Tracking transition towns -- by Ruah Swennerfelt

This is an excerpt from about in Ruah's new blog Transitionvision. Her latest post has reports from Rob Hopkins and others across the world at the Transition conference in the UK. See also the discussion site of her local group Transition Vermont and resources at Interfaith Power and Light.  For a book list see Visions of the future recommended by Friends.

I’m on a search for how our civilization will survive the current “perfect storm” of peak oil, climate disruption, and economic instability. We live in a time where our world economic system requires perpetual growth to survive. This is not sustainable since there is a limited supply of Earth’s resources available. My search will take me to Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Europe, Scandanavia, and North America. I want to help articulate the world vision that exists as a result of the wonderful efforts of Transition Town Initiatives, Sustainable Cities, and other municipal “green initiatives”. Like a quilt, each piece is unique and beautiful on its own, but the finished quilt is something greater than the parts. I hope that my research will reflect this whole as a blueprint for our necessary transition. I hope that you who follow my blog, will comment, suggest, argue, and support what I write. I’m depending on that interaction to enrich my research and the results of it.

How will the human race live as we enter the post-carbon world? What if people in towns or section of cities got together regularly for local foods potlucks, discussions about sharing resources and building resilience, listening to speakers and watching films, making music, and having fun? What if the place we each call home had really prepared for the end of cheap, abundant fossil fuels? What might that look like? Can one imagine bringing people together who are from different political viewpoints, different incomes, and different educational backgrounds? How can the obstacles to that vision be overcome? 

These are the goals of the Transition Town, Sustainable Cities, and other “green” movements. There are many fine grassroots movements around the globe that are individually working on community efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change and peak oil. It will be a difficult transition—with fewer resources to help that happen. I have learned from previous journeys about the difficulties of improving the lives of people in developing countries and the hopes and fears of people in our own country.

Renewable power isn’t just safer than nuclear, it’s cheaper -- Amory Lovins

Reprinted from Living on Earth April 14, 2011: Listen to the program.
On March 25, Bruce Gellerman of the Public Radio International program Living on Earth spoke with the co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute about the true costs of nuclear power.
“Nuclear is such a slow and costly climate solution, it actually reduces and retards climate protection" -- Lovins

LOE: There are “dangerously high” radiation levels in water leaking from Reactor number 3 at Japan’s Fukushima plant. At our deadline, operators still struggling to gain control of the facility, fear the core might be breached. Prime minister Kan calls the situation “grave and unpredictable” and officials are urging those within 19 miles of the nuclear plant to leave voluntarily, and avoid eating many kinds of green vegetables.To say the least, the nuclear disaster in Japan has refocused attention on the future of the atom as a source of energy. But the threat of global climate change has led even some die hard environmentalists to reconsider and embrace nuclear power. But not Amory Lovins. He’s chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Amory Lovins, welcome to Living on Earth!
LOVINS: Thank you.
LOE: So is it possible that we can meet our carbon reduction targets without nuclear power?
LOVINS: Of course! Not only that, but we could do so more effectively and more cheaply. It is quite true that if a nuclear plant displaces a coal plant that would replace carbon emissions.
But if you spent the same money on efficiency, renewables and combined heat and power, you would reduce the carbon emissions by about two to ten times more and about 20 to 40 times faster. So nuclear is such a slow and costly climate solution, it actually reduces and retards climate protection, compared with a best buys first approach.
LOE: When you say it’s slow, isn’t it people like you that are holding up the process with lawsuits, holding up the process of licensing nuclear power plants?
LOVINS: Not in the least! I know the industry likes to blame environmental groups — of which, by the way, we are not one — for holding up licensing for several decades. New nuclear power plants in this country are offered subsidies that now rival or exceed their total construction costs.
And yet, even though that’s been true since 2005, three years before the financial crash, they’ve been unable to raise a penny of private capital, simply because the cost and risks are unfinanceable. Wall Street will not invest in them — it’s an utterly unfinanceable technology, and it’s obvious why — it’s grossly uncompetitive.
LOE: But can renewables, like wind for example, produce enough energy, enough density to replace nuclear power plants, which are huge and hugely powerful. And, plus, the wind doesn’t blow on calm days.
LOVINS: Yeah, well, that’s two separate points. The first one — I’m afraid the industry got it backwards. Actually, if you properly do the math — and count if you count the whole nuclear fuel cycle, not just the power plant, not just the core of the reactor, but the occlusion zone, the uranium mining and so on, it turns out that wind power uses hundreds or thousands of times less land per kilowatt hour, than nuclear does.
Even solar photovoltaics are equal to or might be better than nuclear in that respect. As for the wind not blowing and the sun not shining all the time, that’s true. Every kind of power plant can fail. They differ, however, how much fails at once, how often, how long and for what reasons and how predictably. You can predict pretty well when wind or solar will not work, but you cannot predict when a nuclear plant will fail.
They break without warning about three to five percent of the time — big coal nuclear plants are down about ten or twelve percent of the time — and for that reason, we’ve designed grids for over a century to cope with that intermittence that every power plant suffers from. So you don’t depend on any single plant, you depend on the whole grid.
So it turns out, if you diversify renewables by type so they’re not all affected by weather the same way, you diversify them by location, so they don’t all see the same weather at the same time, and you integrate them with the resources on the grid, both power plants and ways to save or shift electric use, then you can have a largely, or wholly renewable electric supply system at very reasonable cost, with greater reliability and resilience than we have right now.
LOE: I find it a little bit ironic, you know — I see in these pictures from Japan — and if they had put a little bit — if they had put a wind turbine on top of the nuclear complex there, the plant might have had power and would still be running.
LOVINS: Actually, the wind machines in the vicinity were not affected by the earthquake and tsunami, and the utilities have been calling for them to crank out every bit of juice they can to help keep the grid up. Look, here’s a quick summary of what’s going on with nuclear in the world. At the end of 2010, there were 66 nuclear units, officially listed as “under construction” worldwide.
You look a little closer, you’ll find a dozen of them have been listed as “under construction” for over 20 years, 45 of them have no official start up date, half of them are late. All 66 of them are in centrally planned power systems, not a single one of them is a free-market purchase. And since 2007, nuclear growth has added less electricity to our supply each year, then even the costliest renewable — solar power — and it will probably never catch up.
LOE: But they’re having rolling blackouts in Japan right now because they don’t have the nuclear power plants online.
LOVINS: Of course if you lose a lot of capacity, you can be short. And they were already a bit short. But I would actually view that as a drawback of nuclear power in two respects. First, to make it cheap, they tried to put a bunch of plants in one place, which was always a bad idea, because if something goes wrong with one plant, you can’t even get in to fix the others and keep them from developing serious problems.
Second, nuclear plants are shut down abruptly, when there’s a loss of grid connection, like in the tsunami. And the trouble with that is, it is then very hard to restart the plant. So in 2003, we had a big blackout in the northeastern US, nine plants were running perfectly until the blackout and then they went to zero, and it took two weeks to get them all back up. And so they’re like an anti-peaker, they’re guaranteed unavailable when you most need them. Renewables don’t have that problem.
LOE: Amory Lovins is the chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Well, Mr. Lovins, thank you so very much.
LOVINS: You’re welcome.

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.

300 years of fossil fuel addiction in 5 minutes -- by Post-Carbon Institute

This is just one of many videos from Post Carbon Institute. Founded in 2003 by Julian Darley, PCI is a think tank focusing on climate change, renewable energy and (re-)localization, resource and water depletion, limits to growth, overpopulation, and food. For more of his ideas see Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil (2005). PCI experts now include Richard Heinberg, Bill McKibben, Majora Carter, Wes Jackson, Joshua Farley, Richard Douthwaite, Rob Hopkins of the international Transition Towns, and many others. Partners are Transition US and Energy Bulletin.net.

Unsustainable development -- by Lester Brown

(reprint of interview by Greg Ross in American Scientist)

Since founding the Worldwatch Institute in 1974, environmental analyst Lester Brown has been monitoring the effects of unsustainable development and forecasting their possible consequences. He sees signs that we've entered what ecologists call an "overshoot-and-collapse" mode, in which demand exceeds the sustainable yield of natural systems. This effect has toppled earlier civilizations; now, he says, it is occurring at the global level.

Brown's book, Plan B 2.0 (Norton, 2006), updates a first edition that appeared three years ago. In it, he argues that the first signs of economic decline appear in the environment, and he sees worrisome omens in today's forests, fisheries and grasslands. His prescription is a remodeled global economy that fosters education and sustainable methods to support the planet's growing population.

A MacArthur Fellow, Brown holds more than 20 honorary degrees and an honorary professorship in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His books have appeared in more than 40 languages. He currently leads the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit, interdisciplinary research organization based in Washington, D.C. American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed him by e-mail in February 2006.

You address a number of issues in the book—the oil peak, water shortages, global warming. How are they related? Is there a root cause?

The oil peak, water shortages and global warming are related in the sense that they are all driven by the enormous growth in world population and economic activity. With oil we are depleting a resource that is not renewable in a relevant human time frame. Water shortages are the result of ever-growing demands for water, primarily to produce food. Global warming is the result of the enormous growth in the use of fossil fuels and the associated rise in carbon emissions to the point where they exceed the Earth's capacity to absorb them.

At the beginning of the last century, growth in the world economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today annual growth is measured in trillions of dollars. The sad fact is that the environmental trends that we monitor—shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, deteriorating grasslands, eroding soils, rising temperatures, melting ice, rising seas, dying coral reefs and disappearing species—are all manifestations of a civilization that is putting more demands on the Earth than it can bear.

The overriding challenge facing our generation is to restructure the global economy so that economic progress can continue. This means replacing the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with one that is powered by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system and that reuses and recycles virtually everything.

How is China's emergence affecting the global scorecard?

China's emergence as the world's leading consumer of natural resources can best be understood by comparing it with the United States, which was for decades the leader in consumption. Among the basic commodities—grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector and steel in the industrial sector—China now consumes more than the United States of each of these except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat (67 million tons compared with 39 million tons) and more than twice as much steel (258 million to 104 million tons).

These numbers are about national consumption. But what if China reaches the U.S. consumption level per person? If China's economy continues to expand at 8 percent a year, its income per person will reach the current U.S. level in 2031.

If at that point China's per capita resource consumption were the same as in the United States today, then its projected 1.45 billion people would consume the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world grain harvest. China's paper consumption would be double the world's current production. There go the world's forests.

If China one day has three cars for every four people, U.S.-style, it will have 1.1 billion cars. The whole world today has 800 million cars. To provide the roads, highways and parking lots to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave an area equal to the land it now plants in rice. It would need 99 million barrels of oil a day. Yet the world currently produces 84 million barrels per day and may never produce much more.

The Western economic model—the fossil fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy—is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream."

And, perhaps most important, in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain and steel, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either. China is helping us see that the days of the old economy are numbered.

Sustaining our early-21st-century global civilization now depends on shifting to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system. Business as usual—Plan A—cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan B, time to build a new economy and a new world.

Doesn't our globalized economy make us more resilient than, say, the Sumerians?

Our globalized economy makes us more resilient in some ways and less resilient in others. The advantage of a global economy is that different parts will be affected by varying combinations of environmentally damaging trends, some much more than others. Nonetheless, in an integrated global economy, the effects anywhere will be felt to some degree everywhere. The destruction of forests or the depletion of aquifers in any part of the world will affect the entire world.

The principal weakness of our global economy is that we do not have a global governing body to manage our response to the environmental trends that are undermining the global economy. The lack of a global governing structure to mount an effective response to the environmental trends that are undermining our future is definitely a weakness.

What about new technologies? Can we invent our way out of these problems?

New technologies will play a central role in the energy transition, the shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. For the U.S. automotive fuel economy, the key to greatly reducing oil use and carbon emissions is gas-electric hybrid cars. The average new car sold in the United States last year got 22 miles to the gallon, compared with 55 miles per gallon for the Toyota Prius. If the United States decided for oil security and climate stabilization reasons to replace its entire fleet of passenger vehicles with super-efficient gas-electric hybrids over the next 10 years, gasoline use could easily be cut in half. This would involve no change in the number of cars or miles driven, only a shift to the most efficient automotive propulsion technology now available.

Beyond this, a gas-electric hybrid with an additional storage battery and a plug-in capacity would allow us to do most of our short-distance driving, such as the daily commute or grocery shopping, with electricity. This could cut U.S. gasoline use by an additional 20 percent, for a total reduction of 70 percent. Then if we invest in thousands of wind farms across the country to feed cheap electricity into the grid, we could do most short-distance driving with wind energy, dramatically reducing both carbon emissions and the pressure on world oil supplies.

Using timers to recharge batteries with electricity coming from wind farms during the low-demand hours between 1 and 6 a.m. costs the equivalent of 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline. Not only do we have an alternative to dwindling reserves of oil, but it is inexpensive, inexhaustible, and it is ours. The supply cannot be disrupted.

In effect, advances in the design of gas-electric cars and wind turbines has provided the technological foundation for creating a new automotive fuel economy in the United States and in much of the world as well. Other technologies that will facilitate the shift to renewable sources include photovoltaic cells, solar-thermal power plants, solar-thermal water and space heaters, devices to harness wave power, devices for harnessing geothermal energy and processes for converting cellulosic material into automotive fuel.

Ultimately, you say, the key is to "get the market to tell the ecological truth." What steps do you recommend?

The key to building a global economy that can sustain economic progress is the creation of an honest market, one that tells the ecological truth. The market is an incredible institution, allocating resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match. It easily balances supply and demand, and it sets prices that readily reflect both scarcity and abundance.

The market does, however, have some fundamental weaknesses. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of providing goods or services, it does not value nature's services properly, and it does not respect the sustainable-yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Accounting systems that do not tell the truth can be costly. Faulty corporate accounting systems that leave costs off the books have driven some of the world's largest corporations into bankruptcy. Unfortunately, our faulty global economic accounting system has potentially far more serious consequences. Our modern economic prosperity is achieved in part by running up ecological deficits, costs that do not show up on the books, but costs that someone will eventually pay.

The first step is to calculate the indirect costs of the various goods and services we buy. Since we are all economic decision-makers as consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers and investment bankers, we rely on market prices to guide our decision-making. The problem is the market is giving us bad information. The result is bad decision-making.

Let me illustrate this point. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States calculated the social cost of smoking cigarettes, including two costs: the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses and the loss of productivity associated with these illnesses. They concluded that the cost to society of smoking a pack of cigarettes was $7.18. If we assume that the cost of growing the tobacco and manufacturing the cigarettes is roughly $2 a pack, then the price of cigarettes should be roughly $9 per pack. This not only justifies raising taxes on cigarettes, which claim 4.9 million lives per year worldwide, but it also provides guidelines for how much to raise them.

If the cost to society of smoking a pack of cigarettes is $7.18, how much is the cost to society of burning a gallon of gasoline? Fortunately, the International Center for Technology Assessment has done a detailed analysis, entitled "The Real Price of Gasoline." The group calculates several indirect costs, including oil industry tax breaks, oil supply protection costs, oil industry subsidies and health care costs of treating auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses. The total of these indirect costs centers around $9 per gallon, somewhat higher than the social cost of smoking a pack of cigarettes. Add this external or social cost to the roughly $2 per gallon average price of gasoline in the United States in early 2005, and gas would cost $11 a gallon. These costs are real. Someone bears them. Now that these costs have been calculated, they can be used to set tax rates on gasoline, just as the CDC analysis is being used to raise taxes on cigarettes.

In the summer of 1998, China suffered record flooding in the Yangtze River basin for an extended period of time. Eventually the flooding racked up $30 billion worth of damage, a sum equal to the value of China's annual rice harvest.

For some weeks the government referred to the flooding as the result of an act of nature, which indeed it was. But in mid-August they held a press conference in Beijing acknowledging that there was a human contribution, that the deforestation of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River basin was also contributing to the flooding. The government then took an unusual step. It banned the cutting of trees in forests throughout China. Officials justified this action by pointing out that the value of trees standing was three times that of those cut. What they were recognizing was that the flood control services provided by forests were three times as valuable as the timber in those forests. In the scientific world, this is known as an "aha" moment. The Chinese government was recognizing the ecological truth in the market. It is, in a sense, what the entire world needs to do across the board with all goods and services.

Do you foresee a tipping point, a deadline for action? What happens if we miss it?

In looking at the fast-changing relationship between our early-21st-century global civilization of 6.5 billion people and the natural systems and resources on which we depend, we think about thresholds, tipping points and deadlines for action. Unfortunately, since these thresholds are natural phenomena and since the deadlines for action are set by nature, we are handicapped in responding. We may not know that we are missing a deadline until it is too late. One of the best-known examples of failing to recognize a key threshold was in the management of the huge centuries-old cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Some marine biologists warned that the overfishing and the shrinking stocks were jeopardizing the fishery. But when the decision was finally made to ban fishing for cod, the stocks had shrunk to the point where they could not recover. Today, more than a decade later, there are no signs of recovery. This fishery may have been lost for good.

Another example would be the melting of Arctic Sea ice. The melting of this ice in its own right will not affect sea level because the ice is already in the water, but if this vast, continent-sized area of ice, which has shrunk by more than 20 percent in the summertime over the last three decades, should eventually all melt, it will profoundly alter the climate in the region.

When incoming sunlight strikes snow and ice, roughly 80 percent is reflected back into space and 20 percent is absorbed as heat. Once the snow and ice melt and the incoming sunlight hits open water, this ratio is reversed, with only 20 percent being reflected back into space and 80 percent being absorbed as heat. This is what modelers refer to as a positive feedback loop, a situation where a trend, once under way, tends to feed on itself.

The melting of Arctic Sea ice concerns scientists because it could lead to a warming in the region and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If this were to occur it would likely take a few centuries, but it would raise sea level by 23 feet. Some scientists think that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea level at a rate of 1 meter for each half-century. If warming in the arctic region has reached the point where the Greenland ice sheet is doomed, then we are looking at a future where many of the world's coastal cities will be partly or entirely under water. The rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of Asia will also be inundated, depriving the region of part of its rice supply.

Some scientists think we have already reached the point of no return. Others think if we move quickly to cut carbon emissions we might be able to save the Greenland ice sheet. The reality is that this deadline is set by nature. We will know if we have failed only when we learn that it has become irreversible.

If a few years from now it were to become clear that the arctic ice melting is indeed going to lead to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and that we cannot save it, then we may face, for the first time in history, a fracturing of societies along generational lines. We have experienced social fracturing along racial, religious and ethnic lines, but never before along generational lines. The next generation, which will have to cope with the rise in sea level that we have set in motion, will be asking us why we did not act. How, they will ask, could you do this to us? They will be able to read the same scientific literature and the warnings from the scientific community that we now read.

There is a further question, namely, how will we feel about ourselves if it becomes clear that our generation is responsible for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet?

Oil, war and food

food riot, Haiti: courtesy of groovygreen.The end of oil will cause food riots worldwide, according to the UK Ecologist. The oil industry's forecast for peak oil within 5-10 years, was covered up by industry and IEA under pressure from the US, while Bush and Cheney launched wars for oil in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other "wars on terror".

Alberta tarsands: photo by S.Jocz © Western Canada Wilderness Committee

Alberta's Parkland Institute shows the link between US military strategy and oil wars. Kairos says Canadian taxpayer subsidies to oilsands, mostly in tax breaks, cost $1.446b over six years to 2002 [and have since risen sharply under the Conservatives]. Tarsandswatch says tarsands development and the SPP (Security and Prosperity Initiative) are designed to prop up the declining US empire.

food riots, Mexico 2008: David Sheen
The G20's ballyhooed food security initiative is a front for pushing GMO seeds in the Third World: Monsanto, Syngenta, the Gates-Rockefeller AGRA (Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa ), BASF, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont. See this article on AGRA by an American living in Ghana. He also comments on AFRICOM, the Pentagon's strategic military expansion into Africa.

food riot, Egypt 2008: © AP / Nasser Nasser

The conservative Financial Times shows a global food crisis has already hit Africa, Haiti, Tibet, Iran, Morocco, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, and Egypt, though absurdly it claims the problem will be solved by "markets" alone. During the 2008 crisis, nations turned to land grabs and food hoarding. Third world agriculture is already suffering from double-digit fuel and fertilizer price hikes. In India, food prices are rising 16% annually.

The oil crisis will come in the next 6 years, say market fundamentalists of the Deutsche Bank, whose Oct 09 study predicts "peak oil" will be triggered by price, not supply: "we expect demand to break decisively" when oil prices rise to US$150/bbl, gas US$4/gal, "the tipping point that will destroy gasoline demand and mark the end of the age of oil." OPEC spare capacity is a myth. They predict a huge destabilizing oil shock (like 1972, 1980, 2008) between 2010-2016, followed by a major shift to natgas, electric cars and e-bikes and a permanent oil price collapse.

They say Canadian tarsands, Brazil's Guara offshore field, oil shales will be among the (currently overpriced) losers. Agricultural production (dependent on fuel and fertilizer), heavy trucking and aviation will be hard hit. Oilco owners will engage in an orgy of profit-taking and invest in other industries.

Wikipedia

Secret CIA-Pentagon predictions of peak oil, they imply, were the strategic motive for US oil wars on Islamic countries: in their terms 71% of proven world oil reserves are "Muslim" (incl Nigeria), 20% "socialist" (Russia and Venezuela). See diagram.

They also say that US gasoline consumers are undertaxed. Just to cover the cost of the Iraq war, gasoline prices should be some 54 cents per gallon higher (p.10). Nor do US gas prices reflect the increased risk of drilling and refining in a hurricane zone, the Gulf of Mexico. (p.25).

In short term policy, fuel efficiency is an obvious choice; decades of US government laxity on CAFE fuel efficiency standards helped create the present crisis [implicitly, politicians caved in to the auto and oil lobbies] (p.31). Forsaking gas hogs, Japan and Germany have been able to thrive on $8 gas (p.28 ). In the long term, hybrids and electric cars will end the oil age. China and the US are both moving fast in this direction.

Finally, they expect climate action limiting CO2 to fail -- resisted by the habits of US consumers, rising demand in China, producers in Mid-East and Russia. By 2022 the falling demand for oil will reduce C02 [but too late to avoid catastrophic climate change] (p.57-58).

*****

For peaceful alternatives to these scenarios, see Matt Savinar's Life After the Oil Crash, TransitionUS.org (formerly Relocalize.net), Canada's Foodforethought.net, "Food crisis -- the facts" in New Internationalist Dec 2008, Food First founded by Francis Moore Lappé, and Via Campesina.

Five ways to make a killing on the environment -- and the alternatives

Doomsday Seed Vault on the remote Arctic island of Svalbard
administered by GCGTrust

1. Monopoly rights on seeds
BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont and biotech partners have filed 532 patent documents (a total of 55 patent families) on so-called “climate ready” genes. Farming communities in the global South – those who have contributed least to global greenhouse emissions – are among the most threatened. The top 10 multinationals have cornered the seed market, use climate change to argue that any other choice will "starve" millions, lobby governments and WTO to make their monopoly legal, and enforce it over farmers' rights. See the ETC study Patenting the Climate Genes, Quaker International Affairs Programme (QIAP) book The Future Control of Food, the Schmeiser lawsuit, and the Doomsday Vault.

2. Land grabs for agrofuels
Joan Baxter's book Dust from Our Eyes gives examples from Mali. She worked for two decades in Africa. See our previous post about land grabs in the Third World, the secret World Bank report on how financial speculation drove up food prices, UN and Jubilee analysis of the food crisis and its threat to MDGs.

3. Rogue fleets fishing to extinction, to benefit banks
See Boris Worm's warning in a previous post, and Callum Roberts book Unnatural History of the Sea.

4. Slice-and-dice derivatives trading in pollution permits
Derivatives caused the 2008 financial meltdown that was bailed out with our grandchildren's earnings; now OTC speculators want to repeat the bubble. In 2008 the Financial Times reported carbon trading doubling, but warned that 140 of 170 carbon offsets were "poor quality". Recently traders have sliced-and-diced these. See our previous post: climate justice vs the carbon casino, updated in the recent FOE study Dangerous Obsession, and Mark Schapiro, "Conning the Climate", Harpers Feb 2010. In 2009 China threw the risk back on derivatives traders, but in 2010 in the US, they are still refusing Federal Reserve regulation.

5. Industrial agriculture, feedlots and fish farms (breeding grounds for superbugs)
See this 2010 scientist's blog on superbugs updating the New Yorker 2008 investigative report. Feedlots have been accused of fostering flu viruses. Fish farms have spread viruses worldwide, despite years of warning, which -- typically -- BC lobbyists and governments have denied.

6. Tarsands and the "security" of the US empire: blood for oil
Canadian ecojustice groups raised questions of the tarsands' true cost years ago, to denials from Alberta and federal governments. Pipelines and projects are now being quadrupled despite warnings by ethical analysts that environmental damage is being hidden from investors. Federal studies long kept secret show woodland caribou being driven to extinction. Alberta's Parkland Institute shows US strategy calls for further involvement in wars to protect oil supply. Examples are the Afghanistan war, its connection with US pipelines, and Pentagon geopolitical studies (2006, 2007, 2008). Already the world's biggest oil consumer, in 2007 the US military reported that its new tactics (supposed to protect "security of supply") require four times as much oil per soldier as in the Gulf War of 1991.

Hopeful alternatives
1. a list of ecojustice goals from Climate Justice Now!
2. New Economics Foundation, Other Worlds are Possible: Human progress in an age of climate change (Dec 2009) with 28 case studies from around the world.
3. British Quakers' Sep 2009 Zero Growth conference: summary, conference powerpoints and mp3 sound recordings; queries and readings for a one-hour workshop.

The need for ecojustice: Wall Street, the City, Zurich take food out of the mouths of babes

MDG 2005 in Grid-Arendal. The 2009 report turns many more squares red. Click to see details.
Gains since the 1990s have been wiped out in one year, says the recent UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2009. Careful reading (summary below) suggests the need for a world social movement combining faith and aid groups, human rights, and environmental NGOs. Join the Quaker discussion on QEWnet.ning.com.

The following analysis cites the UN statistics, but goes beyond its polite phraseology.

• Hunger which had dropped by 16% since 1990, reversed course during the 2008 food crisis -- largely due to commodities speculation and the ethanol craze. East Asia was particularly hard hit. This means 20 years' of gains under the Washington consensus "globalization" were lost in one year to the vampires of Wall Street, the City and Zurich.

• Longterm trends to hunger [not in the MDG report]: Scientific data show other tipping points have been passed: peak fish in the 1990s, peak fertility for food crops a few years ago, peak water in the next decade, peak oil which raises cost of fuel and fertilizer

• In 2009 global unemployment will reach 6.1-7 % for men and 6.5-7.4% for women, reversing slow gains in gender equality. (See summary of 2007 ILO report)

• The fight against poverty has stalled. In 2009, an estimated 55 million to 90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty.

• Child nutrition will fail to meet the 2015 MDG target. Even before the food crisis, more than 1/4 of children in poor countries were underweight for their age.

• Rich countries have cut aid for family planning since the mid-1990s, on a per woman basis, despite the undeniable contribution of such programmes to maternal and child health. (See also ECOSOC and WHO criticism.)

• Poor countries are unable to finance their own programmes. The debt service to export ratio has suddenly increased, as exports have fallen. But the World Bank will insist on its pound of flesh. Despite promises, its SAP policies (renamed PRSP) have changed little but the name.

• Rich countries have broken their aid promises in NEPAD 2001 and Gleneagles 2005. Even if the promises were kept, actual aid (because it is calculated as a percentage of national income) would fall as a result of the financial meltdown. Remember the bailout bonuses and golden parachutes! Taking food out of babies' mouths.

Before the 2008 food and finance crisis

• the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day had decreased from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion.

• Primary education had reached 88%

• Child deaths under age 5 decreased; even in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria nets and measles immunization had made dramatic progress.

• The rate of infection by HIV (and of AIDS deaths) had peaked and declined. However, the provision of retroviral drugs to poor countries is once again in doubt due to Big Pharma lobbying and fewer donations.

In his introduction to the MDG report, UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-moon puts the best face on it: if we act,there is hope. "We cannot allow an unfavourable economic climate to prevent us from realizing the commitments made in 2000. The global community cannot turn its back on the poor and the vulnerable. Now is the time to accelerate progress towards the MDGs. The goals are within reach, even in the very poor countries, with strong political commitment and sufficient and sustained funding."

Those who have been following the climate negotiations will recognize a familiar pattern. When corporations make money, the rich nations are generous -- at least in promises. Otherwise, nothing.

Could a new church-led Jubilee movement, this time in combination with climate NGOs, put enough pressure on our governments to change this? There has been talk of repaying ecological debt.

On June 24 Ban Ki-moon begged the G8 meeting (which turned deaf ears to him and to the Pope)

1. to remedy its $20 million annual shortfall in promised aid to Africa,
2. to make "ambitious and firm commitments" to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent, the levels the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says are required on the part of industrialized countries to ward off the worst effects of global warming" and
3. to "commit to a specific timetable and modalities to deliver the billions of dollars needed during the next few years to assist the poorest and most vulnerable to adapt to climate change."

Peace concerns also coincide with eco-justice. The theme of the UN's 9-11 September 2009 DPI/NGO Conference in Mexico City is "For Peace and Development: Disarm Now!”. Launching this campaign, Ban Ki-moon said, "We must disarm to save lives. We must disarm so that we can redirect precious resources to health, education and development."

Further references (an incomplete list)
For more details and campaigns:
Jubilee Research UK
Third World Network Singapore
Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP): coalition of over 100 NGOs incl One.org (USA), Make Poverty History (UK, Canada), Global Poverty Project (Australia). Their demands: trade justice, drop the debt, more and better aid
Kairoscanada info in English and French

Youth actions
The Trade to Climate Caravan in Europe Nov-Dec 2009: details in QEWnet Forum - Drewery
Quaker Right Sharing of World Resources USA
The Global Youth Action Network (GYAN) New York
UNICEF Voices of Youth
Oxfam International Youth Partnerships
CARE youth corps

Graphs, statistics, research
UNEP /GRID Arendal graphs, newsletter Environment and Poverty Times
IFPRI Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture (Sep 2009)
John Breen's Poverty.com and FreeRice
Anup Shah's Global Issues raises questions about poverty, inequality, environment, militarism
Poverty mapping for researchers - includes environmental factors
Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) research
World Bank PovertyNet tends to be technical and self-congratulatory; its research section is better.