Water crisis in China -- by Elizabeth C. Economy

Reprinted from China Daily 9 Aug 2010. The author is Asia Studies director, US Council on Foreign Relations. 

A series of environmental disasters have hit China recently. The Zijin mining company is under fire for toxic leaks into the Tingjiang River from its copper plant in Shanghang, Fujian province.... Government officials have found Zijin was illegally discharging wastewater into the river, and detained some company officials. Earlier reports suggested Zijin might have to pay penalties and compensation of at least 5 million yuan ($738,000). The real tragedy of the Zijin case is that it is far from unique. Dumping of wastewater illegally by factories is a common practice in China. The health of local communities and the livelihood of farmers and fishermen are under constant threat from companies that take environmental shortcuts.

According to Minister of Environmental Protection Zhou Shengxian, about 25 percent of China's drinking water sources pose a threat to people's health. Last year, a report by China Geological Survey, affiliated to the Ministry of Land and Resources, said 90 percent of the country's groundwater was polluted. China can ill afford to pollute its water, because two-thirds of Chinese cities face water shortages, and the groundwater levels in the country's coastal region are dropping by the year, causing land to sink, roads to crack and villages to relocate.

 Fish kill due to pollution, Wuhai

The country's environmental officials are well aware of the challenge. Vice-Minister of Environmental Protection Wu Xiaoqing said late last year: "Water pollution has become a bottleneck for economic development in China, and a key environmental issue that threatens people's health." With this in mind, officials are seeking ways to rein in the problem.

In 2008, the government revised the Water Pollution Control Law, raising the level of fines that could be imposed on negligent companies and individuals, as well as asserting the responsibility of provincial officials to meet anti-pollution targets such as reducing chemical oxygen demand. Some Chinese cities are raising water prices, too, to encourage conservation and recycling. These are important first steps, but they are not enough.

Effective environmental protection rests on a partnership among local environmental protection officials, NGOs, the media, the public in general and - under the best circumstances - companies that are motivated to avoid harming the environment. China has all the actors in place, but none of them is fully empowered to do the right thing. A few small reforms would make all the difference.

First, local environmental protection bureaus are often understaffed and their employees underpaid. Indeed, according to Zhou Shengxian, only about 25 percent of the country's more than 660 cities are even capable of monitoring water quality once a month to check for pollutants.

One way of enabling them to do so would be to place local environmental protection bureaus under the auspices of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) rather than local governments. This would allow for more capacity building and the establishment of uniform training and standards throughout the country. This may help reduce corruption, too, which causes roughly half of environmental funds to be spent on other things. Of course, this would mean substantially increasing the government's environment budget, which at 1.3 percent of GDP is woefully small for the task at hand.

Second, a critical element of any environmental protection effort is a watchdog -- independent actors committed to keeping business and government honest. Many countries rely on NGOs, the media and individual citizens to perform this function. China, too, has an increasingly vibrant environmental NGO sector and the media interested in environmental issues. But government regulations often make it difficult for them to find funding, expand their activities and operate freely. These watchdogs need independence of action, as well as legal protection to do their job well.

Finally, the legal system underpinning environmental protection remains a weak link in the country's environmental work. More environmental lawyers and trained judges, the ability of NGOs to bring class action lawsuits on behalf of multiple victims, and a greater degree of independence for the judiciary - freeing it of other parts of the government, for instance - would help build a more robust environmental protection system.

There is no silver bullet. Environmental disasters happen everywhere in the world, all the time. One need only look at the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of the United States, to see one of the worst environmental disasters of the decade. Yet in China, Zijin is the norm, not the exception. The Chinese people want and deserve much better from those responsible.

update:

In Jan 2011, Water Resources Minister Chen Lei announced conservation "red lines" for water overexploitation, water efficiency and pollution. A 40-billion-cubic-meter a year water shortage has hit two thirds of the country's cities, as well as North China wheatlands. Budgets for irrigation, flood control and drought relief will double in the next decade:  China Daily Jan 30.

See also Wikipedia, Chinese water crisis, FP 24 Aug 2010 China's water grab [in the Himalayas], NYT 2 Feb 2011 China's grain supply threatened by drought.

Straw Bale Houses for Indian Country -- by Bob Gough

This interview first appeared in an FCNL Indian Report 14 July 2010. Bob Gough is secretary of the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, on the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota.

Efficiency First

Before you get to generating a single megawatt of electricity, become energy efficient first. We just spent this whole week on a building project on Rosebud, a pilot project of a straw bale house. You build the walls out of packed straw bales and they're about 18 inches across. You've now got the perfect combination of mass of the earthen plaster on the walls and insulation from the straw sandwiched in the middle, and you get an R40 [insulation] value, which is double anything 6 inch fiberglass insulation will give you. It's sequestering carbon in the form of straw, which is a waste material…. Instead of burning it, put it into housing walls, make them far more efficient; then you need less energy to heat it in the winter and cool it in the summer.

straw bales with timber frame on a reservation in MT
There are many straw bale buildings constructed in the early years of the last century still occupied and holding up very well. There's a house in Alliance, Nebraska that was built in 1903 and abandoned in 1954. A photograph was taken of it in 1994, 40 years later, and that house looks like 3 good weekends and you could be back living in it again. You cannot show me a HUD [Housing and Urban Development] house…that could be abandoned for 40 or 50 years and it'd still be standing at all. These straw bale houses, made with natural materials, not only last a long time, but to build them requires a lot of local labor. We call that a solution to the unemployment problem.

How Can Congress Help?

earth plaster on straw bale, AZ
There's now a whole wave of training grants; just through the Department of Labor we can get a whole lot of money to train people, and we'd love to train them to build straw bale houses. With one grant from a given department you can get training funds but can't get stipends or buy a whole lot of straw bales to build houses. "No, this is a training grant, this isn't a housing grant."…If you're going to train somebody to paint you've got to buy them paint. You've got to be able to get enough straw bales to train in construction techniques…it means you've got to get the Department of Agriculture working with the Department of Labor and with the Department of Energy, and with the Department of the Interior. You need them all…playing together.

Why Indian Country?

Tribes and tribal governments are very different from cities and counties, because so much more of the housing on an Indian reservation is…low-income, public assistance housing, because that's the population, these are America's poorest communities. Cities don't have programmatic control over all the residential buildings in their jurisdiction the way tribes do-or the way tribes can. Tribes have a greater opportunity to really make a difference; tribes can programmatically address their housing needs and address their unemployment needs and at the same time address their energy needs.… If we could meet the present need for new homes and replace a good deal of the existing Indian housing in the next 20 or 30 years with energy efficient homes, these reservations would hum as models, as islands of sustainability, as shining stars of passive and efficient survivability.

***

See also Wikipedia, straw bale construction.

Food Sovereignty -- by Via Campesina and other NGOs

photo: World Forum, Nyéléni, Mali 2007
The Our World Is Not For Sale coalition formed around this statement in opposition to the stalemated Doha round of the WTO in 2001, and was updated in 2003. It has been signed by many NGOs and is one of the clearest statements of their aims. Corporate lobbies still push to complete the Doha round, inserting it in the UN agenda for the Rio+20 conference of 2012.

Priority to Peoples' Food Sovereignty

WTO out of Food and Agriculture

Food and agriculture are fundamental to all peoples, in terms of both production and availability of sufficient quantities of safe and healthy food, and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures and environments. All of these are being undermined by the increasing emphasis on neo- liberal economic policies promoted by leading political and economic powers, such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), and realised through global institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). Instead of securing food for the peoples of the world, these institutions have presided over a system that has prioritised export-oriented production, increased global hunger and malnutrition, and alienated millions from productive assets and resources such as land, water, fish, seeds, technology and know-how. Fundamental change to this
global regime is urgently required.

People’s Food Sovereignty is a Right

In order to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s peoples, it is essential that food is produced though diversified, community based production systems. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.

Governments must uphold the rights of all peoples to food sovereignty and security, and adopt and implement policies that promote sustainable, family-based production rather than industry-led, high- input and export oriented production. This in turn demands that they put in place the following measures:

I. Market Policies
- Ensure adequate remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers;
- Exercise the rights to protect domestic markets from imports at low prices;
- Regulate production on the internal market in order to avoid the creation of surpluses;
- Abolish all direct and indirect export supports; and,
- Phase out domestic production subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture, inequitable land tenure patterns and destructive fishing practices; and support integrated agrarian reform programmes, including sustainable farming and fishing practices

II. Food Safety, Quality and the Environment
- Adequately control the spread of diseases and pests while at the same time ensuring food safety;
- Protect fish resources from both land -based and sea-based threats, such as pollution from dumping, coastal and off-shore mining, degradation of river mouths and estuaries and harmful industrial aquaculture practices that use antibiotics and hormones;
- Ban the use of dangerous technologies, such as food irradiation, which lower the nutritional value of food and create toxins in food;
- Establish food quality criteria appropriate to the preferences and needs of the people;
- Establish national mechanisms for quality control of all food products so that they comply with high environmental, social and health quality standards; and,
- Ensure that all food inspection functions are performed by appropriate and independent government bodies, and not by private corporations or contractors;

III. Access to Productive Resources
- Recognise and enforce communities' legal and customary rights to make decisions concerning their local, traditional resources, even where no legal rights have previously been allocated;
- Ensure equitable access to land, seeds, water, credit and other productive resources;
- Grant the communities that depend on aquatic resources common property rights, and reject systems that attempt to privatise these public resources;
- Prohibit all forms of patenting of life or any of its components, and the appropriation of knowledge associated with food and agriculture through intellectual property rights regimes and
- Protect farmers', indigenous peoples’ and local community rights over plant genetic resources and associated knowledge – including farmers' rights to exchange and reproduce seeds.

IV. Production-Consumption
- Develop local food economies based on local production and processing, and the development of local food outlets.

V. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)
- Ban the production of, and trade in genetically modified (GM) seeds, foods, animal feeds and related products;
- Ban genetically modified foods to be used as food aid;
- Expose and actively oppose the various methods (direct and indirect) by which agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Aventis/Bayer and DuPont are bringing GM crop varieties into agricultural systems and environments; and,
- Encourage and promote alternative agriculture and organic farming, based on indigenous knowledge and sustainable agriculture practices.

VI. Transparency of Information and Corporate Accountability
- Provide clear and accurate labelling of food and feed-stuff products based on consumers' and farmers' rights to access to information about content and origins;
- Establish binding regulations on all companies to ensure transparency, accountability and respect for human rights and environmental standards;
- Establish anti-trust laws to prevent the development of industrial monopolies in the food, fisheries and agricultural sectors; and,
- Hold corporate entities and their directors legally liable for corporate breaches of environmental and social laws, and of national and international laws and agreements.

VII. Specific Protection Of Coastal Communities Dependent On Marine And Inland Fish
- Prevent the expansion of shrimp aquaculture and the destruction of mangroves;
- Ensure local fishing communities have the rights to the aquatic resources;
- Negotiate a legally binding international convention to prevent illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing;
- Effectively implement international marine agreements and conventions, such as the UN Fish Stocks Agreement; and,
- Eradicate poverty and ensure food security for coastal communities through equitable and sustainable community based natural resource use and management, founded on indigenous and local knowledge, culture and experience.

Trade Rules Must Guarantee Food Sovereignty

Global trade must not be afforded primacy over local and national developmental, social, environmental and cultural goals. Priority should be given to affordable, safe, healthy and good quality food, and to culturally appropriate subsistence production for domestic, sub-regional and regional markets. Current modes of trade liberalisation, which allows market forces and powerful transnational corporations (TNCs) to determine what and how food is produced, and how food is traded and marketed, cannot fulfil these crucial goals.

“No” to Neo-liberal Policies in Food and Agriculture

The undersigned denounce the ‘liberalisation' of farm product exchanges as promoted through bilateral and regional free trade agreements, and multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. We condemn the dumping of food products in all markets, and especially in Third World countries where it has severely undermined domestic production. We condemn the attempts by the WTO and other multilateral institutions to sell all rights of aquatic resources to transnational consortiums. Neo-liberal policies coerce countries into specialising in agricultural production in which they have a so-called “comparative advantage” and then trading along the same lines. However, export orientated production is being pushed at the expense of domestic food production, and production means and resources are increasingly controlled by large transnational corporations. The same is occurring in the fishing sector. Fishing communities are losing their rights of access to fisheries, because access has been transferred to industrial corporations, such as PESCANOVA. Those TNCs have consolidated a great part of the production and of the global fishing commerce.

Rich governments continue to heavily subsidise export oriented agricultural and fisheries production in their countries, with the bulk of support going to large producers. The majority of taxpayers’ funds are handed out to big business – large producers, traders and retailers – who engage in unsustainable agricultural, fisheries and trading practices, and not to small-scale family producers who produce much of the food for the internal market, often in more sustainable ways.

These export-oriented policies have resulted in market prices for commodities that are far lower than their real costs of production. This has encouraged and perpetuated dumping, and provided TNCs with opportunities to buy cheap products, which are then sold at significantly higher prices to consumers in both the North and the South. The larger parts of important agricultural and fisheries subsidies in rich countries are in fact subsidies for corporate agri-industry, traders, retailers and a minority of the largest producers.

The adverse effects of these policies and practices are becoming clearer every day. They lead to the disappearance of small-scale, family farms and fishing communities in both the North and South; poverty has increased, especially in the rural areas; soils and water have been polluted and degraded; biological diversity has been lost, and natural habitats destroyed.

Dumping

Dumping occurs when goods are sold at less than their cost of production. This can be the result of subsidies and structural distortions, such as monopoly control over markets and distribution. The inability of current economic policy to factor in externalities, such as the depletion of water and soil nutrients and pollution resulting from industrial agricultural methods, also contribute to dumping. Dumping under the current neo-liberal policies is conducted in North-South, South-North, South-South and North-North trade. Whatever the form, dumping ruins small-scale local producers in both the countries of origin and sale.

For example:

Imports by India of dairy surpluses subsidised by the European Union had negative impacts on local, family based dairy production.

Exports of industrial pork from the USA to the Caribbean proved ruinous to Caribbean producers;

Imports by Ivory Coast of European pork at subsidised prices are three times lower than the production costs in Ivory Coast;

Chinese exports of silk threads to India at prices far lower than the costs of production in India has been seriously damaging for hundreds of thousands of farmer families in Southern India; and,

On one hand the import of cheap maize from the US to Mexico – the centre of the origin of maize – ruins Mexican producers; on the other hand the export of vegetables at low prices from Mexico to Canada ruins producers in Canada.

Dumping practices must to be stopped. Countries must be able to protect their home markets against dumping and other trade practices that prove damaging to local producers. Exporting countries must not be allowed to dump surpluses on the international market, and should respond to real demands for agricultural goods and products in ways that do not undermine domestic production, but rather support and strengthen local economies.

There is no ‘World Market’ of Agricultural Products

The so called ‘world market’ of agricultural products does not exist. What exists is, above all, an international trade of surpluses of milk, cereals and meat dumped primarily by the EU, the US and other members of the CAIRNS group. Behind the faces of national trade negotiators are powerful TNCs, such as Monsanto and Cargill. They are the real beneficiaries of domestic subsidies and supports, international trade negotiations and the global manipulations of trade regimes. At present, international trade in agricultural products involves only ten percent of total worldwide agricultural production and is mainly an exchange between TNCs from the US, EU and a few other industrialised countries. The so called ‘world market price’ is extremely unstable and has no relation to the costs of production. It is far too low because of dumping, and therefore, it is not an appropriate or desirable reference for agricultural production.

The Older Siblings of the WTO: The World Bank and The IMF

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are the older siblings of the WTO and serve as domestic arms of the WTO regime in developing countries. They have played significant roles in weakening agricultural autonomy, dismantling domestic self-sufficiency, creating famines and undermining food sovereignty. Their structural adjustment programmes – now called poverty reduction programmes – have created and entrenched policy induced poverty across the developing world. Hardest hit by these policies are those who rely on agriculture and the natural environment for their livelihood and survival.

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the Bank and Fund are unchanged in their belief that “global integration” of domestic agriculture systems and “market access” are the best avenues to reduce poverty. Developing countries are exhorted to undertake reforms in their respective agr iculture sectors, which include dismantling of agriculture subsidies, deregulation of pricing and distribution, privatisation of agriculture support and extension services, provision of greater market access to
foreign producers and removing all barriers to international agriculture trade. However, the Bank and Fund are unable to force the rich countries of the OECD to the same. As a result, Bank -Fund policies entrench inequalities among the developed and developing world and reproduce colonial structures of production and distribution.

Privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation are the hallmarks of the World Bank-IMF approach to development and are necessary conditions in all Bank -Fund lending programmes. Despite fierce criticism from numerous farmers’ organisations, academics and independent researchers, the Bank continues to support “market assisted land reform” and the creation of “functioning land markets” as a key rural development strategy. Bank-Fund policies mandate the transformation of subsistence based, community oriented and self-sufficient agriculture systems to commercial and market dependent production and distribution systems. Food crops are replaced by cash crops for export, and communities and societies are compelled to rely on external markets that they have no control over for food security. Furthermore, the emphasis on export crops has led to increased dependence on harmful and costly chemical inputs that threaten soil, water and air quality, biodiversity, and human and animal health, while providing greater profits for large agribusiness and chemical corporations.

The commercialisation of agriculture has resulted in the consolidation of agriculture land and assets in the hands of agribusiness and other large commercial entities, displacing small-scale and family farmers off their lands to seek employment in off-farm activities, or as seasonal labour in the commercial agriculture sector. Most farmers in developing countries are steeped in debt as a result of increasing input costs and falling farm-gate prices for their products. Many have mortgaged their land and assets to repay old debts, and in several cases have lost their lands altogether. An equally large number have moved to contract farming for large agribusiness in order to hold on to whatever assets they have left. This has resulted in widespread migration of farming families, the creation of new pockets of poverty and inequality in rural and urban areas, and the fragmentation of entire rural communities.

The World Bank and the IMF threaten the wealth, diversity and potential of our agriculture. Agriculture is not simply an economic sector, it is a complex of ecosystems and processes that include forests, rivers, plains, coastal areas, biodiversity, human and animal habitats, production, distribution, consumption, conservation, etc. Bank-Fund policies are creeping into every one of these areas. In order to protect our agriculture, the World Bank and the IMF must be removed from food and agriculture altogether.

The World Trade Organisation Dismisses Calls for Reform

The WTO is undemocratic and unaccountable, has increased global inequality and insecurity, promotes unsustainable production and consumption patterns, erodes diversity and undermines social and environmental priorities. It has proven impervious to criticisms regarding its work and has dismissed all calls for reform. Despite promises to improve the system made at the Seattle Ministerial Meeting in 1999, governance in the WTO has actually become worse. Rather than addressing existing inequities and power imbalances between rich and poor countries, the lobby of the rich and powerful in the WTO is attempting to expand the WTO’s mandate to new areas such as environment, labour, investment, competition and government procurement.

The WTO is an entirely inappropriate institution to address issues of food and agriculture. The undersigned do not believe that the WTO will engage in profound reform in order to make itself responsive to the rights and needs of ordinary people.

The WTO is attempting to establish rules to protect foreign investments of fleets that operate in national waters, and is pressuring the governments to yield exclusive fishing rights to the international consortiums. Therefore, the undersigned are calling for all food and agricultural concerns to be taken out of WTO jurisdiction through the dismantling of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and removing or amending the relevant clauses on other WTO agreements so as to ensure the full exclusion of food and agriculture from the WTO regime. These include: the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures (SPS), Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Quantitative Restrictions (QRs), Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

Agriculture: A Deadlock at the World Trade Organization

In February 2003, the WTO released the controversial and unacceptable Harbinson Draft proposal, written by General Council Chairman, Stuart Harbinson, to restructure world agricultural production and trade. Modalities are the terms of reference and conditions upon which member states will make binding commitments in the WTO of their agriculture sectors. However, trade-offs in this sector will be linked to other WTO negotiations. All member states were suppose to come to agreement on the Modalities text by March 25-31, but they did not. Members are also expected to draft their commitments in this agreement by the WTO Ministerial in Cancun in September 2003, but they may not be able to reach an agreement by then.

The US and the Cairns Group (a bloc led by Australia and other developed countries, which never reflects the interest of developing countries) are lobbying for more aggressive cuts in agricultural tariffs, claiming that the Harbinson Text is inadequate, but both are content with the proposed domestic support. The European Commission (EC) has the most trouble with the domestic support cuts proposed. Although the European Union does not endorse the Harbinson modalities, there are some commonalties between it and the EC proposal to reform the Common Agriculture Policy. The lack of proposals to fundamentally address the level and nature of US domestic support has been forgotten, because of widespread criticism against the EC. India is in agreement with the EC on its caution against steep tariff reductions. As a result, India is finding itself squeezed from both the Cairns developing countries and the US. India is hoping for 1) a much milder tariff reduction formula; and, 2) a strong permanent Strategic Product (SP) provision and a temporary Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) against import surges, for developing countries only. The SP and the SSM are a major concern for many developing countries that simply cannot afford to liberalise many of their agriculture sectors and even wish to raise their tariffs in certain vulnerable areas.

The proposed modalities still allow developed countries to retain significant levels of trade-distorting domestic support. The GATT-UR provisions on domestic support are maintained, providing protection to payments exempted under the Green Box, where a significant portion of the trade-distorting subsidies of developed countries have been transferred. For example, the direct payments under the Green Box, which have the same net effect of boosting farm production was not subjected to removal despite calls from developing countries for such.

The modalities on market access did not address the main inequity in the provision that forced many developing countries to tarify and lower their tariffs substantially, while developed countries retained high tariffs through tariff peaks and escalation. If developed countries reduce their high tariffs to an average of 60% over 5 years, and developing countries 40% over 10 years, the former will have higher tariff protection than developing countries whose tariffs have already been reduced to very low levels or even to zero at the start of implementation.

Finally, the provisions for special and differential treatment for developing countries remain inconsequential, as they can hardly redress the existing inequities in trade stemming from the agreement, itself. The provision for a minimal tariff reduction of 10% for products specified by developing countries as strategic to food security and rural development ignores the fact that many of these countries have already bound their agricultural tariffs to very low levels.

We, the undersigned, reject the Harbinson Text. Rather than redressing the imbalances and inequities inherent in the AOA, it enunciates modalities that will further intensify trade in agriculture; ensures protection of trade-distorting agricultural support and subsidies in developed countries; and entrenches control of transnational corporations in global agricultural production and trade.

A Role for Trade Rules in Agricultural and Food Policies?

Trade in food can play a positive role, for example, in times of regional food insecurity, or in the case of products that can only be grown in certain parts of the world, or for the exchange of quality products. However, trade rules must respect the precautionary principle to policies at all levels, recognise democratic and participatory decision making, and place peoples' food sovereignty before the imperatives of international trade.

An Alternative Framework

To compliment the role of local and national governments, there is clear need for a new and alternative international framework for multilateral regulation on the sustainable production and trade of food, fish and other agricultural goods. Within this framework, the following principles must be respected:

1. Peoples' food sovereignty;
2. The rights of all countries to protect their domestic markets by regulating all imports that undermine their food sovereignty;
3. Trade rules that support and guarantee food sovereignty;
4. Upholding gender equity and equality in all policies and practices concerning food production;
5. The precautionary principle;
6. The right to information about the origin and content of food items;
7. Genuine international democratic participation mechanisms;
8. Priority to domestic food production, sustainable farming and fishing practices and equitable access to all resources;
9. Support for small farmers and producers to own, and have sufficient control over means of food production;
10. Support for open access of traditional fishing communities to aquatic resources;
11. Effective bans on all forms of dumping, in order to protect domestic food production. This would include supply management by exporting countries to avoid surpluses and the rights of importing countries to protect internal markets against imports at low prices;
12. Prohibition of biopiracy and patents on living matter - animals, plants, the human body and other life forms - and any of its components, including the development of sterile varieties through genetic engineering; and,
13. Respect for all human rights conventions and related multilateral agreements under independent international jurisdiction.

The undersigned affirm the demands made in other civil society statements, such as Our World is Not for Sale: WTO-Shrink or Sink , and Stop the GATS Attack Now. We urge governments to immediately take the following steps:

1. Cease negotiations to initiate a new round of trade liberalisation and halt discussions to bring 'new issues' into the WTO. This includes further discussions on such issues as investment, competition, government procurement, biotechnology, services, labour and environment.
2. Cancel further trade liberalisation negotiations on the WTO’s AoA through the WTO’s built-in agenda.
3. Cancel the obligation of accepting the minimum importation of 5% of internal consumption; all compulsory market access clauses must similarly be cancelled immediately.
4. Undertake a thorough review of both the implementation, and the environmental and social impacts of existing trade rules and agreements (and the WTO's role in this system) in relation to food, fisheries and agriculture.
5. Initiate measures to remove food and agriculture from under the control of the WTO through the dismantling of the AoA and through the removal or amendment of relevant clauses in the TRIPS, GATS, SPS, TBT and SCM agreements. Replace these with a new Convention on Food Sovereignty and Trade in Food,Agriculture and Fisheries.
6. Revise intellectual property policies to prohibit the patenting of living matter and any of their components and limit patent protections in order to protect public health and public safety;
7. Halt all negotiations on GATS, and dismantle the principle of “progressive liberalisation” in order to protect social services and the public interest;
8. Implement genuine agrarian reform and ensure the rights of peasants to crucial assets such as land, seed, water and other resources;
9. Promote the primary role of fish harvesters’ and fish workers’ organisations in managing the use of aquatic resources and oceans, nationally and internationally.
10. Initiate discussions on an alternative international framework on the sustainable production and trade of food, agricultural goods and fisheries products. This framework should include:

* A reformed and strengthened United Nations (UN), active and committed to protecting the fundamental rights of all peoples, as being the appropriate forum to develop and negotiate rules for sustainable production and fair trade;
* An independent dispute settlement mechanism integrated within an international Court of Justice, especially to prevent dumping and GM food aid;
* A World Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty established to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of trade liberalisation on food sovereignty and security, and develop proposals for change. This would include agreements and rules within the WTO and other regional and international trade regimes, and the economic policies promoted by International Financial Institutions and Multilateral Development Banks. Such a commission could be constituted of and directed by representatives from various social and cultural groups, peoples’ movements, professional fields, democratically elected representatives and appropriate multilateral institutions;
* An international, legally binding Treaty that defines the rights of peasants and small producers to the assets, resources and legal protections they need to be able to exercise their right to produce. Such a treaty could be framed within the UN Human Rights framework, and linked to already existing relevant UN conventions;
* An International Convention that replaces the current Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and relevant clauses from other WTO agreements and implements within the international policy framework the concept of food sovereignty and the basic human rights of all peoples to safe and healthy food, decent and full rural employment, labour rights and protection, and a healthy, rich and diverse natural environment and incorporate trading rules on food and agriculture commodities.

***

See also Wikipedia on food sovereignty, dumping, Doha round, and critique of UN Rio+20 policy in QEWnet.

Tikkun olam is environmental sanity –- by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Excerpted from The Network of Spiritual Progressives. See also his magazine Tikkun.

For the last thirty-five years ecologists have been warning about the impending environmental crisis, apologists for the large corporations that are despoiling the earth have been sponsoring corrupt scientists to say that the crisis is exaggerated, conservative politicians have warned that taking environmental reforms seriously could drive corporations to relocate in other places around the world with the consequence that we’d be out of jobs and still have an unclean global environment, and the bulk of the population has felt powerless to do anything. It’s not that people don’t care about the earth. They care powerfully. This earth is our only home, and our own lives are tied to its well-being....

But few people have seen a path that could connect their caring about the earth to actual life choices that would enable them to have much of an impact in saving the planet from destruction. Many were happy to recycle when it was made convenient by city services offering to pick up recycled goods. A growing number of upper middle class people bought organic foods and products with less poisonous additives — a luxury that most working class people could not afford on a regular basis. When there was an opportunity to stop a local polluter, many voters sided with regulation, though those whose income would be threatened should the venture move out of town often found themselves deeply conflicted — caring about the long-term fate of the planet but also worried about how to feed their families.

Meanwhile, the predicted dangers are already happening. As the demand for food grows, increases in land cultivation cannot keep up, though in the attempt to expand agriculture into the Amazon Basin, major parts of a precious bio-system are at risk, and other parts of the world will soon face water shortages of catastrophic proportions.

CO2 emissions per person

Carbon emissions and global warming are accelerating... Wetlands and coral reefs are damaged... In the last three decades, according to Christopher Flavin of Worldwatch Institute, 13,500 square kilometers of Antarctic ice shelves have already disappeared and two of the largest ice sheets have begun to weaken, threatening to raise the sea level and produce massive flooding.

The impact on the health of the global environment is more severe from advanced industrial societies than from developing countries. The U.S., for example, releases 15.7 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year as compared with India (with 4 times the population), which releases 4.9 million tons.

The world’s population has grown to 6.3 billion, approximately twice as many people as were alive on the planet just 45 years ago. Simultaneously, fewer people are living in the same household in the past thirty-five years (down from 5.1 to 4.4 in developing countries and from 3.2 to 2.5 in industrial countries), and since each new household requires land and material, the decline in extended families or living units takes a significant toll on the environment. Birth rates have declined in parts of Europe so that there is an actual decline in population in some countries, while the explosion of births in third world countries continues, in large part because lack of adequate birth control and reproductive health services make it harder for many to engage in planning their family size. The opposition from the Vatican and from the U.S. Religious Right to providing this kind of information if it contains information on abortion or birth control devices has contributed significantly to the inadequate funding for the dissemination of this information, thereby increasing the actual rate of abortions and the number of women who die in childbirth.

Environmental activists have been woefully unsuccessful in convincing government to play a decisive role in reversing this process and healing the earth from the destructive consequences of 150 years of environmental irresponsibility. These activists have been up against seemingly overwhelming odds. The power of corporations to threaten whole regions with economic devastation should they dare to challenge environmental pollutants, media that are slavishly subordinate to the interests of corporate owners and hence unwilling to dramatize the level of catastrophe facing the human race, the irresponsibility of political leaders in both major parties who refuse to acknowledge and seriously contend with the realities (cf. Clinton’s failure to aggressively back the Kyoto Accords which in any event would have been only a weak substitute for serious global action or the plans of the Bush Administration to drill for oil in the Arctic), and the depth of denial among ordinary citizens that leads us to imagine that a little recycling and a few more hybrid cars and fluorescent lights and all will be well.

The environmental movement itself has often channeled the outrage and energy of ordinary citizens in paths that have proven extremely unproductive. Instead of building a mass base for a movement demanding fundamental restructuring of the global economy in ways that would guarantee a dramatic decrease in global warming and in saving the earth for future generations, the environmental movements have often downplayed the seriousness of the challenge on the advice that they would be called “chicken little” and that fundraising does better with a positive message. Instead of working the beltway, the environmentalists need to be mobilizing the American public with a broad vision of what is needed.

As Peter Teague, the environmental program director at Nathan Cummings Foundation, put it, “So long as the siren call of denial is met with the drone of policy expertise — and the fantasy of technical fixes is left unchallenged — the public is not just being misled, it’s also being misread. Until we address Americans honestly, and with the respect they deserve, they can be expected to remain largely disengaged from the global transformation we need them to be a part of.”

Michael Shellenberger, in the introduction to his “Death of Environmentalism,” puts it equally starkly. “In their public campaigns, not one of America’s environmental leaders is articulating a vision for the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead, they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards….” What Shellenberger and other critics of the current trends in environmentalism have understood is that what is critical to save the planet is not only correct scientific data and technical ideas for how to improve things, but a new set of core values that must predominate in the public sphere and a new way of understanding that reality.

In Boiling Point, Ross Gelbspan accuses environmental leaders of “being too timid to raise alarms about so nightmarish a climate threat” and for settling for too little... “The major national environmental groups focusing on climate – groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Federation – have agreed to accept what they see as a politically feasible target of 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide... [That] may be politically realistic, it would likely be environmentally catastrophic.” What is needed is to cut emissions 70 or 80 percent. Gelbspan advocates the “WEMP” proposal – the World Energy Modernization Plan — to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent worldwide in three ways: 1) shifting subsidies from polluting industries to clean industries; 2) creating a fund to transfer clean technology to the developing world; and 3) ratcheting up a “Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard” by five percent per year.

I’ve mentioned here the most pressing environmental crisis, but it would be a mistake to limit environmental concerns to the immediate survival emergencies. There are longer term concerns about the way that the human race is growing so rapidly that we may soon consume many of the resources of this planet, leaving little for future generations. A huge amount of resources are poured into the creation of “goods” that have no redeeming social value except as ways for corporations to make profits, and hence also ways to ensure high levels of employment. It might be useful to think of the human race as involved in a kind of strip-mining of the world’s resources, leaving devastation and waste for the future. And talking about waste, we have no place to store it and so more and more of the planet gets filled with waste dumps that send off potentially carcinogenic poisons.

Of course, the corporations have an answer to all this. “We only produce what people will buy. We are in business to make profits, and our products respond to market demands. If people don’t want these products, we’ll know soon enough and produce what they do want.”

There’s a fundamental dishonesty here... the marketplace responds not on the principle of one person one vote, but on the principle of one dollar one vote, so that the more money you have, the more market power to shape what is being produced. So the market will respond way more to the rich than to the poor.

Still, there is an important point being raised by the response of the corporations: reduced consumption of the earth’s resources, and cutbacks in fuels that are destructive, require the backing (active or passive) of the vast majority of the people of the world. “Well, you’ll never get that,” the voice of cynical realism rushes in to warn us. “People want to get as many toys for themselves as possible, and they will never voluntarily adopt cutbacks in their level of consumption. Run on the ticket of lowering the material level of consumption and you’ll be as dead as the Kyoto Treaty.”

The cynical realist has a point, but only within a certain context — the context of a society in which the bottom line is money and power and the common sense is to “look out for number one.” In such a society, most people will reason this way: “If I cut back on my consumption, it won’t really save the earth. I know how selfish everyone else is, how deeply materialistic, so I am sure that they won’t cut back on their consumption. So what I do won’t really make that much of a difference because most other people will just be taking care of their own material needs. So I end up being part of a small idealistic group that stops purchasing the ecologically destructive stuff but meanwhile everyone else gets what they want. I become the one jerk on the block, while the rest of my neighbors are binging on consumption. Well, why should I do that to myself? I won’t!! And I’m not going to vote for some candidate who wants to do that for our society, when I see that the selfishness is global, so while we stop polluting, those third world countries like China and India, which are now rapidly industrializing and modernizing, will increase the level of global destruction so that our own country’s reduction in consumption won’t have that much of an impact.” Even if we explained to this person that the U.S. footprint is much greater because of levels of consumption than that of other countries, we are unlikely to convince enough people to dramatically reduce their level of consumption unless we can do it globally. “That will never happen,” the voice of cynical realism responds, “so why should I worry about the future, which is going to be a mess anyway — I might as well get what I can right now for myself while I’m still alive.”

A spiritual movement

The only way to counter this cynical realism is to recast the environmental movement as a spiritual movement aimed at building a New Bottom Line and a new consciousness of who we are as human beings. Only a spiritual movement has the capacity to ask how to nurture an awareness of ourselves that transcends ego and begins to see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being. It is precisely by being able to recognize our interdependence and oneness with all other human beings, all other life forms, and with all of being, that we begin to see a way toward answering the narrow materialist self-interest consciousness that is leading to the destruction of the planet. It is true that some religious and spiritual traditions have talked of human beings exercising dominion or rule over the earth. But what that means in practice is being recontextualized by many of the religious and spiritual traditions, so that it translates into having the responsibility to protect the earth from the environmental threats a section of the human race has caused by its past and present insensitivity to the needs of the earth. Still, dominion or “rule over” language seems more like the language of the Right Hand of God, and so today many religious and spiritual communities are affirming a new relationship to the planet, one which eschews domination and seeks instead to cooperate with the rest of the life-sphere, and which recontextualizes human beings as one member of the earth family, affirming the worth and value of every life form, supporting biological diversity and cultural diversity. To see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being, made in the image of the ONE, is a religious starting point for this new consciousness.

But you don’t have to believe in a Supreme Being or use religious language to get this spiritual insight. Other spiritual traditions talk of Gaia as a living entity of which we are part. The various animate and inanimate parts of the planet constitute a swirling dynamic that makes life possible. Or we can think of it as a constantly changing open ecosystem with intricate, interdependent parts. The key is to recognize that the earth includes the more-than-human. As Paul Wapner puts it (Tikkun, Sept/Oct 2003), “The earth is not the backdrop for our lives, but is part and parcel with them…. Rather than efficiency, system failure and the like, a tikkun sense of things prods us to talk in terms of care, awe appreciation, sacredness and love. The earth is not something we use but something we share our lives with — something we nurture, have fun with, are stunned by, respond to, empathize with, find nourishment from, and in turn, nourish.”

And this leads to another deep teaching of the spiritual tradition: the insistence that there is enough, that we do not essentially need endless goods, that we are enough as we are, that the earth’s produce can be shared and we can survive without endless production of new things. The consciousness of abundance is a major teaching of many spiritual traditions and practices, and stands in sharp contrast to the teachings of scarcity that underlie much of the fear that drives capitalist consumption.

The Torah commandment/practice of a sabbatical year once every seven, mandating all people to take one year off together (the same year), was a practice of developing trust that there would be enough (in a society where “enough” was far less than what is available to most people on this planet today). The ongoing practice of Sabbath-observance, taking one day off and not using money or buying or selling, not doing any work-related activity, not engaging in any domination or control over nature, is a contemporary spiritual practice that could help foster and strengthen our sense of the abundance that already is there, so that we don’t have to constantly be driven by the fantasy that we need more. Spiritual practice and consciousness may be the indispensable link for helping to develop the consciousness that could respond to the narrow materialistic self-interested consciousness that seeks to benefit in the global marketplace even at the expense of future planetary survival.

If environmentalists wish to win their own very rational program, they are going to have to move beyond environmental concerns and begin to address the need for a whole new way of being in the world., and to build on the spiritual consciousness that helps us see our connection to all other humans, to all life forms, to all of being. It’s a hard transition for the hardcore scientists and legislative technicians who have become the center of currently constituted environmentalism, but unless that shift takes place, we will get nothing better than what we have now: an “agreement in principle” by most Americans that environmentalism is very important, but an unwillingness to actually give it a high priority among their various concerns because of a (sometimes articulated, sometimes unconscious) suspicion that going this route is going to force them to reduce consumption without any corresponding benefit.

So what would be the benefit if they found environmentalism rooted in a spiritual movement? The benefit of having a multi-dimensional movement that was also speaking to their own immediate spiritual needs.... If people can get convinced that there is a real movement for a New Bottom Line, that selfishness and materialism are not rooted in the nature of reality in ways that will never be altered, then they will be open to environmentalism in a way that could produce real tangible results. Thus, the struggle for the Social Responsibility Amendment becomes an important element in any campaign for environmental sanity.

Let's consider a few other steps.

Protecting the Victims

One of the ironies of global warming is that the environmental damage done by industrialized and industrializing countries will play out first in the form of huge flooding of underdeveloped countries that did not make any serious contribution to the problem. Millions of flood refugees will desperately need a new place to live and work, and most of their own countries will be submerged under water. One way that we can begin to foster a sense of global unity in facing these problems is to adopt a formula which requires the industrial countries to welcome in refugees in direct proportion to the extent to which that country contributed global emissions that caused the problem. So, for example, the U.S. would take in somewhere between 20-22% of the refugees because we had that percentage of the world’s greenhouse gases. China and India would also have major responsibility, as would other polluters. Recognizing that our actions have global consequences, and that we will have to take care of the victims, could be an important step in developing a global ecological consciousness.

A Campaign for Ethical Consumption

Judaism has developed notion of foods that are kosher (acceptable for eating) and those that are not (treyf). Looking back on the system that emerged, I argued in my book Jewish Renewal that this was a system based on moving toward vegetarianism and emphasizing the need for attention to decreasing and eventually eliminating the suffering of the animals who would be killed. But while we will never know the full motivation that led to inclusion of some animals as edible (most were excluded as treyf), we do know that other parts of the system were explicitly based on ethical concerns. For example, it was not kosher to eat food from the corners of your fields, since the Torah mandates that those corners must be left for the poor who get to enter your fields and take their allocation (for them it is not treyf, but for the owners it is). Similarly, the notion of kosher wine was developed as the first grape boycott against the power and depravities of Roman society. Today, the Jewish Renewal movement is an advocate of extending that notion to eco-kashrut, so that foods that are environmentally destructive or produced in an unjust way are “treyf”.

Spiritual progressives need to take this same concept and extend it beyond food to all products.

The notion of ethical consumption already has a powerful foothold in the important movements that have developed around “fair trade” coffee, teas, and chocolates. By encouraging people to buy only those products which could be certified as having been produced in ways that were both ecologically sound and fair to the workers who picked the crop and brought in to market, these movements have already made an important contribution to improving the quality of life of those workers in the countries in which the food was grown.

Imagine extending that consciousness now to all products available on the marketplace. Imagine if all the religious and spiritual communities of the world, working in close cooperation with environmentalists, toxic experts, and labor movement organizers, were to coordinate an effort to develop criteria for a very wide array of products so that they could certify that some goods had been produced in environmentally sensitive ways and were developed, grown, picked, or manufactured in ways that were respectful to the needs of the working people involved. Governments could participate in this process by providing funding to support frequent surprise visits at the workplaces by teams of ethicists charged with determining what was really happening at a given worksite, and could also participate by requiring that products sold in stores that received goods in interstate commerce label the products with a few obvious codes that identified which products were produced in ways that were ethically and environmentally acceptable. Government could also help by mandating ads in media reminding people of the importance of consulting this kind of labeling, in the way that it today mandates ads informing people about the risks of smoking for cancer and heart disease.

While this campaign would have to be energized primarily through free-market choices, it probably should have some stricter punishments for those who produce goods that are overtly linkable to cancer or environmental pollution. For example, criminal liability would accrue for the top management and members of the board of directors of firms that have not taken adequate steps to protect the public and the planet from environmental pollutants, toxic chemicals, and carcinogenic agents. If the punishments were strict enough, this could add a powerful incentive for those who had not yet fully developed an ethical awareness of the interrelationship between all peoples.

***

See also Wikipedia on tikkun olam, Jill Jacobs' on the current debate within Judaism, videos from other members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

Quaker queries -- by Mary Lee Comer

From US Inter-Mountain Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice. Submitted by Mary Lee Comer along with contributions by other Friends, to the blog -- which is worth further reading -- of Right Sharing of World Resources. See also videos and reflections on the main RSWR site.

Implicit in our testimony on simplicity is an understanding that we will not take more than we need—particularly if it means depriving others, including future generations, of their basic needs.

The earth is not in bondage to us nor are its riches ours to dispose of at will. We recognize that we are part of the natural world. Humankind is not a species to which all of creation is subservient. Rather, it is one of many interrelated and interdependent facets of a creation more vast than human understanding can grasp.

Part of understanding one’s place in the world is forming right relationships with things. Such relationships are as much a consequence of observation as they are the product of activity. Let us exercise our power over nature responsibly, with due reverence for life. Let us strive to show loving consideration for all creation and seek to enhance the beauty and variety that surrounds us.

Truth is revealed in diversity if we give way for its expression. Rejoice in the splendor of the earth’s continuing creation, for it is that of God speaking.

How do we inform ourselves about how our style of living affects the global economy and the environment?

How do we exercise our respect for the balance of nature? Are we careful to avoid poisoning the earth, the air, and the water? Do we use the world’s resources with care and consideration for future generations and with respect for all life? Do we recycle all that we can?

How do we encourage environmental responsibility within our community?

How do we live in accord with our sense of God in all creation?

Slow death by carbon credits -- by Dennis Martinez

Dennis Martinez, a Native American forest-restoration specialist, is on the steering committee of the Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative (IPCCA). Laird Townsend of the non-profit media organization Project Word, a project of the Tides Center, contributed to this article. It appeared as an op-ed in the Boston Globe 10 Jan 2011.

This is one of the best explanations I have seen of the dangers of "market mechanisms" such as REDD, lacking proper MRV monitoring, lacking safeguards for campesinos and indigenous peoples, lacking legal appeal or sanctions. The IPCCA is a partnership of UNPFII and a number of indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. Project Word's mandate is to publish such stories, which the corporate media have persistently ignored. - Ed.

Forget any spin. In the end, the recent UN gathering on climate change in Cancún repeated Copenhagen’s failure in 2009. Again, the world’s industrial economies refused to set new binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, despite dire warnings by scientists. Instead, delegates again vaguely promised money for climate adaptation and mitigation: this time $30 billion to the developing world by 2012, and $100 billion more by 2020.

Once more, the industrialized countries appear to have pledged much of this money in a salvage measure dubbed “REDD’’ — Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries.

Established by wealthy nations, venture capitalists, the World Bank, and the United Nations, REDD would pay for the carbon absorbed in developing countries, to compensate for pollution caused by industrialized countries. The initiative would allow polluters to buy carbon credits from companies, communities, non-government organizations, or countries that promise not to destroy forests for a specific period. To polluters, setting aside money for carbon absorption in a REDD forest is far less costly than reducing emissions at tailpipes or smokestacks.

But even if it works — itself a point of contention — this carbon-offsetting simply postpones any weaning off the fossil-fuel economy.

Perhaps the people least impressed by this half-measure are the ones who most urgently need a solution to climate disruption. From the Amazon basin to the African savannahs, traditional indigenous peoples depend directly on their local environment for sustenance, and so they are the most vulnerable to climate change. At Cancún, indigenous leaders again watched as REDD technocrats tried to “save’’ their territorial forests as global carbon sinks, instead of cutting their own countries’ emissions.

REDD can target the tropical forests exactly because indigenous communities have carefully preserved them for many thousands of years. But the initiative seems to have little use for the forest inhabitants themselves. The UN climate talks relegate indigenous peoples to “observer’’ status. At least eight national REDD plans funded by the World Bank would allow bans on the kind of small-scale, biodiverse farming that is practiced by many indigenous peoples and is misnamed “slash and burn.’’ At the same time, at least 19 of the plans explicitly contain provisions for tree plantations, which displace forest dwellers, degrade biodiversity, and cause high fire risk. Plantations are tolerated under the United Nations’ definition of forests. They satisfy carbon investors who like precise measurement and predictability — not messy, biodiverse forest habitat.

This mentality inspires what critics call “fortress conservation’’: non-government organizations and national authorities cordon off land to protect species and institute carbon-offset projects, driving out of their forests the indigenous stewards, who become “conservation refugees.’’ John Nelson, Africa policy adviser for the Forest Peoples Program, estimates that some 150,000 to 200,000 people in the Congo basin alone have suffered this fate.

“Imagine waking up one day,’’ he says, “to find a boundary outside your village — with armed paramilitary guards telling you that you cannot enter the forest.’’ If people cannot go there, they cannot teach their children how to live in the traditional ways, and these ways, with all they might have to teach the larger world about storing carbon and repairing forest ecosystems, will be lost. “Mitigation policies of the developed world,’’ Ramiro Batzin, a Keqchikel Maya from Guatemala, recently told the World Bank, “will kill us before climate change does!’’

Despite their long residence in the forests, many indigenous peoples have fought for decades to establish legal title to the land. But nothing at Cancún required REDD programs to establish or secure those rights, or to obtain genuine consent for projects in indigenous communities.

This neglect, and the fortress conservation it allows, is not only an injustice but also a missed opportunity. Studies have shown that traditional land management, when title is secured, sinks carbon far more effectively and cheaply than conventional efforts favored by REDD.

The Emberá of Panama, like the Ogiek of Kenya, have been the stewards of the land for millennia. But at best REDD would promise them compensation — and a dubious dependence on a cash economy, which tends to erode traditional culture. Especially in an age of climate chaos, the erosion of such stewardship is unacceptable. And in any case, nobody should mistake the initiative for a real solution to a changing climate. That remains what it was in Kyoto, and what it will be later this year in Durban: cut greenhouse gas emissions.

We are Facing the Greatest Threat to Humanity: Only Fundamental Change Can Save Us -- by Maude Barlow

Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project, gave this speech to the Environmental Grantmakers Association on 15 October 2010. Republished from Alternet. She is a contributor to AlterNet's forthcoming book Water Matters and is circulating a petition for a UN debate on this concern 22 April 2011.

We all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban slums.

Almost every human victim lives in the global South, in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.

We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.

The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced. As vast areas of the planet are becoming desert as we suck the remaining waters out of living ecosystems and drain remaining aquifers in India, China, Australia, most of Africa, all of the Middle East, Mexico, Southern Europe, US Southwest and other places. Dirty water is the biggest killer of children; every day more children die of water borne disease than HIV/AIDS, malaria and war together. In the global South, dirty water kills a child every three and a half seconds. And it is getting worse, fast. By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.

Knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment, pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geo-political ramifications. Rich investors have already bought up an amount of land double the size of the United Kingdom in Africa alone.

We Simply Cannot Continue on the Present Path

I do not think it possible to exaggerate the threat to our earth and every living thing upon it. Quite simply we cannot continue on the path that brought us here. Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. While mouthing platitudes about caring for the earth, most of our governments are deepening the crisis with new plans for expanded resource exploitation, unregulated free trade deals, more invasive investment, the privatization of absolutely everything and unlimited growth. This model of development is literally killing the planet.

Unlimited growth assumes unlimited resources, and this is the genesis of the crisis. Quite simply, to feed the increasing demands of our consumer based system, humans have seen nature as a great resource for our personal convenience and profit, not as a living ecosystem from which all life springs. So we have built our economic and development policies based on a human-centric model and assumed either that nature would never fail to provide or that, where it does fail, technology will save the day.

Two Problems that Hinder the Environmental Movement

From the perspective of the environmental movement, I see two problems that hinder us in our work to stop this carnage. The first is that, with notable exceptions, most environmental groups either have bought into the dominant model of development or feel incapable of changing it. The main form of environmental protection in industrialized countries is based on the regulatory system, legalizing the discharge of large amounts of toxics into the environment.

Environmentalists work to minimize the damage from these systems, essentially fighting for inadequate laws based on curbing the worst practices, but leaving intact the system of economic globalization at the heart of the problem. Trapped inside this paradigm, many environmentalists essentially prop up a deeply flawed system, not imagining they are capable of creating another.
Hence, the support of false solutions such as carbon markets, which, in effect, privatize the atmosphere by creating a new form of property rights over natural resources. Carbon markets are predicated less on reducing emissions than on the desire to make carbon cuts as cheap as possible for large corporations.

Another false solution is the move to turn water into private property, which can then be hoarded, bought and sold on the open market. The latest proposals are for a water pollution market, similar to carbon markets, where companies and countries will buy and sell the right to pollute water. With this kind of privatization comes a loss of public oversight to manage and protect watersheds. Commodifying water renders an earth-centred vision for watersheds and ecosystems unattainable.

Then there is PES, or Payment for Ecological Services, which puts a price tag on ecological goods – clean air, water, soil etc, – and the services such as water purification, crop pollination and carbon sequestration that sustain them. A market model of PES is an agreement between the “holder” and the “consumer” of an ecosystem service, turning that service into an environmental property right. Clearly this system privatizes nature, be it a wetland, lake, forest plot or mountain, and sets the stage for private accumulation of nature by those wealthy enough to be able to buy, hoard sell and trade it. Already, northern hemisphere governments and private corporations are studying public/private/partnerships to set up lucrative PES projects in the global South. Says Friends of the Earth International, “Governments need to acknowledge that market-based mechanisms and the commodification of biodiversity have failed both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation.”

The second problem with our movement is one of silos. For too long environmentalists have toiled in isolation from those communities and groups working for human and social justice and for fundamental change to the system. On one hand are the scientists, scholars, and environmentalists warning of a looming ecological crisis and monitoring the decline of the world’s freshwater stocks, energy sources and biodiversity. On the other are the development experts, anti-poverty advocates, and NGOs working to address the inequitable access to food, water and health care and campaigning for these services, particularly in the global South. The assumption is that these are two different sets of problems, one needing a scientific and ecological solution, the other needing a financial solution based on pulling money from wealthy countries, institutions and organizations to find new resources for the poor.

The clearest example I have is in the area I know best, the freshwater crisis. It is finally becoming clear to even the most intransigent silo separatists that the ecological and human water crises are intricately linked, and that to deal effectively with either means dealing with both. The notion that inequitable access can be dealt with by finding more money to pump more groundwater is based on a misunderstanding that assumes unlimited supply, when in fact humans everywhere are overpumping groundwater supplies. Similarly, the hope that communities will cooperate in the restoration of their water systems when they are desperately poor and have no way of conserving or cleaning the limited sources they use is a cruel fantasy. The ecological health of the planet is intricately tied to the need for a just system of water distribution.

The global water justice movement (in which I have the honour of being deeply involved) is, I believe, successfully incorporating concerns about the growing ecological water crisis with the promotion of just economic, food and trade policies to ensure water for all. We strongly believe that fighting for equitable water in a world running out means taking better care of the water we have, not just finding supposedly endless new sources. Through countless gatherings where we took the time to really hear one another – especially grassroots groups and tribal peoples closest to the struggle – we developed a set of guiding principles and a vision for an alternative future that are universally accepted in our movement and have served us well in times of stress. We are also deeply critical of the trade and development policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the World Water Council (whom I call the “Lords of water”), and we openly challenge their model and authority.

Similarly, a fresh and exciting new movement exploded onto the scene in Copenhagen and set all the traditional players on their heads. The climate justice movement whose motto is Change the System, Not the Climate, arrived to challenge not only the stalemate of the government negotiators but the stale state of too cosy alliances between major environmental groups, international institutions and big business – the traditional “players” on the climate scene. Those climate justice warriors went on to gather at another meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, producing a powerful alternative declaration to the weak statement that came out of Copenhagen. The new document forged in Bolivia put the world on notice that business as usual is not on the climate agenda.

How the Commons Fits In

I deeply believe it is time for us to extend these powerful new movements, which fuse the analysis and hard work of the environmental community with the vision and commitment of the justice community, into a whole new form of governance that not only challenges the current model of unlimited growth and economic globalization but promotes an alternative that will allow us and the Earth to survive. Quite simply, human-centred governance systems are not working and we need new economic, development, and environmental policies as well as new laws that articulate an entirely different point of view from that which underpins most governance systems today. At the centre of this new paradigm is the need to protect natural ecosystems and to ensure the equitable and just sharing of their bounty. It also means the recovery of an old concept called the Commons.

The Commons is based on the notion that just by being members of the human family, we all have rights to certain common heritages, be they the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, or culture, language and wisdom. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community. Since adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, governments are obliged to protect the human rights, cultural diversity and food security of their citizens.

A central characteristic of the Commons is the need for careful collaborative management of shared resources by those who use them and allocation of access based on a set of priorities. A Commons is not a free-for-all. We are not talking about a return to the notion that nature’s capacity to sustain our ways is unlimited and anyone can use whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the world’s biological heritage as well as the knowledge that our ecosystems must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time.

Also to be recovered and expanded is the notion of the Public Trust Doctrine, a longstanding legal principle which holds that certain natural resources, particularly air, water and the oceans, are central to our very existence and therefore must be protected for the common good and not allowed to be appropriated for private gain. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, governments exercise their fiduciary responsibilities to sustain the essence of these resources for the long-term use and enjoyment of the entire populace, not just the privileged who can buy inequitable access.

The Public Trust Doctrine was first codified in 529 A.D. by Emperor Justinian who declared: “By the laws of nature, these things are common to all mankind: the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” U.S. courts have referred to the Public Trust Doctrine as a “high, solemn and perpetual duty” and held that the states hold title to the lands under navigable waters “in trust for the people of the State.” Recently, Vermont used the Public Trust Doctrine to protect its groundwater from rampant exploitation, declaring that no one owns this resource but rather, it belongs to the people of Vermont and future generations. The new law also places a priority for this water in times of shortages: water for daily human use, sustainable food production and ecosystem protection takes precedence over water for industrial and commercial use.

An exciting new network of Canadian, American and First Nations communities around the Great Lakes is determined to have these lakes named a Commons, a public trust and a protected bioregion.

Equitable access to natural resources is another key character of the Commons. These resources are not there for the taking by private interests who can then deny them to anyone without means. The human right to land, food, water, health care and biodiversity are being codified as we speak from nation-state constitutions to the United Nations. Ellen Dorsey and colleagues have recently called for a human rights approach to development, where the most vulnerable and marginalized communities take priority in law and practice. They suggest renaming the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals the Millennium Development Rights and putting the voices of the poor at the centre.

This would require the meaningful involvement of those affected communities, especially Indigenous groups, in designing and implementing development strategies. Community-based governance is another basic tenet of the Commons.

Inspiring Successes Around the Globe

Another crucial tenet of the new paradigm is the need to put the natural world back into the centre of our existence. If we listen, nature will teach us how to live. Again, using the issue I know best, we know exactly what to do to create a secure water future: protection and restoration of watersheds; conservation; source protection; rainwater and storm water harvesting; local, sustainable food production; and meaningful laws to halt pollution. Martin Luther King Jr. said legislation may not change the heart but it will restrain the heartless.

Life and livelihoods have been returned to communities in Rajasthan, India, through a system of rainwater harvesting that has made desertified land bloom and rivers run again thanks to the collective action of villagers. The city of Salisbury South Australia, has become an international wonder for greening desertified land in the wake of historic low flows of the Murray River. It captures every drop of rain that falls from the sky and collects storm and wastewater and funnels it all through a series of wetlands, which clean it, to underground natural aquifers, which store it, until it is needed.

In a “debt for nature” swap, Canada, the U.S. and The Netherlands cancelled the debt owed to them by Colombia in exchange for the money being used for watershed restoration. The most exciting project is the restoration of 16 large wetland areas of the Bogotá River, which is badly contaminated, to pristine condition. Eventually the plan is to clean up the entire river. True to principles of the Commons, the indigenous peoples living on the sites were not removed, but rather, have become caretakers of these protected and sacred places.

The natural world also needs its own legal framework, what South African environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinen calls “wild law.” The quest is a body of law that recognizes the inherent rights of the environment, other species and water itself outside of their usefulness to humans. A wild law is a law to regulate human behaviour in order to protect the integrity of the earth and all species on it. It requires a change in the human relationship with the natural world from one of exploitation to one of democracy with other beings. If we are members of the earth’s community, then our rights must be balanced against those of plants, animals, rivers and ecosystems. In a world governed by wild law, the destructive, human-centered exploitation of the natural world would be unlawful. Humans would be prohibited from deliberately destroying functioning ecosystems or driving other species to extinction.

This kind of legal framework is already being established. The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that protection of natural lakes and ponds is akin to honouring the right to life – the most fundamental right of all according to the Court. Wild law was the inspiration behind an ordinance in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania that recognized natural ecosystems and natural communities within the borough as “legal persons” for the purposes of stopping the dumping of sewage sludge on wild land. It has been used throughout New England in a series of local ordinances to prevent bottled water companies from setting up shop in the area. Residents of Mount Shasta California have put a wild law ordinance on the November 2010 ballot to prevent cloud seeding and bulk water extraction within city limits.

In 2008, Ecuador’s citizens voted two thirds in support of a new constitution, which says, “Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments, communities, and individuals to enforce those rights.” Bolivia has recently amended its constitution to enshrine the philosophy of “living well” as a means of expressing concern with the current model of development and signifying affinity with nature and the need for humans to recognize inherent rights of the earth and other living beings. The government of Argentina recently moved to protect its glaciers by banning mining and oil drilling in ice zones. The law sets standards for protecting glaciers and surrounding ecosystems and creates penalties just for harming the country’s fresh water heritage.

The most far-reaching proposal for the protection of nature itself is the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that was drafted at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia and endorsed by the 35,000 participants there. We are writing a book setting out our case for this Declaration to the United Nations and the world. The intent is for it to become a companion document to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now as we begin to understand the urgent need to protect the earth and its ecosystems from which all life comes. The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth must become a history-altering covenant toward a just and sustainable future for all.

What Can We Do Right Now?

What might this mean for funders and other who share these values? Well, let me be clear: the hard work of those fighting environmental destruction and injustice must continue. I am not suggesting for one moment that his work is not important or that the funding for this work is not needed. I do think however, that there are ways to move the agenda I have outlined here forward if we put our minds to it.

Anything that helps bridge the solitudes and silos is pure gold. Bringing together environmentalists and justice activists to understand one another’s work and perspective is crucial. Both sides have to dream into being – together – the world they know is possible and not settle for small improvements to the one we have. This means working for a whole different economic, trade and development model even while fighting the abuses existing in the current one. Given a choice between funding an environmental organization that basically supports the status quo with minor changes and one that promotes a justice agenda as well, I would argue for the latter.

Support that increases capacity at the base is also very important, as is funding that connects domestic to international struggle, always related even when not apparent. Funding for those projects and groups fighting to abolish or fundamentally change global trade and banking institutions that maintain corporate dominance and promote unlimited and unregulated growth is still essential.

How Clean Water Became a Human Right

We all, as well, have to find ways to thank and protect those groups and governments going out on a limb to promote an agenda for true change. A very good example is President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who brought the climate justice movement together in Cochabamba last April and is leading the campaign at the UN to promote the Rights of Mother Earth.

It was this small, poor, largely indigenous landlocked country, and its former coca-farmer president, that introduced a resolution to recognize the human right to water and sanitation this past June to the UN General Assembly, taking the whole UN community by surprise. The Bolivian UN Ambassador, Pablo Solon, decided he was fed up with the “commissions” and “further studies” and “expert consultations” that have managed to put off the question of the right to water for at least a decade at the UN and that it was time to put an “up or down” question to every country: do you or do you not support the human right to drinking water and sanitation?

A mad scramble ensued as a group of Anglo-Western countries, all promoting to some extent the notion of water as a private commodity, tried to derail the process and put off the vote. The U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand even cooked up a “consensus” resolution that was so bland everyone would likely have handily voted for it at an earlier date. But sitting beside the real thing, it looked like what it was – an attempt, yet again, to put off any meaningful commitment at the UN to the billions suffering from lack of clean water. When that didn’t work, they toiled behind the scenes to weaken the wording of the Bolivian resolution but to no avail. On July 28, 2010, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to adopt a resolution recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. One hundred and twenty two countries voted for the resolution; 41 abstained; not one had the courage to vote against.

I share this story with you not only because my team and I were deeply involved in the lead up to this historic vote and there for it the day it was presented, but because it was the culmination of work done by a movement operating on the principles I have outlined above.

We took the time to establish the common principles that water is a Commons that belongs to the earth, all species, and the future, and is a fundamental human right not to be appropriated for profit. We advocate for the Public Trust Doctrine in law at every level of government. We set out to build a movement that listens first and most to the poorest among us, especially indigenous and tribal voices. We work with communities and groups in other movements, especially those working on climate justice and trade justice. We understand the need for careful collaborative cooperation to restore the functioning of watersheds and we have come to revere the water that gives life to all things upon the Earth. While we clearly have much left to do, these water warriors inspire me and give me hope. They get me out of bed every morning to fight another day.

I believe I am in a room full of stewards and want, then to leave you with these words from Lord of the Rings. This is Gandalf speaking the night before he faces a terrible force that threatens all living beings. His words are for you.

“The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril, as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair, or bear fruit, and flower again in the days to come. For I too am a steward, did you not know?” —J.R.R. Tolkien