By Soren Ambrose
NEW YORK, Jul 27 2015 (IPS)

The final round of negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals – the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, due to be inaugurated in September at the U.N. General Assembly – is now underway in New York.

Courtesy of Soren Ambrose/ActionAid

The United Nations and many member governments want to conclude the debates by the end of July, so that there will not be open debate during the SDG Summit. But reports indicate that the atmosphere in the room is one of seething distrust.

That’s because of what happened during the Financing for Development (FfD) conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia last month.

The developing countries – those grouped together in the “G77,” which 50 years after its founding actually has 134 members – were pushing a proposal for a universal intergovernmental organisation, within the U.N., which would have as its mandate reform and maintenance of the international tax system.

While this proposal would not have immediately remedied any of the myriad ways that corporations dodge taxes in developing countries, it would be a decisive change to the system that has allowed such activities to flourish.

To the extent that there are international rules, or standards and guidelines, on taxation now, they are proposed and elaborated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), a club of 34 of the world’s richest countries. Every once in a while they make a show of consulting those other 134 countries, but those others never actually get a vote.Ultimately it’s the pressure of the people which will force their governments to be responsible. The movement to stand up to those who have hijacked our power is building.

In the new proposed way of making decisions on international tax rules, every country would have an equal voice and equal vote. This fight matters is because developing countries are confronting the need to change how the rules are made, and who makes the rules.

Until they manage that, they will always, at best, be running to stay in place. Changing who makes the rules is a necessary, although not sufficient condition, for creating permanent change.

Taxation is vital because wealthy companies and individuals get and stay rich by using a portion of their considerable resources to hire lawyers and accountants to guide them in dodging the taxes they should be paying in the countries where they excavate, grow, or purchase their raw materials, assemble their products, and make an increasing proportion of their sales.

If they don’t have such staff in-house, they can hire the services of big accounting firms for whom this is the most lucrative activity.

Most big companies manipulate “tax treaties” between countries and tax havens like Switzerland, Mauritius, and the Cayman Islands to create legal fictions that exempt them from paying most of the taxes they owe.

What they do is usually not technically illegal, because of the impossibility of keeping up with the tactics of the armies of experts dedicated to avoiding taxes. But neither is it quite ethical.

This deprives countries of the revenue – to the tune of at least 100 billion dollars every year – that they need to fund development, and ensures the perpetuation of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few. That wealth translates to power – a veritable global plutocracy.

The OECD, to be fair, has made some moves to clamp down on the most egregious forms of tax avoidance, including their “base erosion and profit shifting” (BEPS) process begun in 2013.

The corporate lawyers and accountants were a little nervous about BEPS, but with the process winding up, it appears that any reforms it demands will not be manageable. The promises at the outset of the process to include developing countries never amounted to much.

The FfD process in the U.N. was, of course, universal. The U.N. and national governments usually like to have the “outcome document” finalised before a summit meeting. The prospect of a messy negotiation with thousands of advocates just outside the door makes them nervous.

But after months of negotiations in New York and a series of missed deadlines, the big debate over the tax body was not resolved. The ministers would go to Addis facing open negotiations.

Bolstered by the support of hundreds of civil society groups, the G77 governments – a group that has to accommodate the interests of very disparate countries – held together. Three BRICS countries – South Africa as the chair of the G77, along with India and Brazil – were vocal actors on the side of the developing countries, something they can’t always be relied on to do as they ascend the global power ladder.

With negotiators starting to meet before the formal start of the meetings on July 13, there were several days filled with ever-shifting rumours. But on the evening of July 15, the eve of the scheduled end of the conference, the announcement came: there would be an outcome document little changed from the unsatisfactory draft they brought from New York.

Promises were made to expand the resources and prestige of the existing U.N. Committee of Tax Experts, but nothing more. No universal membership, and no mandate for reform.

The G77 held out to the end. But the rich countries, led by the United States with the steady support of the European Union, Canada, Japan, and Australia, refused to give up the regime of loopholes and havens and double-dealing that adds up to billions in lost revenue every year.

Make no mistake, ordinary people in rich countries also lose out as corporations dodge taxes. But with their territories serving as the leading facilitators of tax avoidance in the world, their governments showed they want the present system to endure.

The current global hyper-capitalism now puts no constraints on capital. Unlimited profits, unlimited wealth, and unlimited power have been accruing to the finance industry and the wealthy corporations and individuals it serves for over 40 years.

The rich countries’ politicians not only put up with it, they tout the “private sector” as the panacea for development in poor countries, with nearly no evidence to support them.

And at home, they cut public services and impose austerity, explaining that government just can’t afford to serve the people. Their priority has been corporations’ and investors’ bottomless appetite for profit and power.

As my colleague Ben Phillips has written about the FfD, it’s actually good news that the rich countries had to put an ugly stop to the negotiations, with barely a face-saving compromise to point to. Usually they manage to find a way to assign the blame to someone else.

Forcing them to show their hand is valuable; it’s clear that those making the rules are far more identified with a powerful few than with the public they claim to serve.

The next step is at the SDG Summit at the end of September, at the time of the annual U.N. General Assembly meetings. There we will learn whether and to what extent the developing countries will stand up to those who have monopolised power for so long. If they do, we may be on the road to reversing parts of the system that perpetuates the status quo.

Whatever happens, we aren’t going anywhere. Civil Society won’t change this global dynamic by attending these conferences, or through polite lobbying. We will have to endure many more meetings, and more setbacks.

But ultimately it’s the pressure of the people which will force their governments to be responsible. The movement to stand up to those who have hijacked our power is building.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Agroecology is a different way of seeing the food system because it deals with issues related to who gets access to resources and the processes that determine this access. Photo credit: UN Photo

By Geneviève Lavoie-Mathieu
ROME, Sep 24 2014 (IPS)

“It is time for a new agricultural model that ensures that enough quality food is produced where it is most needed, that preserves nature and that delivers ecosystem services of local and global relevance” – in a word, it is time for agroecology.

The call came from Pablo Tittonell of Wageningen University, one of the world’s leading institutions in the field of agriculture science, speaking at the International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition, organised by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The symposium, held at FAO headquarters in Rome on Sep. 18-19, gathered experts from many backgrounds, including scientists, scholars, policy-makers and farmers.In times of climate change, food insecurity and poverty, “agroecology, especially when paired with principles of food sovereignty and food justice, offers opportunities to address all of these problems" – open letter in support of the International Symposium on Agroecology

In an open letter ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Summit on Sep. 23 in New York, some 70 scientists and scholars said that in times of climate change, food insecurity and poverty, “agroecology, especially when paired with principles of food sovereignty and food justice, offers opportunities to address all of these problems.”

“The FAO symposium contributes to building momentum for agroecology in Rome,” Gaëtan Vanloqueren, an agro-economist and one of the speakers, told IPS. Since 2008, there has been a renewed debate on agricultural models and the food system in general, he explained, but this symposium is, up to now, the most significant effort made by FAO.

Vanloqueren, who was adviser to former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, has a positive view of recent interest by a number of organisations in Europe and elsewhere to talk, research and promote agroecology, but “the danger”, he told IPS, “is that it becomes the new ‘sustainable development’, a new buzzword and catch-all phrase that can mean just about anything.”

“There remains a large amount of misunderstanding related to agroecology,” said Luca Chinotti, Oxfam’s GROW campaign adviser. For example, “a lot of people think that organic agriculture is the same as agroecology” and “sustainable agriculture is used by different people, meaning very different things,” the Oxfam spokesperson told IPS.

The expression ‘sustainable agriculture’, for example, is used by both Monsanto, the ag-biotech giant, and Greenpeace, the environmental organisation which strongly opposes the use of genetically modified seeds.

There is much work that needs to be done with respect to informing people about what agroecology really is, Chinotti told IPS.

According to Vanloqueren, agroecology includes a set of practices, such as the diversifying of species and genetic resources and the recycling of nutrients and organic matter. But it is also more than the scientific study of ecology applied to agriculture. It encompasses a set of socio-economic and political principals that questions the basis of the current dominant agricultural system.

“Agroecology should not be seen as a model or a technological package that can be replicated anywhere at any time. There are very few practices that can be applied to a great number of situations,” explained Celso Marcatto, technical officer on sustainable agriculture at ActionAid International.

This is why, he said, agroecology “has more to do with introducing new ways of thinking, rather than distributing ready-made solutions.”

Agroecology is a different way of seeing the food system because it deals with issues related to who gets access to resources and the processes that determine this access. That is why agroecology is also considered a social movement.

“The principals of autonomy, the importance of the combination of traditional knowledge and economic knowledge, the co-construction of solutions by peasants’ organisations, researchers and citizens are key in defining agroecology and are the basis of what distinguishes the movement from the so-called ‘sustainable ecological intensification’,” Vanloqueren told IPS.

At the centre of agroecology is the “role of farmers that needs to be scaled out and scaled across,” said Vanloqueren.

Agroeology is also about substituting inputs with knowledge, he added, and it is about fostering autonomy through both knowledge and independence from global markets. Finally, agroecology is about social equity and about democracy.

However, many obstacles remain in the way of convincing policy-makers and donors to advocate and promote the adoption of agroecology.

Quentin Delachapelle, a French farmer and vice-president of the Federation Nationale des Centres d’Initiatives pour Valoriser l’Agriculture et le Milieu rural (FNCIVAM), told the FAO symposium that one of the main obstacles to the larger adoption of agroecology is that it is based on a longer term vision.

“Unfortunately”, he said, “current public and market policies are based solely on a short-term perspective.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, drive up environmental remediation costs. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jul 22 2014 (IPS)

Extreme poverty and hunger can be eliminated, but only through far greater efforts to reduce carbon emissions that are overheating the planet and producing punishing droughts, catastrophic floods and ever wilder weather, said climate activists involved in talks to set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Last weekend, the United Nations released the 17 draft SDGs following a year and a half of discussion by more than 60 countries participating in the voluntary process."You can’t climb out of poverty if you have to rebuild your home every other year." -- Harjeet Singh

The SDGs are a set of goals and targets intended to eliminate extreme poverty and pursue sustainable development. When finalised in 2015, at the expiration of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs are intended to be the roadmap for countries to follow in making environmental, social and economic policies and decisions.

“Disasters are a major reason many of the MDG goals will not be met,” said Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International, an NGO based in Johannesburg.

“A big flood or typhoon can set a region’s development back 20 years,” Singh, ActionAid’s international coordinator of disaster risk reduction, told IPS.

Last year’s Super Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people and left nearly two million homeless in the Philippines, he said. Less than a year earlier, the Philippines was hit by Typhoon Bopha, which killed more than 1,000 people and caused an estimated 350 million dollars in damage.

In the past two weeks, the country was struck by two destructive typhoons. The Philippines may face another 20 before the end of typhoon season.

“Everything is affected by disasters — food security, health, education, infrastructure and so on. You can’t climb out of poverty if you have to rebuild your home every other year,” Singh said.

Goals for poverty elimination or nearly anything else in the proposed SDGs are “meaningless without reductions in carbon emissions”, he said.

Carbon emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are trapping heat from the sun. The amount of this extra heat-energy is like exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year, according to James Hansen, a climate scientist and former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As a result the entire planet is now 0.8 C hotter.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado previously told IPS.

Climate change doesn’t necessarily cause weather disasters but it certainly makes them worse, said Trenberth, an expert on extreme events.

Climate and low-carbon development pathways need to be fully reflected in the SDGs, said  Bernadette Fischler, co-chair of Beyond 2015 UK. Beyond 2015 is a coalition of more than 1,000 civil society organisations working for a strong and effective set of SDGs.

“Climate change is an urgent issue and needs to be highly visible in the SDGs,” Fischler told IPS.

In the current SDG draft climate is goal 13. It calls on countries to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. There is no target to reduce emissions, and nearly all of the targets are about adapting to the coming climate impacts.

“Countries don’t want to pre-empt their positions in the U.N. climate change negotiations,” said Lina Dabbagh of the Climate Action Network, a global network of environmental NGOs.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC) involves every country in a negotiation to create a new global climate treaty in 2015. After five years of talks, countries are deadlocked on key issues.

“The SDGs are a huge opportunity to move forward on climate, but the climate goal is weak and there is no action agenda,” Dabbagh told IPS.

Finalising the SDGs draft was highly politicised, resulting in very cautious wording. The country alliances and divisions are remarkably similar to those in the UNFCCC negotiations, including the South-North divide, she said.

Every country is concerned about climate change and its impacts but there is wide disagreement on how this should be reflected in the SDGs, with some only wanting a mention in the preamble, said Fischler.

Some countries such as the United Kingdom think 17 goals is too many and it is possible that some will be cut during the final year of negotiations that start once the SDGs are formally introduced at the U.N. General Assembly on Sep. 24.

The day before that the U.N. secretary-general will host a Climate Summit with leaders of many countries in attendance. The summit is intended to kick-start political momentum for an ambitious, global, legal climate treaty in 2015.

“Civil society will make a big push during the summit to make climate an integral part of the SDGs,” said Dabbagh.

However, much work remains to help political leaders and the public understand that climate action is the key to eliminating extreme poverty and achieving sustainable development, she said.

The G77+China group of 133 developing countries negotiating a new international deal at COP19 in Warsaw to combat climate change walked out of the talks in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to protest developed countries’ reluctance to commit to loss and damage.

“Today at 4 a.m. the delegation of Bolivia and all delegations of G77 walked out because we do not see a clear cut commitment by developed countries to reach an agreement,” said Bolivian negotiator Rene Orellana speaking on Wednesday morning at the COP19 climate summit.

What seems to have happened at the closed night-time session of the so-called contact group of loss and damage is that Juan Hoffmaister, the Bolivian negotiator on loss and damage, who was representing the entire G77 + China group, walked out in the name of developing countries. The walk-out has a strong symbolic value and is unprecedented in the last decade of climate talks.

Orellana further explained that the walk-out was sparked by the attitude of developed countries, among them Norway, which proposed that loss and damage be discussed not under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developing countries requested but under the looser Rio+20 sustainable development framework.

“G77 put forward a very constructive proposal on loss and damage and have been engaging meaningfully with all countries, but [during the loss and damage session taking place into the early hours of Nov. 20], Australians were behaving like high school boys in class, their behaviour was rude and disrespectful,” commented Harjeet Singh from the NGO ActionAid International on Wednesday.

“On top of that, in the middle of the night, Norway came up with a proposal whereby they rejected everything, they rejected discussing socioeconomic losses, non-economic losses, rehabilitation, compensation,” added Singh. “But these are the crucial elements of loss and damage; if you do not discuss these, how can you discuss loss and damage?”

Developing countries negotiating at COP19 have repeatedly stated that creating an international mechanism under UNFCCC to address loss and damage is the biggest expectation they have of the Warsaw meeting.

G77+China last week proposed a text meant to provide the basis of negotiations for creating such an international mechanism for loss and damage, which called for this issue to be treated as a third, separate, pillar in the UNFCCC process, in addition to mitigation and adaptation.

The super-typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippines right before COP19 started brought even more to the fore the fact that some countries are already suffering the deadly impacts of climate change, having moved into the so-called “post-adaptation” phase. For these countries, assistance to deal with the loss and damage already caused by climate change would be crucial, argued G77+China.

But developed countries have been reluctant to give such a prominent role under UNFCCC to loss and damage.

According to a U.S. document outlining Washington’s negotiating position at COP which was leaked to the media during the first week of the Warsaw meeting, accepting loss and damage as a third pillar would mean “focusing on blame and liability”. That is, developed countries would have to accept historical responsibility for emissions causing climate change and commit to paying the price.

Australia and Norway appear to have carried this reluctance towards loss and damage into the midnight session.

Speaking on Wednesday, UK negotiator Ed Davey confirmed his country’s support for the developed countries’ resistance. Davey said, “We do not accept the argument on compensation. I don’t think the compensation analysis is fair and sensible, but that does not mean we are not committed to helping the poorest countries adapt.”

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard stated that it was concerning that developing countries took such a tough stance and made an appeal for countries not to backtrack on talks.

While the walk-out makes developing countries vulnerable to the accusation of being responsible for holding back the Warsaw negotiations, developing countries and NGOs are pointing out that it was the attitude and behaviour of developed countries that forced them to issue such an ultimatum in the first place.

“We are very disappointed by the slow process on negotiations on loss and damage, the most important measure of success here in Warsaw,” said Philippines negotiator Yeb Sano on Wednesday.

“The walk-out happened because a very strong proposal for a loss and damage mechanism put forward by G77 and China did not receive enough traction,” explained Meena Raman from the NGO Third World Network. “This is a postponing tactic by developed countries in order not to make a decision on loss and damage here in Warsaw.”

Since COP19 began on Nov. 11, developed countries have given few signs of being committed to a meaningful international climate deal.

This week, Japan announced that it would cut a previous commitment of reducing CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2020 to a three percent cut only. Australia recently announced an intention to scrap an existing carbon tax, while Canada indicated it might not meet a pledge to reduce emissions made at the Copenhagen 2009 COP.

Developing countries have indicated that they are ready to discuss more if developed countries take a more serious stance. As an example, Indian Minister of Environment Jayanthi Natarajan declared Wednesday upon arrival in Warsaw that her country would be open to temporarily using the existing Green Climate Fund for doing immediate disbursements for loss and damage, until a proper international mechanism is set in place.