for factories or apartment buildings, and the farmers often received little or no compensation.

So far, researchers say, there have been few cases of farmers being pushed off their land to make way for commercial agriculture and larger farms. But Li Xiande, another CAAS professor, says agribusiness groups are increasingly negotiating supply contracts with the village officials who control the use of the land, rather than with the farmers themselves. "It could become a serious issue if the officials do a deal and the farmers only get a small part of the compensation," he says.

The controversy over land rights came to a head last month when a new property rights bill was approved by the National People's Congress in Beijing. The law has been hugely divisive: proponents think it an important step towards strengthening capitalism, while leftwing critics claim it will validate the illegal land grabs of recent years. Yet the law does not change the situation for rural land ownership and legal experts say it will not give farmers much more protection against unscrupulous officials.

Another level of protection could come from farmers establishing more co-operatives, which would allow them to negotiate collectively with buyers and organise larger-scale production. However, although farming co-ops are permitted, only 7 per cent of villages have created one, according to Mr Rozelle at Stanford. "In reality, the Communist party is not so keen on other groups organising themselves."

Tens of thousands of farmers have been elbowed off their land in recent years to make way for the country's manufacturing boom, creating a dangerous well of resentment that China's top leaders have pledged to address. The introduction of agribusiness to rural China is a test of whether Beijing really can look after the small farmer.

Britain and China faced off on Tuesday in the first-ever U.N. Security Council debate on climate change, with Beijing saying the 15-member body had no competence in dealing with global warming.

But British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who chaired the meeting, argued that the potential for climate change to cause wars had to move from the fringes of the debate to the Security Council, the most powerful U.N. body.

”Our responsibility in this council is to maintain international peace and security, including the prevention of conflict,” said Beckett, whose country holds the current council presidency. ”An unstable climate will exacerbate some of the core drivers of conflict -- such as migratory pressures and competition for resources.”

She noted that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose economy depends on hydropower from a reservoir depleted by drought, had called climate change ”an act of aggression by the rich against the poor.”

”He is one of the first leaders to see this problem in security terms. He will not be the last,” she said in the day-long debate with 52 countries participating.

But China’s deputy ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session: ”The developing countries believe that Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change -- nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.”

No resolution is expected and Russia, China, Qatar, Indonesia and South Africa, among others, also warned that the council, whose mandate is only peace and security, was not the place to take concrete action.

So did Pakistan on behalf of 130 developing nations, although many, such as Peru and Panama and small island states, agreed with Britain. Their main argument against the debate is that the council was encroaching on more democratic bodies, such as the 192-member U.N. General Assembly.

U.S. POSITION

But U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon supported the debate, which Beckett called ”a groundbreaking day in the history of the Security Council.”

”Projected changes in the earth’s climate are thus not only an environmental concern,” Ban said. ”And -- as the council points up today -- issues of energy and climate change can have implications for peace and security.”

The United States, the world’s larger emitter of greenhouse gases that spur climate change, opposes mandatory caps on emissions but a focus instead on alternative fuels and energy efficiency.

”The developing world, we and others, must deal with this issue in a manner that does not affect ... growth and development,” acting U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff said.

Most industrial nations, including the European Union, agreed with Britain. As did Papua New Guinea, head of the Pacific small island states, which fear they may disappear under the waves as the Earth warms up.

”The dangers that the small island states and their populations face are no less serious than those nations threatened by guns and bombs,” Papua New Guinea Ambassador Robert Guba Aisi told the council.

Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Vittorio Craxi, said members should support Ban’s effort to create a new U.N. Environmental Organization, in an effort to coordinate action on climate change.

Currently, the United Nations has had nearly 400 meeting days a year on biodiversity, climate change, desertification and related subjects with over 30 agencies and programs involved in environmental projects.

”It is clear that climate change can pose threats to national security,” Japan’s U.N. Ambassador Kenzo Oshima said. ”In the foreseeable future climate change may well create conditions or induce circumstances that could precipitate or aggravate international conflicts.”

Britain has long favoured an odd school system whereby well-to-do parents buy an education at the better state schools by giving money to homeowners who live near those schools, rather than by giving the money to the schools themselves. This is not very satisfactory, and there are two logical responses. One is to let the parents give the money to the schools. The other is to prevent people from buying a place at a good school through the housing market, and instead assign places from a much wider area using a lottery. This bold new experiment is about to be tried in Brighton and Hove.

Some parents are understandably livid: they paid for a service (albeit indirectly) and suddenly discover it’s being handed out like a raffle prize. Their houses will probably lose value. Little Jeremy may not even go to that wonderful school at all. But Brighton’s dispossessed parents are also worried by the same thing that worries parents all over the country: that if their school allows too many of the ”wrong” type of children in the door, Little Jeremy’s performance will suffer.

What these parents are worrying about is what an economist would call a ”peer effect”. Peer effects are what happen when you hang around in the wrong company. Yet the evidence for their existence is slimmer than the nation’s parents assume.

The difficulty is this. If Jeremy hangs around with the ”right” kids and does well, why? The obvious explanation is that he did well because his peers were a good influence on him, but it is just as plausible to suggest that he chose those peers, or had those peers chosen, because he was one of the ”right” kids, too. Does John Terry play great football because he is surrounded by great footballers, or is he surrounded by great footballers because he plays great football?

Clever researchers can disentangle some of these effects. The economist Bruce Sacerdote used the same technique that medical researchers would use to test a new headache remedy: a randomised trial. He realised that students at Dartmouth College had roommates assigned largely at random. There was some selection at work based on sex, smoking and preferences for hours of work - but mostly, the assignments were the result of a lottery.

Sacerdote found a modest - and statistically robust - peer effect. Being assigned a roommate with a higher grade-point average improves your own. If your roommate is at the top of the grade-point distribution you’ll tend to be about 5 per cent better than average. If they are 20 per cent below average you’ll tend to be 1 per cent below average. Sacerdote doesn’t know what the cause is, but since students did not choose their peers, it must be a genuine peer effect.

Most studies of peer effects are not so careful, however. In a clever paper based on studies of North Carolina’s public schools, Thomas Nechyba and Jake Vigdor highlight the pitfalls. They provide what appears to be strong evidence of peer effects - but then demonstrate that these apparent effects are at work before the peers ever appear. That is, by looking at Jeremy’s fifth-grade classmates you can work out how Jeremy performed, with different classmates, in the fourth-grade. Similarly, the quality of John Terry’s team-mates is a sign that Terry was a good footballer before he joined Chelsea.

Nechyba and Vigdor also show that the peer effects evaporate once they consider the quality of teaching. Students with smart peers are also students with better teachers. Perhaps the good folk of Brighton and Hove should worry less about Jeremy falling in with the wrong sort of classmate, and more about him falling in with the wrong sort of teacher.