Another month of plying his ‘becak’ (trishaw) in the capital city and Sarjo will be coming back to this West Java district to harvest the rice ripening on his 1,400 sq m paddy.

Sarjo (one name) reckons the harvest will fetch him a timely 325 dollars to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan (Jul. 20 – Aug. 18) before returning to becak-pulling in Jakarta.

Mona, who works as an entertainer in Jakarta’s ‘Princess Entertainment’ nightclub, is also preparing to return home for Ramadan. “But, my boss has warned me that if I leave for Indramayu without completing my contract I don’t need to come back.”

“Entertainment work is not easy,” says Lisa, another Indramayu girl who works in a Jakarta disco. “I am expected to encourage guests to spend money and for that I need to be attractive, even after staying up night after night keeping drunken clients happy.”

Lisa manages to send one million Indonesian rupiah (106 dollars) every month to her parents. “They are too old to work on the farm, so they depend on my earnings,” she explained.

Many residents of Indramayu, one of Indonesia’s ‘rice bowls’, are seasonal migrants to the city where there are opportunities to earn cash by pedaling becaks, running street food stalls and working as construction labourers.

Indramayu’s women, too, are part of the exodus to the cities, working the nightspots, massage houses and the entertainment businesses. Those who are not so lucky end up as domestic workers. Either way, they are vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse.

The shuttling between Indramayu and Jakarta is dictated by the rice cropping cycles. The last months of the year, September, October, November and December, referred to as the ‘ber’ period for the last syllable of those months, form the rainy season when rice seedlings are planted.

Four months later, the paddy is ready for harvest – at least that used to be the case until the cycle began to go awry with changing climate and erratic rainfall.

“We can no longer tell when it is going to start raining or when the rice is ready for harvesting, and so we just continue working in the city until we are sure,” says Sarjo. “It costs money and time travelling between Indramayu and Jakarta.”

Over the last few years, rice crops have been failing in Indramayu not only because of dry conditions but also because unseasonal downpours have inundated paddies, affecting the quality and quantity of harvests.

In a 2007 report titled ‘Indonesia and Climate Change: Current Status and Policies,’ the World Bank had warned that the country could become vulnerable to both prolonged droughts and unseasonal downpours.

These conditions, according to the report, could lead to changes in water supply and soil moisture, negatively impacting agriculture. Additionally, the Bank warned of a rise in sea levels and saline ingress into coastal farming zones like Indramayu.

Erratic weather in Indramayu affects jobs in Jakarta, which are often on contract. “Until a few years ago, we could be sure of our schedules and sign up for specified months,” says Sudira, a construction labourer.

With incomes from both rice farming and the seasonal work in the cities uncertain, many of Indramayu’s farmers have fallen into debt and been forced to sell off their smallholdings, weakening their links to the land.

Lisa is unsure what will happen to the family’s rice fields after her parent’s time and they may have to be sold off. “Already, I am spending more time in Jakarta than in Indramayu.”

A study conducted by the Fahmina Institute, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on community empowerment, shows that 70 percent of Indramayu’s 11,000 hectares of paddy fields are now owned by about 30 percent of its 125,000 people.

The rest have become landless farmers, struggling to make a living in the cities. Many fall prey to human trafficking networks that have links in wealthy Asian countries like Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East.

According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, a major international NGO, over the last three years, at least 1,500 girls from Indramayu have ended up in Japan as sex workers.

Supali Kasim, chairman of the Indramayu Art Council, explains that female migration from Indramayu goes back to a prolonged drought in the 1960s. That started a trend of women leaving Indramayu in droves to find work in the cities, depriving the rice farms of extra hands.

“Nowadays, women who cannot find work as entertainers in Japan are ‘exported’ as domestic workers to the Middle Eastern countries,” Kasim said.

Currently, there are 93,000 Indramayu women working overseas, going by figures available with insurance companies of which the women are clients.

A student organisation in Indramayu, ‘Sarinah’, has petitioned the government to intervene and create conditions that would encourage the district’s women avoid having to look for risky situations abroad.

Warisyah, a female farmer who has stayed back in Indramayu, said the government could start by ensuring that rice farming is viable. “They can build irrigation networks so that we don’t have to be so dependent on rainfall,” she said.

So far, the government’s response has been to hasten completion of the controversial 900,000 cu m Jatigede mega dam capable of irrigating Indramayu and adjacent districts. But the dam is also expected to submerge five districts and 39 villages along with 3,000 hectares of rice fields.

In 1988, the World Bank cancelled plans to allocate 37 million dollars to the dam – planning for which began in 1963 – following doubts about its consequences to residents and the environment, but the government has pressed on and the dam is due to be operational by 2014.

By that year more of Indramayu’s men and women are likely to have moved to Jakarta and other cities, many never to return.

(END)

Teófila Anchahua raises guinea pigs in Peru’s southern highlands with the help of a microloan. Credit: Julio Angulo/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, May 11 2012 (IPS)

A new report takes a close look at the territorial distribution of poverty and inequality in Latin America, which has long had a reputation of being the most unequal region in the world.

The Latin American Report on Poverty and Inequality 2011, presented this week by the Latin American Centre for Rural Development (RIMISP), notes that rural areas and indigenous and black populations are hit hardest by inequality.

It also points out that the huge disparities in development levels within the countries of Latin America are one of the aspects of inequality that have received the least attention.

“In Latin America, one’s place of birth or residence is not a minor issue because it determines both socio-economic conditions and opportunities to access the goods that guarantee wellbeing,” the report says.

“This is true of entire countries and areas within them. The region is home to countries that have achieved greater levels of growth, but that growth is concentrated in a limited number of territories,” it adds.

The study also says that some countries with relatively low average levels of development have no areas that are particularly lagging or advanced with respect to the national median, while other countries with relatively high average levels of development have only a few areas with satisfactory results.

The report is based on data from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru, in six different socioeconomic areas: health, education, economic dynamism and employment, income and poverty, citizen security, and gender equality.

“One of the most consistent findings was that in practically all countries of the region, the same inequalities and the same gaps are repeated in the same kinds of territories,” Ignacia Fernández, who coordinated the study, told IPS.

“The exception is in terms of income inequality and citizen insecurity, which most heavily affect densely populated urban (slum) territories,” added Fernández, who holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Barcelona in Spain.

The report says that because the average statistics of socioeconomic indicators for each country hide major variations between urban and rural areas, they fail to adequately inform the design and implementation of public policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality.

As a result, there are public policies that instead of helping to come up with solutions, actually aggravate the problem of inequality.

“What the tyranny of averages does in the end is hide significant differences,” Fernández said. “One case in point is Chile, which in general has a good average with respect to the rest of the region. But it has districts with indicators similar to those of Nigeria, and others that are like Switzerland. There are huge disparities that are normally not seen.”

And public policies and solutions tend to be designed with the averages in mind, she added.

Pablo González, the economist who coordinated the 2010 UNDP National Human Development Report on Chile, called for public policy-makers to keep the needs of different territories in mind, and to generate development-oriented proposals with input from people on their specific needs.

“We are in one of the continents that exhibit the greatest inequality in the world, along with the countries of southern Africa, and that inequality varies, from places in the region that are comparable to the most developed parts of the world, to other places that are at levels comparable to the most backward regions,” the UNDP (U.N. Development Programme) official told IPS.

González said top-down policy-making that fails to take into account the particularities of each specific part of the territory and the population should be avoided. He recommended bottom-up policies and management, focused on specific units of territory, and said there were successful international experiences in this respect.

“The complex policy issues of the future have to be handled this way, and not with a limited sectoral focus. Issues like gender equality, for example, require a multisectoral effort, and the unit that has comparative advantages for doing this is the territory,” he said.

The report mentions three sectoral policies that have had different results in different areas: Chile’s decentralised education policy; rural development programmes in Mexico; and Ecuador’s Human Development Cash Transfer.

Although these initiatives have different purposes and scopes, they all have one thing in common: while the overall results have been positive, “when they are assessed in a spatially disaggregated manner, we find significant inequalities in their results and impacts,” the report says.

In practice, “the problem ends up being aggravated, because the solutions are not tailored to specific, particular problems” that vary from area to area within a country, Fernández said.

For example, “If you look at aggregate statistics from Mexico in the last 20 years, inequality in general, and in urban areas, has declined, while rural inequality has increased, despite resources dedicated to a programme specifically targeting the rural sector,” she said.

In contrast, the study cites two examples of local administration that have successfully managed to fight poverty: the Sierra Sur Project, in Peru’s southern Andean highlands, and the Land of Solidarity initiative in southern Santander, a province in northeastern Colombia.

The Sierra Sur project, which got underway in 2005 with financing from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), supports hundreds of small farmer organisations and networks involved in efforts to improve the quality of production of natural resources and strengthen rural business initiatives, through transparent, local programmes based on community participation.

The Land of Solidarity programme, meanwhile, covers 52 municipalities in the province of Santander, where a solidarity economy has grown up on the basis of a strong social, cultural and economic tradition of cooperatives, which began to emerge in the 1960s under the influence of Catholic Church social outreach efforts.

González said “both models are interesting to study.” In his opinion, it is a matter of “going beyond approaches that emphasise unidimensional questions, such as income, efficiency, or even the way poverty is traditionally measured.”

“It is necessary to ask people what they care about, and what results they want to see,” in order to “give new legitimacy to political action and public policies,” he said.

Angola is now focusing on cash crops. This is a new sugarcane plantation in Malange, Angola. Credit: Louise Redvers

By Louise Redvers
JOHANNESBURG, May 11 2012 (IPS)

Millions of Angola’s poorest families are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country has destroyed harvests and killed off livestock.
Up to 500,000 children are now thought to be suffering from severe malnutrition triggered by the collapse in food production after a lengthy dry season in the first three months of this year. Currently emergency feeding centres are being set up in the worst-affected communities.

The provinces of Huambo, Bie, Benguela and Zaire in central and northern Angola are the hardest hit, but across the country both small-scale and commercial farmers are suffering. Crop yields are down by as much as 70 percent in some places.

There are reports of subsistence farmers abandoning their fields altogether in a bid to find other paid work in towns and cities so that they can feed their families, and large commercial farms are laying off workers because there is no harvest to gather.

Despite Angola’s enormous oil wealth and the International Monetary Fund’s forecast that GDP will swell by 9.7 percent in 2012, nearly two thirds of rural households live on less than 1.75 dollars a day.

More than four decades of war (1961-2002) left the country with one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, with 20 percent of youngsters dying before they reach their fifth birthday.

Poor diet is a major factor in the high death rates and according to the latest National Nutrition Survey, carried out in 2007, nearly 30 percent of children under five are stunted, more than eight percent are wasted, and close to 16 percent are underweight.

Koen Vanormelingen, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Angola, explained that this year’s weak harvest was already taken its toll on the most vulnerable children, who were showing elevated rates of malnutrition.

“These people were already living on the border line and were scraping by at the best of times,” he said.

“But where they were once eating a varied diet three times a day, now they are having just one meal a day, maybe two, and they are restricted to a very poor selection of cassava and bananas.

“It is a very serious situation and we are very concerned because we are seeing a significant increase in malnutrition and malnutrition-related mortality in children,” he added.

The government has allocated 43 million dollars to an emergency response campaign, which will include the distribution of food and water supplies, as well as seeds and other agricultural inputs to help farmers salvage their wasted crops.

In addition, a 40-tonne shipment of nutritionally-enhanced peanut-based paste used to treat malnutrition has been imported with support from the Clinton Foundation. It is ready to be sent to emergency feeding centres that are being set up around the country.

“This is not a famine, it is an issue of food insecurity,” Vanormelingen explained. “There is food available; the issue is that because people are not producing as much food, they must buy more.

“And because their production has gone down, their income has also gone down so they cannot afford to buy food, and as supply falls and demand increases, prices are going up – in some cases doubling.”

This collapse in crop production is a major setback for Angola, which has been trying desperately to re- launch its once buoyant agricultural sector that was destroyed by decades of war.

In a bid to help boost output, last year the government launched a high profile 150-million-dollar microcredit scheme giving small farmers loans to buy seeds and fertilisers.

But now with yields so low, many families are struggling to repay their debts.

The União Nacional das Associações de Camponeses Angolanos, the national union of farming cooperatives, has said that the government will help bridge the payment gap with the commercial banks, which made the loans.

But Belarmino Jelembi, director of Angola’s largest rural development organisation, Acção para o Desenvolvimento Rural e Ambiente, warned: “The government needs to be extremely careful how this is managed, because there is a risk that if it is not managed well, the whole programme could fail altogether.”

He added: “What this situation tells us is that we need to do more to support the small farmers with basic tools for irrigation, so people are not so dependent on the rain for their crops.

“We need to think about the basic things at local level, rather than investing huge amounts of money in big capital projects that often turn out to be white elephants.”

Abrantes Carlos, provincial director of the Agriculture Ministry in Benguela, where around 100,000 families – or well over half a million people – are now food insecure, agreed that “more sustainable systems” of irrigation were needed.

“Benguela is a province that often faces dry spells, so we need to have better irrigation so we can overcome this situation,” he told IPS.

“We have large rivers in the province but we are not managing our supplies, and we do not have accurate data about how much water is available.”

Carlos said the lack of water in the province, where many rivers have run dry, was the worst the area had seen for over 30 years, and that for the first time since the end of the war in 2002 there were plans to start giving out food aid to families.

“At this moment people still have some food, but the situation in the next three months will likely get worse,” he said. He explained that the government was assisting in the drilling of new boreholes to try to find water, and was also providing seeds for crops that could be grown in the cooler months, in a bid to boost the next harvest.

Jelembi welcomed the government’s commitment to provide assistance, but said: “We have seen a lot of announcements about what the government is going to do to help people affected, but in practice not much is happening yet.”

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, May 10 2012 (IPS)

While women constitute the majority of food producers, processors and marketers in Africa, their role in the agricultural sector still remains a minor one because of cultural and social barriers.

Jane Karuku, the new AGRA boss, dreams of seeing smallholder farmers become the drivers in Africa's quest for food security. Credit: Courtesy: AGRA

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), women are the majority of the world’s agricultural producers, supplying more than 50 percent of the food that is grown globally. And in sub-Saharan Africa the number is higher, as women grow 80 to 90 percent of the food in the region.

FAO says that although across the globe women are responsible for providing the food for their families, they do this in the face of constraints and attitudes that conspire to undervalue their work and responsibilities and hinder their participation in decision and policy making.

But it is a situation that the new Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) boss, Jane Karuku, says must change in order for Africa to feed itself.

Karuku, a Kenyan business leader with a career spanning over 20 years, became the first female president of the organisation in April.

AGRA is a partnership that works on the African continent to improve food security and enhance the economic empowerment of millions of smallholder farmers and their families. It does this through nearly 100 programmes in 14 countries.

Karuku joins AGRA from Telkom Kenya, a subsidiary of France Telecom-Orange, where she was the deputy chief executive.

She told IPS about her dream of seeing smallholder farmers become the drivers in Africa’s quest for food security. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: Do you see your appointment as a milestone for women farmers in Africa?

A: As AGRA’s first female president, it is a great honour to advocate on behalf of the tireless women who are sowing seeds and working in fields across Africa. They are the real heroines in this story, and I hope to highlight their important contributions for a food-secure future.

Q: Do food security policies recognise the role of women farmers in the production, processing and marketing of food in agriculture?

A: Across Africa there are great signs of progress when it comes to smallholder farmers, the majority of whom are women who are building prosperous lives for themselves and their families.

Success for smallholders, however, has been lopsided. Women smallholders and rural entrepreneurs on the continent are neither participating fully nor deriving benefits in equal measure in the agri-economy owning to gender obstacles driven by cultural and societal norms. This must change if Africa is to transform the capacity to feed itself and realise the quality of life envisioned for rural households and communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Q: In your appointment speech you said: “Smallholder farming is a way of life in Africa, full of challenges and equally full of huge opportunities.” What will you do to strike a balance for food security?

A: My focus is to work to remove the obstacles that prevent smallholder farmers across Africa from significantly boosting productivity and income, while safeguarding the environment and promoting equity. I am committed to ensuring farmers have a full range of choices when it comes to approaching their work.

Q: Smallholder farmers hold the key to food security in Africa. What is your vision for improving their situation?

A: My vision is a food-secure and prosperous Africa achieved through rapid and sustainable agricultural growth that is based on smallholder farmers who produce staple food crops. AGRA’s mission is to trigger a uniquely “African Green Revolution” that transforms agriculture into a highly productive, efficient, competitive and sustainable system to ensure food security and lift millions out of poverty.

Q: Where do you see the role of AGRA in advocating assistance for smallholder farmers to cope with the impact that climate change has on food security?

A: AGRA and its partners work together to determine the kinds of environmental safeguards farmers need to increase their yields and improve their livelihoods. By focusing on sustainable development practices, AGRA reduces environmental degradation and conserves biodiversity.

Rebuilding soil health and enabling Africa’s smallholder farmers to grow more on less land should reduce the pressure to clear and cultivate forests and savannahs, thus helping conserve the environment and biodiversity.

AGRA’s sustainable agricultural practices include improving soil health through integrated soil fertility management. We do this through using a combination of fertilisers and organic inputs, and techniques that are appropriate for local conditions and resources. Through advocating the use of agro- ecologically sound approaches to soil and crop management, such as fertiliser micro-dosing in arid areas, AGRA will guard against potential overuse of fertilisers that could harm the environment.

Q: Research is key to food security; what is your take on the current investment in agricultural research in Africa?

A: Research is critical to making the most of the full agricultural value chain – from seed to harvest. While food productivity has increased globally by 140 percent in recent decades, the figures for sub- Saharan Africa over the same period of time show a reduction. This is because farming across much of the continent has changed little in generations. The role of research is critically important.

Q: What major impact has AGRA had in Africa, and how do you plan to build on it?

A: AGRA takes a uniquely integrated approach to helping smallholder farmers overcome hunger and poverty. By focusing on seeds, soil, market access, policy and partnership and innovative financing, the programme is transforming subsistence farming into sustainable, viable commercial activities that will increase yields across the continent. I hope to continue to look for intersections and innovative opportunities to improve farmers’ lives.

Excerpt:

Having land has made all the difference to Zar Bibi, a 60-year-old widow in Pakistan (centre). Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Land is the missing element at next month’s big U.N. sustainable development summit known as Rio+20, where nations of the world will meet Jun. 20-22 with the goal of setting a new course to ensure the survival and flourishing of humanity.

However, governments are apparently unaware that a reversal of decades of land reform is underway with speculators, investment banks, pension funds and other powerful financial interests taking control of perhaps 200 million hectares of land from poor farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia in recent years. Speculators and investors know land is the key to three necessities of life: food, water and energy. But neither land nor community land rights are on the summit agenda.

“Rural people are losing control over land and water because of this global land grab,” said Honduran farmer leader Rafael Alegria of the international farmers’ movement La Via Campesina.

Anywhere from 80 to 227 million hectares of rural, often agrarian land have been taken over by private and corporate interests in recent years, according to an April report released by Friends of the Earth International.

Many small land holders are being displaced in Central America and up to 40 percent of Honduran small farmers live in extreme poverty, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Alegria told IPS through a translator.

Bilateral trade agreements have allowed the U.S. to dump its highly subsidised maize and rice on Honduran and other markets, depressing prices and making it impossible for locals to compete, he said.

Unable to survive on their lands, poor farmers sell or abandon their land and move into the city or become hired labourers. Resistance has been met with violence. Local people have been evicted, arrested and killed by police and armed security forces in Honduras and other places.

“Corporate landowners are taking over large tracts of land for sugar and oil palm plantations for export markets,” Alegria said. According to the Honduran news media, “I’m a terrorist. They (the media) ignore the dire poverty of campesinos.”

Most of the media in Honduras is controlled by a wealthy elite who are very conservative and only interested in profits, he said.

“Controversial land acquisitions were a key factor triggering the civil wars in Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone,” said Jeffrey Hatcher, director of global programmes for the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a UK-based coalition of NGOs.

“Local land rights are being repeatedly and tragically ignored during an astonishing buying spree across Africa,” Hatcher said in a release.

RRI and others have documented hundreds of land deals where governments are cutting deals with investors over land that really belongs to local communities. In fact, more than 1.4 billion hectares of rural land including forests in Africa are held in common by communities yet governments arbitrarily claim them.

Local communities are rarely included in negotiating the terms of a purchase or lease, even in countries where laws recognise such lands as private property, research by RRI revealed. In fact, many don’t know their lands have been sold out from under them until the bulldozers arrive.

John Muyiisha, a farmer from Kalangala, Uganda, says he awoke one morning to find bulldozers destroying his crops. Nearly 10,000 ha of the 40,000 ha of forested islands off the coast of Lake Victoria in Kalangala have been turned into oil palm plantations, according a report released late last month by Friends of the Earth Uganda. The World Bank provided millions in funding and technical support to get the project started.

“People’s rights to land are being demolished despite protection for them under the Ugandan Constitution,” said David Kureeba from Friends of the Earth Uganda.

Testimonies from local people confirm that despite the promise of jobs, they’ve lost their means of livelihood and are struggling to make ends meet. The region’s small scale farming and forestry that protected unique wildlife, heritage and food of Uganda is being converted to palm oil wastelands, Kureeba said in a release.

Much of this is being presented under the guise of a new green economy that promises to feed people and alleviate poverty, said Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an international NGO focused on sustainable agriculture.

“How can poverty and hunger be addressed by taking away the land and water resources people need to survive?” Kuyek said in an interview.

The World Bank, International Finance Corporation and the World Trade Organization facilitate land grabs because it is convenient from them to believe this will solve the development problems of the global south, including poverty, he said.

“Sure some people get jobs out of this. But just ask plantation workers what they think of their jobs.”

The Rio+20 effort recognises that major changes are needed to the global food system given the fact that more than a billion people go hungry every day. However, governments are not seriously looking at the real alternatives to a failed industrial agricultural production system, he said.

Nor are governments in Rio likely to address land rights issues. At best they’ll endorse a voluntary code of conduct such as the World Bank’s “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment” known as the RAI. The evidence is clear that such voluntary codes of conduct have never worked on a large-scale anywhere, said Kuyek.

“Land grabbing is a fundamental injustice. It’s the world’s richest taking from the world’s poorest,” he said.

Ghost mining town in Coahuila, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 10 2012 (IPS)

The controversial concept of degrowth receives little press coverage in a region like Latin America. But the idea of a way of life that is not aimed exclusively at GDP growth does have its proponents in Argentina.

As in other countries of the region, the Argentine perspective on degrowth differs somewhat from that of academics and civil society organisations in the industrialised world, according to sources consulted by Tierramérica.

The threat of a systemic global crisis with various dimensions – environmental, economic, energy-related – will be on the discussion table at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), taking place Jun. 20-22 in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.

For advocates of degrowth, it has become clear that sustainable development will not succeed in averting environmental collapse or enhancing social justice, the goals set forth 20 years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit, also held in Rio.

Degrowth in the Americas, an international conference taking place in Montreal, Canada on May 13-19, seeks to challenge and move beyond the sustainable development agenda, drawing on previous degrowth conferences in Paris and Barcelona in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

One of the best-known proponents of degrowth, French philosopher and economist Serge Latouche, says that the movement is aimed primarily at promoting a shift away from the pursuit of “growth for growth’s sake”. It would actually be better to speak of “agrowth” instead of degrowth, just as one speaks of atheism, he believes.

Degrowth supporters call for a controlled and rational decrease in consumption and production, in a way that respects the climate, ecosystems and human beings themselves.

Nevertheless, Latouche stresses that degrowth is not a concrete alternative, but rather a matrix of multiple alternatives. Obviously, any concrete proposal or counterproposal is both necessary and problematic, he adds.

In Argentina, “degrowth is not covered by the media, nor does it form part of academic courses in political economy. But it exists, especially now, on the threshold of the Rio+20 conference,” social scientist Julio Gambina told Tierramérica.

In Latin America, “where economic growth was deified in the 1990s, degrowth gets bad press,” added Gambina, a professor of political economy at the National University of Rosario and president of the Social and Policy Research Foundation of Argentina. In his opinion, “it would be better discuss how growth is achieved.”

A number of Latin American countries, he noted, have achieved economic growth on the basis of “an extractivist model of production,” which increases GDP at the cost of the intensive use of natural resources that are gradually being exhausted.

Examples include large-scaling mining, which involves the use of cyanide and causes major environmental impacts, or the expansion of monoculture plantations of soybeans for export, at the expense of diversified rural production.

Gambina pointed to the case of Brazil, where organisations affiliated to the international network Via Campesina challenge this model and call for greater support for peasant agriculture and the productive practices of indigenous and traditional communities, which are less destructive to natural resources. But these groups “have no visibility,” he said.

In the countries of Latin America, there is generally little resistance to the pursuit of growth. “Degrowth is primarily associated with economies that are in crisis, like those of Europe,” he explained.

Statistician María Elena Saludas, national coordinator of ATTAC (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens), commented that “the debate over the impossibility of continuing to pursue limitless economic growth in the framework of a finite planet dates back to the 1960s.”

The conception of sustainable development that began to be heavily promoted at the 1992 Earth Summit does not question the global power structure or the capitalist system, whose leitmotiv is profit, said Saludas.

The same can be said of the so-called “green economy” now being energetically promoted by the United Nations, which is organising Rio+20.

“What we should be discussing,” she said, “is the fact that this economic model cannot be sustained.”

Saludas is critical of the expansion of monoculture production and the heavy dependence of Latin American economies on the export of raw materials. She also warns of the limits of the expansion of the automotive industry, in countries like Argentina and Brazil. “A car for everyone is not sustainable. We need to work towards more efficient and collective transportation,” she said.

In her opinion, the current GDP growth in Latin America is generating “extreme inequality” between rich and poor. Those at the so-called bottom of the pyramid “are barely surviving.” As such, “we cannot tell them that they should be opposed to growth.”

She prefers to highlight experiences like that of Bolivia, where a movement of indigenous peoples advocates the pursuit of “buen vivir” or “living well”, in harmony with nature and not at the cost of natural resources or other members of society.

Saludas said she is enthusiastic about the theory of degrowth, although “not as a proposal for individual changes in behavior, but rather for each community to find a way of experiencing this way of life.”

For his part, Gambina has qualms about a debate which, at least in the way it is currently formulated, is unlikely to gain new supporters.

“Whether the discussion of degrowth will achieve a greater impact remains to be seen. There are groups pushing for a different kind of development, which challenge the prevailing model of production, but they don’t have a favorable cultural environment,” he said.

The pursuit of growth persists as the consensus ideology in the region, which is why the degrowth debate has not gained widespread support, Gambina stressed. He believes the emphasis should not be on “degrowing” but rather on “growing in a different way.” “We need to support family farming, local production and distribution,” as well as challenging the currently prevailing means of measuring development through GDP, he said.

“GDP only counts what is created, and doesn’t subtract what is destroyed,” he explained. “Perhaps there are cases where GDP is lower, as in Cuba or Venezuela, but quality of life or the distribution of wealth improves. Social well-being is not necessarily tied to economic growth,” he said.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. 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.

By Walter García and Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 9 2012 (IPS)

The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), whose mandate includes the preservation and protection of the world’s fast-degrading oceans, will play a pivotal role in Expo 2012, an international exhibition to be formally opened later this week in the coastal town of Yeosu in South Korea.

“From the U.N.’s perspective, the seas form part of what is commonly referred to as the ‘global commons’, and as such, any threat to this global resource ought to be addressed,” Amina Mohamed, a U.N. assistant secretary-general and UNEP‘s deputy executive director, told IPS.

She pointed out that the largest creatures in the world live in the oceans (blue whales) as well as the smallest (bacteria).

“Protecting our oceans is tantamount to protecting our planet and is critical for long-term sustainable development,” said Mohamed, who is also co-commissioner-general of Expo 2012 and a former Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

The primary theme of Expo 2012, which runs May 12 May through Aug. 12 – is “the living ocean” and the protection of the world’s marine ecosystems.

The U.N. Pavilion located in the exhibition site will bring together more than 20 U.N. agencies and international organisations, primarily to showcase their collective efforts at the sustainable use of oceans and coasts.

The participating agencies include the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Seabed Authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Ocean Institute and the World Food Programme (WFP).

In an interview with IPS, Mohamed said that UNEP, as the lead U.N. agency, will coordinate the preparatory work of the agencies, as well as their participation.

She pointed out that coasts and ocean resources are key to economic development and growth, and therefore offer the potential for transitioning to a green economy and a sustainable future, as envisaged by the upcoming Rio+20 summit of world leaders in Brazil in June.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How important is the protection of marine resources in the context of the global environment? A: Protection of marine resources, and specifically oceans, is extremely important for a number of reasons. Oceans comprise more than 70 percent of our planet, are crucial to sustaining the Earth’s life- supporting systems, especially in regulating our climate, and provide food and income to the billions of people who depend on marine ecosystems for their livelihoods.

Indeed oceans, coasts, and islands are vital suppliers of diverse resources and ecosystem services that are essential for the survival of human civilisation. We must remain deeply aware of the importance of the oceans, coasts and islands so that they continue to serve as a source of prosperity for humankind.

Oceans, coasts and islands have also functioned as foundations for cultural development throughout human history. Consequently we must increase our efforts to protect and develop maritime cultures in order to help them conserve marine resources sustainably and ensure the equitable sharing for present and future generations.

In addition, oceans constitute a conduit for trade and exchange that connect the economies of the entire world. In light of the oceans interconnectedness, all nations of the world should strive to make it a place of safe navigation and welfare for all mankind. People depend on all of these for their wellbeing. And every second breath we take comes from oceans’ oxygen.

Q: Will Expo deal with related issues such as the rise in piracy and also the Law of the Sea (which was essentially the creation of the United Nations)? A: Visitors to the U.N. Pavilion will have the opportunity to learn about the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.

However, the theme of the expo may not address the issue of piracy directly but we are keen to deliver the following key messages, namely that oceans are the heart and lungs of the planet and determine every form of life that inhabit them.

Q: What specific messages do you plan to convey regarding the world’s oceans at Expo 2012? A: Coasts and oceans are resilient but have their limits, and so if millions of tourists enjoy them every year and if limited fish stocks are over-fished, we need to give them time to recover. Care and sustainable use can make a difference.

Additionally, land-based activities such as agriculture and industries have a significant impact on the overall quality of our oceans. Poor use of resources leads to the generation of pollution loads through wastewater discharges and air pollution emissions. To this end, we must remember that removing pollutants is more expensive than avoiding them in the first place.

Oceans and inland water resources also provide important sources of food, nutrition and income for billions of people.

Q: Will protection of marine resources be on the agenda of Rio+20, billed as one of the biggest summit meetings on the global environment? A: Protection of marine resources will be on the agenda of the Rio+20 conference. Under this item, discussions will focus on various matters, including the role of oceans in sustaining Earth’s life support system; sustainable exploitation of the oceans and their resources; conservation, sustainable management and equitable sharing of marine and ocean resources; economic, social and environmental contribution of coral reefs to island and coastal states; significance of the Global Marine Assessment process; impact and prevention of ocean acidification, restoration of global fish stocks, conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity.

In addition to this prominent feature of oceans in the Rio+20 text, there will be an ‘Oceans Dialogue event’ in Rio on Jun. 16 at the Rio Conventions pavilion. And arrangements have been put in place to celebrate ‘Oceans Day’ (during the summit).

Q: Regarding the impact of oceans on humans, how threatening is sea level rise on the world’s smaller island nations such as Maldives, Tuvalu and Solomon islands? Does UNEP have a role here? And can the Expo provide any guidance to these countries? A: The rise in sea level poses serious challenges to the whole world. It is estimated that sea levels have been rising at an average rate of 2.5mm per year between 1992 and 2011. This scenario clearly supports the view that small island nations remain a special case for sustainable development in view of their unique and particular vulnerabilities.

The vulnerability of small island nations has worsened over the last two decades if the rate of rising sea level is anything to go by. There exists therefore a strong basis for increased efforts to assist small island nations to deal with this global challenge including the need to convene a third international conference for the sustainable development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the very near future.

UNEP is uniquely placed to provide information that would assist the Small Island Nations deal with their vulnerabilities. We have for instance published a report titled “Green Economy in a Blue World” which sets out several options that address challenges faced by these countries. These options range from transition to green growth in fisheries to developing a sustainable tourism sector.

Excerpt:

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 9 2012 (IPS)

Clean, renewable energies contribute to economic growth and job creation while decreasing dependency on imports. This is why governments should be increasing incentives for the development of renewable energy during a crisis like the one facing Europe today, German engineer Björn Pieprzyk told Tierramérica.

Even skeptics believe renewable energies could cover half of Germany’s energy demand by 2050, says Björn Pieprzyk. Credit: Courtesy of Björn Pieprzyk

Clean energy sources play a key role in combating climate change and developing a greener economy, said Pieprzyk, a consultant with the Bundesverband Erneuerbare Energie (BEE), or German Renewable Energy Federation.

In an interview in Rio de Janeiro at one of the numerous events being held prior to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), which will take place in June in this Brazilian city, Pieprzyk told Tierramérica that Germany should be able to meet all of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050.

This is one of the goals of BEE, founded in 1991 as the political umbrella organisation of the renewable energy sector in Germany. It now comprises 22 associations from the hydropower, wind, biomass, solar and geothermal energy sectors, representing a total of over 30,000 individual members and companies.

But a transition is needed from the existing energy system, based on hydrocarbon fuels such as coal, gas and oil, to these cleaner, renewable sources. This will require cutting subsidies for fossil and atomic energies, stressed Pieprzyk, who is also a co-founder of the Energy Research Architecture consulting firm.

Q: How do you see the discussion of renewable energies in the context of the Rio+20 conference? A: Developments in the last 20 years have shown that renewable energies are the most important contributor for climate protection worldwide. We can continue with this growth, but for the future we need to make a transition from the existing energy system, and we need a level playing field to cut subsidies for fossil and atomic energies. Renewable energies need new incentives.

We need standards to monitor the real costs of fossil energy in the future. I expect clear and strong standards in the field of sustainability and social development. That means clear conditions for development where renewable energies shall play an important part.

Q: What is the potential for renewable energies in Germany? A: Renewable energies account for 12 percent of the energy system. We are using about 20 percent renewable energy in the electricity sector, nine percent in the heating sector and six percent in fuels. It is still a small percentage in comparison to fossil energies.

But the potentials are very high, especially in the solar energy sector, but also biofuel and hydropower. Germany will be able to cover 100 percent of its energy needs with renewable energies before 2050; in 30 to 40 years it will be possible to achieve these goals.

This is the aim of our federation, although the majority of the German population and the government are less optimistic and expect that half of the energy demand in 2050 will be covered by renewable energies.

Q: Are renewable energies economically viable today? A: In the last 10 years in Germany, the cost of renewable energy – wind and solar – decreased very fast. Nowadays the costs of renewable energy are close to fossil fuel prices to produce electricity. Atomic energy plants are much more expensive than renewable energies.

By next year, the cost to produce solar power in private households will be less than the price that they are paying now. A private household now has to pay about 25 euro cents (roughly 32 cents of a dollar) per kilowatt/hour. The price of solar power now is already less than this amount of money. This energy will be competitive.

Q: Are the other countries of the European Union (EU) following this path of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies? A: Germany is ahead, but some other countries are following this path and have much better conditions to use renewable energies. The UK and Ireland have a lot of sun in the south.

It is possible for the whole of Europe to follow this path and achieve goals in the next decades. But there is a need for more political and legal incentives in some sectors, especially the electricity sector.

Q: What has been the impact of the economic crisis on renewable energies in the EU? A: In Germany investments in renewable energies are still stable, but there are some plans to cut support for solar energy. There are a lot of decentralised jobs in the whole country. In Germany it is a priority, and big companies like Siemens are earning a lot.

Private sector investment is about 25 billion euros (33 billion dollars) per year. The government has support programmes for heating systems that come to less than half a billion euros (660 million dollars). Nearly all of the money is coming from companies. Germany and Europe can become less dependent on energy imports, and renewable energies are already an important factor for economic growth and increasing rates of employment.

The problem is if governments react like Spain and Italy, cutting state support and legal incentives which are important at this point when renewable energies are so close to being competitive.

Q: How do you see the situation of renewable energies in emerging countries like Brazil? A: Traditionally Brazil has a lot of experience in the use of hydropower and biomass to produce biofuels (such as ethanol). It is a leading country in this sector and is now starting to use wind energy and solar power. It has an advantage for those two energies, since at the moment the price is much lower than ten years ago.

There is a great possibility for Brazil to increase the percentage of renewable energy rapidly – for private households, companies and the whole economy. They also have possibilities to use modern technologies that are environmentally friendly and competitive.

However, Latin American countries still pay double the price in comparison to Europe for renewable energy. There are several reasons for that, for example, because it is a new market. There are now negotiations for new wind farms in Brazil that can produce energy for around six cents per kilowatt/hour.

But for companies to invest you need clear conditions for renewable energy. You need stable conditions for investors.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. 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.

Excerpt:

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 8 2012 (IPS)

The vital role of women in creating a green economy will be highlighted at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, to be held in Brazil in June.

Rebecca Tavares: "Women's leadership should help the transition towards a green economy." Credit: Courtesy of U.N. Women

Women’s contributions are essential for environmental management, food production and social reproduction, as well as the transition to a green economy, Rebecca Tavares, regional director of U.N. Women for Brazil and the Southern Cone region, told IPS.

This is especially true in rural areas, where women take the lead in climate change adaptation and mitigation activities in farming work. But their rights and their contribution to development continue to be negated, she said.

Q: What will happen at the Women Leaders’ Forum to be held at Rio+20? A: The Forum will bring together women, governments, civil society organisations, academics and the private sector to discuss and reaffirm the centrality of gender equality and women’s empowerment for the achievement of sustainable development in its three dimensions.

There will be a Call to Action supported by U.N. Women and female heads of state to incorporate new ideas, best practices, innovative proposals and visions for the future.

Q: How can women make a difference at Rio+20? A: Sustainable development implies a global compact of laws, policies and standards on gender equity, while at the same time responding to new problems, challenges and opportunities.

Action plans must include mechanisms for implementing a green economy, and must recognise the leadership role of women, and their voice and participation, as key factors to ensure sustainable development.

Q: What is your view of women’s role in relation to climate change? A: One-quarter of the world’s female population lives in rural areas. These women are leaders, decision-makers, workers, businesswomen and service providers. That is why their contribution is vital for the welfare of their families and communities, as well as for the local and national economies.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women are crucial for achieving the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. Where women’s rights and access to resources are ensured, women are powerful agents of change in this direction.

Women play a pre-eminent role in environmental management, food production and social reproduction.

Many also have traditional knowledge that contributes to conscientious use of resources like soil, water and energy. Therefore it is essential to develop training programmes for women in sustainable development techniques, to perfect their knowledge.

Q: How can women contribute to the eradication of poverty and hunger? A: Women’s leadership should help the transition towards growth in a green economy. However, the rights of women who are small farmers, for instance, and their contributions and priorities are still looked down on.

Women can be agents of change through access to the labour market and educational opportunities.

Q: What actions is U.N. Women carrying out in Brazil? A: We have assistance and empowerment programmes for indigenous women, black women living in “quilombos” (communities originally established by escaped slaves) and women working in the extractive industries.

A programme has been developed by the Brazilian government in partnership with U.N. Women, to promote South-South technical cooperation with African, Latin American and Caribbean countries, with the support of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The goal of the plan is to consolidate best practices and experiences in Brazil, in order to promote gender equality and spread these actions in the social and economic spheres.

Q: What kind of initiatives is U.N. Women involved in to help empower Brazilian women? A: Since 2008, U.N. Women has supported work with rural women who are small farmers.

One of these programmes, “Chapéu de Palha” (Straw Hat), has been carried out in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, in conjunction with the state’s Secretariat for Women’s Policies. The aim is to improve nutrition and the general quality of life in the communities, and to carry out educational and reforestation activities.

Over 28,000 Pernambucan women have benefited since the inception of this plan nearly four years ago, and the programme has received 50,000 dollars from U.N. Women in 2011-2012.

Moreover, in 2010 the Pernambuco state Plan for Public Policies for Rural Women was created, the first of its kind in Brazil.

Excerpt:

Teacher Nelly Olaya shows IPS the Floragaita school greenhouse, where seedlings are grown to help reforest the headwaters of the Las Ceibas river. Credit: Courtesy FAO

By Constanza Vieira
NEIVA, Colombia, May 8 2012 (IPS)

“Out of love for the river, we reforest, recycle, and make this place beautiful,” says a sign welcoming visitors to the Floragaita school, where a balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) tree with enormous white flowers guards the entrance to the lush green grounds on a hill in the heart of Colombia’s Andes mountains.

The Floragaita schoolchildren themselves came up with that slogan for a campaign launched in 2006 by Celia Cardozo, a slight, vivacious teacher who coordinates the 10 public secondary schools that serve the rural outskirts of Neiva, the capital of the southwestern province of Huila, which have incorporated environmental issues in the teacher training programme.

The campaign won a prize granted as part of the Las Ceibas River Basin project, which got under way in 2008 in this rural, mountainous area outside Neiva. Before the project began, local farmers widely used the slash-and-burn technique and people dumped everything into the river, from raw sewage to old mattresses.

Cardozo is determined to buy a blender to make recycled paper at the Santa Helena secondary school, which is in the same area. “People here don’t have paper,” she told IPS. But she added that the main objective is “to save even just one little tree a year.”

In February, the Santa Helena school won 450 dollars when it took second place in a contest for a prize awarded locally by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). But that is 60 dollars less than what the blender costs.

First prize, 560 dollars, went to Floragaita, for the best proposal for environmental education in the Las Ceibas River Basin.

The Las Ceibas River is the only source of piped water for Neiva, a city of 295,000 people 300 km southwest of Bogotá, where day-time temperatures range between 28 and 37 degrees year-round.

The population of Neiva grew by 130,000 people in the last 20 years. But the water flow in the Las Ceibas River has significantly declined.

The challenges are to reforest, in order to improve water retention, and to put an end to the slash-and-burn technique, traditionally used by local peasant farmers to clear land, which increases the sediment load in the river.

Another task is to get the 600 families living in scattered houses in the river basin to adopt farming practices that combine production with conservation, while improving water quality.

“If we manage to do this, it’s possible that by 2030, when Neiva has grown by another 100,000 or 130,000 inhabitants, we will still have good quality water in the river, to supply that population,” Humberto Rodríguez, an engineer who heads the Las Ceibas River Basin project, told IPS.

Despite the abundance of water resources in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, 15 percent of the population lack access to drinking water, and more than 20 percent have no basic sanitation.

The Las Ceibas project, which began in 2008, operates well under a trust fund system which ensures that the money is not lost in a maze of poor management.

Besides FAO, partners in the project include the Empresas Públicas de Neiva – the municipal public utilities company – and the city government, which told IPS that the plan is for the project to continue to form part of its Development Plan until 2015.

Other partners are the Huila provincial government and the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Alto Magdalena – the environmental authority in the area.

But in Rodríguez’s view, the main partner is the community itself. “Unless the community makes a project its own, you can’t say things are working well,” he said.

“Governance means, precisely, participation and responsibility shared by the institutions and the community. Only under these conditions can we say there is real governance” in the river basin area, he said.

In Floragaita, they are starting at the beginning: with the children. In fact, only three of the 18 students say they think “the city is better.” The rest say they want to stay in the countryside.

“They say they don’t like Neiva because it’s too hot there, and because everything costs money, even a glass of water, and there are many thieves. The smartest ones make these comparisons,” said Nelly Olaya, a teacher who works together with Cardozo.

The dirt road climbs in several curves before it reaches the school, where three one-storey buildings, including a cafeteria, are surrounded by trees and abundant vegetation. In one of the large classrooms, there are half a dozen computers with broadband internet connection.

Downhill, cassava, plantain, carrots, lettuce, cilantro, chives, bananas, giant granadilla, papaya and medicinal herbs are growing in the school’s vegetable garden.

There is also a greenhouse where a variety of trees are grown, including: soursop (Annona muricata), which produces a long, prickly green fruit that can weigh up to two kilos; cambara (Erisma uncinatum), a tree that provides medium density wood that is used locally for making fences; and naranjillo (Trichanthera gigantea) and naked albizia (Albizia carbonaria), trees that protect river banks.

Sometimes, the children of Floragaita make field trips to plant dozens of tree seedlings along rivers on nearby farms.

The first tree planting session took place in 2005, when the children planted 75 seedlings. They have planted 300, 400 and up to 1,200 seedlings along rivers threatened by deforestation in this rural area.

On the tree planting days, the children play games using the multiplication tables, and learn what each tool is called in English.

Because the Floragaita school grounds are small, Olaya proposed that the families prepare an area where the children can sit outside, “so they won’t spend all day in the classroom.”

That is how the school got its “environmental classroom”, 3,200 square metres in size, under large pine trees, with aviaries made by the children and their parents, and tables and wooden benches painted with hearts and surrounded by flowers.

Hands-on mathematics is taught here. “I give them a tape measure and I tell them ‘two metres long’, ‘one centimetre wide’,” and the students measure the objects around them, the teacher says.

“There is no need to write on a blackboard that this is a metre and this is a centimetre; we don’t have paper here,” Olaya explains. “So I teach this to them using a tape measure.”

The children sit and look out at the view for geography class, learning what is a hill, a mountain range, a river basin, a tributary, or a valley.

The land for the environmental classroom was loaned to the school by Álvaro Díaz, the president of the Junta de Acción Comunal, an elected local civic organisation.

Díaz’s eight children went to school here. “The future is in the countryside,” which is why it is important for the children to fall in love with nature, he says, adding that they “learn better” in a classroom like this one.

But of the 35 assistant teachers who have been posted to Floragaita, 29 or 30 hope to continue their studies in areas that have nothing to do with the countryside.

Olaya always takes the new assistant teachers to the greenhouse first, and tells them: “If you don’t want to get dirty, then don’t be a rural schoolteacher.”

* This article was produced with support from FAO.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2012 (IPS)

After two weeks of closed door negotiations, a U.N. preparatory committee (PrepCom) has failed to reach consensus on a global plan of action, titled “The Future We Want,” to be adopted by a summit meeting of world leaders mid-June in Brazil.

The negotiators, comprising representatives of all 193 member states, proclaimed limited success, including reducing the size of the action plan – formally called the “outcome document” – from nearly 200 to less than 100 pages.

The document, called the “zero draft”, originally ran to more than 6,000 pages of submissions by member states, international organisations and civil society groups.

Still, after protracted negotiations ending last Friday, Ambassador Kim Sook of South Korea, one of the co-chairs of the PrepCom, said delegates had expressed “disappointment and frustration at the lack of progress” on reaching agreement on a plan aimed at a greener economy and a sustainable future.

In an effort to break the deadlock, the PrepCom will give another shot at the zero draft when it holds an unscheduled five-day session beginning May 29.

This will be a last ditch attempt to finalise the draft action plan, which has to be ready for approval by world leaders arriving in Rio de Janeiro for the three-day summit, beginning Jun. 20.

If it fails to reach consensus, negotiations will be resumed in Brazil Jun. 13-15 in a do-or-die attempt to finalise it before the three-day summit Jun. 20-22, officially called the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD)

The summit will be the culmination of the UNCSD, also called Rio+20, a follow-up to the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil which adopted Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.

“Let us be frank,” UNCSD Secretary-General Sha Zukang said Friday, “currently, the negotiating text is a far cry from the ‘focused political document’ called for by the General Assembly.”

He said the objective should be to arrive in Rio “with at least 90 percent of the text ready, and only the most difficult 10 percent left to be negotiated there at the highest political levels”.

However, a statement released Friday by a coalition of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) warned that Rio+20 “looks set to add almost nothing to global efforts to deliver sustainable development”.

“Too many governments are using or allowing the talks to undermine established human rights and agreed principles such as equity, precaution, and polluter pays,” it said.

Antonio Hill of Oxfam said, “After four months of talks on the so- called zero draft outcome document, the Rio+20 talks are stuck at zero.”

He said little or nothing has emerged that will deliver on what governments agreed was needed 20 years ago at the Earth Summit.

Besides Oxfam, the coalition includes Development Alternatives, Greenpeace, the Forum of Brazilian NGOs and Social Movements for Environment and Development (FBOMS), International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Vitae Civilis.

Asked about the sticking points in the negotiating process, Zeenat Niazi, senior programme director at the India-based Development Alternatives Group, told IPS there was disagreement over the concept of green economy and “its relevance and meaning to the Global South – concerns of green associated with the creation of sustainable livelihoods”.

She pointed out that other areas of disagreement include: issues of equity; sustainable consumption and production in the Global North; social justice, especially related to resource extraction from developing and least developed countries; technology transfer and trade.

Additionally, there were also disputes relating to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how they deal with “the integration across the three pillars of sustainability, and not becoming a long laundry list”.

“And what kind of commitments will nations need to make, and the readiness for them, and the building up of national capacities to facilitate the inclusion of SDGs in national development plans and priorities?” Niazi said.

Asked whether an additional week of negotiations will make any significant difference to the outcome document, Niazi told IPS, “It could, if there are spaces created to include the voices of civil society, and integrate the same in the outcome document and outline an inclusive road map to design the post-Rio+20 action plans.”

In a statement released Friday, the United Nations identified some of the contentious issues which prevented agreement on the outcome document.

Some developed countries, the statement said, have embraced the green economy as a new roadmap for sustainable development, while many developing countries are more cautious, asserting that each country should choose its own path to a sustainable future and that a green economy approach should not lead to green protectionism or limit growth and poverty eradication.

Other countries and stakeholders, it said, have voiced concerns about implementation and accountability, pointing out that some commitments made at previous global meetings, such as for official development assistance (ODA), have yet to be fully realised.

Nonetheless, says the statement, virtually all countries appear willing to agree on a number of issues, including the overall need to recognise and act to meet pressing global and national challenges.

“It has been widely acknowledged that action is needed to provide for the needs of a growing global population that continues to consume and produce unsustainably, resulting in rising carbon emissions, degraded natural ecosystems and growing income inequality.”

The need to find a better measurement of progress than gross domestic product (GDP) has also been widely acknowledged.

The statement further said that countries have also been examining the concept of new Sustainable Development Goals, a set of benchmarks to guide them in achieving targeted outcomes within a specific time period, such as on access to sustainable energy and clean water for all.

But some countries have differing views on what should or should not be included in the goals, as well as the formal process for how and when the goals may be defined, finalised and agreed to.

By Peter Richards
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados , May 7 2012 (IPS)

By the time small island developing states (SIDS) arrive at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in June, they will have worked hard to co-ordinate their message to the rest of the world about the importance of sustainable development for their countries.

In a two-day conference, SIDS Achieving Sustainable Energy for All, that began today in Barbados, these countries are preparing for the conference to ensure that their needs do not go overlooked in June.

Freundel Stuart, prime minister of Barbados, said the country believes it is crucial for the Rio+20 conference to not only recognise the structural vulnerabilities of SIDS but also “offer a model to assist us in realising our sustainable development aspirations and create the institutional platform that would enable us to participate in innovative partnerships both regionally and internationally in this process”.

In turn, islands in the African, Caribbean and Pacific must press the international community to honour previous commitments related to SIDS, he added. “It is also essential that SIDS obtain the requisite resources to make renewable energy resources accessible and affordable,” he told the delegates to the United Nations-sponsored conference.

Stuard called the Rio+20 conference a golden opportunity for the SIDS to speak as one and convey the urgency of fully embracing sustainable development and united around a common agenda to ensure its realisation.

“We must use these meetings in Barbados to prepare ourselves for what will be a battle to articulate, promote and defend our interests, to the benefit of our people, and indeed of the planet. The time for talking is over. The time for concrete and concerted action is upon us,” Prime Minister Stuart said.

The United Nations (U.N.) Conference on Sustainable Development, commonly known as the Rio+20 conference, is a follow- up to the historic 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also held in Brazil.

Finding “political entry points”

In the meantime, the SIDS conference, first held in Barbados in 1994, is underway.

Its participants are discussing a number of initiatives, including ensuring affordable and reliable access to modern energy services in SIDS by 2030; energy access, governance and poverty in SIDS; and the role of energy access in relation to economic development.

Stuart told delegates from various SIDS including the Cook Islands, Tuvala and Nauru that the meeting’s proposed outcome document will address the fundamental concerns of SIDS on issues of conservation and sustainable management, or “blue economy”, even though they are not currently reflected in the draft document.

He emphasised that “plans are being developed for a coordinated approach to renewable energy” at the wider Caribbean level, citing an “abundant endowment of renewable energy resources”.

Stuart said that an honest assessment of the international community’s track record on sustainable development leads to the conclusion that while the concept is part of the international lexicon, it remains too amorphous to be properly implemented.

“Sustainable development is still seen fundamentally as an environmental issue while development, as economic growth, continues to be the dominant paradigm,” he explained. As a result, “it has not been able to find the political entry points to make real progress.”

“The concept of sustainable development must therefore be incorporated into the mainstream national and international economic policy debates.”

Uniquely vulnerable states

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, in a message to the conference, said that the diverse group of countries is united by special vulnerabilities, from climate change and increased risk from disaster, to restricted markets and high conventional energy costs that can hinder development.

“Small island developing states need to free themselves from dependence on fossil fuel imports and transform their energy sectors to encompass modern efficient, clean and renewable sources of energy,” he said, noting that “sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy”.

“Sustainable energy for all can drive economic growth. It can lift people from poverty, strengthen social equity and protect our environment,” Ban said, adding that “sustainable energy must figure prominently in the outcome” of Rio+20.

It was a theme reiterated by Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, the U.N. resident coordinator and U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative in Barbados.

“Sustainable energy for all is an idea whose time has come,” she said, adding that discussion at Rio+20 has the ability to “(give) birth to a new energy paradigm to propel the development process across SIDS and the rest of the developing world” and “achieve full realisation of the Barbados Programme of Action for SIDA”, which was the result of the 1994 conference in Barbados.

Stuart said that in reviewing how fully policies in that programme have been implemented, a “fair amount of work remains undone, especially regarding the integration of sustainability principles into mainstream economic policies”.

Stuart acknowledged that the global economic crisis and the volatility and high levels of international oil prices over the last three years have “seriously weakened the three pillars of sustainable development – the society, the economy and the environment”.

But he countered these disadvantages by noting that “at the same time, advances in technologies for harnessing renewable energy, and the capacity to increase energy intensities, have made it possible for us to believe that there can be a future for the world beyond the use of fossil fuels”.

By Vanya Walker-Leigh
HANOI, May 7 2012 (IPS)

Vietnam is hailed as a development success story for lifting millions out of poverty and staying on track to meet all of its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. But the country’s future progress is severely threatened by the impact of global climate change.

This nation of 86 million people – stretching down the eastern seaboard of the Indochina peninsula, its mountainous inland fringed by a broad coastal plain – shares the vast Mekong river system with Laos, Thailand, Burma, China and Cambodia.

Unprecedented climate-related catastrophes in recent years have turned government and citizen attention onto the pressing need for proactive climate change policies, although the actual speed of future global warming is beyond Vietnam’s control and depends more on major industrial nations’ future greenhouse gas emission reductions agreed within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Vietnam’s National Climate Change Strategy launched this March dramatically describes the nation as “one of the most affected countries…with the Mekong River Delta being one of the three most vulnerable deltas in the world alongside the Nile and the Ganges.”

By the end of this century average temperatures could have increased by two to three degrees Celsius, the Strategy warns, with major changes in rainfall patterns threatening devastating floods and droughts, while the sea level is set to rise by between 0.75 to one metre.

The policy document adds, “About 40 percent of the Mekong River Delta, 11 percent of the Red River Delta and three percent of other regions will be submerged, with two percent of Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam’s commercial capital, home to over seven million inhabitants) under water.”

Any slump in production in the huge Mekong Delta rice bowl will have grave national and global food security implications, since Vietnam is the world’s second largest rice exporter.

The Asian Development Bank’s report, ‘Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific’, issued this March, forecasts that by 2050 some 9.5 million Vietnamese will be at risk from the impacts of sea level rise. The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment (MONRE) is leading implementation of the national Strategy.

“Building on a previous National Target Programme for Climate Change launched in 2008, the Strategy focuses on both adaptation and mitigation, while setting guideposts for the short, medium and long term as well as ten strategic tasks,” Pham Van Tan, deputy director-general of MONRE’s International Cooperation Department told IPS.

“The three action phases (go) up to the end of this year, from 2013-2025 and 2016-2050,” he explained, “aiming at a careful balance between adaptation and mitigation – the latter to counter the expected rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions implied in Viet Nam’s ambitious industrialisation plans. We will also pursue regional approaches with our neighbouring countries.”

Strategic tasks include developing wide-ranging actions on food and water security, sea level rise, increasing forest cover and renewable energy use, emission reductions, community capacity development for adaptation and scientific and technological development. Provinces and cities are tasked with developing their own plans, merged with national goals, involving the private sector and civil society.

Extensive support over the long term from international donors is seen as critical to the Strategy’s success. However, it warns, “Since Vietnam has become a middle-income country, international support will be decreased and cooperation carried out on a win-win basis.” New types of funding will hopefully emerge “through new financial and technology transfer mechanisms from developed countries.”

The Strategy’s ninth and 10th tasks relate to international cooperation and financial resources, to be channelled through a national Green Climate Fund to be set up by MONRE at the Prime Minister’s request. An international investment conference envisions inviting foreign businesses to invest in adaptation-related infrastructure.

“A climate change donor support group (comprised of countries and multilateral institutions), set up in 2008 to interact with the government as well as coordinate our actions, is currently chaired by Germany and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),” Juergen Hesse, director of the Natural Resources Programme at the Vietnam office of GIZ (the German development cooperation agency) told IPS.

“GIZ is cooperating with several other donors as well as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on coastal zone protection in the Mekong Delta, which includes restoration (and) extension of mangrove belts (and) upgrading existing dykes while determining key ‘erosion hot spots’ where new ones would be most needed.”

Broadening existing climate change cooperation to support the new Strategy was discussed during two high-level visits to Vietnam last month, first by UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, followed by the European Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs, as well as by the recently appointed Director- General of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) José Graziano da Silva during his visit in March.

“Non-governmental organisations, both Vietnamese and foreign, have been working on climate change for some time through field projects and their Climate Change Working Group,” Vu Trung Kien, director of the Climate Change Resilience Centre, told IPS. “We talk with (the) government but don’t sit on the National Climate Change Committee and have a few entry points at provincial levels so far. Lack of capacity, lack of information at all levels is a huge problem.”

The government admits that its climate change actions can only succeed as part of a broad ‘green economy’ framework, a radical departure from the environmentally destructive growth policies followed after 1975. The related National Green Growth Strategy being drafted under the Prime Minister’s leadership will hopefully be launched in time for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, known as Rio+20, from Jun. 20-22.

As the climate change strategy tellingly warns, “public awareness on climate change remains limited and one-sided: too much attention towards the adverse impacts…and too little to changing production and consumption behaviours towards…low-carbon, green growth.”

The world’s population today is healthier, wealthier, and better educated than ever before. Yet, despite incredible progress, disconcerting realities stubbornly persist.

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

Many people still live in extreme poverty, even where economies are growing rapidly. Over 20 percent of the world’s population lives in states which are considered fragile and highly vulnerable.

Global economic and financial systems remain volatile. Armed violence and organised criminal networks are a growing threat to human security in many countries. Women continue to face serious barriers to real empowerment. Our planetary boundaries are being stretched to the limit.

As the world’s population increases from the current seven billion people to a projected almost nine billion in 2040, and if current consumption and production patterns continue, this stress on our planet and its resources will undoubtedly increase.

Therefore, when world leaders come together in Rio de Janeiro in June to discuss sustainable development, resilience must be an important part of the discussion.

Achieving development which lasts is not about trading economic, social, and environmental objectives off against each other. It is about seeing them as interconnected objectives which are best pursued together.

Resilience cannot be built overnight. It takes time. But it is our best chance of locking in progress made to date, and advancing equitable and sustainable human development.

Resilience implies the inherent capacity of a system to deal with any external shock, no matter how well anticipated or how surprising it is.

For the UN Development Programme (UNDP), achieving resilience is a transformative process which builds on the innate strength of individuals, their communities, and institutions to prevent, lessen the impacts of, and learn from the experience of shocks of any type, internal or external, natural or man-made, economic, health-related, political, or social.

In 2000, Mozambique was battered by cyclone-related flooding, which left 800 people dead, half a million people homeless, and disrupted the livelihoods of over one million more, affecting 4.5 million people in total.

Fast forward to 2007 when floods of similar magnitudes again hit Mozambique. This time the death toll was 29 people compared to 800 people and the numbers displaced were some 70,000 compared to one million. When Mozambique was hit for the second time, the society was much more prepared, disaster risk had been addressed in a more comprehensive manner, and the government had provided leadership and articulated a clear strategic vision.

The international community stepped in to provide support for institutional, policy, and capacity development. Community and livelihood risk reduction programmes were initiated, and emergency response systems strengthened. Civil society organisations and the Red Cross movement worked with local governments and the U.N. on community-based preparedness.

The key lesson from Mozambique’s experience is that when societies invest time in learning from adversity, they become better prepared to face it in the future. State institutions and local governance structures were better prepared and had more coherent response strategies.

Self-help efforts by communities played vital roles in saving more lives than any external intervention could have done. The society took far less time to self-organise and recover.

In building resilience, the first priority must be prevention, complemented by explicit efforts to reduce societal vulnerabilities and a commitment to maintain the integrity of communities, institutions, and ecosystems.

Building resilience benefits from governance which is active, effective, honest, and fair, and not just in developing countries. As the recent financial crisis showed, not all developed countries have retained systemic resilience to economic shocks. Unless developed countries are prepared to see years of human development and progress wiped away when adversity strikes, their systemic resilience to shocks is critical as well.

Institutions – particularly structures and systems of governance – provide frameworks for building resilience. When state institutions fail to guarantee access to justice and a functioning public service, and cannot provide an enabling environment in which people can flourish, communities become more vulnerable to the criminal or other violent entities which will fill any void.

State fragility is a function of not only weak institutions but also of social systems under strain. A resilient state is anchored in a cohesive society. Stark inequalities and inequities undermine that.

Sustainable development based on resilience also calls for developing the capacity of the poor to overcome challenges, and should be guided by a commitment to national ownership, comprehensive and integrated responses, innovation and learning, and long-term strategic engagement.

Building social protection systems is an important investment in resilience, as they shield the most vulnerable from the worst effects of shocks and help prevent irreversible development setbacks. These are the steps many nations we now call developed took in the 1930s and 1940s.

The costs of an adequate social protection floor are one to two percent of GDP. Yet, currently, only around 20 percent of the world’s working age population – mostly in middle- and upper- income countries – has access to comprehensive social protection systems.

Resilient societies also those with a capacity for dialogue which can amicably mediate differences. They exhibit social and civic trust – thus enabling people to feel included and encouraged to work together.

It takes hard work to establish these attributes in any society. It is even more difficult to do so in those wrecked by conflict and violence. Yet, without such capacities for tolerance, fragility can overwhelm the institutions and systems of a society.

*Helen Clark is Administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and former Prime Minister of New Zealand

A civil disobedience campaign last August led to hundreds of arrests. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 4 2012 (IPS)

What are you doing on Saturday? Peter Nix, a retiree, will be standing on a railway track on Canada’s west coast blocking a coal train destined to ship U.S. and Canadian coal to Asia.

Nix will be joined by dozens of people near White Rock, British Columbia on May 5. They will be in good company as tens of thousands of people around the world participate in global day of action to “connect the dots” between climate change and extreme weather.

“There will be at least 1,200 actions in more than 100 countries,” says Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, a U.S.-based environmental group.

There’s been a general perception that climate change is a future problem but with all the extreme weather disasters and weather records the public is being to realise that climate change is here, says Henn.

“Recent opinion surveys show the more than 60 percent of the U.S. public are connecting extreme weather to climate change,” Henn told IPS.

The U.S. public is not wrong, say scientists.

“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 U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, told IPS previously.

Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.

This year, most of the U.S. and Canada experienced summer in winter with record-shattering heat waves in March. More than 15,000 temperature records were broken in the U.S. which had its first billion-dollar weather disaster of the year. In most places, the spring month of April was colder than March.

“What kind of future are we leaving for our children if we keep putting more carbon into the atmosphere?” asks Nix.

As a former scientist who used to work for the oil industry in Canada’s tar sands, he has a pretty good idea of what’s coming unless fossil fuels are phased out. Catastrophic consequences including everything from droughts, floods, forest fires, food shortages, to increases in tropical diseases and political chaos.

“Politicians are not leading. Corporations are only interested in quick profits. They are the real radicals in our society,” says Nix. This is a reference to a high-level Canadian official who accused environmentalists of having a “radical ideological agenda” in an open letter.

“There is no one left to protect the future for our children but the public,” says Nix.

Every day, six long trains each carrying up to 10,000 tonnes of coal from the U.S. and British Columbia (BC) travel the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) rail line to the Westshore Coal Terminal at Delta, BC just north of the U.S. border. It is the busiest coal export port in North America.

The climate-heating carbon in the coal exported every year is equivalent to the annual emissions for the entire province of BC of 4.5 million people and many energy-intense industries like aluminium smelting and mining, says Nix.

“We have to stop burning coal. Leading scientists like James Hansen have made that clear,” he said.

Nix and other members of British Columbians for Climate Action have asked to meet with government officials to work out a plan to phase out coal exports. Their requests have been ignored. Now they have asked U.S. billionaire Warren Buffet to take action. His company Berkshire Hathaway Inc owns BNSF, one of the largest freight networks in North America.

Buffet has previously cancelled plans to build new coal-fired plants in the U.S. In a letter to Buffet, British Columbians for Climate Action write, “…when it comes to climate change it appears that other people are doing all the suffering while you profit from the very causes of the problem.”

On Saturday, 23-year-old Brandon Cormier wants to inform her local residents in the small Canadian town of Orangeville, Ontario about one of the sources of the climate change problem, Canada’s huge tar sands operation that boils oil out sands under its northern forests.

Cormier is organising a demo-fest event as part of International Stop the Tar Sands Day*, which is also May 5.

“I am hoping to make local people more aware of climate change, and that the tar sands are a big contributor,” says Cormier, who has never done anything like this.

International Stop the Tar Sands Day has been held annually since 2010 with events in 50 cities around the world last year. It involves playful demonstration-festivals involving music, dancing, costumes, handing out flowers and postcards as part of an awareness-raising effort.

The tar sands operations in the province of Alberta supply the US with more than 2.4 million barrels of heavy oil a day. Considered “dirty oil” because requires large amounts of natural gas and clean water to extract it from the ground, it is under growing international pressure as a major source of carbon emissions and over destruction of thousands of kilometres of forests and wetlands.

“Not many people I know want to help me with this. They think that it is silly being so far away (from Alberta)….But I won’t let that discourage me. It’s everyone’s planet.”

Cormier she says even if just one more person goes home on Saturday to research the impacts of the tar sands and spreads the word, it will have been a success. “I am happy that I am able to make a difference even if it is small.”

*Full disclosure: International Stop the Tar Sands Day was started by Leahy’s son Derek Leahy, who remains the European coordinator.

By Aline Jenckel
UNITED NATIONS, May 2 2012 (IPS)

In the weeks and months leading up to the Rio+20 summit on sustainable development, groups spanning a wide spectrum of interests are doing everything in their power to ensure that the outcomes of the summit are actually carried out.

Ivana Savic, left, and Kiara Worth, co-ordinators of the Conference on Sustainable Development Major Group for Children and Youth. Credit: Aline Jenckel/IPS

One such group is the Conference on Sustainable Development Major Group of Children and Youth, which believes that strengthening youth involvement and activism is urgent and critical to the success of the United Nations (U.N.) Conference on Sustainable Development, commonly known as Rio+20, to be held this year in Rio de Janeiro from June 20 to 22.

Ivana Savic and Kiara Worth, co-ordinators of the CSD Major Group of Children and Youth, have high hopes for the summit and the results it could bring.

“We will see a renewal of the political will, and we would like to see youth being recognised more concretely in official documentation,” Worth told IPS, although she acknowledged that while she had “huge expectations, whether or not they will be achieved is a different thing”.

“It is not only about the policy, the dialogue or the official statements,” Worth added. “It is about creating the energy and the sense of urgency and the sense of ability to move forward.”

Worth and Savic also hope to see different forums established that will inspire, enable and motivate youth to participate in negotiations.

The period from April 30 to May 4 is the third informal week of negotiations on the zero draft of the outcome document for Rio+20. The negotiations are being held at the U.N.’s New York headquarters.

U.N. Correspondent Aline Jenckel talked with the women about the work of the youth organisation and their hopes for the Rio+20 summit as well as preceding negotiations.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are the main concerns of the CSD Major Group for Children and Youth? A: (Savic) What needs to be done during these negotiations (held at the U.N. this week), and I believe also for the Rio + 20 Summit, are adopting a human rights based approach to sustainable development and strengthening human rights in the outcome document.

(Worth) Within the themes of Rio+20, there are different policy points for which we are strongly advocating. Within the green economy, for example, we are promoting sustainable agriculture. The main line in the green economy is also youth employment, in terms of shifting from job seeking to job creation.

In addition, we advocate for more reflection on creating a blue economy and protecting our water.

Within the institutional framework for sustainable development, we campaign for the establishment of an ombudsperson for future generations to ensure that there is a high level of engagement of youth in global processes.

Q: What contributions will the Major Group bring to the Rio+20 conference in June 2012? A: (Worth) The two main things our group will bring to the summit are first, our policy contributions and second, the inspiration and motivation for youth activism.

At the moment, we are focused on a whole series of different groups that people can get involved in. We try to cater to a variety of youth around the world who have different interests, skills and abilities. We try to create a space where they can gather and share their ideas.

We build momentum and a social movement that is inspiring and reviving the spirit of Rio.

Q: The first step to build momentum for progress on current global challenges is to draw attention to the topic. How does your organisation inspire others to learn more about sustainable development, and how do you convince them to act? A: (Worth) Recently, we launched a social media strategy, for as youth we have a unique opportunity through access to new social media platforms and different tools to increase the scope of our message.

We are currently working on a strategy to use those different platforms to first create awareness – to inform people about the discussion, about sustainable development, about our focus. Second is to build capacity, once people gain knowledge about the topic, and give them tools to take action.

This builds a movement in two complementary ways: Local action takes into account global perspectives, while you ensure that the global process reflects local perspectives, thus taking into account the differing abilities of people and their diverse interests. You become much more effective.

(Savic) We also make sure it’s accessible to people who have fewer opportunities to participate.

Even if they are physically not there, at the U.N. or in Rio for example, they still have an influence because we have the technology and the ability to bring their perspectives to the table and to address those issues.

Q: What are your expectations regarding the outcomes of the conference and the commitments made by governments? A: (Worth) Touching on the inspiration of Rio, the main expectation especially from my perspective would be that we build that movement and the energy. It is not only about the policy, the dialogue or the official statements, it is about creating the energy and the sense of urgency and the sense of ability to move forward.

By achieving that, then at least we have a young, social, strong and empowered movement that can act on anything we decide to to.

(Savic) I expect us to move away from that materialistic development to a more human and well-being oriented development that actually respects the human rights, economic growth and also the respect owed to our environment.

For me, another important outcome of Rio +20 is forming partnerships between civil societies and governments in implementation. In previous times, due to the lack of that partnership, we were not able to meet agreements and commitments.

It goes the same for governments as for civil societies who were not participating in or held accountable for those agreements.

Excerpt:

Women in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of this city 40 km north of Rio de Janeiro no longer have to spend money on vegetables, because they have learned to grow their own, as organic urban gardening takes off in Brazil.

Cooperative member Rosinéia Soares displays the aubergines growing in her garden in Parque Genesiano da Luz. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The land here is not fertile, like it is in the hilly region of the state of Rio de Janeiro that supplies the city’s markets. And the climate is sometimes too hot for vegetables to grow without stress or pests.

But in the poor neighbourhood of Parque Genesiano da Luz in the city of Nova Iguaçu, local women can now proudly say they eat what they themselves have grown.

The women sell the rest of what they produce – 70 percent – through the Univerde cooperative they set up, which comprises 22 families who put five percent of what they earn back in, to run the cooperative.

Production is carried out on an individual basis, but everything else, including the sales of produce, is done collectively.

“It’s wonderful to see what you grow in the garden, bring everything home fresh, and give your children such healthy food,” Joyce da Silva, one of the members of the cooperative, told IPS. “So much so that when the low-production season arrives, we don’t even buy outside, because now we know that conventional products have a lot of poison. And I don’t want to eat that anymore.”

The gardens, which are each about 1,000 square metres in size, are located on what once were empty lots. Below them lie pipelines of the state oil company, Petrobras, which financed the project when it got under way in 2007.

When the financing dried up, many of the more than 50 families taking part at the time dropped out, due to a lack of resources.

But a group of women decided to continue, against all odds: they didn’t have funds, tools, or transportation to haul seeds and seedlings or take their products to the street markets to sell them.

But they were determined not to give up the independence they had achieved.

“Before getting involved in the cooperative, I only looked after my home,” da Silva said. “But afterwards, I gained economic independence. Another kind of independence is the health I achieved for my family. And also the improved living conditions. Things at home improved in general.”

The Urban Agriculture Programme, which now provides the women with technical assistance, was created in 1999, and was expanded into peri-urban areas in 2011 by AS-PTA, a non-governmental organisation that promotes urban family gardening and agroecology.

This programme is aimed at boosting the incomes of families in peri-urban areas – poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Queimados and Magé, where it benefits a total of 650 people.

The urban farmers do not use chemicals. Both the fertilisers and pesticides they use are homemade and non-toxic.

The majority of the food consumed in the city comes from far away, which means prices are driven up by transport costs, Marcio Mattos de Mendonça, the coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Programme, told IPS.

“The people who live in these communities need food from nearby areas,” he said. “Fresh vegetables are often left off the menu, and unhealthy kinds of food are given priority.”

In line with the global demographic trend, Brazil’s population of more than 192 million people is increasingly urban.

In 2000, 81 percent of Brazilians lived in urban areas, and 10 years later the proportion has risen to over 84 percent, according to the 2010 census.

But the growing urbanisation has not snuffed out the vocation for farming passed down through the generations, Mendonça said. In many poor urban areas like the favelas or shantytowns lining the hills of Rio de Janeiro, people have kept alive the custom of growing vegetables and medicinal herbs, and raising small animals like pigs, goats or barnyard fowl.

Aldeni Fausto, who always grew vegetables in her yard, inherited that practice which has been kept alive by migrants from rural areas and which she is now successfully reproducing within the city limits.

“Living in nature is what I like the most,” she said. “The pleasure of planting, harvesting and feeding ourselves, reviving our family’s roots and traditions and teaching them to our children; that is so important, so we don’t forget our history.”

Fausto, the president of the Univerde cooperative, said the distancing of rural migrants from their land led to “an increase in diseases, an imbalance in nature, and financial problems, because these people have nothing to eat and no interest in producing food.”

But “if people planted a little bit in every corner, they wouldn’t suffer from a lack of food,” she said.

Da Silva looks at it from another angle. “I never imagined producing food in the middle of the city. This area didn’t even have a market. And sometimes we couldn’t even afford to go somewhere else to buy things,” she said.

The visit to the cooperative was one of the field trips organised by World Nutrition Rio 2012, an international nutrition congress organised in Rio de Janeiro Apr. 27-30 by the World Public Health Nutrition Association and the Brazilian Association of Collective Health.

Among other issues, the congress discussed healthy eating habits, the planet’s resources, and the need to recognise and support traditional food systems – three core concepts that underlie the activities of the Univerde cooperative.

Da Silva said her family had various health-related problems linked to eating habits that she now understands were harmful.

Her daughter, for example, had anaemia. “Even though she is dark-skinned like I am, she looked sort of yellowish and was very weak. But with this food, she is now in good health, her skin shines, and her lips and gums are nice and red; this was the best thing about it, for me,” da Silva said.

Fausto also noticed improvements in her family’s quality of life. “Although I don’t look like it, I used to be fat. I have seen changes in my body, in my health, in my children’s diet. My mind now is more at ease, and I have found an equilibrium,” she said, pointing out that she is now free of obesity-related health problems like back pain and hypertension.

But the route these women chose is not an easy one. Without strong support, like the funding they received at first, the sustainability of the cooperative is always an issue of concern.

Of the more than 50 plots of land available for urban farming in Nova Iguaçu, only 22 are currently in use, said one of the visitors from the congress, Angélica Siqueira, a student in her final year of coursework for a degree in nutrition at the alternative economy centre of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

“There is still a prejudice that the countryside is poor,” Siqueira told IPS. Her team is attempting to apply urban and peri-urban farming techniques in poor neighbourhoods in her state, in southern Brazil, through the Technological Incubator of Popular Cooperatives.

The hope of the cooperative members is that now they have official certification, they will be able to sell their produce to the federal government’s school meals programme, which stimulates purchases by public schools of food produced by family farmers.

“Before, we didn’t even know how to run a company, and now we administer our own cooperative,” said Fausto, a true convert to urban gardening. “It’s therapy. One little plant gives you back gratitude and love.”

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, May 2 2012 (IPS)

“It’s very hard for them to put food on the table, but they are very noble people,” Diego Orozco, one of the thousands of young urban Guatemalans who spent last weekend with a poor rural family, told IPS.

“They only ate a plate of beans, but they gave me the privilege of also giving me an egg and some boiled water,” added the 18-year-old, who comes from a middle-class family.

“The most significant thing was that I realised the importance of water. They get water every four days, and it’s really hard for them to be able to take baths and have drinking water. If they don’t have water they can’t irrigate their crops, and without crops, they don’t have food,” he said, after spending Saturday Apr. 28 and Sunday Apr. 29 with campesinos or peasant farmers in the western department (province) of Quetzaltenango.

Like Orozco, more than 6,000 middle- and upper-middle-class young people, mainly from the capital, visited 14 of the country’s 22 departments to stay with poor rural families and get an up-close view of the poverty and malnutrition they face.

The president, right-wing retired General Otto Pérez Molina, and cabinet ministers and other public officials also participated in the activity.

The initiative, “Todos tenemos algo que dar” (We All Have Something to Give), brings the private sector and the government’s Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security together to raise awareness among young people about poverty and malnutrition, and get them to take part in the search for solutions.

In Guatemala, which has the highest chronic malnutrition rates in Latin America, one out of two children under five is undernourished, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

And a full 54 percent of the country’s 14 million people live in poverty, while 13 percent – mainly indigenous people – live in extreme poverty, according to the government’s 2011 National Survey on Living Conditions.

“We waste water and we don’t value what our parents give us,” Orozco said. “We are all human and we should all have the same, not some less and others more. There are people who work very hard, and who have a really hard time trying to get ahead, and others who don’t have to struggle at all.”

The visitors stayed overnight in the public schools closest to the communities they visited, ate their meals with campesino families, took part in their daily work activities, and exchanged opinions about their lives.

Juan Carlos Girón, an 18-year-old private school student, spent the weekend with a family in Vixbén, a mainly indigenous community in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala’s western highlands.

“I visited a couple with nine kids,” he told IPS. “They’re poor, but very noble. They have a small woodstove, a few plates, a sheet metal roof with holes, and a dirt floor.

“The father told me that last week his children didn’t have anything to eat, because the family had no money. But they welcomed me with a special meal (sheep liver) that they used all their savings to buy, when they usually eat just corn tamales with coffee or water,” he added.

“I felt embarrassed and sad because I know that so many people in the world don’t appreciate or take advantage of what they have,” he said.

Girón helped the family wash the dishes and wash clothes, cut firewood, and take the sheep out to pasture.

He noticed that one of the youngest children “was five years old, but was the size of a three-year-old, and she was really skinny. They said they ate well, but you could see how things really were.”

He said that he realised he can’t complain about his own life.

Guatemala is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world. Nearly 80 percent of the country’s farmland is owned by just five percent of the population, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The organisers of “Tengo algo que dar” were pleased with the results.

“It was very positive and special, an encounter between human beings with the same vision, the search for joint solutions between two realities: urban Guatemala and rural Guatemala,” Luis Enrique Monterroso, the head of the Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security, told IPS.

But the initiative, which forms part of the government’s “Zero Hunger” plan to combat malnutrition, doesn’t end there.

The official explained that in May they would hold an exhibition on food solutions, where different experiences will be shared, and in June, a national “coperacha” or collection will be held, to provide tools for farmers and launch projects to attack malnutrition.

“And in July, we’ll go back to the communities, with a proposal for individual or collective solutions,” he said.

Businessman Emilio Méndez, one of the organisers, said that “until we manage to join forces, the problem of malnutrition won’t be solved. It will continue to grow bigger and bigger, and will lash back at us.”

“It’s a tragedy that 50 percent of Guatemalan children are malnourished. That means that 50 percent of Guatemala’s future is compromised,” he said.

Meanwhile, a seed of hope was planted in the communities visited by the officials and young people.

“I thought it was good they came, because the kids came from somewhere else to see the work we do every day,” Delvi Pérez, an 18-year-old farmer, told IPS.

His family, who live in the community of Huitán, often find it hard to feed themselves. “The truth is that we don’t have enough. We plant 11 to 15 cuerdas (between four and six hectares) a year in basic grains and vegetables, but since there are 11 of us, we have to lease land elsewhere,” he said.

“I think they’re going to do something for us. I’m not sure, but they could help with fertiliser for our land, so we could improve production,” he added.

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, May 1 2012 (IPS)

Thirty percent of food is wasted globally, while one billion people go hungry and another billion are obese.

The current food system is broken and is failing to meet the world’s nutritional needs, says Danielle Nierenberg, “Nourishing the Planet” project director at Worldwatch Institute.

Worldwatch and the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition recently released “Eating Planet 2012” to highlight the challenges faced by today’s food and agricultural system and the benefits of making the system more sustainable, accessible and fair.

“While we talk a lot about the bad news (in the report), the focus is on how agriculture can be the solution for some of the world’s most pressing problems, whether it’s hunger and obesity or youth unemployment. We really think that food and how we produce it and how we eat it is a significant solution,” Nierenberg said.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Farmers don’t make much. Can they afford to be sustainable? Will they be able to mass-produce without the usual fertiliser? A: I think what we are seeing as fuel prices continue to rise, it’s becoming harder and harder for farmers all over the world to afford agriculture inputs that are highly fossil fuel intensive like fertiliser, pesticide and other chemicals. And there really are no signs of fuel prices going down soon.

So I think the whole issue of whether organic or sustainable agriculture can feed the world is not really the question, it’s whether we can continue the food system based on fossil fuel intensive resources. I don’t think it can.

We have one billion hungry people in the world and we have an industrialised agricultural system that’s supposed to be feeding these people, but it’s not. (Various studies) comparing the two show that the industrial system is not making that much more in yield and, in some cases, yields are lower.

We are not feeding with the current system, anyway. So we have to figure out less fossil fuel intensive methods to make sure everyone is fed.

Q: What are some of the solutions you propose? A: In “Eating Planet”, the focus is on nutrition. There is a lot of talk in agricultural development on how to improve yields and what kind of agricultural system is best but there are only a few people who bridge the gap between agriculture and nutrition.

It’s not just about how much food we are producing, but what kind of food we are producing. Are we trying to introduce more varieties of highly nutritious beans, vegetables and fruit? There’s so much focus on the amount of calories we are producing, but no focus on nutrients that are present in those calories. This is why we are seeing things like obesity and diabetes as a global epidemic, not just happening in rich countries but also in poor countries. How can we make the agricultural system more nutritious?

At the World Bank, the nutrition people are not talking to the agricultural people. That sort of thing needs to change. We need to make sure that public health professionals and nutritionists are talking to farmers, food processors and food businesses to make sure the food is as nutritious as it can be.

Q: Let’s consider the U.S. for example. Here nutritious organic food can be expensive and people might not want to pay that much or are able to. How can that be changed? A: A lot of subsidies that have existed in American agriculture in the last 50 years have been focused on industrial agriculture and producing commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Organic food is expensive because farmers are growing it on a smaller scale.

One reason for this is because it’s still not receiving the subsidies the big farmers have. To help small- and medium-scale farmers, we can funnel more of the agricultural funding for farmers who are more sustainable, using less fertiliser and more organic compounds. It’ll help struggling farmers and make it more affordable for consumers.

Q: Fast-food restaurants like McDonalds are now exporting to other countries, changing the eating habits of those people. How would you address that? A: Factory farming or concentrated operations, this agricultural system really started here in the U.S. and in Europe, (and) is now spreading to the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia. The environmental, public health and animal welfare impact of this is really extreme. You have huge amounts of waste that can’t be utilised by farmlands, surface fertiliser is becoming toxic waste, there’s tropical water pollution, surface water pollution.

The impact of this fast-food diet in developing countries they weren’t exposed to 30 or 40 years ago is leading to the same types of problems – diabetes, obesity, heart disease and sometimes types of cancer.

The thing about this system is, whether it’s industry farming or the fast-food culture, is that it’s very dependent on cheap sources of grain…Agriculture can’t be seen as sort of an industry, it’s part of the landscape. More than any other industry it relies on clean energy and water.

What we are calling for is a restructuring of the entire food system. One that is more regional and local and relies on resources already available.

Q: How realistic is that? What would you suggest as the basic foundation for a system like that? A: This transition isn’t going to happen overnight. It requires actions from all levels – businesses so that they make their production systems more sustainable, and action from consumers, knowing where food comes from and demanding safe, fairly produced food. We want food that is more animal-welfare friendly.

Finally, policymakers need to push a lot of these changes, without that we won’t see huge investments in agriculture. Really, for the last 30 years agriculture has been ignored by the international donor communities. Now, because of the food crisis, we are seeing a shift to ‘oh gosh, we need to invest in agriculture or we are going to be in a lot of trouble.’

We can’t ignore agriculture any longer whether we are policymakers or soccer moms. We really need to make sure that agriculture is something that sustains and not just some extractive industry.

Excerpt:

The Earth's capacity to meet human needs is finite, and depends on lifestyle choices and associated consumption. Credit: John Snape/CC BY 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 1 2012 (IPS)

Just before the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some of the industrial nations, and specifically the United States, were lambasted for their obscenely high consumption of the world’s finite resources, including food, water and energy.

The world was being gradually destroyed, environmentalists warned, by unsustainable consumption.

Hitting back at critics, then U.S. president George H.W. Bush famously declared: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”

The message, a pre-emptive diplomatic strike by the United States, reverberated throughout the summit of world leaders, whose plan of action for the 21st century virtually skirted the hot political issue.

Now, 20 years later, the United Nations will once again focus on population, consumption and the environment at the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio+20) in mid-June in Brazil.

The upcoming summit will adopt a new plan of action for a greener economy and a sustainable future.

A new 134-page study, released on the eve of the summit, and titled “People and the Planet“, highlights the rapid and widespread changes in the world’s population and the unprecedented levels of consumption that are threatening the well being of the planet.

Authored by the Royal Society, a 352-year-old institution described as a fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists, the study says the Earth’s capacity to meet human needs is finite.

But how the limits are approached depends on lifestyle choices and associated consumption – and these depend on what is used, and how, and what is regarded as essential for human wellbeing.

The members of the Royal Society’s glorious past include some of the world’s illustrious scientists and thinkers of a bygone era, the likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Watson and Albert Einstein.

Presenting the report on behalf of the Royal Society, Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston told reporters Tuesday there is a strong link between population, consumption and the environment.

The unsustainable consumption of the world’s most developed and emerging economies must be urgently reduced, he said.

A child born in the developed world, he pointed out, consumes 30 to 50 times as much water as one born in the developing world.

The increase in “material consumption”, he said, involved food, water, energy and minerals.

And as the report points out, “these resources are the most basic needs for survival, and in some parts of the world even these basic needs are not being met for some people.”

By contrast, high levels of material consumption seen in many parts of the world “may lead eventually to loss of well being for the consumer, and, in an inequitable world with finite resources, also result in the deprivation of others.”

The 21st century is a critical period for people and the planet, says the study, pointing out that the global population, which reached 7.0 billion during 2011, will reach between eight and 11 billion by 2050.

“Human impact on the Earth raises serious concerns, and in the richest parts of the world per capita material consumption is far above the level that can be sustained for everyone in a population of seven billion or more.”

This is in stark contrast to the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people, who need to consume more in order to be raised out of extreme poverty.

The study also says that population and consumption are both important: the combination of increasing global population and increasing overall material consumption has implications for a finite planet.

As both continue to rise, signs of unwanted impacts and feedback (such as climate change reducing crop yields in some areas) and of irreversible changes (such as the increased rate of species extinction) are “growing alarmingly”.

“The relationship between population, consumption and the environment is not straightforward, as the natural environment and human socio- economic systems are complex in their own right.”

Demographic change is driven by economic development, social and cultural factors as well as environmental change. A transition from high to low birth and death rates has occurred in various cultures, in widely different socioeconomic settings, and at different rates, the study adds.

And countries such as Iran and South Korea have moved through the phases of this transition much more rapidly than Europe or North America.

This has brought with it challenges different from those that were experienced by the more developed countries as they reached the late stages of the transition.

Developing countries will be building the equivalent of a city of a million people every five days from now to 2050, the study predicts.

And the continuing and rapid growth of the urban population is having a marked bearing on lifestyle and behaviour: how and what they consume, how many children they have, the type of employment they undertake.

Urban planning is essential to avoid the spread of slums, which are highly deleterious to the welfare of individuals and societies, the study notes.

In a series of recommendations, the study calls on the international community to bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than 1.25 dollars per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today.

Additionally, the most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.

Also, reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally.

Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues, the study says.

“Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings,” it says.

Also, governments should realise the potential of urbanisation to reduce material consumption and environmental impact through efficiency measures.

And in order to meet previously agreed goals for universal education, policy makers in countries with low school attendance need to work with international funders and organisations, such as U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Education for All.

As the United Nations and countries around the world look at cooperatives as an alternative economic model for the production of energy, rural energy cooperatives have thrived for over eight decades in the U.S., and citizens in some parts of the country are beginning to reclaim them through the democratic process.

Cobb EMC's new board voted to pursue solar energy through a power purchase agreement. Credit: Living Off Grid/CC BY 2.0

There are more than 900 rural electric cooperatives, or Energy Membership Corporations (EMCs), providing electricity to 42 million people in 47 U.S. states.

Georgia has the largest network of EMCs in the nation in terms of the number of customers served, with 42 customer-owned EMCs providing electricity and related services to four million people, nearly half of Georgia’s population, across 73 percent of the state’s land area.

Originally, the EMCs were part of a New Deal initiative to bring electricity to rural areas because private enterprise was not doing it. The federal government provided seed money credit to get them going, and the programme was run under the Rural Electric Administration.

“When the (energy) co-op movement started, it was very democratic,” Seth Gunning, organising associate of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, told IPS.

“Very quickly, though, it was sort of taken over by the same social institutions that run local governments and local businesses, and it sort of turned into this social club thing, that still exists all over Georgia. If you have a brother-in-law that sits on board, and there’s a vacancy on the board, you’re likely to get that seat,” Gunning said.

Most citizens and energy consumers in Cobb County, Georgia, did not realise they were members of the Cobb EMC, or what privileges that brought them, until a recent scandal in which it was revealed that the Cobb EMC CEO and Board of Directors were engaged in racketeering.

Cobb EMC, a non-profit, had created a for-profit entity called Cobb Energy. The EMC contracted out all of its work to the entity at a 12 percent premium, while the EMC CEO and Board of Directors also served in the same positions at Cobb Energy, thus profiting from Cobb EMC.

Instead, the profits are supposed to be returned to the members or to community initiatives of members’ choosing, such as donations to nonprofit organisations or investments in community infrastructure.

A number of lawsuits were filed, included a lawsuit seeking that profits dating back to 1939 be returned to EMC members. Additionally, the CEO was indicted.

This debacle – which seemed like a soap opera, or, even more so, a telenovela – led Cobb EMC members to get involved in the democratic process again.

Community organisations such as the Cobb Alliance for Smart Energy (CASE) were formed. They recruited and vetted reform candidates to run for the Board of Directors, after a judge mandated the EMC hold board elections for the first time in over a decade. At one meeting before the election in September 2011, over 3,600 members showed up to vote on whether to accept mail-in ballots at the election. Prior Cobb EMC meetings had only had a few hundred members to show up.

At the end of the day, after elections were held in November 2011 and March 2012, every single member of the Board of Directors was replaced with a reform candidate.

A few days ago, the new directors held their first Town Hall Meeting for EMC members, and are expected to open up their board meetings for members to attend in the near future.

As a result, in January 2012, the new Cobb EMC Board voted to divest from two proposed new coal energy plants in Georgia, Plant Washington and Plant Ben Hill. Prior to that, Cobb EMC had been part of a consortium of several EMCs called Power4Georgians (P4G), that had planned to build the two new plants.

Earlier this month, plans for Plant Ben Hill were cancelled, in part because the Cobb EMC pulled out of the project. Only four Georgia EMCs remain as part of P4G; plans for Plant Washington remain on the table, but Gunning says he believes P4G will be unable to find an investor willing to take on the project.

Also, earlier this month, Cobb EMC’s new board voted to pursue solar energy through a power purchase agreement, marking a complete turnabout from investment in dirty energy towards clean energy sources for the co-op and its members.

According to Gunning, a very similar turnaround happened with an EMC in Pedernales, Texas, near Austin, and citizens in other parts of Georgia are working to reshape their EMCs.

Despite the difficulties and struggles that citizens have had with their local EMCs, Tom Barksdale, chairman of the CASE, said he still thinks EMCs are a good idea, so long as they are done right.

“I do believe that (energy) co-ops could work in less developed countries or developing countries for the same reason they originally worked in the U.S.,” Barksdale told IPS.

“I think co-ops work, but like any democracy, the members have to pay attention to what they’re doing. In that sense, small is better. They should be set up with specific areas, instead of as massive utilities,” he said.

“The co-op was the idea that neighbours, people who knew each other personally, would get together in relatively small areas to bring electricity to the area. The situation changed when what used to be a few thousand members became like Cobb EMC with over 200,000 members. It became unwieldy and got out of control,” he said.

“The good ol’ boys found out they could do whatever they wanted to and they could get away with it,” he said.

Barksdale also said that EMCs should have “institutional safeguards” such as open board meetings, open records, community meetings in addition to board meetings, and perhaps some government oversight.

“They shouldn’t be able to maintain fiction that they are private; they should be seen as quasi-public,” he said.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 2012 (IPS)

The U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) rightly believes the road to Rio goes via Cairo – and that sustainable development and population are inextricably linked.

Michael Herrmann Credit: Courtesy of UNFPA

So when the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (also known as the Rio+20 summit) takes place in Brazil in June, a strong underlying theme will be the human factor, as spelled out in the Programme of Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in the Egyptian capital.

“Development has to serve people, and a sustainable development agenda must consider people,” says Michael Herrmann, economics adviser with UNFPA, and member of the U.N. Lead Economist Network.

An agenda that does not take account of people – their numbers, locations and age structures, as well as their living conditions, ambitions and opportunities – “misses the raison d’etre of sustainable development.”

In an interview with IPS, he pointed out that “for sustainable development, it quite simply matters how many people we are, where we live, how we live and what we want from life.”

“Sustainable development demands greener and more inclusive economic growth, which encourages sustainable production and consumption, and rights-based policies which address population dynamics,” said Herrmann, who once co-authored some of the flagship reports of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and is currently responsible for economic and demographic analysis at UNFPA.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What is the impact of rising population on the environment? A: Last year the world population surpassed the seven billion mark and by mid-century it will have grown to over nine billion. By 2050, we will add about as many people to the planet as inhabited the planet as recently as 1950.

More people will need more water, food and energy, more clothing, housing and infrastructure, and more health and education, amongst others. Meeting these needs will require not only a more balanced distribution of economic resources, but also higher levels of economic output, and this will lead to mounting pressures on all natural resources.

Q: How best can these challenges be met? A: The dual challenge of improving the well-being of a large and growing population, while promoting the sustainable use of essential natural resources, calls for a two-pronged approach. In accordance, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the 1994 ICPD in Cairo have emphasised the need to shift towards sustainable production and consumption – which is the hallmark of the green economy – and appropriate policies to address demographic changes.

Contrary to common perceptions, we can address population dynamics, and we can address population dynamics through human-centred and rights-based policies. Whether the world population will grow to over nine billion by mid-century and stabilise at around 10 billion by the end of the century, or whether it will grow to well over 10 billion by mid-century and to about 16 billion by the end of the century, depends on today’s policies.

Demography is not destiny. The difference between these two population projections of the United Nations is half a child per woman, on average. Individual choices and opportunities culminate in population dynamics, and population dynamics can be addressed by enlarging, not restricting, individual choices and opportunities.

Q: What does this entail? A: This requires universal access to sexual and reproductive health, investment in education beyond the primary level, the empowerment of women, and a more active involvement of youth.

Together, these measures will not only help improve the quality of life of people – by reducing infant, child and maternal mortality, arresting the spread of communicable diseases and reducing unintended pregnancies of young women – but will also contribute to lower fertility and slow population growth.

Q: How much of the focus should be on population growth? A: It would be wrong to focus on population growth and neglect other demographic trends, including migration and urbanisation, which can be strong positive drivers for most sustainable development. However, to seize the benefits and address the challenges that come with demographic change, countries must systematically plan for demographic change using population data and projections.

Q: Will population be one of the key elements in the plan of action – formally called the outcome document – to be adopted by world leaders in Rio in June? A: For sustainable development it quite simply matters how many people we are, where we live, how we live and what we want from life.

Not to recognise the challenges that come with demographic change in the new outcome document would be a missed opportunity, and a step back from pervious political declarations. Not to outline rights-based policies to address population dynamics would leave undesirable room for misinterpretations.

To highlight demographic challenges is not the same as calling for population controls. Countries can address population dynamics through rights-based policies by encouraging sexual and reproductive health and rights, education, empowerment and participation; and they can address demographic challenges by systematically using population data and projections to inform rural, urban and national development strategies and policies.

Excerpt:

At the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the latest on-site measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography reveal that global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations reached 391.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, up from 388.56 ppm in 2010 and from 280 ppm from pre-industrial times.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in order to have a 90 percent chance of avoiding dangerous changes in climate, greenhouse gases (GHGs) concentrations need to be stabilised at 450 ppm, which would roughly translate into an average temperature increase of two degrees Celsius.

This means that to stabilise GHG concentrations at 450 ppm, global GHG emissions will need to peak before 2015 and be reduced to 50 percent of their 2000 level by 2050.

Industrialised countries need to reduce their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020, and 80-95 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels, which serves as the reference base year for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Various scientific reports also estimate that developing countries should reduce their CO2 emissions by 15-30 percent by 2020, and 50 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels.

In recent years, however, emissions increased in both industrialised and developing economies.

In 2010, member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of industrialised countries, increased their emissions by 3.4 percent, while countries outside the OECD saw an increase of 7.6 percent.

Ten countries constituted around 68 percent of the world’s global emissions. Although China was the world’s largest overall emitter in 2010 (followed by the United States, India, and Russia), an examination of emissions per capita tells a different story.

China ranks only 61st in terms of the CO2 emitted per person. In India – the world’s third largest emitter – emissions per capita rank far below the world average. The United States, in contrast, ranks second overall and 10th in per capita emissions.

Our economies still remain tightly coupled to fossil fuel combustion and carbon dioxide emissions. As the global economy started to recover in 2010, emissions increased massively by 5.8 percent.

More than 70 percent of CO2 emissions result from the burning of fossil fuels for energy use, such as electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, and construction. In 2009, electricity generation and heating alone accounted for 41 percent of all energy related CO2 emissions.

Over the past decade, some countries have developed strong policy regimes to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. By early 2010, 83 countries had adopted some sort of policy to promote renewable energy power generation, up from an estimated 48 countries in mid-2005.

Recent estimates by Deutsche Bank Climate Advisors, however, have stated that even if we implement all the current mitigation policies, there would still be a gap of 5.8 Gigaton (Gt) to the 450 ppm pathway.

The International Energy Agency has warned that the door to two degrees, which is the internationally recognised limit to avoid catastrophic climate change, is closing. And as the four degree scenario is becoming increasingly likely, countries such as the Philippines are starting to set up funds dedicated to national survival and adaptation to extreme events resulting from climate change.

Despite significant actions at a national level, the future of the international effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions is uncertain.

The Kyoto Protocol is an important achievement because it is the only international instrument that sets legally binding targets, yet it is becoming increasingly symbolic as it now only regulates around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Global CO2 levels are now 45 percent above the 1990 level. Several Annex I countries – including the United States, which signed but never ratified the Kyoto Protocol – will be unable to meet their original reductions targets.

Since December 2011, Canada, Japan, and Russia, have decided not to take on additional emissions targets within the second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol in the coming decade.

*Xing Fu-Bertaux is a Research Associate with Worldwatch’s Climate and Energy Team.

Human development and biodiversity will not be the only focus of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, for which representatives of hundreds of states and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) will gather to discuss sustainable development.

The delegates will also deal with the wellbeing of farm animals and sustainable farming, thanks to the efforts of the London-based NGO World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), the governments of the G-77 countries, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Together, they have helped to draft a part of the Rio+20 outcome text, to be negotiated in June, to “call upon all States to prioritise sustainable intensification of food production through increased investment in local food production”, especially in regard to women, smallholders, youth and indigenous farmers.

The draft text further demands an increase in “the use of appropriate technologies for sustainable agriculture”.

The WSPA, which sees itself not only as an animal advocacy group but also as one that supports sustainable agriculture, defines sustainable livestock production as part of a food and agriculture system that is ecologically sound, equitable for farmers and rural communities and other sectors of society, and humane in its use and treatment of livestock.

The livestock sector provides livelihoods to about 1.3 billion people worldwide – more than one-sixth of the global population – according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

A significantly higher proportion – about 70 percent – of the world’s rural poor, however, relies on livestock production for their livelihoods.

Industrial farming, which threatens the livelihoods of these people, especially smallholders, while simultaneously damaging socio-economic systems and the environment, came about during the second half of the twentieth century.

“The ancient contract of responsible stewardship, once honored by farmers for thousands of years, was replaced by intensive factory farming methods that exchanged ethical farming practice for increased economic profitability,” said a 2010 article in the journal “Holistic Nursing Practice”.

Profit came “at the expense of animal welfare and the increase in potential adverse health consequences to the general public”, it added.

“Factory farming is not sustainable,” Dinah Fuentesfina of WSPA Thailand told IPS. “Factory farming also is bad for the climate,” she added.

Raising cattle, in fact, not only generates more greenhouse gases than does driving cars, according to a 2006 FAO report, but it is also a major contributor to land and water degradation.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” said Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author.

“The Rio+20 conference is about poverty reduction. If you really want to achieve that, there is no way to leave out such an important sector as the agricultural or the livestock sector,” Stephen Chacha of WSPA’s Tanzania branch told IPS.

“Governments really need to put more emphasis on this,” he added.

In order to convince the governments represented at the Earth Summit to take livestock farming into account, the NGO has collected more than 100,000 signatures in more than 165 countries in a petition addressing John W. Ashe and Sook Kim, the chairs of the Earth Summit.

On April 25, the petition was handed over to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Executive Coordinators Elizabeth Thompson and Brice Lalonde, who agreed to forward the signatures to Ashe and Kim.

The petition is part of the WSPA’s pawprint campaign to put farm animal welfare on the agenda of Rio+20.

Growing movements around the globe point to the importance of animal welfare both for the sake of the climate and environment as well as for the sake of people’s health. Numerous studies and groups have found links between animal welfare and food safety.

“Standards of animal welfare and animal management practices including feeding, house and husbandry can impact…the prevalence of food-borne diseases,” says the website of the European Food Safety Authority.

Although a gradual cultural shift is evident, with consumers growing more conscious of their food choices, the movement has yet to overpower industrial farming, and progress in the fight to create a sustainable and ecologically sound agricultural system can be painfully slow.

On Thursday, food chain giant Burger King announced a major policy shift, pledging to use 100 percent cage-free eggs in its more than 7,200 fast food restaurants throughout the United States – by 2017.

Those restaurants represent more than half of the 12,500 Burger King locations in 81 countries and territories worldwide, although the corporation did not indicate it would also replace caged eggs in other countries.

The White House on Thursday announced the formulation of the National Bioeconomy Blueprint, aimed at shoring up the U.S. commitment to bioscience-related research.

A recent study found that "zero percent" of federal funding of synthetic biology was going into risk assessment. Credit: Horia Varlan/CC By 2.0

But critics warn that the new programme focuses too much on economic concerns, placing too little emphasis on either social issues or on the environment itself.

“We’re disappointed to see what finally came out,” Eric Hoffman, a Washington-based campaigner with Friends of the Earth, an international NGO, told IPS. “This report largely seems to be an endorsement for the biotechnology industry to rush ahead without any real oversight.”

The biotechnology industry “says that it has been calling for this type of legislation for long time,” Hoffman notes. “That makes sense, given that the industry stands to gain the most from the types of policies laid out in the Blueprint.”

Hoffman says that the biotechnology industry includes many of the largest oil and petrochemical producers – ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Monsanto, Dow. The lack of plans for government regulation apparent in the Blueprint leaves him pessimistic that much “clean, green” technology will come out of the new effort.

He also points to a recent study by the Woodrow Wilson Center, based here, that found that “zero percent” of federal funding of synthetic biology was going into risk assessment. “That’s not how you have an honest policy debate,” he says.

The government itself defines the bioeconomy as “economic activity powered by research and innovation in the biosciences”. In the Blueprint, the issue of environmental concerns is dealt with only tangentially, although the general push is to phase out fossil fuels and industrial materials in favour of organically based compounds and “green” approaches.

Of the five strategic objectives laid out in the Blueprint, only one specifically mentions the environment. Even then, it arises only in a call to “Develop and reform regulations to reduce barriers, increase the speed and predictability of regulatory processes, and reduce costs while protecting human and environmental health.”

The bioeconomy has increasingly emerged as a priority for the Barack Obama administration. Thursday’s announcement followed on initial plans announced by the U.S. government in September 2011, building on legislation passed in 2000 called the Biomass Research and Development Act.

Other developed countries are also increasing their focus on aspects of their nascent bioeconomies, particularly in moving beyond fossil fuels. In February, the European Commission publicised a new strategy to ramp up related efforts. The “green economy” is also a central theme at the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro.

While many such efforts are to be lauded individually, there is growing understanding of the dangers of state-backed moves towards relying on ecosystem-based products.

“While the idea of using renewable resources instead of fossil fuels is a good idea in theory, the way in which the bio-economy approach proposes to achieve this goal is at best deeply flawed and inequitable, and at worst downright dangerous,” states a new report released on Thursday by the Global Forest Coalition, an international umbrella group.

The report, “Bio-economy Versus Biodiversity”, notes the spiking demand for land across the world for both food production and human habitat. This has not only led to increased land-based conflict, the report suggests, but has also increased global hunger.

“Without reducing consumption and demand for energy and products, the sheer scale on which biomass would have to produced to meet the demands of a global bio-economy would severely exacerbate these problems,” the report states.

Those technologies currently being lauded in the attempt to move beyond fossil fuels – such as the use of algae in creating electricity – are risky or as yet untested on a wide scale, warns the report. As such, the technologies that would undoubtedly be used in the immediate future – and almost certainly beyond – would be relatively dirty and wasteful, such as burning biomass.

“The bio-economy approach offers politicians in industrialized countries an opportunity to be seen to be doing something about meeting ill-defined ‘renewable energy targets’, while maximizing opportunities for economic growth and securing a constant supply of energy,” the report warns. “There is precious little concern about the environment, or about impacts in other countries, apart from the usual platitudes about providing jobs.”

Concerns over this new push towards the bioeconomy coincide with high levels of international anxiety over food security.

“The current U.S. mandate prescribes a huge increase in the generation of energy from land,” Ujjayant Chakravorty, a professor at the Alberta School of Economics, told IPS. “Forty percent of U.S. corn is already used for energy rather than food, and that number will go up in the next 10 years.”

In the U.S. in particular, any major new push towards mass reliance on biofuels would almost certainly have a direct impact on wellbeing in other parts of the world.

For instance, Chakravorty says that rice, wheat and sugar constitute around two-thirds of daily calories for many people in India, as they do for much of the developing world. If more land in India were to be sown for non-edible biofuels, prices for these necessities would almost certainly rise.

“The U.S. has a quarter of the world’s vehicles,” Chakravorty says. “In India alone, the U.S. biofuel policy could directly result in 15 to 40 million people dropping below the poverty line.”

By Christopher Pala
CRISFIELD, Maryland, U.S., Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

Authorities in Maryland and Virginia have rescued the Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab from the brink of collapse, tripling its population in five years, by using methods that emerging crabmeat-exporting countries in Asia and Central America could emulate, scientists say.

“It’s one the most successful fishery stock rebuilding programmes ever, anywhere,” said Douglas Domenech, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources.

“There are a lot of things that you can do to reduce the catch in a fishery,” said Richard Robins, the chairman of the commission that regulates crab-fishing in Virginia. “But this was the first time we used them all at once.”

The result: 2010 was the Cheseapeake’s second-biggest harvest in 60 years of the hand-sized crabs whose Latin name, Calinestes sapidus, means tasty, beautiful swimmers, and 2011 came close.

Here in Crisfield, the self-described crab capital of the world, Dan Dize, a 33-year-old crab fisherman, now catches more crabs per pot. He admitted he was worried about rising fuel costs eating up his profits, but added, “I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

After a day on the bay, he unloaded 3,500 live crabs packed tightly in 26 wooden baskets that would soon be heading for markets in Washington and New York.

For the second half of the 20th century, the crab population in the Chesapeake, the United States’ biggest bay that’s home to one of the world’s biggest crab fisheries, had oscillated around 400 million crabs, the average annual harvest was 250 million crabs. But in 1997, the population declined to about 130 million crabs and despite efforts to reduce the catch, up to 100 million crabs were still being caught each year.

“You can’t harvest 80 percent of anything year after year and expect it to last,” explained British-born Tom Miller, a fisheries ecologist who heads the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.

While the population never collapsed completely, the drop of crabmeat supply led local companies that wholesaled Chesapeake crab to increase imports from Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Central America of high-quality crab meat, which is picked by hand from steamed crabs, pasteurised and shipped under refrigeration.

“Crab and crabmeat imports into Baltimore went from 10.5 million dollars in 1995, when the Chesapeake harvest was starting to decline, to over 110 million dollars in 2011,” said Douglas Lipton, a fisheries economist at the University of Maryland.

“Now we’re hearing that while these Asian crab fisheries bring good income to their communities, the crabs are being taken faster than they reproduce, so that if they don’t act soon, they could experience the declines we saw in the Chesapeake.”

In many communities around the world, particularly those that depend on fishing, leaders are sometimes able to persuade local fishermen to fish less if a particicular fish population has visibly diminished.

But in most developing countries, the sampling equipment and know-how that Western scientists use to determine how a given population is weathering being intensely fished are generally lacking, making the kind of restrictions that led to the rescue of the Chesapeake crab less precise.

“The countries that import seafood, like the United States, need to export their expertise in fishing sustainably,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, perhaps the world’s most influential fisheries expert.

“In this case, foreign aid should take the form of sending American crab specialists to the exporting countries so they can scientifically assess how fast the crab populations are responding to increased harvests. Then they can come up with ways to prevent overfishing so the fishery can keep on benefitting everyone.”

“Getting people to fish less anywhere is very hard,” said Miller, the Maryland fisheries ecologist. “Usually you keep on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and when it starts to sink, you impose a fishing moratorium, which is very disruptive to the communities.”

In the Chesapeake, the solution came after Robins, the owner of a seafood packing business, was appointed to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in 2004. He realised that piecemeal efforts to curtail the catch weren’t working and called for a blue-ribbon commission to determine why.

Miller was the senior scientist on the panel, whose report came up with what he calls the “kindergarten solution”, so easy a five-year- old could have figured it out: “If there aren’t enough babies, stop killing the mommies.”

“We needed to save at least half the number of pregnant females that were being harvested, about 30 million crabs,” says Miller. “Overall, we wanted the harvest to be no more than 46 percent of the stock.”

A broad array of measures was put in place, with the reduction of the fall harvest of females migrating to the mouth of the bay in both states the most effective. A winter dredge fishery of buried hibernating pregnant females in Virginia was closed and a spawning- season sanctuary was extended, explained Robins, who helped coordinate the measures.

The local fishermen were not happy, but the spring 2009 survey of 1,500 spots up and down the bay found that the new restrictions had raised the female population by 70 percent, while the male population barely changed.

In 2010, the yearly survey showed females were up 200 percent from the 2008 level. A survey published in late April showed that this year, the total number of Chesapeake crabs is, at 764 million, triple what it was in 2007.

Meanwhile, added Robins, the fisheries official, the average price Virginia fishermen got for their crabs remained stable at two dollars a kilo between 2008 and 2010, while the amount of crabs caught rose by more than a third. He expects prices to go up again.

“We saw that when the scallop fishery recovered,” he says. “Demand increased and now prices are at an all-time high, and there’s three times more scallops being harvested now than in the 1980s.”

If Robins is right, prices will rise to offset Dize’s expenses, demonstrating that more often than not, saving a species from commercial extinction – the point at which it costs more to catch a fish than the fish can be sold for – benefits the fishermen who traditionally fight restrictions on their work.

Protesters at 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen. Credit: Ana Libisch/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

Innovating and stepping up the pressure on governments are the bywords for civil society participation in the run-up to Rio+20, a conference with the ambitious goal of changing the way humankind relates with the planet.

Rio+20 is the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which will take place Jun. 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the same city that hosted the historic Earth Summit in 1992.

The key themes addressed at the conference will be a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

“There is a great deal of concern over what is going to happen. There is skepticism,” Marcelo Cardoso, executive coordinator of the non- governmental Vitae Civilis Institute, told Tierramérica. “For us, it will be an opportunity for international civil society to work together towards developing agendas of convergence” with the authorities and the private sector to achieve consensus.

Agenda 21, the plan of action adopted at the Earth Summit, stated the need for broad public participation in decision-making, with a particular emphasis on nine major groups: indigenous peoples, farmers, workers and their trade unions, local authorities, business and industry, the scientific and technological community, women, children and youth, and non-governmental organisations.

These nine groups are striving to influence the formal discussions through the organisation of campaigns and parallel activities within the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future.

“Civil society organisations must take on a global role,” said Cardoso. While civil society can have a key impact on decision-making processes, it is also a complex and “highly fragmented” sector, he noted.

“We want to bring together organisations that work on the issue of the green economy and integrate programmes,” said Cardoso. In 1992, civil society played a leading role. “Today we need to act in conjunction with the private and governmental sectors,” he added.

The Vitae Civilis Institute was a major civil society actor in 1992 when the principles of sustainable development were defined. Since 2008 it has been participating in United Nations discussions for the writing of the “zero draft” of the Rio+20 outcome document, as part of the group of non-governmental organisations.

In addition to this final document, Rio+20 is also supposed to produce a programme of sustainability targets that range from poverty eradication to the stabilisation of the global climate, although it is most likely that no binding commitments will be adopted.

The foundations should also be laid for global institutions with the power to implement and enforce the agreements reached.

Sustainable development is traditionally defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is also meant to comprise three pillars: economic development, social development and environmental protection.

But the past decades have seen few advances in this model, and today the world is facing an economic and financial crisis that has primarily affected the industrialised North as well as more profound and lasting crises, such as the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity and natural resources, and the persistence of poverty.

Rio+20 runs the risk of ending up as a major step backwards for nature, warned 18 environmental experts, former government ministers and legislators from Brazil in a statement released Apr. 18.

The authors of the statement – who include former Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva – consider the agenda of the conference to be highly “diluted”, since it does not establish environmental issues as the central focus.

For Carlos Henrique Painel, coordinator of the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Development, the challenge for civil society is to put forward “real solutions.”

Painel is one of the organisers of the People’s Summit at Rio+20 for Social and Environmental Justice, taking place Jun. 15-23, which aims to act as a counterpoint to the official conference.

Many organisations oppose the concept of a “green” economy as the “monetisation of nature and common goods and resources,” he told Tierramérica. What is needed is a “new pact for a global agenda.”

“We want to highlight the causes of the structural crises we are facing, and show the genuine solutions that are practiced by the peoples, such as agro-ecology and permaculture,” said Painel.

Meanwhile, the chief negotiator of the Brazilian delegation at Rio+20, André Corrêa do Lago, claims that civil society can not only make suggestions but also actually influence the course and ecisions adopted by many countries.

An online platform launched on Apr. 16, Rio+20 Dialogues, is aimed at enhancing public participation, he explained at a seminar for journalists.

The web tool, which allows for up to 400,000 people to be logged in at the same time, was developed to bring together world experts from academia, civil society, the private sector and the media to define practical recommendations “that will be taken directly to the heads of state and government during the high-level segment of Rio+20.”

The dialogues, explained Corrêa do Lago, are organised around ten topics: oceans; water; forests; sustainable cities and innovation; sustainable development as an answer to the economic and financial crises; unemployment, decent work and migrations; the economics of sustainable development; sustainable energy for all; sustainable development for fighting poverty; and food and nutrition security.

This use of technology can help to ensure “broad and innovative participation,” he said. While it may not be ideal, “it is an important contribution.”

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. 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.

By Beverly Bell
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

In honour of Earth Day, we run an interview with Yves-André Wainright, who discusses ways that poor governance and the role of foreign donors have contributed to the country’s environmental catastrophe.

He also lays out a blueprint for what could turn the situation around, effectively mobilising both government and the population to begin restoring the environment.

Yves-André Wainright served twice as Haiti’s minister of environment. Trained as an agronomist, Yves-André’s work has focused on environmental management, especially management of natural resources and waste.

His comments follow:

My approach towards management of the environment is to have Haitians who face (the same environmental) challenges come together. We might not all share the same economic interests, but if we work together, we can reach a compromise where one’s interest won’t trump another’s.

A second issue is that (central) government ministries act as competitors rather than allies. As a result, information is not shared and institutions are not organised to provide assistance and directives to local government or NGOs (non-governmental organisations, and international agencies).

Since management of the physical environment is a crosscutting and long-term challenge, it’s very difficult to maintain continuity from one government to the next, which hinders the implementation of required programmes.

For example, in the 1990s, I led the preparation of an innovative programme to fund peasant-managed micro-enterprises for families who depended on cutting down trees in national parks. All state institutions including local governments, the judicial system, the national police, and key ministries would be able to give input and would receive training in the sustainable management of biodiversity.

The project facilitated coordination among the various stakeholders, public and private, through various management committees. The first disbursements were made two weeks before I left the government.

(When I returned,) the project was considered overall as having failed. The governance structure of the project was considered too complex, and (since) normally in the government, people from different ministers don’t talk to each other, the project’s implementation lacked leadership.

There were even 70 or so agronomists trained, and about 10 who went abroad for professional specialisation, but none of them were never put to use. And, the peasants never benefited from the comprehensive technical and financial assistance I had dreamed of.

The third issue I wish to highlight is the role of donors from the international community. They put too much emphasis on ‘transparency’ toward their foreign constituency and lack sensitivity to the process of building democracy within communities receiving aid.

I admire the abundance of documentation donors have accumulated on Haiti but feel that not enough effort is put into making this information available to local stakeholders. This has facilitated the creation of an oligarchy of consultants and specialists who monopolize the field of international assistance. Donors don’t seem to trust the initiatives from people outside of this circle.

For instance, during my first term as minister of environment, USAID and the World Bank were the main donors providing assistance to the process of clarifying the role of the newly created ministry and prioritising actions for environmental management and rehabilitation.

I started to organise multi-stakeholder platforms towards preparation of a National Action Plan for the Environment, but the donors decided to replicate the preparation process from various African countries – a plan written by specialists and validated afterwards by the civil society. They succeeded in having beautiful documents prepared, which are currently embellishing shelves of libraries in foreign universities.

What is needed is to help Haitians develop partnerships around common environmental concerns.

(In 2010), the office of the prime minister organised a forum on lessons learned from watershed management over the past 30 to 40 years. That forum had a large participation of funders, with data- rich presentations by the experts.

These presentations confirmed that, during the period considered, more and more short-term NGO-led projects promoted market-linked incentives for environmental protection instead of building of decentralised state capacity so that the government ensures respect of environmental norms.

(Participants of the forum) acted as though the state were outsiders of the process and that the government should be replaced by the market as the driving force for livelihood improvement.

But the problem is that the market promotes individualism and a spirit of competition. It can’t instill the feeling of community and citizenship needed to stimulate Haitians to take part in the rehabilitation of the environment.

We must have regulations that guarantee the socioeconomic and environmental rights of all citizens: the right to be informed of initiatives affecting their environment; the right to have input into (environmental) mitigation measures to be implemented; the right to an unbiased judicial system to (ensure) the application of norms.

We must also have an appropriate democratic governance structure able to implement this at the regional and local level. Otherwise, even if the billions of dollars pledged would be effectively disbursed, we won’t resolve anything.

One of the principles in the Rio Declaration on Sustainable Development (endorsed by 165 countries in June 1992) states, “Peace, economic development and protection of the environment are interdependent and indivisible.” There is no peace without social justice. I’m not preaching anything new.

Fortunately, there is progress being made. In October 2005, the government adopted an important environmental decree. It integrates most of the international principles for managing the environment promoted by the Rio Declaration. It identifies nine priorities (to be implemented by government authorities and) the private sector. By the private sector, I don’t just mean the bourgeoisie in town, but also peasants and small merchants.

There are ways to improve governance of the environment around these themes, provided they are integrated into a comprehensive and progressive land-use zoning process.

For example, alleviation of the pressure of agriculture production on mountainous lands should be a common objective for all groups working on any of these nine issues. With more than 500,000 families depending on subsistence agriculture on eroded lands, there’s no potential for improving living conditions.

Policies must be proactive in providing alternative means to make a living, and we have to invest more in building governance capacity at the municipal level.

We have to start working collaboratively. We can be successful in the nine priorities listed, but only if we admit that whatever our capabilities and our excuses, we’re condemned to fail without cooperation. By we, I mean the government, the ministries, the parliament, the NGOs and their networks, grassroots organisations and social movements, enterprises and trade unions, donors and others.

*Read the full, unedited interview with Yves-André Wainright here.

Interview translated by Larousse Charlot and David Schmidt.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance and is working on the forthcoming book, Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s New Divide. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Alexis Erkert is the Another Haiti is Possible Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy and with Haitian social movements since 2008. You can access all of Other Worlds’ past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Excerpt:

By Charundi Panagoda
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

About 140 million Africans are now on the internet. With half of the population under age 15 and 70 percent of the population under 30, social media is becoming an important feature in the continent’s development path.

Teddy Ruge Credit: Courtesy of Teddy Ruge

Teddy Ruge, lead social media strategist for the World Bank’s Connect4Climate campaign and co-founder of Project Diaspora, an online platform for mobilising members of the African diaspora, calls this Africa’s “renaissance of access to information”.

“In 2012, there are about 600 million connected mobile devices in Africa,” he said. “Demographically, we have 300 million on the continent now moving to the middle class who can afford smart phones, laptops, connectivity.

“I look at that in terms of local voices beginning to have a conversation in development. I see this as an opportunity to look at issues of climate change, self- government, economic development and youth employment.”

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What does it mean that Africans are using social media and that they are connected more than ever before? A: There are frank discussions in development. What I like about social media is that Africans are connected, that they are able to read information about good governance and issues from a global perspective. They are also able to see how their country fares and compare themselves to other groups.

There is still a huge divide between participatory government – we have this connected youth, then we have these older people in governing ranks, some of them are remnants of colonial rule who’ve stayed in their positions for decades who really don’t have a connection to these youth voters yet. Hopefully, we can use social media to bridge that divide and say these are the voices of the youth of your country, this is what they need to move forward.

Q: You have called this the “legitimacy of social media for global engagement”. With the Rio+20 sustainable development conference coming up, what are African youth most concerned about? A: The conversation is still the same – are policymakers going to make policies to help us Africans who didn’t contribute a lot to climate change but are going to pay the most? Green energy is expensive, solar isn’t that cheap yet. Those coming out of university and high school are wondering where the jobs are going to be.

You see African youth beginning to ask the tough questions. If you want green job creation, who is going to pay for that? If you want us to stop cutting down trees, how are the villagers going to have energy access? Those are the critical questions. We anticipate a lot of commentary over social media from those who are not able to attend Rio. We expect the same questions for COP 18 Qatar as well.

Q: What could these social media savvy youth show that the policymakers can’t? A: We saw the actual people behind the numbers. We wanted to make it real for those sceptical about climate change. We wanted to provide this information to see if they can drive the local changes, that it simply isn’t about policy.

(For contributions for Connect4Climate) we asked to share with us what climate change means in your community. People sent us pictures of dead cows because of droughts. It wasn’t just the picture, it was the story that came with the picture. We saw energy, water and forestry were the biggest concerns.

We saw stories about women. In Africa, women do most of the domestic work, when there’s no water or firewood they have to walk miles to get some. We got pictures of women lining up to dig for water, walking into the woods.

Q: Do you see a disconnect between people who funnel money into Africa and the real Africans concerned? A: If we are looking at it from a policy and finance perspective, it’s very different. The World Bank is not necessarily communicating with the villager in Africa, they are connecting with the government and asking ‘what is it that you are working on and how can we connect you to funders?’ That’s the type of high-level conversation.

I think Connect4Climate falls somewhere between low- level and high- level conversation. Connect4Climate is able to say this is what the conversation is about in relation to climate change, how this goes through to the decision making depends on the veracity of these voices and how sustainable they are in calling for better solutions.

We do have people who pay attention to these voices and say perhaps we can aggregate these voices and craft a policy. I can say the voices are rising up and saying ‘we need solutions from an economic development perspective.’

For example, in Kenya youth are going into junkyards and retrofitting little engines and mechanical contraptions and building faster and more efficient windmills to recharge their electronics rather than rely on the grid. They were able to actually build working prototypes to generate electricity.

Solutions are already happening on the ground with youth. Can we find a way to fund these kids and their ingenuity and replicate that kind of spirit across the board?

Q: In the past you have spoken about the “White man’s burden”, about paternalistic attitudes toward Africa. Is this something the online Africans also talk about? A: I think they talk about it from a corruption standpoint. Aid isn’t really going to create jobs. Aid should be about creating infrastructure to help job creation. That’s what the entrepreneurs I talked to think, how to get financing so they can expand their operation and hire more people and move to the middle class.

We are becoming a lot more vocal because of the connectivity; we are a lot louder and so is our role in our solutions. We have issues but it’s not necessarily your job to fix them. It is our job to say ‘this is what we are working on, we can work together to solve this problem.’ The full-scale hijacking of African agency is going to be a thing of the past.

Excerpt:

The celebrated storyteller Mark Twain (1835-1910) wrote, “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.”

As more and more people take that advice to heart, and set off to explore and discover, global tourism will surge to heights reached never before with a record one billion visits across international boundaries this year.

In the process they will generate trillions of dollars for investment, create one in 12 jobs worldwide, enhance the lives of millions of people and open massive opportunities for the growth and development of countries, rich and poor, all across the world.

Because of its ability to create wealth, tourism plays a major role in achieving the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals for prosperity, peace and sustainability.

New challenges such as climate change and poverty, hunger and disease make fulfilling these goals more complex and pressing.

Therefore, as the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development or Rio+20 convenes in Brazil this June, tourism leaders need to forge active partnerships with other sectors of the global economy to reach an inclusive, equitable and sustainable future for all.

Tourism is like fire. If well managed it can serve us; if allowed to master us, it can burn us.

Tourism poses many challenges for the well-being of the global community and the health of our planet – from the cultural degradation of local communities to the complete destruction of their value systems.

What is more, tourists impair the health of the earth by over- visitation of fragile ecosystems and the emissions of CO2 and other pollutants from their modes of transport, from cars and buses to trains and planes.

The global travel industry is now faced with the challenge of making a conscious decision of how it wants to go, where it wants to go – somewhat like Robert Frost in his poem “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…. And sorry I could not travel both…..Two roads diverged in a wood, and I …. I took the one less traveled by….. And that has made all the difference.”

Global tourism seems to have chosen the road “less traveled”. Still, it is stumbling along, not quite sure how it will get to where it wants to go.

Responsible tourism demands that destinations, travel vendors and travelers alike unite in operating tours with a sensitivity to the social, cultural, natural and economic environments of the host communities and of Mother Earth.

Towards that end, the industry has been fostering various forms of what is called sustainable tourism since the 1970s when the environmental movement began.

From this sprang today’s popular concept of ecotourism. It nurtures the desire to travel to natural locations away from the man-made and built-up attractions, allowing the traveler to experience nature in its pristine glory, and to be educated about the culture and lifestyles of lesser known, poorly understood societies, off the beaten path.

Such visits create the beneficial effects of raising funds for the conservation of neglected natural landscapes and cultural monuments, as well as for the economic uplift of impoverished communities.

The flip side of the coin is that the growing popularity of ecotourism has led to abuse and exploitation of vulnerable environments and societies by unscrupulous tour and lodging operators, partly because of the absence of an internationally accepted single definition of what constitutes ecotourism, often interchanged with sustainable tourism, green tourism, nature tourism, etc.

Tourism organisations and conservationist groups have their own definitions of ecotourism. Individual tour operators and governments also muddy the water by promoting their own definitions.

In the broadest sense, however, ecotourism is travel to ecologically and culturally sensitive locations with the least negative impact thereon.

It is, of course, not possible for humans to travel anywhere without any negative impact, because even getting there causes environmental damage by the spread of carbon pollutants.

Airplanes are among the worst emitters of pollutants in the travel industry, although the International Air Transport Association counters that airplanes contribute only two percent of global manmade CO2 emissions – less than the flatulence of the cows in Europe!

Tourism will add 43 million more visitors every year, to top 1.8 billion arrivals by 2030, challenging the conservation of earth’s resources more, even as these resources suffer more damage and become less available.

It is, therefore, critical that travelers be educated to be sensitive to the environments of the places they visit and understand they have a great responsibility to Mother Earth. In today’s world of many interconnections, tourism cannot stand alone, and apart, from the global community.

We need to act together for the collective interest over self- interest. As Nelson Mandela discovered, “after climbing a great hill, one only finds there are many more hills to climb.”

*Lakshman Ratnapala is Emeritus President & CEO of the Pacific Asia Travel Association.

In an almost ceremonial manner, Selinah Mncwango opens her big plastic bag and pulls out several smaller packets, each filled with different types of seeds: sorghum, bean, pumpkin, and maize. They are her pride, her wealth, the “pillar of my family,” says the farmer from a village in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

Farmer Selinah Mncwango is proud of her traditional sorghum seeds. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

Sixty-five-year-old Mncwango comes from a family of smallholder farmers in the village of Ingwawuma in the east coast province. The crops she grows today are from seeds that have been handed down from generation to generation, over decades, she says. Other seeds come from exchanges with neighbouring farmers. “My seeds are very important to me. I hope the day will never come when I have to buy seeds from a shop,” says the farmer, whose five children and eight grandchildren largely depend on her harvest. She is keenly aware of the fact that seed saving, storing and exchanging promotes crop diversity, saves money and provides smallholder farmers with a safety net in case of harvest failures.

But the traditional farming methods of smallholder farmers – which, researchers say, also help to fight soil depletion, reduce irrigation needs and adapt to climate change – may soon disappear. They are being wiped out by governments focused on promoting commercial monocultures that they hope will bring fast, high yields in order to boost national agricultural sales on global markets.

“The sector is dominated by commercial seed companies and industrial agricultural production,” explains Rachel Wynberg, policy analyst at the Environmental Evaluation Unit of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Small-scale farmers have been systematically pushed out of the system by those who put profits before food security and biodiversity, she says.

“There is a poor understanding of small farmers’ rights. Traditional agricultural practices have thus been eroded over decades,” she adds.

In South Africa, and in most other countries on the continent, the rights of small-scale farmers are regularly violated by governments and commercial entities that push genetically modified (GM) and hybrid seeds – which have been cross-pollinated in controlled environments – on them.

This is common despite a 2006 United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (IT- PGRFA) that protects farmers’ indigenous knowledge, demands rewards for their contribution to maintaining crop diversity, ensures their participation in decision-making about genetic resources, and guarantees their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds.

South Africa and many other African U.N. member states never signed the treaty, however.

“South Africa’s policy framework on farmers’ rights is fragmented and unclear,” says Wynberg. “Commercial programmes are promoted that contradict and undermine traditional farming practices.”

According to Wynberg, government support of small-scale farmers is incoherent and insufficiently funded, lacks capacity and often ignores the needs of farmers. “Government is unfortunately often not delivering,” she adds.

Smallholders agree. Mncwango, who has actively tried in cooperation with many rural farmers in her community to protect their traditional farming methods, says she is appalled at the South African government’s drive to sideline them.

“The Department of Agriculture regularly comes to give workshops. They hand out GM and hybrid seeds and tell us to throw away our traditional seeds. They also tell us to use pesticides and chemical fertilisers,” the farmer laments. “By corrupting our traditional seeds, they make us lose our seed banks and force us into dependency.”

According to Mncwango, farmers often realise too late that GM seeds cannot be saved for the next season, and that they contaminate traditional seeds. Farmers have had to learn the hard way that hybrid seeds are of inferior quality. “They don’t store well and they rot easily and have less nutritional value,” she says.

“The government keeps forcing seeds on us. Even though we tell them we don’t want seeds. We’d rather have support with fencing, farming equipment and better access to markets,” she explains. “But they just don’t listen.”

Researchers like Wynberg confirm the large disconnect between agricultural policies that are deemed “progressive” and farmers’ needs. “High yields are traded for long-term food security,” she says.

Lawrence Mkhaliphi, agro-ecology manager at Biowatch, a non-governmental organisation promoting sustainable agriculture, has been working with small-scale farmers in KwaZulu-Natal province for many years. He takes the argument a step further.

“Many agro-chemical companies offer governments incentives for pushing their products onto farmers,” Mkhaliphi claims. “They want farmers to buy seeds, not save them. It’s a huge business. Instead of serving the people, departments of agriculture have become the agents of agro-chemical companies.”

South Africa’s Department of Agriculture denies these accusations.

“Replacing traditional seeds with commercial varieties is not an official government policy,” says Julian Jaftha, the department’s director of genetic resources. “The government does not own shares in GM seeds.”

The Department of Agriculture supports both traditional and commercial farming methods, Jaftha says. It ran a national programme to reintroduce traditional seeds in rural areas and has a Plant Genetic Resources Centre in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, to conserve traditional seeds.

“GM (seeds) should never be a farmer’s only choice,” says Jaftha. “They should be another option made available to farmers who wish to use those seeds. We expect that there are democratic processes in place for farmers to voice their concerns and make choices.”

Jaftha acknowledges, however, that national policy has not always been implemented correctly. “Unfortunately, it does happen at provincial level that farmers are not given a choice,” he admits. “We know that there is still a lot of work that needs to be undertaken.”

By Adrianne Appel
KENANSVILLE, Florida , Apr 20 2012 (IPS)

There was a time when big, yellow cats freely roamed the length of a wild Florida. Today, three medium-sized humans are trekking the length of this southeastern U.S. state – 1,000 miles of swamp, forest, ranchland and blistered feet – in hopes that panthers may one day be able to safely tread the same path.

“We are all focused on the mission and little things don’t get to us,” said photographer Carlton Ward, who along with bear biologist Joe Guthrie and filmmaker Elam Stoltzfus have been walking, canoeing, biking and horseback riding Florida’s natural areas since January.

Along the way they spent too long carrying their canoes and gear up and over countless downed trees by Josephine Creek, and passed two memorable nights camping on an active U.S. Air force bombing range.

“They were practicing shooting down black hawk helicopters,” Guthrie said.

By Earth Day, Sunday Apr. 22, they expect to be closing in on the Okefenokee Swamp in Southern Georgia, and the end of their 100-day journey.

The reason for the journey is to rally support for the creation of a Florida wildlife corridor, a north-south band of open space protected from development and shielded from vehicles, where the endangered panther, and black bears and other wildlife can travel.

“The corridor is a vision,” said Ward on day 47 of their trip, while resting under a hammock of trees at a cattle ranch.

Nearby, sandhill cranes jumped and flapped crazily – their mating dance. The air was dry and the grassy landscape, with grazing cattle and calves, looked more like Texas.

About 100 panthers live in Florida, on 3,500 acres in the uninhabited southwestern region of the state that includes the Everglades, where they hunt deer, wild hogs and rabbits. They are nocturnal and rarely seen by humans. They have been listed as endangered since 1967.

The panthers’ original territory extended from Louisiana up into Tennessee but hunting and encroachment by human development pushed them into what is now a fraction of their former territory. The animals are stressed, with 45 percent of their deaths each year due to fights with each other. For the population to grow, which it must to be healthy, experts say, the big cats need more land to roam.

The panther falls under the Endangered Species Act, a U.S. law governing the care of species on the brink of extinction, and that means the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to aid its recovery.

The Fish and Wildlife Service determined decades ago that the Florida panther population needs to grow to 240 individuals, and to have a total of three population clusters, with one in the northern part of the state and one in the south and natural areas connecting them, to be healthy and sustainable.

In the central part of the state, far from Florida’s crowded beaches and tourists, large swaths of contiguous open space remain, north and south. Converting these lands into areas reserved for wildlife would not be difficult, Ward says.

“We don’t need to buy land. It’s a matter of getting the easements,” Ward said.

Conservation easements are a novel method of preserving land from development, in which authorities pay owners a fee in exchange for an agreement that it cannot be developed.

But the plan has mostly sat idle. In 2011, the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior to allow the release of Florida panthers into northern Florida, to build a second breeding population, but the request was denied.

In 2010 the administration of President Barack Obama announced that it wanted to designate 100,000 acres in central Florida as conservation land, by purchasing the development rights. The land would fall within the hoped-for panther corridor.

So far, just 10 acres have been set aside for conservation under the programme.

“The programme exists. The authority exists. The money doesn’t,” Ward said.

Ward and his crew hope that their steps over logs and through swamps during the past four months will put muscle and money behind the open space programme and the wildlife corridor.

“It’s remarkable how possible it is. We’ve been on natural land for 47 days and walking the path that a bear or panther could walk,” Ward said during a stopover at a cattle ranch about 60 miles south of Orlando.

Much of the land is broken up by busy roads. Wildlife tunnels under the roads would help make it safe for panther, bear and other animals to travel freely, Ward says.

Male panthers do attempt to travel north already and are inevitably hit by vehicles north of the Everglades, their deaths obvious because of the radio collars many of them wear.

Some land in the planned corridor is clogged with development, like the banks of the Caloosahatchee River,

“The only way to get panthers north of the river is to carry them in a car,” Guthrie said.

At least one panther did brave the crowded riverbank. In 2008, it walked about 1,500 miles through Florida all the way to the interior of Georgia, where it was killed by a hunter.

The group hasn’t seen any panthers on their trek but in the Everglades area they knew the cats were out there.

“It’s amazing how many panther tracks we saw,” Ward said.

They did see scores of other remarkable wildlife, catalogued by Ward’s photos, including an Eastern indigo snake, the largest, non- poisonous snake in the U.S., bald eagles, sandhill cranes, the threatened Florida scrub jay, the rare grasshopper sparrow, and swallow-tail kites, listed as endangered in South Carolina.

It was in the Everglades that for three days Ward’s group saw no other people, as they pulled their boats through saw grass, the old way of Everglades travel, and slept in them at night. Further north, faced with the need to paddle cross the Caloosahatchee in stiff winds, they grabbed their coats – and sailed across.

Guthrie’s blog entries tell the full range of experiences of the team:

“It felt blistering hot and dry all day. My water was down to about half a liter by the time we arrived at our campsite.” Feb. 25

“In howling wind and three foot chop we struggled across the lake (Lake Marion) for the toughest two miles of the expedition.” Mar. 10.

“I grew lazy with the wind and current helping me along. I fished half-heartedly among a few dock pilings, catching a small bass every mile or so.” Mar. 23.

The wildlife corridor and the Obama administration’s 100,000 acre Florida open space plan would include thousands of acres now in ranching, an occupation traditionally fearful of panthers.

But Bud Adams, 86, wants the federal government to buy the development rights of some of his land, and his family has met with Obama and Interior Department Ken Salazar about it.

Adams says he backs the wildlife corridor and is not afraid that panthers would eat his cattle. The panthers are part of the ecosystem, he said.

“As a boy the panthers ate the deer. When the deer were gone, the panthers left. Now we have a deer population again and the panthers will have a place here.”

Innovation at the service of food production in Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2012 (IPS)

Continuing near-record high food prices around the world are highlighting international inattention to a looming threat, observers here warned on Friday.

According to speakers at the launch of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) Global Monitoring Report 2012, on the sidelines of the Bank-IMF spring meetings, a lack of focus on agriculture and nutrition in development priorities could prove disastrous in the event of another spike in food prices.

The sudden rise in food prices in 2007-08 is thought to have brought the number of hungry people to more than one billion internationally. While food costs dropped in 2009 due to the international financial crisis, 2011 again saw record highs, brought about in part by variable weather conditions, mounting oil prices and the growing use of biofuels.

According to information released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in early April, food prices have continued to rise during the first three months of this year, and currently remain higher than during the crisis period of 2007-09. According to many observers, high food costs have become the “new norm”.

The social implications of fluctuations in food costs have been clear. The high cost of staple foods was a major driver behind the Arab Spring protests, for instance. Today, continued high food prices are fuelling inflation worries across the globe, notably in India and China.

The Global Monitoring Report (GMR), which annually tracks development indicators, warns that critical macroeconomic policy buffers in low- income countries have yet to be rebuilt.

“If (low-income countries) have to confront another sharp global slowdown or another surge in food or fuel prices, these countries would start from a weaker position…,” the report states. “A new global food price spike would present low-income countries with difficult trade-offs among price stability, external, and social objectives.”

Although governments around the world did move to put food security atop the international agenda in 2011, those words have translated into little substantive action.

“The international community hasn’t followed through on any promises on making sure that prices are stabilised,’ says Danielle Nierenberg, director of the Nourishing the Planet Program of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental think tank here. “As the G8 and G20 meet, there is an opportunity to make sure that prices stabilise and that farmers are given the resources they need to survive.”

According to the GMR, international aid earmarked for agriculture, food and nutrition constituted just 10 percent of total pledges in 2010. In fact, Nierenberg says such low figures are relatively standard.

“For the past 30 years, there’s been a tendency to turn our backs on agriculture,” she told IPS. “One good thing to come out of the (food price) crisis has been new attention given to agriculture.”

That attention has yet to lead to new development priorities, however. “Surprisingly,” the GMR notes, the amount of aid devoted to agriculture, food and nutrition “has not increased in response to the recent food price spikes.”

“The international community is ill-equipped to deal with what is going on,” Nierenberg says. “But it’s not just donor communities – it’s African countries, Asian countries, increasingly Latin American countries. Currently, only nine African governments invest more than 10 percent of their budgets in agriculture.”

With just three years to go before the 2015 deadline set to reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), observers are worrying that the economic downturn and ongoing lack of attention paid to stabilising food prices could slow progress towards reaching these development indicators.

International aid, having likewise slowed in recent years, is expected to continue to fall off by around 0.2 percent per year.

While many agree that an era of increased austerity would require that aid monies be spent more efficiently, the data surrounding nutrition is not encouraging in this regard.

Nutrition can directly impact on several of the MDGs, including two on which the GMR warns that countries are furthest behind, child and maternal mortality. Yet nutrition only accounts for around 0.3 percent of total international spending, a figure that has not risen since the MDGs were agreed upon in 2000.

While the needs are clear, how best to deal with high and unstable food prices is up for debate. One of the central priorities outlined by the GMR is liberalised trade regimes.

“Trade liberalization protects national food markets against domestic shocks…,” the report states. “Encouraging more trade – not less – can thus promote food security, which requires a more open, rules-based multilateral trade regime best achieved by concluding the Doha Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization.”

According to some analysts, however, liberalised trade regimes are at the root of the current problems.

“First and foremost, the long-term neoliberal neglect of agriculture has caused an agrarian crisis that has muted the supply response capabilities of agriculture,” Mritiunjoy Mohanty, an economist in Kolkata, told IPS.

“Financialisation of agricultural commodities and related financial speculation have also amplified the price effects of supply-demand imbalances, as has the control of transnational firms over the global agricultural supply chain.”

Mohanty continued, “Which of these aspects does trade liberalisation help alleviate? Actually none. Indeed, if there are structural deficiencies or institutional issues of market power concentration, then trade liberalisation tends to reinforce these.”

Instead, both Mohanty and Nierenberg suggest a renewed focus on localised agriculture, to safeguard both farmers and consumers.

“We need to refocus on local foods rather than imported foods,” Nierenberg says. “By depending on regional or local food systems, we can build resilience that is not at the whim of global markets. Trade liberalisation, on the other hand, often doesn’t benefit those who really need the most help.”

Former ministers, lawmakers and environmental experts in Brazil are urging the government to take a more proactive stance to prevent the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development the country will host in June from falling short of the standard set by the preceding summit.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon jungle has slowed down in the past few years. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Called Rio+20 in reference to the 1992 Earth Summit conference in the same Brazilian city, the gathering “is an opportunity to keep the sustainable development flame alive and move forward on climate negotiations, and should not be diluted within a generic and unfocused development agenda,” says a document presented by the group.

“There is a high risk that Rio+20 may not just be irrelevant, but might actually represent a step backward from the achievements of the Earth Summit,” says the text, titled “Rio mais ou menos 20?” (Rio Plus or Minus 20?), presented Wednesday Apr. 18 in São Paulo at a meeting organised by the Centre for Integration and Development Studies (CINDES).

“In order to prevent Rio+20 from becoming ‘Rio minus 20’ the main challenge is to implement environmental goals, given the seriousness of the state of the planet,” environmental consultant Fábio Feldmann, a former legislator and former São Paulo state environment secretary, told IPS.

Scientific advances need to be taken on board “if humanity is to have a future,” he said.

The document’s authors, headed by Rubens Ricupero, who was minister of the environment and finance in the 1990s, say that “present production and consumption patterns are straining the natural limits of the planet.

“We should not stand by passively when this problem and all it implies for economic and social development strategies is being neglected in the agenda of a meeting whose very name indicates that its aim is sustainable development,” they say.

They also say “dramatic evidence for global warming, manifested in extreme climate events, is growing in Brazil and around the world, and the impacts, including economic effects, are already being felt in various countries and sectors.”

Physicist José Goldemberg, one of those who signed the document, is concerned that the pre-summit negotiations are neglecting this issue.

In his presentation in São Paulo, Goldemberg, a former education minister, environment secretary and science and technology secretary, emphasised that the number of environmental disasters has increased exponentially over the past three decades.

The most recent catastrophes in Brazil were torrential rains in early 2011 and January 2012, which caused flash floods and landslides and claimed lives in the steep and densely populated hillsides of Rio de Janeiro.

The authors of the document say the Rio+20 summit agenda is too “diluted” as it does not place the environment at the centre of debate.

Rio+20 organisers have taken the line that 20 years after the Earth Summit, there should be broader discussion of sustainable development, based on three pillars: social, economic and environmental.

Marina Silva, the first environment minister in the administration of former president Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), said development necessarily includes all three pillars, but “to say the environment as such should not be discussed is a setback with respect to the vision of the 1992 Earth Summit.”

Ricupero, an active participant in the preparatory Rio+20 negotiations, also expressed the view that it is a mistake to turn away from focusing on the environment.

The environmental pillar “is the essential condition” for the economic and social aspects, said Ricupero, who was secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1995 to 2004.

For instance, the expected increase in global temperature by at least two degrees Celsius is crucial. “If we fail to keep below that limit, no economic or social pillar can stand… This is about the foundation of the planet’s physical sustainability,” he declared in Sao Paulo.

Feldmann told IPS an industrial and economic policy capable of incorporating and encouraging the environmental dimension is needed.

The document’s authors propose that Brazil, as the host of the Rio+20 conference and as a country rich in agricultural, energy, water and forest assets, should take the initiative, set an example and take on a leading role.

They also call on the government of President Dilma Rousseff to design a set of policies for the transition to a low-carbon or green economy. They recommend adopting a system of competitive advantages to support this process and discourage economic activities that go “in the opposite direction.”

“The goal of a low-carbon economy must be translated into coordinated policies for industry, transport, energy, agriculture, trade and innovation that include incentives favouring sustainable investment,” they say.

Ricupero said Brazil pioneered a “green economy” energy programme, supporting the development of ethanol, a biofuel derived from sugarcane, which most of the nation’s vehicle fleet now runs on. “But that is as far as it went,” he complained.

Brazil is at risk of serious environmental failings if Congress approves a new forestry code that would grant an amnesty to those responsible for deforestation and strip the executive branch of the power to take essential measures, such as creating indigenous or environmental reserves, said Feldmann.

At the 15th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2009, Brazil committed itself to reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by between 36 and 39 percent by 2020. “It cannot now elude the responsibility of contributing, as host, to bridging gaps between participants’ positions and building consensus around ambitious goals,” the group says.

According to Feldmann, Brazil has taken great strides in environmental legislation, but “there is still too much deforestation in the Amazon and other ecosystems.”

Similarly, apart from some tax incentives for manufacturing energy-saving domestic appliances, no other initiatives with a “green tax stimulus” to motivate industry “to put sustainability into practice” have been adopted, he said.

Former environment minister Silva went further. She proposed that Brazil should lead a movement to create a United Nations body devoted specifically to environmental issues.

Orizaba Peak, in Mexico. Glacier melt is among the clearest evidence of climate change. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 19 2012 (IPS)

The Rio+20 sustainable development summit, scheduled to take place in Brazil in June, is billed as a key meeting of world leaders who are expected to renew their political commitment and approve a wide-ranging plan for a greener future.

“Without exaggeration,” says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, “I would call it one of the most important conferences in the history of the United Nations.”

Still, a U.N. Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) negotiating the final plan of action – formally called the “outcome document” – is virtually deadlocked on a draft text which has “ballooned” from 20 to 200 pages.

At least one Western diplomat was quoted as saying the final outcome document, currently known as “zero draft”, should really be reduced to about five to 10 pages. And this will be one of the monumental tasks before the PrepCom, comprising all 193 member states, which will continue negotiations next week, beginning Apr. 23.

The PrepCom will make one last attempt to finalise the action plan over a two-week period through May 4.

If it fails to reach consensus, negotiations will be resumed in Brazil Jun. 13-15 in a do-or-die attempt to finalise it before the three-day summit Jun. 20-22, officially called the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD).

One Asian diplomat says the scenario is predictable, and as in previous international conferences, the negotiators are expected to meet round-the-clock in the final days in a desperate attempt to meet the deadline.

“When the text is finally agreed upon,” he said, with a tinge of diplomatic exaggeration, “half the delegates will be fast asleep in their hotel rooms and the other half will be dozing off in the committee room while the negotiations are going on.”

As an afterthought, he added, “Not to mention those delegates who are already heading towards the airport even while the remaining negotiators are adding the final touches.”

“And that’s the usual political game plan before a U.N. summit,” he told IPS. “The final document is eventually the brainchild of a small core group dedicated to leave its fingerprints on it.”

Ambassador Kim Sook of South Korea, one of the co-chairs of the PrepCom, (along with Ambassador John Ashe of Antigua and Barbuda), told a closed-door meeting of the 132-member Group of 77 developing countries that many paragraphs in the document are “too long and complicated to read and comprehend”.

“A clear indicator of the success of Rio+20,” he said, “will be the quality of the outcome document to be adopted by more than 135 heads of state and government.”

“We have a long text,” Kim said, “but very few negotiating days.”

Beginning Apr 23, the co-chairs plan to “try their best to utilise our limited negotiating days as efficiently as possible,” including three sessions per day: morning, afternoon and evening.

Kim called upon all parties – specifically the negotiating groups, including the European Union (EU), the G77, the East European Group (EEG) and the group of countries known as JUSCANZ (Japan, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) – “to participate in the negotiations in the spirit of collaboration and compromise, and with the goal of agreeing on a focused political document, which is both action and future-oriented.”

He said members have been provided with “a compilation text” which includes a “suggested text” by the co-chairs, together with the zero draft and all amendments.

According to the United Nations, the “zero draft” titled “The Future We Want” is based on more than 6,000 pages of submissions from member states, civil society groups, businesses, consumers, trade unionists, farmers, students, teachers, researchers, activists, and indigenous communities, all of them categorised under a single heading called “major groups”.

Besides the complaints made by civil society groups on the deletion of crucial issues, including gender, reproductive and human rights from the outcome document, there are also other contentious issues such as financing for sustainable development where member states are deadlocked.

“The rigorous negotiating process is a clear call for the outcome of Rio+20 to be one that takes bold, decisive action that sets us on course for a more sustainable future,” says U.N. Under-Secretary- General Sha Zukang, who has been designated secretary-general of the summit.

Paying a compliment to Brazil, he said, “At the national level, as host country, you have allocated and mobilised unprecedented financial, human and material resources for an event that promises to be the largest, most participative U.N. event of its kind (with Brazil expecting as many as 50,000 participants).”

Meanwhile, at a press conference last month, just after the Mar. 19-23 negotiating sessions, Tim Core of Oxfam International said that “business-as-usual negotiations in an age of crisis is just not acceptable.”

He said the March negotiations had produced nothing “but hardened positions, weak pledges and eleventh hour amendments that eroded real gains in sustainable development”.