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UNFCCC: Don't trade off climate!
Food sovereignty can cool down the earth!
Small-farmers and peasant communities are among the first victims of
climate change. Everywhere, in our fields, amongst the plants we
cultivate and the animals we raise, the consequences of climate
change are palpable. Yet, this is nothing new. Already back in the
1970s, African farmers started to suffer the consequences of
desertification and a radical change in the seasons. Since then, many
of us have suffered hurricanes, large-scale floods, shortening of
the wet season and plant and animal diseases caused by unusual
temperatures. Small-scale farmers and peasants have adapted their way
of living and farming in order to withstand these changes. For
example, they have chosen seeds from varieties that grow more quickly
or resist dryness, they have developed water management systems to
deal with floods and to keep soils humid during the dry season. Most
of the time, they have done it so successfully that it has gone
unnoticed. The attention of the mass media was only brought to the
long-term crisis faced by farming communities and the critical
situation of food production in the globalized economy by the food
price crisis in Spring 2008 and riots in cities that threatened
national governments.
Corporate « solutions » to climate change are a threat to peasants
and small farmers
However, it seems that farming communities are more threatened now
by the so-called solutions to climate change promoted by corporate
interests, G8 countries, the World Trade Organization and the World
Bank, than by climate change in itself. Industrial agrofuels, climate-
ready seeds, fertilization of oceans and carbon-trading schemes, both
deepen and widen the privatization of all natural resources on Earth
and thus exclude local communities from access to those resources
which where once called the Commons: land, water, seeds and now,
perhaps, even the air we breathe.
Many of these "solutions" are, in fact, linked more to the problem
of shortage of fossil fuel than with fighting climate change. One of
the explicit goals of COP is now also to « secure long term energy
supply ». Agrofuels illustrate this problem well. While they are
supposedly developed to diminish carbon emissions linked to fossil
fuels, their main goal is to replace fossil fuels and to allow
increasing energy consumption to continue at the global level, to the
benefit of corporate interests.
The neo-liberal solutions to climate change and the shortage of
fossil fuel supplies make it increasingly difficult for small-scale
farmers and peasants to make a living from agriculture. All over the
world, land is being taken away from local food producers by
transnational corporations to grow agrofuels. All over the world,
seed giants widen their intellectual property rights agenda to forbid
peasants to reproduce their own seeds, the only varieties that can
effectively adapt to changing climatic conditions. The seed giants
impose patented hybrid and GM seeds. The aggressive free-trade
agenda, promoted by Japan, the US and the EU through bilateral
agreements, takes food markets out of the hands of local communities
to ensure their by financial interests, the agro-industry and the
retailing sector. Farmers are unable to make a living out of their
work even though they produce sufficient food in an efficient
manner, because of the aggressive take-over by corporate-interests
of all natural resources and their control over markets. Indeed, this
year's food crisis has shown that no food shortage was responsible
for rocketing food prices, but that rather this was due largely to
financial speculation on commodity markets.
More generally, the solutions advocated by neo-liberal governments
and institutions are all based on placing the costs of adjustment
policies to climate change on the shoulders of the poor. On the one
hand they promote « green » consumption for the rich, enabling them
to dismiss their responsibility for climate change and, on the other,
they prevent the poor from accessing basic necessities by increasing
the prices of basic commodities (while rich Europeans and Americans
are acclaimed for buying CO2 efficient cars, the price of cooking oil
in the South has become so expensive that most of the people can't
afford it anymore). Climate change has become a new pretext for
exploitation of the poorest while an ever smaller elite can enjoy
business as usual.
The destruction of sustainable family farming is one of the main
causes of climate change
Massive rural exodus is one consequence of these policies. In Europe
and in the United States, where almost all common goods have been
privatized and where small farmers face harsh competition from highly
subsidized industrial agriculture, less than 5% of the population is
still engaged in farming. Everywhere in the world, small farmers and
peasants are trapped between dependency on expensive seeds, inputs,
and pesticides that they must buy from industry and the low prices
they receive for their products. Peasants are being forced to leave
the countryside and join the misery of urban shantytowns. Of the six
billion inhabitants on Earth, three are now urban, including one
billion that live in slums. Experts predict that soon the majority of
urban people will live in shantytowns.
This rural exodus is one of the biggest threats to climate
stability. Indeed, while small-scale family farming cools down the
Earth, the industrial model of production and consumption that
replaces it multiplies carbon emissions. Over the last 150 years, the
industrialization of agriculture has meant replacing people's energy -
men and women's work as farmers and peasants – by the energy of
fossil fuel: tractors, fertilizers, the specialization of production
and development of monocultures which requires long-distance
transports of food and animal feed. This has meant replacing a model
of production which was keeping great quantities of carbon in the
soil by taking care of humus, by a system which uses four times more
calories in fossil fuel than it is able to produce as food.
UNFCCC should recognize the failures of the Kyoto Protocol and adopt
a radically new agenda of negotiation
The Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 and has been in force
since 2005, has already proved to be a failure. As discussions start
for its revision before it expires in 2012, governments and
international institutions should recognize that the solution they
proposed, namely emission-trading mechanisms, has had no effect in
stopping climate change. Since 1997, global CO2 emissions have
exceeded the worst projection undertaken by the climate experts of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
If the UNFCCC and governments want to take the grave issue of
climate change seriously, must discuss the real causes of climate
change. They have to start recognizing their mistakes and failures
and start an open public debate with all movements from civil society
to tackle the real root of climate change: the corporate-based,
greedy model of development and its spread all over the world.
In order to achieve this, the agenda of climate negotiations should
be radically changed. It should include the following topics of
discussion:
the impact of trade on carbon emissions and how to re-localize
economies;
the impact of industrialized agriculture on climate and how to
support small-scale family farming and agro-ecological models of
production;
strategies to implement food sovereignty;
strategies to keep fossil fuels in the soil, to radically reduce
energy consumption, and to develop locally-controlled renewable
energies;
strategies to ensure fair access to the commons, specifically through
agrarian reform and renationalization of water supplies;
strategies to end plundering of the Global South's resources by the
Global North as it has done since colonial times.
Unless such an agenda is discussed in the UNFCCC, instead of
discussing emission trading mechanisms as planned, it is clear it
will not have any positive effect on the climate catastrophe.
UNFCCC: tackle the real roots of climate change or sink
UNFCCC's mandate is to deal with climate change in a serious manner,
not to pave the way for another wave of green capitalism to the
benefit of corporations. Unless it deals with this mandate in a
serious manner it will be useless or even have negative impacts, as
it prompts people to believe that governments are dealing with
climate change when they are not. The Bali summit has set a bad
precedent of corporate take-over of the negotiations.
UNFCCC's next meetings, in Poznan in December 2008 (COP14) and in
Copenhagen in December, 2009 (COP15) will be decisive.
La Via Campesina calls on UNFCCC and on governments not to wait to
decide on another agenda of discussion already for Poznan. People and
social movements will judge by whether or not UNFCCC is relevant to
tackle climate change and thus whether UNFCCC is legitimate or not
according to the results of COP14.
We are committed to work with our allies in Poznan, Copenhagen and
throughout the year, all over the world, to denounce false solutions
to climate change and to build real alternatives at the local,
national and international levels based on food sovereignty and
peasant agriculture.
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Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass.
Your idea?