Small-scale farmer, Zimbabwean Ruth Chikweya, struggles with her maize crop. Both rich and poor nations struggle from issues of food insecurity. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
DOHA, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

Qatar may be one of the richest countries in the world, but it has something in common with its African counterparts – food insecurity.

This Middle-Eastern oil-producing nation imports 90 percent of its food because it is a dryland country.

“Food is very expensive here,” an immigrant Ghanaian taxi driver who opted to remain anonymous told IPS.

“Here, a litre of petrol is cheaper than water,” said the driver who spent the last week transporting the delegates at the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to their venue.

While Qatar’s issues of food insecurity stem from its terrain, African countries are struggling with food insecurity because of poverty and erratic weather patterns that have dramatically reduced agricultural production over the years, Emmanuel Seck, programme manager at the Dakar-based Environment and Development Action in the Third World, told IPS.

As African countries struggle to make use of their vast land resources to improve food production because of climate change, Qatar, like other Gulf States and emerging economies such as China, is leasing and buying land in Africa, said Seck. According to a 2012 report by the Oakland Institute, investors in the United States and Europe are the leaders in foreign land acquisition.

But developing countries such as Swaziland are already aligning their policies towards producing and supplying food for Qatar, and the two monarchies have established diplomatic relations.

“We have vast virgin land in our country and we can use it to produce food for Qatar to drive our economy,” head of Swaziland’s COP 18 technical mission, Mbuso Dlamini, told IPS.

Swaziland, however, is not producing enough staple food for its citizens, importing most of it from neighbouring South Africa. Swaziland’s largest foreign exchange earner is sugar.

According to the latest report from Worldwatch Institute, of the 70.2 million hectares of land leased or bought all over the world in the last decade, 34.3 percent is in Africa. Qatar and other Gulf States have acquired a combined 6.4 million hectares of land in developing countries.

Bruce Campbell, programme director at the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR) Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), said that a balance needed to be struck in order to ensure that poor communities that are dependent on subsistence farming are not kicked off their land to make way for agricultural developments by foreign governments and multinational companies.

“Countries need to put in place mechanisms that will ensure that the leasing of land does not disenfranchise communities,” Campbell told IPS.

He said that leasing land might not necessarily be a bad idea as some people are moving away from subsistence farming to finding jobs. Campbell said that the guidelines on the Responsible Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of Food Security spearheaded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation would help countries strike that balance.

Tanzanian researcher from the University of Dar es Salaam Emma Limenga warned African governments against leasing out land for long periods. Normally, land lease agreements last for 99 years, which Limenga said could jeopardise the food security of future generations.

“Remember, future generations are not responsible for the decisions that we make now,” Limenga said in an interview with IPS. “A 10- to 20-year lease agreement is reasonable.”

She said that leasing land and justifying the practice by saying that it would create jobs was neither right nor wrong. She pointed out that while poor communities may have access to land, they might not be able to buy food because of unemployment.

“Some communities are not even cultivating the land because of the erratic weather patterns … Access to jobs helps people to be able to buy food,” said Limenga.

Burger Patrice, the executive director of the NGO Centre d’Actions et de Realisations Internationales, told IPS that Africa’s poverty should not be an excuse for “land grabbing”.

Patrice explained that the rehabilitation of dryland was the solution to land grabbing and food insecurity.

“Drylands are a result of climate variations over many years,” he said. “It is cheaper to rehabilitate the land through the use of fertiliser and ecological agriculture than to let it continue to deteriorate.”

“It is in the interest of countries like Qatar to start producing their own food because at some point they will run out of oil and will not afford the high costs of importing this basic need,” said Patrice.

He said that although land has experienced the greatest impact of climate change, the negotiations in the Qatari capital of Doha have overlooked that aspect. And he maintained that the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification was a poor cousin in the U.N. system because land was not given the prominence it deserved.

COP 18 president Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah addresses a roomful of young delegates. Credit: Sallie Shatz – Courtesy of COP 18

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Dec 3 2012 (IPS)

The new Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change may one day have a bigger budget than the World Bank. At the moment, however, the Fund is empty.

No financial pledges have been made even though the Fund is supposed to begin dispensing money in 2013.

“Finance is at the heart of negotiations here,” said Oxfam International climate change policy advisor Tim Gore on the sidelines of the UN climate change negotiations at the 18th meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18), taking place in the capital of Qatar until Dec. 7.

“The issue has come to a head in Doha. Developing countries are bitter and saying rich industrialised countries are once again failing to deliver on their promises,” Gore told Tierramérica.

“The NGO community is calling on the COP president to convene a special roundtable on finance next week during the high-level segment,” he said.

Without that call by COP president Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah of Qatar, many ministers will arrive next week without the authority to do anything on finance. “I doubt the meeting will be successful without this,” added Gore.

In 2009, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, “developing countries bought into the sales pitch” by industrialised countries that they would get financial help beginning in 2013 and ramping up to 100 billion dollars a year in new and additional funding by 2020, said Gore.

In exchange for getting this Green Climate Fund – officially adopted at the following COP, in Cancún – they signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, a U.S.-backed voluntary emission reduction agreement.

This was a big compromise. Not only did developing countries want a legally binding agreement, they wanted larger emission reduction commitments from industrialised nations and they wanted a lot more money to help them cope with the impacts of climate change, said Gore.

To bridge the gap between 2010 and 2012, developed countries also agreed to a “Fast Start Finance” programme of 30 billion dollars.

But not all of that promised money has been delivered, and most of it was in the form of loans, not grants. Moreover, much of the money was not new or additional, but came out of development aid, said Nithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance.

Tracking a country’s actual contribution to Fast Start Finance and where the money has come from is extremely complex, Mwenda said in a press conference.

The Green Climate Fund must have clear reporting and verification measures along with a forum to independently oversee this, he said.

Should the promised billions for the Fund materialise, this might simply be more bad news for the world’s indigenous peoples if the money goes into massive tree plantations or mega-dams that end up displacing local communities, said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an indigenous representative from the Philippines.

“We will be in big trouble if the money goes into the wrong projects,” Tauli-Corpuz told Tierramérica.

The Green Climate Fund is creating environmental and social safeguards intended to prevent this. However, the involvement of indigenous peoples and civil society is limited.

The Fund is run by a board of 24 representatives, 12 each from industrialised and developing nations. There are four observers, two for civil society and two for private industry. Observers cannot vote and are often not allowed inside the room where the board meets, said Mrinal Kanti, a Tripura indigenous person from Bangladesh who has attended meetings as an observer.

“We don’t even get documents in advance. That makes it very difficult for us to participate,” Kanti said at a COP 18 side event. “Many board members are unaware of indigenous issues.”

Strong safeguards will also need to be combined with monitoring and verification and a “grievance” mechanism accessible to local people should a Green Climate Fund-financed project be having a negative impact, said Nira Amerasinghe of the Centre for International Environmental Law.

“Participation by indigenous people is key. The draft rules are very poor right now,” Amerasinghe told delegates.

There is also a major issue around the Fund’s governance. Industrialised countries want the board to run it, while developing countries think it should be under the UNFCCC, which gives every country an equal vote, said Tauli-Corpuz.

“What is happening at this COP is that rich countries are withholding pledges to fund the Green Climate Fund to see what concessions they can get from developing countries,” she said.

“The biggest fight at most of these COPs is over money,” she added.

Costa Rica takes a different view. “We’re not waiting. Acting to reduce our emissions has been very good for our economy,” said Monica Araya, a member of the Costa Rican negotiating team.

Since 2007, Costa Rica has been working towards the goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2021.

This small Central American country is sometimes criticised by other developing countries for taking ambitious steps outside of the UNFCCC process. “It is can be frustrating here,” Araya said in a press briefing.

“There is no question rich countries should do more. But we have to find more countries willing to compromise and put their national interests aside,” she said.

“It is not well recognised, but developing countries have made unprecedented efforts to reduce emissions in 2012. We can do far more, especially middle-income countries, if we work together,” she maintained.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Turkana women in Kenya. Turkana district was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Horn of Africa in the 2011 drought that affected the entire region. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
DOHA, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

The skyscraper Qatari capital city of Doha is a far cry from Cecilia Kibe’s home in Turkana district, a remote area in Kenya inhabited by mostly nomadic communities and pastoralists hit hard by the effects of climate change.

But the agriculturalist-cum-sociologist has come here to the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), thanks to funding from the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice (MRFCJ), to sit and listen as scientists, researchers, top government officials and activists argue their case.

Kibe is on a mission – to gather as much knowledge as possible to share with the women in her community. Turkana district was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Horn of Africa in the 2011 drought that affected the entire region.

According to Oxfam International, Turkana district has gone without good rain for about five years. And this has affected the community severely. In 2011 the United Nations news agency IRIN reported “Turkana has experienced malnutrition rates of up to 37.4 percent; the highest recorded in 20 years and more than double the U.N. World Health Organization emergency threshold of 15 percent.”

Back in Turkana district, Kibe runs an information-sharing network that she started because she refused to allow herself and the other women in her village to continue suffering from hunger as they repeatedly lost their crops in the prolonged drought.

“Most women in African rural communities still attribute the impact of climate change to different myths, including that God is upset with people,” Kibe told IPS.

“I work with 4,000 champions (women) who educate their fellow community members and help them come up with adaptation strategies,” she said. She named her organisation Kenya Climate Justice Women Champions, and has now expanded her network to benefit over 3,000 households.

“In turn the women identify their areas of need and, based on the information I get from international conferences such as this one, we start projects that address those challenges,” said Kibe. The projects are funded by MRFCJ.

She said that often the information from conferences such as COP 18 does not filter down to the people most affected by climate change.

“We need to get the information from this conference to help them understand what exactly is happening,” said Kibe.

Top of Kibe’s priority list of things to tackle is food insecurity. And the cultivation of cassava, a drought-tolerant crop, has been identified as part of the strategy to combat this. Previously people in Kibe’s area grew maize, which often failed because of the lack of rain.

Another priority is addressing water insecurity, Kibe said. Back home, women and children have to travel long distances to fetch water, which in many cases is contaminated.

“We have introduced solar water cleaning, which is a technology that uses a device that easily purifies water when placed in the sun,” explained Kibe. “It’s just a press of a button.”

Women are also encouraged to plant five trees each to combat carbon emissions.

What Kibe is doing is important. According to Trish Glazebrook, a researcher from the University of Texas:  “Knowledge transfer is very important because we know that in as much as women need to adapt, they also have to mitigate through climate smart technologies for their farming and sources of domestic energy.”

She told IPS that women in sub-Saharan Africa are not only victims of climate change, but are also contributing to pollution because they lack the technology to improve their farming methods and remain heavily dependent on agriculture, a sector that contributes to global emissions.

But Robinson, who was the first female president of Ireland, said Kibe’s story was a compelling case of why women should be adequately represented at the COP 18.

“A lot of rural women like Cecilia are doing a lot of work on the ground to adapt, but they are hardly recognised and they work with limited resources,” Robinson said.

Speaking at the first ever Gender Day at COP 18 on Nov. 27, Robinson called for more active participation of women in the conference. For more than 10 years gender organisations have advocated aggressively for this day to be recognised in the climate negotiation process.

“We need gender balance in all the UNFCCC bodies, including the attendance,” she said.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, concurred.

“It’s very dumb not to maximise the participation of a group that is over 50 percent of the world population,” she said.

She said she was proud that the gender text was included in the UNFCCC process, although the words needed to be transformed into action.

Mozambican Minister of Environment Acinda Abreu said that society as a whole needed a mind shift to allow women to make meaningful contributions at all levels of the climate change process.

“Adaptation strategies should prioritise the farmers, particularly women who are mainly into subsistence agriculture, and the communities they live in,” she said.

The special advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Francois Rogers, told IPS that women from all walks of life have to be adequately trained to give them the capacity to participate in policy-formulation processes at the local, regional and international levels.

“It should not be just about meeting quotas, but we should ensure that they have confidence in understanding the issues so that they can fully participate in the decision making,” he said.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, told IPS that a renewed commitment period was urgently needed in order to safeguard important emissions reductions and accounting roles that have existed under the Kyoto Protocol. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
DOHA, Nov 27 2012 (IPS)

African negotiators attending the United Nations climate change talks in Doha, Qatar say they are determined to ensure that developed countries do not let the Kyoto Protocol die as its commitment period comes to an end.

The protocol’s first commitment period will expire on Dec.31, 2012 unless negotiators at the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can give it a new lease of life under a second commitment period to begin in January 2013.

“We are not about to watch on as some of the developed countries plot to bury the Kyoto Protocol in Doha,” Chebet Maikut, a Ugandan delegate, told IPS. The current protocol commits industrialised nations and the European Community to reduce their emissions of four greenhouse gases.

The African Group of Negotiators and the Alliance of Small Island States are pushing for the renewal of the agreement, as it is the only international treaty of its kind.

Peter Odhengo, the coordinator of Greening Kenya Initiative, told IPS: “Some of the developed countries that have been buying time (to implement emissions reductions) want to use the upcoming deadline as an opportunity to end Kyoto and we are saying ‘No’.”

According to Odhengo, Canada, Russia, and Japan are not willing to sign a second commitment period partly because they want emerging economies like China and India to commit to bigger emissions reductions.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, told IPS that a renewed commitment period was urgently needed in order to safeguard important emissions reductions and accounting roles that have existed under the Kyoto Protocol.

“The Kyoto Protocol is the only existing and binding agreement under which developed countries commit to cutting greenhouse gases. It underwrites international political trust that developed nations remain responsible to lead emission cuts,” she said.

Figueres said that the Doha deliverables had been prepared during the year and she hoped that no new issues would come up.

According to Figueres, deliverables include the second commitment period for Kyoto as well as an array of institutional arrangements and the convention to support developing countries.

Meanwhile, according to Odhengo, African countries are eager to save the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which provides for emission reduction projects that would cease to exist if the Kyoto Protocol is not extended beyond December.

However, Peter Storey, the coordinator of the United States-based Climate Technology Initiative’s Private Financing Advisory Network, told IPS that it was meaningless for Africa to push for this. He said Africa had less than two percent of all CDM projects registered globally and the remaining projects were mostly in China, India and Brazil.

Conor Barry, the head of stakeholder development mechanisms at the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told IPS that CDM projects were rapidly increasing in Africa.

He said that the focus had changed from large-scale projects that could easily be found in India, China and Brazil to small-scale projects in Africa and least-developed countries (LDCs) in other regions.

“We have learnt a lot from CDM during the first commitment period and we think the situation will be much better for Africa if parties at Doha agree to the second (Kyoto) commitment period,” said Barry.

He said the secretariat was expanding its small-scale projects, including those involving the use of improved cooking stoves and solar lamps, across various geographical areas.

According to Barry, in April the secretariat introduced a loan scheme aimed at stimulating the registration of CDM projects in under-represented countries.

The loans are given to projects that have a high probability of registration, an expected generation of 7,500 Certified Emissions Reductions or CERs per year in LDCs and 15,000 CERs per year in non-LDCs.

John Christensen, head of the U.N. Environment Programme’s Risoe Centre, told IPS that such initiatives could increase Africa’s share of CDM projects.

He said that the European Union Emission Trading Scheme, which is the main purchaser of CERs, would only accept carbon credits from projects in LDCs from 2013.