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!

State of the Future 2007; Cartel Capitalism

The UN has released its “State of the Future 2007” report. Some highlights:

On corruption:
-Annual worldwide income from organized crime “could be well over $2 trillion,” of which counterfeiting accounts for about $520 billion and the drug trade another $320 billion.

-Contrary to self-congratulation about “transparency” in “the industrial democracies,” the report finds that “the vast majority of bribes are paid to people in richer countries,” where the political process is “vulnerable to vast amounts of money.” Hunt Oil, anyone? How about the EU Parliament and the U.S. Congress in general?

On inequality:
-Of the 6.6 billion people on earth, the richest 2% have over 50% of the wealth, while the poorest 50% have 1% of the wealth. The income of the richest 225 billionaires is equal to that of 40% of the world’s population, or 2.7 billion people.

On climate change and natural disasters:
-The number of people affected by natural disasters has tripled over the past decade to 2 billion, with an average of 211 million people being affected each year. “This is approximately five times the number of people thought to have been affected by conflict over the past decade.”

-The number of environmental refugees is “estimated to reach 50 million by 2010 and 200 million by 2050.”

In other news, the Brazilian mining monopoly CVRD has been forced to slow production by protests from the Movement of Landless Rural Workers, increasing word iron ore prices. Two statistics are relevant to this story. One: 5% of Brazilian landowners hold 70% of the arable land in the country. Two: CVRD and Australian behemoths BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto dominate the world iron industry, accounting for no less than 70% of global iron ore exports between the three of them. This kind of wealth concentration, in land and in mineral resources, creates all kinds of contradictions, in this case an ironic one. According to the following article from the Australian corporate press, the supply disruption has only served to “stoke an already hot spot market for iron ore and strengthen the hand of producers at upcoming pricing talks with Chinese and Japanese steelmills.” The article is worth reading, because it shows how the mythical “free market” actually works in practice: oligopolies form cartels and generate artificial “supply shocks” to jack up prices when it serves their interest, or glut markets to slash prices when that does the trick.

The Australian Business
Iron giants face shortages, derailments and peasant riots
Andrew Trounson October 19, 2007

Iron ore giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton might be battling infrastructure bottlenecks and train derailments as they race to ramp up production, but at least their trains aren't being stopped by angry, landless peasants. In Brazil, rival iron ore giant CVRD has had its major Carajas railroad cut by about 200 peasants who have invaded the tracks and thrown stones at trains as they agitate for agrarian reforms. The protesters are part of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers whose slogan is “in defence of agrarian reform and against imperialism.” CVRD is now seeking to have police remove the protesters as soon as possible. But on the flipside, any production delays will only stoke an already hot spot market for iron ore and strengthen the hand of producers at upcoming pricing talks with Chinese and Japanese steelmills. Price negotiators will be circling each other at the Japan-Australia business conference in Tokyo with BHP Iron Ore boss Ian Ashby and Rio's head of iron ore marketing, Sam Walsh, both expected to be in attendance. Macquarie Equities is forecasting a global shortfall in seaborne iron ore exports this year of about 30 million tonnes, compared with the industry's original expectations. It noted CVRD's operations had already been hit by rain delays and maintenance shutdowns that will likely see it ship, at the most, 287 million tonnes in 2007 -- down from CVRD's target of 300 million tonnes. Rio has stockpiled about 4.6 million tonnes of iron ore at its West Australian operations as it battles bottlenecks. ``This represents some $US230 million ($257 million) of iron ore that is currently not in the market, which can only strengthen the market tightness, and bodes well for a strong contract price increase, particularly as we are on the eve of the contract negotiation season,'' JP Morgan said in a research note yesterday. The stock build is the result of a car dumper at Cape Lambert port being shut for maintenance for 14 days, and Rio's move to restructure its stockpiles for its new Pilbara blend iron ore. Rio disappointed the market on Wednesday with lower-than-expected production numbers in the wake of two train derailments, and the market focus is now on BHP Billiton's quarterly numbers, due out on Tuesday. But earnings downgrades on Rio were minimal at around just 1 to 2 per cent, given continued strength in commodity prices. A key positive was that Rio remained on track with its planned iron ore expansions. ``This puts Rio in a good position to benefit from a buoyant iron ore market, although the cost pressures look set to continue,'' ABN AMRO said. Rio shares yesterday bounced back, gaining $2.83, or 2.6 per cent, to $112.83. Macquarie Bank is forecasting a massive 50 per cent rise in benchmark iron ore prices for the coming year, compared with consensus expectations for a still hefty 25-35 per cent rise.

Read more!

Ocean Adification, Accelerating Emissions

Some frightening, and related, news from two Australian sources:

According to the Australian Research Council, a third of global marine life is endangered by ocean acidification. This is caused by a long-term build-up of carbon emissions: the world's oceans are believed to have absorbed a third of all carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

Coral reefs are among the most threatened; the Science Daily article notes that “[g]lobally, the welfare of 500 million people is closely linked to the goods and services provided by coral reef biodiversity.”

This should be taken alongside the IPCC's warning that 20-30% of all species could be endangered by climate change.

And this process will only speed up, because the rate of increase in global emissions is…increasing. The Adelaide Advertiser reports that researchers at the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Centre, and the group Global Carbon Project, have found that global carbon emissions increased 3% annually from 2000 to 2006. This represents a tripling of the rate of increase from the 1990s, when it was 1% annually.


The researchers found that:

“The rate at which carbon dioxide was being absorbed by oceans and land had also decreased in the past 50 years.
The efficiency of the Southern Ocean in particular to absorb carbon dioxide had reduced by 30 per cent in the past 20 years. The analysis is published today in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

[…] ``The message from this picture is emissions are increasing and a lot faster than we thought they would, even a few years ago. Dr [Mike] Raupach said oceans were ``overwhelmed'' by the amount of emissions in the atmosphere and were unable to soak up the carbon dioxide as fast as it was produced. Deforestation, heatwaves and drought had affected the amount of carbon land could absorb, he said.”

In 2006, the British Treasury issued a 700-page report on climate change by its senior economist, Sir Nicolas Stern. Some of Stern's predictions include a 200 million environmental refugees by mid-century, and a contraction of the global economy by one fifth, or about $7 trillion.






Read more!

Climate Change as Entropy/Cost Externalization

Depending on who you ask, between 66% and 80% of all past carbon emissions can be traced to the OECD countries, which comprise 12% of the world’s population. But the biggest victims of climate change are the 4 billion + rural and urban poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America. There is evidence that the Sahel famines in the 1970s and 1980s, which killed millions of Africans, were caused by carbon monoxide pollution in the US and EU. The British Foreign Minister, Margaret Beckett, has said that the Darfur conflict is largely being driven by climate change. Now the IPCC is predicting that the poor in the South will face exacerbated food insecurity, threat from extreme weather events, with all their bacteriological effects, as a result of climate change. None of this has to happen. But the main culprits are bluffing and resisting action on climate change. The logical conclusion of Northern recalcitrance is the use of force to suppress the human consequences of desertification, flooding, soil erosion, hurricanes, and disease. And it seems that the governments of the US, EU and Australia are preparing to do exactly that.

In an article in the Financial Times last week, Fiona Harvey reported (italics mine):

“The award of the peace prize to the UN's climate change panel shows how the problem of global warming has been recast from an environmental issue to one of international security. It is the latest attempt to highlight the potential for conflict that climate change will bring. In April, the UK government brought climate change before the United Nations Security Council for the first time. Margaret Beckett, then British foreign minister, labelled climate change as one of the key factors behind the conflict in Darfur, because desertification had forced people from their traditional homes and into areas where they competed with others for scarce resources such as water.

Around the same time, a group of 11 influential retired US generals produced a report on the military implications of climate change, warning it could prolong the war on terrorism and foster political instability that some governments would be unable to handle. The move to reframe climate change started with Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general. Shortly before he left office, he warned: "Climate change is not just an environmental issue, as too many people still believe. It is an all-encompassing threat."

[…] In the most comprehensive survey of climate change science yet produced, the IPCC warned earlier this year that global warming would cause widespread food shortages in the developing world. Other destabilising results would include increased flooding, particularly in Asia, as well as fiercer storms and prolonged droughts. John Ashton, special representative of the UK government on climate change, told the Financial Times there were signs of the problem already. He pointed to the recent record rises in the price of grain, which showed that droughts in key grain-growing areas were pushing up prices and forcing governments such as China to look at ways of tackling the problem. Another risk to international security is that the disastrous consequences of climate change will be spread unevenly around the world. Northern regions such as parts of the US, Canada, Russia and Europe may benefit from climate change in the form of increased agricultural productivity[!], but the regions least able to cope - southern Africa, southern Asia and parts of South America - would be hardest hit as a warming climate reduced agricultural yields and led to increased droughts and floods. This disparity could increase the number of migrants and lead to political instability.” [emphasis added]

The latter point, that Northern agriculture might actually benefit from climate change, combined with the recasting of the issue in military terms, presents a very ugly picture of greed and mutually reinforcing inequalities. It’s as if one farmer was using a type of pesticide that improved his wheat yield while destroying his neighbor’s corn, and reacted to his neighbor’s protests by erecting a barbed-wire fence and hiring more guards.

Similarly, Charles J. Hanley of AP reports:

“A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon warned that abrupt climate change "could potentially destabilize the geopolitical environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints." Now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that warmer and drier conditions are already shortening the growing season in Africa's Sahel, a conflict-ridden region long burdened by food and water shortages. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the German scientists cited other potential "hot-spots," including:

-Egypt's vital, low-lying Nile Delta, where the livelihoods of millions may be at risk from rising sea levels and salinization of agricultural areas.

-The Asian subcontinent, where the retreat of Himalayan glaciers will dry up downstream water supplies, and rising seas and stronger cyclones will threaten tens of millions on the Bay of Bengal coast.

-The poor nations of Central America, where more intense hurricanes could severely damage economies, destabilize political systems and send streams of uprooted people toward the U.S. border.

Global efforts have faltered, however, in trying to cut back emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases. [Hmmm…maybe that’s because the biggest polluters and the biggest victims are separated by thousands of miles and heavily guarded borders?] That in itself may help sharpen world tensions, the German report said. If, amid recriminations and finger-pointing, governments fail to unite on global warming, "climate change will draw ever-deeper lines of division and conflict in international relations," it said.

Leaders are growing nervous. At the U.S. Army War College last March, military and scientific specialists quietly convened in a colloquium on "Global Climate Change: National Security Implications." Among the topics discussed: the possible need for a new National Security Act to "oblige intergovernmental cooperation" on climate by future U.S. administrations.” [emphasis added]

The noises coming from Australia are no different. According to an AAP News report:

“Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty says climate change, with the threat of water and food shortages and refugees fleeing rising sea levels, is the greatest security risk of this century. He says the fast-changing situation in China could be the epicentre of such problems. "We could see a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water," Mr Keelty said in a speech in Adelaide last night. "Crops could fail, disease could be rampant and flooding might be so frequent that people en masse would be on the move. "Even if only some, if not all, of this occurs, climate change is going to be the security issue of the 21st century. "It's not difficult to see the policing implications that might arise in the not-too-distant future." If such problems took hold in China, millions of people would move looking for new lands, he said. "For China to feed its predicted 2030 population, it needs to increase its food production by about 50 per cent above today's levels," Mr Keelty said. "How does it achieve this, if its available land is dramatically shrinking and millions of people are on the move because of land and water. "In their millions, people could begin to look for new land and they'll cross oceans and borders to do it.” The existing cultural tensions may be exacerbated as large numbers of people undertake a forced migration. "The potential security issues are enormous and should not be underestimated." [emphasis added]

Similarly, the Turkish military establishment is worried about its water-scarce desert neighbors. According to the Turkish Daily News:

“Water hungry countries like Israel, Iraq and Syria could become threats in the future, said the Office of the Chief of Staff's Military History and Strategic Assessment Directorate's expert, Lieutenant Colonel Suleyman Ozmen, in a military publication. In the latest edition of Armed Services (Silahli Kuvvetler) magazine, Ozmen said just like the rest of the world, climate change is the biggest threat facing Turkey and that the national security strategy needed to be amended with climate change in mind.

"Turkey may be forced to wage war to protect its citizens and living space. Our national security strategy needs to be amended in accordance with the risks and threats caused by climate change. The improvement of the military's capabilities on domestic and international security, emergencies and population transfers is being discussed," he said in the article. The rivers Euphrates and Tigris in the east will increase the strategic value of eastern and southeastern Turkey, he said, adding, "In 2025, five billion people will find it difficult to gain access to clean water. When one considers the fact that Turkey has the cleanest water resources in the region, especially countries like Israel, Syria and Iraq that face serious water shortages may become threats to Turkey." Ozmen said water scarcity will also increase domestic threats. "Lack of water may result in food shortages and an economic collapse," he said. [emphasis added]

Agence France-Presse reports:

“The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in its annual review of world affairs that governments need to do more to tackle a resurgent Al-Qaeda as well as limit the damage from global warming. […] On global warming, the analysts assessed that although there was growing, but still not universal, recognition that the problem exists and may be man-made, urgent action was needed to tackle the rise in harmful emissions. Unchecked, the effects will be "catastrophic -- on the level of a nuclear war -- if not in this century, certainly in the next", they said in a 23-page assessment of the fall-out from the rise in the Earth's temperature. Climate change has important effects for global security, the IISS said, as it could potentially increase migration, water and food shortages and exacerbate existing flashpoints and tensions, particularly in Africa. In a stark warning, it said action taken in the next few years will determine whether the second half of the 21st century will see instability, human tragedy and war, or an easing of and adjustment to climate change and a new emphasis on greater international co-operation.” [emphasis added]

The warnings of the IPCC have posed a direct conflict between the fuel consumption of the North and the major “developing economies,” and the food security of the world’s farmers (and those who depend on their output). This is most obvious in the effects of greenhouse gas output, but it is also true at the level of inputs. In chilling article in the UK Guardian, John Vidal reports:

“The era of "agrofuels" has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1bn gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use.[…]"The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue," says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, and author of the book Who Will Feed China? It is not going to get any better, says Brown. The UN's World Food Organisation predicts that demand for biofuels will grow by 170% in the next three years. A separate report from the OECD, the club of the world's 30 richest countries, suggested food-price rises of between 20% and 50% over the next decade, and the head of Nestle, the world's largest food processor, said prices would remain high as far as anyone could see ahead.

A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," says the US Department of Agriculture. In seven of the past eight years the world has actually grown less grain than it consumed, says Brown. World stocks of grain - that is, the food held in reserve for times of emergency - are now sufficient for just over 50 days. According to experts, we are in "the post- food-surplus era".

The food crisis, Brown warns, is only just beginning. What worries him as much as the new competition between food and fuel is that the booming Chinese and Indian populations - the two largest nations in the world, with nearly 40% of the world's population between them - are giving up their traditional vegetable-rich diets to adopt typical "American" diets that contain more meat and dairy products. Meat demand in China has quadrupled in 30 years, and in India, milk and egg products are increasingly popular. In itself, this is no problem, say Brown and others, except that it means an acceler- ated demand for water to grow more food. It takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and increased demand will require huge amounts of grain-growing land. Much of this, of course, will need to be irrigated. "Water tables are now falling in countries that contain over half the world's people," Brown points out. "While numerous analysts and policymakers are concerned about a future of water shortages, few have connected the dots to see that a future of water shortages means a future of food shortages."

[…] Climate change, meanwhile, is leading to more intense rains, unpredictable storms, longer-lasting droughts, and interrupted seasons. In Britain, the recent floods will result in a shortage of vegetables such as potatoes and peas, and cereals such as wheat. This comes on top of a 4.9% rise in food prices in the year to May - well over consumer price inflation - and a 9.6% hike in vegetable prices. Britain can get by, but elsewhere climate change is proving disastrous. "I met leaders from Madagascar reeling from seven cyclones in the first six months of the year," Josette Sheeran, new director of the World Food Programme, told colleagues in Rome recently. "I asked them when the season ends and was told that such questions are becoming more difficult to answer. Farmers know that predictable patterns in weather are becoming a thing of the past. How does the global food supply system deal with such changing risk?"The answer is: with ever greater difficulty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020 as a result of climate change. "Anything even close to a 50% reduction in yields would obviously pose huge problems," said Sheeran. Within a week, Lesotho had declared a food emergency after the worst drought in 30 years and greatly reduced harvests in neighbouring South Africa pushed prices well beyond the reach of most of the population. [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, John Zaracostas of Lloyds List reports:

“Calls for a review of food aid shipment policy come as a top UN climate change expert, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has highlighted the threat posed by a decline in the availability of water in Africa to agricultural yields and food prices. The UN intergovernmental climate change panel chairman is alarmed over the impact of increased plantings of corn and other crops for biofuel production on global food supplies. 'This is a growing concern, because if there's going to be competition between food and fuel then clearly this would leave the poorest of the poor in a position of disadvantage‛,' Dr Pachauri told reporters in Geneva. 'Lower stocks worldwide mean prices of food grains will go up and this has stark implications for the poor all over the world.'‛ UN climate change experts are calling for a biofuels policy to avoid damaging the prospects of high-yield agricultural crops needed to feed the poorer nations. 'Let's face it, the population of the world is going up, and it's going up in some of the poorest regions of the world,' said Dr Pachauri. [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, AFP reports that the floods that struck Africa in July, August and September were “the worst floods in three decades.” The floods, which have affected over 1.5 million people in 22 countries, “are believed by some experts to be caused by the "La Nina" weather pattern, thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean. Several government officials have warned that the floods were a wake-up call for the world, and especially the poorest countries, to increase their preparedness for disasters induced by climate change.”

And the New York Times reported in August:

"Nothing tests the mettle of government in this part of the world than a fierce monsoon, as unusually heavy rains across South Asia showed this week, leaving a trail of death and ruin and raising the risk of disease. Freak rains, which scientists describe as a hallmark of climate change, seemed to be responsible. The devastation was all the more severe because flimsy dams and embankments collapsed under the weight of floodwaters. The mud houses of the poor were the first to wash away. Weather scientists have said South Asia is likely to get much more unpredictable rain in the coming decades, bringing greater challenges for its governments to prepare and cope with nature's fury. In Bangladesh, perennially inundated because so much of it is low-lying delta, more than half of the districts were under water. More than one million families were affected by flooding, according to government officials; the death toll after a week's heavy rains stood at 58. [emphasis added]

What all these events suggest is that climate change is happening now. It's only being discussed as a "future" problem in the North because, as one would expect of a dissipative structure, the gains and losses of industrial capitalism are separated in time and space (climate change is just the culmination of this tendency). The real costs of the system have so far been effectively dumped on peripheral areas (most of the South, parts of the North), and on future generations. In both cases, it's "out of sight, out of mind" for metropolitans, because the same vested interests that are behind the problem block its accurate diagnosis in public discourse, let along treatment in policy. So we need to keep it in our sight, in our minds, and act.

Read more!

Taiwan Missile Crisis? And: Indigenous Rights, Global Health Toll from Pollution

Taiwan is one of the largest recipents of U.S. arms, recieving $540 million in high-tech weaponry in 2003 alone. U.S. planners are now worried that China will gain a military edge over Taiwan through a French arms deal with Pakistan. According to Jane's Defense Weekly, quoted by USA Today, Pakistan is developing a JF-17 jet fighter with China, and it is trying to buy air-to-air missiles from the MBDA company, and radar from the Thales company, which use the same technology as the French-built Mirage jet fighters used by Taiwan. The diffusion of this technology to China could tip the military balance in an attempted future annexation of Taiwan. Alexander Neill of the British Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies predicts a "quite vicious" reaction from the U.S. if the deal goes through. My reaction is that the U.S. arming of Taiwan is much more provocative than the Russian arming of Cuba leading up to the Cuban missile crisis ever was, given that China has a more legitimate historical claim to Taiwan than the U.S. did to Cuba. And can we imagine the absurdity of Kremlin officials reacting "viciously" to the diffusion of the missile technology possessed by Cuba to the U.S.?

The U.N. passed a declaration of rights for indigenous peoples on Thursday. 143 countries voted in favor. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand voted against it, while Colombia, Suriname, Guyana, Russia and Namibia abstained. Opponents protested especially the article stating that "indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired." And with good reason: if it were honored, most of the territory in the Americas, Australasia, southern Africa and southern and eastern Russia could be claimed as indigenous property, an alarming prospect for many a priveleged descendant-of-Euro-settlers. As a Reuters article notes, "That could potentially put in question most of the land ownership in countries, such as those that opposed the declaration, whose present population is largely descended from settlers who took over territory from previous inhabitants."

David Pimentel, an ecologist and agricultural scientist at Cornell, has published a study collating "120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases." The conclusion? About 40% of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution! According to the study:
-Almost half the people on earth live in urban areas where inadequate sanitation exposes them to epidemics.
-1.2 billion people don't have access to clean water. As a result, 80% of all infectious diseases are caused by waterborne infections.
-1.2-2.7 million people a year are killed by malaria, often contracted by mosquitoes that breed in polluted water.
-3 million people a year are killed by air pollution.
-5 million people a year are killed by unsanitary living conditions, over half of them children.
-As microbes become more drug resistant, global warming is increasing the ability of parasites and exotic species to invade new areas, leading to increased threats of West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, etc.

Recall that in 2005, the UN warned that there were already 20 million "environmental refugees" worldwide. Desertification in western China and the African Sahel is already generating waves of migrants. Northeastern Brazil (one of the places catastrophically effected by El Niño events in the late 19th century, as documented by Mike Davis in "Late Victorian Holocausts") is already generating "eco-refugees." Rising sea levels in South Asia will perhaps effect the most people of all. Read more!

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!