When the U.S. and its principal ally Great Britain invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2001 and 2003 respectively, both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair believed they were fulfilling “God’s Will.”

This has been rumored for years after fundamentalist Bush was quoted six years ago as saying that he launched the invasions because he was “on a mission from God.” But new evidence establishes both former leaders were convinced that the Christian deity supported their attacks on the two Islamic countries.

Former French Premier Jacques Chirac, in a book published in March, revealed that Bush said he was fulfilling Biblical prophesy in starting each of his unjust, illegal wars. In late May, John Burton, one of Blair’s closest political associates for a quarter-century and often described as his mentor, told the press that the British leader’s support of the wars was “all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil.”

An account of Bush’s religious motivations appeared May 24 in CounterPunch under the byline of Clive Hamilton, a visiting professor at Yale.

“In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac,” Hamilton wrote. “Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped.

“The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.’”

“Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac: ‘This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.’”

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and ‘wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.’”

Blair’s support for wars of aggression was likewise justified by religious beliefs, which is hardly a new phenomenon in either the ancient or modern world. Has there ever been a war when God wasn’t on America’s, or Great Britain’s side?

The London Daily Telegraph of May 23 published an interview with Blair’s friend Burton who revealed that the ex-Prime Minister was frustrated because British politics – as opposed to the politics of godly America – frowned upon expressions of religious zeal by the country’s top leaders. Now that he’s out of office, Blair has established the “Tony Blair Faith Foundation” and has been interviewed numerous times about his religious views.

According to the Telegraph, “The former Prime Minister’s faith is claimed to have influenced all his key policy decisions and to have given him an unshakeable conviction that he was right.” Burton said “It’s very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior. It was part of Tony living out his faith. While he was at Number 10, Tony was virtually gagged on the whole question of religion. But Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

The newspaper continued: Burton’s “comments will add to the suspicions of Mr. Blair’s critics, who fear he saw the Iraq war in a similar light to Bush, who used religious rhetoric in talking about the conflict, as well as the war in Afghanistan, describing them as ‘a crusade.’”

The BBC reported Bush’s “mission from God” statement following the U.S. president’s June 2003 meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath. They disclosed that “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”

A year later, the Commander in Chief of the most deadly war machine in history confessed that, in effect, his is the voice of a supernatural being: “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a skillful manipulator of Bush’s delusional religious beliefs. It was revealed in May by GQ magazine that Rumsfeld adorned the covers of his top secret war intelligence reports to the president with biblical quotations along with photos of American
soldiers and battle equipment. One such report, a few days after the invasion, showed a U.S. tank in the desert and a paragraph from Ephesians 6:13, declaring: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” (3)

On March 22, 2003, Rumsfeld announced in a worldwide broadcast that his threatened “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad had just commenced. The dark sky over the Iraqi capital was illuminated throughout the long night by Washington’s bombs bursting in air like Fourth of July firecrackers, accompanied by the “ohs” and “ahs” of a huge American television audience. The screaming and pain were off camera. Over the course of six years more than a million Iraqis have been slain so far in carrying out Bush’s mission from God to “liberate” the country and confiscate all its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

To Bush, Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” terror bombing was the equivalent of a vengeful God’s threat against Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38:22: “And with pestilence and with blood I shall enter into judgment with him; and I shall rain on him, and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire, and brimstone.”

How many poor, innocent peasant families will be killed in destitute Afghanistan now that the successor to a Christian religious fanatic has decided to hurl his own “hailstones, fire, and brimstone” against the Islamic religious fanaticism of the Taliban?

But of course “you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” Onward Christian soldiers, Onward as to war!

Reprinted from DissidentVoice.

What if you woke up one day to find that humans eventually did make the right decisions, and those decisions had all the right effects and, well, the world turned out to be a pretty cool place.

For a while, it looked as though everything would fall apart. There was the triple crunch of the global credit crisis, declining oil supplies, and the threat of runaway climate change driven by massive overconsumption by rich countries and the elites in poor countries.

In 2008, humanity overshot its global biocapacity on September 23. It was the world’s earliest “ecological debt day” since humanity first started going into the environmental red in the mid-1980s. We were pursuing economic growth for its own sake, but it was completely unsustainable, and the people it was most supposed to benefit -the poorest-were getting a shrinking slice of the benefits. Perversely, because of the way the world economy worked, to get tiny amounts of global poverty reduction required massive amounts of destructive overconsumption by those who were already rich.

In the face of inescapable economic chaos and ecological upheaval, we finally woke to find that we already had most of the solutions under our noses. This is what a day in our lives looks like now, after things turned out right.

On waking
With less time spent working, the choice is yours-sleep in, go for a run, read a novel. Having rediscovered the real meaning of a good life, previously overconsuming rich countries have now cured most cases of work addiction. In this “downshifted” world the phrase “rush hour” has become a half-remembered curio. Our society has begun to get the hang of how computing and IT can make for smart work, rather than generate slave work.

Those choosing the early morning run enjoy fresh air and clear paths as dramatic reductions in traffic have transformed city air and streets.

Breakfast
No need to sweat over every shopping decision: socially and environmentally sustainable trade are the (carefully checked) norm. The weekly food bill has gone up-but so has the quality, and the damaging consequences of cheap food systems have gradually been rolled back. This is sustainable consumption universalized-no more scanning labels. A few deft moves in boardrooms and government chambers helped to make food markets fair and sustainable.

For an international meeting-step onto your balcony: video-conferencing and networking are so slick and intuitive that you rarely need to travel for work. The hours gained, backache cured, and wrinkles postponed make you more effective and committed to the work you do. But these changes are about more than work. Social networking software has thrown you together with new people-your desktop gives you a global network, but also connects you in new-live-human ways to the community where you actually live.

Computer connections aside, there are plenty of benefits in the new sense of community that has evolved from the revival of local shops (where the shopkeepers actually remember who you are) and the way that residential streets and town centers have become people-friendly. Streets are safer, with some entirely car-free, and many towns have reclaimed central plots of land as public squares. A calmer environment and more opportunities for casual contact between neighbors means people gather and talk to each other more. Even in cities, people, and especially the elderly, feel less lonely.

Take some time out late morning to plan your long-awaited summer trip. While the big increases in the cost of fossil fuels have made international travel a rarer experience, it tends to be much better-and longer-when you do head off on your travels. In the bad old days you might have dashed off a postcard after thirty-six hours in a congested foreign capital. These days it is more a matter of picking out a few choice photos from the hundreds you’ll take on your once-in-a-lifetime three-month trip to India. Travel has returned to being a pleasure and an adventure.

With more leisure time and good cycle and public transport links, low impact local excursions are a much-loved part of life. But with our experience of both cities and countryside transformed by investment in really great public spaces, people feel less need to get away in order to unwind.

Lunch
Need to get out of the house? Take a short stroll to one of the thousands of courtyard and street cafés that are enjoying the cleaner air and quieter streets. Plenty of these are cheap workplace and school cafés that have opened their doors to locals. The combination of a few familiar faces, a random mix of new ones, and a daily changing menu of fresh local food makes food a daily pleasure.

Afternoon
A journey to work? Problems are as big as you make them: it used to be said that people wouldn’t give up their cars. But instead of denying people their cars, the big breakthroughs were made by offering people really appealing alternatives. Some of these were alternatives to travel (like the conferencing tools). But we all want to move about.

So, by raising revenue from polluting and inefficient fossil fuel-run cars, governments completely transformed people’s experience of cities and towns. Owning and driving cars to meet most of your mobility needs has come to seem simply eccentric. Lifespan and quality of life have dramatically increased as a result of cities being redesigned around people-and walking and cycling-not cars. Transport options range from trains, streetcars, and quiet clean buses, to on-demand rural shared taxis and simple car-share schemes that meet the range of needs we have through a year. The common “ting” of the cycle bell is as much to say “hello,” as to remind you that you’re stepping across a cycle path. And when we do get in a car, the uncongested roads and beautifully designed hyperefficient vehicles remind us what a great invention these things can be.

Perhaps your office is one of the last bits of the building to have a green makeover. In hot weather you’ve got to turn the air conditioning on. It is not as wasteful as the old machines, but you know that some of the electricity is still going to be fossil fueled. You can comfort yourself with the knowledge that the increased costs brought about by carbon taxes have got your finance department talking to your building managers who are talking to the builders about natural ventilation systems. In the meantime the tax raised is salving all of your consciences.

In an idle moment you reflect on where this cash goes, and why that matters. One of a series of breakthrough climate deals between north and south ensures that the inhabitants of Brazil, especially those living in the Amazon, are directly rewarded for their stewardship of the ecological services that the rainforest provides to the whole planet. As we gradually descend from our carbon-fix high we can at least ensure that our habit is funding some security for us all by protecting these key carbon sinks. The bill for your air-conditioning that helps you cope with climate change in your office is, in effect, helping to pay the bill to keep the global air-conditioning running in the Amazon basin.

Dinner
Time released from long working days, and the fact that fast food and ready meals have gone up in price now that they reflect their full ecological costs, has seen a revival of home cooking. With lots more single households there are some twists. More people get together to take turns to share informal meals in a neighborhood. There are delivery services providing decent food in returnable containers for people without the time or inclination for the kitchen or company.

Evening
Stories and music are as old as campfires. For a time we forgot it, but being actively involved in making entertainment made us feel much better than just passively watching others perform. One of the first things taught in school now is the medical evidence that watching TV induces a mental state almost identical to clinical depression. It’s now common in pubs, clubs, and in any available hall to find groups of friends showing films made by themselves on cheap, easy-to-use equipment, and putting on a wide range of music and other performances.

People are intrigued and drawn in by the fact that they can actually get to know the musicians and filmmakers, because they are likely to live in the area. Just as people are happier to go out more locally during the day, because towns have become more pleasant places to be, the same is true at night. In the early evening people of all ages take to strolling around town, just for the sake of it. The increase in spare time means people start reviving half-forgotten festivals and celebrations, as well as creating new ones to mark everything from important global events, to the seasons, local history, people, and important events. There is much more partying in general.

The good life is active, but it’s full in a good way. By pressing all the right buttons it creates its own energy to thrive. So, by the time evening turns to night, most people are still in the mood to press other right buttons on the one they love. Then we’ll settle, tired maybe, satisfied surely, to take stock of how things have gone, round off our day, look forward to the next one, and enjoy our sleep, deeply.

Reposted from yesmagazine.org.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

• The decade of 1998-2007 was the warmest on record. The top 11 warmest years all occurred in the past 13 years.²
• This warming is being caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.
• In order to avoid a catastrophic rise of 6^oC by the end of the century, global emissions need to have peaked by 2015 and reduce by at least 80% by 2050.

Who is being affected?

Climate change is causing human suffering all over the world, due to rising sea-levels, extreme weather events, water and food shortages, and disease.

• The World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 climate change was causing 150,000 deaths worldwide⁴ – from malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and flooding. This conservative estimate is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every week.
• ‘Natural’ disasters are increasing in frequency and severity.⁵ Since the mid-1970s, storms of the force of Hurricane Katrina have almost doubled.⁶
• An estimated 90% of all those killed – and 98% of those affected – by natural disasters live in Asia and Africa. Developing countries are most at risk because they lack the resources and capacity to prevent or mitigate the worst effects.⁵
• Between 1996 and 2005, disasters caused $667 billion in direct losses to people worldwide. Losses were 20 times greater in developing countries.⁵
• Rising world food prices caused in part by climate change and expanded biofuel production led to food riots and protests in more than 50 countries between January 2007 and July 2008.⁷

o NORTH AMERICA
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast causing 1,836 deaths.

o LATIN AMERICA
In October 2005 Hurricane Stan hit Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, causing more than 1,500 deaths.

o CARIBBEAN
In April 2008, a week of protests and riots in Haiti over rising food prices left at least five people dead and 200 injured.

o ARCTIC
The thawing of the Arctic permafrost is affecting the traditional way of life of its indigenous people, making hunting and travelling difficult and dangerous.

o EUROPE
The 2003 heatwave killed approximately 35,000 people from nine countries.

o In summer 2007, Britain suffered widespread flooding following one of the wettest months on record. It caused $4 billion worth of damage and prompted the biggest rescue effort in peacetime Britain.

o AFRICA
Floods in Mozambique in February/March 2000 killed several thousands.

o In September 2007 torrential rain triggered flash floods across Africa, affecting over a million people in 22 countries. The heavy rains destroyed thousands of acres of land and prompted an outbreak of cholera, which killed at least 68 people.

o ASIA
In India a record 944 mm of rainfall in Mumbai in July 2005 claimed over 1,000 lives.

o Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma in May 2008 killing an estimated 150,000 and severely affecting 2.4 million.

o AUSTRALASIA
In Canberra wildfires killed 4 in January 2003.

o Since 2003, Australia has been undergoing its worst drought on record, with many cities facing severe water shortages and crops and farms affected.

o PACIFIC ISLANDS
The low-lying island of Tuvalu has already evacuated 3,000 of its inhabitants to New Zealand.

o The 2,500 residents of the Carteret Islands are being forced to relocate to nearby Bougainville as their island disappears under the waves.

Who is responsible?

Just 23 rich countries, home to only 14% of the world’s population, have produced 60% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1850. Today they produce 40% of the world’s total. Despite committing to reduce annual emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012, their collective emissions are continuing to rise.⁹

• In 2007 China overtook the US as the world’s biggest emitter.
• Around 23% of Chinese carbon dioxide emissions in 2004 were due to products produced for export to richer countries. This is comparable to Japan’s total CO₂ emissions, and is more than double Britain’s emissions in the same year.¹⁰
• A US citizen emits seven times as much in a year as an Ethiopian does in a lifetime.¹¹

Future scenarios

Unless urgent action is taken now, the world faces terrifying consequences.

MIGRATION

• At least 250 million people will be forced to leave their homes between now and 2050.¹²

HUNGER AND THIRST³

• By 2020, up to 250 million people in Africa and 77 million in South America will be under increased water stress – where supplies no longer meet demand.
• By 2025 tens of millions more will go hungry due to low crop yields and rising global food prices. 49 million people are at risk of hunger by 2020 in Asia alone. Food crop yields in some African countries could decline by as much as 50% by 2020.

SPECIES LOSS³

• Approximately a third of all species will be committed to extinction by 2050.

RISING SEA-LEVELS

Sea-levels are set to rise dramatically. If we continue ‘business as usual’ we are likely to see a rise of at least 1-2 metres this century, possibly much more.¹³

• A 1 metre rise would displace 10 million people in Vietnam and 8-10 million in Egypt.
• The number of Africans at risk of coastal flooding will rise from 1 million in 1990 to 70 million by 2080.¹⁴
• In Bangladesh, flood damage has become more extreme in the past 20 years. By 2100, predicted ocean rises threaten to submerge 18% of the country, creating 35 million environmental refugees.¹⁵
• During the Pliocene period, when the world was 2oC to 3oC warmer, sea-levels were 25 metres higher. About 1 billion people live within a 25-metre rise in today’s sea-level, including many US East Coast cities and areas occupied by more than 250 million people in China.¹⁶

DEATH FROM DISEASE

• By 2085 an estimated 220-400 million more people will be at risk from malaria, and 3.5 billion from dengue fever.³
• Some 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone could die of disease directly attributable to climate change by the end of the century.¹³

Solutions¹⁷

Today, renewable energy sources account for only 13% of the world’s energy use. As much as 80% of energy still comes from fossil fuels, and the remaining 7% from nuclear power.

• In one day, the sunlight that reaches the earth provides enough energy to satisfy the world’s current power requirements for 8 years – although only a percentage of that potential is technically accessible.
• Current wind, wave, solar and geothermal technologies could provide six times more power than the world currently uses.

• 1. BBC News, ‘Billions face climate change risk’, 6 April 2007, tinyurl.com/5fzkur
• 2. World Meteorological Organization, ‘Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years’, 13 December 2007.
• 3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, www.ipcc.ch
• 4. World Health Organization, ‘Climate and health fact sheet’, July 2005, tinyurl.com/5fnu4m
• 5. Ronald Parker, ‘Development Actions and the Rising Incidence of Disasters’, World Bank Independent Evaluation Group, June 2007.
• 6. K. Emanuel, ‘Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years’, Nature 436, 2005.
• 7. Joachim von Braun, ‘Responding to the world food crisis’, International Food Policy Research Institute, 2008.
• 8. Carbon Dioxide Information Analyisis Center, cdiac.oml.gov
• 9. World Resources Institute, ‘Climate Analysis Indicators Tool 5.0′, 2008, www.cait.wri.org
• 10. Tao Wang and Jim Watson, ‘Who Owns China’s Carbon Emissions?’, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, October 2007.
• 11. Based on figures from CIA World Factbook, tinyurl.com/3d6bhw and Energy Information Administration, tinyurl.com/yoxmh8
• 12. Dr Norman Myers, quoted in ‘Human Tide: The real migration crisis,’ Christian Aid, May 2007
• 13. Christian Aid, ‘The Climate of Poverty: Facts, fears and hope’, May 2006.
• 14. DFID, submission to the Stern Enquiry into Climate Change and Developing Countries, Nov 2005.
• 15. Anwar Ali, ‘Vulnerability of Bangladesh Coastal Region to Climate Change with Adaptation Options’, 1999.
• 16. James Hansen, Testimony to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, US House of Representatives, 26 April 2007.
• 17. All figures taken from Greenpeace, ‘Energy [r]evolution: a sustainable global energy outlook’, 2008, tinyurl.com/6fdqgy

Reprinted from New Internationalist.This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 2.l5 License.

Geneva/Hanoi/New York – More than 2000 children die every day as a result of an unintentional, or accidental injury, and every year tens of millions more worldwide are taken to hospitals with injuries that often leave them with lifelong disabilities, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.

The World Report on Child Injury Prevention provides the first comprehensive global assessment of childhood unintentional injuries and prescribes measures to prevent them. It concludes that if proven prevention measures were adopted everywhere at least 1000 children’s lives could be saved every day.

“Child injuries are an important public health and development issue. In addition to the 830 000 deaths every year, millions of children suffer non-fatal injuries that often require long-term hospitalization and rehabilitation,” said WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. “The costs of such treatment can throw an entire family into poverty. Children in poorer families and communities are at increased risk of injury because they are less likely to benefit from prevention programmes and high quality health services.”

“This report is the result of a collaboration of more than 180 experts from all regions of the world,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “It shows that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of childhood death after the age of nine years and that 95% of these child injuries occur in developing countries. More must be done to prevent such harm to children.”

Africa has the highest rate overall for unintentional injury deaths. The report finds the rate is 10 times higher in Africa than in high-income countries in Europe and the Western Pacific such as Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom, which have the lowest rates of child injury.

However, the report finds that although many high-income countries have been able to reduce their child injury deaths by up to 50% over the past 30 years, the issue remains a problem for them, with unintentional injuries accounting for 40% of all child deaths in such countries.

The report finds that the top five causes of injury deaths are:

1. Road crashes: They kill 260 000 children a year and injure about 10 million. They are the leading cause of death among 10-19 year olds and a leading cause of child disability.
2. Drowning: It kills more than 175 000 children a year. Every year, up to 3 million children survive a drowning incident. Due to brain damage in some survivors, non-fatal drowning has the highest average lifetime health and economic impact of any injury type.
3. Burns: Fire-related burns kill nearly 96 000 children a year and the death rate is eleven times higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.
4. Falls: Nearly 47 000 children fall to their deaths every year, but hundreds of thousands more sustain less serious injuries from a fall.
5. Poisoning: More than 45 000 children die each year from unintended poisoning.

“Improvements can be made in all countries,” said Dr Etienne Krug, Director of WHO’s Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability. “When a child is left disfigured by a burn, paralysed by a fall, brain damaged by a near drowning or emotionally traumatized by any such serious incident, the effects can reverberate through the child’s life. Each such tragedy is unnecessary. We have enough evidence about what works. A known set of prevention programmes should be implemented in all countries.”

The report outlines the impact that proven prevention measures can have. These measures include laws on child-appropriate seatbelts and helmets; hot tap water temperature regulations; child-resistant closures on medicine bottles, lighters and household product containers; separate traffic lanes for motorcycles or bicycles; draining unnecessary water from baths and buckets; redesigning nursery furniture, toys and playground equipment; and strengthening emergency medical care and rehabilitation services.

It also identifies approaches that either should be avoided or are not backed by sufficient evidence to recommend them. For example, it concludes that blister packaging for tablets may not be child resistant; that airbags in the front seat of a car could be harmful to children under 13 years; that butter, sugar, oil and other traditional remedies should not be used on burns and that public education campaigns on their own don’t reduce rates of drowning.

The report is available online at the World Health Organization.

December 09, 2008

BOULDER-Contrary to earlier projections, few developing countries will be able to afford more efficient technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades, new research concludes. The study, by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado, warns that continuing economic and technological disparities will make it more difficult than anticipated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it underscores the challenges that poorer nations face in trying to adapt to global warming.

The study will be published this month in the journal Climate Research. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

“There is simply no evidence that developing countries will somehow become wealthier and be in a position to install more environmentally friendly technologies,” says Patricia Romero Lankao, an NCAR sociologist who is the lead author of the study. “We always knew that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was going to be a challenge, but now it looks like we underestimated the magnitude of this problem.”

As a result, most industrialized and developing countries are increasing their emissions of carbon dioxide. Their economic growth is outstripping the increase in efficiency, and the demand for more cars, larger houses, and other goods and services is leading to ever-increasing emissions of carbon dioxide. Many of the products these nations consume come from developing countries that are producing more but not gaining the wealth needed to increase efficiency.

As a result, most industrialized countries, as well as developing countries with growing economies, are increasing their emissions of carbon dioxide. Overall, global emissions grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the 1990s and 3.3 percent from 2000 to 2006.

The study has implications for international climate change negotiations, such as this week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland. The United States and other technologically advanced nations are under pressure to reduce their per capita carbon dioxide emissions, while developing countries are being urged to adopt cleaner technology. The research suggests that both goals will be difficult to achieve.

In addition, if developing countries fail to become significantly more prosperous, they may be unable to protect their residents from some of the more dangerous impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and more-frequent droughts.

“Their populations and economic activities will not have the availability of resources, entitlements, social networks, and governance structures deemed particularly important … for them to adapt to the impacts of climate change,” the paper states.

The cost of inefficiency

Even though the developing nations analyzed by the research team generally have smaller economies, they are responsible for about 47 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases.

The reason has to do in part with the inefficient energy and transportation systems in nations with less wealth. Small and outdated industrial facilities that use higher-polluting fossil fuels, for example, tend to emit more carbon dioxide per production unit than a larger facility with newer, cleaner technologies. In addition, developing countries contribute a large amount to carbon dioxide emissions when their forests are logged or burned.

To determine whether developing countries are likely to become significantly more efficient, Romero Lankao and her co-authors divided 72 of the world’s more populous countries into three primary groups: technologically advanced nations such as the United States (haves), emerging nations such as Thailand (have-somes), and poorer nations like Tanzania (have-nots). Using World Bank data, they based their classifications on three criteria that can influence carbon dioxide emissions: gross domestic product per capita, urban population, and population in the 15 to 65 age range. They then analyzed the economic trajectories of the selected nations from 1960 to 2006, using several statistical techniques.

The team found that the economic disparity between industrialized countries and most developing ones, as measured by gross domestic product per capita, has increased since 1960 rather than converging. Furthermore, the study projects that, if present trends continue, that disparity will continue to grow for at least the next two decades.

A few have-some nations, such as China, appear poised to move up in the world economy and potentially adopt more efficient technology. But many other have-some and have-not countries that emit a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, such as India and Iran, are failing to amass the resources needed to become substantially more efficient.

The study also highlights the disparities in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide. Of the 72 countries analyzed, the team found that the advanced countries have a tiny share of the world’s population, yet emit 52.2 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, one-third of the global population lives in the have-not countries, but accounts for just 2.8 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions.

A challenge to IPCC projections: the lack of convergence

These findings cast doubt on some projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When the IPCC released its comprehensive assessment in 2007, it based several scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions on the concepts of modernization and convergence, which state that many developing countries would close the economic gap and adopt more efficient technologies.

Romero Lankao and her co-authors, however, found evidence for an alternative view, known as the world economy theory, which holds that nations will remain hierarchical, with poorer nations continuing to be in a peripheral economic position even as they produce more products and resources for wealthy countries. Those nations may adopt more efficient and environmentally friendly means of production over time, but at a significantly slower rate than projected by the IPCC.

The world economy theory suggests significant impacts on future greenhouse gas emissions. For example, if the wealthiest regions were to have seven times the average income of the poorest regions in 2100, as projected in some IPCC scenarios, the world would pump 14.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the air that year. But if the income disparity reached 16 times, then carbon dioxide emissions would be about 9 percent higher, at 15.5 gigatons–a difference that, over time, would lead to substantially higher global temperatures.

About the article

Title: “Development and greenhouse gas emissions deviate from the ‘modernization’ theory and ‘convergence’ hypothesis”

Authors: Patricia Romero Lankao, Douglas Nychka, and John Tribbia

Publication: Climate Research

Reprinted from The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

OSLO (15 October 2008)-Unless based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and forest communities, efforts by rich countries to combat climate change by funding reductions in deforestation in developing countries will fail, and could even unleash a devastating wave of forest loss, cultural destruction and civil conflict, warned a leading group of forestry and development experts meeting in Oslo this week.

The experts are gathering in Oslo with policymakers and community leaders for a conference on rights, forests and climate change. The conference was organized by two non-profits, Rainforest Foundation Norway and the US-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

Speaking at the meeting, Norway’s Minister of Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, says efforts towards reduced emissions from deforestation in developing countries should be based on the rights of indigenous peoples to the forests they depend on for their livelihoods, and provide tangible benefits consistent with their essential role in sustainable forest management.

“In addition to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, early action, pilot projects and demonstrations should safeguard biodiversity, contribute to poverty reduction and secure the rights of forest dependent communities in order to achieve any degree of permanence, legitimacy and effectiveness,” said Solheim.

Deforestation is responsible for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing it is seen as one of the quickest and cheapest ways of cutting emissions.

“Moves to finance reductions in tropical deforestation and forest degradation are necessary and welcome,” said Andy White, Coordinator of RRI. “But on their own they won’t solve the problem. Poorly devised, they could even make it worse. If such initiatives are well designed they can not only secure carbon but present a global opportunity to address the underlying causes of poverty and conflict in many developing countries.”

Globally, climate change negotiators are considering the introduction of a new financial mechanism, known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), that could generate billions of dollars for reducing forest loss in the tropics. Meanwhile, the Government of Norway has already pledged up to 3 billion Norwegian kroner annually (US$ 500 million) to cut emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries.

“To achieve long-term reductions in deforestation and forest degradation, it is absolutely necessary to respect and strengthen the rights of indigenous and other forest dependent communities,” says Lars Løvold, director of Rainforest Foundation Norway. “Many of these schemes are still being developed, and major decisions on how to spend the money will be made in the next few years. For us, the question is whether this money will result in a great deal of good or a great deal of harm to the environment and forest communities.”

Previous attempts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation have largely failed, often due to a lack of attention to human rights, property rights and transparency.

“There are growing conflicts between indigenous peoples and both forestry companies and conservation organizations. Imposed forest management initiatives are only viable if they respect the customary rights of forest peoples and ensure they have control about what happens on their lands. Indigenous peoples must be accepted as full and fair participants in all climate negotiations,” said Joji Carino, Director of TEBTEBBA, the Indigenous Peoples’ International Center for Policy Research and Education.

Conference organizers worry that REDD could fuel corruption and provoke tensions and land grab situations unless good governance, policies and the rule of law are first put in place.

“Indigenous peoples are rightly concerned about how these new investments could affect their access to the forests that they depend on for their livelihoods,” Solheim noted. “This is precisely why we are fully supportive of a role for indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities in the development and monitoring of climate plans and investments at the national and global level. These rights need to be respected, not just for moral reasons, although that is vital. It is also a matter of pragmatism and effectiveness.”

Experience from Brazil, the country in the world with the most advanced monitoring of its forests, gives valuable insight to the discussion on how forests can be protected. According to research from the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental, 19 percent of unprotected forest areas in Brazil have been deforested, while deforestation inside federal national parks is 2 percent. In indigenous territories, however, only 1.1 percent have been deforested.

The Oslo conference will discuss the Four Foundations for Effective Investments in Climate Change:

1. Recognize rights – establish an equitable legal and regulatory framework for land and resources.
2. Prioritize payment to communities – ensure that benefits and payments prioritize indigenous and local communities, according to their potential role as forest stewards.
3. Establish independent advisory and auditing processes to guide, monitor and audit investments and actions at national and global levels.
4. Monitor more than carbon to keep track of the status of forests, forest carbon, biodiversity and impacts on rights and livelihoods. Secure a role for indigenous peoples in monitoring of emissions, making full use of their knowledge of the state of forest ecosystems, something which could be particularly relevant to keep track of forest degradation.

New research to be presented at the conference demonstrates that the costs of recognizing local rights and tenure systems are low relative to the projected costs of REDD, and that indigenous and other forest communities own or manage a major portion of the global forest carbon stock. The research also shows that communities have proven to be good stewards of the forest.

A new study by RRI and Intercooperation, a Swiss development organization, finds that the average direct cost to legally recognize traditional community tenure rights is around $3 per hectare – an insignificant investment to make when the minimum estimates needed to pay for elements of a global REDD scheme are somewhere between $800 and $3500 per hectare each year for the next 22 years.

Another study that will be released at the conference, by Professor Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan, uses data from 325 sites in 12 countries to show that community ownership of forests provides the best possibility for increasing carbon stocks and improving livelihood outcomes. This is the most robust research to date at a global scale on the relationship between forest tenure and carbon sequestration, livelihood benefits and biodiversity.

Agrawal’s study also finds that the larger the property owned by communities, the better the chances for maintaining and sequestering carbon. This research shows the tremendous scope for cost-effective investments that strengthen local land rights, reduce poverty and conflict, and protect remaining natural forest areas.

To help ensure effective investments to combat in climate change, Rainforest Foundation Norway and RRI have called for the formation of independent bodies to advise and monitor the UN Convention on Climate Change.

“We believe that such advisory functions should be given serious consideration,” said Solheim. The conference will take up this recommendation and consider how to best move forward in its deliberations.

Major decisions on REDD, as well as other measures to combat climate change, are likely to be made at the 15th Conference of the UN Convention on Climate Change, which will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009.

“In the next fifteen months, the world will have to make a choice,” said Løvold. “We can continue to ignore the legitimate rights of forest dwellers, which will exacerbate conflict in forests and make REDD ineffective. Or we can learn from the lessons of the past, recognize the property and human rights of forest dwellers, and almost immediately start reaping the benefits.”

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Interested readers can find background information and follow the conference discussions at http://www.rightsandclimate.org/.

The mission of the Rainforest Foundation is to support indigenous peoples and traditional populations of the world’s rainforests in their efforts to protect their environment and fulfill their rights by assisting them in: securing and controlling the natural resources necessary for their long-term well-being and managing these resources in ways which do not harm their environment, violate their culture or compromise their future; and developing the means to protect their individual and collective rights and to obtain, shape, and control basic services from the state. http://www.rainforest.no/, www.rainforest.no/html/180.htm

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) in a new coalition of organisations dedicated to raising global awareness of the critical need for forest tenure, policy and market reforms, in order to achieve global goals of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and forest-based economic growth. Partners currently include ACICAFOC (Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Agroforestry Communities of Central America), the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Civic Response, the Foundation for People and Community Development (FPCD), Forest Peoples Programme, Forest Trends, the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), Intercooperation, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the Federation of Community Forest Organisations of Nepal (FECOFUN), and the Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC). For further information, visit the Web site at: http://www.rightsandresources.org/

The return of the food riot

Across the world, from Mozambique to Mexico, from the Philippines to Pakistan, countries have been surprised by the re-emergence of one of the oldest forms of social protest – the food riot. Food is getting more expensive, and many people are less able to afford it. In 2006, food prices increased by 9 per cent. Last year, they went up by at least 37 per cent. This year doesn’t look like it will be any better.

Most of this increase is in the dairy and grain sectors, but the entire planet feels the effect. In its understated way, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations puts it like this: ‘Rarely has the world felt such a widespread and commonly shared concern about food price inflation, a fear which is fuelling debates about the future direction of agricultural commodity prices in importing as well as exporting countries, be they rich or poor.’

Agflation (as it’s somewhat inelegantly called) hurts those least able to afford it. It is they who spend the greatest part of their income on food, and they who will find it hardest to span the price jump.

In Haiti, one of the most mercilessly punished countries on the planet, the poor in Port-au-Prince are finding themselves priced out of the market for food. Never let it be said, though, that the market cannot provide. In the poorest districts, there is now a brisk trade in mud cakes. Mothers feed the biscuits, made with water, salt, margarine and clay, to their children. The cake puts a dampener on hunger, at least for a couple of hours, but leaves your mouth dry and bitter for several hours more.

In some respects, the city’s clay cookie eaters are the lucky ones. At least they’re in a position actually to buy something, no matter how awful. By far the largest number of people who die from hunger die in rural areas, where the food is produced, and not ultimately for want of food, but for want of money to be able to buy the food that is available.

There’s a bitter irony here. Most of the world’s poorest people are the farmers and farm workers who actually produce food. One might think that they’d benefit from the fact that food prices are going up. And some farmers will undoubtedly be better off, particularly those growing cereals for export.

But most countries in the global South have a very particular pattern of agricultural production, which involves a few, very large scale farmers producing the bulk of export crops. The majority of poor rural people – and four out of five poor people on the planet live in rural areas – either work on or, if they’re lucky, own a very small amount of land. Their food production has been largely destined for the home market. With the World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) pushing for increased levels of free trade, they’ve found themselves shut out of their own markets by imports dumped from the global North.

Consider rice, a source of income and sustenance for more than two billion people. As part of its ‘structural adjustment’ policies, the World Bank has insisted that countries in the South reduce government support for agriculture. This has meant that in order to feed the people, governments have become increasingly reliant on the global economy.

But the giants of the international economy, particularly the US and EU, haven’t had to play by the same rules. While the WTO removed tariff barriers in order to ‘level the playing field’ in developing countries, many large scale farmers in the North remained heavily subsidised by their governments, with inducements to export surplus production. So when US rice farmers sold their product overseas, the subsidies they received undercut the local competition. That is why a 50-kilo bag of rice will sell in the US for $19, but in the Ghanaian market the same bag will cost you $15. The latest available data show import prices running at a third of what you’d be able to get for a similar locally produced bag at wholesale prices. No Ghanaian farmer can compete with that for long.

Following the money

Between 2000 and 2003, this dumping of rice into the countries of the South was compounded by another feature – low rice prices. It meant that the poorest farmers were ground out of the market, unable to make a living. Again, the World Bank puts the positive spin on trade liberalisation. In its 2005 Global Agricultural Trade report, the Bank put it like this: ‘The real story is the large transfers between consumers and producers that lead to these net gains. In [rice] importing countries consumers gain US$32.8 billion, while producers lose $27.2 billion.’ But since those farmers were among the countries’ poorest, transferring money away from them to slightly richer working people in the cities meant that poverty deepened.

What are ex-rice-farmers to do? The World Bank would like them to move to the city. In countries where they have followed the Bank’s advice, there have been explosions in urban poverty. The industrial jobs that should have been there to feed the displaced rural poor had themselves been whittled away by the same liberalisation policies that had just put the boot in to agriculture. It is a double whammy that millions of farmers continue to face, and one that has recently been adopted as an official development policy by the World Bank, under the banner of ‘agriculture for development’. And it becomes a triple whammy when displaced agriculturalists end up in cities forced to pay far more for food than they ever thought possible.

So what’s behind the food price rises, and why aren’t poor farmers benefiting? We’ve got an intuition that helps us here. When the price of oil goes up, we don’t think for a minute that the beneficiaries are oil workers or the people on the petrol station forecourts. We understand that oil is a commodity controlled by a few powerful corporations, and that it is they, and more specifically the oil financiers, who are getting fat pay cheques. This intuition helps us understand why most farmers aren’t getting rich off the price rises – if they’re involved with the international economy, it is, with few exceptions, invariably as peons.

That explains why farmers aren’t getting the lucre. But where, then, does it go? One clue is to be found through a longer historical view. We’d like to think that food price rises are new, but if you look at the real cost to consumers, the price of food has been increasing, while at the same time the price that farmers receive on that food, the farm gate price, has been falling in real terms. Driving a wedge between the consumers and farmers are the food corporations, and it’s unsurprising that they’ve been one of the most consistently desirable stocks on the market.

But there are other factors at work too, ones outside the control of even the most powerful food companies. Most important, the harvest has been incredibly poor over the past year because the weather in several key growing regions has been erratic. Some are already calling this the first climate-change famine and the harbinger of worse to come. In Africa, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, studies suggest that within a century, crop revenues could be down by up to 90 per cent as a result of climate change. This could be compounded by up to 50 per cent of animal species becoming endangered (so no relying on tourism) and up to 250 million people being affected by water stress as a result of a very conservative one-degree temperature increase.

The oil we eat

At the heart of this, of course, lies oil, and oil matters to food more than global warming. Take, for instance, the price of oil. It makes sense that, with higher energy prices, the costs of food distribution have soared. But this isn’t the only way that oil matters for our food. Industrial agriculture, by definition, involves the use of inorganic fertiliser. Making inorganic fertiliser requires a great deal of energy, and one of the primary elements in fertiliser manufacture is natural gas. Dearer oil means dearer gas means dearer fertiliser means dearer food.

Ironically, one of the other major reasons why prices are going up is because of an intervention to wean us away from oil: agrofuels (the combustible plant products that we’re being induced to call ‘biofuels’). The source of these fuels varies from country to country – from palm oil in Indonesia to sugar cane in Brazil. Their production is peddled by politicians as an unmitigated good in the battle against climate change, even though study after study suggests precisely the opposite.

This research will come as small comfort to those displaced to grow agrofuels, those going hungry because of them, or even those directly involved in growing them. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 50,000 slaves in Brazil, mainly on sugar cane plantations. The cane is thirsty, and is drying up the largest aquifer in South America- the Guaraní. In the US, the government has backed the transformation of corn (maize) into ethanol, a move that has pleased farmers and delighted the ethanol producers (food giants Cargill, ADM, Bunge, joined by the more familiar ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil) who lobbied hardest for it.

The demand for agrofuel corn means that there’s less corn around to eat, and the price goes up. Farmers being astute and very aware of the market, see the bright future for corn, and switch to it from other crops. This means that not only has the price of corn gone up but there’s less of the other cereals, leading again to higher prices. And tilting the market yet further, the US and EU have explicit policy targets and subsidies for agrofuels to reach the political nirvana of ‘energy independence’.

As a result, there is less food on the market. But there’s a further force at work, which means that an even smaller fraction of it ends up in the bellies of the hungry. As the incomes of the new middle classes in India and especially China increase, the demand for meat has spiked. To produce a kilo of chicken requires two kilos of grain, to produce a kilo of pork needs four kilos, and to produce one kilo of beef needs seven. The demand for millions of tons of meat means that multiple millions of tons of grain are being fed to animals, rather than people. Reducing the demand for meat loosens some of the supply constraints on grain, which means that it’s more accessible to the poor. And that’s independent of the ethical reasons to cut out meat, and ignoring the environmental damage done by livestock, not only through methane emissions but through toxic levels of agricultural run-off from the farms that breed them.

The peasant way

There is a gamut of reasons both why prices are higher and why farmers are seeing less and less of the revenue. Those hurt the hardest are rural workers and small farmers. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that farmers are at the forefront of understanding the effects of international agricultural trade. For decades, they’ve been schooled in the violence of the market, and in the use of food as a political weapon by agribusiness.

Recently, though, modern communications technologies have allowed conversations between different struggles in different parts of the world. One of the largest farmers’ movements in the world, La Via Campesina (Spanish for ‘the peasant way’) is an international association of millions of farmers, peasants, and landless labourers. It has long organised against the predations of international capitalism. It was in 1992, for instance, that farmers were reading and critiquing, in the fields of Karnataka, India, a Kannada translation of the charter text that was to found the World Trade Organisation. This was fully seven years before the Seattle WTO protests.

One of the movement’s major outcomes has been the development of a coherent international alternative to modern industrial agriculture. It’s called ‘food sovereignty’. To fully understand it, it’s important to contrast it with the dominant liberal goal – food security. Food security has a technical definition, along the lines of this, taken from the US government: food security is characterised by ‘access by all people at all times to sufficient food and nutrition for a healthy and productive life’. This sounds all well and good until you realise that it’s compatible with everyone getting vouchers for McDonald’s and a baggie of vitamins to fill the nutritional gaps.

Crucially, what the definition of food security omits is any idea of who controls what and how food is grown and distributed. The definition of food sovereignty is fairly long; Wikipedia has a good summary. The most recent iteration of it is this: ‘Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.’

It’s a bold vision, and it has two sets of demands. The first is that food policy must be decided by everyone in a democratic manner, rather than a small cabal of plutocrats in a smoke-filled room. Nonetheless, there is a second set of demands that are non-negotiable, demands that protect women’s rights and ecological sustainability. The insistence on women’s rights is, incidentally, the clearest indication that what Via Campesina is lobbying for is not some misty-eyed recuperation of traditional agriculture, but a thoroughly modern and socially just system of food production and consumption.

It’s ambitious, yes, but it offers to solve some of the biggest troubles with food. First, the demands of ecological sustainability mean that industrial agriculture and agrofuels are off the table. There are ways of growing food agro-ecologically, free of inorganic fertiliser, that have a far smaller ecological footprint, foster biodiversity, and provide outputs at levels in excess of conventional agriculture. These techniques have been pioneered in Cuba, which used to be one of the largest importers of fertiliser and pesticides on the continent, but has since turned its agricultural production around. The fall of the Soviet Union, in combination with the US trade embargo, forced the country first towards two years of widespread hunger, and then the development of some of the most sophisticated oil-free agricultural science on the planet. Today 70 per cent of food eaten in Havana comes from Havana.

Cuba has become an agricultural leader by reforming its land tenure system, offering relevant and public scientific support to farmers, and paying attention to the effects of geography and town planning on access to food. They are lessons from which the rest of the world can profit. But in order to be able to implement them, the South needs to have a little more wiggle room in agriculture than it currently does. Which means that agricultural concerns should be removed from the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank (responsible for a great deal of damage to agriculture over the past 30 years) should be defunded, and the subsidy systems in the global North and South need to be overhauled to benefit the poorest, rather than the wealthiest, to promote local food democracies.

From ethical shopping to political hedonism

While there are elements of Cuban agriculture to wish for everywhere, it’s easy for the majority of us, living in cities, to feel rather disconnected from agrarian struggles. The solution we’re offered, to eat sustainably, is sold to us as a lifestyle choice for a kind of consumerism that somehow aspires to short-circuit capitalism. This is a deep contradiction in terms, of course, but it has its seductions. After all, which Red Pepper reader hasn’t bought fair trade coffee? I certainly have.

But while fair trade is preferable to its alternative (super-exploitative trade), it’s not going to do anything about the major inequities of the farming system. Most of the poorest and most militant farmers are demanding not slightly higher prices for a sack of beans, but land reform and comprehensive agrarian change. This isn’t the sort of thing that one can shop for, and even the best fair trade programmes don’t pretend to be advancing this agenda. This is precisely the limitation of consumer activism – that it makes us feel that through judicious shopping we’re engaging in structural change when our behaviour is entrenching precisely the structures of domination we would range ourselves against.

So what are we to do? The principles of food sovereignty suggest that the solution doesn’t lie in abdicating responsibility and doing whatever passing fancy crosses one’s mind. One solution to put growers and eaters back at the heart of the food system is to be found, paradoxically, in a particular kind of hedonism, one that comes from a country where leftist politics and food are both treated very seriously: Italy.

One of the triumphs of the Italian left has been the staking out of a particular territory of joy. In 1986, the Italian communist daily Il Manifesto published an eight-page insert fighting for, among other things, the right to food. The publication was called Gambero Rosso – meaning ‘red shrimp’ but also a play on the words ‘bandiera rossa’, ‘red flag’. The thinking behind it was this: why should pleasure be only the domain of the bourgeoisie? Is it not every worker’s right to be able to enjoy food?

From a class analysis of pleasure came a realisation that in order to enjoy food, workers needed two things: time and money. And the getting of these things was to be a social and collective pursuit, in defiance of, rather than through the market. The organisers worked with unions for an increase in wage rates, and then campaigned for a two-hour lunch break, freeing time in the middle of the day for agricultural workers to be able not just to eat but to savour their food. Soon, the original founders were joined by a range of activists, artists, writers, workers and cooks from across the world. They wrote their vision into a manifesto, with lines like ‘In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes.’ Their answer became the name of their organisation: Slow Food (see Red Pepper, Oct-Nov 2007).

The Slow Food movement suggests that enjoying food more is a way of reclaiming our nourishment from capital. The kind of enjoyment they’re fighting for involves not just individual choices but social ones, and requires more than simply opting for a more ethical shopping basket. It is in the direction of Slow Food that the principles of food sovereignty point those of us living in cities.

Food sovereignty offers a paradoxical solution to agflation. The answer isn’t to lower prices – most farm workers and farmers see little enough as it is. The solution is simultaneously to increase farm-gate prices, to promote land reform, appropriate technology and women’s rights, and also to increase wages and social supports. These outcomes can’t be shopped for. They’re the fruits of organising and agitation, a necessary step if we are all to be able to savour our food. And they’re fruits well worth struggling for.

Footnote

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Portobello Books) www.stuffedandstarved.org. He is a researcher at the University of California, at Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal

Reprinted from Red Pepper.

Grist Magazine, April 28, 2008

Straight to the Source

It’s really an absurd travesty when starvation gets blamed on “global warming do-gooders,” and we haven’t seen the last of that. The problem is miscast, though. There isn’t a food shortage, at least not yet. There is a food price crisis, which is a very different beast.

Are its roots in the huge resource gap between the relatively rich and the very poor? If that’s true, it has broad implications.

Here’s one way of looking at it, from the Omaha World-Herald:

The list of likely damages from global warming is long and includes those from rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, species loss, a wider reach of malaria, reductions in water supplies, and increased urban pollution. Perhaps the biggest likely risk, however, is to world agriculture.Higher temperatures speed plants through their development and leave less time for grain filling. Evaporation and loss of water through plant leaves rises more rapidly with temperatures than the increase in rainfall expected from global warming, causing a loss of moisture. Incidence of severe drought, like that in the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s or Australia in recent years, would likely increase.

There’s another way this can be played, though, from The New York Sun:

The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

…

“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

In fact, there is plenty of agricultural productivity to feed everyone, and in principle a considerable amount left over for biofuels.

What’s going on? It isn’t that there isn’t enough food. It’s that the ability to fill up a gas tank with gasoline is, in the “wisdom” of the marketplace, the highest value use of the food crop.

Admittedly, what we’re seeing now is a consequence of some distorted subsidies, but consider this. If the price of liquid fuel goes up further because of reduced supply and inflexible demand, then even if the subsidy goes away, it might well become more lucrative to produce biofuel for rich people than to provide food for poor people.

Indeed, something like this is already going on. Most of the land in production in the U.S. goes to produce animal feed, which produces a small fraction as many calories in a luxury crop (meat) as the same land would in producing directly for human consumption. While cereal crops worldwide set new records, some people have been going hungry even before this year’s price rises.

How is this possible? Is the demand for one luxury meat meal really bigger than the demand for ten subsistence grain meals? This is true only if the wealthy person’s desires are valued more than the poor person’s desires. A starving Haitian’s desire for a scrap of bread exceeds your desire for your favorite meal by a considerable amount, but his ability to pay is constrained by your desire for steak.

When our economic system evolved, the number of very wealthy people was small. For most of the population, there was a market for their labor, which they could exchange for goods. The demands of the wealthy for luxuries didn’t compete directly with the demands of the general population for basics. The world was essentially infinite; people bought labor and not resources.

The worker, free to sell his or her services to the highest bidder (at least in principle), was at least relatively liberated compared to his feudal ancestor.

Two things have changed. The number of relatively wealthy people has burgeoned, and the competition for raw materials has become important. The arrangement that fueled the successes of the industrial economy breaks down.

There is less opportunity to exchange labor for goods even in the wealthy countries, as the labor gets outsourced to foreigners and machines. With globalization, your currency gets weighed against my currency, and your labor competes against the labor of even more desperate people. At the same time, rich and poor now compete for the same raw materials.

In these circumstances, meat for one is “worth more than” gruel for ten, and a rational farmer will target the former rather than the latter.

The problem gets worse, the larger the ratio of the wealth of the wealthiest to the wealth of the poorest. In a recent NPR article about gasoline hitting $4/gal in the Bay Area, one fellow said, “It won’t affect me in the least. I am sure it is difficult for some people, but it has no impact on me whatsoever.” I have heard similar comments from a Texan who sells very large luxury vehicles.

I’m not sure how to address this. I used to believe that a carbon tax was our best bet, but I’ve come to doubt that it will work. In an age of a huge wealthy demographic, such measures become extremely regressive long before they bite the major consumers. Note that gasoline prices had to triple in the U.S. before the consumption curve showed even a tiny dent.

A rise in price of essential commodities concentrates wealth and, in turn, exacerbates excess.

Thinking about the fact that world cereal production set records last year, I’m convinced that the problem is in the incentive system, though, not in the production of biofuels or (leaving aside other issues) even in the demand for meat. When very rich and very poor people compete for the same resources, you have a problem that can’t be fixed with pricing.

We have excess food production capacity, and some of it could go into meat or into biofuels. The problem is that this makes it harder for poor people to get grain. I genuinely hate to say this, but I see no way around it. Unless wealth becomes much more evenly distributed, we need a way of separating out the necessities from the luxuries that isn’t purely market driven.

I guess the simplest thing on the food front is to tie food aid directly to prices of the foods that food aid supports, and to fund it through taxes of the competing commodities.

What to do about discouraging carbon use is less clear to me. The recent events regarding food versus biofuels has me thinking that, unfortunately, putting a price on carbon is not going to work out very well without some other, more complex and more difficult measures to discourage excessive consumption by the relatively wealthy individuals and societies.

Forecast growth in 2008 cereal production could ease tight global supply.

The cereal import bill of the world’s poorest countries is forecast to rise by 56 percent in 2007/2008. This comes after a significant increase of 37 percent in 2006/2007, FAO said today.

For low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the cereal bill is projected to increase by 74 percent, according to the UN agency’s latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. The increase is due to the sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices.

International cereal prices have continued to rise sharply over the past two months, reflecting steady demand and depleted world reserves, the report said. Prices of rice increased the most following the imposition of new export restrictions by major exporting countries. By the end of March prices of wheat and rice were about double their levels of a year earlier, while those of maize were more than one-third higher, according to the report.

FAO has launched an Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP), offering technical and policy assistance to poor countries affected by high food prices in order help farmers boost production in the coming agricultural seasons. Farmers can achieve higher yields and increase production areas if they have access to inputs such as improved seeds, organic and inorganic fertilizer and water. Field activities are starting in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. FAO will also help governments prepare actions and strategies to increase agricultural production. In collaboration with the World Food Programme, IFAD and other partners, FAO will enlarge its food market information system to pull together and analyze various data sources at local, national and international levels and to disseminate this information. FAO has allocated US$17 million for these activities.

Domestic food prices spur social unrest

Prices of bread, rice, maize products, milk, oil, soybeans and others basic foods have increased sharply in recent months in a number of developing countries, despite policy measures — including export restrictions, subsidies, tariff reductions and price controls — taken by governments of both cereal importing and exporting countries to limit the impact of international prices on domestic food markets.

Food riots have been reported in Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid seizing of food from the fields and from warehouses.

“Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations,” said Henri Josserand of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning system. “Food represents about 10-20 percent of consumer spending in industrialized nations, but as much as 60-80 percent in developing countries, many of which are net-food-importers.”

2008 forecast: production up

According to FAO’s first forecast world cereal production in 2008 is to increase by 2.6 percent to a record 2 164 million tonnes. The bulk of the increase is expected in wheat, following significant expansion in plantings in major producing countries.

“Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season,” the report said.

But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.

“Favourable climatic conditions will be even more critical in the new season because world cereal reserves are depleted,” the report said.

According to FAO’s forecast, world cereal stocks are expected to fall to a 25-year-low of 405 million tonnes in 2007/08, down 21 million tonnes, or 5 percent, from their already reduced level of the previous year.

“Any major shortfalls resulting from unfavourable weather, particularly in exporting countries, would prolong the current tight market situation; contribute to more price rallies and exacerbate the economic hardship already facing many countries,” the report said.

FAO urges all donors and International Financing Institutions to increase their assistance or consider reprogramming part of their ongoing aid in countries negatively affected by high food prices. A tentative estimation of the additional funding required by the governments to implement country projects and programmes for dealing with soaring food prices ranges between US$ 1,2 and 1,7 billion. The release of these funds can provide important support for poor farmers, including access to inputs and assets, to enhance the food supply response in the next agricultural seasons.

Worldwide, 37 countries are currently facing food crises, according to the report. Click here for the complete list of countries in need of external assistance.

Reprinted from FAO.

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WASHINGTON/LONDON/NAIROBI/DELHI – 15^th April 2008. The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse. That is the message from the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, a major new report by over 400 scientists which is launched today.

The assessment was considered by 64 governments at an intergovernmental plenary in Johannesburg last week.

The authors’ brief was to examine hunger, poverty, the environment and equity together. Professor Robert Watson Director of IAASTD said those on the margins are ill-served by the present system: “The incentives for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak… the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade liberalization scenarios.”

Modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.

It says the willingness of many people to tackle the basics of combining production, social and environmental goals is marred by “contentious political and economic stances”. One of the IAASTD co-chairs, Dr Hans Herren, explains: “Specifically, this refers to the many OECD member countries who are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or subsidy systems. Without reforms here many poorer countries will have a very hard time… ”

The report has assessed that the way to meet the challenges lies in putting in place institutional, economic and legal frameworks that combine productivity with the protection and conservation of natural resources like soils, water, forests, and biodiversity while meeting production needs.

In many countries, it says, food is taken for granted, and farmers and farm workers are in many cases poorly rewarded for acting as stewards of almost a third of the Earth’s land. Investment directed toward securing the public interest in agricultural science, education and training and extension to farmers has decreased at a time when it is most needed.

The authors have assessed evidence across a wide range of knowledge that is rarely brought together. They conclude we have little time to lose if we are to change course. Continuing with current trends would exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.

Professor Bob Watson, Director of IAASTD said: “To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message. But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world. If those with power are now willing to hear it, then we may hope for more equitable policies that do take the interests of the poor into account.”

Professor Judi Wakhungu, said “We must cooperate now, because no single institution, no single nation, no single region, can tackle this issue alone. The time is now.”

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