Green Capitalism, Climate Change, GMOs

Against all historical evidence, the EU is claiming that rapid liberalization will "help Africa develop." In a new draft agreement on Economic Partnership Agreements with the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), Brussels is asking the EAC to remove tariffs on 80% of products within 15 years. Kenyan farmers have attempted to file a lawsuit in Kenyan courts to prevent the government from signing the agreement.

The greed and cynicism of the EU, which is matched by the US in its dealings with Latin America, Asia and Africa, is all the more striking in the context of climate change. Right now, a bevy of forecasts from NGOs and governments alike are predicting agricultural declines in the southern hemiphere due to climate change; hundreds of millions of farmers could be driven off the land in the next half-century.

But the loudest European and North American voices on the subject of agriculture in the South are the agribusiness lobbies clamoring for easy access to overseas markets, followed by think tanks and research foundations arguing for a "second Green Revolution." The latter claim that genetically engineered drought- and salt-resistant crops will be the answer to climate-induced agricultural declines. But one has to ask whether the forces driving this research are altruism and contrition over past exploitation, or a coalition of "green capitalists," such as those pushing biofuels like jatropha.

The following article, published earlier this week in the Washington Post, makes truly chilling reading on several levels: the genocidal scenarios bandied about like movie plots; the GMO schemes discussed without mention of possible ecosystemic side effects.

Facing a Threat to Farming and Food Supply

By Rick Weiss Monday, November 19, 2007
Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe's citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture. Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years--along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts-- will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet's lower latitudes, where most of the world's poor live. India, on track to be the world's most populous country, could see a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity by the 2080s as record heat waves bake its wheat-growing region, placing hundreds of millions of people at the brink of chronic hunger. Africa--where four out of five people make their liviing directly from the land--could see agricultural downturns of 30 percent, forcing farmers to abandon traditional crops in favor of more heat-resistant and flood-tolerant ones such as rice.

Worse, some African countries, including Senegal and war-torn Sudan, are on track to suffer what amounts to complete agricultural collapse, with productivity declines of more than 50 percent. Even the emerging agricultural powerhouse of Latin America is poised to suffer reductions of 20 percent or more, which could return thriving exporters such as Brazil to the subsistence-oriented nations they were a few decades ago. And those estimates do not count the effects of new plant pests and diseases, which are widely expected to come with climate change and could cancel out the positive "fertilizing" effects that higher carbon dioxide levels may offer some plants. Scenarios like these--and the recognition that even less-affected countries such as the United States will experience significant regional shifts in growing seasons, forcing new and sometimes disruptive changes in crop choices--are providing the impetus for a new "green revolution." It is aimed not simply at boosting production, as the first revolution did with fertilizers, but at creating crops that can handle the heat, suck up the salt, not desiccate in a drought and even grow swimmingly while submerged. The work involves conventional breeding of new varieties as well as genetic engineering to transfer specific traits from more resilient species.

As part of those efforts, scientists are also busily preserving seeds from thousands of varieties of the 150 crops that make upmost of the world's agricultural diversity, as well as wild relatives of those crops that may harbor useful but still unidentified genes."For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt," said Ren Wang, director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a network of agricultural research centers. "It's important that we have a wide pool of genetic diversity from which to develop crops with these unique traits."At the same time, scientists are finding that agriculture and related land uses, which today account for about one-third of all greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, can be conducted in much more climate-friendly ways.

But time is of the essence if a worldwide crisis in food security is to be avoided, said William R. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington-based nonpartisan economic think tanks."You'll have a tripling of world food demand by 2085 because of higher population and bigger economies, and I would not be surprised to see as much as one-third of today's agricultural land devoted to plants for ethanol," Cline said. "So it's going to be a tight race between food supply and demand."The work of developing adaptive plants has begun to pay off. Researchers have discovered ancient varieties of Persian grasses, for example, that have an incredible tolerance for salt water. The scientists are breeding the grasses with commercial varieties of wheat and have found they are growing well in Australia's increasingly salty soils.

Other research is building on the recent discovery of a gene that helps plants survive prolonged periods underwater. Even rice, which grows in wet paddies, will die if it is fully submerged for more than three or four days, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. But recent tests on farms in Bangladesh show that a new line of rice containing the flood-resistance gene can live underwater for two weeks. That's going to be important, Zeigler said, because 70 percent of the world's poor live in Asia -- most of them in south Asia -- where rice is the staple. Yet 50 million acres of that region are already subject to seasonal flooding that can temporarily submerge plants under 10 to 12 feet of water. And the problem is predicted to worsen as climate change brings more intense rainfall there."Crops grow in weather, not in climate," Zeigler said, meaning they must be able to survive not only the anticipated average rises in temperature but also the day-to-day extremes that come with climate change.

Corn is another staple that is getting gussied up to party with the hardy--in this case in preparation for dry spells, which are predicted to increase in Latin America and other corn-growing regions, with a potential 20 percent drop in production over the next 25 years. Recent tests in South Africa showed that drought-resistant maize plants, created by breeding, produced 30 percent to 50 percent more corn than traditional varieties under arid conditions.

But the real test, scientists say, will be to splice in potent drought-resistance genes from plants such as sorghum and millet, which are famously productive even in parched, sub-Saharan Africa. That assumes consumers and regulators will accept such engineered crops, which have been shunned in many countries because of economic and environmental concerns. To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity. In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic bridge across hard times.

Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say. A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Cape Harrison, Labrador. That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt. By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed--important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide. Studies also show that by plowing or tilling less frequently -- planting seeds in the stubble of a previous crop, for example --farmers can significantly reduce evaporation in dry areas and also cut the amount of carbon dioxide released from the soil (and from the exhaust of their tractors, if they have them). Crops grown this way also trap carbon more effectively, becoming part of the solution instead of adding to the problem.

For the truly pessimistic, there is always the "doomsday vault," a seed bank being constructed in a Norwegian mountainside that nations around the world are stocking with every kind of seed imaginable. After all, you never know what kind of plant trait is going to save humanity if the climate makes an unexpected turn, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is leading the effort and who has boasted that the vault will be protected in part by the region's polar bears.That is assuming, of course, that rising temperatures or the newly arrived wheat farmers will not have driven them away.

Meanwhile, new social science research suggests a persistent historical correlation between climate, war and population declines. Building on the work of University of Hong Kong geographer David Zhang, Georgia Tech political scientist Peter Brecke and a team of researchers compared a database of 4,500 wars between 1400 and 1900 with climate change records assembled by paleo-climatologists. They found a persistent pattern of turbulence and warfare during colder periods, followed by migration and population declines, and relative calm in warmer periods. But the researchers argue that the effect of climate change could be analogous to temperature declines in the past, as extreme heat, like extreme cold, will disrupt agriculture and increasing migration pressures. I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to read the paper. But their conclusions are interesting. Read more!

Bottlenecks, Supply-Demand Crises, and Rising Food and Oil Prices

As Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed out in his 1971 classic The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, all forms of production and consumption are ultimately tributaries of solar energy flow captured through mining, forestry and agriculture. Despite the vast diversity of output in the global economy—from art to artillery—the main inputs are relatively simple: fossil fuels, minerals, timber and food (especially grains).

One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was to tie food production to fossil fuel inputs. The supply-demand dynamics of food and oil (and the distortions of cartels and subsidies) are as inseparable in industrial capitalism as air is from water in the atmosphere. And now the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel inputs since 1750 could reduce yields of rice, wheat and corn by as much as a third in Asia, Africa and Latin America(where the overwhelming majority of subsistence farmers now live).

These news stories from the last few days capture the interrelated dynamics of food production, oil consumption and climate change:

Global Food Crisis Looms as Climate and Fuel Shortages Bite
Rising Food Prices To Hit Consumption
Frenzy in the Markets as Oil Heads for $100 a Barrel
IEA Sounds Alarm Over Huge Energy Demands
High-Prices Oil Adds Volatility to Power Scramble

To see how these interrelationships work, look no further than the U.S. corn industry. As Michael Pollan shows in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the seeming diversity of products in U.S. supermarkets is largely corn-based. Corn-based sweeteners have replaced cane sugar in most U.S. soft drinks; U.S. bacon, eggs, milk and hamburgers (through corn-based pig, chicken and cattle-feed) ultimately come from corn. Corn is used in 2,500 out of 10,000 products sold in the average U.S. supermarket. This dietary monopoly is made possible through obscenely large subsidies ($51.3 billion from 1995 to 2005), about 63% of which go to the top 10% of enterprises, the main suppliers of corporate processors like Cargill and Archer Daniel's Midland. In fact, 3 or 4 corporations control 81% of corn exports in the U.S., 60% of the grain handling facilities, 61% of flour milling, and 49% of ethanol production.

The result (a real irony considering the anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. corn belt) is an export subsidy to the agribusiness giants of over $100 million annually to dump U.S. corn on the Mexican market under the neoliberal NAFTA rules. According to the Mexican government itself, U.S. corn dumping has driven around 2 million Mexican farmers off the land. CAFTA is now bringing this dynamic to Guatemala, Honduras and other signatories with small corn farmers.


Besides fuelling poverty in Latin America and obesity in the U.S., this subsidized corn production is fragile, because it's overwhelmingly oil-based. On average, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are burned for every 1 calorie of food energy produced in the U.S. The fertilizers, the tractors, the processing equipment, the refrigerated trucks, the plastic packaging and grocery bags: all require oil.

The intimate connection of oil and food inputs at the base of the global economy means that changes in supply and demand affect both. We see this in rising food and oil prices worldwide, reported side by side by the Financial Times today:
To be continued...






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Protests and Enclosure in India and China

25,000 landless farmers India are embarked on a 600-kilometer march to New Delhi. It began on October 2nd, and is scheduled to end on October 30th. From Agence France-Presse:

"[Puthan Vithal] Rajgopal, a 59-year-old engineer, said he and the people following him believed the lack of land reforms was creating "tiny pockets of vast wealth" in billion-plus India, where 73 percent of the population lives off the land. The marchers want India to introduce iron-clad legislation on holdings, deeds and tenancy rights -- replacing the current system where ownership can easily be disputed and taken by the rich and powerful. "Forty percent of Indians are now landless and 23 percent of them are in abject poverty," said Rajgopal, who heads a campaign group called Ekta Parishad, or Unity Forum. Many of the marchers say debt-ridden farmers or those who lost their land did so because of the absence of clear-cut land rules. Such conditions have bred Maoist insurgency in 172 of India's 600 districts and farmers are killing themselves in 100 other districts," Rajgopal told AFP as the mass of misery reached Palwal, 70 kilometres from New Delhi. "So we want to ask the government, 'What are you governing? Where are the fruits of the reforms in these districts?,'" he said.

A government plan to set up tax-friendly Special Economic Zones across thousands of acres of farmland in a bid to lure overseas corporations has also led to sometime violent protests in at least two states. India's economy is expanding at around nine percent a year, with services and manufacturing clocking double digit growth. Being left far behind at just shy of a few percent is the farm sector and activists are increasingly pointing at a widening gap between the few rich and the hundreds of millions of poor.

"We have the growth process and the re-distribution process, but banking on one will be a fatal folly," commented Ram Upendra Das, and economist with a New Delhi-based think-tank, the Research and Information System for Developing Countries. "The challenge is to spread the positive reforms across the length and width of India and containing its ill-affects such as the widening of gap... We cannot have one at the expense of the other."

Among the marchers was Krishnand Prasad, who abandoned farming on a strip of land his ancestors had leased in the impoverished state of Bihar centuries ago. He was forced to give up after the landowner demanded 65 percent of the harvest. "Once we reach Delhi I will tell the government to give me my land back," the 79-year-old farmer said, hobbling on the dusty asphalt, one quivering hand on the shoulders of his near-blind wife, Samudri Devi. "Or else, we'll not go back home," she whispered. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, according to the Chinese government, there have been some 87,000 "mass incidents" in China in the last two years alone, many of them disputes over land between peasant farmers and developers. From AP:

XIAMEN (China) - It was a sight to behold: Thousands of protesters massed on the streets of one of China's most prosperous cities, demanding an end to the construction of a potentially dangerous chemical plant close to their homes. Demonstrators, many wearing yellow bands of cloth in a show of unity, faced down a wall of policemen, marching past skyscrapers and shopping malls as onlookers passed out bottles of water under the hot June sun. The protest led the government to halt construction of the US$1.4 billion (S$2.1 billion) facility, at least for now, and became emblematic of the simmering discontent facing Chinese leaders. As Communist Party leaders gathering in Beijing this week call for creating a 'harmonious society,' signs abound that the country is far from it.

As Communist Party leaders gathering in Beijing this week call for creating a 'harmonious society,' signs abound that the country is far from it. In China's wrenching transformation from a poor, largely agricultural society to a prosperous industrial one, the party is wrestling with changes that have angered many Chinese.

'Farmers have lost their land, workers of state-owned companies have gotten laid off, people living at the bottom of society struggle in their daily lives, there is a huge difference in incomes of the rich and the poor, and a large amount of violence exists,' said Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University and an advocate for human rights and legal reform.

'These are signs of a disharmonious society,' she said from Guangzhou, the capital of prosperous Guangdong province, where rising land prices have touched off disputes between farmers and developers. The tensions pose a challenge for the authoritarian communist government, which
often tries to suppress dissent, and especially for President Hu Jintao. In power for five years, Mr Hu has made a priority of distributing the benefits of recent decades of speedy economic growth more evenly. He has used the phrase 'creating a harmonious society' and a related phrase, 'the scientific outlook on development,' as slogans for this campaign. Senior Communist Party members are expected to weave the ideologies into a final draft of a document outlining priorities for the next five years.

'We will spare no effort to solve the most specific problems of the utmost and immediate concern to the people and strive to create a situation in which all people do their best, find their proper places in society and live together in harmony,' Mr Hu told more than 2,200 delegates on Monday in the weeklong conclave's opening speech. Mr Hu's government has set aside billions of dollars in new farm subsidies, increased spending on social security, education and health care, and made public efforts to root out rampant corruption.

But it is an uphill task to ease social tensions. According to the most recent figures from the Ministry of Public Security, 87,000 'mass incidents' were reported in 2005, including a deadly clash between police and villagers over the seizure of land for a power plant. And just last month, thousands of demobilised soldiers sent to railway training centres rioted in at least three cities. Then there's the emerging middle class, whose investments in homes, cars and their children's education gives them a growing stake in society and an awareness of their rights.

'The amount of demonstrations is growing as social issues of instability are increasing. People's sense of safeguarding their rights is awakening,' wrote Wen Yunchao, a columnist for the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, who witnessed the June 1-2 protests in Xiamen. 'I will slap anyone who says today's China is harmonious.' In Xiamen, a tropical port city once known in the West as Amoy and once a haven for pirates and the opium trade, the demonstrations centred around construction of a Tenglong Aromatic PX (Xiamen) Co plant in the coveted Haicang district, a breezy suburb west of the city of 1.6 million.

The plant would have made the petrochemical paraxylene, which is used in the production of plastics, polyester and film; it can cause eye, nose or throat irritation and chronic exposure may result in death. Residents say they were kept in the dark about the project until details started trickling out in March. Soon, text messages, blogs, Internet bulletin boards and computer messenger services were abuzz. One phone message likened the plant to an atomic bomb being dropped on Xiamen. Talk of protest gathered steam. 'I felt that if everyone went, we could make a change,' said Wu, a 32-year-old resident who did not want his full name used for fear of reprisals and who carried his 3-year-old son to the protest. 'If my son asks me in the future 'Where were you when the project was being built, Dad?' I would feel ashamed if I had not dared to join the march.' After the protest, the State Environmental Protection Administration said it was conducting a new environmental assessment for the entire city, including the paraxylene plant. Less than four kilometres from the construction site, many apartments now sit empty because no one wants to live there, and real estate prices have plunged. Residents are not sure if their victory was final or temporary. [Emphasis added]

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De facto apartheid, Desertification, Extinction, Airstrikes...Another beautiful day!

It has been noted by many commentators that 9/11 is not only a notorious day in the United States. On 9/11/1973, in a military operation coordinated with the CIA, the Chilean military bombed the Chilean presidential palace, precipitating the suicide of Salvador Allende and allowing General Augusto Pinochet to take power.

On 9/11/1977, white South African security forces beat black activist Steve Biko in his prison cell in Port Elizabeth. He was found dead the next day. South African president Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Biko on the 30th anniversary of his murder by the apartheid regime in a memorial lecture in Cape Town yesterday. He said:

"I speak here of the challenge to defeat the centuries-old attempt to ... treat us as children, to define us as sub-humans whom nature has condemned to be inferior to white people, an animal-like species characterised by limited intellectual capacity, bestiality, lasciviousness and moral depravity."
[...]
"We must ask ourselves whether the majority of our people, for whose freedom Steve Biko sacrificed his life, are truly aware that they too are people and whether they do not still regard themselves as appendages of our self-appointed superiors.
"Has the majority taken advantage of its victory in 1994 to repudiate the practice of resorting to forced gestures of friendship it does not desire?"

Forced gestures, indeed. Who can make "friends" when white economic domination continues in South Africa today, 13 years after the official end of apartheid? According to a UN FAO report from July 2007, some 57,000 white South African farmers currently own 80% of the arable land in the country. White-owned farms in South Africa take up 1,300 hectares on average, and are 250 times the size of the average black-owned farm (which is usually on more arid land). They employ over a million workers, or about 11% of the entire formal sector workforce in South Africa. Meanwhile, about half of all black South Africans fall below the government's official poverty line of R354, or the equivalent of less than $50 per month. While over 60% of black South Africans are poor, only 1% of white South Africans are poor.

Similarly, the white minorities in Namibia and Zimbabwe still own about half the arable land in those countries. In Zimbabwe, what land reform has taken place under Mugabe has elicited political interference from Britain and the U.S., including funds for opposition parties and perhaps coup attempts. (Not to mention bizarro-world tantrums about Mugabe's "reverse racism" in the Euroamerican media. It's as if the descendants of black colonizers controlled half the arable land in western Europe and the U.S.) Just imagine what they'd do if land reform in South Africa became an actuality?

These issues will only become more urgent in the coming years, as (largely Northern-induced)climate change decreases the quantity of arable land on Earth. Last Friday, M.V.K. Sivakumar of the U.N. Meteorological Organization told a U.N. conference in Madrid that desertification caused by climate change would threaten the global food supply in the 21st century:

"Today we feed the present world population of 6.3 billion from the 11 per cent of the land surface that can be used for serious food production. The question is: Will we be able to feed the 8.2 billion that we expect to populate the globe in 2020 if even less land is available for farming?" he said.
[...]
Sivakumar said that in some regions the spread of deserts and the salination of once arable land was already well under way. In the future it would be most widespread in drier areas of Latin America, including in farming giant Brazil.

In Africa, increasing climate variability would create major problems for farmers, who are likely to see their growing seasons getting shorter and crop yields cut, especially in areas near already arid and semi-arid regions. [end quote]

Simultaneously, "development" experts continue to push the cultivation of cash crops for export rather than food crops for consumption. As Iain Boal pointed out in an interview published at Counterpunch, people are starving in Zimbabwe while planes full of cut flowers leave Harare for the European market.

In other climate change-related news, The World Conservation Union just published its annual Red List, according to which over 16,300 species (out of the 41,415 species considered) are threatened with extinction. List manager Craig Hilton-Taylor told Reuters that the estimate, which calculates an extinction rate 100-1,000 times higher than normal, is "just the tip of the iceberg."

And it turns out that Syrian accusations about an Israeli airstrike on September 6th were true. U.S. officials told Reuters that the strike was aimed at Iranian weapons being smuggled to Hezbollah through Syria. According to CNN, the strike was coordinated with Israeli ground forces, apparently explaining the mobilization at the Golan border. The above-quoted "U.S. officials" also practically announced that U.S. forces helped coordinate, or at least were privy to, the operation: "Sources in the U.S. government and military confirmed to CNN's Barbara Starr that the airstrike did happen, and that they are happy to have Israel carry the message to both Syria and Iran that they can get in and out and strike when necessary." Or: our attack dog is ready to bite again. Read more!