Aurelia Butler

UK house price growth slowed in March, prompting warnings that the squeeze on household incomes and rising interest rates could push the cost of homes down despite demand for property outstripping supply.Property prices increased by 9.8 per cent over the year to March, down from 11.3 per cent in February, according to Land Registry figures released on Wednesday. The average cost of a home was £278,000, up £24,000 from the same time last year. The data, which reflected purchases completed months before inflation reached its current 40-year high, showed house prices growth was resilient in the first quarter but may not be sustainable as the cost of living crisis bites.“While the housing market is certainly defying the wider economic climate, this will not continue forever,” said Amanda Aumonier, head of mortgage operations at online broker Trussle. She added that indications house prices would fall “could be on the horizon”.Aumonier noted the growing gap between pay and house prices. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average house price-to-earnings ratio in England was 9.05 last year, compared with 7.15 recorded in 2007 before the financial crash.Home costs have surged in the past two years after the government introduced a temporary cut to stamp duty, which ended in March 2021, and people made lifestyle changes during Covid-19 lockdowns, fuelling a house-buying frenzy.But with UK inflation reaching 9 per cent in April and economic growth slowing, while spending power is squeezed and mortgage rates rise, the housing market could cool.Average house prices fell in 15 London boroughs between February and March, including in Hackney, where the cost of homes declined 2.8 per cent. In the City of London they slipped 3.5 per cent, but prices edged up 0.3 per cent nationwide.Estate agents said an ongoing shortage of homes and high demand would continue to buoy property prices. Jason Tebb, chief executive of website OnTheMarket.com, said the housing market continued to “defy expectations” with prices increasing across the country.“The number of properties newly listed for sale is slowly increasing and, if this continues, supply-demand economics suggests price growth will moderate,” he said. “But as yet, the fundamental lack of stock is not able to satisfy strong demand from serious buyers.” More

The writer is a climate justice activist from Uganda and author of ‘A Bigger Picture’As corporate leaders and government officials fly into Davos for the World Economic Forum next week, climate will be one of the issues near the top of the agenda. Its recent survey of global leaders ranked failure in this area as the top global risk for the next decade. Among the executives concerned with this pressing challenge is BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who has worked hard in recent years to signal his company’s support for climate-aligned investing. Although the world’s largest money manager announced last week that it would vote against more shareholder climate resolutions this year, the group insists that its position has not changed. It says that its latest announcement focuses on proposals it regards as micromanagement or damaging to the financial interests of shareholders. But behind Fink’s careful positioning is the story of BlackRock and Zambia, and how debt is preventing lower-income countries from protecting themselves against the worst effects of climate change.Most of the climate finance the world’s richest countries have provided to the global south is in the form of loans that pile on more debt. Half of external debt payments by lower income countries are to banks, hedge funds and asset managers that have also profited from funding fossil fuels on a massive scale. They have profited while contributing to the climate crisis. They are now preventing the most climate-vulnerable countries from limiting the damage they suffer.Funds managed by BlackRock are the largest owners of Zambian and lower-income country bonds. Zambia’s borrowing costs are far higher than those faced by wealthy countries. In September 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, it asked to suspend payments. BlackRock and other corporate lenders refused. With almost $13bn owed, Zambia began defaulting on repayments later that year.Zambia’s debt repayment schedule amounted to four times what it had hoped to spend on protecting its people from the extreme weather being driven by the climate crisis. That means less money to spend improving irrigation systems to cope with intense droughts, on early warning systems for flash floods and for sensor technology to predict drought and floods. According to the principle of “polluter pays”, countries and corporations that have generated the most historic emissions should pay the costs of the climate crisis, in line with the amount of harm they have caused. But while Africa is responsible for less than 4 per cent of global emissions, the global north — responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions — refuses to pay.Last month, climate scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world cannot afford new fossil fuel infrastructure, and that we must rapidly phase out our existing use of fossil fuels if we are to meet our temperature goals. BlackRock has invested $85bn in coal companies, $24bn of which is in companies planning to expand their coal business.The G20 approved a “Common Framework” in late 2020, which should have enabled countries with unsustainable debts to restructure them — but 18 months later, no debts have been restructured. The IMF calls on all creditors to help increasingly debt-distressed countries, but the institution has done little to bring bondholders to the table.Debts like these are only exacerbating the injustice of the climate crisis. If countries such as Zambia can’t afford to invest in adapting to extreme weather, the suffering that their population is already experiencing will increase dramatically. Political leaders and chief executives at Davos cannot address climate change without talking about debt. If BlackRock and other bond owners really want to show themselves as climate leaders, they should cancel the debts. Only debt justice can rebuild trust and allow the world to confront the climate emergency.An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Larry Fink will be attending next week’s World Economic Forum in Davos More

Well, that was an abrupt and unwelcome U-turn. A month ago India was boasting it would combat the gathering international food crisis by releasing some of its bounteous wheat stocks on world markets. Last Saturday Narendra Modi’s government downgraded its ambitions from feeding the world to just feeding India, announcing an export ban on wheat after sudden heatwaves pushed down forecast domestic production and drove up prices. With Ukrainian wheat production expected to fall by a third this year and Russia seizing Ukrainian grain and destroying its farms, the risk of the food crisis spiralling out of control just went up another notch.There’s a pretty clear parallel between India’s volte-face on wheat and the Covid vaccine shortages last year. Its super-competitive pharma industry boasted of inoculating the world, and the government initially enjoyed the reflected soft-power glory, but New Delhi cut off exports when its own country’s needs called louder.You see here the dangerous gap where a system of global governance ought to exist but doesn’t. When an international food or vaccine crisis hits, budding claims of abundant supply and international solidarity shrivel pretty quickly in the heat of domestic expedience. There are lots of conversations among governments about global food security — the G7 group of rich countries sprang into rhetorical action to criticise India’s export ban this week — but nothing like enough co-ordination to make it happen.Although India’s export restrictions are more likely to be used as a calibrated management tool than outright prohibition, commodity markets weren’t happy, global wheat futures shooting higher on Monday. The situation is particularly worrying for importing nations in the Middle East and north Africa, which consume wheat in vast quantities and tend not to substitute with other grains. Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, approved India as a vendor in April: it has had to seek assurances that its recent order for half a million tonnes of grain will be fulfilled.Saleable stocks are the relevant issue here. Overall global grains production has generally been satisfactory in the past few years, according to US Department of Agriculture data. If trading were instant and costless and all food were substitutable and tradable, there wouldn’t be so much of an issue. But strong demand, and latterly some bad harvests, including in the southern US states, mean that the wheat stocks held by the biggest global exporters are at their lowest in a decade.In India’s case, it wasn’t just bad luck with the harvest. The problem has arisen from a complex and inefficient way of distributing wheat, which is bought by a government agency, the Food Corporation of India, and sold on at subsidised rates or added to public stocks. There’s actually been plenty of wheat in the country, but mismanagement of procurement has left the FCI suddenly scrambling to meet its needs.As ever, global problems stem from domestic ones, and frequently from political choice rather than economic inevitability. Food crises aren’t usually about an overall lack of food. They’re about the inability of the authorities to get it to where it’s needed, usually through some combination of lack of data, poor policy and neglect.A while back I wrote about Modi saying India wasn’t allowed to export wheat to resolve the crisis because the World Trade Organization told it not to. This was a slight exaggeration on his part, but it’s true there are WTO rules against countries inefficiently subsidising farmers with high fixed prices and dumping the food cheaply abroad. Rules stopping cheap food reaching world markets may look odd, but this weekend’s news from India shows their long-term benefits. It’s not sensible to let food-importing countries become dependent on subsidised and dumped exports that can suddenly be turned off at source.The world needs some more efficient large-scale food producers who systematically and reliably prioritise exports, and so far it doesn’t have enough. There is still distressingly little sense of a well-planned response to the food crisis, either internationally or through the actions of individual countries. There’s lots of talk about co-ordinated action, but India’s sudden change of tack shows how hard it is to make plans [email protected] More

BONN (Reuters) – The World Bank will make $30 billion available to help stem a food security crisis threatened by Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has cut off most grain exports from the two countries, the U.S. Treasury said in a report on food security plans from international financial institutions on Wednesday.The total will include $12 billion in new projects and $18 billion funds from existing food and nutrition-related projects that have been approved but have not yet been disbursed, the Treasury report said. More