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from Davos Notebook:

Italian CEO says retail banks need time to adapt

Yesterday I spoke to Antonio Vigni, CEO of Siena-based Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world's oldest bank. Below are two video clips of Vigni answering questions on lending in Italy and the hot topic of regulation.

In this first clip, Vigni says bank lending is holding up in Italy and he sees improvement.

In the next clip, Vigni says that retail banks may need more time to adapt to the brave new regulatory world.

from Felix Salmon:

World hunger and the locavores

Every so often at Davos you have a short, startling conversation which completely changes the way you think about a subject -- and I just had one of those standing next to Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill Farm. He's a very smart, very funny guy, who's passionate about food on every level from preparing the ingredients of the dishes in his restaurants to the logistics of feeding the planet.

I bumped into Barber as we were milling around the Davos conference center, waiting for the panel on "rethinking how to feed the world" to begin. I asked him what he thought of the food in Switzerland; he compared in unfavorably to what he was fed by the airline on the way over here. "I haven't seen a vegetable since Thursday," he added, looking a bit overwhelmed by the number of things that the Swiss seem to be able to do with bread, cheese, and bit of veal.

When the panel started, I could almost see the steam coming out of Barber's ears. It featured two heads of state; two agribusiness CEOs; a representative from the World Bank; and Bill Gates. All of them looked at food mainly as a matter of logistics and problem-solving, and they seemed to do so with real good will and good motives. (Well, maybe not the CEO of ADM.) But they were all very much bought into a model which looks, to Barber's eyes, incredibly shaky.

Essentially the problem is that the people on the panel have internalized the principles of comparative advantage and free trade to the point at which they are more or less incapable of thinking any other way. In a Ricardian world it makes sense for Ohio to overwhelmingly grow corn and soy, since growing corn and soy is what it does best. And because of economies of scale, it makes sense to grow just one type of each, on farms of mind-boggling size. Ohio can then trade all that corn and soy for the food it wants to eat, and everybody is better off.

Except in reality it doesn't work like that. Monocultures are naturally prone to disastrous outbreaks of disease, which can wipe out an entire crop. The panel at Davos has a favored method of dealing with such things: the development of disease-resistant crop strains, often through high-tech and patentable genetic modification. Bright research scientists create clever transgenic crops, and then people like Bill Gates and the World Bank try to get them broadly adopted while setting well-intentioned staffers to work minimizing potential problems with IP licensing. Innovation through agricultural technology is the obvious and necessary solution to the problem of global hunger.

Barber isn't anti-science, nor is he anti-innovation. But he knows (and the panelists know too) that a system of globalized agriculture can break down, as we saw during the commodity boom of 2008. As the price of soy and rice and wheat soared, exporters started hoarding rather than selling, and importers couldn't obtain necessary supplies at any price. As the World Bank's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala noted, Ukraine had 5 million tons of surplus wheat, but the international food markets were very thin, and it was extremely difficult to get that wheat exported. The system didn't work like it was meant to: when put to a real-world test, it broke down.

Problems associated with monocultures can pop up even when there isn't a commodity-price bubble, too: look, for instance, at the tomato plight which devastated the northeast US last year. Barber explains clearly what happened: millions of more-or-less identical starter plants were transported across the US by huge corporations like Home Depot and Wal-Mart which have neither the inclination nor the ability to notice when the plants are showing signs of blight. Those starters, planted by enthusiastic amateurs across the nation, then started "transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses" into the local biosphere.

from Davos Notebook:

Iran’s foreign minister joins the Davos Debates

Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Manouchehr Mottaki discusses the aims of, and his thoughts on, the World Economic Forum in Davos.

from Davos Notebook:

Stingy Italians

A black mark for Italy in the doing-good stakes.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, took a swipe at the Italian government in Davos for being "uniquely stingy" when it comes to foreign aid.

The good guys are Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg -- all of which give 0.72 to 1.0 percent of GDP as foreign aid.

But Italy gives a paltry 0.21 percent, following a decision by Silvio Berlusconi's government to cut its help to poor countries by more than half.

So, who is Gates to talk?

Well, he and wife Melinda have arguably earned the right to a certain amount of finger-wagging after pledging $10 billion over the next decade to fund vaccine development and delivery in developing countries.

from Davos Notebook:

Next year’s potential guest to Davos?

The World Economic Forum is all about promoting debate and finding solutions to problems the world is facing.

One thing the world's political and business leaders have been discussing is the role of the dollar in the global economy.

The world's most wanted man Osama bin Laden has been offering his take on solving global imbalances. He urges the world to stop relying on the dollar in order to solve the global financial crisis.

Perhaps next year's key note speech might be delivered from bin Laden via satelite from his mountain hideaway camp?

Read the full story on bin Laden's view on the dollar.

from Felix Salmon:

Talking to Nouriel

I'll be doing a live video interview with Nouriel Roubini here on Reuters.com in a couple of hours (6:20pm Davos time, 5:20pm GMT, 12:20pm ET), asking him questions from readers. So if you have anything you want me to ask him, leave a comment on this blog or on the liveblog, or send a tweet with the #askroubini hashtag. It should be fun!

Update: Here it is!

from Davos Notebook:

The global values crisis

Writer and activist the Reverend Jim Wallis discusses the importance of morals in today's society.

from Davos Notebook:

Marathon day for Greece in Davos

It's truly a marathon. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou are in Davos to tell the world that they are serious about reducing their huge deficit.

UK finance minister Alastair Darling, who passed by, tapped the PM's shoulders, saying:  "Are you doing the rounds? Good luck!"

Below you see how our team of text reporters and Reuters Insider television prepping for an interview with the finance minister, inside the congress hall in Davos.

from Davos Notebook:

Africa needs to bargain more

Africa is one area we at Reuters is focusing at this year's Davos (click for our special report)

Kola Karim, chif executive of Lagos/London-based Shoreline Energy International, says moves by Korea, Saudi Arabia and other emerging countries to buy up thousands of hectares of land in Africa to grow food "is sending fears to Africans."

"Africa needs to ask, are these deals for us? Or for them. There's a mismatch. We're talking about countries that lack food. There's no food for us," he tells Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He argues that rejecting capital from these countries was not an answer. Negotiators need to properly use their bargaining power and promote investment -- in the form of factories or other steps that create employment -- rather than just sell off land.

"We have resources which we can do business with. We can do bargaining with the assets we have."

from Davos Notebook:

Ask Nouriel Roubini

Got a question you would like to ask economist Nouriel Roubini? Now's your chance. Roubini will be joining us in Davos later today for a social media interview and we want you to send us questions to put to him.

Roubini, Professor of Economics at New York University and co-founder of RGE Monitor)  is one of the few economists to accurately predict the global financial crisis, warning of turbulence in the housing market, loss of consumer confidence and a deep recession.

The interview will be streamed live and you can watch it in this blog post or on our Davos 2010 live blog at 5:20pm GMT (12:20 ET and 6:20pm local time). Reuters columnist Felix Salmon will conduct the interview and put your questions to Roubini.

Submit a question by leaving a comment on this blog or by using the hashtag #askroubini on Twitter.com.

Update: Here's an archive of Felix and Nouriel's conversation: